The fetish folk of West Africa

An African woman was one day walking through the forest to her garden when she found a little child who was apparently lost and was crying with hunger. She took pity on the child and immediately carried him back to her town where she comforted him and nursed him. The child remained a few days and then mysteriously disappeared. Immediately a dreadful plague broke out in the town and many people died and there was much mourning. Then they knew that it was not a real child whom the woman had found, but a spirit in the form of a child, who had appealed to the woman’s pity and had lain on her bosom in order to bring death and desolation upon the people.

With such spirits, wanton and wicked, the African mind has filled the invisible world. The powers above him are hostile—all except the spirits of his immediate ancestors.

The former worship of snakes in Dahomy (nearly extinct by this time) throws a lurid light upon the African’s conception of the powers above him. According to the belief of the Dahomians snakes were spirits incarnate. The Dahomians have a peculiar interest for Americans since the World’s Fair of Chicago, where the chief attraction of the Midway Plaisance was an African village of real Dahomians, who regularly entertained a gazing throng with war-songs and war-dances and also scandalized feminine modesty. In one respect, however, the Chicago village had been modernized, as we shall see.

When Leighton Wilson first went to Dahomy he found in each village a house in the middle of the street, provided for the “exclusive” use of snakes—there was probably not much difficulty in keeping it “exclusive” considering the deadliness of many African snakes. The snakes, Dr. Wilson tells us, were fed and better cared for than the inhabitants of the town. If they were seen straying away they were brought back. At the sight of them the people prostrated themselves upon the ground. It is not improbable that during the World’s Fair Dahomians in far-away Africa were offering prayers to snakes for the safety of their friends in Chicago.

The snakes are spirits; and such are all the innumerable spirits which infest the air, excepting only a man’s ancestors, who are more or less kindly disposed towards him. The African, therefore, is not merely, like the Mohammedan, the victim of inexorable fate; nor merely the plaything of nature. But he is subject to the caprice of evil spirits, or the object of their malignant hostility.

The following are chief factors in the demoralization of African character: first, the African’s attitude towards the powers above him is that of fear, for he deems them hostile to him; second, his consequent attitude towards his fellow men is that of distrust, culminating in the belief in witchcraft; third, his conception of his own destiny is not hopeful nor ennobling: the future life is not better, but worse, than this life.

Against the hostility of the spirits a man’s ancestors (especially his immediate father) afford him some protection. But even such protection is uncertain; for the ancestors themselves are very petulant and easily offended, and when they are displeased they are as much to be feared as other spirits. The favours which a son seeks from his father are not spiritual blessings of any kind, but temporal benefits. It cannot be said that the motive of this worship is entirely filial reverence. A father is much more useful dead than living; and aged parents are sometimes even afraid that their sons will put them to death in order to procure the benefits which they could afterwards confer. The skull of the father is the commonest ancestral fetish, but not the only one.

An old chief, one day when I was visiting in his town for the first time, came and laid at my feet his most sacred fetish. It was contained in a small cylindrical box of bark made for the express purpose of holding this kind of fetish. The women, when they saw the box, screamed with fear and fled for their lives, putting their hands on their ears lest they should hear the old man’s words and die. They are not supposed to know the contents of the box, and they are ready at any moment to take a solemn oath that they do not know, though as a matter of fact they know very well.

The following were the interesting if somewhat repulsive ingredients of this very powerful fetish. There was first, and chiefly, the brains of the old man’s father, who had gained eminence and success according to Fang ideals. Some days after the father’s death, when the body was partly decomposed, the son visited his grave at midnight—entirely naked—opened the shallow grave, severed the head from the body, and hung it up in a house, letting the decomposing brain drip upon some white chalk. To this he added one of the old man’s teeth and a bit of his hair and cuttings of his nails, also a strip of flesh cut from the dead man’s arm and dried over the fire. When the owner of such a fetish is about to engage in any considerable enterprise he rubs a portion of the brains upon his forehead and thereby possesses himself of all the serviceable qualities of the deceased—his adroitness in lying, his skill in cheating, his cleverness in stealing goods or other men’s wives or in killing his enemies. If he is going to talk a big palaver he places the strip of dried flesh in his mouth, and keeps it there all the time he is talking, that he may be eloquent and successful. A man possessing this kind of fetish, if he were going to a trading-house, would not hesitate to rub a portion of the brains and chalk upon his hand, so that in shaking hands with the white man it might pass to the white man’s hand and make him benevolent. Some of them think that having thus put medicine on the white man’s hand he will give them anything they ask.

