West African Studies/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII
FETISH AND WITCHCRAFT
Now, here we come to a very interesting question: What is witchcraft in itself? Conversing freely with the Devil, says Christendom, firmly; and taking the Devil to mean the Spirit of Evil, I am bound to think Christendom is in a way scientifically quite right, though the accepted scientific definition of witchcraft at present is otherwise, and holds witchcraft to be conversing with Natural Science, which of course I cannot accept as the Devil. Thus I cannot reconcile the two definitions should they mean the same thing; and so I am here really in the position of being at one in opinion with the Roman Catholic missionaries of the fifteenth century, who, as soon as they laid eyes on my friend the witch-doctor, recognised him and his goings on as a mass of witchcraft, and went for the whole affair in an exceeding game way.
But let us take the accepted view, that first propounded by Sir Alfred Lyall; and I humbly beg it to be clearly understood I am only speaking of the bearing of that view on Fetish in West Africa. I was of course fully aware of the accepted view of the innate antagonism between religion and witchcraft when I published in a deliberately scattered form some of my observations on Fetish, being no more desirous of giving a mental lead to white men than to black, but only wistful to find out what they thought of things as they are. The consequence of this action of mine has been, I fear, on the whole a rather more muddled feeling in the white mind regarding Fetish than ever heretofore existed; a feeling that, if what I said was true, (and in this matter of Fetish information no one has gainsaid the truth of it), West African religion was more perplexing than it seemed to be when regarded as a mere degraded brutal superstition or childish foolishness.
However, one distinguished critic has tackled my Fetish, and gallantly: the writer in the Edinburgh Review. With his remarks on our heresy regarding the deification of ancestors I have above attempted to deal, owning he is quite right—we do not believe in deified ancestors. I now pass on to his other important criticism, and again own he is quite right, and that "witchcraft and religious rites in West Africa are originally indistinguishable."[1] This is evidently a serious affair for West Africa and me, so I must deal with it carefully, and first quote my critic's words following immediately those just cited. "If this is correct there can be no doubt that such a confusion of the two ideas that in their later forms not only stand widely apart, but are always irreconcilably hostile, denotes the very lowest stage of aboriginal superstition wherever it prevails, for it has been held that, although the line between abject fetishism and witchcraft may be difficult to trace in the elementary stages, yet from the beginning a true distinction can invariably be recognised. According to this theory, the witch is more nearly allied with rudimentary science than with priestcraft, for he relies not upon prayer, worship, or propitiation of divinities, but upon his own secret knowledge and experience of the effect producible by certain tricks and mysterious devices upon the unseen powers, over whom he has obtained a sort of command. Instead of serving like a priest these powers, he is enabled by his art to make them serve him, and it is for this reason that his practices very soon become denounced and detested by the priesthood."
Now there are many interesting points to be considered in West Africa bearing on the above statement of Sir Alfred Lyall's theory of the nature of witchcraft,—points which I fancy, if carefully considered, would force upon us the strange conclusion that, accepting this theory as a general statement of the nature of witchcraft, there was no witchcraft whatever in West Africa, nothing having "a true distinction" in the native mind from religion. You may say there is no religion and it's all witchcraft, but this is a superficial view to take; you see the orthodox Christian view of witchcraft contains in it an element not present in the West African affair; the Christian regards the witch with hatred as one knowing good, yet choosing evil. The West African has not this choice in his mind; he has to deal with spirits who are not, any of them, up to much in the way of virtue viewed from a human standpoint. I don't say they are all what are called up here devils; a good many of them are what you might call reasonable, respectable, easy-going sort of people; some are downright bad; in fact, I don't think it would be going too far to say that they are all downright bad if they get their tempers up or take a dislike to a man; there is not one of them beneficent to the human race at large. Nzambi is the nearest approach to a beneficent deity I have come across, and I feel she owes much of this to the confusion she profits by, and the Holy Virgin suffers from, in the regions under Nkissism; but Nzambi herself is far from morally perfect and very difficult tempered at times. You need not rely on me in this matter; take the important statement of Dr. Nassau: "Observe, these were distinctly prayers, appeals for mercy, agonising protests; but there was no praise, no love, no thanks, no confession of sin."[2] He was speaking regarding utterances made down there in the face of great afflictions and sorrow; and there was no praise, because there was no love, I fancy; no thanks because what good was done to the human being was a mere boughten thing he had paid for. No confession of sin, because the Fetish believer does not hold he lives in a state of sin, but that it is a thing he can commit now and again if he is fool enough. Sin to him not being what it is to us, a vile treason against a loving Father, but a very ill-advised act against powerful, nasty-tempered spirits. Herein you see lies one difference between the Christian and the Fetish view,—a fundamental one, that must be borne in mind.
