Volume I Part 4 (2/2)
are two chief agencies, working partners who manage the business of the world, and who effect what the civilized call ”Providence.” Mbwiri here becomes the Osiris, Jove, Hormuzd or Good G.o.d, the Vishnu, or Preserver, a tutelar deity, a Lar, a guardian. Onyambe is the Bad G.o.d, Typhon, Vejovis, the Ahriman or Semitic devil; s.h.i.+va the Destroyer, the third person of the Aryan triad; and his name is never mentioned but with bated breath.
They have not only fear of, but also a higher respect for him than for the giver of good, so difficult is it for the child- man's mind to connect the ideas of benignity and power. He would harm if he could, ergo so would his G.o.d. I once hesitated to believe that these rude people had arrived at the notion of duality, at the Manichaeanism which caused Mr. Mill (sen.) surprise that no one had revived it in his time; at an idea so philosophical, which leads directly to the ne plus ultra of faith, El Wahdaniyyeh or Monotheism. Nor should I have credited them with so logical an apparatus for the regimen of the universe, or so stout-hearted an attempt to solve the eternal riddle of good and evil. But the same belief also exists amongst the Congoese tribes, and even in the debased races of the Niger.
Captain William Alien (”Niger Expedition,” i. 227) thus records the effect when, at the request of the commissioners, Herr Schon, the missionary, began stating to King Obi the difference between the Christian religion and heathenism:
”Herr Schon. There is but one G.o.d.
”King Obi. I always understood there were two,” &c.
The Mpongwe ”Mwetye” is a branch of male freemasonry into which women and strangers are never initiated. The Bakele and Shekyani, according to ”Western Africa” (Wilson, pp. 391-2), consider it a ”Great Spirit.” Nothing is more common amongst adjoining negro tribes than to annex one another's superst.i.tions, completely changing, withal, their significance. ”Ovengwa” is a vampire, the apparition of a dead man; tall as a tree, always winking and clearly seen, which is not the case with the Ibambo and Ilogo, plurals of Obambo and Ologo. These are vulgar ghosts of the departed, the causes of ”possession,” disease and death; they are propitiated by various rites, and everywhere they are wors.h.i.+pped in private. Mr. Wilson opines that the ”Obambo are the spirits of the ancestors of the people, and Inlaga are the spirits of strangers and have come from a distance,” but this was probably an individual tenet. The Mumbo-Jumbo of the Mandengas; the Semo of the Susus; the Ta.s.sau or ”Purrah-devil” of the Mendis; the Egugun of the Egbas; the Egbo of the Duallas; and the Mwetye and Ukukwe of the Bakele, is represented in Pongo-land by the Nda, which is an order of the young men. Nda dwells in the woods and comes forth only by night bundled up in dry plantain leaves[FN#14] and treading on tall stilts; he precedes free adult males who parade the streets with dance and song. The women and children fly at the approach of this devil on two sticks, and with reason: every peccadillo is punished with a merciless thras.h.i.+ng. The inst.i.tution is intended to keep in order the weaker s.e.x, the young and the ”chattels:” Nda has tried visiting white men and missionaries, but his visits have not been a success.
The civilized man would be apt to imagine that these wild African fetis.h.i.+sts are easily converted to a ”purer creed.” The contrary is everywhere and absolutely the case; their faith is a web woven with threads of iron. The negro finds it almost impossible to rid himself of his belief; the spiritual despotism is the expression of his organization, a part of himself. Progressive races, on the other hand, can throw off or exchange every part of their religion, except perhaps the remnant of original and natural belief in things unseen--in fact, the Fetis.h.i.+st portion, such as ghost-existence and veneration of material objects, places, and things. I might instance the Protestant missionary who, while deriding the holy places at Jerusalem, considers the ”Cedars of Lebanon” sacred things, and sternly forbids travellers to gather the cones.
The stereotyped African answer to Europeans ridiculing these inst.i.tutions, including wizard-spearing and witch-burning is, ”There may be no magic, though I see there is, among you whites.
But we blacks have known many men who have been bewitched and died.” Even in Asia, whenever I spoke contemptuously to a Moslem of his Jinns, or to a Hindu of his Rakshasa, the rejoinder invariably was, ”You white men are by nature so hot that even our devils fear you.”
