The Fetish Folk of West Africa

Record summary

Robert Hamill Nassau’s The Fetish Folk of West Africa draws heavily on decades of Presbyterian missionary work in the Lower Congo and Gabon, much of it undertaken in the nineteenth century. It discusses nkisi objects, ritual experts, illness, witchcraft accusations, dreams, and Christian interpretations of spiritual power. The lead matters because it documents a transition between local religious categories and missionary demonology. The publication is early twentieth century, so its retrospective organization and polemical framing must be separated from the underlying nineteenth-century observations.