Fetichism in West Africa

by Robert Hamill Nassau

Modern missionaries, also, in studying the beliefs and forms of worship of the heathen nations among whom they dwell, while they may be shocked at the immoralities, cruelties, or absurdities of the special cult they are investigating, have to acknowledge that its followers, in their practice of it, exhibit a devotion, a persistence, and a faithfulness worthy of Christian martyrs. They are very “religious.” Verily, if the obtaining of heaven and final salvation rested only on sincerity of belief and consistency of practice, the multitudinous followers of the so-called false religions would have an assurance greater than that of many professors of what is known as Christianity, and much of the occupation of the Christian missionary would be gone.

I say much; but not all, by any means. For the feeling with which I was impressed on my very first contact with the miseries of the sociology of heathenism, entirely aside from its theology and any question of salvation in a future life, has steadily deepened into the conviction that, even if I were not a Christian, I still ought to, and would, do and bear and suffer whatever God has called or allowed me to suffer or bear or do since 1861 in my proclamation of His gospel, simply for the sake of the elevation of heathen during their present earthly life from the wrongs sanctioned by or growing out of their religion. Distinctly is it true that “Godliness is profitable unto all things,” not only for the life “which is to come,” but also for “the life that now is.” Those in Christian lands who have no sympathy for, or who refuse to take any interest in, what are known as “Foreign Missions,” err egregiously in their failure to recognize the indisputable fact that they themselves are debtors for their possession of protected life, true liberty, and unoppressed pursuit of personal happiness, not to civilization as such, but to the form of religious belief called Christianity, which made that civilization possible. And by just so much as divine law has ordained us each our brother’s keeper, we are bound to share the blessings of the gospel with those whom God has made of one blood with us in the brotherhood of humanity.

A pursuit of this line of thought would lead me into an argument for the duty of foreign missions. That is not the direct object of these pages. True, I pray that, as a result of any reader’s following me in this study of African superstition, his desire will be deepened to give to Africa the pure truth in place of its falsity. But the special object of my pen, in following a certain thread of truth, is to show how degradingly false is that falsity, in its lapse from God, even though I accord it the name of religion.

For my present purpose it is sufficiently accurate to define theology as that department of knowledge which takes cognizance of God,—His being, His character, and His relation to His Cosmos. Whenever any intelligent unit in that Cosmos looks up to Him as something greater than itself, under what Schleiermacher describes as “a sense of infinite dependence,” and utters its need, it has expressed its religion. It may be weak, superstitious, and mixed with untruth; nevertheless, it is religion.

When a study of God and the thoughts concerning Him crystallize into a formula of words expressing a certain belief, it is definitely a creed. When, under a human necessity, a creed clothes itself in certain rites, ceremonies, and formulas of practice, it is a worship. That worship may be fearful in its cruelty or ridiculous in its frivolity; nevertheless, it is a worship. Worship is essential to the vitality of religion; without it religion is simply a theory.

Theology differentiates itself from other departments of knowledge, as to its source and its effects. For instance, in the study of geography, as to its effects, it is comparatively a matter of indifference whether we believe that the earth is flat or globular, like Booker T. Washington’s teacher who in his district school was prepared to teach either, “according to the preference of a majority of his patrons”; or, in astronomy, whether we believe that the sun is the stationary centre of our planetary system, or whether, with the late Rev. John Jasper, we assert that the sun “do move” around our earth.

But in theology it matters enormously for this present life, whether we believe the supreme object of our worship to be Moloch, and infinitely for our future life, whether Jesus be to us the Son of God.

As to the source of theological knowledge, all our other knowledge is evolved, systematized, and developed by patient experiment and investigation. The results of any particular branch of human knowledge are cumulative, and are enlarged and perfected from generation to generation. But the source of our knowledge of God is not in us, any more than our spiritual life had its source in ourselves. It came ab extra. God breathed into the earthly form of Adam the breath of life, and he became a living creature, essentially and radically different from the beasts over which he was given dominion. Knowledge of God was thus an original, donated, component part of us. It grew under revelations made during the angelic communications before the Fall. Revelation was continued by the Logos along thousands of years, until that Logos himself became flesh and dwelt among us in visible form in His written word, and by His Comforter, who still reveals to us.

I do not feel it necessary here to discuss, or even to express an opinion as to the evolution of the physical species. I know, simply because God says so,—and am satisfied with this knowledge,—that “in the beginning God created.” As to when that “beginning” was, there may be respectable difference of opinion; for it is only a human opinion that asserts when. Assertion may have apparently very reliable data; but these data often are like the bits of glass, factors in the geometric figures of a kaleidoscope, whose next turn in scientific discovery dislocates and relocates in an apparently reliable proof of the existence of another figure.

As to what it was that God created in that beginning, there may be also respectable difference of opinion. Whether, like Minerva, full armed from the head of Jove, Adam sprang into his perfect physical, mental, and moral manhood on the sixth of consecutive days of twenty-four solar hours each; or whether, created a weakling, he slowly grew up to perfect development; or whether life began only in protoplasm, and gradually differentiated itself into the forms of beasts, and finally into that of man,—back of all was a great First Cause that “created” in the “beginning.” It is all a subject fearfully wonderful.