The hostility of spirits other than ancestors is appeased in various ways. Arbitrary restraints and prohibitions are frequently imposed upon children soon after birth, to be observed through life. Such prohibitions usually have reference to a particular spirit which is always present with the inhibited person. The commonest prohibition is that of some particular food. Among my schoolboys there were always several who could not eat plantain, although it is the food that they like best. It was often difficult to provide other food for them; but they would have died rather than eat plantain. Women are prohibited from eating certain kinds of meat, or certain parts of an animal—usually (by a strange coincidence) the very parts that the men like best. There is scarcely a limit to the self-denial sometimes involved in the observance of these arbitrary restrictions.

Among the Fang the offering of human sacrifice to placate the spirits is not customary. Witchcraft probably usurps the place of this form of human sacrifice. But among the more highly organized tribes of the Calabar and the Niger, where individuals wield despotic power, multitudes have been offered in sacrifice to appease the hostility of the spirits: and they would still be offered but for the presence of foreign governments. It took the English many years to suppress the annual sacrifice of human beings to the crocodiles of the Niger. I once had the pleasure of travelling with that great man and great missionary, Mr. Ramseyer (Father Ramseyer, all white men called him), a member of the Basle Mission, who for thirty years lived at Kumassi in the Ashantee Territory; and I heard from Mr. Ramseyer himself the story of Prempeh, that beastly king of Kumassi, whose fetish-trees were regularly watered with the blood of human beings; and who, when at length his lust for blood had become insatiable, had a slave put to death each night for his entertainment—and probably, also, to appease the hostility of the spirits. King Prempeh was finally captured by the English, and not long afterwards died in the prison at Sierra Leone.

Next to fear of the spirits the most demoralizing factor is the African’s distrust of his fellow men. The one is a corollary of the other. The African, like other savages, before giving one a drink swallows a mouthful of it himself to prove that it is not poisoned. In some of the large tribes of the Niger, where a king is a king, it was the practice (until the English government interfered with custom) for a king, upon his accession to the throne, to put to death all his brothers and half-brothers. In one of those tribes the blood royal was held in such reverence that under no circumstances would they shed it; so they used to put the royal brothers to death by stuffing the mouth and nostrils full of cotton. It was a far more horrible death than cutting the throat; but it was respectful.

On one occasion, when my heart had been rent by the dreadful cruelty inflicted upon a certain woman whom I knew very well, who had been charged with witchcraft because of the death of her husband, I addressed the whole population of the town, and after holding forth for some time in wrathful denunciation of their unreasoning suspicion, I asked why a man’s wives must always be the first to be charged with his death. An elderly chief; rising to his feet, gently interrupted me, and using my native name, Mote-ke-ye (Man-who-never-sleeps), he said:

“Ah, Mote-ke-ye, I would like to ask one question: Are you a married man?”

I was well aware, when I answered No, that the shrewd old man had routed me. The guilty men looked at one another with a relieved and peculiarly significant smile which said politely but unmistakably: “Then you are not qualified to judge us; for you know nothing about the natural hostility of wives, and we know all about it.”

A man’s wives are the first to be charged with his death, even without evidence, because they are supposed to have a latent desire for it. As I have already said, much of the witchcraft of Africa is straight poison usually administered in food. Africa abounds with deadly poisons and many Africans are skillful in their use. Wives do the cooking, and so have the constant opportunity to inflict death by this powerful but invisible weapon. One often finds that one bad custom is nothing more than a pitiful attempt to correct another. And this may explain the custom of killing wives at the death of the husband. At any rate it tends to restrict a wife’s use of poison and to inspire an earnest effort to keep her husband alive.

It has been estimated that, in those tribes that are beyond the restraints of foreign governments, nineteen out of twenty Africans die by violence. This accounts for the sparse population of Africa. For although the African race is prolific, and the land in most parts capable of sustaining a dense population, it is the most sparsely populated country in the world.

Many of this number are killed in war, which is a chronic condition. Nothing is too trivial to occasion a war. The usual beginning, however, is the stealing of a woman by a man of another tribe or village. Following this, the people of the two villages wage an aggressive guerrilla warfare, killing each other at every opportunity, not sparing women or children. The war usually continues until on either side another woman is stolen by a third party and another war begins. Then the first war is closed: a great palaver is talked between the two parties in some neutral town; and after oceans of oratory it is usually agreed that the side that has done the most killing shall pay over to the other side a corresponding number of women and much goods, including a proper dowry for the woman first stolen.

