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The word “juju” found only in the neighbourhood of the Oil Rivers is used indiscriminately by europeans for all matters which may be considered to form a part of the pagan’s religion and as a synonym for fetish thus the priest is a juju man, his temple a juju house, to take an oath is to swear juju, and so on Like fetish it is of european origin being as Miss Kingsley tells us nothing more than a corruption of the french “joujou” though it is extensively used by the english speaking natives of these regions
-Augustus Ferryman Mockler-Ferryman, British West Africa: Its Rise and Progress (1900), pg 392
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I mean by Fetish the religion of the natives of the Western Coast of Africa where they have not been influenced either by christianity or mohammedanism I sincerely wish there were another name than Fetish which could use for it but the natives have different names their own religion in different districts and I do not what other general name I could suggest for I am sure that the other name sometimes used in place of Fetish, namely Juju is for all the fine wild sound of it only a modification of the French word for toy or doll “joujou”. The french claim to have visited West Africa in the fourteenth century prior to the portuguese and whether this claim can be sustained on historic evidence or no, it is certain that the french have been on the coast in considerable numbers since the fifteenth century and no doubt have long called the little objects they saw the natives valuing so strangely “joujou” just as I have heard many a frenchman do down there in my time. Therefore believing Juju to mean doll or toy, I do not think it is so true a word as Fetish and after all West Africa has a prior right to the use of this word Fetish for it has grown up out of the word Feitiço used by the portuguese navigators who rediscovered West Africa with all its wealth and worries for modern europe. These worthy voyagers noticing the veneration paid by Africans to certain objects, trees, fish, idols and so on very fairly compared these objects with the amulets, talismans, charms and little images of saints they themselves used and called those things similarly used by the Africans “feitiço” a word derived from the latin factitius, in the sense magically artful. Modern french and english writers have adopted this word from the portuguese but it is a modern word in its present use. It is not in Johnson and the term Fétichisme was introduced by De Brosses in his remarkable book Du Culte des Dieux fetiches 1760 but doubtless as Professor Tylor points out it has obtained a great currency from Comte’s use of it to denote a general theory of primitive religion Professor Tylor most unfortunately for us who are interested in West African religion confines the use of the word to one department of his theory of animism only – namely to the doctrine of spirits embodied in or attached to or conveying influence through certain material objects
-West African Studies, Mary Henrietta Kingsley (1899), Pg 114-115
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Stop allowing europeans or anyone else to label us or anything Afrikan, it’s insulting and disrespectful that they renamed and mislabeled everything related to our ancestry, and added their blighted and cursed mess.-
Many of our people still use those mislabels. Here just showing their mischievous origins
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That is one to be monitored and reversed, the mislabeling of Afrika and Afrikans to promote their own wicked agendas. We have to stay focused to remove the centuries old succubus.
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88,768
Abibisika (Black Gold) Points
If you really go into it, using roman terminology like Afrika and Afrikan themselves are mislabels as neither one tells you this is the land of Black people not that we are Black people.-
Indeed. It would even be best to change the name of the group from Afrikan spirituality to Kmtyw spirituality
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88,768
Abibisika (Black Gold) Points
Done
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