The fetish folk of West Africa

by Robert H. Milligan

But the most powerful and sacred fetish is the ancestral relic, possessed by every grown man. It is the skull of the father or other ancestral relation. Here fetishism becomes ancestor-worship. The skull is the residence of the dead father, and if it be treated well, that is, kept in a warm and dry place, the father will confer every kind of favour—success in hunting and in war, in stealing and attracting other men’s wives. For death has not improved the morals of these ancestors. The son never punishes the ancestral fetish. Indeed, if he neglect it—if he let it get cold or wet—the ancestor will punish him. Many a hunter’s gun has refused to fire just at the critical moment because of such neglect. He often talks to the dead father and tells him his affairs and asks his help. This fetish is only for men, not for women. If a woman should see it she will surely die. If she even be heard talking too curiously about it she is liable to die. This is no imaginary fear on her part. For the ancestral anger, like much of the occultism of Africa, has a material basis of secret poison administered by living agents.

The fetish-doctor, or medicine-man, is to be feared. He is more powerful in some tribes than in others; but within his own tribe his reputation depends upon himself. Any shrewd fellow, should good fortune attend him for a while, may persuade the people that he can make powerful fetishes. There will be application for various fetishes at good prices. Every success enhances his reputation; and if he is very clever he will even convert failure into success. If a man return a fetish and tell him it has failed—that his goods have been stolen, his hens have not laid, his wives have eloped, or his canoe has capsized with him—the doctor will not usually dispute the failure, but will discover the reason, and more than ever impress his customer with his skill and knowledge. Sometimes as soon as he looks at it he will say that it is dead; that the spirit has escaped from it and it may as well be thrown away. Then by some occult means he discovers how this has happened. The owner, it may be, has not taken proper care of it; or an enemy has lured it away from him into his own service; or a witch has killed it. Thereupon he offers to make him another fetish at a reasonable price.

The fetish-doctor soon acquires the power of detecting witchcraft and sometimes even of discovering the witch. His diagnosis and treatment of the bewitched are interesting and varied. One particular treatment is as follows: Having discovered that the patient has really been bewitched, he makes several incisions on the breast. Then, after an exercise of howls and incantations, he applies his lips to the incision and sucks the wound until the patient screams; whereupon, he takes out of his mouth some article, perhaps a goat’s horn, which he is supposed to have sucked out of the body of the patient, and which had been witched into him. He again applies his lips, and when the patient screams a second time he takes another article out of his mouth and displays it before the credulous people. Having thus removed a miscellaneous assortment of articles—roots, pebbles, broken pottery and other objects entirely out of place in a human anatomy—the patient is left in a fair way to recover; and if he should not it is surely not the fault of the doctor.

It is always a question to what extent the fetish-doctor is a conscious hypocrite. He usually begins practice by exploiting some particular fetish in which he really believes and whose power he has proved. Finding the trade lucrative he invents other fetishes upon the same principle—for there is a principle, that is to say, there is always some apparent relation between the ingredients of a fetish and the purpose for which it is designed. If some of his first fetishes should be successful and gain him a reputation he may come to believe in his own power. He may consciously abuse that power—and physicians in other lands have been known to do the same; but he still believes in the power—believes in fetishes and in witchcraft and in the possibility of its detection.

Africa presents to the psychologist an unexplored and inviting field. A man who possesses a fetish-skull usually invokes its aid to prevent secret unfaithfulness on the part of his wife. He compounds a certain fetish the ingredients of which include a lock of his wife’s hair, cuttings of her nails, or her saliva. This fetish he puts into the box with the father’s skull; and now, it is believed, if his wife be unfaithful she will surely die; death being inflicted by the ancestor. It seems to be a fact that this fetish frequently proves effective without the aid of poison; that is to say, the woman dies. Fear often drives her to a tardy confession, which, however, affords her but small relief; for everybody tells her that she is going to die.

“You’re a corpse,” says one. “You’re failing every day,” says another.

And the poor woman, as if yielding to some occult compulsion, fails rapidly and dies. She dies, presumably, as a psychological consequence of her belief in the fetish.

One must never tell a sick person that he is going to die lest one be charged with wishing his death. In some tribes it is equivalent to a curse designed to effect death, and is liable to severe punishment.

The following dying confession was made by a woman in a Fang town of Gaboon: Years ago, when she was a child, a man of her town had given her a certain fetish medicine, concealing it in her food. After she had eaten it he told her what he had done, and said that this medicine would effect her death at the birth of her first child. She must keep this matter secret from everybody, even from her parents, lest the medicine kill her immediately. This gloomy prospect darkened her life for years, and just before the birth of her first child she sickened and died—probably as a psychological consequence of her belief in the fetish. Such confessions are not uncommon.

The mental degradation of the African is often overlooked through the deeper regard for his moral degradation. Therefore it is my present purpose to depict the mental degradation of fetishism, and to set over against it the new and transforming conception of God and nature which Christ imparts to the African mind.