Chapter XVII: Of the Dahoman Religion

I cannot but admire the incuriousness of so many travellers who have visited Dahome and have described its Customs without an attempt to master, or at least to explain, the faith that underlies them. Their excuses must be the difficulty presented by the incorporation of manifold elements, and the various obstacles to exploring a religion which every man, to a certain extent, makes up for himself. “Perhaps,” said a Dahoman officer to Captain Snelgrave, the first European who visited his country (1627), “that God may be yours who has communicated so many extraordinary things to white men; but as that God has not been pleased to make himself known to us, we must be satisfied with this we worship”; and Captain Phillips truly remarks of the Whydah people, “In truth they have so many things they call fetishes that I could never understand the true meaning of the word.”

Fetishism, according to the older opinion, is, like the negro’s personal conformation, a fall from the primitive inspired and spiritual belief of mankind. The researches of our modern day tend to establish the fact of a fossil ancestry of immeasurable inferiority to the present _Homo sapiens_, the effect of a selection ever active throughout a course of ages. Consequently anthropologists will substitute, even in the Hamite, a rise above instead of a fall from the philosophic Adam: they will consider his superstitions as the dawnings of belief struggling to attain the brightness of day, equally inferior in the moral or sentimental qualities to the Asiatic, and to the European in the reflectives and the perceptives.

Africans, as a rule, worship everything except the Creator. Yet there is, even amongst this people, a “_sensus numinis_” which raises them above the Andamanian “Minkopi,” the Australasian races, and the idiots or imperfect brain formations amongst the higher families. I will not delay to inquire whether the Yoruban deity, confused and indigested as the idea is, has not been greatly modified by converse with Al-Islam, or whether it was not derived from Christians driven southwards during the Vandal persecutions.

The Ffon name for the deity is Mau.[116] The Roman Catholic missioners have preferred to call themselves Mau-no or Mau-mother, as opposed to Vodun-no or fetish priest. On the other hand, Mau is the moon,[117] a distinct trace of Sabæanism; as the feminine principle, it made man in conjunction with Lisa or Se,—a male, the fetish representative of the sun, of which more hereafter.[118] The Fanti or Wesleyan missionaries, who translate Mau as “all the gods,” or “the unknown God,” prefer Yewhe, or Ji-wule-ye-whe.[119] It is evident that, in the Dahoman mind, the _numen_ has not had time to separate itself from material objects, or to vindicate its right to Latria as opposed to Dulia.

This Mau, or Ye-whe, is the Esquimaux “Pirksoma”—“he who is above”—an entity wholly undeveloped, and, for the same reason, the imperfect intellect of both races. Being incomprehensible, the Supreme is judged too elevated to care for the low estate of man; and consequently is neither feared nor loved. The sentiment almost universal amongst negro races corresponds with the views of many thinkers in modern or in ancient Europe, who look upon the Deity as the Cause of Causes and the Source of Law, rather than as a local and personal fact. It has, at least, saved the African from anthropomorphism—a besetting peculiarity of the Aryan race, whose hostility to a pure theism lingers, even at the present time, in that Semitic faith which has become the creed of modern Europe. Thus, so easily do extremes meet, and such is the radical identity of creeds, the negro’s Deity, if disassociated from physical objects, would almost represent the idea of the philosopher.

It has been doubted whether, in the present state of human nature, a belief so abstract as Monotheism, asomatous and non-local, is a sufficient proof for the weakness of mankind. As there is in man a _besoin d’aimer_, so his veneration requires, they say, a Creator, whose image he is. The Athanasian looks upon deism as atheism, and holds all but a personal god no god or a useless god. In England the mind of Milton found comfort in a Father, who, unable to forgive the disobedience of his creatures, accepted the agony of a sinless Son; and he saw nothing irreverent in recording a divine dialogue of Arian and Calvinistic theology. Truly, says the Yoruban proverb, “The wisdom of this year will be as folly in another.”

The African—somewhat like the vulgar Asiatic and European, especially the southron—holds the illogical belief that his dark, silent, eternal Deity can be influenced by intercessions animate and inanimate, human and bestial; that the leopard and the crocodile, like the walí (saint) and the prophet, and that the fetish shrub, like the Salagram, the Karbela clay, or the bit of True Cross, may, by some inexplicable process, control the inscrutable course of mundane law. These articles, however, must not be confounded, as they often are by Europeans, with the Platonic inferior deities. In some points they preserve a family resemblance with the old Gebr faith. Thus the latter had, for instance, Izad as angel or fetish for the sun, Mohr for the moon, Awa for water, Gowad for air, Amardad for trees, and Bahman for cattle.

