to the Portuguese, and whether this claim can be sustained on historic evidence or no, it is certain that the French have been on the Coast in considerable numbers since the fifteenth century, and no doubt have long called the little objects they saw the natives valuing so strangely joujou, just as I have heard many a Frenchman do down there in my time. Therefore, believing Juju to mean doll or toy, I do not think it is so true a word as Fetish; and, after all, West Africa has a prior right to the use of this word Fetish, for it has grown up out of the word Feitiço used by the Portuguese navigators who rediscovered West Africa with all its wealth and worries for modern Europe. These worthy voyagers, noticing the veneration paid by Africans to certain objects, trees, fish, idols, and so on, very fairly compared these objects with the amulets, talismans, charms, and little images of saints they themselves used, and called those things similarly used by the Africans Feitiço, a word derived from the Latin factitius, in the sense magically artful. Modern French and English writers have adopted this word from the Portuguese; but it is a modern word in its present use. It is not in Johnson, and the term Fétichisme was introduced by De Brosses in his remarkable book, Du Culte des Dieux fetiches, 1760; but doubtless, as Professor Tylor points out, it has obtained a great currency from Comte’s use of it to denote a general theory of primitive religion. Professor Tylor, most unfortunately for us who are interested in West African religion, confines the use of the word to one department of his theory of animism only—namely to the doctrine of spirits embodied in, or attached to, or conveying influence through certain material objects.[11]
I do not in the least deny Professor Tylor’s right to use the word Fetish[12] in that restricted sense in his general study of comparative religion. I merely wish to mention that you cannot use it in this restricted sense, but want the whole of his grand theory of animism wherewith to describe the religion of the West Africans. For although there is in that religion a heavy percentage of embodied spirits, there is also a heavier percentage of unembodied spirits—spirits that have no embodiment in matter and spirits that only occasionally embody themselves in matter.
Take, for example, the gods of the Ewe and Tshi.[13] There is amongst them Tando, the native high god of Ashantee. He appears to his priesthood as a giant, tawny skinned, lank haired, and wearing the Ashantee robe. But when visiting the laity, on whom he is exceedingly hard, he comes in pestilence and tempest, or, for more individual village visitations, as a small and miserable boy, desolate and crying for help and kindness, which, when given to him, Tando repays by killing off his benefactors and their fellow-villagers with a certain disease. This trick, I may remark, is not confined to Tando, for several other West African gods use it when sacrifices to them are in arrears; and I am certain it is more at the back of outcast children being neglected than is either sheer indifference to suffering or cruelty. Because, fearing the disease, your native will be far more likely to remember he is in debt to the god and go and pay an instalment, than to take in that child whom he thinks is the god who has come to punish.
But you have only to look through Ellis’s important works, the “Tshi-speaking, Ewe-speaking, and Yoruba-speaking peoples of the West Coast of Africa,” to find many instances of the gods of Fetish who do not require a material object to manifest themselves in. And I, while in West Africa, have often been struck by incidents that have made this point clear to me. When I have been out with native companions after nightfall, they pretty nearly always saw an apparition of some sort, frequently apparitions of different sorts, in our path ahead. Then came a pause, and after they had seen the apparition vanish, on we went—not cheerily, however, until we were well past the place where it had been seen. This place they closely examined, and decided whether it was an Abambo, or Manu, or whatever name these spirit classes had in their local language, or whether it was something worse that had been there, such as a Sasabonsum or Ombuiri.
They knew which it was from the physical condition of the spot. Either there was nothing there but ordinary path stuff; or there was white ash, or there was a log or rock, or tree branch, and the reason for the different emotion with which they regarded this latter was very simple, for it had been an inferior class spirit, one that their charms and howled incantations could guard them against. When there was ash, it had been a witch destroyed by the medicine they had thrown at it, or a medium class spirit they could get protection from “in town.” But if “he left no ash” the rest of our march was a gloomy one; it was a bad business, and unless the Fetish authorities in town chose to explain that it was merely a demand for so much white calico, or a goat, &c., some one of our party would certainly get ill.
Well do I remember our greatest terror when out at night on a forest path. I believe him to have been a Sasabonsum, but he was very widely distributed—that is to say we dreaded him on the forest paths round Mungo Mah Lobeh; we confidently expected to meet him round Calabar; and, to my disgust, for he was a hindrance, when I thought I had got away from his distribution zone, down in the Ogowé region, coming home one night with a Fan hunter from Fula to Kangwe, I saw some one coming down the path towards us, and my friend threw himself into the dense bush beside the path so as to give the figure a wide berth. It was the old symptom. You see what we object to in this spirit is that one side of him is rotting and putrifying, the other sound and healthy, and it all depends on which side of him you touch whether you see the dawn again or no. Such being the case, and African bush paths being narrow, this spirit helps to make evening walks unpopular, for there are places in every bush path where, if you meet him, you must brush against him—places where the wet season’s rains have made the path a narrow ditch, with clay incurved walls above your head—places where the path turns sharply round a corner—places where it runs between rock walls. Such being the case, the risk of rubbing against his rotting side is held to be so great that it is best avoided by staying at home in the village with your wives and families, and playing the tom-tom or the orchid-fibre-stringed harp, or, if you are a bachelor, sitting in the village club-house listening to the old ones talking like retired Colonels. Yet however this may be, I should hesitate to call this half-rotten individual “a material object.” Sometimes we had merry laughs after these meetings, for he was only So-and-so from the village—it was not him. Sometimes we had cold chills down the back, for we lost sight of him; under our eyes he went and he left no ash.
Take again Mbuiri of the Mpongwe, who comes in the form usually of a man; or Nkala, who comes as a crab; or the great Nzambi of the Fjort—they leave no ash—and so on. This subject of apparition-forms is a very interesting one, and requires more investigation. For such gods as Nzambi Mpungu do not appear to human beings on earth at all, except in tempest and pestilence. The great gods next in order leave no ash. The witch, if he or she be destroyed, does leave ash, and the ordinary middle and lower class spirits leave the thing they have been in, so unaltered by their use of it that no one but a witch doctor can tell whether or no it has been possessed by a spirit.
You see therefore Fetish is in a way complex and cannot be got into “worship of a material object.” There is no worship in West Africa of a material not so possessed, for material objects are regarded as in themselves so low down in the scale of things that nothing of the human grade would dream of worshipping them. Moreover, apart from these apparitions, I do not think you can accurately use the word Fetish in its restricted sense to include the visions seen by witch-doctors, or incantations made of words possessing power in themselves, and yet these things are part and parcel of Fetish. In fact, not being a comparative ethnologist, but a student of West African religion, I wish to goodness those comparative ethnologists would get another word of their own, instead of using our own old West Coast one.
It is, however, far easier to state what Fetish is not, than to state what it is. Although a Darwinian to the core, I doubt if evolution in a neat and tidy perpendicular line, with Fetish at the bottom and Christianity at the top, represents the true state of things. It seems to me—I have no authority to fortify my position with, so it is only me—that things are otherwise