Then in the above-quoted passage you will observe that the dislike to witchcraft is traced in a measure to the action of priesthoods. This hatred is undoubted. But witchcraft is as much hated in districts in West Africa where there are no organised priesthoods as in districts where there are—in the regions under the Calabar and Mpongwe schools, for example, where the father of the house is the true priest to the family, where what looks like a priesthood, but which is a law god-cult only—the secret society—is the dominant social thing. Now this law god-cult affair, Purroh, Oru, Egbo, Ukukiwe, etc., etc., call it what you please, it's all the same thing, is not the organisation that makes war on witchcraft in West Africa. It deals with it now and then, if it is brought under its official notice; but it is not necessary that this should be done; summary methods are used with witches. It just appeals at once to ordeal, any one can claim it. You can claim it, and administer it yourself to yourself, if you are the accused party and in a hurry. A. says to you, "You're a witch." "I'm not," you ejaculate. I take the bean; down it goes; you're sick or dead long before the elaborate mechanism of the law society has heard of the affair. Of course, if you want to make a big palaver and run yourself and your accuser into a lot of expense you can call in the society; but you needn't. From this and divers things like it I do not think the hatred of witchcraft in West Africa at large has anything originally to do with the priesthood. You will say, but there is the hatred of witchcraft in West Africa. You have only to shout "Ifot" at a man or woman in Calabar, or "Ndo tchi" in Fjort-land, and the whole population, so good-tempered the moment before, is turned bloodthirsty. Witches are torn to bits, destroyed in every savage way, when the ordeal has conclusively proved their guilt—mind you, never before. Granted; but I believe this to be just a surging up of that form of terror called hate.
I am old enough to remember the dynamite scares up here, and the Jack the Ripper incidents; then it was only necessary for some one to call out, "Dynamiter" or "Jack the Ripper" at a fellow-citizen, and up surged our own people, all same for one with those Africans, only our people, not being so law-governed, would have shredded the accused without ordeal, had we not possessed that great factor in the formation of public virtue, the police, who intervened, carried away the accused to the ordeal—the police court—where the affair was gone into with judicial calm. Honestly, I don't believe there is the slightest mystic revulsion against witchcraft in West Africa; public feeling is always at bursting-point on witches, their goings-on are a constant danger to every peaceful citizen's life, family, property, and so on, and when the general public thinks it's got hold of one of the vermin it goes off with a bang; but it does not think for one moment that the witch is per se in himself a thing apart; he is just a bad man too much, who has gone and taken up with spirits for illegitimate purposes. The mere keeping of a familiar power, which under Christendom is held so vile a thing, is not so held in West Africa. Everyone does it; there is not a man, woman, or child who has not several attached spirits for help and preservation from danger and disease. It is keeping a spirit for bad purposes only that is hateful. It is one thing to have dynamite in the hand of the government or a mining company for reasonable reasons, quite another to have it in the hands of enemies to society; and such an enemy is a witch who trains the spirits over which he has got control to destroy his fellow human beings' lives and properties.
The calling in of ordeal to try the witch before destroying him has many interesting points. The African, be it granted, is tremendously under the dominion of law, and it is the law that such trials should take place before execution; but there is also involved in it another curious fact, and that is that the spirit of the ordeal is held to be able to manage and suppress the bad spirits trained by the witch to destruction. Human beings alone can collar the witch and destroy him in an exemplary manner, but spiritual aid is required to collar the witch's devil, or it would get adrift and carry on after its owner's death. Regarding ordeal affairs I will speak when dealing with legal procedure.
