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"The religion of the negro," said this authority, "is emotional, and more often than not associated with beliefs in witchcraft and in the rites known as Voodoo or Obi Mysteries. It has been endeavoured by some students to show that these are relics of the Fetish worship of equatorial Africa, but such a genealogy has never been satisfactorily demonstrated.
"Our object is the benefit of society at large," Miss Ogle explained; "and our obstacles so far have been, in chief, the fetish of proprietary rights and the ubiquity of the police."
As soon as the decanters had been emptied of their contents, other ardent spirits were introduced, but as Richard Lander imagined that fetish water had been mingled with it, they simply took a tea-spoonful into their mouths, and privately ejected it on the ground.
I remember discoursing with a very charming French official on the difficulty of eradicating fetish customs. "Why not take the native in the rear, Mademoiselle," said he, "and convert the native gods?" I explained that his ingenious plan was not feasible, because you cannot convert gods. Even educating gods is hopeless work.
Others, still worse, to show their abject flunkeyism to Scott, and to humbug the public at large about their intimacy with this fetish, make speeches in his defence. Scott broadly prepared the defeat, and now, through the mouths of flunkeys and spit-lickers, he attempts to throw the fault on the thus called politicians.
In sweeping away the idolatries and fetish worships of the Syrian Catholics, the Mussulmans had swept away also that doctrine which alone can deliver men from idolatry and fetish worships if not outward and material ones, yet the still more subtle, and therefore more dangerous idolatries of the intellect.
The middle-class will be the first victims; then the privileged aristocracy of labour will exploit the poor. But trade will take wings and migrate to some other country where labour is good and comparatively cheap. The dethronement of a fetish may give a sounder faith its chance. In the time of decay and disintegration which lies before us, more persons will seek consolation where it can be found.
"Hi, hi, don't you hear? come back, come back. See here. This is your place," etc. This custom holds good among both Negroes and Bantus; but the funeral ceremonies vary immensely, in fact with every tribe, and form a subject the details of which I will reserve for a separate work on Fetish.
Four hundred churches were a good many for even Rome to people; and, indeed, some were merely attended on fixed ceremonial occasions, and a good many merely opened their doors once every year on the feast day, that is, of their patron saint. Some also subsisted on the lucky possession of a fetish, an idol compassionate to human sufferings.
For the next sixteen years, barring accidents, he "rips"; he rips carefully, terrified by his many fetish restrictions, if he is a pagan; but if he is in that partially converted state you usually find him in when trouble has been taken with his soul then he rips unrestrained. It is most unfair to describe Africans in this state as "converted," either in missionary reports or in attacks on them.
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