Witchcraft, which has by no means thoroughly disappeared from Europe, maintains firm hold upon the African brain. The idea is found amongst Christians, for instance, the ”reduced Indians” of the Amazonas River; and it is evidently at the bottom of that widely spread superst.i.tion, the ”evil eye,” which remains throughout Southern Europe as strong as it was in the days of Pliny. As amongst barbarians generally, no misfortune happens, no accident occurs, no illness nor death can take place without the agency of wizard or witch. There is nothing more odious than this crime; it is hostile to G.o.d and man, and it must be expiated by death in the most terrible tortures. Metamorphosis is a common art amongst Mpongwe magicians: this vulgar materialism, of which Ovid sang, must not be confounded with the poetical Hindu metempsychosis or transmigration of souls which explains empirically certain physiological mysteries. Here the adept naturally becomes a gorilla or a leopard, as he would be a lion in South Africa, a hyena in Abyssinia and the Somali country, and a loup-garou in Brittany.[FN#15]
The poison ordeal is a necessary corollary to witchcraft. The plant most used by the Oganga (medicine man) is a small red rooted shrub, not unlike a hazel bush, and called Ikazya or Ikaja. Mr. Wilson (p. 225) writes ”Nkazya:” Battel (loc. cit.
334) terms the root ”Imbando,” a corruption of Mbundu. M. du Chaillu (chap. xv.) gives an ill.u.s.tration of the ”Mboundou leaf”
(half size): Professor John Torrey believes the active principle to be a vegeto-alkali of the Strychnos group, but the symptoms do not seem to bear out the conjecture. The Mpongwe told me that the poison was named either Mbundu or Olonda (nut) werere--perhaps this was what is popularly called ”a sell.” Mbundu is the decoction of the sc.r.a.ped bark which corresponds with the ”Sa.s.sy- water” of the northern maritime tribes. The accused, after drinking the potion, is ordered to step over sticks of the same plant, which are placed a pace apart. If the man be affected, he raises his foot like a horse with string-halt, and this convicts him of the foul crime. Of course there is some antidote, as the medicine-man himself drinks large draughts of his own stuff: in Old Calabar River for instance, Mithridates boils the poison-nut; but Europeans could not, and natives would not, tell me what the Gaboon ”dodge” is. According to vulgar Africans, all test-poisons are sentient and reasoning beings, who search the criminal's stomach, that is his heart, and who find out the deep hidden sin; hence the people shout, ”If they are wizards, let it kill them; if they are innocent, let it go forth!” Moreover, the detected murderer is considered a bungler who has fallen into the pit dug for his brother. Doubtless many innocent lives have been lost by this superst.i.tion. But there is reason in the order, ”Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” without having recourse to the supernaturalisms and preternaturalisms, which have un.o.bligingly disappeared when Science most wants them. Sorcery and poison are as closely united as the ”Black Nightingales,” and it evidently differs little whether I slay a man with my sword or I destroy him by the slow and certain torture of a mind diseased.
The Mpongwe have also some peculiarities in their notions of justice. If a man murder another, the criminal is put to death, not by the nearest of kin, as amongst the Arabs and almost all wild people, but by the whole community; this already shows an advanced appreciation of the act and its bearings. The penalty is either drowning or burning alive: except in the case of a chief or a very rich man, little or no difference is made between wilful murder, justifiable homicide, and accidental manslaughter- -the reason of this, say their jurists, is to make people more careful. Here, again, we find a sense of the sanct.i.ty of life the reverse of barbarous. Cutting and maiming are punished by the fine of a slave.
And now briefly to resume the character of the Mpongwe, a nervous and excitable race of negroes. The men are deficient in courage, as the women are in chast.i.ty, and neither s.e.x has a tincture of what we call morality. To commercial shrewdness and eagerness they add exceptional greed of gain and rascality; foreign rum and tobacco, dress and ornaments, arms and ammunition have been necessaries to them; they will have them, and, unless they can supply themselves by licit, they naturally fly to illicit means.
Yet, despite threats of poison and charges of witchcraft, they have arrived at an inkling of the dogma that ”honesty is the best policy:” the East African has never dreamed it in the moments of his wildest imagination. Pre-eminent liars, they are, curious to say, often deceived by the falsehoods of others, and they fairly ill.u.s.trate the somewhat paradoxical proverb:
”He who hates truth shall be the dupe of lies.”
Unblus.h.i.+ng mendicants, cunning and calculating, their obstinacy is remarkable; yet, as we often find the African, they are at the same time irresolute in the extreme. Their virtues are vivacity, mental activity, acute observation, sociability, politeness, and hospitality: the fact that a white man can wander single-handed through the country shows a kindly nature. The brightest spot in their character is an abnormal development of adhesiveness, popularly called affection; it is somewhat tempered by capricious ruffianism, as in children; yet it ent.i.tles them to the grat.i.tude of travellers.
