Fetichism in West Africa Part 7

3. But the general consensus of opinion is that the world of spirits is peopled by the souls of dead human beings. This presupposes a belief in a future life, the existence of which in the native mind some travellers have doubted. I have never met that doubt from the native himself. While I do not impute to the travellers referred to any desire, in their efforts at describing the low grade of intelligence or religious belief of certain tribes, to misrepresent, I fully believe they were mistaken, their mistake arising from misunderstanding. It is not probable that they met, in the course of their few years, what I have not met with in a lifetime. It is probable that natives had expressed to them a doubt, or even ignorance, of a general resurrection, and may have said to them, as a few have said to me, "No, we do not live again; we are like goats and dogs and chickens,--when we die that is the end of us." Such a statement is indeed a denial of the resurrection of the body, but it is not a denial of a continued existence of the soul in another life. The very people who made the above declaration to me preserved their family fetich, made sacrifices to the spirits of their ancestors, and appealed to them for aid in their family undertakings. The few who have expressed a belief in transmigration did not consider that the residence of a human spirit in the body of a beast was a permanent state; it was a temporary condition, a.s.sumed by the spirit voluntarily for its own pleasure or convenience, and terminable at its own will, precisely as human spirits during their mortal life are, everywhere and by all, believed capable of temporarily deserting their own human body and controlling the actions of a beast. This belief in transmigration, though not general, has been found among individuals in almost all tribes.

It being thus generally accepted that all departed human souls become spirits of that future that is all around us, there is still a difference in the testimony of intelligent witnesses as to who and what, or even how many, of these souls are in one human being. (1) Ordinarily, the native will say in effect, "I am one, and my soul is also myself. When I die, it goes out somewhere else." (2) Others will say, "I have two things,--one is the thing that becomes a spirit when I die, the other is the spirit of the body and dies with it." (This "other" may be only a personification of what we specify as the animal life.) But it has frequently occurred that even intelligent natives, standing by me at the side of a dying person, have said to me, "He is dead." The patient was indeed unconscious, lying stiff, not seeing, speaking, eating, or apparently feeling; yet there was a slight heart-beat. I would point out to the relatives these evidences of life. But they said: "No, he is dead. His spirit is gone, he does not see nor hear nor feel; that slight movement is only the spirit of the body shaking itself. It is not a person, it is not our relative; _he_ is dead."

And they began to prepare the body for burial. A man actually came to me on Corisco Island, in 1863, asking me for medicine with which to kill or quiet the body-spirit of his mother, whose motions were troubling him by preventing the funeral arrangements. I was shocked at what I thought his attempt at matricide, but subsequently found that he really did believe that his mother was dead and her real soul gone.

Such attempt to distinguish between soul-life and body-life has not infrequently led to premature burial. The supposed corpse has sometimes risen to consciousness on the way to the grave. A long-protracted sickness of some not very valuable member of the village has wearied the attendants; they decide that the body, though mumbling inarticulate words and aimlessly fingering with its arms, is no longer occupied by its personal soul; _that_ has emerged. "He is dead"; and they proceed to bury him alive. Yet they deny that they have done so. They insist that _he_ was not alive; only his body was "moving." Proof of premature burial has been found by discoveries made in the practice of a custom which is observed when a village has been afflicted with various troubles after the death of one of its members. The villagers, after ineffectual efforts to drive away the evil influences that are supposed to cause these troubles, decide that the spirit of some dead relative is dissatisfied about something, and order the grave to be opened and the bones rearranged or even thrown into the river or sea. On opening the grave, corpses that had been buried in a rec.u.mbent position have been found in a sitting position. It is possible for one thus prematurely buried to change posture in a dying struggle; for, mostly, heathen graves are shallow, and are hastily and not always completely filled in.

(3) Another set of witnesses will say that, besides the personal soul and the soul of the body, there is a third ent.i.ty in the human unit, namely, a dream-soul. That it is which leaves the body on occasions during sleep, and, wandering off, delights itself by visiting strange lands and strange scenes. On its return to the body its union with the material blunts its perceptions, and the person, in his efforts to remember or tell what he has seen, relates only the vagaries of a dream,--a psychological view which, under the manipulation of a ready pen, could give play to fantasies pretty, romantic, not unreasonable, and not impossible.

