In dealing with the East African the traveller cannot do better than to follow the advice of Bacon—“Use savages justly and graciously, with sufficient guard nevertheless.” They must be held as foes; and the prudent stranger will never put himself in their power, especially where life is concerned. The safety of a caravan will often depend upon the barbarian’s fear of beginning the fray: if the onset once takes place, the numbers, the fierce looks, the violent gestures, and the confidence of the assailants upon their own ground, will probably prevail. When necessary, however, severity must be employed; leniency and forbearance are the vulnerable points of civilised policy, as they encourage attack by a suspicion of fear and weakness. They may be managed as the Indian saw directs, by a judicious mixture of the “Narm” and “Garm”—the soft and hot. Thus the old traders remarked in Guinea, that the best way to treat a black man was to hold out one hand to shake with him, while the other is doubled ready to knock him down. In trading with, or even when dwelling amongst this people, all display of wealth must be avoided. A man who would purchase the smallest article avoids showing anything beyond its equivalent.
The ethnologist who compares this sketch with the far more favourable description of the Kafirs, a kindred race, given by travellers in South Africa, may suspect that only the darker shades of the picture are placed before the eye. But, as will appear in a future page, much of this moral degradation must be attributed to the working, through centuries, of the slave-trade: the tribes are no longer as nature made them; and from their connection with strangers they have derived nothing but corruption. Though of savage and barbarous type, they have been varnished with the semi-civilisation of trade and commerce, which sits ridiculously upon their minds as a rich garment would upon their persons.
Fetissism—the word is derived from the Portuguese feitiço, “a doing,”—scil. of magic, by euphuism—is still the only faith known in East Africa. Its origin is easily explained by the aspect of the physical world, which has coloured the thoughts and has directed the belief of man: he reflects, in fact, the fantastical and monstrous character of the animal and vegetable productions around him. Nature, in these regions rarely sublime or beautiful, more often terrible and desolate, with the gloomy forest, the impervious jungle, the tangled hill, and the dread uniform waste tenanted by deadly inhabitants, arouses in his mind a sensation of utter feebleness, a vague and nameless awe. Untaught to recommend himself for protection to a Superior Being, he addresses himself directly to the objects of his reverence and awe: he prostrates himself before the sentiment within him, hoping to propitiate it as he would satisfy a fellow-man. The grand mysteries of life and death, to him unrevealed and unexplained, the want of a true interpretation of the admirable phenomena of creation, and the vagaries and misconceptions of his own degraded imagination, awaken in him ideas of horror, and people the invisible world with ghost and goblin, demon and spectrum, the incarnations, as it were, of his own childish fears. Deepened by the dread of destruction, ever strong in the barbarian breast, his terror causes him to look with suspicion upon all around him: “How,” inquires the dying African, “can I alone be ill when others are well, unless I have been bewitched?” Hence the belief in magical and supernatural powers in man, which the stronger minded have turned to their own advantage.
Fetissism is the adoration, or rather the propitiation, of natural objects, animate and inanimate, to which certain mysterious influences are attributed. It admits neither god, nor angel, nor devil; it ignores the very alphabet of revealed or traditionary religion—a creation, a resurrection, a judgment-day, a soul or a spirit, a heaven or a hell. A modified practical atheism is thus the prominent feature of the superstition. Though instinctively conscious of a being above them, the Africans have as yet failed to grasp the idea: in their feeble minds it is an embryo rather than a conception—at the best a vague god, without personality, attributes, or providence. They call that being Mulungu, the Uhlunga of the Kafirs, and the Utika of the Hottentots. The term, however, may mean a ghost, the firmament, or the sun; a man will frequently call himself Mulungu, and even Mulungu Mbaya, the latter word signifying bad or wicked. In the language of the Wamasai “Ai,” or with the article “Engai”—the Creator—is feminine, the god and rain being synonymous.
