Fetichism in West Africa. Robert Hamill Nassau

whom he appeals is not God. True, he does not deny that He is; if asked, he will acknowledge His existence. But that is all. Very rarely and only in extreme emergencies, does he make an appeal to Him; for he thinks God so far off, so inaccessible, so indifferent to human woes and wants, that a petition to Him would be almost in vain. He therefore turns to some one of the mass of spirits which he believes to be ever near and observant of human affairs, in which, as former human beings, some of them once had part.

      As to the character of the salvation sought, it is not spiritual; it is a purely physical salvation. A sense of moral and spiritual need is lost sight of, although not eliminated. This is an index of the distance the Negro has travelled away from Jehovah before he finally reached the position of placing his trust in a fetich. By just so much as he seems to himself living in a world crowded with unseen but powerful spiritual beings (with whom what a Christian calls “sin” has no reprehensible moral quality), by just so much he seems to have lost sight of his own soul and its moral necessities.

      The future is so vague that in the thought of most tribes it contains neither heaven nor hell; there is no certain reward or rest for goodness, nor positive punishment for badness. The future life is to each native largely a reproduction, on shadowy and intangible lines, of the works and interests and passions of this earthly life. In his present life, with its savagery and oppression and dominance of selfish greed and right of might, goodness has no reward. It is badness which in his personal experience makes the largest gains. From this point of view, while some acts are indeed called “good” and some “bad” (conscience proving its simple existence by the use of these words in the record of language), yet conscience is not much troubled by its possessor’s badness. There is little sense of the sinfulness of sin. There is only fear of possible human injury by human or subsidized spiritual enemies. This is all the salvation that is sought.

      It is sought by prayer; by sacrifice, and by certain other ceremonies rendered to the spirit of the fetich or to other non-localized spirits; and by the use of charms or amulets.

      These charms may be vocal, ritual, or material.

      (1) The vocal are the utterance of cabalistic words deprecatory of evil or supplicatory of favor, which are supposed in a vague way to have power over the local spirits. These words or phrases, though sometimes coined by a person for himself or herself (and therefore like our slang having a known meaning), are often archaisms, handed down from ancestors and believed to possess efficiency, but whose meaning is forgotten. In this list would be included long incantations by the magic doctors and the Ibâtâ-blown blessing.

      (2) Certain rites or ceremonies are performed for almost every child at some time during his or her infancy or youth, or subsequently as occasion may demand, in which a prohibition is laid upon the child in regard to the eating of some particular article of food or the doing of some special act. It is difficult to get at the exact object for this “orunda.” Certainly the prohibited food or act is not in itself evil; for all but the inhibited individual may eat of the food or commit the act as they please. Most natives blindly follow the “custom” of their ancestors, and are unable to give me the raison d’être of the rite itself. But I gather from the testimony of those best able to give a reason that the prohibited article or act is literally a sacrifice, ordained for the child by its parents and the magic doctor, as a gift to the governing spirit of its life. The thing prohibited thus becomes removed from the child’s common use and is made sacred to the spirit. It is therefore a sacrament. Any use of it by the child will thenceforth be a sacrilege which would draw down the spirit’s wrath in the form of sickness or other evil, and which can be atoned for only through expensive ceremonies and by gifts to the magician interceding for the offender.

      Anything may be selected for an orunda. I do not know the ground for a selection. Why one child, perhaps a babe too young to have eaten of the to-be-prohibited thing, should be debarred forever from eating a chicken, or the liver or any other particular part, or any portion at all, of a goat or an ox or any other animal, I do not know. But that orunda is thenceforth faithfully complied with, even under pangs of hunger. It is like a Nazarite’s vow.

      I have a strong suspicion that where the orunda laid on a woman is a matter of meat, superstition has played into the hands of masculine selfishness, and denies to women the choice meat in order that men may have the greater share. My suspicion rests on almost positive evidence in the case of some prohibitions to the women of the Bulu and other Fang tribes of the interior.

      On a boat journey in the Ogowe River, about 1878, I camped on the edge of a forest for the noon meal. My crew of four, members of the Galwa and Nkâmi tribes, had no meat. They needed it, for they had rowed hard and well. For myself, I had only a small chicken. I was satisfied with a portion of it, and gave the rest to the crew. It would make at least a tasty morsel for each, with their manioc bread. Three of them thanked me; the fourth did not touch his share. I felt slightly vexed, thinking my favor was not appreciated, and I asked the cause of his apparent sullenness. He said he did not dare to eat of the fowl, as it was orunda to him.

      On another journey, in 1876, a young man whom I had picked up as extra hand in my boat’s crew, when at the noon mealtime we stopped under the shade of a spreading tree by the river’s bank, instead of respectfully leaving me alone with my lunch in the boat, and going ashore where the others were eating, wanted to remain in the boat, his orunda being that when on a journey by water his food should be eaten only over water.

      Two Ogowe chiefs, near whose villages was anchored the small river steamer “Pioneer,” on which I was passenger, in 1875, came aboard, and in drinking a glass of liquor with the captain, one of them held up a piece of white cloth before his mouth, in order that strangers’ eyes might not see him swallow. That was his orunda, probably. Perhaps also the hiding of his drinking may have had reference to the common fear of another’s “evil eye.”

      The other, having taken a mouthful, wet his finger in his mouth, drew the wet finger across his throat, and then blew on a fetich which he wore as a ring on a finger of the other hand. I do not know the significance of his motion across his throat. The blowing was the Ibâtâ-blessing,—an ejaculatory prayer for a blessing on his plans, probably of trade.

      This word “orunda,” meaning thus originally prohibited from human use (like the South Sea “taboo”), grew, under missionary hands, into its related meaning of sacred to spiritual use. It is the word by which the Mpongwe Scriptures translate our word “holy.” I think it an unfortunate choice; for the missionary has to stop and explain that orunda, as used for God, does not mean the orunda used by mankind. In the translation of the Benga Scriptures the word “holy” was transferred bodily, and we explain that it means something better than good. To such straits are translators sometimes reduced in the use of heathen languages!

      (3) The charms that are most common are material, the fetich,—so common, indeed, that by the universality of their use, and the prominence given to them everywhere, in houses and on the person, they almost monopolize the religious thought of the Bantu Negro, subordinating other acknowledged points of his theology, dominating his almost entire religious interest, and giving the departmental word “fetich” such overwhelming regard that it has furnished the name distinctive of the native African religious system, viz., fetichism. “Fetich” is an English word of Portuguese origin. “It is derived from feitico, ‘made,’ ‘artificial’ (compare the old English fetys, used by Chaucer); and this term, used of the charms and amulets worn in the Roman Catholic religion of the period, was applied, by the Portuguese sailors of the eighteenth century, to the deities they saw worshipped by the Negroes of the West Coast of Africa.

      “De Brosses, a French savant of the last century, brought the word ‘fetichism’ into use as a term for the type of religion of the lowest races. The word has given rise to some confusion, having been applied, by Comte and other writers, to the worship of the heavenly bodies and of the great features of Nature. It is best to limit it to the worship of such natural objects as are reverenced, not for their own power or excellence, but because they are supposed to be occupied each by a spirit.”[29]

      The native word on the Liberian coast is “gree-gree”; in the Niger Delta, “ju-ju”; in the Gabun country, “monda”; among the cannibal Fang,