The Savage Is Also Conscious Of Another Great Set Of Phenomena
Which, He Soon Learns, Take No Interest In Human Affairs.
The sun
which rises and sets, the moon which changes, the tides which come
and go:
- What do they care? Nothing; 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 necessity, 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 dying; 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.
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, and
so Disease sent back word to God that he must have help to bring 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,
etc. 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.
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