FETICHISM IN
WEST AFRICA

Fetich Magician.
(With horns, wooden mask, spear, and sword;
dress of leaves of palm and plantain.)

FETICHISM
IN WEST AFRICA

Forty Years’ Observation of Native Customs
and Superstitions

BY THE
REV. ROBERT HAMILL NASSAU, M.D., S.T.D.
FOR FORTY YEARS A MISSIONARY IN THE GABUN DISTRICT
OF KONGO-FRANÇAISE
AUTHOR OF “CROWNED IN PALM LAND,” “MAWEDO”

WITH TWELVE ILLUSTRATIONS

YOUNG PEOPLE’S
MISSIONARY MOVEMENT
156 Fifth Avenue
New York

Copyright, 1904
By Charles Scribner’s Sons

Published October, 1904

PREFACE

On the 2d of July, 1861, I sailed from New York City on a little brig, the “Ocean Eagle,” with destination to the island of Corisco, near the equator, on the West Coast of Africa. My first introduction to the natives of Africa was a month later, when the vessel stopped at Monrovia, the capital of the Liberian Republic, to land a portion of its trade goods, and at other ports of Liberia, Sinoe, and Cape Palmas; thence to Corisco on September 12.

Corisco is a microcosm, only five miles long by three miles wide; its surface diversified with every variety of landscape, proportioned to its size, of hill, prairie, stream, and lake. It is located in the eye of the elephant-head shaped Bay of Corisco, and from twelve to twenty miles distant from the mainland. Into the bay flow two large rivers,—the Muni (the Rio D’Angra of commerce) and the Munda (this latter representing the elephant’s proboscis).

The island, with adjacent mainland, was inhabited by the Benga tribe. It was the headquarters of the American Presbyterian Mission. On the voyage I had studied the Benga dialect with my fellow-passenger, the senior member of the Mission, Rev. James L. Mackey; and was able, on my landing, to converse so well with the natives that they at once enthusiastically accepted me as an interested friend. This has ever since been my status among all other tribes.

I lived four years on the island, as preacher, teacher, and itinerant to the adjacent mainland, south to the Gabun River and its Mpongwe tribe, east up the Muni and Munda rivers, and north to the Benito River.

In my study of the natives’ language my attention was drawn closely to their customs; and in my inquiry into their religion I at once saw how it was bound up in these customs. I met with other white men—traders, government officials, and even some missionaries—whose interest in Africa, however deep, was circumscribed by their special work for, respectively, wealth, power, and Gospel proclamation. They could see in those customs only “folly,” and in the religion only “superstition.”

I read many books on other parts of Africa, in which the same customs and religion prevailed. I did not think it reasonable to dismiss curtly as absurd the cherished sentiments of so large a portion of the human race. I asked myself: Is there no logical ground for the existence of these sentiments, no philosophy behind all these beliefs? I began to search; and thenceforward for thirty years, wherever I travelled, wherever I was guest to native chief, wherever I lived, I was always leading the conversation, in hut or camp, back to a study of the native thought.

I soon found that I gained nothing if I put my questions suddenly or without mask. The natives generally were aware that white men despised them and their beliefs, and they were slow to admit me to their thought if I made a direct advance. But, by chatting as a friend, telling them the strange and great things of my own country, and first eliciting their trust in me and interest in my stories, they forgot their reticence, and responded by telling me of their country. I listened, not critically, but apparently as a believer; and then they vied with each other in telling me all they knew and thought.

That has been the history of a thousand social chats,—in canoes by day, in camp and hut by night, and at all hours in my own house, whose public room was open at any hour of day or evening for any visitor, petitioner, or lounger, my attention to whose wants or wishes was rewarded by some confidence about their habits or doings.

In 1865 I was transferred to Benito, where I remained until the close of 1871. Those years were full of travels afoot or by boat, south the hundred miles to Gabun, north toward the Batanga region, and east up the Benito for a hundred miles as a pioneer, to the Balengi and Boheba tribes,—a distance at that time unprecedented, considering the almost fierce opposition of the coast people to any white man’s going to the local sources of their trade.

After more than ten uninterrupted years in Africa, I took a furlough of more than two years in the United States, and returned to my work in 1874.

I responded to a strong demand on the part of the supporters of Foreign Missions in Africa, that mission operations should no longer be confined to the coast. Unsuccessful efforts had been made to enter by the Gabun, by the Muni, and by the Benito.

On the 10th of September, 1874, I entered the Ogowe River, at Nazareth Bay, one of its several embouchures into the Atlantic, near Cape Lopez, a degree south of the equator. But little was known of the Ogowe. Du Chaillu, in his “Equatorial Africa” (1861), barely mentions it, though he was hunting gorillas and journeying in “Ashango Land,” on the sources of the Ngunye, a large southern affluent of the Ogowe.

A French gunboat a few years before had ascended it for one hundred and thirty miles to Lembarene, the head of the Ogowe Delta, and had attached it to France. Two English traders and one German had built trading-houses at that one-hundred-and-thirty-mile limit, and traversed the river with small steam launches in their rubber trade. Besides these three, I was the only other white resident. They were living in the Galwa tribe, cognate in language with the Mpongwe. I settled at a one-hundred-and-fifty-mile limit, in the Akele tribe (cognate with the Benga), building my house at a place called Belambila.

Two years later I abandoned that spot, came down to Lembarene, and built on Kângwe Hill. There I learned the Mpongwe dialect. I remained there until 1880, successful with school and church, and travelling by boat and canoe thousands of miles in the many branches of the Ogowe, through its Delta, and in the lake country of Lakes Onange and Azyingo. In 1880 I took a second furlough to the United States, remaining eighteen months, and returning at the close of 1881.

My prosperous and comfortable station at Kângwe was occupied by a new man, and I resumed my old rôle of pioneer. I travelled up the Ogowe, one hundred and fifty miles beyond Lembarene, ascending and descending the wild waters of its cataracts, and settled at Talaguga, a noted rock near which was subsequently established the French military post, Njoli, at the two-hundred-mile limit of the course of the river. There I was alone with Mrs. Nassau, my nearest white neighbors the two French officers five miles up river at the post, and my successors at Kângwe, seventy miles down river. The inhabitants were wild cannibal Fang, just recently emerged from the interior forest. It was a splendid field for original investigation, and I applied myself to the Fang dialect.

I remained at Talaguga until 1891, when I took a third furlough to the United States, and stayed through 1892, during which time the Mission Board transferred my entire Ogowe work, with its two stations and four churches and successful schools, to the French Paris Evangelical Society.

In March, 1893, at the request of the Rev. Frank F. Ellinwood, D.D., LL.D., I wrote and read, before the American Society of Comparative Religions, a forty-minute essay on Bantu Theology.

At the wish of that Society I loaned the manuscript to them, for their use in the Parliament of Religions at the Chicago Exposition; but I carried the original draft of the essay with me on my return to Africa in August, 1893, where I was located at Libreville, Gabun, the Mission’s oldest and most civilized station. There I found special advantage for my investigations. Though those educated Mpongwes could tell me little that was new as to purely unadulterated native thought, they, better than an ignorant tribe, could and did give me valuable intelligent replies to my inquiries as to the logical connection between native belief and act, and the essential meaning of things which I had seen and heard elsewhere. My ignorant friends at other places had given me a mass of isolated statements. My Mpongwe friends had studied a little grammar, and were somewhat trained to analyze. They helped me in the collocation of the statements and in the deduction of the philosophy behind them. It was there that I began to put my conclusions in writing.

In 1895 Miss Mary H. Kingsley journeyed in West Africa, sent on a special mission to investigate the subject of freshwater fishes. She also gratified her own personal interest in native African religious beliefs by close inquiries all along the coast.

