XIII
THE MENTAL DEGRADATION OF FETISHISM
No; it was not among the Negroes, but among the peasants of Germany that the horseshoe acquired its power of luck.
One day very long ago, in a German village, an honest blacksmith was hard at work making a horseshoe when the devil, strolling about the village, was attracted by the hammering. While looking on at the blacksmith it occurred to him that it might be a very good thing to get his own hoofs shod. Thereupon he made a bargain with the blacksmith, and the blacksmith set to work to put horseshoes on the devil. Now the honest blacksmith knew very well that it was the devil and nobody else. So he put on each of his feet a red-hot shoe, and drove the nails straight into the devil’s hoofs. The devil then paid him and went his way; but the honest blacksmith threw the money into the fire. Meanwhile, the devil, after walking some time, began to suffer pain from his shoes, and as he went on the pain became worse and worse. In his torment he danced and he kicked and he raged and he swore, and still the pain became worse. Then at last, in agony, he tore the shoes off and threw them away. From that day to this whenever the devil sees a horseshoe he runs away as fast as he can go.
The superstition of the horseshoe has been so eagerly embraced by the Negro that most people seem to think that it originated with him. It is precisely like many of his own superstitions, and it shows that ignorance and superstition in Africa are like ignorance and superstition anywhere else, and that the African mind is essentially like our own.
The charm, the fetish and the relic represent ascending grades of belief. They are all associated together in what we call fetishism. The charm operates not by reason of any intelligence within itself but by some influence from without. The horseshoe is such a charm. One of the numerous African charms is the string which a mother ties around the waist of her child and which is worn throughout childhood. This fetish is for health. The Roman Catholic priests, in the early history of their missions on the Congo, substituted for this health-fetish a string made from the fibres of a palm that had been blessed on Palm Sunday. There is no evidence, however, that the substitution of the Roman fetish for the African fetish resulted in any marked improvement in the health of the natives.
A charm is not necessarily a physical object—like the amulet. In Africa, as among the superstitious everywhere else, it may be a word or action, a sign or symbol, a formula or incantation. To count the number of persons present on certain occasions will cause the death of at least one of them within the year. The utterance of the word salt at the wrong moment has been known to produce appalling consequences.
The fetish proper represents a more intelligible form of belief than the charm or amulet. One common kind of fetish implies animism; that is, that the various objects of nature have each a life analogous to that of man to which their phenomena are due. This life is inseparable from the object. The eagle’s talon, the wing feathers of any bird, the claw of the leopard, the teeth of animals, and all those objects which are associated with that which is desirable or that which is fearful are valuable fetishes, because one may avail himself of the powers inherent in such objects. The African sometimes says that the surf is in a nasty temper; and when he uses this expression he is not speaking figuratively. The wind talks to the forest, and the forest talks to the wind. The tornado is often nothing more than a quarrel between mountain and forest, lightning against wind; and, as one writer expresses it, we ourselves may get hit with the bits. Not that they are angry at us, but at each other, and we had best keep out of the way.
Closely related to this class of fetishes is a kind somewhat higher than the animistic fetish. In this the relation of the physical object and the power within it is not that of body and spirit but that of a house and a tenant residing in it. The spirit may leave the fetish, and then it will be of no more use. But the skill of a fetish-doctor may compel the spirit to remain. As long as it remains it is under the control of the possessor of the fetish and must do his bidding. If it should disobey he will punish it, usually by hanging it in the smoke. It is such a fetish, contained in a goat’s horn, that a man walking in the forest carries suspended from his neck to make him invisible to an enemy. Another he hangs among his plantains to keep the wind from blowing them down.
