Alexandre Le Roy

“ Animism, based on the distinction between matter and spirit, is the belief in beings which have no affinity to any special thing in nature, but are endowed with a higher power; to whom a certain worship is paid, yet who are incapable of being represented in a visible form. Taken in this very vague and general sense, it may be said that Animism is the religion of a great part of Africa: the Negritos, Hottentots, Bantus of the south and east, many of the Nigritians, and most of the Hamites, have practically neither fetishes, idols, nor material images, honoured with any kind of worship. ”

“ It is curious to meet, in the heart of Africa, with facts of sorcery absolutely identical with those known among us in the Middle Ages, and even at the present day. And, if these wizards and witches practice their arts at the risk of their lives, it may be well to add that they have not seldom merited their fate, for many of them, in addition to and aside from their relations to the supernatural, are undeniably very skilful poisoners. ”

“ Daily, one may say, Islam spreads over the great African continent, creeping down from Morocco to Senegal, making inroads on the valley of the Niger and the shores of Lake Tchad, passing from Kordofan into Uganda, and from Zanzibar to the Congo. Bitterly hostile to Europeans by its very nature, it is yet very skilful in adapting itself to circumstances. ”

“ They are no longer negroes. Most of them lead a pastoral life and, divided into something like clans, tend their flocks on the wide strip of half-desert pasture-land which stretches from Cape Gardafui to Cape Verde. They are intelligent, warlike, independent, given to pillage, and full of scorn for inferior races; they are bad neighbours, but have great influence wherever they may be. From the Hamites we pass, by a natural transition, to the Berbers, who have held northern Africa for many centuries. ”

“ Nevertheless, that which ethnologists call Naturism, Animism, or Fetishism nowhere constitutes in primitive Africa a body of doctrine, with correlative precepts and settled practice which may be reduced to a system. The idea of a Being higher than man, invisible, inaccessible, master of life and death, orderer of all things, seems to exist everywhere; among the Negritos, the Hottentots, the Bantu, the Nigritians, the Hamites ”

“ The occupation of the continent by the European nations, which put an end to local wars, slave-raids, and, to some extent, to poisonings, infanticide, and human sacrifices, might well lead men to hope for the repeopling of Africa. These advantages, however, seem, in modern times, sadly outweighed by the spread of the dread sleeping-sickness and other contagious diseases, drunkenness, and the breaking up of native family life, due to contact with our civilization. ”

“ In Egypt, to begin with, and throughout northern Africa, it was a forcible conquest of countries and peoples in a state of utter social, political, and religious disorganization. These remnants of peoples were intoxicated by a doctrine of great power, covering all that relates to the interests and concerns of man. ”

“ In fact, from one end of Africa to the other we meet, overgrown by a more or less confused mass of strange superstitions, the essential ideas of that which everywhere has been looked upon as the primitive religion: an unseen God, Master of all things, and Organizer of the world; the survival of the human soul, under a form not clearly defined; at times, the idea of reward and punishment in the other world; the existence and activity of spirits, some of whom help men while others deceive them; prayer, sacrifice, the need of a worship ”

“ Religious beliefs and practices, characterized by the two principal elements of prayer and sacrifice, form part of the daily life of the blacks. What is also true, however, is that no body of doctrine, properly so called, exists anywhere with interpreters bound to ensure its integrity, to explain and to hand it down to others. There is, therefore, no distinct religious code, no official teaching, no books, no schools, as in Islam, Buddhism, and other positive religions. ”

“ While this part of the continent was being converted, willingly or by force, to Islam, eastern Africa was invaded in its turn by colonies of merchants, who, however, readily became warriors, and never failed to be apostles. It was thus that Islam gained the shores of the Red Sea, Somaliland, the Zanzibar coast as far as Kiloa, and the islands as far as the Comoto Islands and Madagascar. One nation alone, Ethiopia, entrenched in its huge, mountainous citadel, held out against them. ”

“ We are thus led to conclude that these peoples, being more given to wandering than the others, often living a pastoral life in a more open country, have been less prone than were the sedentary tribes to materialize their worship in objects difficult to carry about with them. This, possibly, is the explanation of the phenomenon which attracted Livingstone's attention. However this may be, an impartial study of African religion makes it impossible for anyone, in the present state of acquaintance with the subject, to assert that man began on this great continent by having no religious ideas ”

“ The Hottentots, like all Africans, are fond of dancing by moonlight; they hail the moon's reappearance and follow her course closely, since it is she who measures time, but this is very far from being worship. The true objects of Hottentot worship are the spirits of their dead. They recognize, moreover, a Power higher than these shades, "Tsu Goab", an expression which the missionaries have made use of to translate the word "God". ”

“ It is a land where the sky is without cloud, and the earth without shade. These deserts, which are not lacking in grandeur and attraction, mark, north and south, the true boundaries of Africa. Beyond them, north and south—to the north, Mauretania, Algeria, Egypt; to the south, the region of Cape Colony—the soil, the climate, the fauna and flora, the inhabitants are no longer characteristically African, but European.
II. The Inhabitants.—The most recent statistics give the population of Africa as from 160,000,000 to 200,000,000 souls. ”

“ This satisfaction is most esteemed when it is possible to sacrifice their enemies, those who have caused their death, and on whom they thus wreak the sweetest revenge that can be dreamed of. This is the origin of cannibalism, which in some parts of Africa has taken on peculiarly disgusting forms. Ancestor worship, in one form or other, is thus the chief expression of African religion. But besides shades, there are a number of spirits, whose origin is unknown, who reveal themselves in various ways. ”