Such being the West African view of witchcraft, I venture to think there are in this world divers reasons for hating witchcraft. There is the fetish one, that he is an enemy to society; there is the priesthood one, that he is a sort of quack or rival practitioner under—this head of priesthood aversion for witchcraft I think we may class the witchcraft that is merely a hovering about of the old religion which the priesthood of an imported religion are anxious to stamp out; and there is that aversion to witchcraft one might call the Protestant aversion, which arises from the feeling that it is a direct sin against God Himself. This latter feeling has been the cause of as violent a persecution of witches, witness the action of King James I. and that of the Quakers in America, as any West African has ever presented to the world. Throughout all these things the fact remains, that whether black, white, or yellow, the witch is a bad man, a murderer in the eyes of Allah as well as those of humanity.
That all witches act by means of poison alone would be too hasty a thing to say, because I think we need hardly doubt that the African is almost as liable to die from a poisonous idea put into his mind as a poisonous herb put into his food; indeed, I do not know that in West Africa we need confine ourselves to saying natives alone do this, for white men sink and die under an idea that breaks their spirit. All the vital powers are required there to resist the depressing climate. If they are weakened seriously in any way, death is liable to ensue. The profound belief in the power of a witch causes a man who knows, say, that either a nail has been driven into an Nkiss down on the South-West coast, or the Fangaree drum beaten on him up in the Sierra Leone region, to collapse under the terror of it, and I own I can see no moral difference between the guilt of the man or woman who does these things with the intent to slay a fellow-citizen and that of one who puts bush into his chop—both mean to kill and do kill, but both methods are good West African witchcraft. The latter may seem to be an incipient form of natural science, but it seems to me—I say it humbly—that the West African incipient scientist is not the local witch, but that highly respectable gentleman or lady, the village apothecary, the Nganga bilongo or the Abiabok. The means of killing in vogue in West African witchcraft without the direct employment of poison are highly interesting, but I think it would serve no good purpose for me to give even the few I know in detail. There is one interesting point in this connection. I have said that in order to make a charm efficacious against a particular person you must have preferably some of his blood in your possession, or, failing that, some hair or nail clipping; failing these, some articles belonging intimately to him—a piece of his loin-cloth, or, under the school of Nkissi, a bit of his iron. This I believe to hold good for all true fetish charms; but we have in the Bight of Benin charms which are under the influence of a certain amount of Mohammedan ideas—for example, the deadly charms of the Kufong society. This class of charm does not require absolutely a bit of something nearly connected with the victim, but nevertheless it cannot act at a great distance, or without the element of personal connection. Take the Fangaree charm, for example, to be found among the Mendi people, and all the neighbouring peoples who are liable to go in for Kufong.
Fangaree is the name of a small drum that is beaten by a hammer made of bamboo. The uses of this drum are wide and various, but it also gives its name to the charm, because the charm, like the drum, is beaten with a similar stick. The charm stuff itself is made of a dead man's bone, of different herbs smoked over a fire and powdered the same day, ants'-hill earth, and charcoal. This precious mixture is made into a parcel; that parcel is placed on a frame made of bamboo sticks. On the top of the charm a small live animal—an insect, I am informed, will do—is secured by a string passing over it, and the charm is fixed with wooden forks into the ground on either side. This affair is placed by the murderer close to a path the victim will pass along, and the murderer sits over it, waiting for him to come. When he comes, he is allowed to pass just by, and then his enemy breaks a dry bamboo stick; the noise causes the victim to turn and look in the direction of the noise—i.e. on to the charm—and then the murderer hits the live animal on it, calling his victim's name, and the charm is on him. If the animal is struck on the head, the victim's head is affected, and he has violent fits until "he dies from breaking his neck" in one of