The carved wooden figures of human beings and animals which are so typical of the art of equatorial Africa, especially in the interior and the west, are commonly grouped under the name of fetishes. This term, anglicized from a Portuguese word which was early applied in this sense, meant originally an amulet or charm. The great majority of these wood carvings undoubtedly have some connection with the religious usages of the Negro. In Africa, no less than in other parts of the world, religion has been the inspiration of art, or it might perhaps be truer to say that each has inspired and encouraged the other in the highest development to which the capacities of the race were able to bring them.
If this is true, we might expect to find that the greater the hold religion has on a people (given the average aesthetic feeling in which primitive people are certainly not lacking) the more developed will be their art. In the southwestern Congo region the Bakuba-Baluba peoples have been characterized by a writer who has observed the Negro in Africa with sympathy and understanding as “singularly superstitious.” The choice of the epithet is perhaps unfortunate, the context shows that these groups of Bantuized Negroes have a more highly developed system of cults, religious or magico-religious, than any other Congo people of their degree of culture, which is high-for the Congo.
Varied as are the practices connected with the use of “fetishes,” and numerous and undefined as are the religious concepts which give rise to them, it is possible to distinguish two notions as to man’s relations towards things seen and unseen, and the way in which he can control or influence them or they him, and as to the nature of forces powerful to affect destiny or give effect to desire.
According to the Bavili of the coast region north of the mouth of the Congo, a man’s shadow, xi dundu, enters and leaves the body by way of the mouth, being thus associated with the breath, muvu. A dead man has no shadow even as he has no breath. The shadow is thus a vital element, but it is associated with mortality: it dies with the man. When a person swoons, it is because his xi dundu has been stolen by a sorcerer; if it is not returned, death ensues. Xi dundu is, evidently, a concept of the same nature as the “spirit of the body” referred to above. It can hardly be called a spirit in any modern sense of the term. To the mind of the Negro every object in nature, inanimate as well as animate, embodies some such principle as this, and is endowed with personality or “self-power.”
A description of the ceremonies which accompany the death of a chief of the Banziri of the northwestern part of the Mubangi valley gives the following suggestive details: “The relatives arrange the corpse in a doubled-up position on a kind of gridiron of poles. Then they kindle a fire under the body. Receptacles of baked earth are placed so as to collect the melted fat which trickles from the body under the action of the fire. Those who are present smear faces and hands with this fat, rinse it off with warm water, and these rinsings are drained into vessels and drunk by the relatives, who believe that in this way they incorporate in themselves the virtues and qualities of the deceased.” A chief has, of course, personality or self-power in the highest degree. He is preëminently the able man.
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In the Delagoa territory there is a mole which burrows under the sand just below the surface. Children in that country are attacked by a parasite which lodges under the skin and burrows there in a similar way, so that the traces of its course are plainly visible on the surface. The women of the region make bracelets of the skin of the mole, which they put on the arms of their babies to protect them from the burrowing parasite. In the Kasai-Sankuru region of the southwestern Congo, diviners make use of a particular apparatus. It consists of a wooden figure, usually of some animal, dog or crocodile, the back of which is flattened and smoothed.
When it is desired to discover, for instance, the name of a thief, this flat space is dampened with a viscous liquid, and a wooden disc passed back and forth along it, the operator pressing hard upon the disc and reciting the names of the villagers. When the disc sticks, the name then being spoken is that of the guilty party. It would seem that we have in such cases evidence of a concept of a principle of power inherent in men, animals, and inanimate nature, by which one may enhance and fortify his capacity for dealing with situations intractable to his own unaided forces.
The essential part of the fetish-the claw of a beast (Fig. 11), some other part of the body of animal or man, dried and powdered, leaves forming a concretion with resin or clay-is placed in a suitable receptacle such as the horn of an antelope, a small shell, or a hole made for the purpose in a figure, usually wooden, representing a human being or an animal. Any object -a stone, a stick, a tree-which attracts attention by some peculiarity of form or of imagined behavior may become a fetish; as when a Negro, stepping out of his hut to start on a journey, stumbles over a stone which flies up and strikes his leg, picks up the pebble, saying, “Ad, there you are!” and carries it off with him, firmly persuaded that it has acted thus in order to attract his attention and signify its ability to help him in the purpose for which the journey is undertaken.
The projection of an invisible force to act at a distance on some other object-as when nails driven into a wooden figure of a man cause the death of the person whom the figure represents-would easily give rise to the notion that this force was a spirit. The container or fetish figure inhabited by it, especially if this had human form, would be looked upon in time as essentially one with the indwelling spirit, just as a man’s spirit or soul forms a unity with his body.
