West African studies Part 7

Another and more fundamental point to be considered is the influence of physical environment on religions, particularly these Nature religions.

The Semitic mind, which had never been kept quite in its proper place by Natural difficulties, gave to man in the scheme of Creation a pre-eminence that deeply influences Europeans, who have likewise not been kept in their place owing to the environments of the temperate zone. On the other hand, the African race has had about the worst set of conditions possible to bring out the higher powers of man. He has been surrounded by a set of terrific natural phenomena, combined with a good food supply and a warm and equable climate. These things are not enough in themselves to account for his low-culture condition, but they are factors that must be considered. Then, undoubtedly, the nature of the African's mind is one of the most important points. It may seem a paradox to say of people who are always seeing visions that they are not visionaries; but they are not.

The more you know the African, the more you study his laws and inst.i.tutions, the more you must recognise that the main characteristic of his intellect is logical, and you see how in all things he uses this absolutely sound but narrow thought-form. He is not a dreamer nor a doubter; everything is real, very real, horribly real to him. It is impossible for me to describe it clearly, but the quality of the African mind is strangely uniform. This may seem strange to those who read accounts of wild and awful ceremonials, or of the African's terror at white man's things; but I believe you will find all people experienced in dealing with uncultured Africans will tell you that this alarm and brief wave of curiosity is merely external, for the African knows the moment he has time to think it over, what that white man's thing really is, namely, either a white man's Juju or a devil.

It is this power of being able logically to account for everything that is, I believe, at the back of the tremendous permanency of Fetish in Africa, and the cause of many of the relapses into it by Africans converted to other religions; it is also the explanation of the fact that white men who live in districts where death and danger are everyday affairs, under a grim pall of boredom, are liable to believe in Fetish, though ashamed of so doing. For the African, whose mind has been soaked in Fetish during his early most impressionable years, the voice of Fetish is almost irresistible when affliction comes on him. Sudden dangers or terror he can face with his new religion, because he is not quick at thinking. But give him time to think when under the hand of adversity, and the old explanation that answered it all comes back. I know no more distressing thing than to see an African convert brought face to face with that awful thing we are used to, the problem of an omnipotent G.o.d and a suffering world. This does not worry the African convert until it hits him personally in grief and misery. When it does, and he turns and calls upon the G.o.d he has been taught will listen, pity and answer, his use of what the scoffers at the converted African call "catch phrases" is horribly heartrending to me, for I know how real, terribly real, the whole thing is to him, and I therefore see the temptation to return to those old G.o.ds--G.o.ds from whom he never expected pity, presided over by a G.o.d that does not care. All that he had to do with them was not to irritate them, to propitiate them, to buy their services when wanted, and, above all, to dodge and avoid them, while he fought it out and managed devils at large. Risky work, but a man is as good as a devil any day if he only takes proper care; and even if any devil should get him unaware--kill him bodily--he has the satisfaction of knowing he will have the power to make it warm for that devil when they meet on the other side.

There is something alluring in this, I think, to any make of human mind, but particularly so to the logical, intensely human one possessed by the West African. Therefore, when wearied and worn out by confronting things that he cannot reconcile, and disappointed by unanswered prayers, he turns back to his old belief entirely, or modifies the religion he has been taught until it fits in with Fetish, and is gradually absorbed by it.

It is often asked whether Christianity or Mohammedanism is to possess Africa--as if the choice of Fate lay between these two things alone. I do not think it is so, at least it is not wise for a mere student to ignore the other thing in the affair, Fetish, which is as it were a sea wherein all things suffer a sea change. For remember it is not Christianity alone that becomes tinged with Fetish, or gets engulfed and dominated by it. Islam, when it strikes the true heart of Africa, the great Forest Belt region, fares little better though it is more recent than Christianity, and though it is preached by men who know the make of the African mind. Islam is in its bluth-period now in all the open parts, even on the desert regions of Africa from its Mediterranean sh.o.r.e to below the Equator, but so far it has beaten up against the Forest Belt like a sea on a sand beach. It has crossed the Forest Belt by the Lakes, it has penetrated it in channels, but in those channels the waters of Islam are, recent as their inroad there is, brackish.

