Shall we not give Africa the Gospel?
We who live in a gospel land can form no adequate idea of
the difference in our condition from that which distinguishes the
nations of heathenism. Let Africa alone be contemplated, and the
soul sickens with horror. Rev. Mr. Beacham of the London
Wesleyan Society, returning from that part of the African coast
bordering the kingdom of Yoruba, where Bowen and Clark are
laboring, thus describes the condition of the people. The picture is
horrible, but true.
“Scarcely has one of their barbarous and bloody customs been
abandoned, from the earliest period of which anything is known of them.
They will even pave their court-yards, palaces, and even the streets or
market-places of their villages or towns with the skulls of those
butchered in the wars, at feasts, funerals, or as sacrifices to Bossom.
Still their wives and slaves are buried alive with their deceased
husbands or mates. When Adahanzen died, two hundred and eighty of
his wives were butchered before the arrival of his successor, which put a
stop to it, only to increase the flow' of blood and the number of deaths in
other ways. The remaining living wives were buried alive, amid
dancing, singing and bewailing, the noise of muskets, horns, drums,
yells, groans and screeches: the women, marching by headless trunks,
bedaubed themselves with blood and mud. Their victims were marched
along with large knives with large knives passed through their cheeks.
The executioners struggle for the bloody office, while the victims look
on and endure with apathy. They were too familiar w'ith the horrid
sacrifice to show terror, or to imagine that all was not as it should be.
Their hands were chopped off, and then their legs sawed off, and then
their heads sawed off to prolong the amusement. Even some who
assisted to fill the grave were then hustled in alive, in order to add to the
sport or solemnity of the scene. Upon the death of the king’s brother,
four thousand victims were thus sacrificed. These cruelties are often
repeated, and hundreds slaughtered during rehearsal. Upon the death of
a king of Ashantee, a general massacre takes place, in which there can be
no computation of the many victims.”
We repeat the question, shall we not send the gospel to
Africa? Every heart beating with Christian sympathy, replies “yes,
we will.”
T.
Home and Foreign Journal
October 1855
p. 15
