Fetichism in West Africa. Robert Hamill Nassau
of a custom which is observed when a village has been afflicted with various troubles after the death of one of its members. The villagers, after ineffectual efforts to drive away the evil influences that are supposed to cause these troubles, decide that the spirit of some dead relative is dissatisfied about something, and order the grave to be opened and the bones rearranged or even thrown into the river or sea. On opening the grave, corpses that had been buried in a recumbent position have been found in a sitting position. It is possible for one thus prematurely buried to change posture in a dying struggle; for, mostly, heathen graves are shallow, and are hastily and not always completely filled in.
(3) Another set of witnesses will say that, besides the personal soul and the soul of the body, there is a third entity in the human unit, namely, a dream-soul. That it is which leaves the body on occasions during sleep, and, wandering off, delights itself by visiting strange lands and strange scenes. On its return to the body its union with the material blunts its perceptions, and the person, in his efforts to remember or tell what he has seen, relates only the vagaries of a dream,—a psychological view which, under the manipulation of a ready pen, could give play to fantasies pretty, romantic, not unreasonable, and not impossible.
Some who are only dualists, nevertheless, believe in the wanderings of this so-called dream-soul, but say that it is the personal soul itself that has gone out and has returned. Both dualists and trinitarians add that sometimes in its wanderings this soul loses its way and cannot find its body, its material home; should it never return, the person will sicken and die.
(4) A fourth entity is vaguely spoken of by some as a component part of the human personality, by others as separate but closely associated from birth to death, and called the life-spirit. Some speak of it as a civilized person speaks of a guardian angel. Regarded in that light, it should not be considered as one of the several kinds of souls, but as one of the various classes of spirits (which will be discussed in a subsequent chapter). To it worship is rendered by its possessor as to other spirits,—a worship, however, different from that which is performed for what are known and used as “familiar spirits.” Others speak of the vague life-spirit as the “heart.” The organ of our anatomy which we designate by that name, they call by a word which variously means “heart” or “feelings,” much like our old English “bowels,” the same word being employed equally to designate a physical organ and a mental state. Considering the organic heart as the seat (or a seat) of life, the natives believe that by witchcraft a person in health can be deprived of his life-soul, or “heart”; that he will then sicken; that the wizard or witch feasts in his or her magic orgy on this “heart,” and that the person will die if that heart is not returned to him.
II. Number.
But whatever this human soul may be, whether existing in unity, duality, trinity, or quadruplicity, all agree in believing that it adds itself, on the death of the body, as another to the multitudinous company of the spirit-world. That world is all around us, and does not differ much in its wants and characteristics from this earthly life, except that it is free from some of the limitations to which material bodies are subject. In that spirit-world they require the same food as when on earth, but consume only its essence; the visible substance remains. They are possessed of all their human passions, both bad and good. Men expect to have their wives with them in that future, but I have never heard the idea even named, that there is procreation by spirits in that after-world. Not having believed during this life in a system of reward and punishment, they have no belief in heaven or hell. All the dead go to Njambi’s Town, and live in that new life together, good and bad, as they lived together on earth. The “hell” spoken of by some of my informants, I believe, is not a native thought; it was probably engrafted on the coast tribes by the Portuguese Roman Catholic missionaries of three hundred years ago.
If therefore the spirits consist almost entirely of the souls of departed human beings, how immense their number! Equal in number with all the dead that have passed from this life in the ages gone by, excepting those who have gone permanently into the bodies of new human beings. That form of metempsychosis is believed in. Occasional instances of belief of transmigration into the body of a lower animal do not necessarily include the idea of a permanent residence there, or that the departed soul has lost its personality as a human being and has become the soul of a beast.
But the idea of reappearance in the body of a newly born child was formerly believed in, especially in regard to white people. Thirty years ago I wrote:[23] “Down the swift current of the Benita, as of other rivers on the coast, are swept floating islands of interlaced rushes, tangled vines, and water-lilies that, clinging to some projecting log from the marshy bank, had gathered the sand and mud of successive freshets, and gave a precarious footing for the pandanus, whose wiry roots bound all in one compact mass. Then some flood had torn that mass away, and the pandanus still waving its long, bayonet-like leaves, convolvuli still climbing and blooming, and birds still nesting trustfully, the floating island glided past native eyes down the stream, out over the bar, and on toward the horizon of broad ocean. What beyond? Native superstition said that at the bottom of the ‘great sea’ was ‘whiteman’s land’; that thither some of their own departed friends found their happy future, exchanging a dusky skin for a white one; that there white man’s magic skill at will created the beads, and cloth, and endless wealth that came from that unknown land in ships, in whose masts and rigging and sails were recognized the transformed trees and vines and leaves of those floating islands. When on the 12th of July, 1866, a few with bated breath came to look on my little new-born Paull, the only white child most of the community had seen, and the first born in that Benita region, the old people said, ‘Now our hopes are dead. Dying, we had hoped to become like you; but verily ye are born as we.’”
Not long after I had arrived at Corisco Island in 1861 I observed among the many people who came to see the new missionary one man who quietly and unobtrusively but very steadily was gazing at me. After a while he mustered courage and addressed me: “Are you not my brother,—my brother who died at such a time, and went to White Man’s Land?” I was at that time new to the superstitions of the country; his meaning had to be explained to me. His thought of relationship was not an impossible one, for many of the Bantu Negroes have somewhat Caucasian-like features. I have often seen men and women at the sight of whom I was surprised, and I would remark to a fellow-missionary: “How much this person reminds me of So-and-so in America!” This recognition of resemblance of features to white persons living in America was the third step in my acquaintance with native faces. At first, all Negro faces looked alike. Presently I learned differences; and when I had reached the third step, I felt that my acquaintance with African features was complete.
III. Locality.
The locality of these spirits is not only vaguely in the surrounding air; they are also localized in prominent natural objects,—caves, enormous rocks, hollow trees, dark forests,—in this respect reminding one of classic fauns and dryads. While all have the ability to move from place to place, some especially belong to certain localities which are spoken of as having, as the case might be, “good” or “bad” spirits. It is possible for a human soul (as already mentioned in this chapter) to inhabit the body of a beast. A man whose plantation was being devastated near Benita by an elephant told me, in 1867, he did not dare to shoot it, because the spirit of his lately deceased father had passed into it. Also a common objurgation of an obstreperous child or animal is, “O na nyemba!” (Thou hast a witch.)
Their habitats may be either natural or acquired. Natural ones are, for the spirits of the dead, in a very special sense, the villages where they had dwelt during the lifetime of the body; but the presence of the spirits of the dead is not desired. It is one of the pitiable effects of African superstition that its subjects look with fear and dread on what the denizens of civilization look with love and tender regret. We in our Christian civilization cling to the lifeless forms of our dead; and when necessity compels us to bury them from our sight, we bid memory call up every lineament of face and tone of voice, and are pleased to think that sometimes they are near us. But it is a frequent native practice that on the occasion of a death, even while a portion of the family are wailing and to all appearances passionately mourning the loss of their relative, others are firing guns, blowing trumpets, beating drums, shouting and yelling, in order to drive away from the village the recently