Chapter XII (12)

It is difficult to explain the state of society in which the civilised “social evil” is not recognised as an evil. In the economy of the affections and the intercourse between the sexes, reappears that rude stage of society in which ethics were new to the mind of now enlightened man. Marriage with this people--as amongst all barbarians, and even the lower classes of civilised races--is a mere affair of buying and selling. A man must marry because it is necessary to his comfort, consequently the woman becomes a marketable commodity. Her father demands for her as many cows, cloths, and brass-wire bracelets as the suitor can afford; he thus virtually sells her, and she belongs to the buyer, ranking with his other live stock. The husband may sell his wife, or, if she be taken from him by another man, he claims her value, which is ruled by what she would fetch in the slave-market. A strong inducement to marriage amongst the Africans, as with the poor in Europe, is the prospective benefit to be derived from an adult family; a large progeny enriches them. The African--like all barbarians, and, indeed, semi-civilised people--ignores the dowry by which, inverting Nature’s order, the wife buys the husband, instead of the husband buying the wife. Marriage, which is an epoch amongst Christians, and an event with Moslems, is with these people an incident of frequent recurrence. Polygamy is unlimited, and the chiefs pride themselves upon the number of their wives, varying from twelve to three hundred. It is no disgrace for an unmarried woman to become the mother of a family; after matrimony there is somewhat less laxity. The mgoni or adulterer, if detected, is punishable by a fine of cattle, or, if poor and weak, he is sold into slavery; husbands seldom, however, resort to such severities, the offence, which is considered to be against vested property, being held to be lighter than petty larceny. Under the influence of jealousy, murders and mutilations have been committed, but they are rare and exceptional. Divorce is readily effected by turning the spouse out of doors, and the children become the father’s property. Attachment to home is powerful in the African race, but it regards rather the comforts and pleasures of the house, and the unity of relations and friends, than the fondness of family. Husband, wife, and children have through life divided interests, and live together with scant appearance of affection. Love of offspring can have but little power amongst a people who have no preventive for illegitimacy, and whose progeny may be sold at any time. The children appear undemonstrative and unaffectionate, as those of the Somal. Some attachment to their mothers breaks out, not in outward indications, but by surprise, as it were: “Mámá! mámá!”--mother! mother!--is a common exclamation in fear or wonder. When childhood is passed, the father and son become natural enemies, after the manner of wild beasts. Yet they are a sociable race, and the sudden loss of relatives sometimes leads from grief to hypochondria and insanity, resulting from the inability of their minds to bear any unusual strain. It is probable that a little learning would make them mad, like the Widad, or priest of the Somal, who, after mastering the reading of the Koran, becomes unfit for any exertion of judgment or common sense. To this over-development of sociability must be ascribed the anxiety always shown to shift, evade, or answer blame. The “ukosa,” or transgression, is never accepted; any number of words will be wasted in proving the worse the better cause. Hence also the favourite phrase, “Mbáyá we!”--thou art bad!--a pet mode of reproof which sounds simple and uneffective to European ears.

The social position of the women--the unerring test of progress towards civilisation--is not so high in East Africa as amongst the more highly organised tribes of the south. Few parts of the country own the rule of female chiefs. The people, especially the Wanyamwezi, consult their wives, but the opinion of a brother or a friend would usually prevail over that of a woman.

The deficiency of the East African in constructive power has already been remarked. Contented with his haystack or beehive hut, his hemisphere of boughs, or his hide acting tent, he hates and has a truly savage horror of stone walls. He has the conception of the “Madeleine,” but he has never been enabled to be delivered of it. Many Wanyamwezi, when visiting Zanzibar, cannot be prevailed upon to enter a house.

The East African is greedy and voracious; he seems, however, to prefer light and frequent to a few regular and copious meals. Even the civilised Kisawahili has no terms to express the breakfast, dinner, and supper of other languages. Like most barbarians, the East African can exist and work with a small quantity of food, but he is unaccustomed, and therefore unable, to bear thirst. The daily ration of a porter is 1 kubabah (= 1·5 lbs.) of grain; he can, with the assistance of edible herbs and roots, which he is skilful in discovering in the least likely places, eke out this allowance for several days, though generally, upon the barbarian’s impulsive principle of mortgaging the future for the present, he recklessly consumes his stores. With him the grand end of life is eating; his love of feeding is inferior only to his propensity for intoxication. He drinks till he can no longer stand, lies down to sleep, and awakes to drink again. Drinking-bouts are solemn things, to which the most important business must yield precedence. They celebrate with beer every event--the traveller’s return, the birth of a child, and the death of an elephant--a labourer will not work unless beer is provided for him. A guest is received with a gourdful of beer, and, amongst some tribes, it is buried with their princes. The highest orders rejoice in drink, and pride themselves upon powers of imbibing: the proper diet for a king is much beer and a little meat. If a Mnyamwezi be asked after eating whether he is hungry, he will reply yea, meaning that he is not drunk. Intoxication excuses crime in these lands. The East African, when in his cups, must issue from his hut to sing, dance, or quarrel, and the frequent and terrible outrages which occur on these occasions are passed over on the plea that he has drunk beer. The favourite hour for drinking is after dawn,--a time as distasteful to the European as agreeable to the African and Asiatic. This might be proved by a host of quotations from the poets, Arab, Persian, and Hindu. The civilised man avoids early potations because they incapacitate him for necessary labour, and he attempts to relieve the headache caused by stimulants. The barbarian and the semi-civilised, on the other hand, prefer them, because they relieve the tedium of his monotonous day; and they cherish the headache because they can sleep the longer, and, when they awake, they have something to think of. The habit once acquired is never broken: it attaches itself to the heartstrings of the idle and unoccupied barbarian.