Some who are only dualists, nevertheless, believe in the wanderings of this so-called dream-soul, but say that it is the personal soul itself that has gone out and has returned. Both dualists and trinitarians add that sometimes in its wanderings this soul loses its way and cannot find its body, its material home; should it never return, the person will sicken and die.

(4) A fourth ent.i.ty is vaguely spoken of by some as a component part of the human personality, by others as separate but closely a.s.sociated from birth to death, and called the life-spirit. Some speak of it as a civilized person speaks of a guardian angel. Regarded in that light, it should not be considered as one of the several _kinds_ of souls, but as one of the various _cla.s.ses_ of spirits (which will be discussed in a subsequent chapter). To it wors.h.i.+p is rendered by its possessor as to other spirits,--a wors.h.i.+p, however, different from that which is performed for what are known and used as "familiar spirits." Others speak of the vague life-spirit as the "heart." The organ of our anatomy which we designate by that name, they call by a word which variously means "heart"

or "feelings," much like our old English "bowels," the same word being employed equally to designate a physical organ and a mental state.

Considering the organic heart as the seat (or a seat) of life, the natives believe that by witchcraft a person in health can be deprived of his life-soul, or "heart"; that he will then sicken; that the wizard or witch feasts in his or her magic orgy on this "heart," and that the person will die if that heart is not returned to him.

II. NUMBER.

But whatever this human soul may be, whether existing in unity, duality, trinity, or quadruplicity, all agree in believing that it adds itself, on the death of the body, as another to the mult.i.tudinous company of the spirit-world. That world is all around us, and does not differ much in its wants and characteristics from this earthly life, except that it is free from some of the limitations to which material bodies are subject. In that spirit-world they require the same food as when on earth, but consume only its essence; the visible substance remains. They are possessed of all their human pa.s.sions, both bad and good. Men expect to have their wives with them in that future, but I have never heard the idea even named, that there is procreation by spirits in that after-world. Not having believed during this life in a system of reward and punishment, they have no belief in heaven or h.e.l.l. All the dead go to Njambi's Town, and live in that new life together, good and bad, as they lived together on earth. The "h.e.l.l"

spoken of by some of my informants, I believe, is not a native thought; it was probably engrafted on the coast tribes by the Portuguese Roman Catholic missionaries of three hundred years ago.

If therefore the spirits consist almost entirely of the souls of departed human beings, how immense their number! Equal in number with all the dead that have pa.s.sed from this life in the ages gone by, excepting those who have gone permanently into the bodies of new human beings. That form of metempsychosis is believed in. Occasional instances of belief of transmigration into the body of a lower animal do not necessarily include the idea of a permanent residence there, or that the departed soul has lost its personality as a human being and has become the soul of a beast.

But the idea of reappearance in the body of a newly born child was formerly believed in, especially in regard to white people. Thirty years ago I wrote:[23] "Down the swift current of the Benita, as of other rivers on the coast, are swept floating islands of interlaced rushes, tangled vines, and water-lilies that, clinging to some projecting log from the marshy bank, had gathered the sand and mud of successive freshets, and gave a precarious footing for the panda.n.u.s, whose wiry roots bound all in one compact ma.s.s. Then some flood had torn that ma.s.s away, and the panda.n.u.s still waving its long, bayonet-like leaves, convolvuli still climbing and blooming, and birds still nesting trustfully, the floating island glided past native eyes down the stream, out over the bar, and on toward the horizon of broad ocean. What beyond? Native superst.i.tion said that at the bottom of the 'great sea' was 'whiteman's land'; that thither some of their own departed friends found their happy future, exchanging a dusky skin for a white one; that there white man's magic skill at will created the beads, and cloth, and endless wealth that came from that unknown land in s.h.i.+ps, in whose masts and rigging and sails were recognized the transformed trees and vines and leaves of those floating islands. When on the 12th of July, 1866, a few with bated breath came to look on my little new-born Paull, the only white child most of the community had seen, and the first born in that Benita region, the old people said, 'Now our hopes are dead. Dying, we had hoped to become like you; but verily ye are born as we.'"

