The elephant would not move aside; so the gorilla broke down a tree and beat the elephant to death. And the proof of it is that the prostrate tree was found beside the body of the dead elephant.
The sun and moon are great enemies. They are the same age but each claims to be older than the other. The sun is the friend of the people and brings daylight and gladness. The moon hates people and devours them like insects; she brings darkness, witchcraft and death. One day the sun and the moon had a palaver and got very angry at each other. The palaver, as usual, began by each one claiming to be older than the other.
The moon said: “Who are you? You are nobody, for you are alone and have no family. My equal? Indeed! Look at these countless stars. They are all my people; but you are alone.”
The sun replied: “Oh, Moon, mother of darkness and of witchcraft! I would have as many people as you if you had not killed them all. But now I have taken the people of the world, men, women and children, to be my family; and I love them all.”
XII
FETISHES
The Fang, like other tribes of West Africa, have a name for God and they conceive that He is a personal being, who made the heavens and the earth, and created man. The one thing that they will say of God and the only fixed idea regarding Him is that He made everything. The world, even in the mind of the African, is an effect which demands a cause; and that cause is God. But since they have no conception of God’s eternity, by the same principle of causality they must account for God Himself. So God has a father and a grandfather. This notion of a divine ancestry is evidently an effort of the mind to grope its way back to a First Cause.
They do not fear God, and they certainly do not love or reverence Him. Nor do I know that they ever worship Him. The transient observer among them sees wooden images, evidently objects of worship, and supposes that they are images of God; but in most cases, if not in all, these are images of ancestors or imaginary personages. He figures in some of their fables; but His deeds are usually wanton, wicked, or immoral. Most of these fables would not bear repetition. God is simply a magnified African chief with a great number of wives, most of whom have been stolen in the first instance. God takes no interest in the world that He has made. He looks down with indifference upon all its cruelty, its sorrow, and its sin. If He interferes in human affairs it is perhaps to make mischief, or to confuse and distress men and women for His amusement. The most that the natives desire of God is that He will let them alone, and to this end they let Him alone.
Our teaching at this point is radical. They are surprised to learn that God always does right; that He loves right and hates wrong; that He loves them as a father loves his children; that their sins grieve Him and that He will punish their cruelties. We divest the character of God of all that is filthy and wicked, and teach them that God is such a one as Jesus was while on earth, even as He said to Philip: “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.” To them it is an entirely new conception.
Their belief in a future life is very clear, although there are individuals who will deny it. Their belief finds strong support in dreams. The African believes in dreams as actual occurrences, and they relate them one to another with great earnestness, which perhaps tends to make them more vivid and possibly more frequent. But no dreams are more common and none more vivid than those in which friends and loved ones appear who have recently died. Those who hold to the evolution of all our ideas from natural antecedents have in the dream as regarded by primitive people a plausible origin for the belief in a future life.