During her stay at Libreville in the Kongo-Français, May-September, 1895, my interest, common with hers, in the study of native African thought led me into frequent and intimate conversations with her on that subject. She eagerly accepted what information, from my longer residence in Africa, I was able to impart. I loaned her the essay, with permission to make any use of it she desired in her proposed book, “Travels in West Africa.” When that graphic story of her African wanderings appeared in 1897, she made courteous acknowledgment of the use she had made of it in her chapters on Fetich.

On page 395 of her “Travels in West Africa,” referring to my missionary works, and to some contributions I had made to science, she wrote: “Still I deeply regret he has not done more for science and geography.... I beg to state I am not grumbling at him ... but entirely from the justifiable irritation a student of fetich feels at knowing that there is but one copy of this collection of materials, and that this copy is in the form of a human being, and will disappear with him before it is half learned by us, who cannot do the things he has done.”

This suggestion of Miss Kingsley’s gave me no new thought; it only sharpened a desire I had hopelessly cherished for some years. In my many missionary occupations—translation of the Scriptures, and other duties—I had never found the strength, when the special missionary daily work was done, to sit down and put into writing the mass of material I had collected as to the meaning and uses of fetiches. Nor did I think it right for me to take time that was paid for by the church in which to compile a book that would be my own personal pleasure and property.

Impressed with this idea, on my fourth furlough to America in 1899, I confided my wish to a few personal friends, telling them of my plan, not indeed ever to give up my life-work in and for Africa, but to resign from connection with the Board; and, returning to Africa under independent employ and freed from mission control, but still working under my Presbytery, have time to gratify my pen.

One of these friends was William Libbey, D. Sc., Professor of Physical Geography and Director of the E. M. Museum of Geology and Archæology in Princeton University. Without my knowledge he subsequently mentioned the subject to his university friend, Rev. A. Woodruff Halsey, D.D., one of the Secretaries of the Board of Foreign Missions. Dr. Halsey thought my wish could be gratified without my resigning from the Board’s service.

In November, 1899, the following action of the Board was forwarded to me: “November 20th, 1899. In view of the wide and varied information possessed by the Rev. Robert H. Nassau, D.D., of the West Africa Mission, regarding the customs and traditions of the tribes on the West Coast, and the importance of putting that knowledge into some permanent form, the Board requested Dr. Nassau to prepare a volume or volumes on the subject; and it directed the West Africa Mission to assign him, on his return from his furlough, to such forms of missionary work as will give him the necessary leisure and opportunity.”

On my return to Africa in 1900, I was located at Batanga, one hundred and seventy miles north of Gabun, and was assigned to the pastorate of the Batanga Church, the largest of the twelve churches of the Corisco Presbytery, with itineration to and charge of the sessions of the Kribi and Ubĕnji churches.

During intervals of time in the discharge of these pastoral duties my recreation was the writing and sifting of the multitude of notes I had collected on native superstition during the previous quarter of a century. The people of Batanga, though largely emancipated from the fetich practices of superstition, still believed in its witchcraft aspect. I began there to arrange the manuscript of this work. There, more than elsewhere, the natives seemed willing to tell me tales of their folk-lore, involving fetich beliefs. From them, and also from Mpongwe informants, were gathered largely the contents of Chapters XVI and XVII.

And now, on this my fifth furlough, the essay on Bantu Theology has grown to the proportions of this present volume.

The conclusions contained in all these chapters are based on my own observations and investigations.

Obligation is acknowledged to a number of writers on Africa and others, quotations from whose books are credited in the body of this work. I quote them, not as informants of something I did not already know, but as witnesses to the fact of the universality of the same superstitious ideas all over Africa.

By the courtesy of the American Geographical Society, Chapters IV, V, X, and XI have appeared in its Bulletin during the years 1901-1903.

I am especially obligated to Professor Libbey for his sympathetic encouragement during the writing of my manuscript, and for his judicious suggestions as to the final form I have given it.

ROBERT HAMILL NASSAU

Philadelphia, March 24, 1904

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FETICHISM IN WEST AFRICA

CHAPTER I

CONSTITUTION OF NATIVE AFRICAN SOCIETY—SOCIOLOGY

That stream of the Negro race which is known ethnologically as “Bantu,” occupies all of the southern portion of the African continent below the fourth degree of north latitude. It is divided into a multitude of tribes, each with its own peculiar dialect. All these dialects are cognate in their grammar. Some of them vary only slightly in their vocabulary. In others the vocabulary is so distinctly different that it is not understood by tribes only one hundred miles apart, while that of others a thousand miles away may be intelligible.

In their migrations the tribes have been like a river, with its windings, currents swift or slow; there have been even, in places, back currents; and elsewhere quiet, almost stagnant pools. But they all—from the Divala at Kamerun on the West Coast across to the Kiswahile at Zanzibar on the East, and from Buganda by the Victoria Nyanza at the north down to Zulu in the south at the Cape—have a uniformity in language, tribal organization, family customs, judicial rules and regulations, marriage ceremonies, funeral rites, and religious beliefs and practice. Dissimilarities have crept in with mixture among themselves by intermarriage, the example of foreigners, with some forms of foreign civilization and education, degradation by foreign vice, elevation by Christianity, and compulsion by foreign governments.

As a description of Bantu sociology, I give the following outline which was offered some years ago, in reply to inquiries sent to members of the Gabun and Corisco Mission living at Batanga, by the German Government, in its laudable effort to adapt, as far as consistent with justice and humanity, its Kamerun territorial government to the then existing tribal regulations and customs of the tribes living in the Batanga region. This information was obtained by various persons from several sources, but especially from prominent native chiefs, all of them men of intelligence.

In their general features these statements were largely true also for all the other tribes in the Equatorial Coast region, and for most of the interior Bantu tribes now pressing down to the Coast. They were more distinctly descriptive of Batanga and the entire interior at the time of their formulation. But in the ten years that have since passed, a stranger would find that some of them are no longer exact. Foreign authority has removed or changed or sapped the foundations of many native customs and regulations, while it has not fully brought in the civilization of Christianity. The result in some places, in this period of transition, has been almost anarchy,—making a despotism, as under Belgian misrule in the so-called Kongo “Free” State; or commercial ruin, as under French monopoly in their Kongo-Français; and general confusion, under German hands, due to the arbitrary acts of local officials and their brutal black soldiery.

I. The Country.

The coast between 5° and 4° N. Lat. is called “Kamerun.” This is not a native word: it was formerly spelled by ships’ captains in their trade “Cameroons.” Its origin is uncertain. It is thought that it came from the name of the Portuguese explorer Diego Cam. The tribes in that region are the Divala, Isubu, Balimba, and other lesser ones.

The coast from 4° to 3° N. Lat. has also a foreign name, “Batanga.” I do not know its origin.

The coast from 3° to 2° N. Lat. is called, by both natives and foreigners, “Benita”; at 1° N., by foreigners, “Corisco,” and by natives, “Benga.” The name “Corisco” was given by Spaniards to an island in the Bay of Benga because of the brilliant coruscations of lightning so persistent in that locality. The Benga dialect is taken as the type of all the many dialects used from Corisco north to Benita, Bata, Batanga, and Kamerun.

From 1° N. to 3° S. is known as the “Gabun country,” with the Mpongwe dialect, typical of its many congeners, the Orungu, Nkâmi (miscalled “Camma”), Galwa, and others.

From 3° S. to the Kongo River, at 6° S., the Loango tribe and dialect called “Fyât” are typical; and the Kongo River represents still another current of tribe and dialect.

