The parallel case of Nzambi Mpungu, the Creator among the Fiorts (a Bantu stock), is thus stated by Miss Kingsley: 

’I have no hesitation in saying I fully believe Nzambi Mpungu to be a purely native god, and that he is a great god over all things, but the study of him is even more difficult than the study of Nzambi, because the Jesuit missionaries who gained so great an influence over the Fiorts in the sixteenth century identified him with Jehovah, and worked on the native mind from that stand-point.  Consequently semi-mythical traces of Jesuit teaching linger, even now, in the religious ideas of the Fiorts.’[36]

Nzambi Mpungu lives ‘behind the firmament.’  ’He takes next to no interest in human affairs;’ which is not a Jesuit idea of God.

In all missionary accounts of savage religion, we have to guard against two kinds of bias.  One is the bias which makes the observer deny any religion to the native race, except devil-worship.  The other is the bias which lends him to look for traces of a pure primitive religious tradition.  Yet we cannot but observe this reciprocal phenomenon:  missionaries often find a native name and idea which answer so nearly to their conception of God that they adopt the idea and the name, in teaching.  Again, on the other side, the savages, when first they hear the missionaries’ account of God, recognise it, as do the Hurons and Bakwain, for what has always been familiar to them.  This is recorded in very early pre-missionary travels, as in the book of William Strachey on Virginia (1612), to which we now turn.  The God found by Strachey in Virginia cannot, by any latitude of conjecture, be regarded as the result of contact with Europeans.  Yet he almost exactly answers to the African Nyankupon, who is explained away as a ‘loan-god.’  For the belief in relatively pure creative beings, whether they are morally adored, without sacrifice, or merely neglected, is so widely diffused, that Anthropology must ignore them, or account for them as ’loan-gods’—­or give up her theory!

[Footnote 1:  Lejean, Rev. des Deux Mondes, April 1862, p. 760.  Citing for the chant, Beltrame, Dictionario della lingua denka, MS.]

[Footnote 2:  Waitz, ii. 74.]

[Footnote 3:  1882.]

[Footnote 4:  Ecclesiastical Institutions, 681.]

[Footnote 5:  Africana, i. 66.]

[Footnote 6:  Africana, i. 67.]

[Footnote 7:  Africana, i. 71, 72_]

[Footnote 8:  i 88.]

[Footnote 9:  i. 68.]

[Footnote 10:  i. 130.]

[Footnote 11:  Ibid.]

[Footnote 12:  Africana, i 279-301.]

[Footnote 13:  Edinburgh, 1892.]

[Footnote 14:  Incidentally Mr. Macdonald shows that, contrary to Mr. Spencer’s opinion, these savages have words for dreams and dreaming.  They interpret dreams by a system of symbols, ‘a canoe is ill luck,’ and ’dreams go by contraries.’]