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It was the outer ripples of civilization starting far away, the indigenous and external civilizations of Africa beating with great impulse among the Ethiopians and the Egyptian mulattoes and Sudanese Negroes and Yorubans, and driving the Bantu race southward.
+929+. There was, however, as is remarked above, a tendency to invest the priest with the function of divination. The Arabian kahin was a soothsayer, the Hebrew kohen was a priest. The Yorubans have a special god of divination whose priest is the soothsayer of the community.
Lagos, one of the chief strongholds of the slave-dealers, which the Yorubans most had to fear, has since been taken possession of by the British, and has been declared an English colony or settlement; but Dahomey, governed by its bloodthirsty monarch, with his army of six thousand Amazons and five thousand male warriors, still exists as a terrible scourge to the surrounding territories.
I agreed the more willingly to the suggestion of a cruize, as my Mpongwe fashionables, like the Congoese, and unlike the Yorubans, proved to be bad and untrained walkers; they complained of sore feet, and they were always anticipating attacks of fever.
The Yorubans have a similar system, embracing gods of the Niger, nightmare, wealth, gardens, and divination. This more elaborate system corresponds to their more highly developed scheme of social organization. +661+. The tribes of Northeastern Asia are less developed religiously.
Other instances of belief in rebirth in human beings or in animals are found among the ancient Germans, the people of Calabar, the Torres Straits islanders, the Central Australians, and the Yorubans.
Lagos, one of the chief strongholds of the slave-dealers, which the Yorubans most had to fear, has since been taken possession of by the British, and has been declared an English colony or settlement; but Dahomey, governed by its bloodthirsty monarch, with his army of six thousand Amazons and five thousand male warriors, still exists as a terrible scourge to the surrounding territories.
On the West Coast of Africa the Yorubans, the most advanced of the coast tribes, with a well-developed pantheon, have deities who may be called creators; such are Obatala, who, according to one account, made the first human pair out of clay, and Ifa, the restorer of the world after the flood. In North America the New England Kiehtan and the Virginian Oki have creative functions.
The Yorubans at once recognize the picture; they call the anthropoid "Naki;" and they declare that, when it seizes a man, it tears the fingers asunder. We should not believe so scandalous an assertion without detailed proof; it is hardly fair to make the innocent biped as needlessly cruel as man. It is well known to the natives of the Old Calabar River by the name of "Onion."
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