In the interior, subtending the entire coast-line as above mentioned, are the several clans of the great Fang tribe, making a fifth distinctly different type, known by the names “Osheba,” “Bulu,” “Mabeya,” and others. The name “Fang” is spelled variously: by the traveller Du Chaillu, “Fañ”; by the French traveller, Count de Brazza, “Pahouin”; by their Benga neighbors, “Pangwe”; and by the Mpongwe, “Mpañwe.” These tribes all have traditions of their having come from the far Northeast.

Before foreign slave-trade was introduced, and subsequently the ivory, rubber, palm-oil, and mahogany trades, the occupations of the natives were hunting, fishing, and agriculture. They subsisted on wild meats, fish, forest fruits and nuts, and the cultivated plantains, cassava, maize, ground-nuts, yams, eddoes, sweet potatoes, and a few other vegetables.

II. The Family.

The family is the unit in native sociology. There is the narrow circle of relationship expressed by the word “ijawe,” plural “majawe” (a derivative of the verb “jaka” = to beget), which includes those of the immediate family, both on the father’s as well as on the mother’s side (i. e., blood-relatives). The wider circle expressed by the word “ikaka” (pl. “makaka”) includes those who are blood-relatives, together with those united to them by marriage.

In giving illustrative native words I shall use the Benga dialect as typical. All the tribes have words indicating the relationships of father, mother, brother, sister. A nephew, while calling his own father “paia,” calls an uncle who is older than himself “paia-utodu”; one younger than himself he calls “paia-ndĕmbĕ.” His own mother he calls “ina,” and his aunts “ina-utodu” and “ina-ndĕmbĕ,” respectively, for one who is older or younger than himself.

A cousin is called “mwana-paia-utodu,” or “-ndĕmbĕ,” as the case may be, according to age. These same designations are used for both the father’s and the mother’s side. A cousin’s consanguinity is considered almost the same as that of brother or sister. They cannot marry. Indeed, all lines of consanguinity are carried farther, in prohibition of marriage, than in civilized countries.

1. Family Responsibility. Each family is held by the community responsible for the misdeeds of its members. However unworthy a man may be, his “people” are to stand by him, defend him, and even claim as right his acts, however unjust. He may demand their help, however guilty he may be. Even if his offence be so great that his own people have to acknowledge his guilt, they cannot abjure their responsibility. Even if he be worthy of death, and a ransom is called for, they must pay it: not only his rich relatives, but all who are at all able must help.

There is a narrower family relationship, that of the household, or “diyâ” (the hearth, or fireplace; derivative of the verb “diyaka” = to live). There are a great many of these. Their habitations are built in one street, long or short, according to the size of the man’s family.

In polygamy each wife has a separate house, or at least a separate room. Her children’s home is in that house. Each woman rules her own house and children.

One of these women is called the “head-wife” (“konde”—queen). Usually she is the first wife. But the man is at liberty to displace her and put a younger one in her place.

The position of head-wife carries with it no special privileges except that she superintends; but she is not herself excused from work. In the community she is given more respect if the husband happens to be among the “headmen” or chiefs.

Each wife is supplied by the husband, but does not personally own her own house, kitchen utensils, and garden tools. She makes her own garden or “plantation” (“mwanga”).

There is no community in ownership of a plantation. Each one chooses a spot for himself. Nor is there land tenure. Any man can go to any place not already occupied, and choose a site on which to build, or to make a garden; and he keeps it as long as he or some member of his family occupies it.

2. Family Headship. It descends to a son; if there be none, to a brother; or, if he be dead, to that brother’s son; in default of these, to a sister’s son. This headship carries with it, for a man, such authority that, should he kill his wife, he may not be killed; though her relatives, if they be influential, may demand some restitution.

If an ordinary man kills another man, he may himself be killed. For a debt he may give away a daughter or wife, but he may not give away a son or a brother. A father rules all his children, male and female, until his death.

If adult members of a family are dissatisfied with family arrangements, they can remove and build elsewhere; but they cannot thereby entirely separate themselves from rule by, and responsibility to and for the family.

A troublesome man cannot be expelled from the family village. A woman can be, but only by her husband, for such offences as stealing, adultery, quarrelling; in which case the dowry money paid by him to her relatives must be returned to him, or another woman given in her place.

3. Marital Relations. Marriages are made not only between members of the same tribe but between different tribes. Formerly it was not considered proper that a man of a coast tribe should marry a woman from an interior tribe. The coast tribes regarded themselves as more enlightened than those of the interior, and were disposed to look down upon them. But now men marry women not only of their own tribe but of all inferior tribes.

Polygamy is common, almost universal. A man’s addition to the number of his wives is limited only by his ability to pay their dowry price.

He may cohabit with a woman without paying dowry for her; but their relation is not regarded as a marriage (“diba”), and this woman is disrespected as a harlot (“evove”).

There are few men with only one wife. In some cases their monogamy is their voluntary choice; in most cases (where there is not Christian principle) it is due to poverty. A polygamist arranges his marital duties to his several wives according to his choice; but the division having been made, each wife jealously guards her own claim on his attentions. A disregard of them leads to many a family quarrel.[1]

If a man die, his brothers may marry any or all of the widows; or, if there be no brothers, a son inherits, and may marry any or all of the widows except his own mother.

It is preferred that widows shall be retained in the family circle because of the dowry money that was paid for them, which is considered as a permanent investment.

Ante-ceremonial sexual trials (the ancient German “bundling”) are not recognized as according to rule; but the custom is very common. If not followed by regular marriage ceremony, it is judged as adultery.

While a man may go to any tribe to seek a wife, he does not settle in the woman’s tribe; she comes to him, and enters into his family.

4. Arrangements for Marriage. On entering into marriage a man depends on only the male members of his family to assist him. If the woman is of adult age, he is first to try to obtain her consent. But that is not final; it may be either overridden or compelled by her father. The fathers of the two parties are the ultimate judges; the marriage cannot take place without their consent, after the preliminary wooing. The final compact is by dowry money, the most of which must be paid in advance. It is the custom which has come down from old time. It is now slightly changing under education, enlightenment, and foreign law. The amount of the dowry is not prescribed by any law. Custom alters the amount, according to the social status of the two families and the pecuniary ability of the bridegroom.

The highest price is paid for a virgin; the next, for a woman who has been put away by some other man; the lowest price for widows. It is paid in instalments, but is supposed to be completed in one or two years after the marriage.

But the purchase of the woman by dowry does not extinguish all claim on her by her family. If she is maltreated, she may be taken back by them, in which case the man’s dowry money is to be returned to him. Not only the woman’s father, but her other relatives, have a claim to a share in the dowry paid for her. Her brothers, sisters, and cousins may ask gifts from the would-be husband.

If a husband die, the widow becomes the property of his family; she does not inherit, by right, any of his goods because she herself, as a widow, is property. Sometimes she is given something, but only as a favor.

If she runs away or escapes, her father or her family must return either her or the dowry paid for her.

On the death of a woman after her marriage, a part of the money received for her is returned to the husband as compensation for his loss on his investment. If she has borne no children, nothing is given or restored to the husband.

If a woman deserts her husband, her family is required to pay back the dowry. If the man himself sends her away, the dowry may be repaid on his demand and after a public discussion.

There is no escape from marriage for a woman during her life except by repayment of the money received for her.

Two men may exchange wives thus: each puts away his wife, sending her back to her people and receiving in return the money paid for her. With this money in hand each buys again the wife the other has put away; and all parties are satisfied.

A father can force his daughter to marry against her will; but such marriages are troublesome, and generally end in the man putting the woman away.

A daughter may be betrothed by her parents at any time, even at birth. The marriage formerly did not take place until she was a woman grown of twenty years; now they are married at fifteen or sixteen, or earlier.

Marriage within any degree of consanguinity is forbidden. Marriage of cousins is impossible. Disparity of age is no hindrance to marriage: an old man may take a young virgin, and a young man may take an old woman.

