Indigenous African Traditions as Models for Theorizing Religion
EDWARD P. ANTONIO
The task of reflecting on the potential of indigenous African traditions to serve as models for theorizing religion is fraught with many difficulties. One difficulty is why this should be necessary at all. This is an important question because there is always the danger of positing these traditions as prototypes of religion. Evolutionary accounts of the history of religion made this mistake. It is a mistake that some anthropologists, missionaries, and African thinkers desirous to prove the religiosity of African cultures (and therefore their civilized status) have made. Some in granting the status of religion to African indigenous traditions have described them as “primal” religions.1 Andrew Walls describes the meaning of the term “primal” as follows: “The word [‘primal’] underlines two features of the religions of the peoples indicated: their historical anteriority and their basic, elemental status in human experience. All other faiths are subsequent and represent, as it were, second thoughts; all other believers, and for that matter non-believers, are primalists underneath.”2 Just before making this statement, Walls denied any intention to equate the primal with the primitive. He is right; the two do not necessarily mean one and the same thing. But he also denies “any evolutionistic undertones.” Now, if we accept this, what are we to make of the language of all other faiths being subsequent, second thoughts, and of believers and nonbelievers being hidden primalists? Surely the use of the term “primal” to designate these traditions harks back to the late-eighteenth and the persistent nineteenth-century quest for theories of the origins of religion and belief that such origins could be determined by identifying, classifying, and describing the earliest (the primal) forms of religion. In addition to this, Walls and some of his followers make two further mistakes. The first one is that if we accept this understanding we are not only forced to subsume African traditions under the category of “religion” in a generalizing manner;3 we are also forced to equate religion with belief and faith. I shall return to the problem of applying the term “religion” to African traditions. His second mistake is about the problematical way in which his description of these traditions is situated in the context of “faiths,” “believers,” and “nonbelievers.” There is in fact a double mistake here: assimilating religion to faith and belief as if this is true of all religions, and assimilating primal traditions to religion on the one hand and to faith and belief on the other. This is a hugely problematical way of thinking about indigenous African traditions. The Africans I am familiar with do not talk about faith, belief, and lack of belief in relation to gods, spirits, and divinities. (Not only am I African, I have also had the privilege of living, for extended periods of time, in various African cultures such as in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. I also have reasonably close knowledge of Malawian, Zambian, and other Central African cultures.)4 There is no evidence that African traditions are remnants of what religion originally looked like, which we must somehow understand if we want to theorize religion effectively. Thus, because there is no historical evidence establishing a prototypical or ideal-typical relationship between indigenous African traditions and religion, how the former can serve as models for theorizing the latter is not a straightforward matter. I shall leave aside the question of what we mean by “theory” and “model.”5 My approach here is as follows: since there is no prototype to work from, and since, as I argue below, the term “religion” is foreign to many African cultures, the movement of theorizing religion from the perspective of African traditions must be based on something else. I shall use the idea of a heuristic to provide such a basis.6 A heuristic, as I use the term, is a clue or suggestion (a rule of thumb), a rough guide that aids the discovery of intelligibility and understanding in knowledge and interpretation. The heuristic question that guides this essay is: How can indigenous African traditions, taken in the context of their everyday expression, that is, before they are reduced to or defined in terms of religion, help us better understand the various phenomena ordinarily subsumed under this latter term? I shall proceed by identifying several areas where I think African traditions can helpfully throw some theoretical light on functions of religion.
