hile to have a presiding genius,' so the Tshis and Bantu might
ironically remark, 'A useful thing, a new Supreme Being!' A quarter of a
continent or so adopts a new foreign god, and leaves him _plante la_;
unserved, unhonoured, and unsung. He therefore came to be thought too
remote, or too indifferent, 'to interfere directly in the affairs of the
world.' 'This idea was probably caused by the fact that the natives had
not experienced any material improvement in their condition ... although
they also had become followers of the god of the whites.'[33]

But that was just what they had not done! Even at Magellan's Straits, the
Fuegians picked up from a casual Spanish sea-captain and adored an image
of Cristo. Name and effigy they accepted. The Tshi people took neither
effigy nor name of a deity from the Portuguese settled among them. They
neither imitated Catholic rites nor adapted their own; they prayed not,
nor sacrificed to the 'new' Nyankupon. Only his name and the idea of his
nature are universally diffused in West African belief. He lives in no
definite home, or hill, but 'in Nyankupon's country.' Nyankupon, at the
present day, is 'ignored rather than worshipped,' while Bobowissi has
priests and offerings.

It is clear that Major Ellis is endeavouring to explain, by a singular
solution (namely, the borrowing of a God from Europeans), and that
a solution improbable and inadequate, a phenomenon of very wide
distribution. Nyankupon cannot be explained apart from Taaroa, Puluga,
Ahone, Ndengei, Dendid, and Ta-li-y-Tochoo, Gods to be later described,
who cannot, by any stretch of probabilities, be regarded as of European
origin. All of these represent the primeval Supreme Being, more or less
or altogether stripped, under advancing conditions of culture, of his
ethical influence, and crowded out by the horde of useful greedy ghosts or
ghost gods, whose business is lucrative. Nyankupon has no pretensions to
be, or to have been a 'spirit.'[34]

Major Ellis's theory is a natural result of his belief in a tangle of
polytheism as 'the original state of religion.' If so, there was not much
room for the natural development of Nyankupon, in whom 'the missionaries
find a parallel to the Jahveh of the Jews.'[35] On our theory Nyankupon
takes his place in the regular process of the corruption of theism by
animism.

The parallel case of Nzambi Mpungu, the Creator among the Fiorts (a Bantu
stock), is thus stated by Miss Kingsley: