Bantu Beliefs and Magic: With particular reference to the Kikuyu and Kamba tribes of Kenya Colony; together with some reflections on East Africa after the war

The author of this book, Mr C. W. Hobley, has long been known to anthropologists as one of our best authorities on the native races of British East Africa, or Kenya Colony, as it is now called, where he resided as Provincial Commissioner for many years. The time he could spare from his official duties he wisely devoted to studying the customs and beliefs of the tribes whom he was appointed to govern, and through the knowledge and experience thus acquired he was able to make a valuable series of contributions to ethnography. In the present work he has resumed and largely supplemented his former studies of two important tribes, the Kikuyu and Kamba, enriching his previous accounts with many fresh details and fruitful observations.

The result is a monograph replete with information of great variety and of the highest interest for the student of savage thought and institutions. But the book has a practical as well as a scientific value. Placed in the hands of British officials engaged in the maintenance of order and the administration of justice among the natives, it must prove of real service to them in their task of affording them an insight into the habits and ideas of the people, and thus greatly facilitating the task of government. Indeed, without some such knowledge of the native’s point of view it is impossible to govern him wisely and well. The savage way of thinking is very different to ours, and Mr Hobley is right in insisting that it is by no means simple, but, on the contrary, highly complex, and that, consequently, it cannot be understood without long and patient study. To legislate for savages on European principles of law [8]and morality, even when the legislator is inspired by none but the most benevolent intentions, is always dangerous, and not seldom disastrous; for it is too often forgotten that native customs have grown up through a long course of experience and adaptation to natural surroundings, that they correspond to notions and beliefs which, whether ill or well founded, are deeply rooted in the native mind, and that the attempt to discard them for others which have been developed under totally different conditions may injure instead of benefiting the people. Even when the new rules and habits, which government seeks to force upon the tribes, are in themselves, abstractly considered, better than the old, they may not be so well adapted to the mental framework of the governed, and the consequence may be that the old moral restraints are abolished without the substitution of any equally effective in their room. To this danger Mr Hobley is fully alive, and he gives a timely warning on the subject to those well-meaning but ill-informed persons at home who would treat the native African in accordance with the latest political shibboleths of democratic Europe. Such treatment, which its ignorant advocates seem to regard as a panacea for all human ills, would almost inevitably produce an effect precisely the opposite of that intended: instead of accelerating the progress of the natives, it would probably precipitate their moral, social, and even physical decline. In practical life few things are so dangerous as abstract ideas, and the indiscriminate application of them to concrete realities is one of the most fatal weapons in the hands of the moral or political revolutionary.

Among the mass of interesting topics dealt with in Mr Hobley’s book it is difficult to single out any for special mention in an introduction. The subjects to which, on the whole, he has paid closest attention are natural religion and magic. In respect of religion the author again and again notes the remarkable similarities which may be traced between East African and [9]Semitic beliefs and rites, and he raises the question how these similarities are to be explained. Are they due to parallel and independent development in the African and the Semitic races? Or are they the consequence of the invasion of Africa either by a Semitic people or at all events by a people imbued with the principles of Semitic religion. In my book “Folk-lore in the Old Testament”1 I had been similarly struck by some of these resemblances, and, while abstaining from speculation on their origin, had remarked that the hypothesis of derivation from a common source was not to be lightly rejected. On the other hand Mr Hobley thinks it safer, in the present state of our knowledge, to assume that the resemblances in question have arisen independently, through parallel development, in the African and Semitic areas. He dismisses as highly improbable the idea that the ancient Semitic beliefs should have originated in East Africa and spread from there to Arabia. Yet recent investigations in this part of Africa, particularly with regard to the native veins of iron and gold, tend in the opinion of some competent inquirers to show that East Central Africa, including the region of the great lakes, was an extremely ancient seat of a rudimentary civilisation, the seeds of which may have been carried, whether by migration or the contact of peoples, to remote parts of Europe and Asia. In regard to iron, which has been wrought in Central Africa from time immemorial, Mr Hobley quotes Professor Gregory who thinks it probable that the art of forging the metal was invented in tropical Africa at a date before Europe had attained to the discovery and manufacture of bronze; he even suggests that the ingenious smith who first fused tin and copper into bronze may have borrowed the hint from the process of working iron which he had learned in Africa.

Among the many curious superstitions recorded by [10]Mr Hobley none is perhaps more interesting and suggestive than by the name of thahu or thabu, and which presents points of similarity to the Polynesian taboo. Mr Hobley thinks that the idea involved in it is best expressed by the English term “curse.” But to this it may be objected that a curse implies a personal agent, human or divine, who has called down some evil on the sufferer; whereas in many, indeed in most, of the cases enumerated by Mr Hobley there is no suggestion of such an agent, and the evil which befalls the sufferer is the direct consequence of his own action or of a simple accident. Thus it would seem that “ceremonial uncleanness” answers better to the meaning of thahu than “curse.” Be that as it may, deliberate cursing apparently plays a prominent part in the superstition of the Kikuyu and Kamba; but it is significant that they give it a different name (kirume, kiume) from that which they apply to ceremonial uncleanness. Great faith is put in the effectiveness of curses, especially the curses of dying persons; and as these latter curses often refer to the disposal of the dying man’s property after his death and are intended to prevent the alienation of land from the family, Mr Hobley is led to make the ingenious suggestion that in some curses we may detect the origin of entail and of testamentary dispositions in general.

Not a few of the customs and beliefs described by Mr Hobley remind us of similar practices and ideas in the religion and mythology of classical antiquity. Thus the warriors who, armed with swords and clubs, dance or hop from foot to foot at the time when the mawele grain is reaped, are curiously reminiscent of the Roman Salii, the dancing or leaping priests of the war-god Mars, who, similarly accoutred with swords and staves, danced or leaped, while they invoked Saturn, the God of Sowing. Again, the strange sort of madness which from time to time seizes on Kamba women and under the influence of which, wrought up to a state of frenzy, they caper about with cow’s tails suspended from their [11]arms, offers a parallel to the Greek legend of the daughters of Prœtus and the other Argive women, who, oddly enough, were said like their African sisters to have been healed of their infirmity by dances and the sacrifice of cattle.2 The study of such hysterical and infectious manias among primitive peoples opens up an interesting field of inquiry to the psychologist.

Such are a few specimens culled from the rich collection of East African folk-lore and religion which the author has presented to his readers in this volume. The facts recorded by him provide much food for thought and suggest many lines of investigation for inquiries in the future. For, as he reminds us, with equal truth and modesty, the field of inquiry is far from being exhausted. Let us hope that it will yet yield an abundant harvest to others, who will follow in Mr Hobley’s footsteps and imitate the example he has set them of patient and open-minded research.

J. G. FRAZER. [13]