Among Congo cannibals

Ideas of a Supreme Being—His various names—Views of the spirit life—Fetishism—Medicine men and spirits—Black and white magic—Origin of the term fetish—Native crusade against fetishes—Bundle of charms—Its contents—Sacrifices to fetishes—Rise and fall of witch-doctors—An attempt to define fetishism—Natives very religious.

We have found a vague knowledge of a Supreme Being, and a belief in Him, very general among those tribes on the Congo with which we have come into contact. In each case the natives’ ideas of the Supreme Being were gathered and noted long before our teaching had influenced their views or increased their knowledge concerning Him. Before we could preach our views we had to learn their language, and while learning their language we necessarily received—in the definitions of the words we were learning from them—their ideas of that great Being who created the world. We found their knowledge of Him was scarcely more than nominal, and no worship was ever paid to Him.

On the Lower Congo He is called Nzambi, or by His fuller title Nzambi a mpungu; no satisfactory root word has yet been found for Nzambi, but for mpungu there are sayings and proverbs that clearly indicate its meaning as, most of all, supreme, highest, and Nzambi a mpungu as the Being most High, or Supreme.

On the Upper Congo among the Bobangi folk the word used for the Supreme Being is Nyambe; among the Lulanga people, Nzakomba; among the Boloki, Njambe; among the Bopoto people it is Libanza, which word is also well known among the Boloki people, and was probably introduced by slaves from Bopoto. At Yakusu, near Stanley Falls, the word used is Mungu, which is a shortened form of the Swahili word muungu, and this may contain the root of the Lower Congo word mpungu. It is interesting to note that the most common name for the Supreme Being on the Congo is also known, in one form or another, over an extensive area of Africa reaching from 6° north of the Equator away to extreme South Africa; as, for example, among the Ashanti it is Onyame, at Gaboon it is Anyambie, and two thousand miles away among the Barotse folk it is Niambe.

These are the names that stand for a Being who is endowed with strength, wealth, and wisdom by the natives; and He is also regarded and spoken of by them as the principal Creator of the world, and the Maker of all things. Some think Him so perfect in all His works that semi-sane people, crooked sticks, and deformed persons and animals are placed to the credit of a subordinate divinity—a demiurge called Kombu.

But the Supreme Being is believed by the natives to have withdrawn Himself to a great distance after performing His creative works; that He has now little or no concern in mundane affairs; and apparently no power over spirits and no control over the lives of men, either to protect them from malignant spirits or to help them by averting danger. They also consider the Supreme Being (Nzambi) as being so good and kind that there is no need to appease Him by rites, ceremonies, or sacrifices. Hence they never pray to this Supreme One, they never worship Him, or think of Him as being interested in the doings of the world and its peoples.

During the whole thirty years of my life in various parts of the Congo I have heard the name of the Deity used in the following four ways only: Among the Lower Congo people, when they desire to emphasize a statement or vouch for the truthfulness of their words, they use the name in an oath. When in extreme trouble they cry out: “I wish Nzambi had never made me!” or when in great distress: “Nzambi, pity me!” Also on the Lower Congo there is the phrase lufwa lua Nzambi = death by God, i.e. a natural death as distinctive from death by witchcraft; but this view of death is not so frequently heard on the Lower Congo as among the Boloki people, where awi na Njambe = he died by God, i.e. there is no witchcraft about the death of the deceased, nor anything pointing to witchcraft about the accident that caused the death, is often heard. These are the only phrases which suppose that the Supreme Being has anything to do with the world. They are generally employed in the case of poor folk when they die, as no one wants the trouble and expense of engaging a witch-doctor to seek out the witch.

About four years ago I asked a most intelligent native, whose age was about 45, if he could recall any prayer that was offered to the Supreme Being (Nzambi) by his family or any natives before the coming of the missionaries. He sat quietly for a few minutes and then answered: “No, but a woman in great distress would say, ‘Nzambi, pity me,’ not because she thought she would receive pity, for we all believed Nzambi was too far away to hear us or think of us, but because it was a saying amongst us for such times of distress.”

Among the Lower Congo people the belief exists that when there is a halo round the moon it is a sign that the Supreme Being is there confirming the residence in that cool place—hence state of happiness of some spirits which have just arrived; and when the halo is round the sun, then those who have recently lost relatives or friends by death will tremble and wail, because that halo round the sun is an indication to them that the Supreme Being (Nzambi) is there confirming the punishment that has consigned the late departed to the hot place—hence state of unhappiness. There is a proverb that shows the lastingness of this punishment: “The bad people are tortured like a locust on the burning grass; it wants to die, but is kept alive.” These comprise the only ideas concerning the Supreme Being that I have ever heard expressed, either on the Lower Congo or among the Boloki natives.