them; if the animal is struck to tailwards, the victim gets extremely ill, but in this latter case he can buy off the charm and be cured by a Fangaree man. A similar arrangement is in working order under some South-West coast murder societies I am acquainted with. The interesting point, however, is the necessity of establishing the personal connection between the victim and the charm by means of making him look on the charm and calling his name. Without his looking it's no good. Hence it comes that it is held unwise to look behind when you hear a noise o'night in the bush; indeed, no cautious person, with sense in his head and strength in his legs, would dream of doing this unless caught off guard. In connection also with this turning the face being necessary to the working of the Fangaree charm, there is another charm that is worked under Kufong, according to several natives from its region—the hinterland of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Ivory Coast with whom I have associated when we have both been far from our respective homes away in South-West Africa. It is a charm I have never met with as indigenous in the South-West or Oil Rivers Fetish, and I think it has a heavier trace of Mohammedan influence in it than the Fangaree charm. The way it works is this. A man wants to kill you without showing blood. Only leopard society men do that, and your enemy, we will presume, is not a leopard. So he throws his face on you by a process I need not enter into. You hardly know anything is wrong at first; by-and-by you notice that every scene that you look on, night or day, has got that face in it, not a filmy vision of a thing, but quite material in appearance, only it's in abnormal places for a face to be, and it is a face only. It may be on the wall, or amongst the roof poles, or away in a corner of the hut floor; outdoors it is the same—the face is first always, there just where you can see it. Some of my informants hold that it keeps coming closer to you as time goes on; but others say no; it keeps at one distance all the time. This, however, is a minor point; it is its being there that gets to matter. It is in amongst the bushes at the side of the path, or in the water of the river, or at the end of your canoe, or in the oil in the pots, or in the Manchester cottons in the factory shop. Wherever you look, there it is. In a way it's unobtrusive, it does not spread itself out, or make a noise, or change, yet, sooner or later, in every place, you cannot miss seeing it. At first you think, by changing your environment—going outdoors, coming in, going on a journey, mixing with your fellow-men, or avoiding them—you can get rid of the thing; but you find, when you look round,—a thing you are certain to do when the charm has got its grip,—for sure that face is there as usual. Now this sort of thing tells on the toughest in time, and you get sick of life when it has always got that face mixed up in it, so sick that you try the other thing—death. This is an ill-advised course, but you do not know in time that, when you kill yourself, you will find that on the other side, in the other thing, you will see nothing but that face, that unchanging silent face you are so sick of. The Kufong man who has thrown his face at you knows, and when he hears of your suicide he laughs. Naturally you cannot know, because you are not a Kufong man, or the charm could not be put on you. What you "can do in this here most awful go," as Mr. Squeers would say, I am unfortunately not able to tell you. I made many inquiries from men who know "the face," who had had it happen on people in their families, and so on, but in answer to my inquiries as to why the afflicted did not buy it off, what charms there were against it, and so forth, I was always told it was a big charm, that the man who put it on lost something of himself by so doing, so it was never put on except in cases of great hatred that would stick at nothing and would kill; also that it was of no real use for the victim to kill his charmer, though that individual, knowing the pleasure so doing would afford his victim, takes good care to go on a journey, and to keep out of the way until the charm has worked out in suicide. There is a certain amount of common sense in this proceeding which is undoubtedly true African, but there is a sort of imaginative touch which makes me suspect Mohammedan infusion; anyhow, I leave you to judge for yourself whether, presupposing you accept the possibility of a man doing such a thing to you or to any one you love, you think he can be safely ignored, or whether he is not an enemy to society who had better be found out and killed—killed in a showy way. Personally I favour the latter course.