The contribution of indigenous African traditions to the theorization of religion must be located in a number of places. First, its “otherness,” which calls into question the category of religion itself. This otherness is a function of several things: (1) the social and cultural difference of these traditions themselves; (2) the manner in which that difference was taken as evidence of the absence of religion in Africa, indeed of the inapplicability of the category of religion to African traditions and cultures (here the otherness of African religions emerges as a colonial production);7 (3) the extent to which African cultural practices refuse to be easily domesticated under the category of religion; and (4) the comparative difference with other religions and traditions. The constitutive otherness of African religion, which caused colonists so much trouble and colonial subjects so much anxiety, serves as a critique of the universality of the category of religion; it relativizes it by the sheer force of its existence.8 The difference of African traditions contributes to a theory of religion insofar as it demands that any adequate theory or account of religion engage and take seriously both difference in general and the particular manifestations of that difference in African traditions. Taking this seriously means attending to the implications of these traditions for what can or cannot be said about the category of religion and its applicability to African cultures. Thus one important area where African traditions contribute to thinking about religion is that of the absence of the term “religion” in many African cultures. I suggest that instead of uncritically imposing the term on these cultures, scholars of religion interested in learning from Africa must grapple with the meaning of this absence and its significance in determining how the term “religion” came to be imposed on Africans. This absence should not be taken as an atavistic cipher, an embarrassing lack or sign of conceptual and moral backwardness, but rather as a powerful heuristic tool for answering questions about the possibility of “belief,” ritual practice, morality, and social organization outside of the meaning of the term “religion.” Acknowledging this absence as explanatory means coming to terms with the fact that Africans have raised questions of meaning and negotiated the cosmos on quite other terms than those typically associated with the term “religion” in Western thought. In fact, the idea that there is such a thing as religion and that it is universal, the idea that underwrites the efforts of many scholars of religions to see religion everywhere, is largely a Western obsession. Absence then circumscribes a moment of “postcolonial” critique that makes possible two different moves. In the first instance, it enables the interrogation of the applicability of religion to contexts where it is not ordinarily applicable. Then, in the second instance, it forces us to ask: “In the absence of religion, how did people comport themselves in ways that gave meaning and purpose to their being human?” (I leave aside here the peculiarity, in many African societies, of the notion that life somehow has or ought to have purpose and meaning. This is another Western obsession. It is exactly here that we run into problems. For here, we are faced with the temptation to ascribe “purpose and meaning” to nothing but the function of religion. But as soon as we do this, the absence of the African difference or rather the presence of the African difference appearing precisely as the absence of religion asserts itself and denies us this appeal to the category of religion.)
The insistence that African traditions must always be comprehended through religion betrays a desire for the reproduction of the “identical” at the expense of the “other.” The identical here is what is posited as the essence of religion, whose meaning across cultures derives from its inherent translatability without difference (which is thus false translation because, in truth, all translations makes a difference) so that it always comes out at the end of any process of translation precisely as nothing other than religion. What I am suggesting is that if we want indigenous African traditions to serve as a model for theorizing religion, we must begin by allowing them to do so on the basis of their otherness or difference. African traditions contribute not by virtue of some imagined way in which they supposedly represent some form of “primal religion” but precisely by not being religion or by functioning in the mode described by Clifford Geertz as “the common-sense perspective,” the perspective of the everyday.9 Notice that, at least initially, I do not say the perspective of the “profane” or the “secular.” This is because these terms already beg the question of religion and the absence or disappearance of religion, as well as the question of religion relative to other ways of being in the world. The import of my argument is that both sets of notions—religion and that against which it is usually defined, and the secular and the profane—are foreign, if not to much of sub-Saharan Africa, certainly to many societies in Southern and Central Africa.10 The otherness of African indigenous traditions demonstrates for the possibility of theorizing religion not only the profound relativity or historical particularity (nonuniversality) of the category but also the fact that most of what is theorized under “religion” can be theorized in nonreligious terms in African traditions. This means that the contribution of the otherness of African traditions derives not from their supposed similarities to religion but from the difference inscribed in their human content.
There are, to be sure, many other ways in which African traditions can contribute positively, creatively, and productively to theorizing religion. I shall take, first of all, what I call the social aspects of indigenous African traditions. I want to distinguish these from cosmological aspects. The latter refer to the sky, god(s), earth, creation, and world. The social aspects range from beer drinking, hunting, and dancing to cooking and the everyday management of the homestead. It is precisely in this domain of the social aspects of indigenous belief that many Africans spend by far the bulk of their lives. Phenomena that we typically subsume under religion, phenomena such as gods, salvation, spirits, and many other cosmic realities, simply have no significance outside these social aspects. Many scholars of African religions have suggested that the everyday meaning of these social aspects, the significance of “the practice of everyday life,” is entirely attributable to religion. Thus it is not uncommon for these scholars to claim that Africans are so totally religious that they entertain no distinction between the sacred and the profane. For Africans, the argument runs, everything is sacred and since everything is sacred Africans are formally incapable of distinguishing between the sacred and the profane.11 Obviously the claim is logically incoherent, not to say, empirically false. But I will not engage with it here. What I am arguing is that what ordinarily passes for religion in Western understandings derives its equivalent meaning in the African context from everyday, immanent, this-worldly processes and interactions. Religious beliefs and practices do not refer to phenomena outside the world. They belong to what Geertz in a different context calls “the common-sense perspective.” One way of naming how this contributes to the theorizing of religion is to emphasize, in the manner of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, this aspect of immanence. However, immanence is not proposed here as some sort of ideological claim against the existence of a transcendent god(s); rather, it is used descriptively, or even phenomenologically. What are described are the structures and the values that constitute the here and the now as the space of the everyday. The methodological significance of this for the study of religion is that religion must be sought in the everyday, not in some category of special or bounded activities. The experiences, entities, processes, practices, institutions, social objects, ideas, and concepts that we ordinarily associate with religion are all understood in terms of the immanent. This calls for a phenomenologically oriented ethnographic approach to the study of indigenous African traditions. One important implication of what I am suggesting is that in the context of these traditions “religion” is understood in terms of the everyday precisely because it radically belongs to the everyday.
