The fetish folk of West Africa

by Robert H. Milligan

FANG TRADERS WITH IVORY.

The white man in setting out for Africa divests himself of every superfluous possession and provides only for the bare necessities of life. If he is bound for the interior he must feel that he has consecrated himself to poverty. It is strange, therefore, and surprising to find the natives regarding his meagre stock of goods as fabulous wealth and himself as a sort of multi-millionaire. But it is stranger still that he himself should gradually accept their judgment and regard himself as rich. For the sense of wealth depends upon having more than one’s neighbours; and there is no feeling of privation in not being able to procure those things that nobody else has. The white man’s privations may be many, but they are inevitable; he has all that is procurable in his situation, and far more than those around him. He therefore has a comfortable feeling of wealth, the more pleasant because unexpected.

But this attitude of the natives towards the white man, especially in new tribes, forebodes trouble. There is not much danger of robbery or violence, but there is danger to his moral influence. A kind of communism obtains among them. A man having our “abundance” would divide with the men of his town, all of whom are related to him. If a man hunting in the forest should kill a monkey or a python he will bring it to his town before he cuts it up and it will be divided equally. For this reason it is very hard to buy any game from them; no one person has authority to sell it. Even at the coast and in the old semi-civilized settlements, when a native, after being employed by a white man, returns to his town with his wages he will be expected to assist everybody in the town who happens to want anything and has not the price—and there are always some of them who want to get married and have not succeeded in raising the dowry. So the wages of a hard year’s work are dissipated in less than a month. It is hard, but it is custom. It cannot be denied that the custom fosters an easy-going content and precludes the unhappiness and cruelty of worldly ambition. But, with ambition, energy also and industry are discouraged and a premium is put upon laziness. The tyranny of custom in Africa and other uncivilized lands is not easy for those to realize who have not witnessed it. It is “the only infallible rule of faith and practice.”

The people of the interior, when the white man first goes among them, invariably expect him to divide his goods with them just as soon as they understand that he professes to be their friend. Such a profession seems hypocrisy while he keeps his goods. They can yield intellectual assent when he reasons that the white man has a right to his own customs; but in the consideration of a particular custom it still remains that theirs is right and his is wrong; and when they actually see the goods, greed masters reason and they are often enraged.

All worldly prosperity in Africa depends upon the possession of proper fetishes. They are therefore quick to conclude that we have very powerful fetishes; and it is inevitable that before long they should conclude that the Bible is the missionary’s fetish. At Efulen, among the Bulu, when we had been there but a short time, a band of men, setting out upon the war-path with their guns upon their shoulders, marched up to our hill and asked if we would give them a Bible to take with them to make their guns shoot straight and procure their success. One day Dr. Good missed a Bible. It had been stolen. He heard nothing of it for a month; after which he was one day walking through a native village where the people, expecting to go to war next day, were preparing a very powerful fetish or “war-medicine” by boiling together in a pot several of their most reliable fetishes; and in the boiling pot he found his Bible.

Perhaps it is the frequency of war between towns that keeps the people within a town, or in a company, generally at peace among themselves. It is surprising how one can trust workmen or carriers or schoolboys to divide their food without quarrelling. In this respect they far surpass white workmen, or white schoolboys. Where we would expect a quarrel no quarrel occurs.

And then again, just when one has declared that “Africans never quarrel,” a scandalous quarrel breaks out over some infinitesimal matter. Individuals, especially women, often have a reputation for quarrelling. Some towns are notorious. I once visited such a town, where no white man had been before. I found the stormiest people I ever met in the jungles. During the two days that I remained in the town there occurred an almost continuous succession of palavers, each of which seemed to involve the whole population of the town—men, women and children. Long after they went into their houses for the night some of them continued yelling their anger loud enough to be heard by all whom it concerned. The occasion of a general quarrel the day that I arrived was this: A certain man’s hen had laid an egg in another man’s house, and the latter man had kept the egg. The town was rent in twain over the ownership of that egg. Forcible arguments were presented on either side but without avail. Before it was settled something else had happened that required a vigorous exercise of lungs for its adjustment, and the egg palaver was laid on the table. There was not a spare moment in which to resume it before I left, and it may be undecided to this day. Even while I was preaching, a woman in the congregation, sitting immediately in front of me, continued the palaver, occasionally yelling unladylike remarks to some other woman whom she evidently supposed to be at the end of the universe. In all such quarrels there is much of bluff and bluster, but not so much anger as one might suppose. Such a quarrel, if anything should appeal to their keen sense of the ridiculous during its progress, might break up in a laugh.

When two Fang women engage in a prolonged quarrel—usually sitting immediately within the door of their respective houses and cursing each other in shrill tones, heard all over the town—the people sometimes become impatient and demand that they shall come out into the street and fight. I have witnessed such a fight. They prepare for it by throwing off even the shred of clothing that they wear. They fight more like men than women—if it be true that women usually scratch and pull each other’s hair when they fight. When one of them is repeatedly thrown to the ground she confesses defeat. At least it may be said to their credit that this usually ends the matter; and the next day they may be as friendly as ever.

The marriage relation, of course, dominates all customs and is the foundation of the whole social structure. With the Africans love is not so closely linked with sex as among most modern races. Friendship is deemed nobler than romantic love. This of course is due to the inequality of the sexes; woman is not regarded as fit for companionship with men. A wife is expected to love her own people more than her husband. A man loves his brothers and his friends at least as much as his wife; his children he loves far more, and his mother he loves most of all. Indeed, his love of his mother is the deepest emotion of his heart and his best moral quality. The African young and old thinks he has fully justified the most violent assault upon another when he says: “He cursed my mother.” Any uncomplimentary reflection more or less serious is a “curse.”

A wife is bought with a price and is part of a man’s wealth. A man’s wealth is always reckoned by the number of his wives. The chief of the town is the man who has the most wives. But most men have only one wife and some have none, because they cannot procure a dowry. The size of the dowry differs in different tribes. Among the Fang it is enormous, considering their very primitive condition. The following dowry was paid by a Fang near the coast: ten goats, five sheep, five guns, twenty trade-boxes (plain wooden chests of imported material), one hundred heads of tobacco, ten hats, ten looking-glasses, five blankets, five pairs of trousers, two dozen plates, fifty dollars’ worth of calico, fifty dollars’ worth of rum, one chair (with one leg missing) and one cat.