visiting the laity, on whom he is exceedingly hard, he comes in pestilence and tempest, or, for more individual village visitations, as a small and miserable boy, desolate and crying for help and kindness, which, when given to him, Tando repays by killing off his benefactors and their fellow-villagers with a certain disease. This trick, I may remark, is not confined to Tando, for several other West African gods use it when sacrifices to them are in arrears; and I am certain it is more at the back of outcast children being neglected than is either sheer indifference to suffering or cruelty. Because, fearing the disease, your native will be far more likely to remember he is in debt to the god and go and pay an instalment, than to take in that child whom he thinks is the god who has come to punish.
But you have only to look through Ellis's important works, the "Tshi-speaking, Ewe-speaking, and Yoruba-speaking peoples of the West Coast of Africa," to find many instances of the gods of Fetish who do not require a material object to manifest themselves in. And I, while in West Africa, have often been struck by incidents that have made this point clear to me. When I have been out with native companions after nightfall, they pretty nearly always saw an apparition of some sort, frequently apparitions of different sorts, in our path ahead. Then came a pause, and after they had seen the apparition vanish, on we went—not cheerily, however, until we were well past the place where it had been seen. This place they closely examined, and decided whether it was an Abambo, or Manu, or whatever name these spirit classes had in their local language, or whether it was something worse that had been there, such as a Sasabonsum or Ombuiri.