On the other hand, there is a seeming contradiction of the moon and sun theory, as stated in the preceding paragraph, by another belief extant among the Lower Congo people, viz. that all the souls of the departed go to a great spirit-town in the forest, and that is the reason why burials take place at sunset. The natives argue thus: During the day folk go to farms, to market, to work in the forests, etc., and the town is left empty; in the evening the inhabitants have returned from their different occupations, and are ready to accord a welcome to any visitor; thus also the spirit-town: all the spirits are away at their different employments and do not return until the evening, and if the deceased were buried during the morning or early afternoon there would be no one in the town to welcome him. These differing beliefs appear to be co-existent, and the natives, if they perceive their inconsistency, have not offered any explanation. I once pointed out the contradictory nature of these beliefs to a smart native with whom I was conversing on the subject, and his reply was: “Some believe one thing, some believe the other, and some people believe both.”

Among the Boloki people there is a general and firm belief in a spirit-world, or nether region (called longa). It is supposed to be somewhere down below. From many natives I have received the same direction, always accompanied by the same action and words, viz. they have pointed with their fingers to the ground, saying, “It is down underneath there.” In the nether regions the conditions of existence appear to be similar to those in the villages and town, with this exception, that a man may be too high in the social scale to be punished on earth, but he cannot escape punishment in the nether regions for the disagreeable qualities he has exhibited on earth. Within a few hours of an unpopular head-man’s death, I have heard the ordinary natives laughingly say to one another as they have snapped their fingers in glee: “He is being punished now.” Who allotted the punishment and saw to its infliction I could never ascertain. Juries of head-men on earth sat to decide difficult cases; and it may be that they thought juries in the nether region sat on cases and allotted the necessary punishment.

The firing of guns, shouting, wailing, beating of drums and such noises are heard in the nether regions, and give notice to the inhabitants there of the approach of another disembodied spirit. The louder the noise the greater is the expectation of those in the spirit-land of seeing a great man arrive. The spirits of the departed wait about the entrance to the nether regions to greet the one about whose departure for their abode so much fuss is being made.

The soul of a living person is called elimo, but on the person’s death his soul becomes a disembodied spirit named mongoli; and the Boloki spirits after sojourning for a time in the nether regions leave that place and wander about the rivers and creeks, doing all the harm they can to the living by flooding their villages and keeping the fish from entering the nets and traps. The spirits of the Bomuna people, and of the bush-people generally, are supposed to roam about the forests, turning the animals from the traps and nets set to snare them, not to save them from death, but to show their hatred of the folk living in the towns.

Are these disembodied spirits turned out of the spirit-land as a punishment? Natives believe that the spirits of bad men are punished in the nether region—by bad they mean a disagreeable, unsociable, disobliging, greedy, rude, discourteous person. The ghost of such a one will return to trouble his whilom neighbours, and it is against his disagreeable qualities as a man that they have to guard now that he is a spirit. There are many stories about the doings of the disembodied spirits—their tricks and their mode of revenge—which will be related in subsequent chapters. The foregoing paragraphs give, I trust, a clear statement of the natives’ ideas of the Supreme Being and their views of existence after death, so far as I have been able to collect their thoughts and beliefs during a long and intimate intercourse with the people.

We now come to a larger subject—larger because it holds a more important place in the life and thought of the native—I refer to fetishism. If fetishism is a form of religion, then the Boloki people, like all other tribes on the Congo, are a very religious folk. In obedience to fetish taboo and custom they exhibit a devotion and persistency worthy of a better cause; in subjection to the demands of their witch-doctors they cut themselves, deny themselves many kinds of pleasant food, and pay heavy fees, even to the impoverishment of themselves and families. But all this is done through their abject fear of the various malignant spirits who, so their medicine men inform them, have power over them for the time being. It may be one spirit to-day and an entirely different one next month, according to the sickness, misfortune, or particular kind of bad luck from which the man is suffering; or a man may for twenty years possess good health and good fortune, and consequently he will need neither the medicine man nor his rites and ceremonies; or it may be that a man thinks “prevention is better than cure,” and in such a case he will fee the medicine men to appease on his behalf such evil spirits over whom they profess to exercise control, or to prepare for him certain charms to destroy their wicked designs.

No single witch-doctor pretends to control all the evil spirits, or confer immunity from all diseases, or remove all misfortunes, or impart every kind of good luck. Hence on the Lower Congo there are about fifty different kinds of medicine men,^[32] and among the Boloki some eighteen varieties of them, each supreme in his own particular branch. The order is not confined to men only, for many women are to be found in its ranks. Some medicine men are supposed to be stronger than others, and, controlling more powerful spirits, they either avert greater evils or confer larger benefits, and consequently receive more respect and richer fees for their services.

It is a misrepresentation to depict the Congo native as “bowing down to wood and stone.” He never worships his fetishes; he exhorts them to do his bidding; he commands them to do that for which they were made, and he is not backward in arousing them to alertness by whistles and explosions of gunpowder, or to activity by whacking them with a stick.

No native of any tribe I have met ever assigned creative powers to his fetishes, or respected them as the representatives of a deity. The fetishes were made yesterday at his bidding and expense by the witch-doctor, and to-morrow, if they fail in their purpose, they will be consigned to the rubbish heap, or left neglected on some shelf in his house. The native lives and moves, so he believes, surrounded by evil spirits which, on account of their own malignant natures or at the instigation of his enemies, are constantly trying to work him harm, and the only means known to him of counteracting the evil, or of appeasing the malignant power, is the medicine man with his powerful fetishes, charms, and ceremonies.

There are two phrases that contain the whole theory and practice of the Congo medicine man’s black and white magic. By the black magic he professes to incite an evil spirit by means of a fetish to inflict a sickness or some other misfortune on an enemy; and by white magic, to appease the evil spirit through the medium of the fetish, so that the sickness or bad luck shall be removed from one’s self or one’s family and friends. The same medicine man uses the same fetish to curse a man with disease, or to cure the man so cursed, hence he often draws fees from both parties.

To curse a person by the aid of a fetish is called loka e nkisi. The fetish is beaten with a stick, informed what it is to do, and then hung up outside the invoker’s house, and the spirit of the fetish flies off to obey its orders. This is the simple modus operandi followed by all the witch-doctors on the Lower Congo, who invoke their fetishes to employ their various powers against the enemies of their clients.

To soothe and appease the spirit of the fetish so that it will remove the curse from working by so conciliating the fetish power, or the spirit the fetish is supposed to control, that it will work for the medicine man’s client and not against him, is called lembola e nkisi (= to soften, tame a fetish), and the ceremony is as varied as there are medicine men, for each branch of the profession has its own special rites to observe.

Now fetishes on the Lower Congo are either images, bundles, or large horns, and these as a rule are owned by the medicine men. Smaller fetishes and charms are made by them for various purposes and sold to the natives. Sometimes a wealthy man will buy a powerful fetish and use its power entirely for himself; at times a poorer man will pay a good fee to a medicine man to borrow his fetish, or the rich man’s fetish for one or two days, so that he may have the entire attention of the spirit it controls. A rich man will sometimes buy a powerful fetish as a speculation, and make a good profit by hiring it out for a fee, and the poorer man will pay the fee, hoping to reap good results to his bodily health or to his prosperity by having the undivided interest of the fetish at his service.

The term fetish comes from the Portuguese word feitiço, and the early navigators of the West African Coast were Portuguese, who carried with them amulets and charms, i.e. feitiços, in the form of crosses, beads, images, etc., that had been blessed by their priests. And when these ancient navigators saw the natives wearing shells filled with some mixture, or displaying on their persons some articles with which they were unwilling to part even for costly gifts, what was more natural for them than to regard such objects as something akin to their own feitiços? And “as they discovered no other traces of religious worship they concluded that this outward show of regard for these feitiços constituted the whole of the negro worship.”^[33]

The native word on the Lower Congo for fetish (nkisi), and among the Boloki (bonganga), means an image, a horn, a shell, a saucepan, etc., and, in fact, anything into which a medicine man has put a part of his “medicine” from his store bundle; and it is not an effective fetish until it has been through the hands of the medicine man and received its power from him. No one witch-doctor makes all the fetishes, but every one has his own speciality, in the making of which he is accounted an expert.

On the Lower Congo the native offers periodic sacrifices to his fetish to keep it in a good humour, otherwise through sulkiness it may refuse to help him; or he returns it to a medicine man to renew its energies when it proves too weak for his purpose; he explodes gunpowder around it to arouse it to proper alertness that it may attend to its owner’s affairs; or he beats it to make it subservient to his wishes, but he never worships it, nor does he ever pay homage to it. Among the Boloki sugar-cane wine is poured over the fetish to render it amenable to its owner’s wishes, and it is threatened if it does not act quickly on its owner’s behalf; and while the Boloki fears his fetish in a way, yet he never worships it.

