Page:West African Studies.djvu/207

 One might, however, quite fairly call the Mpongwe school the trade-charm school, great as trade charms are in all West African Fetish.

This lack of a predominance sufficient to dwarf other parts of pure Fetish makes the Mpongwe school particularly interesting and valuable to a student; it is a magnificent school to study your pure Fetish in, as none of it is here thrown by a predominant factor into the background of thought, and left in a neglected state.

It is of this school that you will find Dr. Nassau's classification of spirits, and all the other observations of his that I have quoted of things absolutely believed in by the natives, and also all the Mpongwe, Benga, Igalwa, Ncomi, and Fetish I have attempted to describe.

It has no gods with proper priests. Human beings are here just doing their best to hold their own with the spirit world, getting spirits under their control as far as possible, and dealing with the rest of them diplomatically. This state I venture to think is Fetish in a very early form, a form through which the now elaborate true Negro Fetish must have passed before reaching its present co-ordinated state. How long ago it was when the true Negro was in this stage I will not venture to conjecture. Sir Henry Maine, of whom I am a very humble follower, says, "Nothing moves that is not Greek." This is a hard saying to accept, but the truth of it grows on you when you are studying things such as these, and you are forced to acknowledge that they at any rate have a slow rate of development—sometimes indeed it seems that there is a mere wave motion of thought among all men rising here and there when in the hands of superior tribes, like the Mpongwe for ex-