In Africa the list of fetish or worshipped objects is nearly endless. Some powerful and indescribable influence residing in the elements, in beasts (mostly the destructive), and even in man (generally human benefactors), enables them to work present weal and woe, and wins for them propitiation or deprecation. The tendency of humanity to worship Nature and her powers extends from Pliny[120] to the American savage. It recognizes as its temples, caverns, valleys, trees, and forests. The Yorubas, of whom it must be remembered the Dahomans are a family, have advanced from the adoration of the material object towards a personification of Nature’s works, and these we consider idols or _simulacres_.[121] There is another idea which in these lands often makes and breaks gods. A man about to undertake a danger or a difficulty looks about as, according to the same Pliny, the Romans did, for some supernatural aid. He takes the first object, be it bird or beast, stock or stone, seen in the morning when leaving his house, and he makes it his Genius. If it prove useful, worship and sacrifice are not wanting: on the other hand, a stronger “medicine” is sought.

In the days of Bosman (1700) the little kingdom of Whydah adored three orders of gods, each presiding, like the several officers of a prince, over its peculiar province.

The first is the Danh-gbwe, whose worship has been described.[122] This earthly serpent is esteemed the supreme bliss and general good: it has 1000 Danh’si or snake wives, married and single votaries, and its influence cannot be meddled with by the two following, which are subject to it.

The second is represented by lofty and beautiful trees,[123] “in the formation of which Dame Nature seems to have expressed her greatest art.” They are prayed to and presented with offerings in times of sickness, and especially of fever. Those most revered are the Hun-’tin, or acanthaceous silk cotton (_Bombax_), whose wives equal those of the snake, and the Loko, the well-known Edum, ordeal, or poison tree, of the West African coast. The latter numbers few Loko-’si, or Loko spouses: on the other hand, it has its own fetish pottery, which may be bought in every market. An inverted pipkin full of cullender holes is placed upon the ground at the tree foot, and by its side is a narrow-necked little pot into which the water offering is poured. The two are sometimes separated by a cresset-shaped fetish iron, planted in the earth. The _cultus arborum_, I need hardly say, is an old and far-spread worship: it may easily be understood, as the expression of man’s gratitude and admiration. The sacred trees of the Hindu were the Pippala (_Ficus religiosa_), the Kushtha (_Costus speciosus_), the sacred juice of the Soma, which became a personage, and many others. The Jews, and after them the early Christians and the Moslems, had their Tuba or Tree of Paradise. Mr. Palgrave, traversing Arabia in 1862-63, found in the kingdom of Shomer or Haíl distinct tree worship, the acacia (Talh) being danced round and prayed to for rain. In Egypt and other Moslem lands rags and cloths are suspended to branches, vestiges of ancient Paganism. North European mythology embraced Yggdrasil, or the world tree. We no longer approach the gods with branches of this sacred vegetation in hand; still the maypole and Christmas tree, the Yule log and the church decorations of evergreens, holly and palms, and the modern use of the sterility-curing mistletoe, descend directly from the treovve-ordung, or tree worship of ancient England. It is also curious that snake worship is generally connected with it: so in the North European system, Nidhoegg, the abyss-worm, lay coiled at the foot of Yggdrasil.

The youngest brother of the triad is Hu, the ocean or sea. Formerly it was subject to chastisement, like the Hellespont, if idle or useless. The Hu-no, or ocean priest, is now considered the highest of all, a fetish king, at Whydah, where he has 500 wives. At stated times he repairs to the beach, begs “Agbwe,” the Samudra-devta or ocean god, not to be boisterous, and throws in rice and corn, oil and beans, cloth, cowries, and other valuables. He doubtless knows the rule mentioned by Captain Phillips, that the weather is better during the wane of the moon than at its full and change. At times the King sends as an ocean sacrifice from Agbome a man carried in a hammock, with the dress, the stool, and the umbrella of a caboceer; a canoe takes him out to sea, where he is thrown to the sharks. The Custom for this element is made at Whydah, in a place near the greater market, and called Hu-kpa-men. It is a round hut, with thatch and chalked walls; outside is a heap of bones, whilst skulls, carapaces of the tortoise, and similar materials, cumber the interior. The priest is a fetish woman, who offers water and Kola nuts to, and expects rum from, white visitors.

These deities, originally of Whydah, have spread throughout Dahome, and men now forget their first habitat. We may add a fourth, “So,” or “Khevioso,”[124] the thunder fetish, whose weapon, as amongst our classics unlearned in brontology, is here still supposed to be Abi, the lightning.[125] This deity is worshipped at Whydah, in a So Agbajyí, or thunder closet. It has about 1000 wives throughout the country. When a man is killed by the electric fluid,[126] which renders sepulture, as amongst the Romans, unlawful, these women place the body upon a platform, and cut from it lumps, which they chew without eating, crying to passers by—“We sell you meat!—fine meat! Come and buy!” This is the nearest approach to cannibalism shown in Dahome. I saw nothing of the blood-drinker described by Mr. Duncan, who, when offered a draught mixed with rum, “could, with a good heart, have sent a bullet through his head.”

In the following general list I have preserved no other order than that dictated by my interpreters; the _Dii servatores_ and _compitales sospitatores_ and _viales_, are all mixed.

1. Afa, as has been said,[127] is the messenger of fetishes and of deceased friends. Its fetisheer is here called Buko-no, and by the Egbas, Babbalawo. The people say of him, “The priest who is most cunning takes to Afa,” meaning that it pays best; consequently, Buko-nos swarm throughout the land. When Afa predicts evil the votary must perform the catholicon—“Vo-sisa.” Ground is cleared near the house or in the bush, a mat is then spread, and a short staff or thick peg is driven through the latter; the worshipper, with his fetishman, who taps a small cymbal with an iron rod, pours upon the wood first water and then the blood of a fowl, whose body becomes, of course, the holy man’s perquisite. As has appeared in the previous pages, there are many different forms of vo- sisa.

2. Bo, a huge Priapus built of clay, and placed in markets, at gates, and in rooms. He is the especial guardian of warriors, defending them from fire and sword; and in his honour they are hung with cowries and horsetails. The images called Bo-chio, the crutched stick, either planted in the ground at home or carried abroad, when travelling, and the Bo-so “struppi,” or bundles of truncheons painted and speckled, are sacred to this great fetish.

3. Legba, also a Priapus and a Janus, whose appearance and worship have been described.[128]

4. Gùn, or Gù, the iron fetish. It is the god Ogun of Abeokuta, where human sacrifices are offered to it. In Dahome it has not that honour.

5. Hoho, the twin fetish,[129] that protects those exceptionals. At Allada the birth was infamous, as men would not believe that a woman could have two children by one husband; at Agbome, where population is wanted, the mother is honoured. So at the mouth of the Benin River the parent and offspring are put to death, and in the city of Great Benin the King makes presents to the progenitrix. Amongst the Fanti, the Attah is also respected, whereas in the Bonny River the twin-mother is called a “she goat,” and is slain. The twin fetish has no wives, and its offerings of little pots and irons have been minutely described.[130]

6. Sapatan, or small pox, the Buku god of Abeokuta, and the Sitla Devi (small-pox goddess) of the Hindu.[131]

7. Takpwonun, the hippopotamus.

8. Kpo, the leopard—a royal Fetish.[132]

9. Gbwe-ji, the great bush Fetish, which helps huntsmen and foresters. It is in the shape of a small snake, marked like a boa.

10. Kpate, the first Whydah man who, sighting a ship from his plantation, brought it to anchor by waving a cloth tied to a long pole, and led the captain into the town. Like Triptolemus, he is worshipped as a benefactor to mankind.

11. Kpase, the man who helped Kpate.

12. Nate, the storekeeper of the sea, who is worshipped by fishermen, and by those who work by water.

13. Avrekete, a fetish which steals the keys from Nate and gives to man—hence he has some 500 wives.

14. Aizan, one of the many street gods which protect the market and the gate. It is a large or small cone of clay, with a pipkin or a stone on the top or at the base. Upon these are poured the consecrated trash—flour, palm-oil, and boiled beans; sometimes fowls are killed for it.

15. Agasun, the old Makhi Fetish that ruled Agbome before Dako conquered it. It aided his enterprise, for which reason the Agasun-no, or head fetishman, is at the capital equivalent to the Hu-no of Whydah. Its emblem is not known. The abode of the great fetisheer, and the respect paid to him by the King and multitude, have been described.[133]

16. Li (pronounced with ळ, the peculiar Sanskrit _l_) was a great fetish at Whydah, in charge of the town before it was conquered by Agaja. The place of worship is a little shed in the bush to the west of Savi.

17. Lisa, the fetish of Khwezioso, the sun. Its emblem is a red clay pot, with a cover of the same material, striped white; on the top is a rude chameleon (agaman), that animal being the messenger of Lisa. It is placed upon a swish-heap and filled with water. Sometimes meat and other food are offered to it.

18. Dohen, a Whydah fetish. It calls vessels and strangers to the English Fort when that building is empty, consequently it is worshipped there. Goats and fowls are sacrificed to it, and beans are especially offered up.

19. Nesu, the proper Ffon fetish of Agbome, established by Agaja the Conqueror. It is worshipped in large sheds called Nesu-hwe, adjoining the various palaces. Its water pot is known as Bagwe, and when the fetish women, guarded by Amazons, pass in strings towards the wells, they are fetching the element for the mysterious rites of Nesu.

20. Ajaruma, the protecting Fetish of white men at Whydah. He also is represented in the English Fort by a tree and a pot inside a room.

21. Tokpodun, the crocodile, formerly worshipped at Allada and Savi, where Captain Phillips was not allowed to shoot it. All are now killed off.

22. Zo, the fire Fetish. A pot is placed in a room and sacrifice is offered to it, that fire may “live” there, and not go forth to destroy the house. The Zovodun has already been described.[134]

23. Aydo-whe-do—commonly called Danh, the Heavenly Snake, which makes the Popo beads and confers wealth upon man—is the rainbow. Its emblem is, I have said, a coiled and horned snake of clay, in a pot or calabash. This utensil, duly whitewashed, is placed at the foot of a silk-cotton tree, or near hills of white ants, which are called Danh’s houses. The Dahomans do not, as the French missionaries suppose, adore insects.

Abeokuta has her _lares_.[135] Benin boasts a profusion of domestic altars, which are here unknown. The Dahomans practise, however, like all Yorubans, the worship of their own heads, in order to obtain good fortune.[136] They do not, however, honour like the Egba traveller, their big toes.[137] The “head” worshipper, after providing a fowl, kola nuts, rum and water, bathes, dresses in pure white baft, and seats himself on a clean mat. An old woman with her _medius_ finger-tip dipped in water, touches successively his forehead, poll, nape, and mid- breast—sometimes all his joints. She then breaks a kola into its natural divisions, throws them down like dice, chooses a lucky piece, which she causes a bystander to chew, and with his saliva retouches the parts before alluded to. The fowl is then killed by pulling its body, the neck being held between the big and first toe; the same _attouchements_ are performed with its head, and finally with the boiled and shredded flesh, before it is eaten. Meanwhile, rum and water are drunk by those present. A quaint superstition!

The fetisheer is all powerful in Dahome. The last monarch was notably desirous of modifying the horrors and the expenses of the national worship; his son has been compelled to walk in the old path of blood. As has been said, the King dismounts at the Agasu-no’s door, and prostrates to him; besides which, he is guided in all his movements by his Buko-no. When a grandee passes the house of a common priest, the latter comes to the entrance, pronounces an allocution in the unintelligible hierarchic tongue, whilst an acolyte shrieks a response to his recitative, and both expect largesse.

There are writers, Captain Adams for instance, who would treat all the ecclesiastical body in West Africa as mere impostors, which is much as if a Zulu, unable to master the subject of Christianity, were to accuse every European priest and parson of deliberate fraud. Fetish, moreover, is, throughout the dark continent, the strongest engine of government—a moral police—whose sudden removal would break up society.[138] In Dahome it gains strength from the peculiar form of tyranny; wherever despotism exists it must rest upon a strong and popular faith, and it will find in its ministrants the most persistent and conservative allies, as they are the most interested in repelling relaxation of discipline. A notable case may be seen nearer home. The French Republic was satisfied with a latitudinarianism of the amplest. The Napoleonic empire must conciliate, if it cannot win over, the _parti-prêtre_. But the polished despotism tempers the superstition and credulity of the ignorant many by the scepticism and the rationalism of the educated few. The barbarous tyranny admits only the thaumaturgic extreme. Amongst the turbulent Fanti there is considerable infidelity touching fetish and its priests; the Dahoman must believe and tremble.

Theological studies are strict in this section of Yoruba. The peculiar fetish is chosen after a fit of ecstacy: abnormal brain action is not uncommon amongst the negro races. During the fit the subject rushes, as one distracted, to the idol, and, after violent exertions, sinks fainting on the ground. When he recovers, the headman informs him what fetish—the sea, for instance, or the snake—has come to him; and that, he adopts for life. This ecstasy is the Hal (حال) of Arabia, the demoniacal possession of the Days of Ignorance, the “spirit of prophecy” amongst the Camisards or Shakers, the “spirit” in Methodism, and the “jerks” and “holy laugh” of the camp-meeting. I have not seen it in Dahome, but old residents have described it to me—all in almost identical terms. In many points it resembles our modern spiritualism, which a late writer (“From Matter to Spirit”) prefers to “fix upon some cause, even if false, than upon none.[139]”

The neophyte is then removed from his friends to the fetish quarter of the town. There he learns the holy fetish Jargon, which is unintelligible to the uninitiated: the technical phraseology and the professional twang—in fact, what John Foster calls “the vulgar of religious authorship”—are the only traces of this enlightened process still lingering in England. The course, which extends through two or three years, ends with the songs, the dances, and the multifarious ceremonies of the religious calling. The relatives then ransom the acolyte, by paying sundry heads of cowries and clothes, goats, and fowls to the principal; and the youth, gaudily dressed, is escorted home, where, for three months, he will not make himself understood. At Agbome there is an ordination. The aspirant is taken before the King, who invests him in a new cloth, changes his name,[140] and addresses him touching his future duties.

Many fetisheers retain their secular callings. Those who have the “cure of souls” receive no regular pay, but live well upon the benevolences of votaries who desire health or wealth, issue, and length of days, to detect a wizard or to destroy a foe. Formerly they had as many _fueros_ as a Mexican ecclesiastic, and were not liable to capital penalties. It was found advisable to alter the system, and to punish them under a legal fiction: whilst the fetish is “upon” the criminal, he is safe; when the fit has passed off, he is put to death.

Still, these fetisheers have many privileges. Both sexes, for instance, may wear dresses forbidden to the commonalty, and personal vanity in Africa emphatically knows no sore. The men shave half their heads or confine the hair in white calico: many also carry a chauri, or fly-flap, of horse or cow tail. Their costume is arbitrary, parts of it having been borrowed, apparently, from the Portuguese priests at Whydah. The women, especially the wives of the small-pox god, are also “half-heads”: some decorate their hair with bunches of small East Indian cowries, beads, or bright flowers, others with the feathers of little red birds planted upright, so as to make them resemble horned owls; whilst others wear the Tabla, or broad-brimmed steeple-hats, with tall thin crowns, before described. There are many other _coiffures_—caps adorned, like the hair, with shells and bouquets, fillets, and so forth. They cover the bosom with kerchiefs; and gaudy-coloured cloths, extending to their feet, are girt round the waist, where the stuff turns over with a fall or narrow flap. Both sexes, especially the Mau, or moon fetish women, prefer, as ornaments, long strings of cowries doubled back to back, with a single black seed[141] separating the pairs. These are passed, baldric-like, over the shoulder, and hang down by the side. I have alluded to their other implements in the course of these pages.

About a quarter of the female population in Dahome may be fetisheeresses, and girls are married to the fetish before their birth. These Vodun-vi[142] are trained like the men, and though but slaves, are greatly respected by the laity. How the sea-marriages and others are conducted, no one knows; scandals are, of course, rife, but who can substantiate them? The husband may not chastise or interfere with his wife whilst the fetish is “upon” her, and even at other times the use of the rod might be dangerous.[143] During the Customs these women pass the forenoon in begging cowries: about four P.M. they don their clerical habits at the fetish house, march in Indian file to the squares, where the public dances are performed, and so excite themselves by music and violent exercise that ecstatic fits are often induced. When the fête is over, they re-assume the laical garb and return home.

The most peculiar, and perhaps the least noticed, tenet of Dahoman religion is the “continuance theory,” which was apparently raised to a doctrine by the sons of Misraim, and which the great Lawgiver of Israel almost expelled from his system. Of the Egyptians it was said that they lived in Hades rather than on the banks of the Nile: the Dahomans call this world their “plantation,” and the next their “home.” I am unable to decide whether it is a spontaneous idea, or whether it immigrated in olden times, as all Africa’s poor arts and arms show a once general intercourse, from that neutral region between the Semite and Hamite. We trace it throughout pagan Yoruba and the Gold Coast, and it shows no signs of a Christian or Moslem origin. It is essentially prosaic, as among the vulgar of Europe. Former travellers vaguely allude to a rude notion of futurity in the native mind: perhaps the idea has since grown; possibly, the observer failed to break through native secretiveness.

Ku-to-men, or Deadland,[144] is the place which receives the “nidon,” or ghostly part of man proceeding from him after death. This “next world” offers none of those rewards and punishment by which, according to the Semitic animist, the balance of good and evil in this life is to be struck. He who escapes punishment here, is safe hereafter; there the earthly king is a king, the slave a slave for ever and ever; the hunter and warrior shall continue their favourite pursuits, and all will busy themselves with the affairs of the living. When sunshine accompanies rain, the people say that the ghosts are going to market, and with us the devil beats his wife. It is impossible to determine whether the departed are looked upon in the light of our spirits, souls, ghosts, or pale shades wandering by the gloomy river: they are probably nothing but the embodiment of the animal horror of death. Consequently, Satan and other Semitic machinery are absolutely unknown. Ku-to-men is, in fact, a Swedenborgian reproduction of this world, and it is placed under the earth. Of course it has been visited as often as St. Patrick’s “purgatory.” Many men, falling ill, believe themselves to be summoned by some ancestral ghost: they repair to certain priests—mostly those of the small-pox, the iron, the poison-tree, and the rainbow gods—not those of the snake or the sea—and pay a dollar fee for the holy man to descend and deliver their excuses. The fetisheer covers himself with a cloth, and, after his trance, reports how, down among the dead men, he found the shades eating, drinking, and making merry. He will even bring back from Hades rare beads known to have been buried with a certain corpse; and sometimes he must pawn his clothes to obtain a specimen or a counterfeit. One of these worthies on the Gold Coast, after returning with a declaration that he had left a marked coin in Deadland, dropped it from his waist-cloth at the feet of the payer whilst drinking rum. But _populus vult decipi_. Some fetisheers, exactly like our mediums, pretend to summon the ghosts. On the other hand, the departed often returns to earth in the body of a child, and yet remains in Deadland—an idea which some travellers have confounded with metempsychosis. Curious to relate, the Dahomans have a morbid fear of losing life: death is never mentioned in the King’s presence except by some euphuism, as “the tree has fallen.” As a rule, the more precise the knowledge of and the belief in a future world, the less value do the believers attach to present existence.

