Project Gutenberg 2025-06-23 Public domain in the USA. 256 Macdonald, Duff 1850 1929 Africana; or, the heart of heathen Africa, Volume 1 (of 2) : $b Native customs and beliefs $aLondon :$bSimpkin, Marshall & co., $c1882. Peter Becker and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) "Africana; or, the heart of heathen Africa, Volume 1 (of 2) : Native customs…." by Rev. Duff Macdonald is an ethnographic and missionary account written in the late 19th century. It sets out to systematize the beliefs, practices, and social life of East Central African peoples from close field observation, especially around Blantyre and Lake Nyasa. The volume surveys religion, law, family life, arts, language, and governance through a missionary lens, aiming to inform and reform Christian mission methods while introducing readers to largely undocumented customs. The opening of the work explains the author’s purpose: to record customs before mission contact alters them, and to caution against missionaries assuming civil authority. He details the pitfalls of gathering reliable data—European bias in questions, “polite” answers from informants, interpreter and idiom traps (especially yes/no and before/after), and the distortions caused by note‑taking—then argues for the value of such study to psychology, ethnology, and the science of religion. Early chapters sketch first impressions: scant dress, heavy tattooing and lip rings, ubiquitous weapons, round smoke‑filled huts with rats, a predictable climate, maize porridge and beer, generous hospitality, light division of labor, and the local mosaic of Wayao, Machinga, Anyasa, Angulu, and Magololo chiefs; travel on winding footpaths, formal salutations, and women’s inferior status. Arts include ironworking, basketry, bark cloth, pottery, and simple music; “learned” roles blend herbalist and diviner, with witchcraft trials by poison and widespread charms. A rich oral literature—conundrums, sung tales with refrains, and word‑play chains—features animal fables and origin stories (pots, houses, death, monkeys). The theology section begins by defining spirit (lisoka, msimu, mulungu), treating the spirits of the dead as the operative gods, worshiped at verandah trees, bedsides, or mountain tops, and known through answered prayers. (This is an automatically generated summary.) https://archive.org/details/africana01macd 20220414112040macdonald 1882 gb Reading ease score: 78.6 (7th grade). Fairly easy to read. en Missions -- Africa, East Africa, East -- Social life and customs DT Text Category: Archaeology & Anthropology Category: Religion/Spirituality Category: Sociology 553630 2025-09-30T07:27:17.394278 text/html 521051 2025-06-23T17:08:08 text/html 966600 2025-09-30T07:27:26.950194 application/epub+zip 958233 2025-09-30T07:27:19.491260 application/epub+zip 351157 2025-09-30T07:27:18.359215 application/epub+zip 1364068 2025-09-30T07:27:32.311718 application/x-mobipocket-ebook 1306154 2025-09-30T07:27:25.885187 application/x-mobipocket-ebook 479050 2025-09-30T07:27:16.301236 text/plain; charset=us-ascii 458993 2025-06-23T17:08:08 text/plain; charset=us-ascii 16848 2025-09-30T07:27:32.936678 application/rdf+xml 17027 2025-09-30T07:27:18.658227 image/jpeg 2949 2025-09-30T07:27:18.508209 image/jpeg 1182928 2025-09-30T07:27:17.472297 application/octet-stream application/zip Archives containing the RDF files for *all* our books can be downloaded at https://book.klll.cc/wiki/Gutenberg:Feeds#The_Complete_Project_Gutenberg_Catalog