I offered a reply, but he would hear no more, and so the conversation on that subject ceased; and we proceeded to discuss one not much more agreeable to him—the payment of a very considerable debt which he owed me.
Fetissism supplies an abundance of professionally holy men. The “Mfumo” is translated by the Arabs Bassar, a seer or clairvoyant. The Mchawi is the Sahhar, magician, or adept in the black art. Amongst the Wazegura and the Wasagara is the Mgonezi, a word Arabised into Rammal or Geomantist. He practises the Miramoro, or divination and prediction of fray and famine, death and disease, by the relative position of small sticks, like spilikins, cast at random on the ground. The “rain-maker,” or “rain-doctor” of the Cape, common throughout these tribes, and extending far north of the equator, is called in East Africa Mganga, in the plural Waganga: the Arabs term him Tabib, doctor or physician.
The Mganga, in the central regions termed Mfumo, may be considered as the rude beginning of a sacerdotal order. These drones, who swarm throughout the land, are of both sexes: the women, however, generally confine themselves to the medical part of the profession. The calling is hereditary, the eldest or the cleverest son begins his neoteric education at an early age, and succeeds to his father’s functions. There is little mystery in the craft, and the magicians of Unyamwezi have not refused to initiate some of the Arabs. The power of the Mganga is great: he is treated as a sultan, whose word is law, and as a giver of life and death. He is addressed by a kingly title, and is permitted to wear the chieftain’s badge, made of the base of a conical shell. He is also known by a number of small greasy and blackened gourds, filled with physic and magic, hanging round his waist, and by a little more of the usual grime—sanctity and dirt being connected in Africa as elsewhere. These men are sent for from village to village, and receive as obventions and spiritual fees sheep and goats, cattle and provisions. Their persons, however, are not sacred, and for criminal acts they are punished like other malefactors. The greatest danger to them is an excess of fame. A celebrated magician rarely, if ever, dies a natural death: too much is expected from him, and a severer disappointment leads to consequences more violent than usual. The Arabs deride their pretensions, comparing them depreciatingly to the workers of Simiya, or conjuration, in their own country. They remark that the wizard can never produce rain in the dry, or avert it in the wet season. The many, however, who, to use a West African phrase, have “become black” from a long residence in the country, acquire a sneaking belief in the Waganga, and fear of their powers. The well-educated classes in Zanzibar consult these heathen, as the credulous of other Eastern countries go to the astrologer and geomantist, and in Europe to the clairvoyant and the tireuse de cartes. In one point this proceeding is wise: the wizard rarely wants wits; and whatever he has heard secretly or openly will inevitably appear in the course of his divination.
It must not be supposed, however, that the Mganga is purely an impostor. To deceive others thoroughly a man must first deceive himself, otherwise he will be detected by the least discerning. This is the simple secret of so many notable successes, achieved in the most unpromising causes by self-reliance and enthusiasm, the parents of energy and consistence. These barbarians are more often sinned against by their own fears and fooleries of faith, than sinners against their fellow-men by fraud and falsehood.
The office of Uganga includes many duties. The same man is a physician by natural and supernatural means, a mystagogue or medicine-man, a detector of sorcery, by means of the Judicium Dei or ordeal, a rain-maker, a conjuror, an augur, and a prophet.