Not long after I had arrived at Corisco Island in 1861 I observed among the many people who came to see the new missionary one man who quietly and un.o.btrusively but very steadily was gazing at me. After a while he mustered courage and addressed me: "Are you not my brother,--my brother who died at such a time, and went to White Man's Land?" I was at that time new to the superst.i.tions of the country; his meaning had to be explained to me. His thought of relations.h.i.+p was not an impossible one, for many of the Bantu Negroes have somewhat Caucasian-like features. I have often seen men and women at the sight of whom I was surprised, and I would remark to a fellow-missionary: "How much this person reminds me of So-and-so in America!" This recognition of resemblance of features to white persons living in America was the third step in my acquaintance with native faces.

At first, all Negro faces looked alike. Presently I learned differences; and when I had reached the third step, I felt that my acquaintance with African features was complete.

III. LOCALITY.

The locality of these spirits is not only vaguely in the surrounding air; they are also localized in prominent natural objects,--caves, enormous rocks, hollow trees, dark forests,--in this respect reminding one of cla.s.sic fauns and dryads. While all have the ability to move from place to place, some especially belong to certain localities which are spoken of as having, as the case might be, "good" or "bad" spirits. It is possible for a human soul (as already mentioned in this chapter) to inhabit the body of a beast. A man whose plantation was being devastated near Benita by an elephant told me, in 1867, he did not dare to shoot it, because the spirit of his lately deceased father had pa.s.sed into it. Also a common objurgation of an obstreperous child or animal is, "O na nyemba!" (Thou hast a witch.)

Their habitats may be either natural or acquired. Natural ones are, for the spirits of the dead, in a very special sense, the villages where they had dwelt during the lifetime of the body; but the presence of the spirits of the dead is not desired. It is one of the pitiable effects of African superst.i.tion that its subjects look with fear and dread on what the denizens of civilization look with love and tender regret. We in our Christian civilization cling to the lifeless forms of our dead; and when necessity compels us to bury them from our sight, we bid memory call up every lineament of face and tone of voice, and are pleased to think that sometimes they are near us. But it is a frequent native practice that on the occasion of a death, even while a portion of the family are wailing and to all appearances pa.s.sionately mourning the loss of their relative, others are firing guns, blowing trumpets, beating drums, shouting and yelling, in order to drive away from the village the recently disembodied spirit. On consideration, it can be seen that these two diverse demonstrations are sincere, consistent, and, to the natives, reasonable.

With natural affection they mourn the absence of a tangible _person_ who, as a member of their family, was helpful and even kind; while they fear the independent existence of the invisible thing, whose union with the physical body they fail to recognize as having been a factor in that helpfulness and kindness. This departed spirit, joining the company of other departed spirits, will indeed become an object of wors.h.i.+p,--a wors.h.i.+p of princ.i.p.ally a deprecatory nature; but its continued presence and immediate contact with its former routine are not desired. In Mashonaland the native fears death by accident or human enmity. "But a greater dread than this is of a visitation of evil by the spirit of a departed friend or relative whom he may have slighted while living."

A village in Nazareth Bay, the embouchure of one of the mouths of the Ogowe River, is called "Abun-awiri" ("awiri," plural of "ombwiri," a certain cla.s.s of spirits, and "abuna," abundance).

Large, prominent trees are inhabited by spirits. Many trees in the equatorial West African forest throw out from their trunks, at from ten to sixteen feet from the ground, solid b.u.t.tresses continuous with the body of the tree itself, only a few inches in thickness, but in width at the base of the tree from four to six feet. These b.u.t.tresses are projected toward several opposite points of the compa.s.s, as if to resist the force of sudden wind-storms. They are a noticeable forest feature and are commonly seen in the silk-cotton trees. The recesses between them are actually used as lairs by small wild animals. They are supposedly also a favorite home of the spirits.

