white, fails to do, whether for good or evil, usually gives you a
truer knowledge of the man than the things he succeeds in
doing. When you fully realise this acuteness on one hand
and this mechanical incapacity on the other which exist in
the people you are studying, you can go ahead. Only, I
beseech you, go ahead carefully. When you have found the
easy key that opens the reason underlying a series of facts, as
for example, these: a Benga spits on your hand as a greeting ;
you see a man who has been marching regardless through the
broiling sun all the forenoon, with a heavy load, on entering
a village and having put down his load, elaborately steal round
in the shelter of the houses, instead of crossing the street; you
come across a tribe that cuts its dead up into small pieces and
scatters them broadcast, and another tribe that thinks a white
man’s eye-ball is a most desirable thing to be possessed of—
do not, when you have found this key, drop your collecting
work, and go home with a shriek of “ I know all about Fetish f
because you don’t, for the key to the above facts will not open
the reason why it is regarded advisable to kill a person who
is making Ikung; or why you should avoid at night a cotton
tree that has red earth at its roots £ or why combings of hair and
paring of nails should be taken care o f ; or why a speck of
blood that may fall from your flesh should be cut out o f wood—
if it has fallen on that— and destroyed, and if it has. fallen on
the ground stamped and rubbed into the soil with great care.
This set requires another key entirely.
I must warn you also that your own mind requires protection
when you send it stalking the savage idea through the tangled
forests, the dark caves, the swamps and the fogs of the
Ethiopian intellect. The best protection lies in recognising
the untrustworthiness of human evidence regarding the unseen
and also the seen, when it is viewed by a person who has in
his mind an explanation of the phenomenon before it occurs.
For example, take a person' who, believing in ghosts, sees a
white figure in a churchyard, bolts home, has fits, and on revival
states he has seen a ghost, and gives details. He has seen a
ghost and therefore he is telling the truth. Another person
who does not believe in ghosts sees the thing, flies at it and
finds its component parts are boy and bed-sheet.
Do not applaud this individual, for he is quite conceited
enough to make him comfortable ; yet when he says the
phenomenon was a boy and a bed-sheet, he is also telling the
truth, and not much more of the truth than observer number
one, for, after all, inside the boy there is a real ghost that
made him go and do the thing. I know many people have
doubts as to the existence of souls in small boys of this
class, holding that they contain only devils; but devils can
become ghosts, according to a mass of testimony. Great as
the protection to the mind is, to keep it, as Hans Breitmann
says, “ still skebdical,” I warn you that, with all precaution,
the study of African metaphysics is bad for the brain, when
you go and carry it on among all the weird, often unaccountable
surroundings, and depressing scenery of the Land of the
Shadow of Death— a land that stretches from Goree to
Loanda.
The fascination of the African point of view is a.s sure to
linger in your mind as the malaria in your body. Never then
will you be able to attain ito the gay, happy cock-sureness
regarding the Deity and the Universe of those people who .
stay at home, and'whom the Saturday so aptly called “ the
suburban agnostics.” You will always feel inclined to
ask this class of people, “ Y e s ; well, what is Force? What
is Motion ; and above all, tell me what is Matter that you talk
so glibly of? and if so wh^?” And the suburban agnostic
looks down on you, and says pityingly, “ Read Schopenhauer
and Clifford,” as if he were ordering you pills ; which revolts
you, and you retort “ Read Kant and Darwin,” and the conversation
disappears into a fog of words.
The truth is, the study of natural phenomena knocks the
bottom out of any man’s conceit if it is done honestly and
not by selecting only those facts that fit in with his pre-con-
ceived or ingrafted notions. And, to my mind, the wisest way
is to get into the state of mind of an old marine engineer who
oils and sees that every screw and bolt of his engines is clean
and well watched, and who loves them as living things, caressing
and scolding them himself, defending them, with stormy
language, against the aspersions of the silly, uninformed outside
world, which persists in regarding them as mere machines, a