Therefore I make no pretence at prophesying which of these great revealed religions will ultimately possess Africa; but it is an interesting point to notice what has been the reason of the great power of immediate appeal to the African which they both possess.

The African has a great over-G.o.d, and below him lesser spirits, including man; but the African has not in West Africa, nor so far as I have been able to ascertain elsewhere in the whole Continent, a G.o.d-man, a thing that directly connects man with the great over-G.o.d. This thing appeals to the African when it is presented to him by Christianity and Islam.

It is, I am quite aware, not doctrinally true to say that Islam offers him a G.o.d-man, nevertheless in Mohammed practically it does so, and that too in a more easily believable form--by easily I do not mean that it is necessarily true. Moreover it minimises the danger of death in a more definite way, more in keeping with his own desires, and it is more reconcilable with his conscience in the treatment of life as he has to live it. Most of the higher cla.s.s Africans are traders. Islam gives an easier, clearer line of rect.i.tude to a trader than its great rival in Africa--under African conditions.

There are many who will question whether conscience is a sufficiently large factor in an African mind for us to think of taking it into account, but whether you call it conscience, or religious bent, or fear, the factor is a large one. An African cannot say, as so many Europeans evidently easily can, "Oh, that is all right from a religious point of view, but one must be practical, you know"; and it is this factor that makes me respect the African deeply and sympathise with him, for I have this same unmanageable hindersome thing in my own mind, which you can call anything you like; I myself call it honour. Now conscience when conditioned by Christianity is an exceedingly difficult thing for a trader to manage satisfactorily to himself. A ma.s.s of compromises have to be made with the world, and a man who is always making compromises gets either sick of them or sick of the thing that keeps on nagging at him about them, or he becomes merely gaseous-minded all round. There are some few in all races of men who can think comfortably

"That conscience, like a restive horse, Will stumble if you check his course, But ride him with an easy rein, And rub him down with worldly gain, He'll carry you through thick and thin, Safe, although dirty, 'till you win,"

but such men are in Africa a very small minority, and so it falls out that most men engaged in trade revert to Fetish, or become lax as Church members, or embrace Islam.

I think, if you will consider the case, you will see that the workability of Islam is one of the chief reasons of its success in Africa. It is, from many African points of view, a most inconvenient religion, with its Rahmadhizan, bound every now and again to come in the height of the dry season; its restrictions on alcoholic drinks and gambling; but, on the whole it is satisfying to the African conscience.

Moreover, like Christianity, it lifts man into a position of paramount importance in Creation. He is the thing G.o.d made the rest for. I have often heard Africans say, "It does a man good to know G.o.d loves him; it makes him proud too much." Well, at any rate it is pleasanter than Fetish, where man, in company with a host of spirits, is fighting for his own hand, in an arena before the G.o.ds, eternally.

We will now turn to the consideration of the status of the human soul in pure Fetish, that is to say in Fetish that is common to all the different schools of West African Fetis.h.i.+sm.

What strikes a European when studying it is the lack of gaps between things. To the African there is perhaps no gap between the conception of spirit and matter, animate or inanimate. It is all an affair of grade--not of essential difference in essence. At the head of existence are those beings who can work without using matter, either as a constant a.s.sociate or as an occasional tool--do it all themselves, as an African would say. Beneath this grade there are many grades of spirits, who occasionally or habitually, as in the case of the human grade, are a.s.sociated with matter, and at the lower end of the scale is what we call matter, but which I believe the West African regards as the same sort of stuff as the rest, only very low--so low that practically it doesn't matter; but it is spirits, the things that cause all motion, all difficulties, dangers and calamities, that do matter and must be thought about, for they are _real_ things whether "they live for thing" or no.

The African and myself are also in a fine fog about form, but I will spare you that point, for where that thing comes from, often so quickly and silently, and goes, often so quickly and silently, too, under our eyes, everlastingly, that thing on which we all so much depend at every moment of our lives, that thing we are quite as conscious of as light and darkness, heat or cold, yet which makes a thing no heavier in one shape than in another,--is altogether too large a subject to touch on now. Yet, remember it is a most important part of practical Fetish, for on it depends divination and heaps of such like matters, that are parts of both the witch doctor and the Fetish priest's daily work.

