The hermeneutical revolution initiated by German biblical scholarship, and which got its philosophical grounding in Heidegger and Gadamer, affirmed the historical roots of all being and knowledge. On the world historical scene, the Second World War marked a watershed, gathering together and enlisting not only North America but all the British and French empire of coloured, colonised peoples to unite to liberate Europe from Nazi Germany and Asia from imperialist Japan. The war, which ended with the explosion of the atom bomb, also resulted collaterally in the explosion of political independence in the colonised, coloured, third world, signalling the end of the imperialism of the West. After political independence, the independence of the mind in the cultural, religious and philosophical dimensions became the goal and aspiration of the once colonised world. It is within this context of the historical and finite nature of all human institutions and of man’s near infinite yearning for freedom that one can situate the enormous effort deployed and the brilliance of insights on display in this book and the palpable enthusiasm the writers exude.
In this collection of reflexions and reactions to Tui Atua’s seminal lecture, Whispers and Vanities in Samoan Indigenous Religious Culture, not every participant sings from the same score. While some contributors descant on the various expressions of whispers and vanities and the pervasive energy of the forces that reduced Samoan culture to whispers, others dwell on the old culture with its focus on the mystical unity and communion of all beings, manifested in the mutual implication of religion and medicine, in the intimacy between man and animal and environment. These are voices crying out, not in unison but in symphony, not una voce dicentes but in chorus, crying for the liberation of peoples and cultures from the domination of the principalities and powers.
All these various reactions signal the arrival of a moment of awareness and the rising tide of a movement. This is the hour of the deconstruction of hegemonies and it is as if, at long last, the world’s moment of freedom has arrived. Not the hour of political or economic or religious or any other particular freedom, not of the freedom of speech or thought, but that of the freedom of all freedoms, the freedom of the mind, the freedom of the self, and not the hour of the freedom of the individual but the freedom of the peoples and their cultures.
This new world spirit, that has given at times violent birth to the nations of the Third world from India to Africa to East Timor, that has presided over modern forms of self assertion in literature, philosophy, culture and religion, that is moving long conquered or integrated peoples in places like Kosovo, Chechnya and now Scotland to strike out for their own independence, however politically or economically diminished, is this same spirit afoot in the great conversation recorded here.
This same spirit has made the world every day more aware of the richness of nature and creation, the phenomenon and rich variety of human cultures and the validity of the knowledge systems based on them, giving back some pride and self-confidence to those who have for too long been intimidated and humiliated. For the reign of what has been dubbed “the C-triumvirate of Colonialism, Christianity and Capitalism” has decimated many cultures, driven some underground, others into ‘whispers’ and yet others into extinction.
With the routing of the gods and deities of the ancient religion, Christianity specifically created in the mission lands all sorts of ironic situations – the destruction of the spiritual landscape with its mythologies and pantheons and the disruption of the links of piety and communion with the ancestors. It planted not only doubts about immemorial beliefs and the seeds of agnosticism and atheism but also left in its wake a chaotic moral landscape. By its very success in destroying ‘paganism’, by its own iconoclasm, Christianity arguably laid the foundation for the future success of secularism and the decline of spirituality and religion itself worldwide.
But in the meantime, we have recognised that we now have in the world multiculturalism, religious pluralism and multilingualism as facts of life, hinting at a new and growing disposition in the world to grant equal validity and respect to each culture and to each people. The dehegemonisation of the world order, the decolonisation of the mind and the dismantling of prevailing Western thought patterns and world views, too long dominant and suffocating, that have for so long locked the genius of three-quarters of humankind and still hamper authentic indigenous self-understanding and self-expression, has become the agenda and programme for the rest of the Third World.
Since we cannot turn back the clock of time and history to return to some pristine cultural purity, it makes more sense to embrace a project of inculturation that integrates something of both old and new to create an inclusive future. As we bemoan the passing away of the old, we may take heart in the immortality it enjoys in the project of inculturation that somehow knows to mix the old and the new. More especially, let us also remember that the old culture really never dies, but like the proverbial phoenix, knows to return from its own ashes even centuries after its death. What we may be witnessing is the return of the phoenix in the resurrection of cultures once thought dead.
THEOPHILUS OKERE
Owerri, Nigeria, Easter 2014