There are no bars of caste nor rank, except the social eminence derived from wealth or free birth.

Only women are barred from marrying an inferior. That inferiority is not a personal one. No personal worth can make a man of an inferior tribe equal to the meanest member of a superior tribe.

All coast tribes reckon themselves superior to any interior tribe; and, of the coast tribes, a superiority is claimed for those who have the largest foreign commerce and the greatest number of white residents.

A man may marry any woman of any inferior tribe, the idea being that he thus elevates her; but it is almost unheard of that a woman shall marry beneath her.

As a result of this iron rule, women of the Mpongwe and a few other small “superior” coast tribes being barred from many men of their own tribe by lines of consanguinity, and unable to marry beneath themselves, expect to and do make their marriage alliances with the white traders and foreign government officials. Their civilization has made them attractive, and they are sought for by white men from far distant points.

Younger sons and daughters must not be married before the older ones.[2]

5. Courtship and Wedding. The routine varies greatly according to tribe; and in any tribe, according to the man’s self-respect and regard for conventionalities. A proper outline is: First, the man goes to the father empty-handed to ask his consent. The second visit he goes with gifts, and the father calls in the other members of the family to witness the gifts. On the third visit he goes with liquor (formerly the native palm wine, now the foreign trade gin or rum), and pays an instalment on the dowry; on the fourth visit with his parents, and gives presents to the woman herself. On a fifth occasion the mother of the woman makes a feast for the mother and friends of the groom. At this feast the host and hostess do not eat, but they join in the drinking. Finally, the man goes with gifts and takes the woman. Her father makes return gifts as a farewell to his daughter.

On her arrival at the man’s village they are met with rejoicing, and a dance called “nkânjâ”; but there is no further ceremony, and she is his wife.

For three months she should not be required to do any hard work, the man providing her with food and dress. Then she will begin the usual woman’s work, in the making of a garden and carrying of burdens.

Weddings may be made in any season of the year. Formerly the dry season, or the latter part of the rainy, was preferred because of the plentifulness of fish at these periods, and the weather being better for outdoor sports and plays.

The man is expected to visit his wife’s family often, and to eat with them. Her mother feasts him, and he calls her parents to eat at his house.

6. Dissolution of Marriage. By death of the husband. Formerly, in many tribes one or more of the widows were put to death, either that the dead might not be without companionship in the spirit world, or as a punishment for not having cared better for him in the preservation of his life.

Formerly the women mourned for six months; now the mourning (i. e., the public wailing) is reduced to one month. But signs of mourning are retained for many months in dark, old, or scanty dress, and an absence of ornament.

The mourning of both men and women begins before the sick have actually died. The men cease after the burial, but the women continue.

All the dead man’s property goes to his male relatives. On the death of a wife the husband is expected to make a gift to pacify her relatives. Formerly the corpse was not allowed to be buried until this gift was made. The demand was made by the father, saying, “Our child died in your hands; give us!” Now they make a more quiet request, and wait a week before doing so. Something must be given, even if the husband had already paid her dowry in full.

Marriage can be dissolved by divorce at almost any time, and for almost any reason, by the man,—by a woman rarely. The usual reasons for divorce are unfaithfulness, quarrelling, disobedience, and sometimes chronic sickness. There are many other more private reasons. In being thus put away the woman has no property rights; she is given nothing more than what the man may allow as a favor. If the woman has children, she has no claim on them; they belong to the father. But if she has daughters who are married, she can ask for part of the money which the husband received for them. The man and the divorced woman are then each free to marry any other parties.

7. Illegitimate Marital Relations. These are very common, but they are not sanctioned as proper. The husband demands a fine for his wife’s infidelity from the co-respondent. Cohabitation with the expected husband previous to the marriage ceremonies is common; but it is not sanctioned, and therefore is secret.

The husband of a woman who is mother of a child begotten by another man takes it as his own. If it be a girl, he (and not the real father) is the person who gives her in marriage and retains the dowry.

8. Domestic Life. No special feast is made for the birth of either a son or a daughter, but there is rejoicing. During the woman’s pregnancy both she and her husband have to observe a variety of prohibitions as to what they may eat or what they may do. They cohabit up to the time of the child’s birth; but after that not for a long period, formerly three years. Now it is reduced to one and a half years, or less. This custom is one of the reasons assigned by men for the alleged necessity of a plurality of wives.

During the confinement and for a short time after the birth, the wife remains in the husband’s house, and is then taken by her parents to their house.

Deformed and defective children are kept with kindness as others; but monstrosities are destroyed. Formerly in all tribes twins were regarded as monstrosities and were therefore killed,—still the custom in some tribes. In the more civilized tribes they are now valued, but special fetich ceremonies for them are considered necessary.

In the former destruction of twins there were tribes that killed only one of them. If they were male and female, the father would wish to save the boy and the mother the girl; but the father ruled. A motherless new-born infant is not deserted; it is suckled by some other woman.

A portion of the wearing apparel and other goods are placed in the coffin with the corpse. The greater part of a man’s goods are taken by his male relatives. Formerly nothing was given to his widow; now she receives a small part. And the paternal relatives of the dead man give something to his maternal relatives.

The corpse is buried in various ways,—on an elevated scaffold, on the surface of the ground, or in a shallow grave, rarely cremated. Formerly the burial could be delayed by a claim for settlement of a debt, but this does not now occur.

No coast tribe eats human flesh. The Fang and other interior tribes eat any corpse, regardless of the cause of death. Families hesitate to eat their own dead, but they sell or exchange them for the dead of other families.

The name given a child is according to family wish. There is no law. Parents like to have their own names transmitted; but all sorts of reasons prevail for giving common names, or for making a new one, or for selecting the name of a great person or of some natural object. A child born at midday may be called “Joba” (sun), or, at the full moon, “Ngândê” (moon). A mother who had borne nine children, all of whom had died, on bearing a tenth, and hopeless of its surviving, named it “Botombaka” (passing away).

Circumcision is practised universally by all these tribes. An uncircumcised native is not considered to be a man in the full sense of the word,—fit for fighting, working, marrying, and inheriting. He is regarded as nothing by both men and women, is slandered, abused, insulted, ostracized, and not allowed to marry.

The operation is not performed in infancy, but is delayed till the tenth year, or even later. The native doctor holds cayenne pepper in his mouth, and, on completing the operation, spits the pepper upon the wound. Then seizing a sword, he brandishes it with a shout as a signal to the spectators that the act is completed. Then the crowd of men and women join in singing and dancing, and compliment the lad on being now “a real man.”

As natives have no records of births, they cannot exactly tell the ages of their children, or the time when a youth is fit to marry or assume other manly rights; but by the eighteenth or nineteenth year he is regarded with the respect due a man. He can marry even as early as fifteen or sixteen.

There are no tests to which he is subjected as proof of his manhood.

A woman may speak in a court of trial, for defence of herself or friends. She may also be summoned as a witness, but she has no political rights.

Aged persons are not put to death, to escape the care of them; they are reasonably well provided for.

III. Succession to Property and Authority.

Only men inherit. The children of sisters do not inherit unless all the children of the brothers are dead.

Slaves do not inherit.

“Chieftains” (those chosen to rule) and “kings” (those chosen to the office) inherit more than their brothers, even though the ruling one be the younger.

A woman does not inherit at any time or under any circumstances, nor hold property in her own right, even if she has produced it by her own labor.

There is no supremacy in regard to age in the division of property. The things to be inherited are women (the widows), goods, house, and slaves. An equal division, as far as it is possible, is made of all these.

The dead man’s debts are to be paid by the heirs out of their inheritance, each one paying his part. There is no written will, but it is common for a man to announce his intention as to the division while still living.