One of the fundamental doctrines of Fetish is that the connection of a certain spirit with a certain ma.s.s of matter, a material object, is not permanent; the African will point out to you a lightning-stricken tree and tell you that its spirit has been killed; he will tell you when the cooking pot has gone to bits that it has lost its spirit; if his weapon fails it is because some one has stolen or made sick its spirit by means of witchcraft. In every action of his daily life he shows you how he lives with a great, powerful spirit world around him. You will see him before starting out to hunt or fight rubbing medicine into his weapons to strengthen the spirits within them, talking to them the while; telling them what care he has taken of them, reminding them of the gifts he has given them, though those gifts were hard for him to give, and begging them in the hour of his dire necessity not to fail him. You will see him bending over the face of a river talking to its spirit with proper incantations, asking it when it meets a man who is an enemy of his to upset his canoe or drown him, or asking it to carry down with it some curse to the village below which has angered him, and in a thousand other ways he shows you what he believes if you will watch him patiently.

It is a very important point in the study of pure Fetish to gain a clear conception of this arrangement of things in grades. As far as I have gone I think I may say fourteen cla.s.ses of spirits exist in Fetish. Dr.

Na.s.sau of Gaboon thinks that the spirits commonly affecting human affairs can be cla.s.sified fairly completely into six cla.s.ses.[15]

Regarding the Fetish view of the state and condition of the human soul there are certain ideas that I think I may safely say are common to the various cults of Fetish, both Negro and Bantu, in Western Africa.

Firstly, the cla.s.s of spirits that are human souls always remain human souls. They do not become deified, nor do they sink in grade. I am aware that here I am on dangerous ground so I am speaking carefully.[16] An eminent authority, when criticising my statements,[17] dwelt upon their heterodoxy on this point, saying however, "We may throw out the conjecture that in remote and obscure West Africa men do not reach the necessary pitch of renown for mighty deeds or sanct.i.ty that qualifies them in larger countries for elevation after death to high places among recognised divinities."

This conjecture I quite accept as an explanation of the non-deification of human beings in West Africa, and I think, taken in conjunction with the grade conception, it fairly explains why West Africa has not what undoubtedly other regions of the world have in their religions, deified ancestors.

After having had my attention drawn to the strangeness of this non-deification of ancestors, I did my best to work the subject out in order to see if by any chance I had badly observed it. I consulted the accounts of West African religions given by Labat, Bosman, Bastian and Ellis, and to my great pleasure found that the three first said nothing against my statements, and that Sir A. B. Ellis had himself said the same thing in his _Ewe Speaking People_. Moreover, I sent a circular written on this point to people in West Africa whom I knew had opportunities of knowing the facts as at present existing,--the answers were unanimous with Ellis and myself.

Nevertheless, mind, you will find something that looks like wors.h.i.+p of ancestors in West Africa. Only it is no more wors.h.i.+p, properly so called, than our own deference to our living, elderly, and influential relations.

In almost all Western African districts (it naturally does not show clearly in those where reincarnation is believed to be the common and immediate lot of all human spirits) is a cla.s.s of spirits called "the well disposed ones," and this cla.s.s is clearly differentiated from "them," the generic name used for non-human spirits. These "well disposed ones" are ancestors, and they do what they can to benefit their particular village or family, acting in conjunction with the village or family Fetish, who is not a human spirit, nor an ancestor. But the things given to ancestors are gifts, not in the proper sense of the word sacrifices, for the well disposed ones are not G.o.ds even of the rank of a Sasabonsum or an Ombuiri.

In an extremely interesting answer to my inquiries that I received from Mr. J. H. Batty, of Cape Coast, who had kindly submitted my questions to a native gentleman well versed in affairs, the statement regarding ancestors is, "The people believe that the spirits of their departed relations exercise a guardian care over them, and they will frequently stand over the graves of their deceased friends and invoke their spirits to protect them and their children from harm. It is imagined that the spirit lingers about the house some time after death. If the children are ill the illness is ascribed to the spirit of the deceased mother having embraced them. Elderly women are often heard to offer up a kind of prayer to the spirit of a departed parent, begging it either to go to its rest, or to protect the family by keeping off evil spirits, instead of injuring the children or other members of the family by its touch. The ghosts of departed enemies are considered by the people as bad spirits, who have power to injure them."

In connection with this fear of the ancestor's ghost hurting members of its own family, particularly children, I may remark it has several times been carefully explained to me that this "touching" comes not from malevolence, but from loneliness and the desire to have their company. A sentimental but inconvenient desire that the living human cannot give in to perpetually, though big men will accede to their ancestor's desire for society by killing off people who may serve or cheer him. This desire for companions.h.i.+p is of course immensely greater in the spirit that is not definitely settled in the society of spiritdom, and it is therefore more dangerous to its own belongings, in fact to all living society, while it is hanging about the other side of the grave, but this side of Hades. Thus I well remember a delicious row that arose primarily out of trade matters, but which caused one family to yell at another family divers remarks, ending up with the accusation, "You good-for-nothing illegitimate offspring of house lizards, you don't bury your ditto ditto dead relations, but leave them knocking about anyhow, a curse to Calabar." Naturally therefore the spirit of a dead enemy is feared because it would touch for the purpose of getting spirit slaves; therefore it follows that powerful ancestors are valued when they are on the other side, for they can keep off the dead enemies. A great chief's spirit is a thoroughly useful thing for a village to keep going, and in good order, for it conquered those who are among the dead with it, and can keep them under, keep them from aiding their people in the fights between its living relations and itself and them, with its slave spirit army. I ought to say that it is customary for the living to send the dead out ahead of the army, to bear the brunt in the first attack.

Ancestor-esteem you will find at its highest pitch in West Africa under the school of Fetish that rules the Ts.h.i.+ and Ewe peoples. Ellis gives you a full description of it for Ashanti and Dahomey.[18] The next district going down coast is the Yoruba one; but Yoruba has been so long under the influence of Mahometanism that its Fetish, judging from Ellis's statement in his _Yoruba Speaking People_, is deeply tinged with it. I have no personal acquaintance with Yorubaland, but have no hesitation for myself in accepting his statements from the accuracy I have found them, by personal experience with Ts.h.i.+ and Ewe people, to possess. Below Yoruba comes a district, the Oil Rivers, where, alas, Ellis did not penetrate, and where no ethnologist, unless you will graciously extend the term to me, has ever cautiously worked.

In this district you have a school where reincarnation is strongly believed in, a different school of Fetish to that of Ts.h.i.+ and Ewe, a cla.s.s of human ghosts called the well-disposed ones. And these are ancestors undoubtedly. They do not show up clearly in those districts where reincarnation is believed to be the common lot of all human souls. Nevertheless, they are clear enough even there, as I will presently attempt to explain.

These ancestor spirits have things given to them for their consolation and support, and in return they do what they can to benefit and guard their own villages and families. Nevertheless, the things given to the well-disposed ones are not as things sacrificed to G.o.ds. Nor are the well-disposed ones G.o.ds, even of the grade of a Sasabonsum or an Ombuiri. It is a low down thing to dig up your father--i.e., open his grave and take away the things in it that have been given him. It will get you cut by respectable people, and rude people when there is a market-place row on will mention it freely; but it won't bring on a devastating outbreak of small-pox in the whole district.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] Of the Divine Law, _Tractatus Theologico Politicus_, Spinoza.

[11] _Primitive Culture_, E. B. Tylor, p. 144.

[12] Professor Tylor kindly allowed me to place this statement before him, and he says that as the word Fetish, with the sense of the use of bones, claws, stones, and such objects as receptacles of spiritual influences, has had nearly two centuries of established usage, it would not be easy to set it aside, and he advises me to use the term West African religion, or in some way make my meaning clear without expecting to upset the established nomenclature of comparative ethnology.

[13] This word is p.r.o.nounced by the natives and by people knowing them, Cheuwe, as Ellis undoubtedly knew, but presumably he spelt it Ts.h.i.+ to please the authorities.

