and so Disease sent back word to God that he must have help
to biing the man ; and so God sent another messenger whose
name was Death ; and Disease and Death together got hold of
the man, and took him to God ; and God said in future He
would always send these messengers to fetch men.
The Fernando Po legend may be taken as fairly pure
African, but the Timneh, I expect, is a transmogrified Arabic
story though I do not know of anything like it among Arabic
stories , but they are infinite in quantity, and there is a certain
ring about it I recognise, and these Timnehs are much in
contact with the Mohammedan, Mandingoes, &c. In none of
the African stories is there given anything like the importance
to dreams that there is given to attempts to account for accidents
and death ; and surely it must have been more impressive
and important to a man to have got his leg or arm snapped
off by a crocodile in the river, or by a shark in the surf, or to
have got half killed, or have seen a friend killed by a falling
tree in the forest in the day time, than to have experienced
the most wonderful of dreams. He sees that however terrific
his dream-experiences may have been, he was not much the
worse for them. Not so in the other case, a limb gone or a life
gone is more impressive, and more necessary to account for.
No trace of sun-worship have I ever found. The firmament
is, I believe, always the great indifferent and neglected god, the
Nyan Kupon of the Tschwi, and the Anzambe, Nzam, &c., of
the Bantu races. The African thinks this god has great power
if he would only exert it, and when things go very badly with
him, when the river rises higher than usual and sweeps away his
home and his plantations ; when the smallpox stalks through
the land, and day and night the corpses float down the river
past him, and he finds them jammed among his canoes that
are tied to the beach, and choking up his fish traps j and then
when at last the death-wail over its victims goes up night and
day from his own village, he will rise up and call upon this
great god in the terror maddened by despair, that he may
hear and restrain the evil workings of these lesser devils •
but he evidently finds, as Peer Gynt says, “ Nein, er hört
nicht. Er ist taub wie gewöhnlich ” for there is no organised
cult for Anzam.
Accounts of apparitions abound in all the West Coast
districts, and although the African holds them all in high
horror and terror, he does not see anything supernatural in
his “ Duppy.” It is a horrid thing to happen on, but there
is nothing strange about it, and he is ten thousand times more
frightened than puzzled over the affair. He does not want to
“ investigate” to see whether there is anything in it. He wants
to get clear away, and make ju-ju against it, “ one time.
These apparitions have a great variety of form, for, firstly,
there are all the true spirits, nature spirits ; secondly, the spirits
of human beings— these human spirits are held to exist before
as well as during and after bodily life ; thirdly, the spirits of
things. Probably the most horrid of class one is the Tschwi’s
Sasabonsum. Whether Sasabonsum is an individual or a class
is not quite clear, but I believe he is a class of spirits, each
individual of which has the same characteristics, the same
manner of showing anger, the same personal appearance, and
the same kind of residence. I am a devoted student of his
cult and I am always coming across equivalent forms of him
in other tribes as well as the Tschwi, and I think he is very
early. I see no reason why gorillas should not believe in
Sasabonsum, only unfortunately Dr. Gamer has not given us
that grammar and dictionary of Gorillese, so I cannot question
these interesting people on the point. As the Tschwi have
got their religious notions in a most tidy and definite state,
we will take their version of Sasabonsum.
He lives in the forest, in or under those great silk-cotton
trees around the roots of which the earth is red. This
coloured earth identifies a silk-cotton tree as being the residence
of a Sasabonsum, as its colour is held to arise from the
blood it whips off him as he goes down to his under-world
home after a night’s carnage. All silk-cotton trees are suspected
because they are held to be the roosts for Duppies.
But the red earth ones are feared with a great fear, and no one
makes a path by them, or a camp near them at night.
Sasabonsum is a friend of witches. He is of enormous
size, and of a red colour. He wears his hair straight and he
waylays unprotected wayfarers in the forest at night, and in
all districts except that of Apollonia he eats them. Round