| OCR Text |
Show FETISHISM IN AFRICA. A Terrible lie LI of Thut Sprcuda Oat into 1 Every Kind of Villainy. I So universal is this belief that ulmostevery village of paau Africa, particularly toward to-ward tho wt-st coast, has Its fetish house, a grim and ghastly building, olten ranged round with human skulls in every 6Lao of decomposition, and a fetish mau, who is its high priest. No human beiug surely ever had a more terrific power ccjimiitEcd to him, and few have isfd it moru uusiariiigly or unscrupulously. Tho fetish man is bound by no law; ho recognizes no rules of evidence. evi-dence. Anything which happens, oven in tho ordinary course of nature, ho may pronounce pro-nounce to bo tha work of a fetish or a wizard, wiz-ard, and to need his assistance to ferret it out A heavy rainfall or a drought, a murrain among tho cattle, a pestilence or a conflagration, conflagra-tion, a child dovoured by a wild animal, au illness or a death, each and all of these may be pronouncwl to bo "fetish ;" somebody has done it, and ho must be detected. So. possessed pos-sessed are the natives by this belief, it so forms part of their being, that it uever occurs oc-curs to any ono of them, though ho knows that his own turn may come next, to question ques-tion tho reality of this uncanny power, and, in tho pauic terror which waits upon the movements of tho fetish man and his de cisious, the negro loses for a time some of his most essential and amiable characteristics, his frivolity, his light beartedness, even his family affection. A son will join in putting bis father to death; a brother will help to tear to pieces a brother. If the accused dares to deny tho charge which he seldom does, however preposterous or impossible it may be he has to submit to some terrible ordeal, such as tho running at full speed under an avenue of hooped arches about half his height, when, if he stumbles, or rather as soon as ho stumbles, he is kicked to death; or the drinking of some deadly decoction, de-coction, such as tho casea bark, when his one chance of escape is handsomely to bribe the fetish man to give him tho exact quantity or quality which will make him desperately Bick before tho poison has well begun its deadly work. In Ashanteo and Dahomey, at Bonny and Calabar, in the Fan country and throughout through-out Angola, this terrible belief prevails, and, as may well be imagined, it rami Lies out into every kind of villainy and crime. Nineteenth Nine-teenth Century. |