The second way in which these traditions can serve as models for theorizing religion is in terms of their orientation toward what I will call their anthropological humanism.12 The basic features of this humanism include personhood, community, hospitality, and health. Scholars of various African cultures have drawn attention to the manner and extent to which human relationships are central to indigenous traditions. The notion of being human, or ubuntuism, the belief that personhood is constituted intersubjectively, that is, through human relationships, is claimed by practitioners and scholars alike to be an organizing feature of African social imaginaries.13 These relationships are defined in terms of belonging to community, and belonging to community is mediated through the ethical framework of hospitality.14 Anthropological relationships represent the realm of interaction not only among humans but also among humans, nature, spirits, and god(s). This can be seen in the way in which these elements are invoked and socially addressed in everyday transactions. For example, ancestors or various spirits (nature or otherwise) are an integral part of the social configuration and their significance is always articulated through the form of existing communal relationships, and not through whatever cosmological status they might appear to have to outsiders. Furthermore, this principle of relationality is socially irreducible, that is to say, it is a fundamental category in terms of which human well-being is socially established and the modes of its achievement morally defined and prescribed.
This humanistic dimension of African traditions provides another heuristic tool for theorizing religion, namely, a pragmatic philosophical anthropology. To be sure, the study of religion is not a stranger to the investigation of ideas of the “self,” selfhood, individuality, the person, the soul, and community. However, in most cases these ideas are treated as disparate themes and topics within the study of religion and hardly ever as convergent parts of a fundamental explanatory category that itself grounds the very nature of reality as an “organic” system of social relationships. I wish to stress two things at this point. The first is that theorizing religion on the model of such a fundamental philosophical anthropology requires making notions such as personhood, community, and relationality both a starting point and the substantive content of the process of theorizing. Second, such theorization must be informed and be inflected by the actual claims or the substantive content of the anthropological beliefs under investigation. If this is taken seriously, African traditions will have taught the study of religion the importance of privileging not gods, spirits, the cosmos, notions of salvation understood as the quest for the other world, and ritual as the bizarre performance of inarticulable abjection, but humanity as the space of relational encounter with otherness in the fullness of all its variety—human, natural, and spiritual. What is rich and fascinating about this is the possibility of a refusal of a Nietzschean and Feuerbachian humanism that is inscribed in its mode of conceiving of humanity. For Nietzsche, humanity is, among other things, the expression of the will to power; humanity is human, indeed, all too human, and is always at the mercy of this will to power. An African reading of Nietzsche is yet to happen. In Feuerbach our gods and the spirits with whom we claim to commune are nothing more than alienated projections of our psychological needs. However, in African indigenous traditions we are dealing with how the affirmation of human relationality is not exclusive of experiences of alienation.