One of the first scenes that I witnessed in Africa was that in which, at the end of a war, four women were thus delivered to the enemy. The people were all gathered together when the chief announced the names of the four women. Each woman, as she heard her name, sprang from the ground with a shriek and tried to escape into the forest; but several men were on hand to catch her. She struggled until they bound her. Then the next name was called, and we heard another shriek. Finally the four women were led away, all of them crying bitterly. In the town to which they were taken they would be given as wives to certain men, and soon they would begin to make the best of the situation, would probably form new attachments and forget the old.

Women are thus bought and sold. A man’s wealth is reckoned by the number of his wives. On one occasion in a native town a conversation with the chief led me to preach on the future life; and I preached both heaven and hell. The chief evidently inferred that he was bound for the latter place. He asked me what I thought about it. I told him candidly that I thought so too. For a moment he seemed troubled, and then his countenance brightened with relief, and he exclaimed: “I know what I’ll do. I’ll send my head-wife in my place.”

Belief in witchcraft is the extreme expression of mutual distrust. It is supposed that as many Africans are put to death for witchcraft as those who die in war. The African seems not to believe that there is any such thing as a natural death. Even when a man is killed in war some one is usually charged with having bewitched him; for it will be said that he wore a fetish for safety, but that a witch had broken the spell of the fetish. A witch’s spirit is “loose from her body.” In the night she leaves her body and goes off to foregather with other witches with whom she joins in wild and unspeakably wicked revels, during which they feast upon the “hearts” of people. The people whose hearts have thus been eaten sicken soon afterwards and die. A witch is always careful to return to her body before daylight. If the vacant body be found during her absence it would be wise to destroy it immediately.

When a number of deaths occur in close succession a council is held in the presence of the witch-doctor. When he announces witchcraft as the cause a panic ensues in which the people become fairly dehumanized with fear and a thirst for vengeance. Each one suspects everybody else. The witch-doctor sometimes names the guilty persons. And woe to any enemies that he may have in that town! Usually, however, they resort to the ordeal to find the guilty ones. The spectacle of such a panic is very revolting. The horrors of war, even at the worst, are never comparable to the horrors of witchcraft. It is the constant fear of the African, and his most powerful fetishes are those which protect him against it.

Except in the vicinity of the foreign governments witches are put to death and always by cruel means, wives charged with witchcraft being buried alive with the dead body of the husband. In one town that I know ten women, wives of one man, were thus buried with him; in another town, twenty women. Their legs were broken before they were thrown into the grave.

Even cannibalism, regarded as the lowest reach of degradation, is not only a natural consequence of fetishism, but is one of its logical forms. I doubt whether, among the Fang, it is ever practiced on the mere impulse of hunger. It is rather the last desperate resort of fear seeking fetish protection. The strongest protection against an enemy in war is to eat one of their number. After that the enemy can do no harm and need not be feared; unless (always this same dreadful qualification)—unless some traitor in one’s own town should break the spell even of this fetish by witchcraft.

The African is further demoralized by his idea of man’s destiny. He believes in a future life. I never encountered a doubt on this subject. But his belief is not ennobling, nor a source of moral inspiration. Death is an unmitigated evil, and the dead are always wishing to be back in the flesh. The future does not hold rewards or punishments for the good or evil of the present life; nor has present goodness any future advantage. There, as here, to have a great many wives and plenty to eat are chief factors in happiness. They have big palavers there as well as here. Sometimes palavers left unfinished here are settled there. In some tribes (the Kru tribe, for instance) when smallpox or other scourge visits a town, and many people die about the same time, it is supposed that an unfinished palaver has been resumed in the other world and these persons were needed as witnesses.

It will be perceived that beneath all this moral degradation of the African, beneath his cruelty and licentiousness, there lies a degrading conception of man’s nature. Man has no divine origin and no noble destiny; therefore he has no intrinsic value and human nature has no inherent worth.

But to this seeming hopeless ruin of humanity Christ in His own person imparts a new conception, first, of the dignity of man’s nature; second, of the possibilities of his character; third, of the greatness of his destiny.

In Jesus, God takes upon Himself this despised human nature, and reveals the divine character in a human life. That same life is at once a revelation of God and an example to men; and without incongruity Jesus could say, in words perhaps the sublimest ever uttered in the ears of men: “Be ye perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” Man, therefore, even the most degraded and the slave, is akin to God and the object of His tender regard. The light of this revelation extinguishes all minor differences between men; a human soul is of more value than the whole world, and neither wealth nor power can add anything to a man’s worth.

Much is added to this new conception of man when Jesus reveals in Himself the possibilities of human character. It was always a surprise to me to find how readily the African recognizes in Jesus the human ideal; how he accepts Him as the true moral standard, by which henceforth he judges himself and realizes what he is and what he ought to be.

