During worship certain objects are placed before the Joss, the
suppliant at the same time jangling and shaking the Ncheke a rude
beginning of the bell, the gong, the rattle, and the instruments
played before idols by more advanced peoples. It is a piece of
wood, hour-glass-shaped but flat, and some six inches and a half
long; the girth of the waist is five inches, and about three more
round the ends. The wood is cut away, leaving rude and uneven
raised bands horizontally striped with white, black, and red. Two
brass wires are stretched across the upper and lower breadth, and
each is provided with a ring or hinge holding four or five strips
of wire acting as clappers.

This "wicker-work rattle to drive the devil out" (M. du Chaillu,
chap, xxvi.) is called by the Mpongwe "Soke," and serves only,
like that of the Dahomans and the Ashantis (Bowdich, 364) for
dancing and merriment. The South American Maraca was the sole
object of worship known to the Tupi or Brazilian "Indians."
[FN#13]

The beliefs and superstitions popularly attributed to the Mpongwe
are these. They are not without that which we call a First Cause,
and they name it Anyambia, which missionary philologists consider
a contraction of Aninla, spirit (?), and Mbia, good. M. du
Chaillu everywhere confounds Anyambia, or, as he writes the word,
"Aniambie," with Inyemba, a witch, to bewitch being "punga
inyemba." Mr. W. Winwood Reade seems to make Anyambia a
mysterious word, as was Jehovah after the date of the Moabite
stone. Like the Brahm of the Hindus, the god of Epicurus and
Confucius, and the Akarana-Zaman or Endless Time of the Guebres,
Anyambia is a vague being, a vox et praeterea nihil, without