WEST AFRICAN FOLKLORE. 771 



WEST AFRICAN FOLKLORE. 



BY COLONEL A. B. ELLIS. 



"TTNTIL a few years ago it was popularly believed that the 

 *->) negro nations of West Africa were in the unique position 

 of never having produced anything worth recording. They were 

 supposed to have no history, no traditions, and no folklore, and 

 even their religion was said to be something infinitely lower than 

 was found anywhere else, a worship of sticks, stones, or shells, 

 picked up at haphazard, and deified without rhyme or reason. 

 This groveling religion, which was alleged to be significant of the 

 degraded condition in which the West African negro was believed 

 to be, was called fetichism, a word which, while really a corruption 

 of the Portuguese feitigo, " amulet " or " charm," was supposed to 

 be a negro word ; and several treatises were written to show that, 

 as it was impossible to conceive a lower form of religion, fetichism 

 might therefore be assumed to be the beginning of all religion. 



All these extraordinary beliefs, which had no foundation what- 

 ever in fact, may be traced to the reports made by those persons 

 who, being engaged in the slave trade, resorted to West Africa in 

 the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The great majority of 

 these men had but a very transient acquaintance with West 

 Africa, only remaining on the coast sufficiently long to obtain 

 cargoes of slaves ; and consequently it was impossible for them to 

 have any real knowledge of the natives with whom they were 

 brought in contact. Then, as they had no knowledge of African 

 languages, they were dependent for their information upon those 

 negroes who had acquired a smattering of some European lan- 

 guage, and in most cases they seem to have completely misunder- 

 stood what their informants doubtless intended to convey. In 

 other cases the slave-traders no doubt drew upon their imagina- 

 tions, or exaggerated what they had seen ; for if they could show 

 that the negro was a mere brutish animal, they palliated to some 

 extent the iniquity of the slave trade ; and so his fancied brutish- 

 ness was persistently brought to the front at all events toward 

 the end of the last century, when the traffic in slaves had begun 

 to fall into disrepute. 



Dr. Theodor Waitz, the distinguished author of Anthropologie 

 der Naturvolker, was the first to express a doubt as to the authen- 

 ticity of the supposed facts concerning the social condition and 

 religion of the West African negro which work my long ac- 

 quaintance with West Africa has enabled me to continue, and in 

 two volumes * I have shown that the religion of the negro, so far 



* The Tshi-speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast and The Ewe-speaking Peoples of the 

 Slave Coast. 



