Fetichism in West Africa : $b forty years' observation of native customs and superstitions — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Fetichism in West Africa : $b forty years' observation of native customs and superstitions
John Stuart Mill · en
At the wish of that Society I loaned the manuscript to them, for their use
in the Parliament of Religions at the Chicago Exposition; but I carried
the original draft of the essay with me on my return to Africa in August,
1893, where I was located at Libreville, Gabun, the Mission's oldest and
most civilized station. There I found special advantage for my
investigations. Though those educated Mpongwes could tell me little that
was new as to purely unadulterated native thought, they, better than an
ignorant tribe, could and did give me valuable intelligent replies to my
inquiries as to the logical connection between native belief and act, and
the essential meaning of things which I had seen and heard elsewhere. My
ignorant friends at other places had given me a mass of isolated
statements. My Mpongwe friends had studied a little grammar, and were
somewhat trained to analyze. They helped me in the collocation of the
statements and in the deduction of the philosophy behind them. It was
there that I began to put my conclusions in writing.
In 1895 Miss Mary H. Kingsley journeyed in West Africa, sent on a special
mission to investigate the subject of freshwater fishes. She also
gratified her own personal interest in native African religious beliefs by
close inquiries all along the coast.
During her stay at Libreville in the Kongo-Français, May-September, 1895,
my interest, common with hers, in the study of native African thought led
me into frequent and intimate conversations with her on that subject. She
eagerly accepted what information, from my longer residence in Africa, I
was able to impart. I loaned her the essay, with permission to make any
use of it she desired in her proposed book, "Travels in West Africa." When
that graphic story of her African wanderings appeared in 1897, she made
courteous acknowledgment of the use she had made of it in her chapters on
Fetich.
On page 395 of her "Travels in West Africa," referring to my missionary
works, and to some contributions I had made to science, she wrote: "Still
I deeply regret he has not done more for science and geography.... I beg
to state I am not grumbling at him ... but entirely from the justifiable
irritation a student of fetich feels at knowing that there is but one copy
of this collection of materials, and that this copy is in the form of a
human being, and will disappear with him before it is half learned by us,
who cannot do the things he has done."