intelligent native superintendence, negro traditions and
religion. He presently found that no two men thought alike upon
any single subject: I need hardly say that he gave up in despair
a work hopeless as psychology, the mere study of the individual.

Fetishism, I believe, is held by the orthodox to be a degradation
of the pure and primitive "Adamical dispensation," even as the
negro has been supposed to represent the accursed and degraded
descendants of Ham and Canaan. I cannot but look upon it as the
first dawn of a faith in things not seen. And it must be studied
by casting off all our preconceived ideas. For instance, Africans
believe, not in soul nor in spirit, but in ghost; when they
called M. du Chaillu a "Mbwiri," they meant that the white man
had been bleached by the grave as Dante had been darkened by his
visit below, and consequently he was a subject of fear and awe.
They have a material, evanescent, intelligible future, not an
immaterial, incomprehensible eternity; the ghost endures only for
awhile and perishes like the memory of the little-great name.
Hence the ignoble dread in East and West Africa of a death which
leads to a shadowy world, and eventually to utter annihilation.
Seeing nought beyond the present-future, there is no hope for
them in the grave; they wail and sorrow with a burden of despair.
"Ame-kwisha"--he is finished--is the East African's last word
concerning kinsman and friend. "All is done for ever," sing the
West Africans. Any allusion to loss of life turns their black
skins blue; "Yes," they exclaim, "it is bad to die, to leave
house and home, wife and children; no more to wear soft cloth,
nor eat meat, nor "drink" tobacco, and rum." "Never speak of
that" the moribund will exclaim with a shudder; such is the ever-
present horror of their dreadful and dreary times of sickness,