IV. Political Organization.

The coast tribes and some of the interior have so-called “kings,” who are chosen by their tribe to that office.

There are family cliques for the accomplishment of a desired end, but these are overruled by the tribal king.

There are headmen in each village with local authority; but they too are subject to the king, they having authority only in their own village.

Quarrels and discussions, called “palavers,” are very common. (A palaver need not necessarily be a quarrel; the word is derived from a Portuguese verb = “to speak.” It comes from the old days of slavery; it was the “council” held between native chiefs and white slave traders, in the purchase of a cargo of slaves.)

The headmen settle disputes about marriage, property rights, murders, war, thefts, and so forth. Their decisions may be appealed from to a chief, or carried further to the king, whose decision is final. Any one, young and old, male and female, may be present during a discussion. Usually only chosen persons do the speaking.

Instead of a question being referred to a chief or king, a committee of wise men is sometimes chosen for the occasion. Public assemblages are gathered by messengers sent out to summon the people. The meeting is presided over by the king.

V. Servants.

The domestic servants are slaves. Prisoners of war are also made to do service; but on the making of peace male prisoners are returned to their tribe; the female prisoners are retained and married. Slaves were bought from interior tribes. If a male child was born to slave parents, he was considered free and could marry into the tribe. If the slave mother died, the widower could marry into the tribe. If the slave father died, the widow was married by some man of the family who owned him. There are no slaves bought or sold now, but there is a system of “pawns,”—children or women given as a pledge for a debt and never redeemed. Their position is inferior, and they are servants, but not slaves.

Also, if a prominent person (e. g., a headman) is killed in war, the people who killed him are to give a daughter to his family, who may marry her to any one they please.

A pawn may be sent away by the holder to some other place, but he cannot be sold or killed; but the holder may beat him if he be obstreperous.

During slavery days anything earned by a slave was taken to his master, who would allow him a share; also, at other times, the master would give the slave gifts. The slave could do paid labor for foreigners or other strangers, and was not necessarily punished if he did not share his wages with the master, but he would at least be rebuked for the omission. Women ruled their female slaves. For a slave’s minor offences, such as stealing, the master was held responsible; for grave offences, such as murder, the slave himself was killed.

Certain liberty was allowed a slave; he could attend the village or tribal palavers and take part in the discussion. If a slave was unjustly treated by some other person, his owner could call a council and have the matter talked over, and the slave could be allowed to plead his case.

A slave man could hold property of his own; and if he were a worthy, sensible person, he could inherit.

In a slave’s marriage of a woman the custom of gifts, feasts, and so forth was the same as for a free man.

If ill treated, he could run away to another tribe (not to any one of his own tribe), and would there be harbored, but still as a slave, and would not be given up to his former owner. A slave could become free only by his master setting him free; he could not redeem himself.

VI. Kingship.

Kingship has connected with it the great honor that a son may inherit it if he is the right kind of man; but it is possible for him to be set aside and another chosen. A son may lose his place by foolishness and incompetency.

Attempts to rule independently of the king are sometimes made by cliques composed of three or four young persons of the same age, who make laws or customs peculiar to themselves. There is no national recognition of them, nor are they given any special privilege.

Kings have very little power over the fines or property of others. These are held, each man for himself; nor have they the right of taxation; but they have power to declare war, acting in concert with their people in declaring it and waging it. They administer justice as magistrates, decide palavers according to the unwritten law of custom, summon offenders, and inflict the punishment due.

Their dwellings differ but little from those of other persons of like wealth and personal ability.

When a palaver is called, the king sits as ruler of the meeting and does most of the talking. He provides food for those who come from a distance.

A king may be blamed if a war he has declared ends disastrously. While a king’s son expects to inherit the title and power, there is no invariable rule of succession; he cannot take the position by force. He must be chosen; but the choice is limited to the members of one family, in which it is hereditary.

If the chosen person be a minor, another is selected (but of the same family) to act as regent. The “incompetency” which could bar a man from kingship, even though in regular succession, would be lack of stamina in his character. The king-elect must make a feast, to which he is to call all the people to eat, drink, and play for twenty days.

There are no higher state forms among the coast tribes, as in civilized lands; no union among tribes; no feudal power nor vassals; no monarchy, nothing absolute; no taxation, no monopoly. Some of the interior tribes formerly had tributes and kingly monopoly of certain products.

VII. Fetich Doctors.

They still exist, but it can scarcely be said that they are a class. They have no organization; they have honor only in their own districts, unless they be called specially to minister in another place. They have power to condemn to death on charge of causing sickness. In their ceremonies they send the people to sing, dance, play, and beat drums, and they spot their bodies with their “medicines.” Any one may choose the profession for himself; fetich doctors demand large pay for their services.

Native King in the Niger Delta.

VIII. Hospitality.

A stranger is entertained hospitably. He is provided with a house and food for two weeks, or as much longer as he may wish to stay. On departing he is given a present. His host and the village headman are bound to protect him from any prosecution while he is their guest, even if he be really guilty.

IX. Judicial System.

Such a system does not exist. Whatever rules there are are handed down as tradition, by word of mouth. There are persons who are familiar with these old sayings, proverbs, examples, and customs, and these are asked to be present in the trial of disputed matters.

1. Courts. In the righting of any wrong the head of the family is to take the first step. If the offenders fail to satisfy him, he appeals to the king, who then calls all the people, rehearses the matter to them, and the majority of their votes is accepted by the king as the decision. The offenders will not dare to resist.

There is no regular court-house. In almost all villages there is a public shed, or “palaver-house,” which is the town-hall, or public reception room. But a council may be held anywhere,—in the king’s house, in the house of one of the litigants, on the beach, or under a large shady tree.

The council is held at any time of day,—not at night. There are no regular advocates; any litigant may state his own case, or have any one else do it for him. There are no fees, except to the king for his summoning of the case. There is sometimes betting on the result; though no stakes are deposited, the bets are paid. There is not much form of court procedure. All the people of a village or district, even women and children, according to the importance of the case, assemble. While women are generally not allowed to argue in the case, yet their shouts of approval or protest have influence in the decision, and encourage the parties by outspoken sympathy.

If an accused person does not come voluntarily to court, the king’s servants are sent to bring him. In the court the accused does not need to have some one plead for him, he speaks for himself. Accusers speak first, then the accused; the accusers reply, the accused answers; and the king and his aged counsellors decide. Witnesses are called from other places. As there is no writing among untaught tribes, the depositions are by word of mouth.

Formerly the accused was subjected to the poison ordeal; indeed, the accuser also had to take the poison draught as a proof of his sincerity, and that his charge was not a libel. But this custom is no longer practised on the coast.

There is no substitution of any kind, except in rare cases. A guilty person must bear his own punishment in some way.

Oaths are common, and are used freely and voluntarily in the course of the discussion. A man who utters false testimony or bears false witness is expected to be thrust out of the assembly, but it is not always done.

When an oath is required, there is no escape from it; he who refuses to swear is considered guilty. Sometimes, under bravado, he will demand to be given “mbwaye” (the poison test), hoping that his demand will not be complied with. When the test is produced, he may seek to escape it by refusing that particular kind and demanding another not readily obtainable. But his attempt at evasion is generally regarded as a sign of guilt.

In court, parties are not obstinate in their opinion; they ask for and take advice from others.

2. Punishment. If it be capital, the accusers are the executioners. Death is by various modes,—formerly very cruel, e. g., burning, roasting, torturing, amputation by piecemeal; now it is generally by gun, dagger, club, or drowning. For a debt that a creditor is seeking to recover, securities may be accepted. But if the accused then runs away, the person giving the security is tried and punished.

