'I have no hesitation in saying I fully believe Nzambi Mpungu to be a
purely native god, and that he is a great god over all things, but the
study of him is even more difficult than the study of Nzambi, because the
Jesuit missionaries who gained so great an influence over the Fiorts in
the sixteenth century identified him with Jehovah, and worked on the
native mind from that stand-point. Consequently semi-mythical traces
of Jesuit teaching linger, even now, in the religious ideas of the
Fiorts.'[36]

Nzambi Mpungu lives 'behind the firmament.' 'He takes next to no interest
in human affairs;' which is not a Jesuit idea of God.

In all missionary accounts of savage religion, we have to guard against
two kinds of bias. One is the bias which makes the observer deny any
religion to the native race, except devil-worship. The other is the bias
which lends him to look for traces of a pure primitive religious
tradition. Yet we cannot but observe this reciprocal phenomenon:
missionaries often find a native name and idea which answer so nearly to
their conception of God that they adopt the idea and the name, in
teaching. Again, on the other side, the savages, when first they hear the
missionaries' account of God, recognise it, as do the Hurons and Bakwain,
for what has always been familiar to them. This is recorded in very early
pre-missionary travels, as in the book of William Strachey on Virginia
(1612), to which we now turn. The God found by Strachey in Virginia
cannot, by any latitude of conjecture, be regarded as the result of
contact with Europeans. Yet he almost exactly answers to the African
Nyankupon, who is explained away as a 'loan-god.' For the belief in
relatively pure creative beings, whether they are morally adored, without
sacrifice, or merely neglected, is so widely diffused, that Anthropology
must ignore them, or account for them as 'loan-gods'--or give up her
theory!

[Footnote 1: Lejean, _Rev. des Deux Mondes_, April 1862, p. 760. Citing
for the chant, Beltrame, _Dictionario della lingua denka_, MS.]

[Footnote 2: Waitz, ii. 74.]

[Footnote 3: 1882.]

[Footnote 4: _Ecclesiastical Institutions_, 681.]

[Footnote 5: _Africana_, i. 66.]

[Footnote 6: _Africana_, i. 67.]

[Footnote 7: _Africana_, i. 71, 72_]

[Footnote 8: i 88.]

[Footnote 9: i. 68.]

[Footnote 10: i. 130.]

[Footnote 11: Ibid.]

[Footnote 12: _Africana_, i 279-301.]

[Footnote 13: Edinburgh, 1892.]

[Footnote 14: Incidentally