Caverns and large rocks have their special spirit inhabitants. At Gabun, and also on Corisco Island, geological breaks in the horizontal strata of rock were filled by narrow vertical strata of limestone, between which water action has worn away the softer rock, leaving the limestone walls isolated, with a narrow ravine between them. These ravines were formerly reverenced as the abodes of spirits.

When I made a tour in 1882, surveying for a second Ogowe Station, I came some seventy miles up river from my well-established first station, Kangwe, at Lambarene, to an enormous rock, a granite boulder, lying in the bed of the river. The adjacent hillsides on either bank of the river were almost impa.s.sable, being covered with boulders of all sizes, and a heavy forest growing in among and even on them. This great rock had evidently in the long past become detached by torrential streams that scored the mountainside in the heavy rainy season and had plunged to its present position. The swift river current swirled and dashed against the huge obstruction to navigation, making the ascent of the river at that point particularly difficult. Superst.i.tion suggested that the spirits of the rock did not wish boats or canoes to pa.s.s their abode. Nevertheless, necessities of trade compelled; and crews in pa.s.sing made an ejaculatory prayer, or doffed their head coverings, in respect, but with the fear that the "ascent" in that part of the journey might be for "woe," whence they called the rock "Itala-ja-maguga," which, contracted to "Talaguga," I gave as a name to my new station, erected in 1882 in the vicinity of the rock.

During my eight subsequent years at the station I did, indeed, meet with some "woe," but also much weal. And the missionary work of Talaguga, carried on since 1892 by the hands of the Societe evangelique de Paris, has met with signal success.

Capes, promontories, and other prominent points of land are favorite dwelling-places of the spirits. The Ogowe River, some one hundred and forty miles from its mouth, receives on its left bank a large affluent, the Ngunye, coming from the south. The low point of land at the junction of the two rivers was sacred. The riverine tribes themselves would pa.s.s it in canoes, respectfully removing their head coverings; but pa.s.sage was forbidden to coast tribes and other foreigners. Portuguese slave-traders might come to the point; but, stopping there, they could trade beyond only through the hands of the local tribe (evidently superst.i.tion had been invoked to protect a trade monopoly). A certain trader, Mr. R. B. N.

Walker, agent for the English firm of Hatton & Cookson, headquarters at Libreville, Gabun, in extending his commercial interests some forty years ago, made an overland journey from the Gabun River, emerging on the Ogowe, on its right bank, _above_ that sacred point. Ranoke, chief of the Inenga tribe, a few miles below, seized him, his porters, and his goods, and kept them prisoners for several months. Mr. Walker succeeded in bribing a native to carry a letter to the French Commandant at Libreville, who was pleased to send a gunboat to the rescue. Incidentally it furnished a good opportunity to demonstrate France's somewhat shadowy claim to the Ogowe.

After the rescue a company from the gunboat proceeded to the Point and lunched there, thus effectually desecrating it. Mr. Walker made peace with his late captor, and established a trading-station at the Inenga village, Lambarene. For years afterward, natives still looked upon that Point with respect. My own crew in 1874 sometimes doffed their hats; but before I left the Ogowe in 1891, a younger generation had grown up that was willing to camp and eat and sleep there with me, on my boat journeys.

Graveyards, of course, are homes of spirits, and therefore are much dreaded. The tribes, especially of the interior, differ very much as to burial customs. Some bury only their chiefs and other prominent men, casting away corpses of slaves or of the poor into the rivers, or out on the open ground, perhaps covering them with a bundle of sticks; even when graves are dug they are shallow. Some tribes fearlessly bury their dead under the clay floors of their houses, or a few yards distant in the kitchen-garden generally adjoining. But, by most tribes who do bury at all, there are chosen as cemeteries dark, tangled stretches of forest, along river banks on ground that is apt to be inundated or whose soil is not good for plantation purposes. I had often observed, in my earlier African years, such stretches of forest along the river, and wondered why the people did not use them for cultivation, being conveniently near to some village, while they would go a much longer distance to make their plantations. The explanation was that these were graveyards. Such stretches would extend sometimes for a mile or two. Often my hungry meal hour on a journey happened to coincide with our pa.s.sing just such a piece of forest, and the crew would refuse to stop, keeping themselves and myself hungry till we could arrive at more open forest.

