The accounts which some travellers have given of tribes without religion I either set down to misunderstanding, or consider them to be insufficient to invalidate the assertion that religion is a universal feature of savage life.
However degraded, every people have a religion. But they are children, babes in the woods, lost in the forest of ignorance, dense and more morally malarious than Stanley’s forest of Urĕga. In their helplessness, under a feeling of their “infinite dependence,” they cry out in the night of their orphanage, “Help us, O Paia Njambe!” Their forefathers wandered so far from him that only a name is left by which to describe the All-Father, whose true character has been utterly forgotten,—so forgotten that they rarely worship him, but have given such honor and reverence as they do render literally to the supposed spiritual residents in stocks and stones. “Lo! this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.”
Offering in the following pages a formulation of African superstitious beliefs and practice, I premise that I have gathered them from a very large number of native witnesses, very few of whom presented to me all the same ideas. Any one else, inquiring of other natives in other places, would not find, as held by every one of them, all that I have recorded; but parts of all these separate ideas will be found held by separate individuals everywhere.
After more than forty years’ residence among these tribes, fluently using their language, conversant with their customs, dwelling intimately in their huts, associating with them in the varied relations of teacher, pastor, friend, master, fellow-traveller, and guest, and, in my special office as missionary, searching after their religious thought (and therefore being allowed a deeper entrance into the arcana of their soul than would be accorded to a passing explorer), I am able unhesitatingly to say that among all the multitude of degraded ones with whom I have met, I have seen or heard of none whose religious thought was only a superstition.
Standing in the village street, surrounded by a company whom their chief has courteously summoned at my request, when I say to him, “I have come to speak to your people,” I do not need to begin by telling them that there is a God. Looking on that motley assemblage of villagers,—the bold, gaunt cannibal with his armament of gun, spear, and dagger; the artisan with rude adze in hand, or hands soiled at the antique bellows of the village smithy; women who have hasted from their kitchen fire with hands white with the manioc dough or still grasping the partly scaled fish; and children checked in their play with tiny bow and arrow or startled from their dusty street pursuit of dog or goat,—I have yet to be asked, “Who is God?”
Under the slightly varying form of Anyambe, Anyambie, Njambi, Nzambi, Anzam, Nyam, or, in other parts, Ukuku, Suku, and so forth, they know of a Being superior to themselves, of whom they themselves inform me that he is the Maker and Father. The divine and human relations of these two names at once give me ground on which to stand in beginning my address.
If suddenly they should be asked the flat question, “Do you know Anyambe?” they would probably tell any white visitor, trader, traveller, or even missionary, under a feeling of their general ignorance and the white man’s superior knowledge, “No! What do we know? You are white people and are spirits; you come from Njambi’s town, and know all about him!” (This will help to explain, what is probably true, that some natives have sometimes made the thoughtless admission that they “know nothing about a God.”) I reply, “No, I am not a spirit; and, while I do indeed know about Anyambe, I did not call him by that name. It’s your own word. Where did you get it?” “Our forefathers told us that name. Njambi is the One-who-made-us. He is our Father.” Pursuing the conversation, they will interestedly and voluntarily say, “He made these trees, that mountain, this river, these goats and chickens, and us people.”
That typical conversation I have had hundreds of times, under an immense variety of circumstances, with the most varied audiences, and before extremes of ignorance, savagery, and uncivilization, utterly barring out the admission of a probability that the tribe, audience, or individual in question had obtained a previous knowledge of the name by hearsay from adjacent more enlightened tribes. For the name of that Great Being was everywhere and in every tribe before any of them had become enlightened; varied in form in each tribe by the dialectic difference belonging to their own, and not imported from others,—for, where tribes are hundreds of miles apart or their dialects greatly differ, the variation in the name is great, e. g., “Suku,” of the Bihe country, south of the Kongo River and in the interior back of Angola, and “Nzam” of the cannibal Fang, north of the equator.
But while it is therefore undeniable that a knowledge of this Great Being exists among the natives, and that the belief is held that he is a superior and even a supreme being, that supremacy is not so great as what we ascribe to Jehovah. Nevertheless, I believe that the knowledge of their Anzam or Anyambe has come down—clouded though it be and fearfully obscured and marred, but still a revelation—from Jehovah Himself. Most of the same virtues which we in our enlightened Christianity commend, and many of the vices which we denounce, they respectively commend and denounce. No one of them praises to me theft or falsehood or murder. They speak of certain virtues as “good,” and of other things which are “bad,” though, just as do the depraved of Christian lands, they follow the vices they condemn. True, certain evils they do defend, e. g. (as did some of our New England ancestors) witchcraft executions, justifying them as judicial acts; and polygamy, considering it (as our civilized Mormons) a desirable social institution (but, unlike the Mormons, not claiming for it the sanction of religion); and slavery, regarded (as only a generation ago in the United States) as necessary for a certain kind of property. But theft, falsehood, and some other sins, when committed by others, their own consciences condemn,—closely covered up and blunted as those consciences may be,—thus witnessing with and for God.
While all this is true, their knowledge of God is almost simply a theory. It is an accepted belief, but it does not often influence their life. “God is not in all their thought.” In practice they give Him no worship. God is simply “counted out.”