In morality, according to the more extended sense of the word, the East African is markedly deficient. He has no benevolence, but little veneration--the negro race is ever irreverent--and, though his cranium rises high in the region of firmness, his futility prevents his being firm. The outlines of law are faintly traced upon his heart. The authoritative standard of morality fixed by a revelation is in him represented by a vague and varying custom, derived traditionally from his ancestors; he follows in their track for old-sake’s sake. The accusing conscience is unknown to him. His only fear after committing a treacherous murder is that of being haunted by the angry ghost of the dead; he robs as one doing a good deed, and he begs as if it were his calling. His depravity is of the grossest: intrigue fills up all the moments not devoted to intoxication.

The want of veneration produces a savage rudeness in the East African. The body politic consists of two great members, masters and slaves. Ignoring distinctions of society, he treats all men, except his chief, as his equals. He has no rules for visiting: if the door be open, he enters a stranger’s house uninvited; his harsh, barking voice is ever the loudest; he is never happy except when hearing himself speak; his address is imperious, his demeanour is rough and peremptory, and his look “sfacciato.” He deposits his unwashed person, in his greasy and tattered goat-skin or cloth, upon rug or bedding, disdaining to stand for a moment, and he always chooses the best place in the room. When travelling he will push forward to secure the most comfortable hut: the chief of a caravan may sleep in rain or dew, but, if he attempt to dislodge his porters, they lie down with the settled purpose of mules--as the Arabs say, they “have no shame.” The curiosity of these people, and the little ceremony with which they gratify it, are at times most troublesome. A stranger must be stared at; total apathy is the only remedy: if the victim lose his temper, or attempt to dislodge them, he will find it like disturbing a swarm of bees. They will come for miles to “sow gape-seed:” if the tent-fly be closed, they will peer and peep from below, complaining loudly against the occupant, and, if further prevented, they may proceed to violence. On the road hosts of idlers, especially women, boys, and girls, will follow the caravan for hours; it is a truly offensive spectacle--these uncouth figures, running at a “gymnastic pace,” half clothed except with grease, with pendent bosoms shaking in the air, and cries that resemble the howls of beasts more than any effort of human articulation. This offensive ignorance of the first principles of social intercourse has been fostered in the races most visited by the Arabs, whose national tendency, like the Italian and the Greek, is ever and essentially republican. When strangers first appeared in the country they were received with respect and deference. They soon, however, lost this vantage-ground: they sat and chatted with the people, exchanged pleasantries, and suffered slights, till the Africans found themselves on an equality with their visitors. The evil has become inveterate, and no greater contrast can be imagined than that between the manners of an Indian Ryot and an East African Mshenzi.

In intellect the East African is sterile and incult, apparently unprogressive and unfit for change. Like the uncivilised generally, he observes well, but he can deduce nothing profitable from his perceptions. His intelligence is surprising when compared with that of an uneducated English peasant; but it has a narrow bound, beyond which apparently no man may pass. Like the Asiatic, in fact, he is stationary, but at a much lower level. Devotedly fond of music, his love of tune has invented nothing but whistling and the whistle: his instruments are all borrowed from the coast people. He delights in singing, yet he has no metrical songs: he contents himself with improvising a few words without sense or rhyme, and repeats them till they nauseate: the long, drawling recitative generally ends in “Ah! ha^{n}!” or some such strongly-nasalised sound. Like the Somal, he has tunes appropriated to particular occasions, as the elephant-hunt or the harvest-home. When mourning, the love of music assumes a peculiar form: women weeping or sobbing, especially after chastisement, will break into a protracted threne or dirge, every period of which concludes with its own particular groan or wail: after venting a little natural distress in a natural sound, the long, loud improvisation, in the highest falsetto key, continues as before. As in Europe the “laughing-song” is an imitation of hilarity somewhat distressing to the spirits of the audience, so the “weeping-song” of the African only tends to risibility. His wonderful loquacity and volubility of tongue have produced no tales, poetry, nor display of eloquence; though, like most barbarians, somewhat sententious, he will content himself with squabbling with his companions, or with repeating some meaningless word in every different tone of voice during the weary length of a day’s march. His language is highly artificial and musical: the reader will have observed that the names which occur in these pages often consist entirely of liquids and vowels, that consonants are unknown at the end of a word, and that they never are double except at the beginning. Yet the idea of a syllabarium seems not to have occurred to the negroid mind. Finally, though the East African delights in the dance, and is an excellent timist--a thousand heels striking the ground simultaneously sound like one--his performance is as uncouth as perhaps was ever devised by man. He delights in a joke, which manages him like a Neapolitan; yet his efforts in wit are of the feeblest that can be conceived.

