the gallant bulls, some two inches long, will spin round and butt each other for a second or so, and then spin round again, and flap each other with their tails, their little red-edged fins and gill-covers growing crimson with fury. I never made out how you counted points in these fights, because no one ever seemed a scale the worse after even the most desperate duels.
Most of the West Coast tribes are inveterate fishermen. The Gold Coast native regards fishing as a low pursuit, more particularly oyster-fishing, or I should say oyster-gathering, for they are collected chiefly from the lower branches of the mangrove-trees; this occupation is, indeed, regarded as being only fit for women, and among all tribes the villages who turn their entire attention to fishing are regarded as low down in the social scale. This may arise from fetish reasons, but the idea certainly gains support from the conduct of the individual fisherman. Do not imagine Brother Anglers, that I am hinting that the Gentle Art is bad for the moral nature of people like you and me, but I fear it is bad for the African. You see, the African, like most of us, can resist anything but temptation—he will resist attempts to reform him, attempts to make him tell the truth, attempts to clothe, and keep him tidy, &c., and he will resist these powerfully; but give him real temptation and he succumbs, without the European preliminary struggle. He has by nature a kleptic bias, and you see being out at night fishing, he has chances—temptations, of succumbing to this—and so you see a man who has left his home at evening with only the intention of spearing fish, in his mind, goes home in the morning pretty often with his missionary’s ducks, his neighbours’ plantains, and a few odd trifles from the trader’s beaches, in his canoe, and the outer world says “Dem fisherman, all time, all same for one, with tief man.”[9]
The Accras, who are employed right down the whole West Coast, thanks to the valuable education given them by the Basel Mission as cooks, carpenters, and coopers, cannot resist fishing, let their other avocations be what they may. A friend of mine the other day had a new Accra cook. The man cooked well, and my friend vaunted himself, and was content for the first week. At the beginning of the second week the cooking was still good, but somehow or other, there was just the suspicion of a smell of fish about the house. The next day the suspicion merged into certainty. The third day the smell was insupportable, and the atmosphere unfit to support human life, but obviously healthy for flies.
The cook was summoned, and asked by Her Britannic Majesty’s representative “Where that smell came from?” He said he “could not smell it, and he did not know.” Fourth day, thorough investigation of the premises revealed the fact that in the back-yard there was a large clothes-horse which had been sent out by my friend’s wife to air his clothes; this was literally converted into a screen by strings of fish in the process of drying, i.e., decomposing in the sun.
The affair was eliminated from the domestic circle and cast into the Ocean by seasoned natives; and awful torture in this world and the next promised to the cook if he should ever again embark in the fish trade. The smell gradually faded from the house, but the poor cook, bereaved of his beloved pursuit, burst out all over in boils, and took to religious mania and drink, and so had to be sent back to Accra, where I hope he lives happily, surrounded by his beloved objects.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] Specimens of rock identified by the Geological Survey, London, as cretaceous, and said by other geologists up here to be possibly Jurassic.
[7] Clarias laviaps.
[8] Translation: “Leave it alone! Leave it alone! Throw it into the water at once! What did you catch it for?”
[9] Translation: “All fishermen are thieves.”
CHAPTER V.
FETISH.
Wherein the student of Fetish determines to make things quite clear this time, with results that any sage knowing the subject and the student would have safely prophesied; to which is added some remarks concerning the position of ancestor worship in West Africa.
The final object of all human desire is a knowledge of the nature of God. The human methods, or religions, employed to gain this object are divisible into three main classes, inspired—
Firstly, the submission to and acceptance of a direct divine message.
Secondly, the attempt by human intellectual power to separate the conception of God from material phenomena, and regard Him as a thing apart and unconditioned.
Thirdly, the attempt to understand Him as manifest in natural phenomena.
I personally am constrained to follow this last and humblest method, and accept as its exposition Spinoza’s statement of it, “Since without God nothing can exist or be conceived, it is evident that all natural phenomena involve and express the conception of God, as far as their essence and perfection extends. So we have a greater and more perfect knowledge of God in proportion to our knowledge of natural phenomena. Conversely (since the knowledge of an effect through a cause is the same thing as the knowledge of a particular property of a cause), the greater our knowledge of natural phenomena the more perfect is our knowledge of the essence of God which is the cause of all things.”[10] But I have a deep respect for all other forms of religion and for all men who truly believe, for in them clearly there is this one great desire of the knowledge of the nature of God, and “Ein guter Mensch in seinem dunkeln Drange Ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewuszt.” Nevertheless the most tolerant human mind is subject to a feeling of irritation over the methods whereby a fellow-creature strives to attain his end, particularly if those methods are a sort of heresy to his own, and therefore it is a most unpleasant thing for any religious-minded person to speak of a religion unless he either profoundly believes or disbelieves in it. For, if he does the one, he has the pleasure of praise; if he does the other, he has the pleasure of war, but the thing in between these is a thing that gives neither pleasure; it is like quarrelling with one’s own beloved relations. Thus it is with Fetish and me. I cannot say I either disbelieve or believe in it, for, on the one hand, I clearly see it is a religion of the third class; but, on the other, I know that Fetish is a religion that is regarded by my fellow white men as the embodiment of all that is lowest and vilest in man—not altogether without cause. Before speaking further on it, however, I must say what I mean by Fetish, for “the word of late has got ill sorted.”
I mean by Fetish the religion of the natives of the Western Coast of Africa, where they have not been influenced either by Christianity or Mohammedanism. I sincerely wish there were another name than Fetish which we could use for it, but the natives have different names for their own religion in different districts, and I do not know what other general name I could suggest, for I am sure that the other name sometimes used in place of Fetish, namely Juju, is, for all the fine wild sound of it, only a modification of the French word for toy or doll, joujou. The French claim to