With so many priests the people must have numerous ceremonies. The child’s name is given on the eighth day after the Buko-no has pronounced what ancestor has sent it. The Genesitic precept (xvii. 10), here called Adda-gbwibo, is not confined to the priestly practitioner. At Whydah it is effected between the twelfth and sixteenth year; at Agbome it is deferred till the twentieth: consequently, many fall ill after it, and some die. The roughly-performed operation is rendered peculiar by a double cut above and below: it is rather in the Moslem than in the Jewish fashion, but it is doubtless indigenous, as amongst many tribes of Central Africa. Hot sand is applied as a styptic to the wound; the patient is dieted with ginger soup and warm drinks of ginger water, pork being especially forbidden to him. The sister operation, excision, wonderful to say, is entirely unknown; the reverse being so much the custom, that a woman in the natural state is derided by others. The _artiste_ is some ancient _sage femme_, and the effect is an exaggeration of that which particularized the Hottentot Venus dissected by Cuvier.

The Dahoman marriage is somewhat complicated. The aspirant sends to his intended father-in-law’s house a man and a woman with two double flasks of rum. These Mercuries open the affair, after many preliminaries, by saying, “Our uncle wishes to wed one of your girls.” The parent inquires and learns the suitor’s name, after which the proxies retire. If Afa return a favourable reply, the family is informed of the coming event, and the empty flasks are sent back, to signify consent and to grant affiance. This honour is acknowledged by two other and full flasks; at the same time two heads of cowries and two cottons for his _fiancée_ being forwarded by Cœlebs. He then collects as much cloth as he can,[145] and this task may occupy three years, during which he is expected to perform all Customs which the girl may have omitted, such as sacrifice for her grandmother and other relatives.

On the “happy day”—which is always Sunday—three messengers with flasks of rum are sent by the bridegroom at morning, noon, and sunset, to beg their daughter from her parents. A large _cortége_ brings the bride to her future home. The father and mother are seated upon chairs, and ensues a general feast and carouse, as many goats and pigs as possible being cooked; the banquet begins and ends with water and then rum.

After midnight the bridegroom retires to his sleeping chamber, and sits on his couch. Three or four fetish-women, holding the girl’s wrists, lead her in and place her two hands in his, saying, “Take your wife, we give her to you; flog her if she is bad, and feed and clothe her well if she pleases you.” They then drink water, rum, gin, and liqueurs with the new couple; and at three or four A.M. retire, leaving them to become _baron_ and _feme_.

The Dahomans are not behind the people of Europe in attaching an extravagant value to the _primitiæ_. According to Mosaic custom, the bridegroom at once bears rejoicing to his people the piece of grey or white baft which covers the nuptial couch. On the bride’s side, a young girl, left purposely in the house when the parents and friends have retired, runs off with the discoloured “languti,” or T-bandage, here universally worn. Great rejoicings follow the demonstration that the daughter has proved herself an _illibata virgo_. Should the other thing happen, some men send home their brides in wrath,[146] and demand back their property of the father, who seeks out the author of his family disgrace and compels him to pay substantial damages.

If all has passed off well, the husband, early on Monday morning, carries cowries and rum as presents to the parents of his spouse. The bride, after a week’s cohabitation, returns to her old home. On the first Saturday she cooks food, and sends it to her master, who on the next morning returns a gift of cloth, and from ten to forty heads of cowries: dollars, however, are not refused. On the same evening the bride returns permanently to her abode, and on Monday morning she visits the market and buys liquor and provisions as a final feast for her husband’s family. When the short period, corresponding with our honeymoon, has elapsed, she joins the rest of the wives in the field or the plantation, and subsides into a quasi-servile position. The vile trick of alluring the unwary into _crim. con._, is as well understood at Agbome as at Abeokuta.

The barren woman is called, in Ffon, “wen-si-no”; the Dahoman, however, does not, like the Egba, attribute her misfortune to bad health, nor is the word insulting, as it generally is in Asia and Africa. As usual, throughout savage Africa, osculation is unknown, even by name, and an offer to “salute” on the part of a white man is attributed to a display of his cannibal propensities.

Curious to say, there is in barbarous Dahome a coroner’s inquest after every death. The kings, who here monopolize murder, hearing that many masters killed their slaves, established in all the towns “Gevi,” or officers charged with controlling the abuse. When a death is reported they must inspect the body; and their fee for certifying a natural death is a head and a half of cowries. Then begins the chio-nun, or “corpse time or mourning,” during which the weeping relatives must fast, and refrain from bathing, but not from singing and dram-drinking. The body is shaved, washed, and habited in its best attire, with bracelets, necklaces, and other ornaments, not forgetting a piece of cloth as a change of raiment when arriving in Deadland. A coffin is made of bamboo, or of native or foreign wood; its huge size denotes, as in the Congo regions, a caboceer. The body is disposed on one side, as if sleeping.