Though the general features of character correspond throughout the tribes in East Africa, there are also marked differences. The Wazaramo, for instance, are considered the most dangerous tribe on this line: caravans hurry through their lands, and hold themselves fortunate if a life be not lost, or if a few loads be not missing. Their neighbours, the Wasagara of the hills, were once peaceful and civil to travellers: the persecutions of the coast-people have rendered them morose and suspicious; they now shun strangers, and, never knowing when they may be attacked, they live in a constant state of agitation, excitement, and alarm. After the Wazaramo, the tribes of Ugogo are considered the most noisy and troublesome, the most extortionate, quarrelsome and violent on this route: nothing restrains these races from bloodshed and plunder but fear of retribution and self-interest. The Wanyamwezi bear the highest character for civilisation, discipline, and industry. Intercourse with the coast, however, is speedily sapping the foundations of their superiority: the East African Expedition suffered more from thieving in this than in any other territory, and the Arabs now depend for existence there not upon prestige, but sufferance, in consideration of mutual commercial advantage. In proportion as the traveller advances into the interior, he finds the people less humane, or rather less human. The Wavinza, the Wajiji, and the other Lakist tribes, much resemble one another: they are extortionate, violent, and revengeful barbarians; no Mnyamwezi dares to travel alone through their territories, and small parties are ever in danger of destruction.

In dealing with the East African the traveller cannot do better than to follow the advice of Bacon--“Use savages justly and graciously, with sufficient guard nevertheless.” They must be held as foes; and the prudent stranger will never put himself in their power, especially where life is concerned. The safety of a caravan will often depend upon the barbarian’s fear of beginning the fray: if the onset once takes place, the numbers, the fierce looks, the violent gestures, and the confidence of the assailants upon their own ground, will probably prevail. When necessary, however, severity must be employed; leniency and forbearance are the vulnerable points of civilised policy, as they encourage attack by a suspicion of fear and weakness. They may be managed as the Indian saw directs, by a judicious mixture of the “Narm” and “Garm”--the soft and hot. Thus the old traders remarked in Guinea, that the best way to treat a black man was to hold out one hand to shake with him, while the other is doubled ready to knock him down. In trading with, or even when dwelling amongst this people, all display of wealth must be avoided. A man who would purchase the smallest article avoids showing anything beyond its equivalent.

The ethnologist who compares this sketch with the far more favourable description of the Kafirs, a kindred race, given by travellers in South Africa, may suspect that only the darker shades of the picture are placed before the eye. But, as will appear in a future page, much of this moral degradation must be attributed to the working, through centuries, of the slave-trade: the tribes are no longer as nature made them; and from their connection with strangers they have derived nothing but corruption. Though of savage and barbarous type, they have been varnished with the semi-civilisation of trade and commerce, which sits ridiculously upon their minds as a rich garment would upon their persons.

Fetissism--the word is derived from the Portuguese feitiço, “a doing,”--scil. of magic, by euphuism--is still the only faith known in East Africa. Its origin is easily explained by the aspect of the physical world, which has coloured the thoughts and has directed the belief of man: he reflects, in fact, the fantastical and monstrous character of the animal and vegetable productions around him. Nature, in these regions rarely sublime or beautiful, more often terrible and desolate, with the gloomy forest, the impervious jungle, the tangled hill, and the dread uniform waste tenanted by deadly inhabitants, arouses in his mind a sensation of utter feebleness, a vague and nameless awe. Untaught to recommend himself for protection to a Superior Being, he addresses himself directly to the objects of his reverence and awe: he prostrates himself before the sentiment within him, hoping to propitiate it as he would satisfy a fellow-man. The grand mysteries of life and death, to him unrevealed and unexplained, the want of a true interpretation of the admirable phenomena of creation, and the vagaries and misconceptions of his own degraded imagination, awaken in him ideas of horror, and people the invisible world with ghost and goblin, demon and spectrum, the incarnations, as it were, of his own childish fears. Deepened by the dread of destruction, ever strong in the barbarian breast, his terror causes him to look with suspicion upon all around him: “How,” inquires the dying African, “can I alone be ill when others are well, unless I have been bewitched?” Hence the belief in magical and supernatural powers in man, which the stronger minded have turned to their own advantage.

Fetissism is the adoration, or rather the propitiation, of natural objects, animate and inanimate, to which certain mysterious influences are attributed. It admits neither god, nor angel, nor devil; it ignores the very alphabet of revealed or traditionary religion--a creation, a resurrection, a judgment-day, a soul or a spirit, a heaven or a hell. A modified practical atheism is thus the prominent feature of the superstition. Though instinctively conscious of a being above them, the Africans have as yet failed to grasp the idea: in their feeble minds it is an embryo rather than a conception--at the best a vague god, without personality, attributes, or providence. They call that being Mulungu, the Uhlunga of the Kafirs, and the Utika of the Hottentots. The term, however, may mean a ghost, the firmament, or the sun; a man will frequently call himself Mulungu, and even Mulungu Mbaya, the latter word signifying bad or wicked. In the language of the Wamasai “Ai,” or with the article “Engai”--the Creator--is feminine, the god and rain being synonymous.

The Fetiss superstition is African, but not confined to Africa. The faith of ancient Egypt, the earliest system of profane belief known to man, with its Triad denoting the various phases and powers of nature, was essentially fetissist; whilst in the Syrian mind dawned at first the idea of “Melkart,” a god of earth, and his Baalim, angels, viceregents, or local deities. But generally the history of religions proves that when man, whether degraded from primal elevation or elevated from primal degradation, has progressed a step beyond atheism--the spiritual state of the lowest savagery--he advances to the modification called Fetissism, the condition of the infant mind of humanity. According to the late Col. Van Kennedy, “such expressions as the love and fear of God never occur in the sacred books of the Hindus.” The ancient Persians were ignicolists, adoring ethereal fire. Confucius owned that he knew nothing about the gods, and therefore preferred saying as little as possible upon the subject. Men, still without tradition or training, confused the Creator with creation, and ventured not to place the burden of providence upon a single deity. Slaves to the agencies of material nature, impressed by the splendours of the heavenly bodies, comforted by fire and light, persuaded by their familiarity with the habits of wild beasts that the brute creation and the human claimed a mysterious affinity, humbled by the terrors of elemental war, and benefitted by hero and sage,--

“Quicquid humus, pelagus, cœlum mirabile gignunt,
Id duxere deos.”

