" And how can he know when the people themselves, even the
princes and priests, are ignorant of it? A missionary of twenty
years' standing in West Africa, an able and conscientious student
withal, assured me that during the early part of his career he
had given much time to collecting and collating, under
intelligent native superintendence, negro traditions and
religion. He presently found that no two men thought alike upon
any single subject: I need hardly say that he gave up in despair
a work hopeless as psychology, the mere study of the individual.
Fetishism, I believe, is held by the orthodox to be a degradation
of the pure and primitive "Adamical dispensation," even as the
negro has been supposed to represent the accursed and degraded
descendants of Ham and Canaan. I cannot but look upon it as the
first dawn of a faith in things not seen. And it must be studied
by casting off all our preconceived ideas. For instance, Africans
believe, not in soul nor in spirit, but in ghost; when they
called M. du Chaillu a "Mbwiri," they meant that the white man
had been bleached by the grave as Dante had been darkened by his
visit below, and consequently he was a subject of fear and awe.
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