As fetishism developed and became more and more systematized, the ritual practices connected with it became so numerous as to require the services of a special class of persons skilled in the songs, dances, incantations, auguries, and offerings which came to accompany fetish worship. Hence the medicine man, witch doctor, magic doctor, whose baleful power, sometimes united in the same person with that of a chief, is still so strong in Africa. Such worship, including sacrifices to the fetish figures, is directed mainly to causing the fetish to exercise its powers for the advantage of the worshipers.
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Since the Negro tends to endow all objects, lifeless or not, with personality similar to his own, it is not surprising to find that he employs, to call forth from the fetish a beneficent activity, means similar to those he has found effective in the case of human friends, enemies, or persons in authority. Thus a fetish is petted, cajoled, or beaten. “The Negro in Guinea beats his fetish if his wishes are frustrated, and hides it in his waist-cloth when he is about to do something of which he is ashamed.”
In this latter case, where it is attempted to conceal knowledge of a shameful act from the fetish, there is present the feeling of fear, which is at least an ingredient of awe, and shame, which belongs to a higher order of the same emotions; while fetishes of more important rank are “prayed to, talked to, sacrificed to, as sentient and willing personifications of the spirit” dwelling in the fetish.
All the figures, illustrated here, from collections in the University Museum, are fetishes of one kind or another. Fig. 12, a so-called “nail fetish,” is from the Congo coast region near Luango. The custom of driving nails into a fetish is the expression of several different ideas as to the results expected. In one well-authenticated instance “a native . . . being accused of stealing . . . invoked the curse of death upon himself if he were guilty, and knocked a nail into his nkisi (fetish) as a proof of his good faith. At that time he was hale and well built, but soon grew meager and thin, and in three months he was scarcely recognizable.
The nails may be the record of the number of persons done to death under the power of that particular fetish. For every nail driven into the figure, the person against whom its power is directed will be afflicted with some disease, or may be at once stricken with death. Again the nails may be of the nature of a spur, a kind of pointed incentive to the fetish to perform the functions expected of it. Fetishes treated in this manner are usually family- or lares-fetishes, which, in the Congo if not in West Africa, are often treated with remarkable roughness-may be beaten, thrown into the water or the bush.
The “nail-fetish” shown in Fig. 12 is a wooden statuette 28 inches high. It is a typical western Congo figure, naively realistic in execution, bringing out by the broadest and simplest means the salient characters of the physique of the Negro of that region. The disproportionately long torso and short legs, the splay feet, columnar neck with the marked forward tilt, as of some primeval near human type not yet fully at home in the upright posture.
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The caricaturist often produces a better likeness with his faculty for discriminating exaggeration than the photographer. The Congo artist is, so to speak, an unconscious caricaturist without a sense of humor. He gets his effects with no laboring of details. The stumpiness of leg of the forest Negro who is his model is emphasized by the almost complete lack of differentiation between thigh and lower leg and the placing of the bulge of the calf behind the slightly indicated knee.
The whole figure has been whitened, though the whitening has been rubbed off in many places. The chest and the back of the neck and of the head bear large blackish dots. There is a rectangular cavity in the abdomen which has carried a mirror or other powerful “medicine.” A nail is stuck in each breast, an arrowhead between. In the middle of the slightly raised panel which represents the shoulder-blades there is a shallow round hole into which another nail has been driven with a bent one beside it. About the neck is a wire necklet, a rope of twisted cloth encircles the ankles. These two articles are probably of the nature of votive offerings. This figure was a “nail fetish” of the Bavili people, who inhabit a region where fetishes of this nature are plentiful.
When the “virtue” has gone out of these fetishes-note the removal of the coiffure and of the “medicine” from the cavity in the abdomen-they are readily sold to foreigners. The nganga, or wizard, who is attached to the service of fetishes, gathers a party of men, whom he leads into the woods to cut down a tree for the purpose of making the figure. On this occasion, if a man should call another by name, the latter will die, and his kulu, or spirit, will pass into the tree and become the kulu of the fetish made from it. The person whose infringement of the name taboo is responsible for this, will answer with his life to the relations of the man whose death he has thus brought about. In any case someone must die in order that a kulu may be secured for the fetish.
The wizard cuts down the tree and blood pours from it. With this is mingled the blood from a fowl then slain. “People pass before these fetishes calling on them to kill them if they do, or have done, such and such a thing. Others go to them and insist upon their killing so and so, who has done or is about to do them some fearful injury. And as they swear or make their demand, a nail is driven into the fetish, and the palaver is settled so far as they are concerned.
The other large figure reproduced here (Fig. 11) is of uncertain provenience. It is certainly a product of the Congo region, probably from the interior, from some group of the superior Baluba-Bakuba stock. The art of these people is the most remarkable to be found in Negro Africa. The portrait statues in wood of the earlier Bakuba (Bushongo) kings, show an individuality as well as a degree of skill in execution unequaled in Negro art. The head of Fig. 11 is, as usual in African, even in Bakuba, art, the feature to which most attention is paid, and here a result almost of delicacy of feature and expression has been arrived at.
