It is only the skulls of men, not of women, that are used by the Secret Society. But the spirits of women return after death, like those of men, and frequently become very troublesome. On Corisco Island there lives a man who has been in contact with civilization all his lifetime and is fairly educated though he is not a Christian. His wife died; and shortly afterwards she began playing pranks in his town and even in his house. She broke nearly all his dishes. Then, one night, she struck him in the neck, and he instantly recognized her. His neck was stiff in the morning. That proved it! Not being able to strike back in this unequal warfare and preferring an enemy whom he could kick (for this individual wore shoes and scarcely anything else) he lost spirit and finally pulled down the entire town and built in another place. Women and children never possess the skulls of ancestors. The power of the ancestor is more often used against women than others. Among the Mpongwe and some other tribes a woman may worship her ancestors; for which purpose she uses not skulls but wooden images, which she never exhibits.
The African conception of nature may be inferred from what we have said of their view of God and their worship of ancestors. God having made the world seems to take no more interest in it. Other spirits innumerable control it and continually interfere with its normal operations. Since there is no single intelligence ever present and presiding it follows that there is no uniformity in nature and no reign of law. Those phenomena which attract the African’s attention he ascribes immediately to a supernatural cause. He does not look for a natural cause. If a tree falls across his path, somebody threw it. The activity of spirits accounts for everything. There is no line between nature and the supernatural; miracles are always happening. The causes of natural phenomena being supernatural are also inscrutable. The study of nature and the investigation of her laws is precluded by this conception.
If then we would understand the African, if we would distinguish between his mentality and a state of imbecility, we must bear in mind that, since according to his conception innumerable spirits at variance with each other preside over nature, uniformity, constancy and dependability are not to be expected. The rainbow, he says, is a serpent, which has the power of making itself visible or invisible at will. If a mountain disappear behind the clouds he has no difficulty in believing that a spirit who inhabits the mountain has removed it, and that he brings it back when the sun shines. The white man who does not accept this explanation and demands a natural and knowable cause does not thereby manifest a knowledge of nature but an ignorance of spirits. The canoe which carries him safely to-day may lose its buoyancy and sink beneath the waves to-morrow. In some of their fables, at the utterance of a magic word a ship may sink, a house may fall, a man be reduced to physical and mental impotence; and such fables are scarcely distinguishable from fact in his conception. At their first contact with the white man they suppose that the beads, cloth and other goods which he displays are made by himself, by some magic process, as easy when known as the utterance of a word; and they suppose that we could without effort make them as rich as ourselves. If a house or a town should burn down there is little use in looking for the cause, as it may have been set on fire by some ancestor who is angry at being neglected.
When Du Chaillu visited a certain town in which the people had never before seen a white man, regarding him as a spirit, they all declared that a great rock near the town had been moved by him and was not in the same place it had been before. This inspired them with dread. But when the smallpox broke out among them and the scourge followed him with the persistency of fate, there was no doubt in their minds but that he had caused it; and meanwhile they made not the slightest effort to protect themselves against the contagion. They regarded him with increasing fear and hostility until at last his journey came to a disastrous end. He and his party turned and fled while the natives pursued with poisoned arrows. But they soon desisted from the pursuit; for, they declared, their arrows rebounded harmless from his body, and sometimes even passed through him and did him no injury. In all this let it not be supposed for a moment that the native is a fool. He is true to his philosophy of nature: but his philosophy is wrong. He knows nothing of the doctrine of God,—of one Intelligence presiding over all nature, and that natural laws are therefore persistent and uniform.
But to the native chaotic conception of nature we must add another idea of fearful import. To the mind of the African nature presents a frowning aspect, from which he naturally infers that the spirits which rule or reside within it are mostly hostile to him. It is only to the reflecting mind that nature seems beneficent. Her greatest forces, her constant ministry, are not obvious. That which is normal and regular does not attract attention. A man thinks more of the one month of sickness than the eleven months of health; he is more observant of the storm than of sunshine, more conscious of adversity than prosperity. The laws of growth, seed-time and harvest, rain and sunshine—all the kindly ministry of nature is quiet and unobtrusive, while her cruelty thrusts itself upon the attention because it is her unaccustomed mood. The conception of nature in the African mind is derived from the devastating tornado and the storm upon the sea that threatens to engulf him, from the hard work necessary to procure his food and the scarcity of meat, from sickness that disables him and death that bereaves him of his friends. It is therefore a part of his philosophy that the spirits are at enmity with him. His own ancestors are among them and they may be placated and even rendered favourable, but a far greater number are hostile; and the motive of his worship is not devotion but fear. He worships the spirits of his ancestors that he may obtain their help against all other spirits.
Contrary to all this Jesus teaches him to call God, Father; and God’s Fatherhood includes His care, which at once relates God to nature, for it is largely through nature that God’s care is exercised. To believe in God’s care over us is to believe that nature’s laws are the operation of His will. The mind awakens to the beneficence of nature, and we learn that even storm, disease and death are under the control of a sympathetic Power. The fear of the native is changed to confidence and trust.
Next to the ancestral relic is a lower form of fetishism in which the external object is the vessel or residence of a spirit, which is under the control of the possessor of the object. A still lower form of fetishism is pure animism, in which the various objects of nature have each a life analogous to that of man to which their phenomena are due. Witchcraft is a supernatural power obtained by a person through a compact with an evil spirit. In Africa witchcraft is also fetishism inasmuch as it is usually, and perhaps always, supposed that there is within the witch’s body a physical object which is the residence of the evil spirit.
The skull or other relic of the ancestor differs from the common fetish in that the possessor of the former cannot compel the ancestor to do his will; he can only persuade him, or induce his help and favour by offerings and kind treatment. But the possessor of the common fetish does not make offerings to it; the fetish is under his control and he can compel the spirit within it to serve him. If it should disobey him he will punish it. The usual punishment is to hang it in smoke. Fetishes have a horror of smoke. I do not know that the native ever punishes his ancestor for refusing a favour. If he should leave the skull in a cold or wet place, or should neglect offerings of food, the ancestor will suffer discomfort, but the discomfort is slight compared with the evil that he will send upon his undutiful son as a punishment for such neglect.
In the proper fetish (if the word fetish be restricted in its meaning) the spirit resides within the object but is not a part of it, and may leave it, the fetish being then of no more use. A still lower form of fetish, implying animism, is that in which the spirit of the fetish is its own life, and is related to it as the soul to the body. This latter fetish however is different from a mere amulet or charm; for the charm operates not by any intelligence within itself but by some sympathetic influence without. Such, for instance, is the horseshoe which the negro in our South hangs over his door for luck. The charm, the fetish, and the relic represent ascending grades of belief. But they are all confused in the mind of the African, just as we confuse them under the one term fetishism.
As long as we live in Africa, however, we do not often speak of fetishes, but of medicines: for this is in strict accord with native usage. The native calls his fetishes medicines, and his medicines fetishes, and in his mind there is no difference. The remedial power of medicine is supernatural, due either to magic or to a spirit residing within it. Upon swallowing the medicine, the spirit of the medicine, like a policeman, chases through the body after the spirit of the disease until it strangles it or drives it out. Of course the white man’s medicines are fetishes also.