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African religion does not, however, stop with fetish, but, as in the case of other peoples, tends toward polytheism and monotheism. Among the Yoruba, for instance, Frobenius shows that religion and city-state go hand in hand.
West of Yoruba on the lower courses of the Niger is Benin, an ancient state which in 1897 traced its twenty-three kings back one thousand years; some legends even named a line of sixty kings. It seems probable that Benin developed the imperial idea and once extended its rule into the Congo valley.
One is a German barque lying close to the bar of the fussy little river; the other, a huge mass of rust, is the hapless Yoruba. Years ago, after the fashion of the Nigritia and the Monrovia, she was carelessly lost.
+393+. The best example of a half-civilized phallic cult is that which is now practiced in Yoruba and Dahomi, countries with definite government and institutions. These are expressions of popular appetite, and it does not appear that the cult itself is otherwise religiously significant. +394+. In modern India the Çivaite phallicism is pronounced and important.
Later and also to the west of the Yoruba come two states showing a fiercer and ruder culture, Dahomey and Ashanti. The state of Dahomey was founded by Tacondomi early in the seventeenth century, and developed into a fierce and bloody tyranny with wholesale murder. The king had a body of two thousand to five thousand Amazons renowned for their bravery and armed with rifles.
But this was not to be, and this heroic woman passed away before her husband's arrival. 'The White Man's Grave' and 'No White Man's Land' are the ominous names that have been bestowed on several unhealthy countries where Europeans have been compelled to reside; but there were none, fifty years ago, more deserving of being so described than Ashantee, Dahomey, and the Yoruba country.
In Africa, outside of Egypt, the only trace of an independent sun-god appears to be in Dahomi, where, however, he is not prominent; why such a god should not be found in the neighboring countries of Ashanti and Yoruba is not clear; climatic conditions would affect all these countries alike.
At that place he was well educated, was converted, and ordained as a minister of the Gospel. Now, several of the Yoruba natives I have spoken of, who had become possessed of property, purchased a vessel, and visited Lagos and Badagry to trade. At those places they heard of Abeokuta and the stand it had made against the slave-trade.
First, we have a project a very excellent one, on hand, for evangelizing the world; second, in consideration of what has been done in the reign of the Seven Churches Pergamos Thyatira, Magnesia, Cassaba, Demish, and Baindir, where all is darkness, we have conceived a mission to Antioch; and third, we have been earnestly engaged in, and have spent a few thousand dollars over a project of the 'Tract Society, which is the getting up of no less than one or two million of their excellent tracts, for the Dahomy field of missionary labor such as the Egba mission, the Yoruba mission, and the Ijebu missions.
The older Negro culture was not overthrown, but, like a great wedge, pushed upward and inward from Yoruba, and gave stubborn battle to the newer culture for seven or eight centuries. Then it was, in the fifteenth century, that the heart disease of Africa developed in its most virulent form. There is a modern theory that black men are and always have been naturally slaves.
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