Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/822

802 One important thought in particular is not peculiar to fetich-faith, but is mixed with the religions of most people; but the negro suffers more than any other man from the fear of ghosts. "In the foaming water, in the dazzling lightning, in the murmuring wind, he sees the working of self-existing spiritual beings. And why should we deprive an anxious human heart of the comforting faith that a piece of hide or a dried snake-head carefully wrapped up and worn about the body can protect him?"

Every Congo negro carries a M'kissi upon himself; and there may be thousands of kinds of them that escape the eyes of the white man. The N'ganga, or medicine-man, is usually the fabricant of the fetich, and whatever he finds good to impose upon his simple-minded, credulous brethren for a high price, sewed up in cloth or leather or inclosed in a goat's horn, is doubly valuable in the eyes of its new possessor, because he believes that his M'kissi stands in a personal relation to himself; and he can not be induced to give it up to a white man for any price. Among these amulets are dried snakes and lizards' heads, little pieces of skin, feathers of certain birds, and parts of known poison-plants. The eye-teeth of leopards are an exceedingly valuable fetich on the Kroo coast, and it is easy to buy with them articles of vastly more real value, like ivory rings, etc. The Kabinda negroes wear a little brown shell, very much like our Linnæus, on their necks. The shells are sealed with wax, and are made, perhaps, vessels containing magic medicines. The larg-e snail-shells found in the Cassava or Manioc fields on the Kuilu Niadi are also M'kissi, and are set in the fields by the women who till them to protect their plantations. One of the chiefs in the upper Kuilu Niadi, in N'kuangila, has a M'kissi against the tornado: it is an antelope-horn. On the approach of a storm the king calls his people together; the horn is stuck in the ground, and a dance is begun around it, which is kept up, in spite of wind and rain, till the tornado is over. Every house in the village has its M'kissi; they are frequently put over the door or brought inside, and then they protect the house from fire and robbery. These penates of the negroes are sometimes figures very artistically cut in wood or ivory, and show a certain degree of native skill and taste in the people. But it is not the guardians of his house only that the negro thus represents in material figures; he also gives corporeal form to diseases, like small-pox, syphilis, and fever. Every town has its war-fetich; and the principle of creation is represented in male and female M'kissi. The Hyphæne palm-tree on the Kuilu shows how the negro sees a spirit at work in the wonders of Nature which he can not explain. That tree was M'kissi to the whole village. Good medicines with which the negroes are acquainted, or of which they experience the salutary effects, are also called M'kissi. A negro called a dose of castor-oil which I gave him, M'kissi mbote, or good medicine.

The white man—mondela or mundele—is regarded by tribes which