"But witchcraft, with its terrors," says some one. True; but I have lain in a Kaffir village on the banks of the Zambesi, within the murmur of its Falls, and watched the young men and maidens dancing together in the full moon—there seemed little of terror there. And I have seen my own boys talking and smoking dacha round the camp fires. Where was the brooding terror, or the dark cloud? Savages do not anticipate, as we do. They feel no uncertain evils, not, at least, till they are very near indeed, till the wizard is actually "smelling" them out; they live, like the animal, in the joy or pain of the moment, and their moments have more of joy and less of pain in them than ours.
But if witchcraft were the "dark cloud that hangs for ever over savage life," that Lord Avebury (Sir John Lubbock) tells us it is, have we no dark clouds, and have we less or more capacity for feeling them? What is an engagement to dine then, or an enforced call? and consider the dark cloud of having to go every year, en famille, to the seaside, that hangs over the civilised married wretch! Surely the certainty of things like these is worse than only the risk of a witchcraft exposure, a thing which, when it occurs amongst savages (and it was the same with ourselves) is often, if not generally, deserved—for evidence of which I would refer to Miss Kingsley.[1]
Then take travelling. It is referred to by Lord Avebury as one great source of pleasure which civilised people enjoy, but which savages do not.
- ↑ West African Studies, pp. 157-68.