A creditor does not usually attach the property of the debtor, though often, in the interior tribes, a woman is seized as hostage. If a long time elapses in deciding the matter, the debtor may be held as prisoner until the debt is paid. Formerly it was very common for the debtor’s family’s property, or even their persons, to be seized as security; and it still is common for a person of the debtor’s tribe to be caught by the creditor’s tribe, and detained until he is redeemed by his own people.

The king of the prisoner’s tribe is called to help release him. If the king himself become a captive, his people combine to collect goods for the payment, and meanwhile give other persons in his place to secure his immediate release. Sometimes differences are settled in a fight, by a hand-to-hand encounter.

3. Blood Atonement and Fines. Revenge, especially for bloodshed, is everywhere practised. It is a duty belonging first to the “ijawe” (blood-relative), next to the “ikaka” (family), next to the “etomba” (tribe).

The murdered man’s own family take the lead,—in case of a wife, her husband and his family, and the wife’s family; sometimes the whole “ikaka”; finally, the “etomba.”

A master seeks revenge for his slave or other servants. Formerly it was indifferent who was killed in revenge, so that it be some member of the murderer’s tribe. Naturally that tribe sought to retaliate, and the feud was carried back and forth, and would be finally settled only when an equal number had been killed on each side,—a person for a person: a woman for a man, or vice versa; a child for a man or woman, or vice versa. A woman (wife of the man killed) does not take the lead in the revenge; his family must take the lead, her family must join in. They would be despised and cursed if they did not do so. The woman herself does not take part in this killing for revenge.

The avenger of blood may not demit his duty until some member of the other tribe has been killed. If a thief has been killed for his theft, blood may be taken for his death. But when that one other life is taken, the matter is considered settled; it is not carried on as a feud.

For a life taken by accident, a life is not required; but some penalty must be paid, e. g., a woman may be given as a wife. But, practically, in former times it was not admitted that “accidents” occurred; any misfortune was adjudged a fault.

Formerly even the plea of self-defence was not accepted. Even idiotic or otherwise irresponsible persons were held responsible, though sometimes they were ransomed by payment of a woman and goods.

At present blood is not always required, but formerly no money would have been accepted as a sufficient penalty. A man would have been despised for accepting it. There was no way of settlement except by bloodshed,—a life for a life,—except that, for the life of a woman, a woman and goods of a certain amount and kind might be accepted. When a woman was thus given for a murdered one, the living woman must not be old, but one capable of bearing children. Among the acceptable goods were sheep, goats, and pottery.

A wound or a broken limb is paid for in goods. These must come not solely from him who caused the injury; his family, as fellow offenders, must assist in paying.

The man who obtains the woman who is given for a woman killed, retains with her also part of the goods given with her, and part he shares with the family of the murdered one. If, in giving a woman for a murdered one, the offending family is unable to furnish also the required goods, they must sell another of their women in order to obtain those goods. The point is that they must give a woman and goods; two women will not suffice.

The ceremonies in settlement of a blood-feud are as follows: The woman is paid in presence of both parties; then the goods are given, counted, and received. Then both parties retire. In the course of a week the parties receiving the woman and the goods call the other party, and produce a goat and kill it in their presence. It is divided equally, and given half to each party; and the feud is settled, as by a covenant of peace, over the divided goat (Gen. xv. 10). The woman thus given in settlement will be married to some one.

The customs in her marriage are the same as for any other woman. Subsequently those who paid her as a fine may come and ask a portion of goods for her as a wife. Not that they have any claim on her as their daughter; but the man who has married her will give the goods they ask for, under the common belief that, unless he does so, the children born by her will die early, or at least will not come to years of maturity.

All misdeeds and offences, even capital ones, may be condoned by a fine in goods, excepting only the murder of a man. This murderer must forfeit his life. These fines are paid with foreign goods, each offence having its own regulation price as a punishment.

In general, the punishment for an injury is the same, whether the injured one be rich or poor. A man’s “majawe” are held responsible if he refuses to make restitution. If they also refuse, the offended party await a suitable opportunity, and then seize some one and hold him as a hostage until he is redeemed, for the price of the original offence, every mite of it being then exacted.

There is no right of asylum to any offender within the limit of his own tribe. In case of a man visiting, for any reason whatever, in the limits of another tribe one of whose members is a fugitive from justice into the limits of the visitor’s tribe, this visitor may be seized, and his countrymen asked to extradite the criminal staying in their midst.

Corporal punishment is administered publicly, the townspeople being called to witness it, so as to operate on their fears and cause them to dread the doing of deeds which may bring on them such a penalty.

4. Punishable Acts. A person is punishable only for an injury committed intentionally, not by accident.

For damages by cattle, the animal may be killed if the damage be considerable. The injured party may keep and eat the carcass, and the owner cannot recover for it. In this respect animals are treated as human beings, their lives being forfeit; and the owner’s majawe are held responsible along with him.

Punishments are rated according to the degree of the crime, in the order theft, adultery, rape, murder. Insults are not punishable by law; the insulted insults in return. If a fight results, and wounds are made during the fight, no fine is required.

Kidnapping, incest, and abortion are not known.

Under the slight duty owed to kings, treason can scarcely be said to exist. Its equivalent, the betrayal of tribal interests, is publicly rebuked, and a curse laid on the offender. If he be a servant, he is beaten and sent away.

The disturber of the peace of a wedding is expected to express regret, but no calamity will follow because of the disturbance. The offence is not common.

X. Territorial Relations.

The tribes have fixed settlements wherever foreign governments have not taken possession. Each man may choose for a garden a place that has not been already occupied. The land is common property for the tribe. But each ijawe may choose a separate place for itself.

No man of a tribe has any claim on the soil other than is common to any other man of that tribe. He has, however, a claim greater than any stranger.

1. Tenure. Land is held as common property; it is not bought or sold to a fellow-tribeman. It may be bought from the confines of another tribe, and it is sold to foreigners. A hunter is free to go anywhere, even into the territory of an adjacent tribe. If he kills game there, he does not have to divide. Bee trees and honey are free to any one. The sea is free for fishing only to the coast tribes.

Every woman has a separate garden; even the wives of polygamists do not have gardens in common.

Soil is free. A family, however, may settle in a limited district, and claim it as theirs as long as they live there; or, leaving it temporarily, if they return after a reasonable time, they may still claim it. They temporarily mark their places by trees or stones, as boundary lines. But there is nothing permanent. They prove their right to it by residing on it or making a garden from time to time. But their claim may be lost if the entire family leave it and go elsewhere. Such a place being vacated, and some one else wishing to occupy it, permission may be granted on formal application to the king. But if an occupant has deserted a place, and no one else has applied for it, he can resume it as his even after the lapse of years.

Dwellers on any ground have right to all the trees of fruitage on it, e. g., palm-nuts, and other natural wild edible nuts. Wells are never dug. People depend on springs and streams. Springs are free, even though they be on land claimed by others.

A man assists his wife in the clearing of the forest for a garden plot; but she and her servants attend to the planting, weeding, and other working of the garden itself.

2. Rights in Movables. The tenant dweller on any particular lot of ground owns everything on it, except the ground itself. If a foreigner buy a piece of ground, he may or may not buy the houses, and so forth, according to agreement. The movables on any ground are houses, trees, and any vegetables planted.

XI. Exchange Relations.

There is no coin or metal currency, except among the coast tribes, where foreign governments have introduced it. Foreign trade-goods are everywhere the medium of purchase and exchange. But there is a sort of currency, in the shape of iron spear-heads and other forms resembling miniature hatchets, a certain number of which are given by interior tribes in the purchase of a wife. They are used only for this purpose, and are exchanged by the parties themselves for the foreign goods required in the dowry.

They are manufactured by any village blacksmith from imported iron. They are not received or recognized by white traders.

