‘Mulungu’ is the Mnyika’s synonym of the Kafir Umdali, Uhlanga, and Unkulumkulu, the Morungo of Tete, the Unghorray of Madagascar, and the Omakuru of the Damaras. Amongst the most advanced tribes it denotes a vague kind of God: here it means any good or evil ghost, especially of a Pagan. The haunting Moslem is distinguished as P’hepo, the plural of Upepo (a whirlwind, or ‘devil,’ generally called Chamchera). As amongst all Fetish worshippers, the evestrum which they call Koma—pronounced like Goma—meaning etymologically ‘one departed,’ is a subject of horror; but of the dead they say Yuzi sira—he is ended. They cannot comprehend a future state, yet they place sheep and goats, poultry and palm wine, upon the tombs of their dead. It is a modern European error (Rev. Mr J. P. Schön and Rev. Mr Sam. Crowther) to suppose that drops of liquor spilt, as by the Brass men, in honour of the old people (ancestors), food-offerings at graves, and fires lighted there on cold wet nights, evidence the European’s, the East African’s,[[20]] or the American’s belief in futurity: as the act proves it is a belief in presentity, and after a few years the ceremony showing ‘a continuation of relationship between the living and the dead’[dead’], is always disused. Savages cannot separate the idea of an immortal soul from a mortal body: can we wonder at this when the wisest of the civilized have not yet agreed upon the subject? The characteristic of the venerative faculty amongst savages and barbarians is ever irreverence: they cannot raise themselves to the idea of a Deity, and they blaspheme as if speaking of a man and an enemy. The Wanyika horrify the Moslems by their free language concerning Allah. So King Radáma I. of Madagascar, a comparatively civilized man, who attempted to regulate his forces upon a European pattern, was in the habit of firing guns during storms; he declared that the two deities were answering one another—the God above speaking by thunder and lightning, the god below by cannon and powder. Yet he could anticipate the Bon Général Janvier by General Tazo, the swamp-fever, who he declared was his best aid against the French invader. Something of this irreverence is remarkable in the character of Richard Cœur de Lion.
The Wanyika thus hold, with our philosophers, that the Koma is a subjective, not an objective, existence; and yet ghost-craft is still the only article of their creed. All their diseases arise from possession, and no man dies what we should term a natural death. Their rites are intended either to avert evils from themselves or to cast them upon others, and the primum mobile of their sacrifices is the interest of the Mganga, or Medicine-man. When the critical moment has arrived, the ghost, being adjured to come forth from the possessed one, names some article, technically called a Kehi, or chair, in which, if worn round the neck or limbs, it will reside without annoying the wearer. This idea lies at the bottom of many superstitious practices: this negro approach to a ‘sympathetic cure’ is the object of the leopard’s claw, of the strings of white, black, and blue beads, called Mdugu ga Mulungu (ghost-beads), worn over the shoulder, and of the rags taken from the sick man’s body, and hung or fastened to what Europeans call the ‘Devil’s Tree.’ The ‘Kehi’ is preferred by the demon-ghost to the patient’s person, and thus by mutual agreement both are happy. Some, especially women, have a dozen haunters, each with its peculiar charm: one of them is called, ridiculously enough, ‘Barakat,’ in Arabic ‘a blessing,’ and the P.N. of the Æthiopian slave inherited by Mohammed.
It has not suited the Moslem’s purpose to proselytize the Wanyika, who doubtless, like their kinsmen the Wasawahili, would have adopted the Saving Faith. As it is, the Doruma tribe has been partly converted, and many of the heathen keep the Ramazan fast, feeling themselves raised in the scale of creation by doing something more than their pagan brethren. The ceremonies are the simplest contrivances of savage priestcraft. Births are not celebrated, and the weakly or deformed infant is at once strangled: it is a failure, and as such it is put away. Children become the property of the mother, or rather of her brother, to be disposed of as he pleases: the only one who has no voice in the matter is the putative father. Circumcision, an old African custom extending from Egypt to the Cape, and adopted from the negroid by the Hebrews, is a semi-religious act performed once every five or six years upon the youths en masse, and accompanied by the usual eating and drinking, drumming and dancing. A man may marry any number of wives; the genial rite, however, is no tie to these fickle souls: it is celebrated by jollifications, and it is broken as merrily.
The principal festivities, if they can be so called, are funerals: the object is to ‘break the fear’ (Ussa kiwewe) of death, an event which, savage-like, they regard with a nameless dread, an inexpressible horror. For a whole week the relations of the deceased must abstain from business, however urgent, and ruin themselves by killing cattle and broaching palm-wine for the whole community. At these times there is a laxity of morals, which recalls to mind the orgies of the classical Adonia, and refusal to lavish wealth upon the obsequies of relations is visited with tauntings and heavy fines.