The great destiny of man which Jesus discloses seems not only credible, but even natural, in the light of man’s kinship with God and the possibilities of human character. Instead of the poor African’s fear of death and his degrading conception of the future life, Jesus sets before him a hope that thrills his heart with joy. Man has many present faults and frailties, but he does not belong to the present. He is not a finality, but a possibility; a possibility to be realized only in the perspective of an infinite future, in which death itself is but an incident, the end of nothing worth while; and beyond it is the consummation of all our hopes, a consummation which language becomes rhapsody when it would describe.

Is it wonderful that this new conception of humanity should be morally transforming? that, for instance, it should impress even the African mind with the sanctity of human life?

Cannibalism disappears as soon as the Gospel becomes intelligible, and long before they accept it as individuals. A war arose between two villages, in a community where I had preached not more than a year, for the people had recently come from the far interior where cannibalism was commonly practiced. The town making the attack came on a very dark night, intending to set fire to the other town, which only required that the blaze be started in one place, the houses being so close that all must burn together. They were led by two young men whom I knew. While the rest of the party were hiding, these two, going forward, saturated the thatch roof of the first house with kerosene, and were striking a match, when the noise was heard by the man inside. He quietly arose, moving stealthily as a cat, opened the door, and discovered the two young men standing a few yards in front of him. He took deliberate aim and fired twice. One man fell dead instantly; the other, frightfully wounded, reached his friends, who put him in a canoe and took him back to his town, where he died a few days later. I have said that one of the two fell in the street. A few years ago they would have eagerly devoured the body, both as a feast, and as a fetish protection against the enemy. The fetish belief still remained strong as ever, but they revolted from the practice; and having cut the body in pieces and boiled it, they smeared the grease upon their foreheads and breasts, hoping that it would thus avail for their protection. But they did not taste it. In former times they would actually boast of eating an enemy; now these same people are ashamed to confess it, and it is the most offensive charge that one town can make against another.

The old chief to whom I have already referred, who laid at my feet the sacred fetish of his father’s brains, told me how that he was persuaded to give it up by a neighbouring chief (one whom I had instructed) who had come to his town, not to make war and kill, as formerly, but in a spirit of peace, and had stayed many days in order to tell the people the things which he had recently learned. He had said that he and they must stop making war with each other; that one God was Father of them all, who also loved them all; that they must throw away their fetishes, entrust themselves to God’s care, believe in His Son and do right; and even if they suffered for it in this world there was a life to come in which they would be fully rewarded. This same chief, who was speaking to me, had had seven wives; but at the instance of his new faith he put away six of them and refused to accept a dowry for those whom he put away.

The Christians among them refuse to accept the dowry for daughter or sister; and polygamy of course is forbidden. Wars are less and less frequent; and the sanctity of human life has taken such a hold of mind and heart that it must henceforth be a governing principle among them.

How completely the Gospel of Christ can transform the invisible world to the mind of the African and vanquish his abject and demoralizing fear of spirits was proved by the numbers of men who began coming to me, some of them from towns far away, in order to surrender the skulls of their fathers, the most potent fetish known to the African for protection against the hostility of the spirits. I found myself in possession of heaps of these uncanny skulls, and I did not quite know what to do with them. One day, a man, having heard that I was going to bring them to America, came to me in alarm to ask whether I had considered the possible consequences of confusion at the resurrection if the heads of these Africans should be transported to the other side of the sea.

The voluntary surrender of a father’s skull is the strongest possible evidence of the sincerity of an African’s faith in Christ, and his salvation from the paralyzing fear of spirits.

The disciples, that stormy night on Galilee, thought they saw a ghost, and in their fear of the ghost they forgot their fear of the tornado that was threatening to engulf them. But at the sound of a well-known voice, “It is I; be not afraid,” their fear becomes joy, and Peter even cries out: “Lord, bid me come unto Thee.”

The story is one that always appealed to the Fang of the Gaboon. For, in bringing their garden produce to the morning market, they must cross the bay at night in their frail canoes, and they all know what it means to be overtaken by the sudden fury of a tropical storm until they have despaired of reaching the land. And it is with the African as with the disciples, his fear of the supernatural is always greater than his fear of the natural, and confidence in Christ casts out all fear. So also in the last hour, when about to pass out of this life into the dread world of spirits, I have seen him meet death without fear. For he hears the voice of Jesus saying: “It is I; be not afraid,” and he responds: “Lord, bid me come unto Thee.”