The barbarian worshipped these visible objects not as types, myths, divine emanations, or personifications of a deity: he adored them for themselves. The modern theory, the mode in which full-grown man explains away the follies of his childhood, making the interpretation precede the fable, fails when tested by experience. The Hindu, and, indeed, the ignorant Christian, still adore the actual image of man and beast; it is unreasonable to suppose that they kneel before and worship with heart and soul its metaphysics; and an attempt to allegorise it, or to deprive it of its specific virtues, would be considered, as in ancient Greece and Rome, mere impiety.

By its essence, then, Fetissism is a rude and sensual superstition, the faith of abject fear, and of infant races that have not risen, and are, perhaps, incapable of rising to theism--the religion of love and the belief of the highest types of mankind. But old creeds die hard, and error, founded upon the instincts and feelings of human nature borrows the coherence and uniformity of truth. That Fetissism is a belief common to man in the childhood of his spiritual life, may be proved by the frequent and extensive remains of the faith which the cretinism of the Hamitic race has perpetuated amongst them to the present day, still sprouting like tares even in the fair field of revealed religion. The dread of ghosts, for instance, which is the mainstay of Fetissism, is not inculcated in any sacred book, yet the belief is not to be abolished. Thus the Rakshasa of the Hindus is a disembodied spirit, doing evil to mankind; and the ghost of the prophet Samuel, raised by the familiar of the Witch of Endor, was the immortal part of a mortal being, still connected with earth, and capable of returning to it. Through the Manes, the Umbra, and the Spectrum of the ancients, the belief has descended to the moderns, as the household words ghost, goblin, and bogle, revenant, polter-geist, and spook, Duh, Dusha, and Dukh attest. Precisely similar to the African ghost-faith is the old Irish belief in Banshees, Pookas, and other evil entities; the corporeal frame of the dead forms other bodies, but the spirit hovers in the air, watching the destiny of friends, haunting houses, killing children, injuring cattle, and causing disease and destruction. Everywhere, too, their functions are the same: all are malevolent to the living, and they are seldom known to do good. The natural horror and fear of death which may be observed even in the lower animals has caused the dead to be considered vindictive and destructive.

Some missionaries have detected in the habit, which prevails throughout Eastern and Western Africa, of burying slaves with the deceased, of carrying provisions to graves, and of lighting fires on cold nights near the last resting-places of the departed, a continuation of relations between the quick and the dead which points to a belief in a future state of existence. The wish is father to that thought: the doctrine of the soul, of immortality, belongs to a superior order of mind, to a more advanced stage of society. The belief, as its operations show, is in presentity, materialism, not in futurity, spiritualism. According to the ancients, man is a fourfold being:--

“Bis duo sunt homini, manes, caro, spiritus, umbra:
Quatuor hæc loci bis duo suscipiunt
Terra tegit carnem, tumulum circumvolitat umbra,
Manes Orcus habet, spiritus astra petit.”

Take away the Manes and the astral Spirit, and remains the African belief in the ειδωλον or Umbra, spiritus, or ghost. When the savage and the barbarian are asked what has become of the “old people” (their ancestors), over whose dust and ashes they perform obsequies, these veritable secularists only smile and reply Wáme-kwisha, “they are ended.” It proves the inferior organisation of the race. Even the North American aborigines, a race which Nature apparently disdains to preserve, decided that man hath a future, since even Indian corn is vivified and rises again. The East African has created of his fears a ghost which never attains the perfect form of a soul. This inferior development has prevented his rising to the social status of the Hindu, and other anciently civilised races, whom a life wholly wanting in purpose and occupation drove from the excitement necessary to stimulate the mind towards a hidden or mysterious future. These wild races seek otherwise than in their faith a something to emotionise and to agitate them.

The East African’s Credenda--it has not arrived at the rank of a system, this vague and misty dawning of a creed--are based upon two main articles. The first is demonology, or, rather, the existence of Koma, the spectra of the dead; the second is Uchawi, witchcraft or black magic, a corollary to the principal theorem. Few, and only the tribes adjacent to the maritime regions, have derived from El Islam a faint conception of the one Supreme. There is no trace in this country of the ancient and modern animal-worship of Egypt and India, though travellers have asserted that vestiges of it exist amongst the kindred race of Kafirs. The African has no more of Sabæism than what belongs to the instinct of man: he has a reverence for the sun and moon, the latter is for evident reasons in higher esteem, but he totally ignores star-worship. If questioned concerning his daily bread, he will point with a devotional aspect towards the light of day; and if asked what caused the death of his brother, will reply Jua, or Rimwe, the sun. He has not, like the Kafir, a holiday at the epoch of new moon: like the Moslem, however, on first seeing it, he raises and claps his hands in token of obeisance. The Mzimo, or Fetiss hut, is the first germ of a temple, and the idea is probably derived from the Kurban of the Arabs. It is found throughout the country, especially in Uzaramo, Unyamwezi, and Karagwah. It is in the shape of a dwarf house, one or two feet high, with a thatched roof, but without walls. Upon the ground, or suspended from the roof, are handfuls of grain and small pots full of beer, placed there to propitiate the ghosts, and to defend the crops from injury.