“About 1872 some natives of Loanda came through the country preaching a crusade against fetishes of all kinds, inducing the natives in town after town to destroy all their fetishes, assuring them that since death and sickness came by the exercise of the black art, which everyone fully believes, if then every fetish were destroyed and no more made there would be no more suffering and death. Far and wide the most strenuous efforts were made to accomplish the destruction of all fetishes to that happy end.”^[34] In 1909 a man with whom I was conversing told me that he as a child was shaken over the fire during this campaign to destroy any fetishes he had about his person. He well remembered this crusade against fetishes, and said that when the people became ill and died as usual, the originators of it said: “It is because some of the people have not destroyed all their fetishes.”

On the Lower Congo every witch-doctor has a bundle of medicines or charms (called ebunda dia mfula) which is the source of his power and the spring from which he draws his supplies for making his own great fetish, and the charms, amulets, and minor fetishes for his clients. This bundle is a conglomeration of powdered chalk, crushed red pepper, wood ashes, bits of the skins of strong animals, claws and beaks of strong birds, heads of snakes, poisonous plants and beans, various herbs, and any other mess the medicine man can collect together. A portion of this bundle is put into the head of the fetish image (and sometimes into the stomach), and becomes the brains, intelligence (nkinda) of the fetish.

When a medicine man uses his fetish on behalf of a client, he takes a little of the bundle and puts it into a horn or shell and ties it round his patient’s neck, telling him that while wearing it he must not eat this or that article of diet, or he must not do certain things. In due time the medicine man goes to receive his fee, and on receipt of it he removes the special charm from the neck of his patient, and at the same time takes off the taboo. If the person does not pay, then the medicine man leaves him under the taboo, and perhaps adds others. The Congo medicine man never has any bad debts.

No native thinks the fetish he uses is possessed of divine power, nor does it represent a deity to him, and he uses no language about it that would lead one to suppose that for a moment he in his own mind invests it with divinity. What is the fetish to him? It is something in which a portion of the mfula bundle has been put which has imparted to it its own mysterious power—to him any portion of the bundle contains the power of the whole.

What then is the bundle? It is composed of the skins of strong animals which are thereby represented, and their combined strength is conserved in it; there are pieces of the skins of cunning animals, and their united craftiness and cuteness are imparted to it; there are portions of strong, swift birds that sail on tireless wings through the air, and they give to it their power of flight; there are various poisonous plants and beans that lend their qualities of harming the human body when used against the enemy of a client; there are beneficial herbs and powders that are supposed to cure the person who uses it for his recovery from a disease; and there is generally powdered chalk, symbolical of brain matter, that gives intelligence to the whole mass. I do not think the native mind goes farther back than the bundle, which contains for him representations of all those qualities that he fears and admires, and whose combined forces overawe him. And should he go beyond that bundle it is only to the animals—the lion, the leopard, etc., whom he fears; the eagle, the hawk, and the falcon whom he admires and wonders at for their flight through space; and to those plants and herbs whose mysterious powers he dreads.

The native supposes that the medicine men have some occult method of so mixing these qualities and forces together in the bundle that they become active agents in flying through the air and seeking out the enemies of their clients, or of destroying those who are bewitching them, or of curing those who seek their aid. All the medicine men do not have all the skins, powders, herbs, etc., in their charm bundles, but each procures what he thinks will make the desired combination for his purpose. It is quite probable that the medicine men and the more intelligent natives believe that by mixing the skins, plants, chalk, etc., in different ways they induce different spirits to take up their abode in the various fetishes, because they like the mixture prepared for them, and in thus taking up their residence in them, or being influenced by them, the medicine men gain power over them.

This view is supported by the following considerations: The fetish when first made is only a piece of wood and can be bought for a few pence; but after the witch-doctor has put a portion of the charm bundle into it the price for it is considerable—from a few shillings to a few pounds—according to what it is expected to do. Sacrifices are offered, not to the piece of wood, but to the spirit now dwelling in it, or over which the charms in it have some influence. These sacrifices range from an occasional drop of blood from a frog’s foot to a goat every new moon, the blood of which is poured over the fetish, and the flesh of the sacrificial goat must not be sold, but eaten by the sacrificer and his family and friends—the larger the benefits expected, the more costly and regular the sacrifice. The sacrifices are to keep the spirits in good humour. The portion of the bundle put into the fetish is after a time played out, becomes stale, and loses its power of attracting the spirit to it, i.e. the fetish becomes ineffective, so the owner of it takes it to a medicine man to have it refreshed by renewing the charms from the bundle; and then if it is still inactive, i.e., if the owner’s luck is still bad, or his health continues unsatisfactory, he throws the fetish on one side and tries the fetish of another branch of the profession, thinking that the former’s mixture of ingredients has no further power to attract the spirit to his fetish, or the fetish does not influence the particular spirit that is able to help him.

