File:An African trail (1917) (14761635111).jpg

Identifier: africantrail00mack (find matches)
Title: An African trail
Year: 1917 (1910s)
Authors: Mackenzie, Jean Kenyon, 1874-1936 Central Committee on the United Study of Foreign Missions
Subjects: Bulu (African people) Missions
Publisher: West Medford, Mass., The Central Committee on the United Study of Foreign Missions
Contributing Library: Princeton Theological Seminary Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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verse—the wise know the ranks of these, thenames of their kinds, their dignities, their disposi-tions, their intentions tov/ard mere man. There areancestor spirits of so great a reputation that theyare as gods and so served. There are humble spiritsso homesick foi the village that they gather aboutthe dancers in the evening—they warm themselvesat the familiar hearths. There are those whichpossess animals, and those which possess men.There are spirits which make or mar births, thereare spirits—these are legion—which kill. There arelesser spirits to blight or bless in lesser measure. Itis not for me to tell or you to know the list of spiritsor their fixed functions. This is the wisdom of theblack man. Created by God and forgotten by Him,he has worked out for himself with fear and trem-bling a salvation. A salvage—let us say—of hisinterests that are under the sun. In particular, asalvage of life. He has apprehended a system inthe flux of the immanent spirit world and he deals
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THE BULU AND GOD 89 with it methodically. The dead who protect oraflBict the tribe, he has a service of these.The things In the dusk of how many forest huts of fetish. J have seen little wooden images perched upon the tall dance drums, and have recog-nized one of the supreme fetishes of the village.These little grotesques were invested with spirit.This is fetish, the investment in a material objectnatural or artificial, of spirit. And this is fetishism,the reverence of that object and the worship ofthat spirit. It is important that the reader who isinterested in the nature of fetish should note thatthe material object is reverenced, that the spirit isworshipped. The skull of the ancestor, that mostsacred object, is only a medium of communicationas Mr. Robert Milligan says, between the living sonand the spirit of the dead father. The rubbingsof the little images by our Bulu with oil, with thered powder of the camma tree, is a kind of serviceby proxy to that ancestral spirit which is ad

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