A prey to base passions and melancholy godless fears, the Fetissist, who peoples with malevolent beings the invisible world, animates material nature with evil influences. The rites of his dark and deadly superstition are all intended to avert evils from himself, by transferring them to others: hence the witchcraft and magic which flow naturally from the system of demonology. Men rarely die without the wife or children, the kindred or slaves, being accused of having compassed their destruction by “throwing the glamour over them;” and, as has been explained, the trial and the conviction are of the most arbitrary nature. Yet witchcraft is practised by thousands with the firmest convictions in their own powers; and though frightful tortures await the wizard and the witch who have been condemned for the destruction of chief or elder, the vindictiveness of the negro drives him readily to the malevolent practices of sorcery. As has happened in Europe and elsewhere, in the presence of torture and the instant advance of death, the sorcerer and sorceress will not only confess, but even boast of and believe in, their own criminality. “Verily I slew such a one!--I brought about the disease of such another!”--these are their demented vaunts, the offspring of mental imbecility, stimulated by traditional hallucination.

In this state of spiritual death there is, as may be imagined, but little of the fire of fanaticism: polemics are as unknown as politics to them; their succedaneum for a god is not a jealous god. But upon the subjects of religious belief and revelation all men are equal: Davus becomes Œdipus, the fool is as the sage. What the “I” believes, that the “Thou” must acknowledge, under the pains and penalties of offending Self-esteem. Whilst the African’s faith is weakly catholic, he will not admit that other men are wiser on this point than himself. Yet he will fast like a Moslem, because doing something seems to raise him in the scale of creation. His mind, involved in the trammels of his superstition, and enchained by custom, is apparently incapable of receiving the impressions of El Islam. His Fetissism, unspiritualised by the philosophic Pantheism and Polytheism of Europe and Asia, has hitherto unfitted him for that belief which was readily accepted by the more Semitic maritime races, the Somal, the Wasawahili, and the Wamrima. To a certain extent, also, it has been the policy of the Arab to avoid proselytising, which would lead to comparative equality: for sordid lucre the Moslem has left the souls of these Kafirs to eternal perdition. According to most doctors of the saving faith, an ardent proselytiser might convert by the sword whole tribes, though he might not succeed with individuals, who cannot break through the ties of society. The “Mombas Mission,” however, relying upon the powers of persuasion, unequivocally failed, and pronounced their flock to be “not behind the greatest infidels and scoffers of Europe: they blaspheme, in fact, like children.” With characteristic want of veneration they would say, “Your Lord is a bad master, for he does not cure his servants.” When an early convert died, the Wanyika at once decided that there is no Saviour, as he does not prevent the decease of a friend. The sentiment generally elicited by a discourse upon the subject of the existence of a Deity is a desire to see him, in order to revenge upon him the deaths of relatives, friends, and cattle.[17]

[17] That the Western African negro resembles in this point his
negroid brother, the following extract from an amusing and truthful
little volume, entitled “Trade and Travels in the Gulf of Guinea and
Western Africa” (London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1851), will prove:--

Always anxious,--says Mr. J. Smith, the author,--to get any of them
(the Western Africans) to talk about God and religion, I said, “What
have you been doing King Pepple?”

“All the same as you do,--I tank God.”

“For what?”

“Every good ting God sends me.”

“Have you seen God?”

“Chi! no;--suppose man see God, he must die one minute.” (He would die
in a moment.)

“When you die won’t you see God?”

With great warmth, “I know no savvy. (I don’t know.) How should I
know? Never mind. I no want to hear more for that palaver.” (I want no
more talk on that subject.)

“What way?” (Why?)

“It no be your business, you come here for trade palaver.”

I knew--resumes Mr. Smith--it would be of no use pursuing the subject
at that time, so I was silent, and it dropped for the moment.

In speaking of him dying, I had touched a very tender and disagreeable
chord, for he looked very savage and sulky, and I saw by the rapid
changes in his countenance that he was the subject of some intense
internal emotion. At length he broke out, using most violent
gesticulations, and exhibiting a most inhuman expression of
countenance, “Suppose God was here, I must kill him, one minute!”

“You what? you kill God?” followed I, quite taken aback, and almost
breathless with the novel and diabolical notion; “You kill God? why,
you talk all some fool” (like a fool); “you cannot kill God; and
suppose it possible that God could die, everything would cease to
exist. He is the Spirit of the universe. But he can kill you.”

“I know I cannot kill him; but suppose I could kill him, I would.”

“Where does God live?”

“For top.”

“How?” He pointed to the zenith.

“And suppose you could, why would you kill him?”

“Because he makes men to die.”

“Why, my friend,” in a conciliatory manner, “you would not wish to
live for ever, would you?”

“Yes, I want to stand” (remain for ever).

“But you will be old by and by, and if you live long enough, will
become very infirm, like that old man,” pointing to a man very old for
an African and thin, and lame, and almost blind, who had come into the
court during the foregoing conversation, to ask for some favour (I
wonder he had not been destroyed),--“and like him you will become
lame, and deaf, and blind, and will be able to take no pleasure; would
it not be better, then, for you to die when this takes place, and you
are in pain and trouble, and so make room for your son, as your father
did for you?”

