The fetish folk of West Africa

by Robert H. Milligan

Against the hostility of the spirits a man’s ancestors (especially his immediate father) afford him some protection. But even such protection is uncertain; for the ancestors themselves are very petulant and easily offended, and when they are displeased they are as much to be feared as other spirits. The favours which a son seeks from his father are not spiritual blessings of any kind, but temporal benefits. It cannot be said that the motive of this worship is entirely filial reverence. A father is much more useful dead than living; and aged parents are sometimes even afraid that their sons will put them to death in order to procure the benefits which they could afterwards confer. The skull of the father is the commonest ancestral fetish, but not the only one.

An old chief, one day when I was visiting in his town for the first time, came and laid at my feet his most sacred fetish. It was contained in a small cylindrical box of bark made for the express purpose of holding this kind of fetish. The women, when they saw the box, screamed with fear and fled for their lives, putting their hands on their ears lest they should hear the old man’s words and die. They are not supposed to know the contents of the box, and they are ready at any moment to take a solemn oath that they do not know, though as a matter of fact they know very well.

The following were the interesting if somewhat repulsive ingredients of this very powerful fetish. There was first, and chiefly, the brains of the old man’s father, who had gained eminence and success according to Fang ideals. Some days after the father’s death, when the body was partly decomposed, the son visited his grave at midnight—entirely naked—opened the shallow grave, severed the head from the body, and hung it up in a house, letting the decomposing brain drip upon some white chalk. To this he added one of the old man’s teeth and a bit of his hair and cuttings of his nails, also a strip of flesh cut from the dead man’s arm and dried over the fire. When the owner of such a fetish is about to engage in any considerable enterprise he rubs a portion of the brains upon his forehead and thereby possesses himself of all the serviceable qualities of the deceased—his adroitness in lying, his skill in cheating, his cleverness in stealing goods or other men’s wives or in killing his enemies. If he is going to talk a big palaver he places the strip of dried flesh in his mouth, and keeps it there all the time he is talking, that he may be eloquent and successful. A man possessing this kind of fetish, if he were going to a trading-house, would not hesitate to rub a portion of the brains and chalk upon his hand, so that in shaking hands with the white man it might pass to the white man’s hand and make him benevolent. Some of them think that having thus put medicine on the white man’s hand he will give them anything they ask.

The hostility of spirits other than ancestors is appeased in various ways. Arbitrary restraints and prohibitions are frequently imposed upon children soon after birth, to be observed through life. Such prohibitions usually have reference to a particular spirit which is always present with the inhibited person. The commonest prohibition is that of some particular food. Among my schoolboys there were always several who could not eat plantain, although it is the food that they like best. It was often difficult to provide other food for them; but they would have died rather than eat plantain. Women are prohibited from eating certain kinds of meat, or certain parts of an animal—usually (by a strange coincidence) the very parts that the men like best. There is scarcely a limit to the self-denial sometimes involved in the observance of these arbitrary restrictions.

Among the Fang the offering of human sacrifice to placate the spirits is not customary. Witchcraft probably usurps the place of this form of human sacrifice. But among the more highly organized tribes of the Calabar and the Niger, where individuals wield despotic power, multitudes have been offered in sacrifice to appease the hostility of the spirits: and they would still be offered but for the presence of foreign governments. It took the English many years to suppress the annual sacrifice of human beings to the crocodiles of the Niger. I once had the pleasure of travelling with that great man and great missionary, Mr. Ramseyer (Father Ramseyer, all white men called him), a member of the Basle Mission, who for thirty years lived at Kumassi in the Ashantee Territory; and I heard from Mr. Ramseyer himself the story of Prempeh, that beastly king of Kumassi, whose fetish-trees were regularly watered with the blood of human beings; and who, when at length his lust for blood had become insatiable, had a slave put to death each night for his entertainment—and probably, also, to appease the hostility of the spirits. King Prempeh was finally captured by the English, and not long afterwards died in the prison at Sierra Leone.

Next to fear of the spirits the most demoralizing factor is the African’s distrust of his fellow men. The one is a corollary of the other. The African, like other savages, before giving one a drink swallows a mouthful of it himself to prove that it is not poisoned. In some of the large tribes of the Niger, where a king is a king, it was the practice (until the English government interfered with custom) for a king, upon his accession to the throne, to put to death all his brothers and half-brothers. In one of those tribes the blood royal was held in such reverence that under no circumstances would they shed it; so they used to put the royal brothers to death by stuffing the mouth and nostrils full of cotton. It was a far more horrible death than cutting the throat; but it was respectful.

On one occasion, when my heart had been rent by the dreadful cruelty inflicted upon a certain woman whom I knew very well, who had been charged with witchcraft because of the death of her husband, I addressed the whole population of the town, and after holding forth for some time in wrathful denunciation of their unreasoning suspicion, I asked why a man’s wives must always be the first to be charged with his death. An elderly chief; rising to his feet, gently interrupted me, and using my native name, Mote-ke-ye (Man-who-never-sleeps), he said:

“Ah, Mote-ke-ye, I would like to ask one question: Are you a married man?”

I was well aware, when I answered No, that the shrewd old man had routed me. The guilty men looked at one another with a relieved and peculiarly significant smile which said politely but unmistakably: “Then you are not qualified to judge us; for you know nothing about the natural hostility of wives, and we know all about it.”

A man’s wives are the first to be charged with his death, even without evidence, because they are supposed to have a latent desire for it. As I have already said, much of the witchcraft of Africa is straight poison usually administered in food. Africa abounds with deadly poisons and many Africans are skillful in their use. Wives do the cooking, and so have the constant opportunity to inflict death by this powerful but invisible weapon. One often finds that one bad custom is nothing more than a pitiful attempt to correct another. And this may explain the custom of killing wives at the death of the husband. At any rate it tends to restrict a wife’s use of poison and to inspire an earnest effort to keep her husband alive.