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.
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.