The Fetiss superstition is African, but not confined to Africa. The faith of ancient Egypt, the earliest system of profane belief known to man, with its Triad denoting the various phases and powers of nature, was essentially fetissist; whilst in the Syrian mind dawned at first the idea of “Melkart,” a god of earth, and his Baalim, angels, viceregents, or local deities. But generally the history of religions proves that when man, whether degraded from primal elevation or elevated from primal degradation, has progressed a step beyond atheism—the spiritual state of the lowest savagery—he advances to the modification called Fetissism, the condition of the infant mind of humanity. According to the late Col. Van Kennedy, “such expressions as the love and fear of God never occur in the sacred books of the Hindus.” The ancient Persians were ignicolists, adoring ethereal fire. Confucius owned that he knew nothing about the gods, and therefore preferred saying as little as possible upon the subject. Men, still without tradition or training, confused the Creator with creation, and ventured not to place the burden of providence upon a single deity. Slaves to the agencies of material nature, impressed by the splendours of the heavenly bodies, comforted by fire and light, persuaded by their familiarity with the habits of wild beasts that the brute creation and the human claimed a mysterious affinity, humbled by the terrors of elemental war, and benefitted by hero and sage,—
“Quicquid humus, pelagus, cœlum mirabile gignunt,
Id duxere deos.”
The barbarian worshipped these visible objects not as types, myths, divine emanations, or personifications of a deity: he adored them for themselves. The modern theory, the mode in which full-grown man explains away the follies of his childhood, making the interpretation precede the fable, fails when tested by experience. The Hindu, and, indeed, the ignorant Christian, still adore the actual image of man and beast; it is unreasonable to suppose that they kneel before and worship with heart and soul its metaphysics; and an attempt to allegorise it, or to deprive it of its specific virtues, would be considered, as in ancient Greece and Rome, mere impiety.
By its essence, then, Fetissism is a rude and sensual superstition, the faith of abject fear, and of infant races that have not risen, and are, perhaps, incapable of rising to theism—the religion of love and the belief of the highest types of mankind. But old creeds die hard, and error, founded upon the instincts and feelings of human nature borrows the coherence and uniformity of truth. That Fetissism is a belief common to man in the childhood of his spiritual life, may be proved by the frequent and extensive remains of the faith which the cretinism of the Hamitic race has perpetuated amongst them to the present day, still sprouting like tares even in the fair field of revealed religion. The dread of ghosts, for instance, which is the mainstay of Fetissism, is not inculcated in any sacred book, yet the belief is not to be abolished. Thus the Rakshasa of the Hindus is a disembodied spirit, doing evil to mankind; and the ghost of the prophet Samuel, raised by the familiar of the Witch of Endor, was the immortal part of a mortal being, still connected with earth, and capable of returning to it. Through the Manes, the Umbra, and the Spectrum of the ancients, the belief has descended to the moderns, as the household words ghost, goblin, and bogle, revenant, polter-geist, and spook, Duh, Dusha, and Dukh attest. Precisely similar to the African ghost-faith is the old Irish belief in Banshees, Pookas, and other evil entities; the corporeal frame of the dead forms other bodies, but the spirit hovers in the air, watching the destiny of friends, haunting houses, killing children, injuring cattle, and causing disease and destruction. Everywhere, too, their functions are the same: all are malevolent to the living, and they are seldom known to do good. The natural horror and fear of death which may be observed even in the lower animals has caused the dead to be considered vindictive and destructive.
Some missionaries have detected in the habit, which prevails throughout Eastern and Western Africa, of burying slaves with the deceased, of carrying provisions to graves, and of lighting fires on cold nights near the last resting-places of the departed, a continuation of relations between the quick and the dead which points to a belief in a future state of existence. The wish is father to that thought: the doctrine of the soul, of immortality, belongs to a superior order of mind, to a more advanced stage of society. The belief, as its operations show, is in presentity, materialism, not in futurity, spiritualism. According to the ancients, man is a fourfold being:—
“Bis duo sunt homini, manes, caro, spiritus, umbra:
Quatuor hæc loci bis duo suscipiunt
Terra tegit carnem, tumulum circumvolitat umbra,
Manes Orcus habet, spiritus astra petit.”