“ African ethnography presents a very complicated problem. Five thousand years before Christ the valley of the Nile was inhabited by a population already possessing a remarkable civilization. Traces of its occupation even prior to that period, during the Age of Stone, have been found from the Atlas to the Cape, from Somaliland to the Guinea Coast. The question, then, arises, whether these primitive populations may not now be represented by the Negritos, or Pygmies, of Africa, mentioned by ancient authors and once more discovered in modern times. ”

“ Certain anthropologists and ethnologists, anxious to find in Africa a territory propitious to their theories, endeavour to prove that the religious evolution of man starts from simple Naturism, whence it proceeds to Animism, and thence to Fetishism, to attain at length to a more or less pure Theism. ”

“ Again, other Bantu tribes use terms which mean either "Sky" or "God", "Sun" or "God", etc., but make a clear distinction as to the meaning conveyed by these words. Not one, in fact, imagines that a material identity exists between the planet that gives us light, or the firmament wherein it moves, and the Supreme Being who inhabits or makes use of them. The same may be said concerning the thunder. The blacks, indeed, sometimes say that it is God, who by this sign, foretells the rain, but this is not worship. Naturism, in the strict sense given to the word, does not exist in Africa. ”

“ Their life is everywhere the same; they are nomads, who make no settled encampments, have no trade, commerce, or farming, neither flocks nor domestic animals of any kind, except a small dog, also found all over Africa, whose life is on a level with the wretched life of his master. These people live by hunting, by what they can pick up or beg from the agricultural or pastoral tribes among whom they live, and whom they supply with meat, ivory, and rubber. ”

“ In Egypt there is hardly a village on the Nile without one of their schools, under a Coptic master. Protestantism, therefore, shows considerable activity in Africa, seconded, as it is, by the magnificent generosity of its adherents and of its numerous native assistants. ”

“ It is in the Equatorial zone, and especially towards the west, that the forests are largest, while in other parts they are somewhat irregularly scattered, with trees rising straight and mighty above a vigorous undergrowth. It is possible to travel for days, and even months, in these forests without so much as a glimpse of the sky, except in some chance clearing where the natives have cut down a few trees, to build their little village, or to till their fields. Silence reigns everywhere, broken only, in the daytime, by an occasional flapping of wings overhead ”

“ The source of the Congo is at a height of 6,000 feet; of the Nile at 4,500; and of the Niger at 3,000; while that of the Amazon is not more than 700 feet, and the Mississippi only about 2,000 feet. It has been said that Africa has been less travelled than any other part of the world. It is there that are found, more than anywhere else, huge mountains, such as Kilima-Njaro, Kenya, etc., which rise suddenly from the level surface of great plains; vast lakes of uncertain outlines, which seem at one time to be drying up and at another to be making new inroads on the land ”

“ Most of them, however, have maintained their patriarchal life, and are scattered in little villages, practically independent of each other. Moreover, litigation and war, slavery, polygamy, the practice of a degrading fetishism, with their train of legal infanticide, trials by poison and by fire, arbitrary condemnations, poisonings, human sacrifices, and even cannibalism, prevail more or less extensively, and to a greater or less degree among all these interesting peoples. ”

“ Man finds himself a being on the earth, like the plants and animals. That fact he is conscious of. He eats, he reproduces himself, he does what he can; he dies also, as a rule, though death is looked on as an accident, the causes of which must always be inquired into. ”

“ It is to the general scheme of these mysterious things that we must reduce the almost universal belief that there exists for each individual, for each family, something sacred or forbidden, the taboo of the Maoris, which cannot be touched without misfortune: a fruit, a tree, a fish, an animal, whose name one bears. ”

“ In a word, from the point of view of the black man, the world was formed to progress regularly, and might possibly have attained its end, had its Creator so willed it. But, for unknown reasons, God had left His work exposed to many harmful influences of elements, of animals, of men, of sorcerers, of ghosts, of spirits. ”

“ All these tribes, whose skin is black, bronze, or reddish—the result, no doubt of a considerable mingling with the tribes they first met with—are, as a rule, of a regular type, often handsome, with shapely limbs, oval faces, long noses, and hair long and curly; all with an air that appears to greater advantage from their skill in draping themselves in the fashion of antique statues. ”

“ But, just as it is possible for man to use to his advantage or to neutralize, these mysterious influences, these secret virtues in things, so he can make use of them to effect his revenge, to do harm to those about him, as do sorcerers, conjurers, or wizards. ”

“ The Capuchins and Jesuits did wonders in Angola; the Dominicans settled at Mozambique, the bishopric of which dates from 1614; and the Augustinians took Zanzibar, Mombasa, and Paté as their sphere of labour, where they founded numerous Christian communities. Attempts were made at the same time to discover the famous Prester John in Abyssinia, but it was only in the seventeenth century, and for barely forty years, that the Jesuits were able to establish themselves in that country, with the hope, soon destroyed by a violent persecution, of bringing back this ancient church to Catholicism. ”

“ From the new groups thus remoulded issued successively other conquerors, down to the recent uprisings of the Samory and the Rabah tribes in the Sudan. Moreover, since Islam is at once a religious doctrine, a social system, a political principle, a commercial interest, a civilization that arrogates to itself all manner of rights against the "infidel", it follows that each Mussulman is intimately possessed by the spirit of proselytism. To this end he may, and does, make use of every means; all is permissible against the "unbeliever". ”