In Eastern Africa it is believed that "the dead in their turn become spirits under the all-embracing name of Musimo. The Wanyamwezi hold their Musimo in great dread and veneration, as well as the house, hut, or place where their body has died."[24]

Beyond the regularly recognized habitats of the spirits that may be called "natural" to them, any other location may be _acquired_ by them temporarily, for longer or shorter periods, under the power of the incantations of the native doctor (uganga). By his magic arts any spirit may be localized in any object whatever, however small or insignificant; and, while thus limited, is under the control of the doctor and subservient to the wishes of the possessor or wearer of the material object in which it is thus confined. This const.i.tutes a "fetich," which will be more fully discussed in another chapter.

IV. CHARACTERISTICS.

The characteristics of these spirits are much the same as those they possessed before they were disembodied. They have most of the evil human pa.s.sions, _e. g._, anger and revenge, and therefore may be malevolent. But they possess also the good feelings of generosity and grat.i.tude; they are therefore within reach of influence, and may be benevolent. Their possible malevolence is to be deprecated, their anger placated, their aid enlisted.

Ill.u.s.tration of malevolence in their character has already been seen in the dread connected with deaths and funerals. The similar dread of graveyards in our civilized countries may rest on the fear inspired by what is mysterious or by those who have pa.s.sed to the unknown, simply because it and they are unknown. But, to superst.i.tious Africa, that unknown is a certainty, in that it is a source of evil; the spirit of the departed has all the capacity for evil it possessed while embodied, with the additional capacity that its exemption from some of the limitations of time and s.p.a.ce increases its facilities for action. Being unseen, it can act at immensely greater advantage for accomplis.h.i.+ng a given purpose.

Natives dying have gone into the other world retaining an acute memory of some wrong inflicted on them by fellow-villagers, and have openly said, "From that other world I will come back and avenge myself on you!"

In any contest of a human being against these spirits of evil he knows always that whatever influence he may obtain over them by the doctor's magic aid, or whatever limitations may thus be put on them, they can never, as in the case of a human enemy, be killed. The spirits can never die.

Sometimes the word "dead" is used of a fetich amulet that has been inhabited by a spirit conjured into it by a native doctor. The phrase does not mean that its spirit is actually dead, but that it has fled from inside of the fetich, and still lives elsewhere. Then the native doctor, to explain to his patient or client the inefficacy of the charm, says that the cause of the spirit's escape and flight is that the wearer has failed to observe all the directions which had been given, and the spirit was displeased. The dead amulet is, nevertheless, available for sale to the curio-hunting foreigner.

CHAPTER V

SPIRITUAL BEINGS IN AFRICA--THEIR CLa.s.sES AND FUNCTIONS

Inequalities among the spirits themselves, though they are so great, indicate no more than simple differentiations of character or work. Yet so radical are these varieties, and so distinct the names applied to them, that I am compelled to recognize a division into cla.s.ses.

CLa.s.sES AND FUNCTIONS.

1. _Inina, or Ilina._ A human embodied soul is spoken of and fully believed in by all the tribes. It is known in the Mpongwe tribes of the Gabun country as "inina" (plural, "anina"); in the adjacent Benga tribe, as "ilina" (plural, "malina"); in the great interior Fang tribes, as "nsisim."

This animating soul, whether it be only one, or whether it appear in two, three, or even four forms, is practically the same, that talks, hears, and feels, that sometimes goes out of the body in a dream, and that exists as a spirit after the death of the body. That it has its own especial materiality seems to be indicated by the fact that in the Fang, Bakele, and other tribes the same word "nsisim" means not only soul but also shadow. The shadow of a tree or any other inanimate object and of the human body as cast by the sun is "nsisim."

