3-065-626 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Ashantee War: fetish tree in village near Cape Coast Castle, from a sketch by our special artist, 1874. 'The fetish tree, in a village only a mile from Cape Coast Castle, is an institution worthy of note. These poor heathen [sic] make a fetish or second-rate god of anything that is at all out of the common - a rock, a stream, a serpent, or a plant of singular growth. Their priests have inclosed the tree with a palisade of sticks. The devout worshippers come up with bottles of rum, which they empty into the hollow space around the trunk of the tree. After giving their deity in this way a good strong dose of their favourite intoxicating drink, they cast in the bottles and say their prayers over the spilt liquor and broken glass. This religious observance will certainly do them more good, body and soul, than to drink the rum themselves, which is the ritual of our English heathen. But when our Artist suggested that some of the Fantees might, perhaps, taste a drop before helping the tree-god to the contents of the bottle, they were very much offended, and thought him a wicked infidel'. From "Illustrated London News", 1874.