Rensselaer Journal, Volume 12, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 August 1902 — ECROPE SELLS HEATHEN IDOLS. [ARTICLE]

ECROPE SELLS HEATHEN IDOLS.

Practice Carried on by Many Civilized Nations. European enterprise is furnishing Africa with its heathen idols! It is an actual fact that the hideous Images which the African savage worships are now being made at factories in England, at Nlmes in France, and at Griez in Germany. The firm that deals in these strange gods has its headquarters at Zanguebar, where it does a thriving business. The natives pay for the European-made gods with ivory, palms, maize, nuts, gold and cattle. They pay at the exorbitant rates, too, which the white man has always exacted from the unsophisticated savage. The merchandise paid for a single god varies in value all the way from $250 to $5,000. The tribes of the Senegambian dis- ' trict in Africa, particularly, believe that they propitiate their gods by having their images made in rich' metals. A chief will readily pay 500 barrels of palm oil, worth $125 a ton, for a fetish in the shape of a gold monster with a fiendish head or for a serpent with three heads affixed to a long pole of ivory.