The figure is of hard brown wood. The arms are carved in relief on the sides and front of the trunk. They are bent at the elbow and the forearms, carried up in front of the body, join at their extremities, where the hands should be, under the chin in an attitude of prayer or entreaty. The legs, disproportionately short and stout in comparison with the long, slim trunk, are bent at the knee, as if giving way under the weight of the body. It is evident that the position of the limbs is intended to give to the figure an expression of beseeching terror. This is hardly reflected in the face, however, in which the only mark of any unusual feeling is in the slightly parted lips. These are prominent, but not unduly thick. The bridge of the nose is fairly high, and the whole feature would not appear markedly negroid if it were not for the abrupt flattening of the tip, as if the artist had sliced off an originally more rounded surface to get an effect corresponding to a corrected impression. The broad cheeks and the central bulge of the forehead above the sunken eyes put in with bits of glass, combine two typical with a distinctly untypical (the last) character.
The conical coiffure is built up of a substance similar to that of which traces appear on the head and abdomen of Fig. 12. The claw embedded in the apex of the coiffure indicates the fetish nature of the figure.
It could be argued that by simply window shopping in the fetish markets, tourists are not financially supporting or condoning the illegal trade. These are local markets for local people, and they exist regardless of tourism; a tourist boycott would have no impact on their existence. At the same time, as responsible travelers, it is very hard to justify visiting a place which promotes the poaching of and trade in threatened species. And while tourists are unlikely to buy a baboon head, they are lured here with the promise of seeing these more grisly items, and may end up spending money on benign herbs or carvings.
It has therefore been suggested that traders may be keen to display these more shocking artefacts in order to encourage visitors to come, and then purchase other trinkets. Additionally, entrepreneurial local residents have started charging visitors for tours of Lomés marché des fétiches, with extra fees for photos, which of course may include some of the more grisly items. Witch doctors guérisseurs are on hand to perform white magic on curious Western tourists, using bags of herbs, wooden sticks and so on.
At Responsible Travel, we understand that cultural traditions often stand in opposition to conservation, such as indigenous communities who hunt whales or polar bears, or traditional medicine practices in parts of Asia, for example. Fetishes are such an intrinsic part of what it means to be a follower of Vodou, so it is difficult to see how the religion could exist without this practice. However, although the governments of Benin and Togo seem to have turned a blind eye to the Vodou trade, they are party to the CITES Convention, which means that these markets are illegal.
Tourists need to be aware of all these issues before visiting fetish markets and Vodou practitioners, and to consider if their actions are supporting damaging as well as illegal practices.
Afro-Brazilian religions like Candomblé, Umbanda or Xangô, are a cluster of religious practices that originated mostly in West Africa, especially in Yorubaland (Nigeria and Benin), but also in Congo and Angola. Similar to other Afro-diasporic religions (i.e. Vodou in Haity and Santeria in Cuba), Candomblé shares many elements with West African traditional religious practices, like the names and characteristics of their deities (called orixás in Brazilian Portuguese and òrìṣà in Yoruba). However, in the whole Afro-Atlantic space the most important common trait is the presence fabricated objects. After a ritual procedure they become the bodies and the material manifestation of the deities themselves. These objects, often referred to as “fetishes,” represent the point of mediation between the material and the spiritual world.
During my research on Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion, the conundrum between materiality, natural elements and invisible forces became central to my understanding of ritual practices. What is the role of the “fetish” and similar “animated objects” in relation to humans and other ontologies? What is the relationship between materiality, nature, and technology in the making of these objects? In this post, I show how these peculiar objects have been presented in the ethnographic literature, and I propose an alternative way to look at them.
At the end of the nineteenth century a Brazilian forensic doctor, Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, conducted some of the first academic research on Afro-Brazilian Candomblé. The results of his work were published in O animismo fetichista dos negros bahianos (1900) - “The fetishist animism of the Bahian negroes” - offering detailed descriptions of ceremonies, offerings and rituals. Influenced by the theories of Sir Edward Tylor, Nina Rodrigues saw in Candomblé the traits of a primitive belief which justified the racial inferiorities of African peoples and conceived of spirit possession as a form of pathological hysteria.
The first author to mention the word “fetishism” is Charles de Brosses in his Du culte des dieux fétiches (1760), who analyzed the worship of objects as a very primitive and rough form of religiosity. The word “fetish”, feitiço in the Portuguese language, means “sorcery”, “enchantment”, and originally it did not refer to a particular religious context. The “fetish” is not only difficult to describe, but also to translate into different words that are not so charged, racialized and controversial. This is so because this object compels us to rethink and challenge our own relationship with materiality.
As explained by Verger (1981: 23), the assentamento or assento is a receptacle of sacred energy, a pot or a jar containing sacred stones, and it must be prepared as part of the initiation process. Johnson (2002: 116) translates it literally as “the seat of the orixá” while Capone, in the same context, defines the verb assentar as “to seat the orixá’s energy in an altar representing the initiate’s head” (2010: 263). Reginaldo Prandi describes it as “material representation of the devotee’s orixá”[1] (1995: 16) and Bastide uses the word “to fix” (fixar) in order to indicate the process for its preparation. Muniz Sodré, also talks of “symbolic foundations”, underlining the function of the assentamentos as representation (2002: 54). Juana Elbein dos Santos uses the word “to plant”, plantar (2002, ed. or. 1972: 42), while others also tell of assentamentos being enterrados, “buried” (Ribeiro dos Santos 2006).
As we can see, the words and metaphors used by ethnographers are borrowed from a variety of semantic categories: the assentamentos can be planted (like a seed) but also installed (as a mechanical component, or even a software). It can be “seated” like a human, and it is a symbol and a material representation of a human head, but it is also a way to tame different ontologies into something else. Moreover, once it is made and assembled, it needs to be “activated” and “fed” with offerings, sacrifices, animal blood and the juice extracted from leaves.
The assentamento is made and fabricated in order to create a privileged channel of communication between the humans and the gods, but also the environment and the landscape. The assentamento is not just a deity per se, but also an oral cavity which speaks, eats, and channels spiritual energy. The Yoruba name of the assentamento is igbá, which indicates a calabash gourd, typically used as a container for all sort of things. Therefore, we can assume that this strange object is, first of all, a receptacle for something. The immaterial force that needs to be contained - physically and figuratively - is normally represented by a stone, called otã, that needs to be collected from the same environment of the orixá that is going to be fixed in it (from the river, the ocean, the forest and so on).
Roger Sansi-Roca elaborated extensively on the meaning of this ritual act of finding the right stone, the right inert “body” to be infused with life energy. Here we encounter a peculiar hybrid: installed and planted, made of organic and non-organic material, considered to be a body or just a mouth, an extension of the natural landscape but also a powerful “stargate”, the assentamento is both a mere receptacle and a social member of the religious community. Being the connection between the immaterial energy and the initiate, the assentamento condenses different places, individuals and realms in the same spot.
The U.S philosopher and biologist was using the image of the cyborg as a “myth of political identity” for a utopian socialist-feminist world. I am willing to take this image out of its original context and test it as a tool to better understand objects, beings, and practices that transcend Western dichotomic categories. These hybrids are described as “creatures simultaneously animals and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted” (Haraway 1991: 149). They do not reproduce organically, and they share both human and animal features. Moreover, cyborgs are not entirely organic nor entirely artificial: they retain life, agency and organic tissues in hi-tech constructed bodies. It can be observed how also the assentamentos challenge many of these same dichotomies.
They are made through the assemblage of objects that are found in nature (like the otã) but also crafted (the receptacle). They are brought to life through vivifying substances that include animal blood from the sacrifices and vegetable chlorophyll. They are, simultaneously, communication devices, symbols and physical bodies of an immaterial, invisible and divine force, and once “planted” they need to be regularly fed and refreshed. Both the cyborgs and the assentamentos compel us to problematise the notion of agency.
Bruno Latour echoes De Brosses’ title with his work On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (2011), where he highlights the ambiguity of this word with a little pun: factish, indeed reproduces the original etymology of feitiço, from the Portugues feito, “made”, “fabricated”, but also “enchanted”, as in the Latin term factura, which means “spell” or “charm” and refers to something that is created, from facere, “to make”. Latour hypothesises a cultural misunderstanding between the Portuguese sailors and the indigenous population of Guinea. In this imagined dialogue, the Portuguese ask how it is possible for the gods to be made and built by human hands and at the same time to be “real” and “alive”, with their own agency over humans (2011: 15-19).
Latour’s neologism helps us to define the factish as a new kind of technological device that goes beyond the control of human authority. Similarly, the assentamento-cyborg, made and crafted by humans and composed by animal and vegetable blood, but also by elements of the natural landscapes, acquires its own agency and individuality. Using the cyborg as a metaphor helps us to rethink religion as technology rather than as opposed to it.
Robert Hamill Nassau, author of "Fetichism in West Africa"
Fetichism in West Africa: Forty Years' Observation of Native Customs and Superstitions is a book by the Reverend Robert Hamill Nassau, a missionary, published in 1904. The book relates the facts which Nassau claims to have discovered over the course of many years concerning traditional religions and the practice of sorcery in West Africa and how it related to the everyday lives of the people of that region.
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