There is but one other point in witchcraft in West Africa that I need now detain you with, and that is why a person killed by witchcraft suffers more than one who dies of old age, for herein lies another reason for this hatred of witchcraft. Every human soul in West Africa throughout all the Fetish schools is held to have a certain proper time of incarnation in a human body, whether it be one incarnation or endless series of incarnations; anything that cuts that incarnation period short inconveniences the soul, to say the least of it. Under Ellis's school, and I believe throughout all the others, the soul that lives its life in a body fully through is held happy; it is supposed to have learnt its full lesson from life, and to know the way down to the shadow-land home and all sorts of things. Hence also comes the respect for the aged, common throughout all West Africa. They are the knowing ones. Such an one was the late Chief Long John of Bonny. Now if this process of development is checked by witchcraft and the soul is prematurely driven from the body, it does not know all that it should, and its condition is therefore miserable. It is, as it were, sent blind, or deaf, or lame into the spirit-land. This is a thing not only dreaded by individuals for themselves, but hated for those they love; hence the doer of it is a hated thing. You must remember that when you get keen hatred you must allow for keen affection, it is not human to have one without the other. That the Africans are affectionate I am fully convinced. This affection does not lie precisely on the same lines as those of Europeans, I allow. It is not with them so deeply linked with sex; but the love between mother and child, man and man, brother and sister, woman and woman, is deep, true, and pure, and it must be taken into account in observing their institutions and ideas, particularly as to this witchcraft where it shows violently and externally in hatred only to the superficial observer. I well remember gossiping with a black friend in a plantation in the Calabar district on witchcraft, and he took up a stick and struck a plant of green maize, breaking the stem of it, saying, "There, like that is the soul of a man who is witched, it will not ripen now."
We will now turn to the consideration of that class whose business in life is mainly to guard the community from witchcraft and from miscellaneous evil spirits acting on their own initiative, the Fetish Men of West Africa, namely, those men and women who devote their lives to the cult of West African religion. Such people you find in every West African district; but their position differs under different schools, and it is in connection with them that we must recognise the differences in the various schools, remembering that the form of Fetish makes the form of Fetish Man, not the Fetish Man the form of Fetish. He may, as it were, embroider it, complicate it, mystify it, as is the nature of all specialists in all professions, but primarily he is under it, at any rate in West Africa, where you find the Fetish man in every district, but in every district in a different form. For example, look at him under the Ellis school. Where there are well-defined gods, there your Fetish Man is quite the priest, devoting himself to the cult of one god publicly, probably doing a little general practice into the bargain with other minor spirits. To the laity he of course advertises the god he serves as the most reliably important one in the neighbourhood; but it has come under my notice, and you will find under Ellis's, that if the priest of a god gets personally unwell and finds his own deity ineffective, he will apply for aid to a professional brother who serves another god. Below Ellis's school, in the Calabar school, your Fetish Man is somewhat different; the gods are not so definite or esteemed, and the Fetish Man is becoming a member of a set of men who deal with gods in a lump, and have the general management of minor spirits. Below this school, in the Mpongwe, the Fetish Man is even less specialised as regards one god; he is here a manager of spirits at large, with the assistance of a strong spirit with whom he has opened up communication. Below this school, in that of Nkissi, the Fetish Man becomes more truly priest-like—he is the Nganga of an Nkiss; but nevertheless his position is a different one to that of the priest in Ellis's school; here he is in a better position than in the Mpongwe school, but in an inferior one to that in Ellis's, where he is not the lone servitor or manager for a god, but a member of a powerful confraternity. You must bear in mind, of course, that the Fetish Man is always, from a lay standpoint, a highly important person; but professionally, I cannot but think, a priest say of Tando in Ashantee or of Shango in Dahomey, is of a higher grade than a Nganga to an Nkiss, certainly far higher than a Fetish Man under the Mpongwe school, where every house father and every village chief does a lot of his own Fetish without professional assistance. Of course chiefs and house fathers do a certain amount in all districts—in fact, in West Africa every man and woman does a certain amount of Fetish for himself; but where, as in Ellis's school, you get a regular set of priests and plenty of them, the religion falls into their hands to a greater extent. I feel that the study of the position of Fetish-Men is deserving of great attention. I implore the student who may take it up to keep the Fetish Man for practical purposes distinct from the gentleman who represents the law god-cult—the secret tribal society. If you persist in mixing them, you will have in practical politics as fine a mess as if you mixed up your own Bench of Bishops with the Woolsack. I beg to contribute to the store of knowledge on this point sundry remarks sent me on most excellent native authority from the Gold Coast:—
"The inhabitants of Cape Coast must congratulate themselves that they enjoy the protection of seventy-seven fetishes. Every town (and this town) has one fetish house or temple, often built in a square or oblong form of mud or swish, and thatched over, or constructed of sticks or poles placed in a circular form and thatched. In these temples several images are generally placed. Every Fetish-Man or priest, moreover, has his private fetishes in his own house, one of a bird, stones encased by string, large lumps of cinder from an iron furnace, calabashes, and bundles of sticks tied together with string. All these are stained with red ochre and rubbed over with eggs. They are placed on a square platform and shrouded from the vulgar gaze.
