African does not; and though his culture does not contain
our institutions, lunatic asylums, prisons, workhouses,
hospitals, etc., he has to deal with the same
classes of people who require these things.
So with them he deals by means of his equivalent institutions,
slavery, the lash, and death. You have just as
much right, my logical friend, to call the West Coast
Chief hard names for his habit of using brass bars,
heads of tobacco, and so on, in place of sixpenny
pieces, as you have to abuse him for clubbing an inveterate
thief. It’s deplorably low of him, I own,
but by what alternative plan of government his can
be replaced I do not quite see, under existing conditions.
In religious affairs, the affairs which lead him
into the majority of his iniquities, his real sin
consists in believing too much. In his witchcraft,
the sin is the same. Toleration means indifference,
I believe, among all men. The African is not
indifferent on the subject of witchcraft, and I do
not see how one can expect him to be. Put yourself
in his place and imagine you have got hold of a man
or woman who has been placing a live crocodile or
a catawumpus of some kind into your own or a valued
relative’s, or fellow-townsman’s inside,
so that it may eat up valuable viscera, and cause
you or your friend suffering and death. How
would you feel? A little like lynching your captive,
I fancy.
I confess that the more I know of the West Coast Africans
the more I like them. I own I think them fools
of the first water for their power of believing in
things; but I fancy I have analogous feelings towards
even my fellow-countrymen when they go and violently
believe in something that I cannot quite swallow.
In which the Voyager complains of the inconveniences
arising from the method of African thought, and discourses
on apparitions and Deities.
However much some of the African’s mental attributes
get under-rated, I am sure there are others of them
for which he gets more credit than he deserves.
One of these is his imagination. It strikes
the new-comer with awe, and frequently fills him with
rage, when he first meets it; but as he matures and
gets used to the African, he sees the string.
For the African fancy is not the “aerial fancy
flying free,” mentioned by our poets, but merely
the aerial of the theatre suspended by a wire or cord.
The wire that supports the African’s fancy
may be a very thin, small fact indeed, or in some
cases merely his incapacity to distinguish between
animate and inanimate objects, which give rise to his
idea that everything is possessed of a soul.
Everything has a soul to him, and to make confusion
worse confounded, he usually believes in the existence
of matter apart from its soul. But there is little
he won’t believe in, if it comes to that; and
I have a feeling of thankfulness that Buddhism, Theosophy,
and above all Atheism, which chases its tail and proves
that nothing can be proved, have not yet been given
the African to believe in.
