he swamps, so lingers
the love of father and mother.'"[51]

Black queens have often ruled African tribes. Among the Ba-Lolo, we are
told, women take part in public assemblies where all-important questions
are discussed. The system of educating children among such tribes as the
Yoruba is worthy of emulation by many more civilized peoples.

Close knit with the family and social organization comes the religious
life of the Negro. The religion of Africa is the universal animism or
fetishism of primitive peoples, rising to polytheism and approaching
monotheism chiefly, but not wholly, as a result of Christian and Islamic
missions. Of fetishism there is much misapprehension. It is not mere
senseless degradation. It is a philosophy of life. Among primitive Negroes
there can be, as Miss Kingsley reminds us, no such divorce of religion
from practical life as is common in civilized lands. Religion is life, and
fetish an expression of the practical recognition of dominant forces in
which the Negro lives. To him all the world is spirit. Miss Kingsley says,
"If you want, for example, to understand the position of man in nature
according to fetish, there is, as far as I know, no clearer statement of
it made than is made by Goethe in his superb 'Prometheus.'"[52] Fetish is
a severely logical way of accounting for the world in terms of good and
malignant spirits.

"It is this power of being able logically to account for everything that
is, I believe, at the back of the tremendous permanency of fetish in
Africa, and the cause of many of the relapses into it by Africans
converted to other religions; it is also the explanation of the fact that
white men who live in the districts where death and danger are everyday
affairs, under a grim pall of boredom, are liable to believe in fetish,
though ashamed of so doing. For the African, whose mind has been soaked in
fetish during his early and most impressionable years, the voice of fetish
is almost irresistible when affliction comes to him."[53]

Ellis tells us of the spirit belief of the Ewe people, who believe that
men and all nature have the indwelling "Kra," which is immortal; that the
man himself after death may exist as a ghost, which is often conceived of
as departed from the "Kra," a shadowy continuing of the man. Bryce,
speaking of the Kaffirs of South Africa, says, "To the Kaffirs, as to the
most savage races, the world was full of spirits--spirits of the rivers,
the mountains, and