50 African Traditional Religion

T.O. Ranger

African religion has been much misunderstood, and misunderstood in ways which have made it very difficult to treat historically. Those who have been hostile to African religion have called it primitive; those who have been favourable to it have called it primal.

Both words imply an unchanging continuity with the earliest times. African religion has been contrasted, both unfavourably and favourably, with the dynamic ‘religions of the book’, with their belief in a divinely ordained historical process and their assertion of the primacy of man over nature. Critics of African religion have said that its collective character has constituted a tyranny over individuals and that its conservative character has acted as a brake on progress. Admirers of African religion have praised its contributions to solidarity, stability and community. Critics have depicted African religion as the product of human fear in the face of an all-powerful and arbitrary nature. Admirers have praised its humility and ecological sensitivity. Yet these opposing evaluations arise from essentially the same analysis of African religion which both critics and admirers have seen as having escaped the blessing, or the curse, of historical development.

The Protestant missionaries of the nineteenth century were men committed to modernising change—to the trinity of Christianity, Commerce and Civilisation. They saw African religion as a powerful force holding Africans locked into an impoverished past. To many of them it hardly deserved to be called a religion at all, and if it were to be considered as a religion then it was only a very primitive and immature one. These missionaries ran together every sort of African belief and practice, confusing religion and witchcraft belief under the general heading of‘superstition’, and describing every African ritual practitioner as a ‘witch-doctor’.

Missionaries were confident that revealed Christianity could lead Africans into a dynamic and progressive future. Ironically, though, their picture of African religion was made use of by evolutionary anthropologists who often sought to discredit all religion by revealing its irrational beginnings. Such anthropologists used data on African religion as evidence for the beliefs of the earliest human societies, out of which the historical religions had evolved.

In the twentieth century both missionary and anthropological assumptions changed but not in the direction of treating African religion more historically. Indeed, in reaction against the bogus history of the evolutionists most anthropologists ceased to ask historical questions at all. They produced instead subtle and illuminating studies of how African religion functioned to maintain the organic stability and coherence of traditional African societies. Functionalist anthropologists were often sharply critical of missionaries, whom they saw as ignorantly interfering with, and sometimes destroying, age-old and delicate mechanisms of social balance.

Many missionaries, however, also came to be much more sympathetic towards African religiosity and many of them sought to learn from functionalist anthropological studies. These missionaries came to admire precisely those qualities in African religion on which the anthropologists laid most emphasis. They liked, and hoped to reproduce within an ‘adapted’ Christianity, the communal values and social stabilities which they thought were guaranteed by African religion. It was no coincidence that these attitudes were most widespread and influential when colonial economies ran out of steam in the 1930s and when stable African rural communities were the ideal of both missionaries and administrators. Since Western historical ‘progress’ seemed to have led to disaster, African a-historicity began to look much more attractive. Many people’s models of African religion were built up at this time by bringing together a collection of opposites to contemporary European beliefs rather than by any objective study of African religion itself.

Such models were taken over by a number of other groups who became particularly interested in African religion. One of these was the Pan-Africanist school, which argued for a single, common African consciousness arising from a fundamental religion of ‘soul-force’. PanAfrican consciousness, which it was believed had been preserved by Afro-Americans also, was contrasted with the technological aridity and competitive individualism of Europe. Another group which took over an a-historic model of African religion was the comparative religionists. Anxious to treat with respect all religious traditions of the world, they coined such terms as ‘the primals’ to describe the oral religions of the Third World. In books about religions in Africa such scholars set out to pay as much attention to African religion as they did to Christianity and Islam. The ways in which they treated these different religions, however, varied greatly. Christianity and Islam in Africa were treated very historically, with relatively little said about the imaginative experience of African Muslims or Christians. African religion, on the other hand, was not treated historically at all, but described entirely in experiential terms. This mode of treatment did as much injustice to African religion as it did to African Christianity and Islam.

Finally, African theologians writing in the last twenty years have offered the same a-historical picture of African religion. One of these, John Mbiti, has published the most widely influential studies of African religion. In these he has emphasised that African religion knew no future tense and possessed no founders, converts or prophets. African religion was coexistent with African societies; every member of a society was born into its religion. Mbiti regards this total integration of religion and society as wholly admirable and laments that it could not survive the rate of change and scale of interaction which have characterised modem Africa. He looks to national and indigenised African Christian churches to play the same role in the future.