But the most powerful and sacred fetish is the ancestral relic, possessed by every grown man. It is the skull of the father or other ancestral relation. Here fetishism becomes ancestor-worship. The skull is the residence of the dead father, and if it be treated well, that is, kept in a warm and dry place, the father will confer every kind of favour—success in hunting and in war, in stealing and attracting other men’s wives. For death has not improved the morals of these ancestors. The son never punishes the ancestral fetish. Indeed, if he neglect it—if he let it get cold or wet—the ancestor will punish him. Many a hunter’s gun has refused to fire just at the critical moment because of such neglect. He often talks to the dead father and tells him his affairs and asks his help. This fetish is only for men, not for women. If a woman should see it she will surely die. If she even be heard talking too curiously about it she is liable to die. This is no imaginary fear on her part. For the ancestral anger, like much of the occultism of Africa, has a material basis of secret poison administered by living agents.
The fetish-doctor, or medicine-man, is to be feared. He is more powerful in some tribes than in others; but within his own tribe his reputation depends upon himself. Any shrewd fellow, should good fortune attend him for a while, may persuade the people that he can make powerful fetishes. There will be application for various fetishes at good prices. Every success enhances his reputation; and if he is very clever he will even convert failure into success. If a man return a fetish and tell him it has failed—that his goods have been stolen, his hens have not laid, his wives have eloped, or his canoe has capsized with him—the doctor will not usually dispute the failure, but will discover the reason, and more than ever impress his customer with his skill and knowledge. Sometimes as soon as he looks at it he will say that it is dead; that the spirit has escaped from it and it may as well be thrown away. Then by some occult means he discovers how this has happened. The owner, it may be, has not taken proper care of it; or an enemy has lured it away from him into his own service; or a witch has killed it. Thereupon he offers to make him another fetish at a reasonable price.
The fetish-doctor soon acquires the power of detecting witchcraft and sometimes even of discovering the witch. His diagnosis and treatment of the bewitched are interesting and varied. One particular treatment is as follows: Having discovered that the patient has really been bewitched, he makes several incisions on the breast. Then, after an exercise of howls and incantations, he applies his lips to the incision and sucks the wound until the patient screams; whereupon, he takes out of his mouth some article, perhaps a goat’s horn, which he is supposed to have sucked out of the body of the patient, and which had been witched into him. He again applies his lips, and when the patient screams a second time he takes another article out of his mouth and displays it before the credulous people. Having thus removed a miscellaneous assortment of articles—roots, pebbles, broken pottery and other objects entirely out of place in a human anatomy—the patient is left in a fair way to recover; and if he should not it is surely not the fault of the doctor.
It is always a question to what extent the fetish-doctor is a conscious hypocrite. He usually begins practice by exploiting some particular fetish in which he really believes and whose power he has proved. Finding the trade lucrative he invents other fetishes upon the same principle—for there is a principle, that is to say, there is always some apparent relation between the ingredients of a fetish and the purpose for which it is designed. If some of his first fetishes should be successful and gain him a reputation he may come to believe in his own power. He may consciously abuse that power—and physicians in other lands have been known to do the same; but he still believes in the power—believes in fetishes and in witchcraft and in the possibility of its detection.
Africa presents to the psychologist an unexplored and inviting field. A man who possesses a fetish-skull usually invokes its aid to prevent secret unfaithfulness on the part of his wife. He compounds a certain fetish the ingredients of which include a lock of his wife’s hair, cuttings of her nails, or her saliva. This fetish he puts into the box with the father’s skull; and now, it is believed, if his wife be unfaithful she will surely die; death being inflicted by the ancestor. It seems to be a fact that this fetish frequently proves effective without the aid of poison; that is to say, the woman dies. Fear often drives her to a tardy confession, which, however, affords her but small relief; for everybody tells her that she is going to die.
“You’re a corpse,” says one. “You’re failing every day,” says another.
And the poor woman, as if yielding to some occult compulsion, fails rapidly and dies. She dies, presumably, as a psychological consequence of her belief in the fetish.
One must never tell a sick person that he is going to die lest one be charged with wishing his death. In some tribes it is equivalent to a curse designed to effect death, and is liable to severe punishment.
The following dying confession was made by a woman in a Fang town of Gaboon: Years ago, when she was a child, a man of her town had given her a certain fetish medicine, concealing it in her food. After she had eaten it he told her what he had done, and said that this medicine would effect her death at the birth of her first child. She must keep this matter secret from everybody, even from her parents, lest the medicine kill her immediately. This gloomy prospect darkened her life for years, and just before the birth of her first child she sickened and died—probably as a psychological consequence of her belief in the fetish. Such confessions are not uncommon.
The mental degradation of the African is often overlooked through the deeper regard for his moral degradation. Therefore it is my present purpose to depict the mental degradation of fetishism, and to set over against it the new and transforming conception of God and nature which Christ imparts to the African mind.
Carlyle has said: “What notion each forms of the universe is the all-regulating fact with regard to him.” Looking out upon nature and knowing of no divine intelligence ever present and presiding, the African does not discover the reign of law nor the uniformity of nature. Those phenomena of which the cause is not as obvious as the effect he relates to a supernatural cause. And since will is the cause that he knows by experience, he instinctively attributes natural phenomena to a personal will; not to one will, however, but to many; for natural phenomena are various and the moods of nature are inconsistent. He hears the crash of thunder, and if he says, “Somebody threw something,” he is not very far from the ancient conception of Jupiter hurling thunderbolts. And, since that which is normal and regular does not attract attention like that which is unusual and fearful, therefore to the unreflecting mind the beneficence of nature is far less obvious than its terrors; since the laws of growth, seedtime and harvest, rain and sunshine,—all the kindly ministry of nature, is quiet and unobtrusive, while her cruelty thrusts itself upon the mind, the African concludes that the innumerable spirits which rule nature or constantly interfere with it are mostly evil and hostile.
From this view it is not a long stride to the belief that the spirits reside in the objects of nature, each in its appropriate object; and this is fetishism. We are all fetishists by instinct; though we may hear it with the astonishment of Molière’s hero when he found that he had been talking prose all his life. Every time one slams a door in anger or kicks at a bucket—as if such things had sentience and could be hurt—he exhibits a fetish instinct.
If we bear in mind, then, that the very axioms of the African’s belief obliterate the line between nature and the supernatural, and, further, that habitual lying makes the character of truth vague and uncertain, and also that he has an imagination almost as vivid as reality, we may be somewhat enabled to understand the degraded mental condition indicated by such incidents as the following, which I repeat because they are representative:
A certain woman, knowing that the penalty would be death, confessed—and with undoubted sincerity—that by witchcraft she had caused another woman’s death, and was herself killed by the people.
A certain man, evidently without the slightest intention of untruthfulness, tells how that journeying one day in the forest he had met two strange men who by fetish power had thrown him to the ground, had opened his body, and removing his intestines, had stuffed him with dry grass instead, which would have injured him for life, but that a doctor of his own tribe found him, reopened him, removed the hay and put real intestines in its place. I know a woman in Gaboon who claims and evidently believes that she is constantly attended by several leopards, invisible to all others but herself. There is a man in Gaboon of whom the whole community believes that he frequently changes himself into a leopard in order to steal sheep and to devour a whole sheep at a meal. This he does also when he would avenge himself upon his enemies. This particular man denies that he has any such power. But sometimes men confess or claim that they themselves possess it; and in some cases they seem to believe it. A broken-hearted chief once told Du Chaillu how that his son, who had been his joy and hope, had been accused of killing two men of the town by turning into a leopard. The old man at first passionately defended his son. But to his horror, the son, stepping forward, confessed the charge, and that he had turned himself into a leopard and killed the two men—he did not know why. With the chief’s consent the son was burnt to death over a slow fire. And the sight of that horrible death was ever in the old man’s eyes.
One day the Rev. Dr. Nassau (who relates this incident in his book, Fetishism in West Africa) arrived in a native village where he found an extraordinary commotion, the people panic-stricken with fear. Upon making an inquiry as to the cause, he was told that on the preceding day the wife of the chief had borne a son, the only son of the chief, who in his joy had this day made a great feast, which they were about to celebrate, when suddenly another woman of the village, carrying at her side a baby girl three months old, passed through the crowd straight to the house in which was the new-born boy, and exchanging the children, came out bearing the baby boy. Upon the loud protest of the people and a demand for an explanation she told them the following story:
This baby boy, she said, although borne by the chief’s wife, really belonged to her; while the baby girl which she had borne three months ago belonged to the chief’s wife. She and the other woman, she said, were both witches. Until recently they had been intimate friends and had been accustomed to go off together in the night to witch-feasts and witch-dances in neighbouring villages. Their unborn babes they were accustomed to leave upon the grass while they joined in the dance. Her babe, she said, was a boy, and the other was a girl. But one morning the other woman, leaving the dance before her, took the male child and left the other, thinking that she would not know the difference. After that they had never gone out together; a coolness had sprung up between them, and she had waited her time and kept her secret. In due time she had borne the baby girl, which really belonged to the chief’s wife; and now the chief’s wife had borne the baby boy, which belonged to her.
The chief’s wife stood dumb, as if in self-condemnation. No one doubted the story; and the woman bore the child away.
The trial for witchcraft is by ordeal. In most cases poison is administered. If the accused dies or is seized with vertigo this is sufficient evidence of guilt; if no such result follows, it is a sign of innocence.
The African believes in a God, who made all things; but his idea of God is grossly anthropomorphic. God is a very big African chief with a great many wives. Some of their fables in which God figures are not repeatable. He regards men and women with contempt, and as a rule ignores them. I do not know that they ever worship Him. Their worship is directed to the innumerable spirits about them who infest the air, among whom are their ancestors. The spirits are generally disposed to do them harm; but they may be placated, and their own dead may even be rendered favourable by certain ceremonies. But an incomparably greater number of spirits are always hostile, and the impulse of African worship is fear.
Here, then, is a state of mental degradation that to us looks almost like insanity. I have only touched upon the salient points of their belief. One can never convey to others any adequate impression of the stifling mental atmosphere of an African community, with its stagnation and torpor, depressing even the mind of the missionary and in some instances fairly threatening his faith. My experience of that atmosphere has been such that I have the deepest sympathy and compassion for traders and government officials living often solitary in such communities; whose beliefs and morals are often not the result of personal convictions, but merely a reflection of the beliefs, traditions and moral restraints of the social community in which they have lived. Upon the beliefs of such men there is a power of gravitation in the mentality of an African community that acts like the Magnetic Mountain of the Arabian fable, which, as ships approached it from the sea, drew out of them every nail, bolt and rivet, and left them a wreck of floating timbers, to be flung at random upon the lonely shore or buried in its sand.
At the first approach the mind of the African seems utterly inaccessible. His mental powers are paralyzed; he has forgotten how to think. If his mental redemption is possible where must it begin?
One day long ago, when a fellow missionary and myself were together in the Bulu interior, a native young man, in response to our inquiry, expressed the African belief that the rainbow is a snake. It has the power—which many men also have—of making itself invisible. The missionary, reflecting that superstition is simply ignorance of nature and nature’s laws, resolved to undertake immediately the boy’s education. The sun was shining brightly, and the missionary, having sent the native to fetch a bucket of water, told him that he himself would then and there make a rainbow. He asked me to stand on the porch and throw the bucketful of water in a certain direction, while he took his stand on the ground with the boy by his side. Now it happens that in matters of science I have an inveterate inclination to be content with theory. I never attempted a practical experiment in my life that did not miscarry. Besides, everybody knows that a bucket is an exceedingly awkward instrument with which to take accurate aim. The water came down on the upturned faces of the two eager scientists. The black man has an abiding antipathy to the fourth element; and this native evidently regarded the performance as a punishment for his unbelief in regard to the substance of the rainbow. He ducked his head and shouted: “I believe; I believe; master, please don’t do it again.”
