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134 At the Back of the Black Man's Mind By R. E. Dennett
Now I wonder whether these old missionaries were the asses Mr. Bentley seems to look
upon them as, or whether they found the true religion of the natives less overgrown by
"fetishism" than it is to-day. We must remember that some 400 years have passed
between the arrival of the first missionaries and that of Mr. Bentley. What the words
meant then and what they appear to mean to-day may well be two widely different
things. Missionaries as a rule do not look for any high virtues in any religion but their
own, and refusing to study the religion of the native set about to destroy it. The greater
the play of civilisation and Christianity so-called the greater the havoc we may expect in
the religion of the indigencs. In this case the work of the missionaries under the
Portuguese Government took the greatest hold of the district south of the Congo, i.e.,
that about which Mr. Bentley writes; it is not then surprising to me that in his
description of what he calls the religion of the natives, all trace of the higher part of it is
found wanting. Neither is it to be wondered at that north of the Congo where the work
of the missionaries took little or no hold, traces of Nkici-ism are still to be found. I say
so-called religion because I do not call fetishism a religion any more than I would call
witchcraft or any other form of priest ridden degeneracy anything more than a
"superstition." Mr. Bentley's description of "fetishism" is a very correct one and must be
most interesting to those who take an interest in the present degenerate form of the
superstition of the native of the Congo. But as Mr. Bentley asks, "What are we to infer
from the present state of things? Is the idea of God being slowly evolved out of
fetishism? Is it not rather that the people have well-nigh lost the knowledge of God
which once their forefathers possessed?" Exactly, I should infer from the long study of
the people that I have made that such is certainly the case, and that this superstition
called fetishism is an overgrowth imposed upon the purer knowledge they once
certainly possessed. Can we be surprised, therefore, if the word Nkici was as near to the
meaning of the word "Holy" as the priests of old could get.
It was stated in the preliminary remarks on Bavili philosophy (Chapter X) that fetishism
is not the sum total of Bavili religion, that Bakici baci, or sacred symbols, exist, which
are connected with Nzambi on the one side, and with the king on the other through his
six titles. These sacred symbols are (1) groves, (2) lands and rivers, (3) trees, (4)
animals, (5) omens, and (6) the seasons. In Chapter X it was shown that the seasons, the
order of which is obviously indisputable, are regarded as genetically related to each
other and that the various groups are connected in the native mind with certain ideas,
which we have termed the categories, viz., water, earth, fire, procreation, motion,
fruitfulness, life.
In the next chapter it was shown that the groves are grouped in sets of four, that the
order of each set of four is fixed for the natives, and that the order of the groups inter se
is likewise determined. That being so, it was possible to trace a connection between
certain groups of groves, which we term families, and the categories, and to show that
the natives regard the families as genetically related both internally and inter se in the
same way as the seasons; it is however impossible, owing to lack of information, to
work out this idea in detail, for though I have been successful in obtaining the names of
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