These are almost all
malevolent; sometimes they can be coaxed into having creditable
feelings, like generosity and gratitude, but you can never trust
them. No, not even if you are yourself a well-established medicine
man. Indeed they are particularly dangerous to medicine men, just
as lions are to lion tamers, and many a professional gentleman in
the full bloom of his practice, gets eaten up by his own particular
familiar which he has to keep in his own inside whenever he has not
sent it off into other people's.
I am indebted to the Reverend Doctor Nassau for a great quantity of
valuable information regarding Bantu religious ideas - information
which no one is so competent to give as he, for no one else knows
the West Coast Bantu tribes with the same thoroughness and sympathy.
He has lived among them since 1851, and is perfectly conversant with
their languages and culture, and he brings to bear upon the study of
them a singularly clear, powerful, and highly-educated intelligence.
I shall therefore carefully ticket the information I have derived
from him, so that it may not be mixed with my own. I may be wrong
in my deductions, but Dr. Nassau's are above suspicion.
He says the origin of these spirits is vague - some of them come into
existence by the authority of Anzam (by which you will understand,
please, the same god I have quoted above as having many names),
others are self-existent - many are distinctly the souls of departed
human beings, "which in the future which is all around them" retain
their human wants and feelings, and the Doctor assures me he has
heard dying people with their last breath threatening to return as
spirits to revenge themselves upon their living enemies. He could
not tell me if there was any duration set upon the existence as
spirits of these human souls, but two Congo Francais natives, of
different tribes, Benga and Igalwa, told me that when a family had
quite died out, after a time its spirits died too. Some, but by no
means all, of these spirits of human origin, as is the case among
the Negro Effiks, undergo reincarnation. The Doctor told me he once
knew a man whose plantations were devastated by an elephant. He
advised that the beast should be shot, but the man said he dare not
because the spirit of his dead father had passed into the elephant.
Their number is infinite and their powers as varied as human
imagination can make them; classifying them is therefore a difficult
work, but Doctor Nassau thinks this may be done fairly completely
into: -
1. Human disembodied spirits - Manu.
2. Vague beings, well described by our word ghosts: Abambo.
3. Beings something like dryads, who resent intrusion into their
territory, on to their rock, past their promontory, or tree.