Later in the day he might have been heard telling his friends not to let the white man hear them say that the rainbow is a snake—if they did not want a bucket of water thrown on them. So we made a conversion after the Mohammedan fashion. But that native must have wondered what might be the essential difference between the reign of law and the law of rain.
A million such experiments, even if perfectly successful, would not be worth while except as amusement; for the native mind is wrong not merely in particulars, but fundamentally. The idea of God must be injected into nature, as a basis for law, before a scientific attitude is possible. Only the idea of God can expel the multitude of spirits whose activities make of nature a haphazard warfare of conflicting forces. And how shall we convey this idea to the degraded mind of the African?
Of course we should change his idea of nature if we could persuade him of God’s unity, and that nature, therefore, is the product of a single mind; His spirituality, and that He is therefore present everywhere, in nature and the hearts of men; His holiness, and that God and nature are therefore on the side of righteousness; His love, and that God and nature are therefore benevolent and sympathetic with man. But to talk to the African about God’s attributes is to speak in an unknown tongue. And besides, God’s personality is something more than the sum of His attributes, which no more make God, as some one has said, than arms and legs and head and trunk make my father. But we can present to the African mind the personal Christ—God incarnate—and the African heart responding can love Him; and loving Him he can know Him; for love is more knowing than reason. The African is, above all, still capable of strong personal affection; and looking into the face of Jesus he sees God—the One God of conscience—and learns to call Him Father, a word which even to the African mind implies love and care. He knows nothing of attributes, but like a child he can discern his Father’s will.
God’s fatherhood includes His care. And this relates God to nature, through which that care is largely exercised. His first lessons on nature the African learns not from science, but directly from Jesus. Jesus multiplies the loaves, and the value of the miracle for the African, and for us, is not the wonder of it, but the lesson that it is God who gives us our daily bread. Jesus stills the storm on Galilee and thus teaches that the Father is present in all storms and always rules the sea and the wind, which are not under the control of demons. Jesus heals the leper, and we learn His power over all disease, and that a loving will afflicts and heals. He raises Lazarus from the dead, and reveals that death is never in the hands of a malignant foe, but under the control of a sympathetic Power. The thought of the African is completely reversed by this knowledge of God. Nature is not the result of myriad spirits hostile to himself, but the product of one single mind, and its laws, the expression of a constant and loving Will. It is as if the forked lightning at which he trembles in the darkness should flash upon the storm-cloud the word Father; and fear becomes faith. In Jesus the One God of conscience, the Father, becomes supreme over nature.
A certain native named Toko, of the Mpongwe coast tribe, who had been for some years a Christian, went back into the interior among the Fang, preaching the Gospel. The Fang were notorious robbers, who at every opportunity plundered the cargo of traders as it passed in boats up and down the river. While Toko was preaching one day, some one interrupting him said: “I don’t believe that God is good, as you say. For why did He make this river so crooked that in order to reach the coast we have to travel nearly twice the straight distance?”
“My friend,” replied Toko, “God knew that you wicked Fang were going to live along this river and that you would plunder passing boats; and He made the river crooked so that you can’t see the boat coming until it is so near that you have not time to get out to it before it is past.”
The wit aside, and however defective the teleology, observe the underlying attitude towards nature, and the fundamental change it implies. God is in nature, which is therefore under law, is sympathetic towards man, and working on the side of righteousness—a view that excludes and dooms fetishism and witchcraft. This simple man, and his fellow Christians with him, had the right basis for a scientific knowledge of nature.
It is truly astonishing how the African mind, despite its rude materialism, beginning with the idea of love, as revealed in Jesus, grasps ultimately the spirituality of God and the spiritual nature of true worship. One instance must suffice for illustration:
The women of West Africa, in preparing their food, bury it in the ground beside a stream for several days. A fellow missionary, one day examining an old woman who presented herself for baptism, and careful lest she might regard the water of baptism as a fetish, asked her a question regarding its significance, to which she replied:
“When I bury my food in the ground I mark the place. What use would the mark be if there were no food there? Baptism is but the mark: God dwells in the heart.”