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.
They regard their god as the creator of man, plants, animals, and
the earth, and they hold that having made them, he takes no further
interest in the affair. But not so the crowd of spirits with which
the universe is peopled, they take only too much interest and the
Bantu wishes they would not and is perpetually saying so in his
prayers, a large percentage whereof amounts to "Go away, we don't
want you." "Come not into this house, this village, or its
plantations." He knows from experience that the spirits pay little
heed to these objurgations, and as they are the people who must be
attended to, he develops a cult whereby they may be managed, used,
and understood.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 206 of 371
Words from 108010 to 108580
of 194943
