Had merely
informed him that "White man live for come from X," a place where he
knew there was another factory belonging to his firm, and he
naturally thought it was the agent from X who had come across.
You rarely, indeed I believe never, find an African with a gift for
picturesque descriptions of scenery. The nearest approach to it I
ever got was from my cook when we were on Mungo mah Lobeh. He
proudly boasted he had been on a mountain, up Cameroon River, with a
German officer, and on that mountain, "If you fall down one side you
die, if you fall down other side you die."
Graphic and vivid descriptions of incidents you often get, but it is
not Art. The effect is produced entirely by a bald brutality of
statement, the African having no artistic reticence whatsoever. One
fine touch, however, which does not come in under this class was
told me by my lamented friend Mr. Harris of Calabar. Some years ago
he had out a consignment of Dutch clocks with hanging weights, as is
natural to the Dutch clock. They were immensely popular among the
chiefs, and were soon disposed of save one, which had seen trouble
on the voyage out and lost one of its weights. Mr. Harris, who was
a man of great energy and resource, melted up some metal spoons and
made a new weight and hung it on the clock. The day he finished
this a chief came in, anxious for a Dutch clock, and Mr. Harris
forthwith sold him the repaired one. About a week elapsed, and then
the chief turned up at the factory again with a rueful countenance,
followed by a boy carrying something swathed in a cloth. It was the
clock.
"You do me bad too much, Mr. Harris," said the chief. Mr. Harris
denied this on the spot with the vehemence of injured innocence.
The chief shook his head and spat profusely and sorrowfully.
"You no sabe him clock you done sell me?" said he. "When I look him
clock it no be to-day, it be to morrow." Mr. Harris took the clock
back, to see what was the cause of this strange state of affairs.
Of course it arose from his having been too liberal in the amount of
spoon in the weight, and this being altered, the chief was not
hurried onward to his grave at such a rattling pace; "but," said Mr.
Harris, "that clock was a flyer to the last."
But I will not go into the subject of African languages here, but
only remark of them that although they are elaborate enough to
produce, for their users, nearly every shade of erroneous statement,
they are not, save perhaps M'pongwe, elaborate enough to enable a
native to state his exact thought. Some of them are very dependent
on gesture. When I was with the Fans they frequently said, "We will
go to the fire so that we can see what they say," when any question
had to be decided after dark, and the inhabitants of Fernando Po,
the Bubis, are quite unable to converse with each other unless they
have sufficient light to see the accompanying gestures of the
conversation. In all cases I feel sure the African's intelligence
is far ahead of his language.
The African is usually great at dreams, and has them very noisily;
but he does not seem to me to attach immense importance to them,
certainly not so much as the Red Indian does. I doubt whether there
is much real ground for supposing that from dreams came man's first
conception of the spirit world, and I think the origin of man's
religious belief lies in man's misfortunes.
There can be little doubt that the very earliest human beings found,
as their descendants still find, their plans frustrated, let them
plan ever so wisely and carefully; they must have seen their
companions overtaken by death and disaster, arising both from things
they could see and from things they could not see. The distinction
between these two classes of phenomena is not so definitely
recognised by savages or animals as it is by the more cultured races
of humanity. I doubt whether a savage depends on his five senses
alone to teach him what the world is made of, any more than a Fellow
of the Royal Society does. From this method of viewing nature I
feel sure that the general idea arose - which you find in all early
cultures - that death was always the consequence of the action of
some malignant spirit, and that there is no accidental or natural
death, as we call it; and death is, after all, the most impressive
attribute of life.
If a man were knocked on the head with a club, or shot with an
arrow, the cause of death is clearly the malignancy of the person
using these weapons; and so it is easy to think that a man killed by
a fallen tree, or by the upsetting of a canoe in the surf, or in an
eddy in the river, is also the victim of some being using these
things as weapons.
A man having thus gained a belief that there are more than human
actors in life's tragedy, the idea that disease is also a
manifestation of some invisible being's wrath and power seems to me
natural and easy; and he knows you can get another man for a
consideration to kill or harm a third party, and so he thinks that,
for a consideration, you can also get one of these superhuman
beings, which we call gods or devils, but which the African regards
in another light, to do so.
A certain set of men and women then specialise off to study how
these spirits can be managed, and so arises a priesthood; and the
priests, or medicine men as they are called in their earliest forms,
gradually, for their own ends, elaborate and wrap round their
profession with ritual and mystery.
