Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/793

Rh

NTIL a few years ago it was popularly believed that the negro nations of West Africa were in the unique position of never having produced anything worth recording. They were supposed to have no history, no traditions, and no folklore, and even their religion was said to be something infinitely lower than was found anywhere else, a worship of sticks, stones, or shells, picked up at haphazard, and deified without rhyme or reason. This groveling religion, which was alleged to be significant of the degraded condition in which the West African negro was believed to be, was called fetichism, a word which, while really a corruption of the Portuguese feitiço, "amulet" or "charm," was supposed to be a negro word; and several treatises were written to show that, as it was impossible to conceive a lower form of religion, fetichism might therefore be assumed to be the beginning of all religion.

All these extraordinary beliefs, which had no foundation whatever in fact, may be traced to the reports made by those persons who, being engaged in the slave trade, resorted to West Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The great majority of these men had but a very transient acquaintance with West Africa, only remaining on the coast sufficiently long to obtain cargoes of slaves; and consequently it was impossible for them to have any real knowledge of the natives with whom they were brought in contact. Then, as they had no knowledge of African languages, they were dependent for their information upon those negroes who had acquired a smattering of some European language, and in most cases they seem to have completely misunderstood what their informants doubtless intended to convey. In other cases the slave-traders no doubt drew upon their imaginations, or exaggerated what they had seen; for if they could show that the negro was a mere brutish animal, they palliated to some eL.tent the iniquity of the slave trade; and so his fancied brutishness was persistently brought to the front—at all events toward the end of the last century, when the traffic in slaves had begun to fall into disrepute.

Dr. Theodor Waitz, the distinguished author of Anthropologie der Naturvölker, was the first to express a doubt as to the authenticity of the supposed facts concerning the social condition and religion of the West African negro—which work my long acquaintance with West Africa has enabled me to continue, and in two volumes I have shown that the religion of the negro, so far