As a rule, all diseases, from a boil to marasmus senilis, are attributed by the Fetissist to P’hepo, Hubub, or Afflatus. The three words are synonymous. P’hepo, in Kisawahili, is the plural form of upepo (a zephyr), used singularly to signify a high wind, a whirlwind (“devil”), and an evil ghost, generally of a Moslem. Hubub, the Arabic translation, means literally the blowing of wind, and metaphorically “possession.” The African phrase for a man possessed is “ana p’hepo,” “he has a devil.” The Mganga is expected to heal the patient by expelling the possession. Like the evil spirit in the days of Saul, the unwelcome visitant must be charmed away by sweet music; the drums cause excitement, and violent exercise expels the ghost, as saltation nullifies in Italy the venom of the tarantula. The principal remedies are drumming, dancing, and drinking, till the auspicious moment arrives. The ghost is then enticed from the body of the possessed into some inanimate article, which he will condescend to inhabit. This, technically called a Keti, or stool, may be a certain kind of bead, two or more bits of wood bound together by a strip of snake’s skin, a lion’s or a leopard’s claw, and other similar articles, worn round the head, the arm, the wrist, or the ankle. Paper is still considered great medicine by the Wasukuma and other tribes, who will barter valuable goods for a little bit: the great desideratum of the charm, in fact, appears to be its rarity, or the difficulty of obtaining it. Hence also the habit of driving nails into and hanging rags upon trees. The vegetable itself is not worshipped, as some Europeans who call it the “Devil’s tree” have supposed: it is merely the place for the laying of ghosts, where by appending the Keti most acceptable to the spectrum, he will be bound over to keep the peace with man. Several accidents in the town of Zanzibar have confirmed even the higher orders in their lurking superstition. Mr. Peters, an English merchant, annoyed by the slaves who came in numbers to hammer nails and to hang iron hoops and rags upon a “Devil’s tree” in his courtyard, ordered it to be cut down, to the horror of all the black beholders, of whom no one would lay an axe to it. Within six months five persons died in that house—Mr. Peters, his two clerks, his cooper, and his ship’s carpenter. This superstition will remind the traveller of the Indian Pipul (Ficus religiosa), in which fiends are supposed to roost, and suggest to the Orientalist an explanation of the mysterious Moslem practices common from Western Africa to the farthest East. The hanging of rags upon trees by pilgrims and travellers is probably a relic of Arab Fetissism, derived in the days of ignorance from their congeners in East Africa. The custom has spread far and wide: even the Irish peasantry have been in the habit of suspending to the trees and bushes near their “holy wells” rags, halters, and spancels, in token of gratitude for their recovery, or that of their cattle.
There are other mystical means of restoring the sick to health; one specimen will suffice. Several little sticks, like matches, are daubed with ochre, and marks are made with them upon the patient’s body. A charm is chanted, the possessed one responds, and at the end of every stave an evil spirit flies from him, the signal being a stick cast by the Mganga upon the ground. Some unfortunates have as many as a dozen haunting ghosts, each of which has his own periapt: the Mganga demands a distinct honorarium for the several expulsions. Wherever danger is, fear will be; wherever fear is, charms and spells, exorcisms and talismans of portentous powers will be in demand; and wherever supernaturalisms are in requisition, men will be found, for a consideration, to supply them.
These strange rites are to be explained upon the principle which underlies thaumaturgy in general: they result from conviction in a gross mass of exaggerations heaped by ignorance, falsehood, and credulity, upon the slenderest foundation of fact—a fact doubtless solvable by the application of natural laws. The African temperament has strong susceptibilities, combined with what appears to be a weakness of brain, and great excitability of the nervous system, as is proved by the prevalence of epilepsy, convulsions, and hysteric disease. According to the Arab, El Sara, epilepsy, or the falling sickness, is peculiarly common throughout East Africa; and, as we know by experience in lands more civilised, the sudden prostration, rigidity, contortions, &c. of the patient, strongly suggest the idea that he has been taken and seized (επιληφθεις) by, as it were, some external and invisible agent. The negroid is, therefore, peculiarly liable to the epidemical mania called “Phantasmata,” which, according to history, has at times of great mental agitation and popular disturbance broken out in different parts of Europe, and which, even in this our day, forms the basework of “revivals.” Thus in Africa the objective existence of spectra has become a tenet of belief. Stories that stagger the most sceptical are told concerning the phenomenon by respectable and not unlearned Arabs, who point to their fellow-countrymen as instances. Salim bin Rashid, a half-caste merchant, well known at Zanzibar, avers, and his companions bear witness to his words, that on one occasion, when travelling northwards from Unyanyembe, the possession occurred to himself. During the night two