The very towns in which these boys lived became different from all other towns. A stranger travelling with me from town to town would surely notice the difference. These boys became without doubt the greatest evangelistic force in the Fang field. Africans are natural orators; and even the small boy has not the least difficulty in expressing his thoughts appropriately. Whatever religious truth I taught the schoolboys they in turn taught their people when they returned home. They did what neither myself, nor any other white man, could ever have done. Boys of twelve years, or even ten, gathered the people of their towns around them, both old and young and taught them reading and whatever they had learned of arithmetic. This is a matter of observation and astonishment in all mission fields in Africa.
And all Africans have this beautiful childlike quality that they are teachable—a quality that Jesus must have had in mind when He set a child in the midst of the disciples as the symbol of Christian attainment. The biggest African chief will sit on the ground and listen to the small boy, so long as the small boy knows anything worth while that the chief does not know.
XIII
THE MENTAL DEGRADATION OF FETISHISM
No; it was not among the Negroes, but among the peasants of Germany that the horseshoe acquired its power of luck.
One day very long ago, in a German village, an honest blacksmith was hard at work making a horseshoe when the devil, strolling about the village, was attracted by the hammering. While looking on at the blacksmith it occurred to him that it might be a very good thing to get his own hoofs shod. Thereupon he made a bargain with the blacksmith, and the blacksmith set to work to put horseshoes on the devil. Now the honest blacksmith knew very well that it was the devil and nobody else. So he put on each of his feet a red-hot shoe, and drove the nails straight into the devil’s hoofs. The devil then paid him and went his way; but the honest blacksmith threw the money into the fire. Meanwhile, the devil, after walking some time, began to suffer pain from his shoes, and as he went on the pain became worse and worse. In his torment he danced and he kicked and he raged and he swore, and still the pain became worse. Then at last, in agony, he tore the shoes off and threw them away. From that day to this whenever the devil sees a horseshoe he runs away as fast as he can go.
The superstition of the horseshoe has been so eagerly embraced by the Negro that most people seem to think that it originated with him. It is precisely like many of his own superstitions, and it shows that ignorance and superstition in Africa are like ignorance and superstition anywhere else, and that the African mind is essentially like our own.
The charm, the fetish and the relic represent ascending grades of belief. They are all associated together in what we call fetishism. The charm operates not by reason of any intelligence within itself but by some influence from without. The horseshoe is such a charm. One of the numerous African charms is the string which a mother ties around the waist of her child and which is worn throughout childhood. This fetish is for health. The Roman Catholic priests, in the early history of their missions on the Congo, substituted for this health-fetish a string made from the fibres of a palm that had been blessed on Palm Sunday. There is no evidence, however, that the substitution of the Roman fetish for the African fetish resulted in any marked improvement in the health of the natives.
A charm is not necessarily a physical object—like the amulet. In Africa, as among the superstitious everywhere else, it may be a word or action, a sign or symbol, a formula or incantation. To count the number of persons present on certain occasions will cause the death of at least one of them within the year. The utterance of the word salt at the wrong moment has been known to produce appalling consequences.
The fetish proper represents a more intelligible form of belief than the charm or amulet. One common kind of fetish implies animism; that is, that the various objects of nature have each a life analogous to that of man to which their phenomena are due. This life is inseparable from the object. The eagle’s talon, the wing feathers of any bird, the claw of the leopard, the teeth of animals, and all those objects which are associated with that which is desirable or that which is fearful are valuable fetishes, because one may avail himself of the powers inherent in such objects. The African sometimes says that the surf is in a nasty temper; and when he uses this expression he is not speaking figuratively. The wind talks to the forest, and the forest talks to the wind. The tornado is often nothing more than a quarrel between mountain and forest, lightning against wind; and, as one writer expresses it, we ourselves may get hit with the bits. Not that they are angry at us, but at each other, and we had best keep out of the way.
Closely related to this class of fetishes is a kind somewhat higher than the animistic fetish. In this the relation of the physical object and the power within it is not that of body and spirit but that of a house and a tenant residing in it. The spirit may leave the fetish, and then it will be of no more use. But the skill of a fetish-doctor may compel the spirit to remain. As long as it remains it is under the control of the possessor of the fetish and must do his bidding. If it should disobey he will punish it, usually by hanging it in the smoke. It is such a fetish, contained in a goat’s horn, that a man walking in the forest carries suspended from his neck to make him invisible to an enemy. Another he hangs among his plantains to keep the wind from blowing them down.