"The fetishes are regarded as spiritual intelligent beings who make the remarkable objects of nature their residence or enter occasionally into the images and other artificial representations which have been duly consecrated by certain ceremonies. It is the belief of this people that the fetishes not unfrequently render themselves visible to mortals. Thus the great fetish of the rock on which Cape Coast Castle stands is said to come forth at night in human form, but of superhuman size, and to proceed through the town dressed in white to chase away evil spirits.
"In all the countries along the Coast (Gold) the regular fetish day is Tuesday. The fishermen would expect that, were they to go out on that day, it would spoil their fishing.
"The priest's office may in some cases be hereditary, but it is not uniformly so, for the children of Fetish-Men sometimes refuse to devote themselves to the pursuits of their parents and engage in other occupations. Any one may enter the office after suitable training, and parents who desire that their children may be instructed in its mysteries place them with a Fetish-Man, who receives a premium for each. The order of Fetish-Men is further augmented by persons who declare that the fetish has suddenly seized on them. A series of convulsive and unnatural bodily distortions establish their claim. Application is made to the fetish for counsel and aid in every domestic and public emergency. When persons find occasion to consult a private Fetish-Man, they take a present of gold-dust and rum and proceed to his house. He receives the presents, and either puts a little of the rum on the head of every image or pours a small quantity on the ground before the platform as an offering to the whole pantheon; then, taking a brass pan with water in it, he sits down with the pan between him and the fetishes, and his inquirers also seat themselves to await the result. Having made these preparatory arrangements, looking earnestly into the water, he begins to snap his fingers, and addressing the fetish, extols his power, telling him that the people have arrived to consult him, and requesting him to come and give the desired answer. After a time the fetish-man is wrought up into a state of fury. He shakes violently and foams at the mouth; this is to intimate that the fetish was come home and that he himself is no longer the speaker, but the fetish, who uses his mouth and speaks by him. He now growls like a tiger and asks the people if they have brought rum, requiring them at the same time to present it to him. He drinks, and then inquires for what purpose they have sent for him. If a relative is ill, they reply that such a member of their family is sick and they have tried all the means they could devise to restore him, but without success, and they, knowing he is a great fetish, have come to ask his aid, and beg him to teach them what they should do. He then speaks kindly to them, expresses a hope that he shall be able to help them, and says, "I go to see." It is imagined that the fetish then quits the priest, and, after a silence of a few minutes, he is supposed to return, and gives his response to the inquirers.
"In cases of great difficulty the oracle at Abrah is the last resort of the Fantees. This notable oracle is always consulted at night. They find a large fire made upon the ground, and the presents they have brought they place in the hands of the priests who are in attendance. They are then directed to elevate their presents above their heads and to fix their eyes steadfastly upon the ground, for should they look up, the fetish, it is said, would inflict blindness on them for their sacrilegious gaze. After a time the oracle gives a response in a shrill, small voice intended to convey the idea that it proceeds from an unearthly source, and the inquirers, having obtained the end of their visit, then depart.
"In cases of bodily affliction the fetish orders medical preparations for the patient. If the malady of the patient does not appear to yield to such applications, the fetish is again consulted, and in some cases, as a further expedient, the priest takes a fowl and ties it to a stick, by which operation it is barbarously squeezed to death. The stick is then placed in the path leading to the house for the purpose of deterring evil spirits from approaching it. When the patient is a rich man, several sheep are sacrificed, and he is fetished until the last moment arrives amidst the howls of a number of old Fetish Women, who continue to besmear with eggs and other medicine the walls and door-posts of his house and everything that is around him until he has ceased to breathe."
