affairs. The sun which rises and sets, the moon which
changes, the tides which come and go :— what do they care ?
Nothing 5 and what is more, sacrifice to them what you may,
you cannot get them to care about you and your affairs, and
so the savage turns his attention to those other spirits that do
take only too much interest, as is proved by those unexpected
catastrophes ; and, as their actions show, these spirits are all
malignant, so he deals with them just as he would deal with
a bad man whom he was desirous of managing. He flatters
and fees them, he deprives himself of riches to give to them as
sacrifices, believing they will relish it all the more because it
gives him pain of some sort to give it to them. He holds
that they think it will be advisable for them to encourage him
to continue the giving by occasionally doing what he asks
them. Naturally he never feels sure of them ; he sees that
you may sacrifice to a god for years, you may wrap him up
- or more properly speaking, the object in which he resides_
in your only cloth on chilly nights while you shiver yourself;
you and your children, and your mother, and your sister and
her children, may go hungry that food may rot upon his
shrine; and yet, in some hour of dire necess'i-ty, the power will
not come and save you— because he has been lured away by
some richer gifts than yours.
You white men will say, “ Why go on believing in him then ? ”
but that is an idea that does not enter the African mind, ■ I
might just as well say " Why do you go on believing in the
existence of hansom cabs,” because one hansom cab driver
malignantly fails to take you where you want to go, or fails
to arrive in time to catch a train you wished to catch.
The African fully knows the liability of his fetish to fail, but
he equally fully knows its power. One, to me, grandly tragic
instance of this I learnt at Opobo. There was a very great
Fetish doctor there, universally admired and trusted, who
lived out on the land at the mouth of the Great River. One
day he himself fell sick, and he made ju-ju against the sickness
; but it held on, and he grew worse. He made more ju-ju
of greater power, but again in vain, and then he made the
greatest ju-ju man can make, and it availed nought, and he
knew he was d y in g ; and so, with his remaining strength, he
broke up and dishonoured and destroyed all the Fetishes in
which the spirits lived, and cast them out into the surf and
died like a man.
Then horror came upon the people when they knew he had
done this, and they burnt his house and all things belonging
to him, and cried upon the spirits not to forsake them, not to
lay this one man’s deadly sin at their doors. I rather doubt
whether those spirits have come round yet, for Dr. Tompstone
wrote to me that last November, just when their yearly plays
were in full swing, to make sure of having fine weather for
them, Opobo “ called in a noted consultant from up river and,”
says the Doctor with a gracious sympathy for a fellow medical
man, “ it has rained in torrents ever since. It is very rough
on him, as I believe he did his best and sacrificed large
numbers of fowls.”
In connection with the gods of West Africa I may remark
that in almost all the series of native tradition there, you will
find accounts of a time when there was direct intercourse
between the gods or spirits that live in the sky, and men. That
intercourse is always said to have been cut off by some human
error ; for example, the Fernando Po people say that once upon
a time there was no trouble or serious disturbance upon earth
because there was a ladder, made like the one you get palm-nuts
with, “ only long, long ; ” and this ladder reached from earth to
heaven so the gods could go up and down it and attend personally
to mundane affairs. But one day a cripple boy started to
go up the ladder, and he had got a long way up when his mother
saw him, and went up in pursuit. The gods, horrified at the
prospect of having boys and women invading heaven, threw
down the ladder, and have since left humanity severely alone.
The Timneh people, north-east of Sierra Leone, say that in old
times God was very friendly with men, and when He thought
a man had lived long enough on earth, He sent a messenger
to him telling him to come up into the sky, and stay with
Him ; but once there was a man who, when the messenger of
God came, did not want to leave his wives, his slaves, and his
riches, and so the messenger had to go back without him ; and
God was very cross and sent another messenger for him, who
was called Disease, but the man would not come for him either,