The government, vested in fathers and chiefs, varied in different tribes from absolute despotisms to limited monarchies, almost republican.  Viewing the Basuto National Assembly in South Africa, Lord Bryce recently wrote, “The resemblance to the primary assemblies of the early peoples of Europe is close enough to add another to the arguments which discredit the theory that there is any such thing as an Aryan type of institutions."[50]

While women are sold into marriage throughout Africa, nevertheless their status is far removed from slavery.  In the first place the tracing of relationships through the female line, which is all but universal in Africa, gives the mother great influence.  Parental affection is very strong, and throughout Negro Africa the mother is the most influential councilor, even in cases of tyrants like Chaka or Mutesa.

“No mother can love more tenderly or be more deeply beloved than the Negro mother.  Robin tells of a slave in Martinique who, with his savings, freed his mother instead of himself.  ‘Everywhere in Africa,’ writes Mungo Park, ’I have noticed that no greater affront can be offered a Negro than insulting his mother.  ‘Strike me,’ cried a Mandingo to his enemy, ’but revile not my mother!’ ...  The Herero swears ’By my mother’s tears!’..  The Angola Negroes have a saying, ’As a mist lingers on the swamps, so lingers the love of father and mother.’"[51]

Black queens have often ruled African tribes.  Among the Ba-Lolo, we are told, women take part in public assemblies where all-important questions are discussed.  The system of educating children among such tribes as the Yoruba is worthy of emulation by many more civilized peoples.

Close knit with the family and social organization comes the religious life of the Negro.  The religion of Africa is the universal animism or fetishism of primitive peoples, rising to polytheism and approaching monotheism chiefly, but not wholly, as a result of Christian and Islamic missions.  Of fetishism there is much misapprehension.  It is not mere senseless degradation.  It is a philosophy of life.  Among primitive Negroes there can be, as Miss Kingsley reminds us, no such divorce of religion from practical life as is common in civilized lands.  Religion is life, and fetish an expression of the practical recognition of dominant forces in which the Negro lives.  To him all the world is spirit.  Miss Kingsley says, “If you want, for example, to understand the position of man in nature according to fetish, there is, as far as I know, no clearer statement of it made than is made by Goethe in his superb ‘Prometheus.’"[52] Fetish is a severely logical way of accounting for the world in terms of good and malignant spirits.

“It is this power of being able logically to account for everything that is, I believe, at the back of the tremendous permanency of fetish in Africa, and the cause of many of the relapses into it by Africans converted to other religions; it is also the explanation of the fact that white men who live in the districts where death and danger are everyday affairs, under a grim pall of boredom, are liable to believe in fetish, though ashamed of so doing.  For the African, whose mind has been soaked in fetish during his early and most impressionable years, the voice of fetish is almost irresistible when affliction comes to him."[53]