This brings me to a discussion of the third way in which African traditions can serve as a model for theorizing religion. Affirmation and alienation are crucial categories for understanding the conception of relationality in African traditions. I take as an example the powerful phenomenon of divination that is almost universal in Africa.15 Divination is a structure of beliefs, practices, processes, and relationships that is defined by the encounter of social and spiritual forces made possible, on the one hand, by the experience of evil and alienation in the world and, on the other, by the desire to overcome them. This structure comprises many different aspects such as the healing of physical ailments, the restoration of broken social relationships, the pacification of angry ancestors and other spirits, the explanation of the origins of evil, particularly social evil and misfortune, the marking and celebration of important events, and ascertaining and delineating the conditions of human well-being. The list is of course not exhaustive. Central to the nature of divination is the status and function of the diviner as a point of contact between humans, nature, and the spirit world. He or she diagnoses physical and social ills by consulting either with the ancestors or with other kinds of spirits.16
Divination can only take place as an intersubjective experience in which humans and spirits encounter each other on a dynamic continuum of moral exchanges reflexively mediated by the diviner. Divination has many goals, but here I want to mention only two. The first, which I call its penultimate goal, has to do with identifying the causes of social problems and prescribing remedies for their elimination. The second, its ultimate goal, I describe as providing a space for determining the preconditions of proper relationality and thus of what it means to be human. What heuristic implications does this have for theorizing religion? I think there are several: hermeneutic, psychoanalytic, and ethical. The diviner is an interpreter of the messages of the ancestors to their living relatives. He or she performs an important hermeneutical or interpretative function. This is a function that is common to many systems of divination throughout Africa. What I want to suggest is that this function provides an interesting model for thinking about the role of hermeneutics and the nature of human understanding in the study of religion. The second implication of divination for theorizing religion is the psychoanalytic role it plays in people’s lives. A diviner is consulted about both social and personal misfortunes. His or her mode of diagnosing the causes of these problems always involves engaging his or her clients in an elaborate process of dialogue in which question and answer and his or her mediatory role between the ancestors and the living play a fundamental role. A psychoanalytic approach to the study of religion along the lines suggested by the role of the diviner is potentially productive of understanding what many religions articulate as their basic goal—human well-being in the very concrete terms of everyday experience rather than otherworldly projection. This is linked to the role ethics and morality play in divination. Divination is almost always a moral practice, concerned with how to create the conditions of rectifying relationships that have broken down. Human relationships are the exhaustive arena of moral concern. The diviner herself or himself must be morally exemplary to become and continue to operate as a diviner. Furthermore, divination is about explaining and communicating the moral expectations of the ancestors. This might help in theorizing religion by making the ethical and the moral important categories in the study of religion. Here the ethical and its social contexts constitute the data that the study of religion investigates through a phenomenological ethnography of everyday moral practices.
NOTES
1. Harold W. Turner, “The Way Forward in the Religious Study of African Primal Religions,” Journal of Religion in Africa 12, no. 1 (1981): 1–15, www.jstor.org/stable/1581010. The term “primal” is linked to preliterate and prehistoric phases of human evolution and stands for indigenous, tribal, and traditional beliefs and practices.
2. Andrew Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transformation of Faith (New York: Orbis, 1996), chap. 10.
3. Thus, Kwame Bediako, “African and Christianity on the Threshold of the Third Millennium: The Religious Dimension,” African Affairs (2000): 99, 303–323. See also R. C. Mitchell, African Primal Religions (Niles, Ill.: Argus, 1977).
4. I am aware that this raises the insider/outsider problem in the study of religion. I have no intention of addressing that problem here.
5. I do not have the space here to explore different meanings of “theory” and “model” in relation to their methodological significance for the study of both religion and indigenous African traditions. However, there can be no doubt that, epistemologically, these notions function in complex ways to structure the manner in which we set up the relationship between the category of religion and African traditions in the first place.
6. My understanding of heuristics is informed by Bernard Lonergan, SJ, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956).
7. For an example from Southern Africa, see David Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996).
8. On the putative universality of “Religion,” see Jonathan Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 269–84.
9. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 119. See also Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
10. I do not mean that these societies do not distinguish between sacred and profane activities. They do. But the distinctions are not secured in through the category of religion but rather by common-sense, pragmatic, everyday concerns.
11. John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1969), 2. See also Jacob K. Olupona, “Major Issues in the Study of African Traditional Religion,” in African Religions in Contemporary Society, ed. Jacob K. Olupona (New York: Paragon House, 1991), 28.
12. See, for example, Kwame Gyekye, An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 143ff.
13. Laurenti Magesa, African Religion: The Moral Traditions of Abundant Life (New York: Orbis, 1997), 64ff.
14. Newell S. Booth “Tradition and Community in African Religion,” Journal of Religion in Africa 9, no. 2 (1978): 81–94.
15. Philip M. Peek, ed., African Divination Systems: Ways of Knowing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
16. See, for example, René Devisch, “Mediumistic Divination Among the Northern Yaka of Zaire,” ibid.