Primitive Manners and Customs

From the myths characteristic of savage tribes, from their beliefs, their proverbs, their political and social regulations, it is here sought to gain some general estimate of their powers of intelligence and imagination, their moral ideas, and their religion; subjects naturally of much interest and inevitably of some dispute. For the reason that in savagery as in civilisation there are heights and depths, with more of light here, more of darkness there, it is quite impossible to bring the whole of savage life into focus at once, so that every general conclusion can only be taken as true within limits. The field to be studied is also so large and diversified, that no two minds can expect to derive from it the same impressions, nor to attain to more than partial truth about it. But since the savage can never hope to be heard in court himself, it is only fair to start with certain considerations which he would be entitled to urge, and which deserve to weigh in any judgment made regarding him.

Statements of very low powers of numeration have been perhaps too hastily taken as indicative of a low state of intelligence; for not only have similar assertions concerning American and Tasmanian tribes by the earliest voyagers proved on subsequent investigation to be erroneous, but many savages have substitutes for our arithmetic which serve them perfectly well, the Loangese, for instance, expressing numbers in narration not by words but by gestures; and the Koossa Kaffirs—very few of whom are said to be able to count above ten—possessing the peculiar faculty of detecting almost at a glance any loss in a herd of cattle which may amount to half a thousand. In the same way the want of a written language is often supplied by symbolism. Puzzle as it might a person of education to read a letter, expressed by a bundle containing a stone, a piece of charcoal, a rag, a pepper-pod, and a grain of parched corn, this would be the way of saying in Yoruba, that, though the sender was as strong and firm as a stone, his prospects were as dark as charcoal; that his clothes were in rags; that he was so feverish with anxiety that his skin burned like pepper, even enough to cause corn to wither. The Niam-Niam, again, who declare war by hanging on a tree an ear of maize, a fowl’s feather, and an arrow, thereby giving contingent enemies to understand that arrows will avenge any injury done to a single fowl or a single ear of maize, convey their meaning quite as clearly as the most politely framed ultimata of any Foreign Office in Europe.

Many of the beliefs attributed to savages are no fair test of their general reasoning capabilities; for there are degrees of credulity in savage as in civilised life, and reason everywhere struggles to exist. When Pelopidas, on the eve of the battle of Leuctra, received commands in a dream to sacrifice to certain shades a virgin with chestnut hair, there were not wanting soldiers, even in that army of Bœotians, who had the shrewdness to think and the courage to say, that it was absurd to suppose any divine powers could delight in the slaughter and sacrifice of human beings, and that, if there were such, they deserved no reverence. All stages of culture thus have their dissenters, their wicked reasoners. Among the Ahts only the most superstitious now burn the house of a dead man, with all its contents, for fear of offending his ghost. The Zulus, whose sole religion consists in ancestor-worship, exhibited often in the most ridiculous ceremonies, begin to doubt the power and even the existence of their Amatongo, or dead ancestors, if, when they are sick, their prayers and sacrifices fail to effect a cure.