[14] _The Vocation of the Hebrews_, Spinoza.

[15] See _Travels in West Africa_, by M. H. Kingsley. Macmillan & Co.

1897.

[16] For further details see _Travels in West Africa_, p. 444.

[17] "Origins and Interpretations of Primitive Religions." _Edinburgh Review_, July, 1897, p. 219.

[18] _The Ts.h.i.+ Speaking, Ewe Speaking and Yoruba Speaking People of West Africa._--A. B. Ellis.

CHAPTER VI

SCHOOLS OF FETISH

Wherein the student, thinking things may be made clearer if it be perceived that there are divers schools of Fetish, discourses on the schools of West African religious thought.

As I have had occasion to refer to schools of Fetish, and as that is a term of my own, I must explain why I use it, and what I mean by it, in so far as I am able. When travelling from district to district you cannot fail to be struck by the difference in character of the native religion you are studying. My own range on the West Coast is from Sierra Leone to Loanda; and here and there in places such as the Oil Rivers, the Ogowe, and the Lower Congo, I have gone inland into the heart of what I knew to be particularly rich districts for an ethnologist. I make no pretence to a thorough knowledge of African Fetish in all its schools, but I feel sure no wandering student of the subject in Western Africa can avoid recognising the existence of at least four distinct forms of development of the Fetish idea. They have, every one of them, the underlying idea I have attempted to sketch as pure Fetish when speaking of the position of the human soul; and yet they differ. And I believe much of the confusion which is supposed to exist in African religious ideas is a confusion only existing in the minds of cabinet ethnologists from a want of recognition of the fact of the existence of these schools.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FANTEE NATIVES OF THE GOLD COAST.

[_To face page 137._]

For example, suppose you take a few facts from Ellis and a few from Bastian and mix, and call the mixture West African religion, you do much the same sort of thing as if you took bits from Mr. Spurgeon's works, and from those of some eminent Jesuit and of a sound Greek churchman, and mixed them and labelled it European religion. The bits would be all right in themselves, but the mixture would be a quaint affair.

As far as my present knowledge of the matter goes, I should state that there were four main schools of West African Fetish: (1) the Ts.h.i.+ and Ewe school, Ellis' school; (2) the Calabar school; (3) the Mpongwe school; (4) Nkissism or the Fjort school. Subdivisions of these schools can easily be made, but I only make the divisions on the different main objects of wors.h.i.+p, or more properly speaking, the thing each school especially endeavours to secure for man. The Ts.h.i.+ and Ewe school is mainly concerned with the preservation of life; the Calabar school with attempting to enable the soul successfully to pa.s.s through death; the Mpongwe school with the attainment of material prosperity; while the school of Nkissi is mainly concerned with the wors.h.i.+p of the mystery of the power of Earth--Nkissi-nsi. You will find these divers things wors.h.i.+pped, or, rather, I would say cultivated, in all the schools of Fetish, but in certain schools certain ideas are predominant. Look at Srahmantin of the Ts.h.i.+ people, and at Nzambi of the Fjort. Both these ladies know where the animals go to drink, what they say to each other, where their towns are, and what not; also they both know what the forest says to the wind and the rain, and all the forests' own small talk in the bargain, and, therefore, also the inner nature of all these things; and both, like other ladies, I have heard prefer gentlemen's society. Women they have a tendency to be hard on, but either Srahmantin or Nzambi think nothing of taking up a man's time, making him neglect his business or his family affairs, or both together, by keeping him in the bush for a month or so at a time, teaching him things about medicines, and finally sending him back into town in so addlepated a condition that for months he hardly knows who he exactly is. When he comes round, however, if he has any sense, he sets up in business as a medical man; sometimes, however, he just remains merely crackey. Such a man was my esteemed Kefalla.

But look how different under different schools is the position of Srahmantin and Nzambi. Srahmantin is only propitiated by doctors and hunters; by all respectable, busy, family men forced to go through forests, she is simply dreaded, while Nzambi, the great Princess, entirely dominates the whole school of Nkissism.