Note 76 — THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF ANDREW BATTELL OF LEIGH IN ESSEX, SENT BY THE PORTUGALS PRISONER TO ANGOLA, WHO LIVED THERE, AND IN THE ADJOINING REGIONS, NEAR EIGHTEEN YEARS.

The so-called fetishes (from feitiço, a Portuguese word meaning sorcery) are not idols, but charms and amulets, generally known as nkissi, nkishi, or mukishi. There are nkissi peculiar to a district, village, or family; charms and amulets to shield the wearer or possessor against all the evils flesh is heir to, and others enabling the priest or nganga to discover crime or the cause of disease. The idea underlying the belief in the efficacy of these charms was very prevalent among our own ancestors, and the images, rosaries, crosses, relics, and other articles introduced by the Roman missionaries are looked upon by the natives as equivalent to their own nkissi. Even at the present day, images of S. Francis and of other saints may be seen in the collection of Royal Fetishes at S. Salvador, and a cross called santu (Santa Cruz) “is the common fetish which confers skill in hunting” (Bentley, Pioneering on the Congo, vol. i, pp. 35, 36, 39). The images, according to Bentley, seen among the natives are not idols but receptacles of “charms” or medicine. As to a belief in witchcraft (ndoki, witch; Kindoki, witchcraft), it is not even now quite extinct among Christian people, boasting of their civilisation, for a reputed wizard was drowned at Hedingham in Essex in 1863, and a witch burnt in Mexico as recently as 1873. Matthew Hopkins, the famous witch-finder, cannot claim a higher rank than an African nganga, although his procedure was not quite the same. Nor can I see any difference between a fetish and the miraculous “bambino” manufactured in the sixteenth century, and kept in the church of S. Maria Aracœli, which a priest takes to the bedside of sick or dying persons, who are asked to kiss it to be cured, and whose guardians are at all times ready to receive the offerings of the faithful (see Dickens, Pictures from Italy).