In my first explorations up the Ogowe River, in 1874, as in my village preaching I necessarily and constantly spoke of our soul, its sins, its capacity for suffering or happiness, and its relation to its divine Maker, I was often at a loss how to make my thoughtless audience understand or appreciate that the nsisim of which I was speaking was not the nsisim cast by the sun as a darkish line on the ground near their bodies. Even to those who understood me, it was not an impossible thought that that dark narrow belt on the ground was in some way a part of, or a mode of manifestation of, that other thing, the nsisim, which they admitted was the source of the body's animation. So far defined was that thought with some of them that they said it was a possible thing for a human being to have his nsisim stolen or otherwise lost, and still exist in a diseased and dying state; in which case his body would not cast a shadow. Von Chamisso's story of Peter Schlemehl, "the man who lost his shadow," in actuality!

So few are the special activities by which to distinguish anina from other cla.s.ses of spirits, that I might doubt whether they should properly be considered as distinct, were it not true that the anina are all of them embodied spirits; none of them are of other origin. As disembodied spirits, retaining memory of their former human relations.h.i.+ps, they have an interest in human affairs, and especially in the affairs of the family of which they were lately members.

2. _Ibambo_ (Mpongwe; plural, "abambo"). There are vague beings, "abambo,"

which may well be described by our word "ghosts." Where they come from is not certainly known, or what locality they inhabit, except that they belong to the world of spirits. Why they become visible is also unknown.

They are not called for, they are only occasionally wors.h.i.+pped; their epiphany is dreaded, not reverenced.

"The term 'abambo' is in the plural form, and may therefore be regarded as forming a cla.s.s of spirits instead of a single individual. They are the spirits of dead men; but whether they are positively good or positively evil, to be loved or to be hated, or to be courted or avoided, are points which no native of the country can answer satisfactorily. Abambo are the spirits of the ancestors of the people of a tribe or race, as distinguished from the spirits of strangers. These are the spirits with which men are possessed, and there is no end to the ceremonies used to deliver them from their power."[25]

The ibambo may appear anywhere and at any time and to anybody, but it has no message. It rarely speaks. Its most common effect on human lives is to frighten. It flits; it does not remain in one spot, to speak or to be spoken to. Indistinctly seen, its appearances are reported as occurring mostly in dark places, in shadows, in twilight, and on dark nights. The most common apparitions are on lonely paths in the forest by night.

To all intents and purposes these abambo are what superst.i.tious fears in our civilization call "ghosts." The timid dweller in civilization can no more tell us what that ghost is than can the ignorant African. It is as difficult in the one case as in the other to argue against the unreal and unknown. What the frightened eye or ear believes it saw or heard, it persists in believing against all proof. Nor will ridicule make the belief less strong. However, the intelligent child in civilization, under the hand of a judicious parent or other friend, and relying on love as an expounder, can be led to understand by daylight, that the white bark of a tree trunk s.h.i.+mmering in uncertain moonlight, or a white garment flapping in the wind, or a white animal grazing in the meadow, was the ghost whose waving form had scared him the night before. His superst.i.tion is not so ingrained by daily exercise but that reason and love can divest him of it.

But to the denizen of Fetich-land superst.i.tion is religion; the night terror which he is sure he saw is too real a thing in his life to be identified by day as only a harmless white-barked tree or quartz rock.

3. A third cla.s.s of spirits is represented by the name _Ombwiri_. The "ombwiri" (Mpongwe; plural, "awiri") is certainly somewhat local, and in this respect might be regarded as akin to the ancient fauns and dryads, with a suggestion of a likeness to the spirits resident in the dense oak groves and the ma.s.sive stones of the Druid Circle. But the awiri are more than dryads. They are not confined to their local rock, tree, bold promontory, or point of land, trespa.s.s on which by human beings they resent. The traveller must go by silently, or with some cabalistic invocation, with bowed or bared head, and with some offering,--anything, even a pebble. On the beach, as I bend to pa.s.s beneath an enormous tree fallen across the pathway, I observe the upper side of the log covered with votive offerings,--pebbles, sh.e.l.ls, leaves, etc.,--laid there by travellers as they stooped to pa.s.s under. Such votive collections may be seen on many spots along the forest paths, deposited there by the natives as an invocation of a blessing on their journey.