CHAPTER XX
FETISH— (Continued)
In which the Voyager discourses on deaths and witchcraft, and, with no
intentional slur on the medical profession, on medical methods and
burial customs, concluding with sundry observations on twins.
It is exceedingly interesting to compare the ideas of the
Negroes with those of the Bantu. A t present I have
a more definite knowledge of the former, but I have
gained sufficient knowledge of the West Coast Bantu to be
able to commence a regular comparative study of these two
analogous, but by no means identical, sets of ideas.
I fancy you find the earliest forms, both of religion and
witchcraft, among the negroes, and I hope in some future
sojourn on the Bantu border-line to work up the subject
more thoroughly, for it is one of great interest to the student
of mental evolution.
The mental condition of the lower forms of both races
seems very near the other great border-line that separates
man from the anthropoid apes, and I believe that if we had
the material, or rather if we could understand it, we should
find little or no gap existing in mental evolution in this old,
undisturbed continent of Africa.
There is one point in evolution, and one only, on which
I am a little heterodox, and that is the dogma that all human
beings came in the beginning from a single pair, appearing
somewhere in Asia, and that their descendants then migrated
about the earth accustoming themselves, their religion, their
cooking, and their culture to new environments, turning the
while all sorts of colours, and developing peculiarities of no
mortal use, and half the time of no ornament, in the matter of
I know, of course, that the South-West Coast tribes have all
migrated from a region in the north-east that seems to be
perpetually throwing off tribe after tribe, which all come west,
and die out in the swamp-lands of the West Coast; but at the
same time we know, and have known for hundreds of years,
quite enough of the regions beyond those from which the
South-West Coast tribes— Duallas, M’pongwe, Benga, and Fan
have come during modern times, to be certain that these
interesting and striking-looking hosts of human beings have
not come trapesing across from Asia. I am not planting
an African garden of Eden to rival the Asiatic one. I am
only saying I agree with the French ethnologists and fancy
there have been several points of origin of the human race.
Let, however, these things be as they may, one thing about
Negro and Bantu races is very certain, and that is that their
lives are dominated by a profound belief in witchcraft and its
effects.
Among both alike the rule is that death is regarded as
a direct consequence of the witchcraft of some malevolent
human being, acting by means of spirits, over which he has,
by some means or another, obtained control.
To all rules there are exceptions. Among the Calabar
negroes, who are definite in their opinions, I found two classes
of exceptions. The first arises from their belief in a bush-
soul. They believe every man has four souls : «, the soul that
survives death j b, the shadow on the path ) c, the dream-soul ,■
d, the bush-soul.
This bush-soul is always in the form of an animal in the
forest never of a plant. Sometimes when a man sickens it
is because his bush-soul is angry at being neglected, and a
witch-doctor is called in, who, having diagnosed this as being
the cause of the complaint, advises the administration of
some kind of offering to the offended one. When you wander
about in the forests of the Calabar region, you will frequently
see little dwarf huts with these offerings in them. You must
not confuse these huts with those of similar construction you
are continually seeing in plantations, or near roads, which