The beliefs and superstitions popularly attributed to the Mpongwe are these.  They are not without that which we call a First Cause, and they name it Anyambia, which missionary philologists consider a contraction of Aninla, spirit (?), and Mbia, good.  M. du Chaillu everywhere confounds Anyambia, or, as he writes the word, “Aniambie,” with Inyemba, a witch, to bewitch being “punga inyemba.”  Mr. W. Winwood Reade seems to make Anyambia a mysterious word, as was Jehovah after the date of the Moabite stone.  Like the Brahm of the Hindus, the god of Epicurus and Confucius, and the Akarana-Zaman or Endless Time of the Guebres, Anyambia is a vague being, a vox et praeterea nihil, without personality, too high and too remote for interference in human affairs, therefore not addressed in prayer, never represented by the human form, never lodged in temples.  Under this “unknown God” are two chief agencies, working partners who manage the business of the world, and who effect what the civilized call “Providence.”  Mbwiri here becomes the Osiris, Jove, Hormuzd or Good God, the Vishnu, or Preserver, a tutelar deity, a Lar, a guardian.  Onyambe is the Bad God, Typhon, Vejovis, the Ahriman or Semitic devil; Shiva the Destroyer, the third person of the Aryan triad; and his name is never mentioned but with bated breath.  They have not only fear of, but also a higher respect for him than for the giver of good, so difficult is it for the child-man’s mind to connect the ideas of benignity and power.  He would harm if he could, ergo so would his god.  I once hesitated to believe that these rude people had arrived at the notion of duality, at the Manichaeanism which caused Mr. Mill (sen.) surprise that no one had revived it in his time; at an idea so philosophical, which leads directly to the ne plus ultra of faith, El Wahdaniyyeh or Monotheism.  Nor should I have credited them with so logical an apparatus for the regimen of the universe, or so stout-hearted an attempt to solve the eternal riddle of good and evil.  But the same belief also exists amongst the Congoese tribes, and even in the debased races of the Niger.  Captain William Alien ("Niger Expedition,” i. 227) thus records the effect when, at the request of the commissioners, Herr Schon, the missionary, began stating to King Obi the difference between the Christian religion and heathenism: 

“Herr Schon.  There is but one God.

“King Obi.  I always understood there were two,” &c.

The Mpongwe “Mwetye” is a branch of male freemasonry into which women and strangers are never initiated.  The Bakele and Shekyani, according to “Western Africa” (Wilson, pp. 391-2), consider it a “Great Spirit.”  Nothing is more common amongst adjoining negro tribes than to annex one another’s superstitions, completely changing, withal, their significance.  “Ovengwa” is a vampire, the apparition of a dead man; tall as a tree, always winking and clearly seen, which is not the case with the Ibambo and Ilogo, plurals of