The fetish folk of West Africa

by Robert H. Milligan

They have seen white men milk the goat, which always requires a number of natives to hold the animal. And once when Mr. Gault of Batanga was explaining to a group of natives about the cow, which gives the milk that we import in tins, describing her size and her great horns, one of the natives suddenly turning to the others exclaimed: “Say, he is lying. How could they hold her?” Since that time most of them have seen cattle.

The Fang wife prepares the food for her husband and sets it in the palaver-house, or public-house of the town, where he eats with the other men. She does not eat with them. There is no regular time in the day for eating; and when they have begun to eat there is no regular time for stopping. The quantity of food is the only limit. On a journey they can go without food a very long time, far surpassing the endurance of the white man. And they are often compelled to travel with empty stomachs from their habit of eating all their food the first day. But afterwards they will make up for this abstinence, however prolonged. Indeed, it is by their gluttony, rather than in other ways, that they first exhibit their degradation to the white man. I have said that the children were usually pretty; but sometimes they are dreadfully misshapen by a distended stomach. The last mail brought me a charming picture of a little three-year-old missionary boy of Gaboon, prodding the stomach of a native child with his finger, and with eyes of wonder, asking: “Is dat your tummy?”

One of their first efforts, after coming in contact with the white man, is an attempt to acquire the noble art of eating with a spoon. But in the first practice of it if they forget themselves for a moment they are very likely to put the hand to the mouth in the old way and drive the spoon round to the ear. Considering their ignorance they are surprisingly cleanly in their persons and their habits. After eating they invariably rinse their mouths with water and they regularly brush their teeth. For the latter purpose they commonly use a brush of soft wood with transverse ridges. They are very particular about this. Often a carrier in the bush will carry his brush along with him. Sometimes it is the sum-total of his personal effects. Everybody knows that the African has beautiful teeth. But in some tribes, and even among the Fang of the far interior, they often file the front teeth to a point, thinking to add to their beauty, but in fact adding greatly to their ugliness.

I have said that the Fang are cannibals. But this loathsome custom is not as common among them as travellers have generally reported. I doubt whether the Fang eat any but their enemies—captives taken in war. And their chronic meat-hunger is not the only reason for eating their enemies. It is done as an insult to the enemy, the most deadly insult that can be offered, and means that the war will be fought to a finish, or at least until the other side has eaten one of the enemy. But the practice of cannibalism in war is intimately related to fetishism. It is believed that after eating one of the enemy, the latter can do them no harm. Their bullets will glance harmlessly off their bodies, or will even go through them without hurting, if indeed they hit them at all. Cannibalism affords them the strongest possible fetish protection.

The cannibalism of the Upper Congo tribes is much worse than this and is almost indescribable. Some of them eat their own dead. Sir Harry Johnston tells us that the Basoko tribe bury none but their chiefs. Others, who would not eat their own dead, exchange them for the dead of a neighbouring clan.

This vicious taste often becomes a mania with the African, an obsession, like the ungovernable appetite for rum, until he thinks of man chiefly as food to satisfy this craving. Among such tribes raids are made on their neighbours for the express purpose of cannibalism. Sir Harry Johnston speaks of the son of a celebrated chief who once exclaimed: “Ah! I wish I could eat everybody on earth!” and also of a Bangala chief who ate his seven wives in succession, inviting his friends and close associates to the feast. It is more than possible that these lowest forms of cannibalism are due to the demoralization incident to the slave-raids of the Arabs. The Arabs were succeeded by the Belgians; but some of those who are best qualified to judge think that the régime of the Belgians has been worse than that of the Arabs.

Among tribes to whom such forms of cannibalism would be revolting, there are probably individual inhuman ghouls, who exhume the bodies of the dead in the night and eat them. And it may be from this fact that witches are always accused of eating people.

If it be true, then, throughout the entire Fang tribe, that they eat only their enemies it will be seen that their cannibalism is very different in extent and even in loathsomeness from that of some other tribes. It is a fact, however, that the cannibal tribes are not necessarily lower than the others, but may be quite as gentle and tractable and quite as capable. And from this some have argued that, after all, our horror of cannibalism is purely conventional, due to custom and training; and that there is no essential difference between eating human flesh and that of the lower animals, except in imagination. But the readiness with which whole tribes renounce the custom, become ashamed of it, and contract the white man’s abhorrence for it, confirms the belief that it is never legitimate and must always be regarded as a vice. In such matters imagination may be closer to our moral natures than we know.

A certain town on the Gaboon named Alum—when I left Africa I knew personally most of the men, women and children of the town—is populated by one of the most intractable clans of the Fang. Though peculiarly fierce in war, they are otherwise gentle and courteous. The venerable chief I regarded as a particular friend. He had a long beard—somewhat rare among the Fang and highly esteemed. It was braided tightly and tied on the end with a string as venerable as the beard itself. The braid was not for fashion or beauty. It was intended to prevent the possible loss of stray hairs that might fall into the hands of an enemy and be used as a powerful fetish against him. Upon my leaving the town at the conclusion of a visit it was in accord with custom for him to express his personal regard for me by taking my hand in his and spitting in it. In order to appreciate this beautiful custom one must regard it spiritually—if he can. It is called “blowing a blessing.” The blessing is blown with the breath and the spitting is a trivial accessory.

It was when these people first migrated from the interior bush that the following incident occurred—which was told to me by Sonia of Gaboon who knew all the persons concerned. A certain man’s wife having several times eloped with a man of another town and having caused the husband much trouble and humiliation, he at last became so enraged that instead of seeking to procure her return he determined upon a bloody revenge. With several companions he immediately started in a canoe for the town where her father and mother lived, arriving before they had heard the news of their daughter’s latest elopement. At some distance from the town they left the canoe and entered the forest. All the others of the party hid themselves near the path while the man himself went on to the town and professed to have come just to make his mother-in-law a friendly visit. Addressing her as Mother, he told her that he had killed a bush-pig in the forest and that he had come to ask her to go with him to get some of it before he should take it home. The woman, without doubting, followed him along the path.