Formerly cowry shells were used, even by foreign traders, as a currency; and they are still so used in the Sudan. But in all coast tribes purchase and sale are effected by foreign-made calico prints, pottery, cutlery, guns, powder, rum, and a great variety of other goods.

The natural products of the country—ivory, rubber, palm-oil, dyewoods—and many other native unmanufactured articles are exchanged for these goods. The natural products belong to the men. If a woman should find ivory, she cannot sell it; it belongs to her husband to barter it.

Contracts are confirmed in various ways in different tribes. A common mode is to eat and drink together, as a sign that the bargain is closed; and it will not be broken. A contract cannot be broken after the price is agreed upon, even if only a part of the price is paid; the remainder is to be paid in instalments.

If one overreaches another in a trade, he must take back the imperfect article or add to it. This is true, according to native law, among themselves. Any amount of overreaching and deception is practised toward foreigners in a trade, or to members of another tribe; and many foreigners are just as guilty in their dealings with the natives.

Loans of trade-goods are constantly made, but the taking of interest therefor is not known. If a borrowed article, such as a canoe, is broken or lost, a new canoe must be given in its place. If the canoe is only injured and had been in want of repair, the borrower, on returning it, must repair it and also pay some goods. One going as surety for goods is held responsible.

Pawning of goods is commonly practised everywhere.

People are generous in making gifts to friends, or donations to the needy; but if a man who has been helped in time of distress subsequently increases in wealth, the one who helped him may demand a return of the original gift.

English Trading-House.—Gabun.

XII. Religion.

Religion is intimately mixed with every one of these aforementioned sociological aspects of family, rights of property, authority, tribal organization, judicial trials, punishments, intertribal relations, and commerce.

Mr. R. E. Dennett, residing in Loango, has made a careful and philosophic investigation into the religious ideas of the Ba-Vili or Fyât nation and adjacent tribes bordering on the Kongo. The result of his research shows that the native tribal government and religious and social life are inseparably united. He claims to have discovered a complex system of “numbers” and “powers” showing the Loango people to be more highly organized politically than are the equatorial tribes, and revealing a very curious co-relation of those “numbers,” governing the physical, rational, and moral natures, with conscience and with God.

Some traces of the “numbers with meanings” are found in Yoruba, where, as described by Mr. Dennett, the division of the months of the year, the names of lower animals typical of the senses, and the powers of earth that speak to us represent religious ideas and relations. They err, therefore, who, as superficial observers, would brush away all these native views as mere superstition. They are more than mere superstition; though indeed very superstitious, they point to God.

The particular exponent of religious worship, the fetich, governs the arrangements of all such relations. It will be discussed as to its origin and the details of its use in the subsequent chapters.

CHAPTER II

THE IDEA OF GOD—RELIGION

Missionary Paul of Tarsus, in the polite exordium of his great address to the Athenian philosophers on Mars Hill, courteously tells them that he believes them to be a very “religious” people,—indeed, too much so in their broad-church willingness to give room for an altar to the worship of any new immanence of God; and then, with equal courtesy, he tells them that, with all their civilization, with all their eminence in art and philosophy, they were ignorant of the true character of a greater than any deity in their pantheon.

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.

“My substance was not hid from Thee when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in Thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.”

But all such assertion, discussion, and attempt at proof I allow only to what is physical and finite, and is therefore a legitimate subject of assertion on merely physical data; for I do not desire to discuss, beyond simple mention, the Spencerian doctrine of evolution, that materialism which would make thought and soul only successions in a series (even if the highest and best) of evoluted developments. To account for the religious nature in man by evolution I regard as a thing that cannot be done. It is a tenable position held by evolutionists such as Dana, Winchell, and the late Professor Le Conte of California, that “at the creation of man the divine fiat asserted itself, and ‘breathed into man the breath of life, and man became a living soul.’ Immortality cannot be evolved out of mortality. If Spencerian evolution is true, either everything is immortal or nothing is immortal; man and vermin in this hypothesis go together.”

Man’s soul came to him direct from God, a part of His own infinite life, in His “image,” and like Him in His holiness. Man’s thoughts of God were holy. The expression of them in words and acts was his practical religion, the visible, audible link that “bound” (ligated) him to God. In this there could be no evolution, unless that, in the many forms and ceremonies used in the expression of religious thought (which ceremonies constitute worship), there could be, and were, variation, change, development, or retrogression.

Therefore I cannot accept the conclusions of those who in their study of ethnology claim to find that the religious beliefs of the world, and even the very idea of a Supreme Being, have been evolved by man himself ab intra. They claim that this evolution has been by primitive man, from low forms of beliefs in spiritual beings, through polytheism and idolatry, up to the conception of monotheism and its belief in the one living God. This process they claim to be able to follow on lines racial and national, under the civilizations of Chaldee, Greek, Roman, Teutonic, and other stocks.

“Until some human being can be found with a conception of spiritual existences without his having received instruction on that point from those who went before him, the claim ... that primitive man ever obtained his spiritual knowledge or his spiritual conceptions from within himself alone, or without an external revelation to him, is an unscientific assumption in the investigation of the origin of religions in the world.”[3]

The rather I find, in my own ethnological observations during these more than forty years in direct contact with aboriginal peoples, that the initial starting-point of man’s knowledge of God was by revelation from Jehovah himself. This knowledge was to be conserved by man’s conscience, God’s implanted witness,—a witness that can be coerced into silence, that may be nursed into forgetfulness, that may be perverted by abuse, that may be covered up by superimposed falsities, that may be discolored by the blackness of foul degradation, but which can never be utterly destroyed; which on occasions, like the Titans, arouses itself with volcanic force; which at God’s final bar is to be His sufficient proof for the verities and responsibilities of at least natural religion (“natural” religion, a recognition of certain attributes of God as revealed in the works of nature). This knowledge of God, a treasure hid in earthen vessels, rightly used and cherished, was to grow and develop under subsequent divine revelation, so that man might become more and more like his divine original; or, if abused, neglected, or perverted, it would carry him even farther away from God.

“Not alone those who insist on the belief that there was a gradual development of the race from a barbarous beginning, but also those who believe that man started on a higher plane, and in his degradation retained vestiges of God’s original revelation to him, are finding profit in the study of primitive myths, and of aboriginal rites and ceremonies all the world over.”[4]

I do not impeach the sincerity of those students of primitive thought who teach that man in his religious beliefs has reached his present monotheism by progressive growths from polytheism, or that he has attained his present conception of the very existence of a Supreme Being by a gradual emergence from a state of ignorance in which even the idea of such a being did not exist; but I do discount the competency of many of the witnesses on whose testimony they base their conclusions.

Whatever may be proved in a complete investigation by science into the arcana of nature,—of archæology and other channels of research,—a reverent comparison of these results of finite intelligence will find them not inconsistent with the statements of God’s infinite Word. Indeed, that Word was not written to make any definite statement on astronomy or geology, or any other human science. The only science of the Bible is that of man’s relation to his divine Father; its only history a history of redemption, as promised to Eve and her seed, the Jewish nation, and as fulfilled in the Lion of the Tribe of Judah. Apparent conflicts of the Bible with science are not always real; too often a claim is set up, based on a single observation, perhaps hastily made, and not verified by a comparison of the variable factors in that observation.

I suppose that it is true that in the theology of even the worst forms of religion there is more or less truth, and almost equally true that in the theology of the best forms there may be somewhat of superstition. This is so because, as I believe, all religions had but one source, and that a pure one. From it have grown perversions varying in their proportion of truth and error.

