Obambo and Ologo.  These are vulgar ghosts of the departed, the causes of “possession,” disease and death; they are propitiated by various rites, and everywhere they are worshipped in private.  Mr. Wilson opines that the “Obambo are the spirits of the ancestors of the people, and Inlaga are the spirits of strangers and have come from a distance,” but this was probably an individual tenet.  The Mumbo-Jumbo of the Mandengas; the Semo of the Susus; the Tassau or “Purrah-devil” of the Mendis; the Egugun of the Egbas; the Egbo of the Duallas; and the Mwetye and Ukukwe of the Bakele, is represented in Pongo-land by the Nda, which is an order of the young men.  Nda dwells in the woods and comes forth only by night bundled up in dry plantain leaves[FN#14] and treading on tall stilts; he precedes free adult males who parade the streets with dance and song.  The women and children fly at the approach of this devil on two sticks, and with reason:  every peccadillo is punished with a merciless thrashing.  The institution is intended to keep in order the weaker sex, the young and the “chattels:”  Nda has tried visiting white men and missionaries, but his visits have not been a success.

The civilized man would be apt to imagine that these wild African fetishists are easily converted to a “purer creed.”  The contrary is everywhere and absolutely the case; their faith is a web woven with threads of iron.  The negro finds it almost impossible to rid himself of his belief; the spiritual despotism is the expression of his organization, a part of himself.  Progressive races, on the other hand, can throw off or exchange every part of their religion, except perhaps the remnant of original and natural belief in things unseen—­in fact, the Fetishist portion, such as ghost-existence and veneration of material objects, places, and things.  I might instance the Protestant missionary who, while deriding the holy places at Jerusalem, considers the “Cedars of Lebanon” sacred things, and sternly forbids travellers to gather the cones.

The stereotyped African answer to Europeans ridiculing these institutions, including wizard-spearing and witch-burning is, “There may be no magic, though I see there is, among you whites.  But we blacks have known many men who have been bewitched and died.”  Even in Asia, whenever I spoke contemptuously to a Moslem of his Jinns, or to a Hindu of his Rakshasa, the rejoinder invariably was, “You white men are by nature so hot that even our devils fear you.”

Witchcraft, which has by no means thoroughly disappeared from Europe, maintains firm hold upon the African brain.  The idea is found amongst Christians, for instance, the “reduced Indians” of the Amazonas River; and it is evidently at the bottom of that widely spread superstition, the “evil eye,” which remains throughout Southern Europe as strong as it was in the days of Pliny.  As amongst barbarians generally, no misfortune happens, no accident occurs, no illness nor death can take