Except under peculiar circumstances,[147] the corpse, as usual in Guinea from the Kru country to the south coast, is interred, either in its own house or in the abode of certain ancestors. An oblong grave is dug for the coffin: the paupers, who are buried wrapped up in palm matting, are placed, as among the Moslems, in a niche offsetting from a circular pit. The body is lowered with ropes, earth is filled in, and the ground is smoothened with water. After mourning nine days, the men and women relatives and friends visit the wives and family of the deceased, join in the myriology, and dash to them cowries and cloths to decorate the last home.

“Here bring the last sad gifts—with these

The last lament be said;

Let all that pleased, and still may please

Be buried with the dead.”

When a human sacrifice is made the head is placed upon the grave, and the body is interred alongside of the corpse so honoured. Usually they plant over the dead an Asen, or short cresset-shaped iron, upon whose flat top water or blood, as a drink for the deceased, is poured. When a Dahoman is interred abroad, a little earth from his tomb is brought home.[148]

At Whydah missionary enterprise is still young; it is therefore not to be judged as if it had enjoyed a fair trial. But all who know how deeply rooted is fetishism in the negro brain, will despair of the nineteenth succeeding better than the sixteenth century. In our modern day the good work has begun here with the curse of sectarian theology upon it: Catholics and Protestants working against one another in the same field. I leave Messrs. Wallon and Dawson to speak each for the success of his own “doxy,” and for the probable failure of the others:—

M. WALLON.

“Des bannières, des tableaux pieux, des images, des médailles distribuées comme grisgris, deviendraient fétiches pour eux et les disposeraient à connaître les signes qu’ils doivent respecter. Avec leur tendance à nous considérer comme réellement supérieurs à eux et leur croyance que cette supériorité nous est acquise par celle de notre Dieu, ils renonceraient bientôt aux leurs pour adorer celui que nous leur prions de connaître! Les femmes et les vieillards seraient là comme partout les plus difficiles à vaincre; mais on s’emparerait aisément de l’esprit des enfans dans un pays qui de lui-même a une véritable disposition à la civilisation.”

All of which is contradicted by actual experiment.

MR. DAWSON.

“Fetish has been strengthened by the white man, whom the ignorant blacks would not scruple to call a god if he could avoid death.[149] Gezo told me that, hearing the white man’s god was at the beach, he was surprised, thinking that he lived above, but ordered the Yevo-gan to bring him on shore. When this was done, the people found ‘gods many,’ like their own, the work of men’s hands, only better made, and brought them, with firing and drumming, to a house built for them in the town. The King had now not only his own but the white man’s gods, and thus he easily prevailed over the Oyos, whom his father could not drive out. Were not these grounds strong to compel the African’s mind to a complete reliance on the efficacy of his fetish?”

Much of which has been proved to be true by the “inexorable logic of facts.”

I cannot better conclude this chapter than with the words of an old traveller: “It is morally impossible by mere human ministry to convince the people of their errors and gross paganism, as it is to convert all other blacks, unless Providence would effect a prodigious change in their natures by its infinite irresistible grace.”

[Footnote 116: So the popular saying, Azo ewadelo Mau na dokpwenuwe (If you walk and work, Mau thanks you, _i.e._, God is of the man who works).]

[Footnote 117: Lisa-ji (lisa, or sun-sky) is the east, because the sun comes out of it. Mau-ji is the west, because the moon is supposed to begin there. Gbwe-ji (bush sky—also a fetish, which will be described) is the north, under which lies the interior forest. Hu-men (in the sea) is the south, for evident reasons. A small oriole, which soars like a sky-lark, and strikes its wing-feathers together with a noise like the locusts’ flight, is called Avo-kan ’gbe-khe—the bird that weaves cloth (for Mau).]

[Footnote 118: Sé, which has been translated God and Spirit, means rather the Ekra of the Gold Coast, also written Okra or Okla, ’kra or ’kla—one that has the Umbra, or ghost of another.]

[Footnote 119: Meaning Ji (the sky), wule (glittering), ye (a shadow—any shadow), whe (the sun). The mulatto, the “tapoyer” of old travellers, is called in Ffon Ye-whe-vi, or Ye-whe-child, because he has no fetish. He is thus opposed to Vodun-vi, fetish child.]

[Footnote 120: (Lib. ii. chap. v.) Pliny, however, probably believed in the Archeus of Nature, its original and all pervading principle.]

[Footnote 121: Ydoles, according to the old writers, were human or bestial forms. “_Symulacres_,” or _simileetes_, are defined by Maundeville, as “ymages made of lewed wille of man,” as two-headed or four-armed figures.]

[Footnote 122: Chap. iv.]

[Footnote 123: Atin, contracted to ’tin in Ffon, is any tree.]

[Footnote 124: This word is peculiarly Whydah, whence I judge the Dahoman fetish to have been first adopted there from the Shango, or Jupiter Tonans of Yoruba.]