“No, it would not; I want to stand all same I stand now.”

“But supposing you should go to a place of happiness after death
and----”

“I no savvy nothing about that, I know that I now live, and have too
many wives, and niggers (slaves), and canoes,” (he did not mean what
he said, in saying he had too many wives, &c., it is their way of
expressing a great number,) “and that I am king, and plenty of ships
come to my country. I know no other ting, and I want to stand.”

I offered a reply, but he would hear no more, and so the conversation
on that subject ceased; and we proceeded to discuss one not much more
agreeable to him--the payment of a very considerable debt which he
owed me.

Fetissism supplies an abundance of professionally holy men. The “Mfumo” is translated by the Arabs Bassar, a seer or clairvoyant. The Mchawi is the Sahhar, magician, or adept in the black art. Amongst the Wazegura and the Wasagara is the Mgonezi, a word Arabised into Rammal or Geomantist. He practises the Miramoro, or divination and prediction of fray and famine, death and disease, by the relative position of small sticks, like spilikins, cast at random on the ground. The “rain-maker,” or “rain-doctor” of the Cape, common throughout these tribes, and extending far north of the equator, is called in East Africa Mganga, in the plural Waganga: the Arabs term him Tabib, doctor or physician.

The Mganga, in the central regions termed Mfumo, may be considered as the rude beginning of a sacerdotal order. These drones, who swarm throughout the land, are of both sexes: the women, however, generally confine themselves to the medical part of the profession. The calling is hereditary, the eldest or the cleverest son begins his neoteric education at an early age, and succeeds to his father’s functions. There is little mystery in the craft, and the magicians of Unyamwezi have not refused to initiate some of the Arabs. The power of the Mganga is great: he is treated as a sultan, whose word is law, and as a giver of life and death. He is addressed by a kingly title, and is permitted to wear the chieftain’s badge, made of the base of a conical shell. He is also known by a number of small greasy and blackened gourds, filled with physic and magic, hanging round his waist, and by a little more of the usual grime--sanctity and dirt being connected in Africa as elsewhere. These men are sent for from village to village, and receive as obventions and spiritual fees sheep and goats, cattle and provisions. Their persons, however, are not sacred, and for criminal acts they are punished like other malefactors. The greatest danger to them is an excess of fame. A celebrated magician rarely, if ever, dies a natural death: too much is expected from him, and a severer disappointment leads to consequences more violent than usual. The Arabs deride their pretensions, comparing them depreciatingly to the workers of Simiya, or conjuration, in their own country. They remark that the wizard can never produce rain in the dry, or avert it in the wet season. The many, however, who, to use a West African phrase, have “become black” from a long residence in the country, acquire a sneaking belief in the Waganga, and fear of their powers. The well-educated classes in Zanzibar consult these heathen, as the credulous of other Eastern countries go to the astrologer and geomantist, and in Europe to the clairvoyant and the tireuse de cartes. In one point this proceeding is wise: the wizard rarely wants wits; and whatever he has heard secretly or openly will inevitably appear in the course of his divination.

It must not be supposed, however, that the Mganga is purely an impostor. To deceive others thoroughly a man must first deceive himself, otherwise he will be detected by the least discerning. This is the simple secret of so many notable successes, achieved in the most unpromising causes by self-reliance and enthusiasm, the parents of energy and consistence. These barbarians are more often sinned against by their own fears and fooleries of faith, than sinners against their fellow-men by fraud and falsehood.

The office of Uganga includes many duties. The same man is a physician by natural and supernatural means, a mystagogue or medicine-man, a detector of sorcery, by means of the Judicium Dei or ordeal, a rain-maker, a conjuror, an augur, and a prophet.

As a rule, all diseases, from a boil to marasmus senilis, are attributed by the Fetissist to P’hepo, Hubub, or Afflatus. The three words are synonymous. P’hepo, in Kisawahili, is the plural form of upepo (a zephyr), used singularly to signify a high wind, a whirlwind (“devil”), and an evil ghost, generally of a Moslem. Hubub, the Arabic translation, means literally the blowing of wind, and metaphorically “possession.” The African phrase for a man possessed is “ana p’hepo,” “he has a devil.” The Mganga is expected to heal the patient by expelling the possession. Like the evil spirit in the days of Saul, the unwelcome visitant must be charmed away by sweet music; the drums cause excitement, and violent exercise expels the ghost, as saltation nullifies in Italy the venom of the tarantula. The principal remedies are drumming, dancing, and drinking, till the auspicious moment arrives. The ghost is then enticed from the body of the possessed into some inanimate article, which he will condescend to inhabit. This, technically called a Keti, or stool, may be a certain kind of bead, two or more bits of wood bound together by a strip of snake’s skin, a lion’s or a leopard’s claw, and other similar articles, worn round the head, the arm, the wrist, or the ankle. Paper is still considered great medicine by the Wasukuma and other tribes, who will barter valuable goods for a little bit: the great desideratum of the charm, in fact, appears to be its rarity, or the difficulty of obtaining it. Hence also the habit of driving nails into and hanging rags upon trees. The vegetable itself is not worshipped, as some Europeans who call it the “Devil’s tree” have supposed: it is merely the place for the laying of ghosts, where by appending the Keti most acceptable to the spectrum, he will be bound over to keep the peace with man. Several accidents in the town of Zanzibar have confirmed even the higher orders in their lurking superstition. Mr. Peters, an English merchant, annoyed by the slaves who came in numbers to hammer nails and to hang iron hoops and rags upon a “Devil’s tree” in his courtyard, ordered it to be cut down, to the horror of all the black beholders, of whom no one would lay an axe to it. Within six months five persons died in that house--Mr. Peters, his two clerks, his cooper, and his ship’s carpenter. This superstition will remind the traveller of the Indian Pipul (Ficus religiosa), in which fiends are supposed to roost, and suggest to the Orientalist an explanation of the mysterious Moslem practices common from Western Africa to the farthest East. The hanging of rags upon trees by pilgrims and travellers is probably a relic of Arab Fetissism, derived in the days of ignorance from their congeners in East Africa. The custom has spread far and wide: even the Irish peasantry have been in the habit of suspending to the trees and bushes near their “holy wells” rags, halters, and spancels, in token of gratitude for their recovery, or that of their cattle.