The Boloki medicine men have a “bag of tricks” made of very similar ingredients to the charm bundle, and regarded in much the same way. The only difference being that on the Lower Congo the witch-doctors largely use images (called teke^[35]) into which they put the portions of the bundle, while among the Boloki the fetish power is imparted to any article that comes conveniently to hand. During fifteen years’ residence among the Boloki people I saw only two very crudely made images in use (they are now in Horniman’s Museum), and those I bought easily for a few brass rods, showing that they valued them very lightly as receptacles for fetish power.

As already stated, there are nearly fifty different kinds of medicine men on the Lower Congo, and about eighteen among the Boloki. It is not to be thought for a moment that all these medicine men sprang simultaneously into existence, or that they are the product of only one tribe; they are undoubtedly the evolution of many generations, and a free appropriation from neighbouring tribes of fetish ceremonies, etc., that appealed to them through being made widely known by some famous medicine man of the time. The Congo native has always been ready to try a new fetish, hoping thereby to gain some advantage to his fortune and health.

The following is probably the rise of many branches of the medicine man’s profession now, or recently, in vogue: A quick-witted, observant man noticed that a certain herb, or a certain mode of procedure, such as massage or inducing perspiration by steaming, was beneficial to a patient suffering from a certain disease. If he had given the herb in a simple way without any hanky-panky, or had done a little medical rubbing without any ceremonies, or had given a vapour bath without ostentatious and mysterious rites, the natives would not have regarded him as a bona fide medicine man, and he would have procured very little business. In order to protect his discovery and to draw patients he surrounded it with the hocus-pocus of fetish rites and ceremonies, and thus started a new class of “doctors” that had its day. It is more than probable that many medicine men and their fetishes have risen in power, have had wide fame and much popular support, have then fallen into disrepute and have been abandoned in favour of new ones; and, if the truth were known, as many if not more kinds of medicine men have been forgotten than are now remembered.

The following is an account of the rise and fall of one fetish order in very recent years: A few years ago a medicine man appeared in Portuguese Congo with a new fetish called nkisi a kiniambe = the divine fetish. The witch-doctor and his fetish with its high-sounding name visited all the towns round about San Salvador. The ceremony was a form of communion prepared with small slices of cassava, pea nuts, and palm-wine. The recipient had first to pay one string of beads for a child and five strings for an adult, and he or she confessed all their witchcraft palavers, i.e. all the evil desires they had in their hearts, for the sickness or death of anyone. After this confession the medicine man gave them a piece of cassava, a pea nut, and drop of palm-wine, and he also gave them a promise that they should never die. When, however, the recipients died the witch-doctor said it was because they had not made a full confession of their witchcraft. He and his accomplices reaped a large sum of money from the natives’ fear of death and the promise of immunity from it; but the medicine man promised too much, and consequently his fetish was soon in disrepute and quickly neglected.

While we find a dim knowledge of a Supreme Being among all the Congo tribes, we also find co-extensive with it an elaborate system of fetishism, which I would define as those means employed by the Congo natives for influencing the various spirits by which they believe themselves to be surrounded, either to act on their own behalf by giving them good luck and good health, or to act against their enemies by sending them misfortune, sickness, or death. Their system of belief has its basis in their fear of those numerous invisible spirits—invisible to the ordinary man, but not to the medicine man—which are constantly trying to compass their sickness, misfortune, and death; and the Boloki’s sole object—and the same may be written of his near and distant neighbours on the Congo—is to cajole or appease, to cheat or conquer, and even destroy the troublesome spirits, hence their witch-doctors with their fetishes, their rites, and ceremonies. If there were no spirits to be circumvented there would be no need of medicine men as middlemen, and no need of fetishes as mediums for getting into touch with the spirits.

Theologically speaking, the Congo natives are utterly void of religion, for they neither worship the Supreme Being nor their fetishes as representing a deity; but if “the belief in and a measure of obedience to a potent being or beings not ourselves is an early minimum of religion,”^[36] then the Congo folk are very religious, for they carefully obey the taboos put on them by their witch-doctors in the name of their fetishes; they invoke the power of the spirits by exploding gunpowder around their fetishes, and by whistling to them and beating them; they try to appease them by frequent sacrifices; and they have dances about some of the fetishes, during which they call upon them, or the spirits they influence, to protect their fighting-men and destroy their enemies.