The absence of scriptures has been one of the fundamental distinguishing
features of indigenous religions south of the Sahara. Before the
arrival of Christianity and Islam, there were no documentary records
of prophetic insights, liturgies or prohibitions. Beliefs were
transmitted orally from generation to generation; they were also
communicated to neighbouring societies. But with no written controls,
beliefs and ritual practices could be changed and adapted imperceptibly,
without people becoming, or remaining, fully conscious of the
alteration. Even radical changes could rapidly become imperceptible.
Within one generation of the Ndebele arrival in western Zimbabwe,
a highly elaborate, local cult of the High God, Mwari, was becoming
so thoroughly assimilated that alien, missionary observers assumed
that the worship of Mwari had always been a prominent feature
of Ndebele religion.
The emphasis in indigenous religions was on direct, immediate
experiences. Religious insights were obtained and shared in dreams,
dance, divination, symbols, prayer, sacrifice and ecstasy. In
the absence of literacy, speculation and reflection concerning
the nature and interaction of spiritual forces did not have to
coalesce into a coherent set of doctrines. There were few ways
in which the religion of a much earlier generation could challenge
subsequent ideas and practices. Neither priests nor reformers
could confront contemporary behaviour with ideals enshrined in
distant prophetic statements or eschatological hopes. There was
little desire to ensure that religion assumed a universal, identical
form throughout a region. There was no overwhelming impetus to
construct a dogmatic orthodoxy. Pre-literate indigenous religions
tended therefore to be tied to specific experiences and problems;
but they combined these local, particular concerns with an ethos
that, in the absence of documentary controls, was often experimental
and open to new ideas and practices.
These pragmatic characteristics were of supreme importance in
the encounter between the indigenous religious traditions and
the literate, monotheistic religions. Often some aspects of the
world religions were initially welcomed with enthusiasm. Their
rituals were seen as potential reinforcements in terms of previous
needs and experiences. And it is here, in this long history of
religious change, that the role of sacred writings became of great
significance.
For well over a thousand years Christianity and Islam have been
present in Black Africa. But for most of this time, Christianity
was restricted to the Ethiopian highlands and Islam was confined
to the savanna belt south of the Sahara and to the coastal fringe
of East Africa. Within these relatively narrow areas, the world
religions brought with them their scriptures and other writings.
But literacy remained restricted to a minute number of individuals,
and before the nineteenth century most sub-Saharan Africans who
adopted a Muslim or a Christian identity remained in practice
illiterate. Partly because of this restriction, and partly because
of the open, pragmatic, welcoming nature of indigenous religions,
over the centuries, Islam and Christianity south of the Sahara
became deeply influenced by, and at times assimilated with, indigenous
beliefs and practices. This mixing process was accentuated by
the relative isolation of Black Christians and Muslims. Christian
Ethiopia, increasingly surrounded by Muslim states, had but slender
contacts with Christians in Egypt, the Sudan, Syria and Jerusalem.
Her contacts with Roman Catholicism were more intense in the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries, but they were soured by Portuguese
cultural and ethnic intransigence. Yet even in Ethiopia the scriptures
and a literate Christian tradition gave an essential continuity
and resilience to the culture of the beleaguered Amharic inhabitants
of the highlands.
Black Muslims, though also isolated, retained closer and far
more fruitful contacts with their co-religionists. A few rich
and powerful rulers, like some emperors of Mali and Songhay from
the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries or some rulers of Bornu,
made the Pilgrimage to Mecca, as did a small yet steady trickle
of scholars, mystics, traders and humble people. Holy men, lawyers
and theologians from North Africa and the Islamic heartlands crossed
the Sahara and, to a lesser extent, the Indian Ocean to settle
in Black Africa and establish schools and centres of learning
there, like the celebrated city of Timbuktu. A tiny, but immensely
influential number of Black Muslim scholars founded a tradition
of Islamic reform which challenged their compatriots by comparing
their syncretistic behaviour and beliefs with those enshrined
in Islamic law and sacred writings. From the seventeenth century
onwards, these Muslim reformers in Black Africa were to lead a
series of holy wars, or jihads, which in the nineteenth century
established a series of powerful Black Muslim states from the
Senegal right across to Chad.
In sharp contrast to the gradual, cumulative experience of Islam,
Christianity burst into much of Black Africa in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries equipped with programmes of mass literacy
and rapid modernisation. Large numbers of African Christians entered
the churches via mission schools, and at times it seemed that
Christianity in Black Africa was destined to be an affair of the
emergent elite, of the educated and aspiring middle classes. That
Christianity in Black Africa has not become merely a bourgeois
ideology is largely due to two contrasted responses to the demands
of literacy. For most Africans the long, drawn-out process of
acquiring effective literacy, demanded by many Protestant missions
as a prerequisite to baptism, raised considerable difficulties.
It also cut across the whole thrust of previous spiritual experiences,
when direct contact with divinities and spiritual forces was demonstrated
by visions, dreams and possession. These spiritual hallmarks still
tend to distinguish African Christian prophets, and these features
continue to attract large numbers of Africans to follow the prophets
and to respond to their messages.
Yet although the acquisition of literacy has not been the principal
channel of religious change for most Africans, the other response
to the literacy brought by missionaries has powerfiilly shaped
the mass movements both within and outside the mission churches.
Most of the prophets, like the humble catechists and prayer-leaders,
are literate, and these African Christians have often been profoundly
influenced by their reading of sacred scriptures. William Wade
Harris, the prophet from Liberia, who during the first World War
swept thousands of West Africans into accepting a Christian identity,
was first and foremost a man of the Bible.
Hundreds of church leaders have, like him, been responsible for
a massive appropriation of Biblical messages with which to confront
the traditional spiritual concerns and needs of their fellow Africans.
In the accounts of healing in the New Testament, for instance,
they found a formidable reinforcement, largely ignored by western
missionaries, in the age-old African conflict with disease and
evil.
One of the fascinating questions in Africa today is, therefore,
whether the sacred writings and rituals of Islam and Christianity
will summon Africans, perhaps in a gradual and cumulative fashion,
to new and deeper understandings of these faiths, and whether,
at the same time, in an increasingly secular environment, Africans
will enrich these religions by retaining the sponaneity, intensity
and immediacy which characterised their previous encounters with
the supernatural.
Recent indications of these processes in a Christian context
can be found in John Parratt (ed.) A Reader in African Christian
Theology, S.P.C.K. London, 1987; E. Milingo The World in Between:
Christian healing and the struggle for spiritual Survival, Hurst
London, 1984; F. Eboussi Boulaga Christianity without Fetishes:
an African critique and recapture of Christianity, Eng. tr. Orbis,
New York, 1984.
Further Reading
- E.M. Zuesse, Ritual Cosmos: The Sanctification
of Life in African Religions, Ohio Univ. Press, 1979.
- I.M. Lewis (ed.), Islam in Tropical Africa,
2nd ed. Hutchinson, London, 1980.
- L.Sanneh, West African Christianity, Hurst,
London, 1983.
- I.Daneel, Quest for Belonging: Introduction
to a study of African Independent Churches, Mambo Press, Gweru,
Zimbabwe, 1987.
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