female slaves, his companions, of whom one was a child, fell, without apparent cause, into the fits which denote the approach of a spirit. Simultaneously, the master became as one intoxicated; a dark mass, material, not spiritual, entered the tent, and he felt himself pulled and pushed by a number of black figures, whom he had never before seen. He called aloud to his companions and slaves, who, vainly attempting to enter the tent, threw it down, and presently found him in a state of stupor, from which he did not recover till the morning. The same merchant circumstantially related, and called witnesses to prove, that a small slave-boy, who was produced on the occasion, had been frequently carried off by possession, even when confined in a windowless room, with a heavy door carefully bolted and padlocked. Next morning the victim was not found, although the chamber remained closed. A few days afterwards he was met in the jungle wandering absently like an idiot, and with speech too incoherent to explain what had happened to him. The Arabs of Oman, who subscribe readily to transformation, deride these tales; those of African blood believe them. The transformation-belief, still so common in Maskat, Abyssinia, Somaliland, and the Cape, and anciently an almost universal superstition, is, curious to say, unknown amongst these East African tribes. The Wahiao, lying between Kilwa and the Nyassa Lake, preserve, however, a remnant of the old creed in their conviction, that a malevolent magician can change a man after death into a lion, a leopard, or a hyæna. On the Zambezi the people, according to Dr. Livingstone (chap. xxx.), believe that a chief may metamorphose himself into a lion, kill any one he chooses, and then return to the human form. About Tete (chap. xxxi.) the negroids hold that, “while persons are still living, they may enter into lions and alligators, and then return again to their own bodies.” Travellers determined to find in Africa counterparts of European and Asiatic tenets, argue from this transformation a belief in the “transmigration of souls.” They thus confuse material metamorphosis with a spiritual progress, which is assuredly not an emanation from the Hamitic mind. The Africans have hitherto not bewildered their brains with metaphysics, and, ignoring the idea of a soul, which appears to be a dogma of the Caucasian race, they necessarily ignore its immortality.
The second, and, perhaps, the most profitable occupation of the Mganga, is the detection of Uchawi, or black magic. The fatuitous style of conviction, and the fearful tortures which, in the different regions, await those found guilty, have already been described, as far as description is possible. Amongst a people where the magician is a police detector, ordeals must be expected to thrive. The Baga or Kyapo of East Africa—the Arabs translate it El Halaf, or the Oath—is as cruel, absurd, and barbarous, as the red water of Ashanti, the venoms of Kasanji (Cassange), the muavi of the Banyai tribes of Monomotapa, the Tangina poison of the Malagash, the bitter water of the Jews, the “saucy-water” of West Africa, and the fire tests of mediæval Europe. The people of Usumbara thrust a red-hot hatchet into the mouth of the accused. Among the south-eastern tribes a heated iron spike, driven into some tender part of the person, is twice struck with a log of wood. The Wazaramo dip the hand into boiling water, the Waganda into seething oil; and the Wazegura prick the ear with the stiffest bristles of a gnu’s tail. The Wakwafi have an ordeal of meat that chokes the guilty. The Wanyamwezi pound with water between two stones, and infuse a poisonous bark called “Mwavi:” it is first administered by the Mganga to a hen, who, for the nonce, represents the suspected. If, however, all parties be not satisfied with such trial, it is duly adhibited to the accused.
In East Africa, from Somaliland to the Cape, and throughout the interior amongst the negroids and negroes north as well as south of the equator, the rain-maker or rain-doctor is a personage of consequence; and he does not fail to turn the hopes and fears of the people to his own advantage. A season of drought causes dearth, disease, and desolation amongst these improvident races, who therefore connect every strange phenomenon with the object of their desires, a copious wet monsoon. The enemy has medicines which disperse the clouds. The stranger who brings with him heavy showers is regarded as a being of good omen; usually, however, the worst is expected from the novel portent; he will, for instance, be accompanied and preceded by fertilising rains, but the wells and springs will dry up after his departure, and the result will be drought or small-pox. These rumours which may account for the Lybian stranger-sacrifices in the olden time, are still dangerous to travellers. The Mganga must remedy the evil. His spells are those of fetissists in general, the mystic use of something foul, poisonous, or difficult to procure, such as the album græcum of hyænas, snakes’ fangs, or lions’ hair; these and similar articles are collected with considerable trouble by the young men of the tribe for the use of the rain-maker. But he is a weatherwise man, and rains in tropical lands are easily foreseen. Not unfrequently, however, he proves himself a false prophet; and when all the resources of cunning fail he must fly for dear life from the victims of his delusion.