Fetichism in West Africa. Robert Hamill Nassau
met, I have seen or heard of none whose religious thought was only a superstition.
Standing in the village street, surrounded by a company whom their chief has courteously summoned at my request, when I say to him, “I have come to speak to your people,” I do not need to begin by telling them that there is a God. Looking on that motley assemblage of villagers,—the bold, gaunt cannibal with his armament of gun, spear, and dagger; the artisan with rude adze in hand, or hands soiled at the antique bellows of the village smithy; women who have hasted from their kitchen fire with hands white with the manioc dough or still grasping the partly scaled fish; and children checked in their play with tiny bow and arrow or startled from their dusty street pursuit of dog or goat,—I have yet to be asked, “Who is God?”
Under the slightly varying form of Anyambe, Anyambie, Njambi, Nzambi, Anzam, Nyam, or, in other parts, Ukuku, Suku, and so forth, they know of a Being superior to themselves, of whom they themselves inform me that he is the Maker and Father. The divine and human relations of these two names at once give me ground on which to stand in beginning my address.
If suddenly they should be asked the flat question, “Do you know Anyambe?” they would probably tell any white visitor, trader, traveller, or even missionary, under a feeling of their general ignorance and the white man’s superior knowledge, “No! What do we know? You are white people and are spirits; you come from Njambi’s town, and know all about him!” (This will help to explain, what is probably true, that some natives have sometimes made the thoughtless admission that they “know nothing about a God.”) I reply, “No, I am not a spirit; and, while I do indeed know about Anyambe, I did not call him by that name. It’s your own word. Where did you get it?” “Our forefathers told us that name. Njambi is the One-who-made-us. He is our Father.” Pursuing the conversation, they will interestedly and voluntarily say, “He made these trees, that mountain, this river, these goats and chickens, and us people.”
That typical conversation I have had hundreds of times, under an immense variety of circumstances, with the most varied audiences, and before extremes of ignorance, savagery, and uncivilization, utterly barring out the admission of a probability that the tribe, audience, or individual in question had obtained a previous knowledge of the name by hearsay from adjacent more enlightened tribes. For the name of that Great Being was everywhere and in every tribe before any of them had become enlightened; varied in form in each tribe by the dialectic difference belonging to their own, and not imported from others,—for, where tribes are hundreds of miles apart or their dialects greatly differ, the variation in the name is great, e. g., “Suku,” of the Bihe country, south of the Kongo River and in the interior back of Angola, and “Nzam” of the cannibal Fang, north of the equator.
But while it is therefore undeniable that a knowledge of this Great Being exists among the natives, and that the belief is held that he is a superior and even a supreme being, that supremacy is not so great as what we ascribe to Jehovah. Nevertheless, I believe that the knowledge of their Anzam or Anyambe has come down—clouded though it be and fearfully obscured and marred, but still a revelation—from Jehovah Himself. Most of the same virtues which we in our enlightened Christianity commend, and many of the vices which we denounce, they respectively commend and denounce. No one of them praises to me theft or falsehood or murder. They speak of certain virtues as “good,” and of other things which are “bad,” though, just as do the depraved of Christian lands, they follow the vices they condemn. True, certain evils they do defend, e. g. (as did some of our New England ancestors) witchcraft executions, justifying them as judicial acts; and polygamy, considering it (as our civilized Mormons) a desirable social institution (but, unlike the Mormons, not claiming for it the sanction of religion); and slavery, regarded (as only a generation ago in the United States) as necessary for a certain kind of property. But theft, falsehood, and some other sins, when committed by others, their own consciences condemn,—closely covered up and blunted as those consciences may be,—thus witnessing with and for God.
While all this is true, their knowledge of God is almost simply a theory. It is an accepted belief, but it does not often influence their life. “God is not in all their thought.” In practice they give Him no worship. God is simply “counted out.”
Resuming my street-preaching conversation: Immediately after the admission by the audience of their knowledge of Anzam as the Creator and Father, I say, “Why then do you not obey this Father’s commands, who tells you to do so and so? Why do you disobey his prohibitions, who forbids you to do so and so? Why do you not worship him?” Promptly they reply: “Yes, he made us; but, having made us, he abandoned us, does not care for us; he is far from us. Why should we care for him? He does not help nor harm us. It is the spirits who can harm us whom we fear and worship, and for whom we care.”
Another witness on this subject is the Rev. Dr. J. L. Wilson.[9] Speaking of Africa and its Negro inhabitants, he says: “The belief in one great Supreme Being is universal. Nor is this idea held imperfectly or obscurely developed in their minds. The impression is so deeply engraved upon their moral and mental nature that any system of atheism strikes them as too absurd and preposterous to require a denial. Everything which transpires in the natural world beyond the power of man or of spirits, who are supposed to occupy a place somewhat higher than man, is at once and spontaneously ascribed to the agency of God. All the tribes in the country with which the writer has become acquainted (and they are not few) have a name for God; and many of them have two or more, significant of His character as a Maker, Preserver, and Benefactor. (In the Grebo country Nyiswa is the common name for God; but He is sometimes called Geyi, indicative of His character as Maker. In Ashanti He has two names: viz., Yankumpon, which signifies ‘My Great Friend,’ and Yemi, ‘My Maker.’) The people, however, have no correct idea of the character or attributes of the Deity. Destitute of (a written) revelation, and without any other means of forming a correct conception of His moral nature, they naturally reason up from their own natures, and, in consequence, think of Him as a being like themselves.
“Nor have they any correct notion of the control which God exercises over the affairs of the world. The prevailing notion seems to be that God, after having made the world and filled it with inhabitants, retired to some remote corner of the universe, and has allowed the affairs of the world to come under the control of evil spirits; and hence the only religious worship that is ever performed is directed to these spirits, the object of which is to court their favor, or ward off the evil effects of their displeasure.
“On some rare occasions, as at the ratification of an important treaty, or when a man is condemned to drink the ‘red-water ordeal,’ the name of God is solemnly invoked; and, what is worthy of note, is invoked three times with marked precision. Whether this involves the idea of a Trinity we shall not pretend to decide; but the fact itself is worthy of record. Many of the tribes speak of the ‘Son of God.’ The Grebos call him ‘Greh,’ and the Amina people, according to Pritchard, call him ‘Sankombum.’”
The following testimony I gather from conversations with the late Rev. Ibia j‘Ikĕngĕ, a native minister and member of the Presbytery of Corisco, who himself was born in heathenism. He stated:
That his forefathers believed in many inferior agencies who are under the control of a Superior Being; that they were therefore primitive monotheists. Under great emergencies they looked beyond the lower beings, and asked help of that Superior; before doing so, they prayed to him, imploring him as Father to help;
That the people of this country believed God made the world and everything in it; but he did not know whether they had had any ideas about creation from dust of the ground or in God’s likeness;
That they believed in the existence, in the first times, of a great man, who had simply to speak, and all things were made by the word of his power. As to man’s creation, a legend states it thus: Two eggs fell from on high. On striking the ground and breaking, one became a man and the other a woman. (Apparently there is no memory of any legend indicating the name, character, or work of the Holy Spirit.)
That there is a legend of a great chief of a village who always warned people not to eat of the fruit of a certain tree. Finally, he himself ate of it and died;
That