The language of the Mpongwe has been fairly studied. T. Edward Bowdich (”Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee,” London, Murray, 1819) when leaving the West Coast for England, touched at the Gaboon in a trading vessel, and visited Naango (King George's Town), on Abaaga Creek, which he places fifty miles up stream. He first gave (Appendix VI.) a list of the Mpongwe numerals. In 1847 the ”Missionaries of the A. B. C. F. M.” Gaboon Mission, Western Africa, printed a ”Grammar of the Mpongwe Language, with Vocabularies” (New York,Snowden and Pratt, Vesey Street), perhaps a little prematurely; it is the first of the four dialects on this part of the coast reduced to system by the American Missionaries, especially by the Rev. Mr. Leighton Wilson, the others being Bakele, Benga, and Fan.
In 1856, the same gentleman, who had taken the chief part in the first publication, made an able abstract and a comparison with the Grebo and Mandenga tongues (”Western Africa,” part iv. chap.
iv.). M. du Chaillu further abridged this abridgement in his Appendix without owning his authority, and in changing the examples he did all possible damage. In the Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London (part ii. vol. i. new series), he also gave an abstract, in which he repeats himself. A ”vocabulaire de la langue Ponga” was printed in the ”Memoires de la Societe Ethnologique,” tome ii., by M. P. H. Delaporte.
The other publications known to me are:--
1. The Book of Proverbs, translated into the Mpongwe language at the mission of the A. B. C. F. M., Gaboon, West Africa. New York.
American Bible Society, inst.i.tuted in the year MDCCCXVI. 1859.
2. The Books of Genesis, part of Exodus, Proverbs, and Acts, by the same, printed at the same place and in the same year.
The missionary explorers of the language, if I may so call them, at once saw that it belongs to the great South African family Sichwana, Zulu, Kisawahili, Mbundo (Congoese), Fiote, and others, whose characteristics are polysyllabism, inflection by systematic prefixes, and an alliteration, the mystery of whose reciprocal letters is theoretically explained by a euphony in many cases unintelligible, like the modes of Hindu music, to the European ear.[FN#16] But they naturally fell into the universally accepted error of a.s.serting ”it has no known affinities to any of the languages north of the Mountains of the Moon,” meaning the equatorial chain which divides the Niger and Nile valleys from the basin of the Congo.
This branch has its peculiarities. Like Italian--the coquette who grants her smiles to many, her favours to few--one of the easiest to understand and to speak a little, it is very difficult to master. Whilst every native child can thread its way safely through its intricate, elaborate, and apparently arbitrary variations, the people comprehend a stranger who blunders over every sentence. Mr. Wilson thus limits the use of the accent: ”Whilst the Mandenga (”A Grammar of the Mandenga Language,” by the Rev. R. Maxwell Macbriar, London, John Mason) and the Grebo (”Grammar,” by the Right Rev. John Payne, D.D. 150, Na.s.sau Street, New York, 1864), distinguish between similar words, especially monosyllables, by a certain pitch of voice, the Mpongwe repel accent, and rely solely upon the clear and distinct vowel sounds.” But I found the negative past, present, and future forms of verbs wholly dependent upon a change of accent, or rather of intonation or voice-pitch, which the stranger's ear, unless acute, will fail to detect. For instance, Mi Taund would mean ”I love;” Mi taunda, ”I do not love.” The reverend linguist also a.s.serts that it is almost entirely free from guttural and nasal sounds; the latter appeared to me as numerous and complicated as in the Sanskrit. Mr. Wilson could hardly have had a nice ear, or he would not have written Nchigo ”Ntyege,” or Njina ”Engena,” which gives a thoroughly un-African distinctness to the initial consonant.
The adjectival form is archaically expressed by a second and abstract substantive. This peculiarity is common in the South African family, as in Ashanti; but, as Bowdich observes, we also find it in Greek, e.g. <greek> , ”heresies of destruction” for destructive. Another notable characteristic is the Mpongwe's fondness for the pa.s.sive voice, never using, if possible, the active; for instance, instead of saying, ”He was born thus,” he prefers, ”The birth that was thus borned by him.”
The dialect changes the final as well as the initial syllable, a process unknown to the purest types of the South African family.
As we advance north we find this phenomenon ever increasing; for instance in Fernando Po; but the Mpongwe limits the change to verbs.
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