Not only does the African depart from life under the care of Fetish-Men—and, as my valued correspondent ungallantly remarks, "old fetish-women"—but he is met, as it were, by them on his arrival. My correspondent says "as soon as the child is born the Fetish-Man binds certain fetish preparations round his limbs, using at the same time a form of incantation or prayer. This is done to fortify the infant against all kinds of evil. On the eighth day after the birth, the father of the child, accompanied by a number of friends, proceeds to the house of the mother. If he be a rich man, he takes with him a gallon of ardent spirits to be used on the festive occasion. On arriving at the house, the friends form a circle round the father, who delivers a kind of address in which he acknowledges the kindness of the gods for giving him the child, and calls upon those present also to thank the fetishes on his account; then, taking the child in his arms, he squirts upon it a little spirit from his mouth, pronouncing the name by which it is to be called. A second name which the child usually takes is that of the day of the week on which it is born. The following are the names of the days in the Fanti language, varied in their orthography according to the sex of the child:—
| Male. | Female. | |
| Sunday | Quisi | Akosua. |
| Monday | Kujot | Ajua. |
| Tuesday | Quabina | Abmaba. |
| Wednesday | Quaku | Ekua. |
| Thursday | Quahu | Aba. |
| Friday | Kufi | Efua. |
| Saturday | Qamina | Ama. |
Those ceremonials called on the Coast "customs" are the things that show off the Fetish-Man at the best in more senses of the word than one. We will take the yam custom. The intentions of these yam customs are twofold—firstly they are a thanksgiving to the fetishes for allowing their people to live to see the new yams, and for the new yams, but they are also institutions to prevent the general public eating the new yam before it's ready. The idea is, and no doubt rightly, that unripe yams are unwholesome, and the law is that no new yams must be eaten until the yam custom is made. The Fetish-Men settle when the yams are in a fit state to pass into circulation, and then make the custom. It generally occurs at the end of August, but is sometimes kept back until the beginning of September. In Fantee all the inhabitants of the towns assemble under the shade of the grove adjoining the fetish hut, and a sheep and a number of fowls are killed, part of their flesh is mixed with boiled yams and palm-oil, and a portion of this mixture is placed on the heads of the images, and the remainder is thrown about before the fetish hut as a peace-offering to the deities.
At Winnebah, on the Gold Coast, there is an interesting modification in the yam custom. The principal fetish of that place, it is believed, will not be satisfied with a sheep, but he must have a deer brought alive to his temple, and there sacrificed. Accordingly on the appointed day every year when the custom is to be celebrated, almost all the inhabitants except the aged and infirm go into the adjoining country—an open park-like country, studded with clumps of trees. The women and children look on, give good advice, and shriek when necessary, while the men beat the bush with sticks, beat tom-toms, and halloo with all their might. While thus engaged, my correspondent remarks in his staid way, "sometimes a leopard starts forth, but it is usually so frightened with the noise and confusion that it scampers off in one direction as fast as the people run from it in another. When a deer is driven out, the chase begins, the people try to run it down, flinging sticks at its legs. At last it is secured and carried exultingly to the town with shoutings and drummings. On entering the town they are met by the aged people carrying staves, and, having gone in procession round the town, they proceed to the fetish house, where the animal is sacrificed, and partly offered to the fetish, partly eaten by the priests."
These yam customs are at their fullest in the Benin Bights, but you get a custom made for the new yam in all the districts lower down. These customs have long been credited with being stained by human sacrifices. Not altogether unjustly. You can always read human sacrifice for goats and fowls when you are considering a district inhabited by true Negroes, and the occasion is an important one, because in West Africa a human sacrifice is the most persuasive one to the fetishes. It is just with them as with chief—if you want to get some favour from him you must give him a present. A fowl or a goat or a basket of vegetables, or anything like that is quite enough for most favours, but if you want a big thing, and want it badly, you had better give him a slave, because the slave is alike more intrinsically valuable and also more useful. So far as I know, all human beings sacrificed pass into the service of the fetish they are sacrificed to. They are not merely killed that he may enjoy their blood, but that he may have their assistance. Fetishes have much to do, and an extra pair of hands is to them always acceptable. As for the importance of these harvest customs to the general system of Fetish, I think in West Africa it is small. The goings on, the licentiousness and general jollification that accompany them, upsetting law and order for days, give them a fallacious look of importance; but I think far more really near the heart of the Fetish thought-form is the lonely man who steals at night into the forest to gain from Sasabonsom a charm, and the woman who, on her way back from market, throws down before the fetish houses she passes a scrap of her purchases; compared to the cult of the law-god, well, yam customs are dirty water price, palaver, and insignificant politically.