In this study of the African theologic ideas I shall endeavor to separate these two—the false and the true—into two divisions: First, Beliefs in God more or less true, which have had their birth in tradition of some divine revelation, which find at least faint echoes in human conscience, and which among exalted nations would be formulated into confessions, creeds, and articles of faith. Second, Animism or beliefs in vague spiritual beings, which, being almost pure superstitions, cannot, from their very nature, be accurately formulated, they being the outgrowth of every individual’s imagination, and varying with all the variances of time, place, and human thought.

Eliminating from any theology its superstitious element, we shall find the highest and truest religion. But if you eliminate from the theology of the Bantu African its superstition, you will have very little left; for, among the religions of the world, it comes nearest to being purely a superstition. So nearly is this true that travellers and other superficial observers and theorists have asserted that the religious beliefs of some degraded tribes were simply superstitions, destitute of reference to any superior being.

I can readily see how the reports of some travellers—even of those who had no prejudice against the Negro, the precepts of the Bible, or missionary work—could be made in apparent sincerity, when they state that native Africans have confessed of themselves that they had no idea of God’s existence; also, their belief that some pygmy and other tribes were too destitute of intelligence to possess that idea,—that it either must be given them ab extra by the possessors of a superior civilization, or must be developed by themselves as they rise in civilization.

The difficulty about the testimony of these witnesses in this matter is that, being passers-by in time, they were unable—by reason of lack of ability to converse fluently, or absence of a reliable interpreter, or of being out of touch with native mode of thought or speech—to make their questionings intelligible.

On the heathen side, also, the obsequious natives, unaccustomed to analytic thought, will answer vaguely on the spur of the moment, and often as far as possible in the line of what they suppose will best please the questioner. All native statements must be discounted, must be sifted.

I am aware that some missionaries are quoted as having said or written that the people among whom they were laboring “had no idea of God.” Even Robert Moffat is reported to have held this opinion. If so, it must have been in the earlier days of his ministry, under his first shock at the depth of native degradation, before he had become fluent in the native language, and before he had found out all the secrets of that difficult problem, an African’s native thought. Such an unqualified phrase could be uttered by a missionary in an hour of depression, in the presence of some great demonstration of heathen wickedness, and in an effort to describe how very far the heathen was from God. That the heathen had no correct idea of God is often true.

Arnot, who among modern African missionaries has lived most closely and intimately with the rudest tribes in their veriest hovels, writes:[5] “Man is a very fragile being, and he is fully conscious that he requires supernatural or divine aid. Apart from the distinct revelation given by God in the first chapter of Romans, there is much to prove that the heathen African is a man to whom the living God has aforetime revealed himself. But he had sought after things of his own imagination and things of darkness to satisfy those convictions and fears which lurk in his breast, and which have not been planted there by the Evil One, but by God. Refusing to acknowledge God,[6] they have become haters of God.[7] The preaching of the gospel to them, however, is not a mere beating of the air; there is a peg in the wall upon which something can be hung and remain. Often a few young men have received the message with laughter and ridicule, but I have afterwards heard them discuss my words amongst themselves very gravely. I heard one man say to a neighbor, ‘Monare’s words pierce the heart.’ Another remarked that the story of Christ’s death was very beautiful, but that he knew it was not meant for him; he was a ‘makala’ (slave), and such a sacrifice was only for white men and princes.”

Lionel Declè,[8] who certainly is not prejudiced toward missionaries or the Negro, writes of the Barotse tribe in South Africa and their worship of ancestors: “They believe in a Supreme Being, Niambe, who is supposed to come and take away the spiritual part of the dead.” This name “Niambe,” for the Deity, is almost exactly the same as “Anyambe,” in Benga, two thousand miles distant.

Illustrative of traveller Declè’s haste or inexactitude in the use of language, he apparently contradicts himself on page 153, in speaking of a tribe, the Matabele, adjacent to the Barotse: “The idea of a Supreme Being is utterly foreign, and cannot be appreciated by the native mind. They have a vague idea of a number of evil spirits always ready to do harm, and chief among these are the spirits of their ancestors; but they do not pray to them to ask for their help if they wish to enter on any undertaking. They merely offer sacrifices to appease them when some evil has befallen the family.”

Perhaps he and other cursory travellers, in making such hasty assertions, mean that the native has no idea of the true character of God; in that they would be correct.

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.”

Resuming my street-preaching conversation: Immediately after the admission by the audience of their knowledge of Anzam as the Creator and Father, I say, “Why then do you not obey this Father’s commands, who tells you to do so and so? Why do you disobey his prohibitions, who forbids you to do so and so? Why do you not worship him?” Promptly they reply: “Yes, he made us; but, having made us, he abandoned us, does not care for us; he is far from us. Why should we care for him? He does not help nor harm us. It is the spirits who can harm us whom we fear and worship, and for whom we care.”

Another witness on this subject is the Rev. Dr. J. L. Wilson.[9] Speaking of Africa and its Negro inhabitants, he says: “The belief in one great Supreme Being is universal. Nor is this idea held imperfectly or obscurely developed in their minds. The impression is so deeply engraved upon their moral and mental nature that any system of atheism strikes them as too absurd and preposterous to require a denial. Everything which transpires in the natural world beyond the power of man or of spirits, who are supposed to occupy a place somewhat higher than man, is at once and spontaneously ascribed to the agency of God. All the tribes in the country with which the writer has become acquainted (and they are not few) have a name for God; and many of them have two or more, significant of His character as a Maker, Preserver, and Benefactor. (In the Grebo country Nyiswa is the common name for God; but He is sometimes called Geyi, indicative of His character as Maker. In Ashanti He has two names: viz., Yankumpon, which signifies ‘My Great Friend,’ and Yemi, ‘My Maker.’) The people, however, have no correct idea of the character or attributes of the Deity. Destitute of (a written) revelation, and without any other means of forming a correct conception of His moral nature, they naturally reason up from their own natures, and, in consequence, think of Him as a being like themselves.

“Nor have they any correct notion of the control which God exercises over the affairs of the world. The prevailing notion seems to be that God, after having made the world and filled it with inhabitants, retired to some remote corner of the universe, and has allowed the affairs of the world to come under the control of evil spirits; and hence the only religious worship that is ever performed is directed to these spirits, the object of which is to court their favor, or ward off the evil effects of their displeasure.

“On some rare occasions, as at the ratification of an important treaty, or when a man is condemned to drink the ‘red-water ordeal,’ the name of God is solemnly invoked; and, what is worthy of note, is invoked three times with marked precision. Whether this involves the idea of a Trinity we shall not pretend to decide; but the fact itself is worthy of record. Many of the tribes speak of the ‘Son of God.’ The Grebos call him ‘Greh,’ and the Amina people, according to Pritchard, call him ‘Sankombum.’”

The following testimony I gather from conversations with the late Rev. Ibia j‘Ikĕngĕ, a native minister and member of the Presbytery of Corisco, who himself was born in heathenism. He stated:

That his forefathers believed in many inferior agencies who are under the control of a Superior Being; that they were therefore primitive monotheists. Under great emergencies they looked beyond the lower beings, and asked help of that Superior; before doing so, they prayed to him, imploring him as Father to help;

That the people of this country believed God made the world and everything in it; but he did not know whether they had had any ideas about creation from dust of the ground or in God’s likeness;

That they believed in the existence, in the first times, of a great man, who had simply to speak, and all things were made by the word of his power. As to man’s creation, a legend states it thus: Two eggs fell from on high. On striking the ground and breaking, one became a man and the other a woman. (Apparently there is no memory of any legend indicating the name, character, or work of the Holy Spirit.)

That there is a legend of a great chief of a village who always warned people not to eat of the fruit of a certain tree. Finally, he himself ate of it and died;

That there was no legend, but, among a few persons, a vague tradition of a once happy period, and of a coming time of good; but he knew of nothing corresponding to the story of Cain and Abel;