A characteristic of Wanyika customs is the division of both sexes into distinct bodies, with initiatory rites resembling masonic degrees. The orders are three, not four as in India, Persia, and ancient Greece; and traces of such organization, founded as it is upon the ages of man, may be found in many communities of negroes and negroids. The Kru Republic, for instance, a pure democracy, flourishing close to the despotisms of Ashanti and Dahome, makes a triple division of its citizens: the Kedibo, or juveniles; the Sedebo, or soldiers (adults); and the Gnekbadi, elders and censors. The southern Gallas appear to be divided into ‘Toibs,’ or officers; the ‘Ghaba,’ adult warriors, who wear four Gútu or pigtails, projecting at right angles from the poll; and the ‘Ari,’ cadets or aspirants, who have a right to only two. The Wakwafi have the El Moran, warriors, young men who live with their fathers; the Ekieko, married men; and the Elkijaro or Elkimirisho, elders. The Wanyika split into the Nyere, or young; the Khambi, or middle-aged; and the Mfaya, or old. Each degree has its different initiation and ceremonies, with an ‘elaborate system of social and legal observances,’ the junior order always buying promotion from the senior. Once about every twenty years comes the great festival ‘Unyaro,’ at which the middle-aged degree is conferred. This (1857) is Unyaro-year; but the Wamasai hindered the rite. Candidates retire to the woods for a fortnight, and clay themselves for the first half with white, and during the second with red earth; a slave is sacrificed, and the slaughter is accompanied by sundry mysteries, of which my informants could learn nothing. When all the Khambi have been raised to the highest rank, the Mfaya, these, formerly the elders, return, socially, to a second childhood; they are once more Nyere, or (old) boys, and there is no future promotion for them. After the clay-coatings and the bloody sacrifice, the chief distinctions of the orders are their religious utensils. Tor instance, the Muansa (plural Miansa) drum, a goat-skin stretched upon a hollowed tree-trunk, six feet long, whose booming, drawn-out sounds, heard at night amongst the wild forested hills, resembles the most melancholy moaning, is peculiar to the third degree or elders of both sexes. It is brought during the dark hours to the Kaya, and the junior orders may not look upon it. Similarly, the women have earthenware drums, which are concealed from the men. El Idrisi (1st climate, 2nd section) had heard that the people of El Banes, 150 Arab miles by sea from Manisa or Mombasah, adored a drum called Esrahim. It was covered with skin only at one end, and was suspended by a cord to be beaten; the result was a frightful sound, heard at the distance of a league.
Languor and apathy are here at once the gifts of the media or climate, and the heritage of the race: moreover, man in these lands, wanting little, works less. Two great classes, indeed, seem everywhere to make of life one long holiday—the civilized rich, who have all things, and the savage, who possesses almost nothing. Yet is the Mnyika, and indeed mostly the wild man, greedy of gain—alieni appetens, sui pro-fusus—perfectly dishonest in quest of lucre, and not to be bound by honour or oath, as he is reckless, wasteful, and improvident. Like their neighbour-nations in this part of Africa, these people are instinctively and essentially thieves. They never go to war; agriculture, commerce, and a settled life have enervated them into pusillanimity without supplying superior knowledge for offence or even for defence. They scratch the ground with their little hoes; they wander about after their few cows and goats; they sit dozing or chatting in the sun or before a fire; and they spend hours squatting round an old pit till water collects, rather than sink it a few feet. Thus they idle away three days, and they rest from non-labour on the fourth, called Juna, from Jum’a the Moslem ‘sabbath.’ This, as amongst the Dahomans and other African tribes, is their week. Spare time is passed mostly in drunkenness, induced by Tembo or palm-wine, and with stronger liquors, when they can get them. They begin the potations early in the morning, and after midday they are seldom sober, except for want of material. The tom-tom is hardly ever silent: as amongst the Somal and the Wasawahili, it sounds at all times, seasons, and occasions: and they dance, accompanying themselves with loud cries, even to expel the bad ghost from the body of a bewitched friend. They have also the Dahoman rattle, an empty gourd or cocoa-nut, filled with pebbles and provided with a handle: this is the celebrated ‘Tamaraka’ idol worshipped by the Tupy-Guarani tribes, between the Gulf of Mexico and the Rio de la Plata. The music is simple, and they are contented to recitative for the live-long night such merum nectar as—
‘Kitosí múlálání ká-uká.’
‘The bird from the palm starts not.’
This reminds us of the Histoire d’un bouton and the magical Teutonic refrain—
‘Trink Bier, liebe, liebe Lieschen,’