It may well be asked whether so many different scholars, writing from so many different perspectives, can have been mistaken in their shared view about the a-historicity of African religion. The view clearly has a foundation in real contrasts between African religion and the historic religions of the book. But to say that African religions have not been historical in the same way as Islam and Christianity is not to say that they have no history at all. Intellectual developments of the last twenty years have led to at least an initial understanding of what that history has been.

One of these intellectual developments, of course, has been the general rise of historical studies of Africa. Thirty years ago most people doubted whether it was possible to write the history of any aspect of pre-colonial African societies, let alone of their religion. Today there is a vast body of historical literature about Africa, though it remains true that African religious history is the least fully developed. Nevertheless, it is now the case that we know that most African societies have undergone such profound economic, social and political changes that if African religion were coexistent with society it must also have changed profoundly. Moreover, the whole notion of an African ‘society’ has come under question. Many historians argue, for instance, that the tribal units into which twentieth-century Africa seems to be divided are of relatively recent origin. If this is the case, then it makes no historical sense to talk of ‘Kamba religion’ or ‘Zulu religion’ prior to the nineteenth century. Such constructs have their own and very recent history.

It seems clear, then, that African religion has a history—or perhaps more accurately that African religions have a history. The problem is to discover how to document and describe that history. Here African religious historians are able to draw on the whole battery of skills and methods which have been developed by African historiography as a whole.

One of these is the collection and assessment of oral traditions. It turns out that some types of African religious institution—cults which possess shrines and priesthoods—have their own mechanisms for transmitting oral traditions. It also turns out that many bodies of oral tradition refer back to key religious figures, and especially to prophets and to bodies of prophecy.

In assessing this material, historians are greatly helped by intellectual developments within anthropology. Anthropologists have become interested in process and in transformation, and especially in cultural and ideological processes and transformations. Many of them draw a distinction between the ‘imageless discourse’ in which Europeans talk about change and an African ‘argument of images’ in which change is expressed and facilitated. In short, in Africa the metaphorical and ritual language of religion, so far from reiterating changelessness, is the very form which change takes.

Finally, there has been an increased interest in African religious history because it has become obvious that African religion is still playing a dynamic role in many parts of contemporary Africa. One example of this was the crucial influence exerted by spirit mediums in the Zimbabwean guerrilla war of the 1970s. These men and women, believed to be the mediums for spirits of founding heroes, ‘made history’ in two ways. They mediated between peasants and guerrillas so as to produce a single ideology of resistance. And they creatively restated oral tradition and redefined traditional history so as to integrate the guerrillas into the past as well as the present. In this case, then, African religious figures commanded history as process. Any historian of the Zimbabwean war has to take African religion into account whether he is a historian of religion or not.

What, then, can we begin to say about African religious history? We have to start off with a different model of African religion. For much of pre-colonial Africa we have to replace the idea of bounded tribal entities, each with its own ‘religion’, by a much more open and complex pattern.

We have to think of broad regions of interaction between village-based agricultural peoples. Across these regions there flowed movements of hunters, and traders, and people in search of salt, and pilgrims to shrines. There were, therefore, many different levels of relationship between people. There were relationships with kin and neighbours but also relationships with other hunters and traders and pilgrims. There were relationships with the cultivated land, but also with the hunting bush and forests. African religious ideas were very much ideas about relationships, whether with other living people, or with the spirits of the dead, or with animals, or with cleared land, or with the bush. In many parts of Africa, though not invariably, all such relationships were thought of as relationships with spirits—spirits of ancestors, spirits of the land or the water or the bush, spirits of dead foreigners. The idiom of spirit was an idiom of personification, dramatising the personal rather than the merely metaphorical content of relationships. What Europeans have come to think of as absolutely impersonal phenomena—such as epidemic diseases—were also personified in African religious thought, and were represented by named spirits. All these spirits could manifest themselves by taking possession of living men or women.

These ideas—of relationship, spirit and possession—helped to make possible ordered interactions between people and helped to establish codes of conduct. Thus cults of the land enforced ecological rules—determining where and when fire could be used, when planting could begin, what crops should be grown. Cults of ancestors legitimated ideas of inheritance and laid down who could marry whom. Cults of alien or a-social spirits helped to establish rules of communication between traders and the communities through whom they passed. At the same time, the idea of relationships expressed through the idiom of spirits allowed for explanations of misfortune. Misfortunes were understood in terms of breach of relationships, either deliberate or inadvertent. Normality could be restored by determining to which spirit reparation was to be made.