I have dealt here with Fetish as far as the position of the human being is concerned, because this phase may make it more comprehensible to my fellow white men who regard the human being as the main thing in the created universe, but I must beg you to remember that this idea of the importance of the human race is not held by the African. The individual is supremely important to himself, and he values his friends and relations and so on, but abstract affection for humanity at large or belief in the sanctity of the lives of people with whom he is unrelated and unacquainted, the African barely possesses. He is only capable of feeling this abstract affection when under the influence of one of the great revealed religions which place the human being higher in the scale of Creation. This comes from no cruelty of mind per se, but is the result of the hardness of the fight he has to fight against the world; and possessing this view of the equal, if not greater importance of many of the things he sees round him, the African conceives these things also have their fetish—a fetish on the same ground idea, but varying from human fetish. The politics of Mungo mah Lobeh, the mountain, with the rest of nature, he believes to exist. The Alemba rapid has its affairs clearly, but the private matters of these very great people are things the human being had better keep out of; and it is advisable for him to turn his attention to making terms with them and go into their presence with his petition when their own affairs are prosperous, when their tempers are not as it were up over some private ultra-human affair of their own. I well remember the opinions expressed by my companions regarding the folly—mine, of course—of obtruding ourselves on Mungo when that noble mountain was vexed too much, and the opinion expressed by an Efik friend in a tornado that came down on us. Well, there Well, there you have this difference. I instinctively say "us." She did not think we were objects of interest to the tornado or the forest it was scourging. She took it they had a sort of family row on, and we might get hit with the bits, therefore it was highly unfortunate that we were present at the meeting. Again, it is the same with the surf. The boat-boys see it's in a nasty temper, they keep out of it, it may be better to-morrow, then it will tolerate them, for it has no real palaver with them individually. Of course you can go and upset the temper of big nature spirits, but when you are not there they have their own affairs.
Hence it comes that we have in Fetish a religion in which its believers do not hold that devotion to religion constitutes Virtue. The ordinary citizen is held to be most virtuous who is least mixed up in religious affairs. He can attain Virtue, the love and honour of his fellow-men, by being a good husband and father, an honest man in trade, a just man in the palaver-house, and he must, for the protection of his interests, that is to say, not only his individual well-being, but the well-being of those dependent on him, go in to a certain extent for religious practices. He must associate with spirits because spirits are in all things and everywhere and over everything; and the good citizen deals with the other spirits as he deals with that class of spirits we call human beings; he does not cheat the big ones of their dues; he spills a portion of his rum to them; he gives them their white calicoes; he treats his slave spirits honourably, and he uses his slave spirits for no bad purpose, and if any great grief falls on him he calls on the great over-lord of gods, mentioning these things. But men are not all private citizens; there are men whose destiny puts them in high places—men who are not only house fathers but who are tribe fathers. They, to protect and further the interests of those under them, must venture greatly and further, and deal with more powerful spirits, as it were, their social equals in spiritdom. These good chiefs in their higher grade dealings preserve the same clean-handed conduct. And besides these there are those men, the Fetish men, who devote their lives to combating evil actions through witches and miscellaneous spirits who prey on mankind. These men have to make themselves important to important spirits. It is risky work for them, for spirits are a risky set to deal with. Up here in London, when I have to deal with a spirit as manifest in the form of an opinion, or any big mind-form incarnate in one man, or in thousands, I often think of an African friend of mine who had troubles, and I think sympathetically, for his brother explained the affair to me. He was an educated man. "You see," he said, "my brother's got a strong Ju Ju, but it's a damned rocky Ju Ju to get on with."