Fetichism in West Africa Part 4

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 rest.i.tution. 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 carca.s.s, 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 fis.h.i.+ng 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 wis.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.sists 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 sh.e.l.ls 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.

p.a.w.ning 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 Fyat 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 G.o.d.

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 superst.i.tion. They are more than mere superst.i.tion; though indeed very superst.i.tious, they point to G.o.d.

The particular exponent of religious wors.h.i.+p, 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 G.o.d--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 wors.h.i.+p of any new immanence of G.o.d; 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 mult.i.tudinous followers of the so-called false religions would have an a.s.surance 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 G.o.d 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 "G.o.dliness 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 G.o.d 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 superst.i.tion, 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d,--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, superst.i.tious, and mixed with untruth; nevertheless, it is religion.

When a study of G.o.d 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 wors.h.i.+p. That wors.h.i.+p may be fearful in its cruelty or ridiculous in its frivolity; nevertheless, it is a wors.h.i.+p. Wors.h.i.+p is essential to the vitality of religion; without it religion is simply a theory.