So far this model has no doubt seemed a very functionalist one and, with its emphasis on rules, a very conservative one. But a number of points can at once be added. First, religious ideas were by no means restricted to personifying and policing relationships. There was speculation about the moral character of power; about the nature of personal identity; about what constituted ‘good’ and what ‘evil’; about whether one could reasonably expect good fortune to be the norm or whether life was intrinsically ambivalent or even tragic. There was plenty of room for divinities as well as personifying spirits, and often the most important relationships were themselves thought of as involving divinities, so that some cults of the land addressed themselves to the spirit of a Creator God, as controller of rain and fertility. Second, the regions so far described, and the flows of people and ideas across them, were themselves the product of long historical processes and were constantly subject to change. The introduction of new crops, the rise of a trade in ivory, the emergence of strong polities which could exact tribute, and the development of new religious ideas and cults, could all significantly change the pattern. Thirdly, these systems of regional flows could not and did not produce a single, common, coherent religion, coexistent with ‘society’. Each set of relationships involved different people at different levels and scales of interaction. So, recent historians of African religion have often talked about ‘cults’—a territorial cult, concerned with relationships with the land; hunting guilds, concerned with relationships to other hunters and to wild animals; ancestral cults; so-called ‘cults of affliction’, bringing together strangers believed to be affected by the same spirit of disease and hence often emerging in zones of extensive trading. The geographical areas in which each of these cults operates vary greatly; so too does their personnel. Cults overlap each other and quite often compete with each other. Some esoteric cults initiate selected elders in a special, tragic or fatalistic understanding of the world, while the majority of people are engaged in less demanding and more optimistic rituals.

Hence there is great scope for innovation in this model. Contrary to Mbiti’s propositions, there can be founders and prophets and converts. The presiding spirits of some territorial cults are remembered as having been in life historical prophetic figures, martyred by jealous rivals or arbitrary chiefs. A stranger could enter a region with a message about a hitherto unknown spirit of affliction or about a hitherto unknown means of eliminating the evil of witchcraft. New religious movements spread across whole regions with surprising regularity and rapidity. Often the founders or emissaries of such movements claimed a special authority given to them by God; they had died and returned to life with a special commission from God. Often this special commission was to restore old rules which had been broken, but even such conservative prophets could in effect produce change. Other prophets articulated new messages which called for change or legitimated it. In such a religious situation there was great dynamism rather than stasis; pluralism rather than a single, collective religion.

Of course, this open set of regional flows was often radically modified by the emergence of strong political units, whch sought to define their boundaries and to give a distinct identity to their subjects. This sometimes happened because of an unusual environment which gave special opportunity for co-ordinated exploitation, so that a ruler could advance claims to ‘own’ and control the land in a very particular way. In such a case, the rulers could take over a territorial cult completely, replacing the original presiding spirits, and turning it into a cult of dead kings. This happened, for instance, in the kingdom of Barotseland, on the flood plain of the Zambezi. Or the rulers could claim a special, privileged relationship with the territorial spirits, so that only they could be possessed by them or come to embody them, as happened in the kingdom of the Kuba in north-eastern Zaire, where a state-induced ‘agricultural revolution’ took place. Sometimes, on the other hand, a powerful kingdom emerged because its rulers could control the flow of trade, in which case territorial cults were much less significant to the state. Other polities depended on control of great cattle herds. Yet others depended on the development of a new military strength, either because of new techniques and weapons or new forms of social organisation. In such cases, cults of authoritarian militarism grew up.

In some cases, the ruling classes of African states became so powerful that they exerted control over most levels of religious association. Thus, the ancestral cult could become centralised so that at its apex were the spirits of dead kings; cults of initiation could be centralised so that young men and women were only inducted at the command and under the supervision of the king; trade flows could be so commanded by the state that cults of possession by alien spirits were set aside; new ideologies of military power could develop, bringing with them a prestige which made people strive to become identified solely as members of the state. All this could happen, though such a degree of control over all religious layers was rarely achieved even by the most powerful state. But even where it did happen the result was not simply one all-dominant consensus religion. Recently, for example, students of the Asante state have been revising views of the nature and function of Asante religion.

Hitherto the myths and rituals of Asante religion had been seen as ensuring an absolute consensus and submission to the divinely ordained authority of the king of Asante. But recent studies have shown that precisely because state power made rebellion or political opposition almost impossible, dissent within the Asante state took the form of counter-myth and counter-ritual. The Asante state was one of the most powerful in Africa. Elsewhere, even strong states had to coexist with long-established regional cults whose zones of influence overlapped with that of the state. And throughout Bantu-speaking Central Africa, abuses of chiefly power were regularly countered by the rise of prophets, whose role was to expose the corruption of rulers and to restore a right political order.

This picture of the variety, scale and dynamism of African religion not only contrasts sharply with older models of static, small-scale ‘tribal’ religions, but also means that historians have had to change their ideas about what happened when African religion encountered mission Christianity and colonial capitalism. Hitherto it had been thought that small-scale and stable religions could not handle the challenge of largescale rapid change. In some remote places African religion ‘survived’; elsewhere, bits and pieces of it continued to operate. But essentially, it was thought, African religion had become archaic, incapable of change or growth and fated to decay. The historic religions, with their sense of the future, their gift of literacy, and—in the case of mission Christianity—their commitment to the values of capitalist enterprise, were manifestly bound to triumph in the modern period. Now that we know more about the pre-colonial vitality of African religion, however, we have to question this sort of interpretation.

In its place a very different picture has begun to emerge. To begin with, we are coming to understand that African religion responded to the crises of the nineteenth century with a variety of thoughtful innovations. Economic crises—the rise of the slave trade in East Africa and its collapse in West Africa; political crises—the collapse of many long-established states and the emergence of new polities led by military adventurers; ecological crises—the spread of human and animal epidemics; the increasing awareness that powerful outsiders were pressing in upon Africa: all these meant that ‘intellectuals’ within African religious systems endeavoured to develop new ideas and forms that made more sense and gave more control of the world. In some cases they developed the idea and role of the High God, whose ‘macrocosmic’ authority seemed appropriate to the greatly increasing scale of societal interaction. In other cases, though, cults of possession by minor spirits became more widespread and influential, as a means of linking people together over wide regions.

In many places there was a sense of an almost mil- lenial moment so that there were attempts to cleanse society by means of movements of witchcraft eradication, with public confession and destruction ofcharms, whether protective or malevolent. Throughout East, Central and Southern Africa great prophets emerged whose names and pronouncements are still vividly remembered today. These prophets were bearers of truth from God and only incidentally predictors; their lives and sayings allowed African peoples to feel that colonial conquest and capitalist transformation were not inexplicably imposed from outside but were events taking place in an indigenous drama.

It seems clear that many nineteenth-century missionaries were received by African societies as part of this complex movement of reinterpretation. Some missionaries were received as witchcraft eradicators, to whom people flocked to throw their charms on bonfires; others are remembered to this day as prophets. Others were accepted as knowing important things about the High God, even if they were ignorant about other spirits and about witches. From this moment on it becomes almost impossible to write about any of the religions of Africa—African religion itself, Islam, mission Christianity, independent African Christianity—in isolation from each other. There has been great religious pluralism in twentieth-century Africa, but, as we have seen, there was much religious pluralism in pre-colonial Africa too.

It also seems clear that African religion has not turned out to be incompatible with ‘modern’ societies. Certainly, African religious leaders were often prominent in armed resistances against European invasion and conquest. But their relation to the colonial world was not merely one of conservative repudiation, with the result that African religion remained influential only in the most remote communities. Instead the twentieth century has seen the same ferment of religious speculation and innovation as the nineteenth. Some scholars have shown how African religion could adapt to people becoming peasants; others have shown how it could adapt to people becoming migrant labourers. Cults of affliction and witchcraft eradication movements have been as vital under colonialism as they were before it. African cults of chiefship have often been supported by colonial powers who supported chiefs in what was called Indirect Rule. And colonially-backed chiefs have often been denounced by prophets at the head of popular movements. So-called ‘secret societies’ have formed the basis for self-help associations of urban migrants.

The variety of forms of African religion have thus proved relevant to colonial Africa. So also has the underlying and fundamental realisation of African religion—that morality is a matter of relationships, and relationships not only with living persons. The rise of Western medicine has certainly not undercut this insight; nor has the rise of scientific agricultural expertise. Crises of health and crises of environment demand relational rather than merely technological solutions. Moreover, the modes of communication of African religion—its argument of images—retain their power, enabling African rural communities to generate powerful metaphors for comprehending and operating within their world.

In conclusion, therefore, not only historians of religion but historians of social, cultural and economic change in Africa have come to realise that they must understand the idioms and history of African rural religion. So far from being set aside from, it has been intermixed with the main movements of twentieth-century change. African religion has turned out to be alive and important at the heart of revolutionary liberation movements. More than ever it needs to be understood historically and dynamically as well as experientially.

50 African Traditional Religion

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