[Footnote 125: So we still say “thunderbolts.” According to Barbot, on the Gold Coast (I have heard the same everywhere, from that place to Camaroons), “when it thunders they say the Deity—with reverence be it spoken—is diverting himself with his wives.” The Anglo-African is, “Man for top, he play for bush.” Others again say, “Great devil he talk angry.” A common imprecation in Dahome is, So ye mi, “Thunder fall upon me if,” &c., &c.]

[Footnote 126: The corpse of a free man can be ransomed for ten heads, that of a slave never.]

[Footnote 127: Chap. xii.]

[Footnote 128: Chap. iv.]

[Footnote 129: Hoho-no is the mother, Hoho-vi the children. The Dahomans do not kill Albinos (here known as “men-wewe” or white bodies), of whom I saw several in the capital: all were of the normal leucous type.]

[Footnote 130: Chap. x.]

[Footnote 131: In the Dahoman vocabulary by Commander Forbes our “small- pox” is translated _Akpotin kpe-vi_, and explained in a foot-note, “A poh tee peh vee; literally, small a poh tee.” But _Akpotin_, in the Whydah dialect is a _box_, not a _pox_—hence the mistake, which is but one in a thousand made in that vocabulary.]

[Footnote 132: In Dr. M‘Leod’s time it was confined to Dahome proper, “but they deem it the safest way of worship to perform their acts of devotion to his skin only, after death, which is stuffed for that purpose.”]

[Footnote 133: Chap. x.]

[Footnote 134: Chap. iv.]

[Footnote 135: The images or teraphim of Laban and Micah (Gen. xxxi. 19, 30; Judges xvii. 5).]

[Footnote 136: So the Jews swore by their heads. The ceremony is called in Ffon, E (he), wa (makes), ta (or ta-kun, the head), nun (thing). The Egbas call it the “Olori li ori,” or Good Genius of Head.]

[Footnote 137: In Ffon, “Afo-su”; in Egba, “Ikpori.”]

[Footnote 138: So it has been popularly said of M. Renan’s views, that an immense revolution, and one which Christians never desire to see, would immediately follow their general reception.]

[Footnote 139: Though objecting to the name, which involves a theory, it appears to me, after long inquiry, to be the action of an abnormal state of the brain, which renders it, to an unknown and as yet undefined extent independent of the external senses. It is less powerful in the sanguine or lymphatic Englishman than in the peoples of Continental Europe; and is most remarkable in the highly nervous temperament of the Anglo-American.]

[Footnote 140: There are in Dahome no hereditary or heraldic surnames and sire-names like those of Europe. All are personal and significant; they are mostly given by the King, who often renews them. So in 2 Kings, xxiii. 34, Pharaoh-nechoh turned the name of Eliakim, son of Josiah, to Jehoiakim. And lately, Napoleon I. made all his vassal brethren assume his first as the dynastic name.]

[Footnote 141: It is called Attikun, and is said to be produced by a tall tree growing at a distance from Agbome.]

[Footnote 142: Vodun (fetish), vi (a child). The name is especially applied to children claimed by a fetish.]

[Footnote 143: The old travellers inform us, that in their days these ladies used to lord it over their lords to such an extent, that to espouse a sanctified woman was like marrying an heiress in civilized lands.]

[Footnote 144: Ku (dead), to (land), men (in, here pleonastic). It is the “Samanmadi” of the Fanti, and the “Ipo-oku” of the Egbas. Mr. Duncan (vol. i. p. 116), mentions a Custom held on April 11, 1845, “to ensure to the spirits of departed friends a safe and easy passage across the great waters westward. They mean the river Votta (Volta). If this custom were not kept up, they believe the spirits would wander on the banks for the space of 100 years, before they would have performed sufficient penance for their friends’ neglect.” But this is a mixture of European classical belief and the creed of the Gold Coast, especially of the Ga, or Accra race, whose ghosts dwell beyond the Volta.]

[Footnote 145: The price of a wife, “young and uncorrupted,” in Virginia, about 1620, was 100 lbs. of tobacco, each pound worth three shillings.]

[Footnote 146: The Jews were more ferocious (Deut. xxii. 21).]

[Footnote 147: As royal blood must not be shed, Tegbwesun (Bossa Ahadi) threw his brother Zingah into the sea off Whydah.]

[Footnote 148: Amongst the Egbas and various tribes of the Congo family (Douville, Voyage au Congo, vol. i. chap. 13), various small parts of the body are brought home to be reinterred.]

[Footnote 149: This is good testimony upon a point which only interest or the veriest ignorance would dispute. Almost every West African tongue testifies that the speakers consider white men supernatural beings on account of their vast superiority, in all the arts of life, to these poor pagans. The Krumen call Europeans Ku-be, or the ghost-tribe; the Efik tribe of Old Calabar, Mbum Ekpo, or spirit men, and the Mpongwe of the Gaboon River, M’buiri or ghost, and so on.]