There are other mystical means of restoring the sick to health; one specimen will suffice. Several little sticks, like matches, are daubed with ochre, and marks are made with them upon the patient’s body. A charm is chanted, the possessed one responds, and at the end of every stave an evil spirit flies from him, the signal being a stick cast by the Mganga upon the ground. Some unfortunates have as many as a dozen haunting ghosts, each of which has his own periapt: the Mganga demands a distinct honorarium for the several expulsions. Wherever danger is, fear will be; wherever fear is, charms and spells, exorcisms and talismans of portentous powers will be in demand; and wherever supernaturalisms are in requisition, men will be found, for a consideration, to supply them.

These strange rites are to be explained upon the principle which underlies thaumaturgy in general: they result from conviction in a gross mass of exaggerations heaped by ignorance, falsehood, and credulity, upon the slenderest foundation of fact--a fact doubtless solvable by the application of natural laws. The African temperament has strong susceptibilities, combined with what appears to be a weakness of brain, and great excitability of the nervous system, as is proved by the prevalence of epilepsy, convulsions, and hysteric disease. According to the Arab, El Sara, epilepsy, or the falling sickness, is peculiarly common throughout East Africa; and, as we know by experience in lands more civilised, the sudden prostration, rigidity, contortions, &c. of the patient, strongly suggest the idea that he has been taken and seized (επιληφθεις) by, as it were, some external and invisible agent. The negroid is, therefore, peculiarly liable to the epidemical mania called “Phantasmata,” which, according to history, has at times of great mental agitation and popular disturbance broken out in different parts of Europe, and which, even in this our day, forms the basework of “revivals.” Thus in Africa the objective existence of spectra has become a tenet of belief. Stories that stagger the most sceptical are told concerning the phenomenon by respectable and not unlearned Arabs, who point to their fellow-countrymen as instances. Salim bin Rashid, a half-caste merchant, well known at Zanzibar, avers, and his companions bear witness to his words, that on one occasion, when travelling northwards from Unyanyembe, the possession occurred to himself. During the night two female slaves, his companions, of whom one was a child, fell, without apparent cause, into the fits which denote the approach of a spirit. Simultaneously, the master became as one intoxicated; a dark mass, material, not spiritual, entered the tent, and he felt himself pulled and pushed by a number of black figures, whom he had never before seen. He called aloud to his companions and slaves, who, vainly attempting to enter the tent, threw it down, and presently found him in a state of stupor, from which he did not recover till the morning. The same merchant circumstantially related, and called witnesses to prove, that a small slave-boy, who was produced on the occasion, had been frequently carried off by possession, even when confined in a windowless room, with a heavy door carefully bolted and padlocked. Next morning the victim was not found, although the chamber remained closed. A few days afterwards he was met in the jungle wandering absently like an idiot, and with speech too incoherent to explain what had happened to him. The Arabs of Oman, who subscribe readily to transformation, deride these tales; those of African blood believe them. The transformation-belief, still so common in Maskat, Abyssinia, Somaliland, and the Cape, and anciently an almost universal superstition, is, curious to say, unknown amongst these East African tribes. The Wahiao, lying between Kilwa and the Nyassa Lake, preserve, however, a remnant of the old creed in their conviction, that a malevolent magician can change a man after death into a lion, a leopard, or a hyæna. On the Zambezi the people, according to Dr. Livingstone (chap. xxx.), believe that a chief may metamorphose himself into a lion, kill any one he chooses, and then return to the human form. About Tete (chap. xxxi.) the negroids hold that, “while persons are still living, they may enter into lions and alligators, and then return again to their own bodies.” Travellers determined to find in Africa counterparts of European and Asiatic tenets, argue from this transformation a belief in the “transmigration of souls.” They thus confuse material metamorphosis with a spiritual progress, which is assuredly not an emanation from the Hamitic mind. The Africans have hitherto not bewildered their brains with metaphysics, and, ignoring the idea of a soul, which appears to be a dogma of the Caucasian race, they necessarily ignore its immortality.

