Berry — The Sierra Leone Cannibals. 6T 



but amongst the African peoples who have turned to Islam there is a curious 

 mixture of Moslem and animistic belief. 



Animism. — The Mendis have words for god (Ngewo), a devil or sprite ; 

 but they also use it in a higher sense, and as a name for the Creator. All the 

 Mandi-speaking people — so Dr. O'Gorman, the Roman Catholic Bishop of 

 Sierra Leone, informs me — have individualized the Creator ; it is he who has 

 made the world, themselves, and everything in it. They consider him good 

 and beneficent, and give to him an attribute of aloofness ; he does not now 

 trouble much with the earth and its inhabitants, but he is an all-powerful indi- 

 vidual. If his favour can be gained, he can do more than other devils, but he 

 does not act direct ; he tells some other devil to do it. He is abjured by an 

 offering ; at the same time the supplicant calls out : " Great God, come down ; 

 I give you a fowl." He is also called upon in swearing by the formula, 

 " Help of God," which is a most solemn declaration, and only resorted to when 

 all else fails ; and a person is never sworn to death without calling on Ngewo. 



The word for " the spirit " is Ngafa, ]!fgafei, whether abstract or materialized, 

 for dream and visual reality are all the same to this people ; indeed, to them 

 this world is the dream, and the one beyond the reality. Ngafa means a 

 spirit, which may be disembodied or, like Ngewo, was never joined to a body. 

 The word for " shadow" (Xdendelij is also used to signify "spirit." Heaven they 

 call Xgelegohu, and the land of the living is Ngelemahu ; but the two words 

 have peculiar meanings, which Dr. O'Gorman has explained to me as 

 follows: — Xgelemahu is the sky which we see; the moon and the stars are in 

 it. Beyond the stars, in the belly of the sky, are Ngewo and his associates in 

 Ngelegohu. When Ngelegohu (in the belly, inside the clouds) was found, 

 Ngelemahu (above the clouds) was lowered, and from the earth up is some- 

 times called Ngelemahu. The lower world is Ndou, and the shades, whose 

 home it is, are the Ndou-bela. There are also words for the sun, moon, star, 

 Orion, Southern Cross, Pleiades, and Venus, whom they call the jealous 

 woman. The language contains few foreign words, and there is no gender. 

 They count in scores, with a basis of ten. They have no abstract idea of 

 property ; " to have " with them is rendered " to be in the hand." 



The Mendi fables show that the ideas of God and the sky are both equally 

 indefinite and indeterminate. He speaks of the father sky who rains down, 

 fructifying the mother-earth, and of man, the animals, and plants as the 

 products. The bush around him swarms with amorphous powers, of whose 

 functions he has no idea, around which no myths have gathered. These 

 incorporeal beings he classes comprehensively as " Hawa," or " devils." But 

 some of these devils have more power than others, and if he gaius the right 

 side of them they may be iudueed to share it with him ; some even have the 



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