Bantu Beliefs and Magic
9781465669667
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
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 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.
