African Language

Abstract

IN an exceedingly interesting article in your issue of the 16th, on “Anthropology versus Etymology,” I am so much struck by the clear statement of the old school mythologist dogma, that “the old name of a deity which had lost its meaning might remind a later generation of the name of some beast; hence might arise those stories of gods taking the forms of beasts,” &c. That this is really the case among certain West African tribes I am quite certain, and I believe that, as far as West Africa goes, the confusion caused in white minds by the language has given rise to a good deal that has been said regarding the West African natives believing themselves descendants of animals. It is, I need hardly say, no uncommon thing to find one and the same word used for two or more distinct things. When that word is written down by a white man, who may not notice the accompanying gesture, that marks in which relation it is employed, error is liable to creep in, and you may be calling “slowness in walking” “the new leaves on trees,” or vice versâ, or “a hundred bundles of bikei” “the butt-end of a log,” or, “a finger-snap” “your maternal aunt” among the Bafanh. This also shows as an element of the danger of judging from words alone in the case of the name used by all the Fjort tribe, who are tinder the Nkissi school of fetish, for their great over-lord of gods, Nzambi Mpungu. In the Loango and Kacongo districts Mpungu means a great ape, and the word is used there also as the name for this great god, the creating god; hence it would be easy, and I hope excusable, for I did it at first myself, to think the great god and the ape had some connection. Nevertheless, they have not Nzambi Mpungu as a name, for the great deity was imported into the Kacongo and Loango from a region on the south bank of the Congo, with the rest of the Nkissi cult, prior to the discovery of these regions by Diego Caõ and therefore, when the word is used in a religious sense, it bears the religious meaning which it brought from its original home, namely, something that is above, or that covers over. Mr. R. E. Dennett tells me that Mpungu is used in this sense to this day in the Nlanoi dialects.