Remember, You Must Always Have
Your Original Material - Carefully Noted Down At The Time Of
Occurrence - With You, So That You May Say In Answer To His Why?
Because Of This, And This, And This.
However good may be the outfit for your work that you take with you,
you will have, at first, great difficulty in realising that it is
possible for the people you are among really to believe things in
the way they do.
And you cannot associate with them long before you
must recognise that these Africans have often a remarkable mental
acuteness and a large share of common sense; that there is nothing
really "child-like" in their form of mind at all. Observe them
further and you will find they are not a flighty-minded, mystical
set of people in the least. They are not dreamers, or poets, and
you will observe, and I hope observe closely - for to my mind this is
the most important difference between their make of mind and our
own - that they are notably deficient in all mechanical arts: they
have never made, unless under white direction and instruction, a
single fourteenth-rate piece of cloth, pottery, a tool or machine,
house, road, bridge, picture or statue; that a written language of
their own construction they none of them possess. A careful study
of the things a man, black or 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," 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 of; or why a speck of blood that may fall
from your flesh should be cut out of 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. 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
preconceived 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 thing his superior intelligence
and experience knows they are not. Even animistic-minded I got
awfully sat upon the other day in Cameroon by a superior but kindred
spirit, in the form of a First Engineer. I had thoughtlessly
repeated some scandalous gossip against the character of a naphtha
launch in the river. "Stuff!" said he furiously; "she's all right,
and she'd go from June to January if those blithering fools would
let her alone." Of course I apologised.
The religious ideas of the Negroes, i.e. the West Africans in the
district from the Gambia to the Cameroon region, say roughly to the
Rio del Rey (for the Bakwiri appear to have more of the Bantu form
of idea than the negro, although physically they seem nearer the
latter), differ very considerably from the religious ideas of the
Bantu South-West Coast tribes. The Bantu is vague on religious
subjects; he gives one accustomed to the Negro the impression that
he once had the same set of ideas, but has forgotten half of them,
and those that he possesses have not got that hold on him that the
corresponding or super-imposed Christian ideas have over the true
Negro; although he is quite as keen on the subject of witchcraft,
and his witchcraft differs far less from the witchcraft of the Negro
than his religious ideas do.
The god, in the sense we use the word, is in essence the same in all
of the Bantu tribes I have met with on the Coast: a non-interfering
and therefore a negligible quantity. He varies his name: Anzambi,
Anyambi, Nyambi, Nzambi, Anzam, Nyam, Ukuku, Suku, and Nzam, but a
better investigation shows that Nzam of the Fans is practically
identical with Suku south of the Congo in the Bihe country, and so
on.
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