The second, and, perhaps, the most profitable occupation of the Mganga, is the detection of Uchawi, or black magic. The fatuitous style of conviction, and the fearful tortures which, in the different regions, await those found guilty, have already been described, as far as description is possible. Amongst a people where the magician is a police detector, ordeals must be expected to thrive. The Baga or Kyapo of East Africa--the Arabs translate it El Halaf, or the Oath--is as cruel, absurd, and barbarous, as the red water of Ashanti, the venoms of Kasanji (Cassange), the muavi of the Banyai tribes of Monomotapa, the Tangina poison of the Malagash, the bitter water of the Jews, the “saucy-water” of West Africa, and the fire tests of mediæval Europe. The people of Usumbara thrust a red-hot hatchet into the mouth of the accused. Among the south-eastern tribes a heated iron spike, driven into some tender part of the person, is twice struck with a log of wood. The Wazaramo dip the hand into boiling water, the Waganda into seething oil; and the Wazegura prick the ear with the stiffest bristles of a gnu’s tail. The Wakwafi have an ordeal of meat that chokes the guilty. The Wanyamwezi pound with water between two stones, and infuse a poisonous bark called “Mwavi:” it is first administered by the Mganga to a hen, who, for the nonce, represents the suspected. If, however, all parties be not satisfied with such trial, it is duly adhibited to the accused.

In East Africa, from Somaliland to the Cape, and throughout the interior amongst the negroids and negroes north as well as south of the equator, the rain-maker or rain-doctor is a personage of consequence; and he does not fail to turn the hopes and fears of the people to his own advantage. A season of drought causes dearth, disease, and desolation amongst these improvident races, who therefore connect every strange phenomenon with the object of their desires, a copious wet monsoon. The enemy has medicines which disperse the clouds. The stranger who brings with him heavy showers is regarded as a being of good omen; usually, however, the worst is expected from the novel portent; he will, for instance, be accompanied and preceded by fertilising rains, but the wells and springs will dry up after his departure, and the result will be drought or small-pox. These rumours which may account for the Lybian stranger-sacrifices in the olden time, are still dangerous to travellers. The Mganga must remedy the evil. His spells are those of fetissists in general, the mystic use of something foul, poisonous, or difficult to procure, such as the album græcum of hyænas, snakes’ fangs, or lions’ hair; these and similar articles are collected with considerable trouble by the young men of the tribe for the use of the rain-maker. But he is a weatherwise man, and rains in tropical lands are easily foreseen. Not unfrequently, however, he proves himself a false prophet; and when all the resources of cunning fail he must fly for dear life from the victims of his delusion.

The Mganga is also a predictor and a soothsayer. He foretels the success or failure of commercial undertakings, of wars, and of kidnapping-commandos; he foresees famine and pestilence, and he suggests the means of averting calamities. He fixes also, before the commencement of any serious affair, fortunate conjunctions, without which a good issue cannot be expected. He directs expiatory offerings. His word is ever powerful to expedite or to delay the march of a caravan; and in his quality of augur he considers the flight of birds and the cries of beasts, like his prototype of the same class in ancient Europe and in modern Asia.

The principal instrument of the Mganga’s craft is one of the dirty little buyu or gourds which he wears in a bunch round his waist; and the following is the usual programme when the oracle is to be consulted. The magician brings his implements in a bag of matting; his demeanour is serious as the occasion; he is carefully greased, and his head is adorned with the diminutive antelope-horns fastened by a thong of leather above the forehead. He sits like a sultan upon a dwarf stool in front of the querist, and begins by exhorting the highest possible offertory. No pay, no predict. Divination by the gourd has already been described; the Mganga has many other implements of his craft. Some prophesy by the motion of berries swimming in a cup full of water, which is placed upon a low stool surrounded by four tails of the zebra or the buffalo lashed to sticks planted upright in the ground. The Kasanda is a system of folding triangles not unlike those upon which plaything soldiers are mounted. Held in the right hand, it is thrown out, and the direction of the end points to the safe and auspicious route; this is probably the rudest appliance of prestidigitation. The shero is a bit of wood about the size of a man’s hand, and not unlike a pair of bellows, with a dwarf handle, a projection like a nozzle, and in the circular centre a little hollow. This is filled with water, and a grain or fragment of wood, placed to float, gives an evil omen if it tends towards the sides, and favourable if it veers towards the handle or the nozzle. The Mganga generally carries about with him to announce his approach a kind of rattle called “sánje.” This is a hollow gourd of pine-apple shape, pierced with various holes, prettily carved and half filled with maize, grains, and pebbles; the handle is a stick passed through its length and secured by cross-pins.

The Mganga has many minor duties. In elephant hunts he must throw the first spear and endure the blame if the beast escapes. He marks ivory with spots disposed in lines and other figures, and thus enables it to reach the coast without let or hindrance. He loads the kirangozi or guide with charms and periapts to defend him from the malice which is ever directed at a leading man, and sedulously forbids him to allow precedence even to the Mtongi, the commander and proprietor of the caravan. He aids his tribe by magical arts in wars, by catching a bee, reciting over it certain incantations, and loosing it in the direction of the foe, when the insect will instantly summon an army of its fellows and disperse a host, however numerous. This belief well illustrates the easy passage of the natural into the supernatural. The land being full of swarms, and man’s body being wholly exposed, many a caravan has been dispersed like chaff before the wind by a bevy of swarming bees. Similarly in South Africa the magician kicks an ant-hill and starts wasps which put the enemy to flight. And in the books of the Hebrews we read that the hornet sent before the children of Israel against the Amorite was more terrible than sword or bow. (Joshua, xxiv.)

The several tribes in East Africa present two forms of government, the despotic and the semi-monarchical.