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Prophets, Spouses and Story‐tellers in Africa
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
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In trying to understand the world, or, at least that part of it with which we are involved, we can look for a prophet, or even turn prophets ourselves, or we can tell stories about the world. The excellence of the prophet is that he parts the wheat from the chaff; the excellence of the story-teller is that he makes chaff look like wheat, perhaps even transmutes it into wheat. The poet, if he is lucky, is something of both prophet and story-teller: the theologian, if he is, as many theologians appear to be, unlucky, will falter when he should speak in prophetic judgement, and fail too in the task of imaginative transmutation. In apocalyptic, the two modes of understanding are fused, as we see in Daniel or Revelations, much to the bafflement of most of us. But for the purposes of this review, it seems possible to see prophecy and story-telling as complementary and inter-acting opposites. Perhaps I should say that I am myself more in sympathy with the story-teller than the prophet; but I shall try to be fair as I mpve between the polar interests of my fellow-Adrians, the prophet-watching of Adrian Hastings and the story-hearing of Adrian Roscoe, taking a look in between at that prophetic institution in which so many stories end, namely marriage.
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- Copyright © 1978 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 The books reviewed in this article are: African Christianity by Hastings, Adrian. Geoffrey Chapman, London 1976. pp 105 −1.50Google Scholar. African Christian Marriage by Kisembo, Benezeri, Magesa, Laurenti and Shorter, Aylward. Geoffrey Chapman, London 1977. pp 242Google Scholar (no price indicated). African Tradition and the Christian God by Charles Nyamiti. pp 76. (No price or date of publication given). Spearhead No 49, Gaba Publications, P.O. Box 908, Eldoret, Kenya. Prayer in the Religious Traditions of Africa by Shorter, Aylward. Oxford University Press, Nairobi 1975. pp 146 −5.75Google Scholar. Themes in the Christian History of Central Africa, edited by Ranger, T. O. and Weller, John. Heinemann, London 1975. pp 285 −2.50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Regional Cults edited by Werbner, Richard P., ASA Monographs, 16, Academic Press, London, New York, San Francisco 1977. pp 256 −7.20Google Scholar. Myth, Literature and the African World by Soyinka, Wole. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1976. pp 168 −5.95Google Scholar. Uhuru's Fire by Roscoe, Adrian. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1977. pp 281Google Scholar.
2 T. O. Ranger in his essay on “The Mwana Lesa Movement of 1925” in Themes in the Christian History of Central Africa gives a figure of 191 witches killed by Tomo Nyirenda in three months. Jan Vansina, using newspaper reports, estimates that out of 505 people given the poison ordeal as suspected witches in the Kuba area of the then Belgian Congo, 250 died. (See his essay in Man in Africa, edited by Douglas and Kaberry, 1969). On the other hand, there were many areas of pre‐colonial Africa where witchcraft fears were weak, or even non‐existent, or where they took a form which did not generate killings.
3 See Merle Lipton, “Race, Industrialisation and Social Change; a Comment” in African Affairs, Jan 1977, pp 105‐7. The rise in real wages has not, of course, prevented the rise in real oppression which has operated over the same period.
4 This view seems to find support in two books describing local‐level administration and politics in two different areas of Tanzania, Joel Samoff s Tanzania: Local Politics and the Structure of Power, University of Wisconsin Press, on Moshi, and J. R. Finucane's Rural Development and Bureaucracy in Tanzania: the Case ofMwanza Region Scandinavian Institute of African Studies.
5 A good case might be made for arguing that colonial and post‐colonial Africa has been a case of Marx's “Asiatic Society“, in which a bureaucracy effectively dominates a state made up of village communities which possess a certain amount of political and economic autonomy. In much of “African Socialism” as in “indirect rule” and “community development”, there is a failure to examine the ways in which the bureaucracy can be a factor militating against development.
6 Page 10. It should be said that Fr. Nyamiti's view, of Western society and religiou attitudes is equally pessimistic.
7 For an account of the discussion on this point at the Conference on the History of African Religion at Limuru, Kenya, in 1974, see African Religious Research, Vol 4, No 2.
8 I imagine that this is fairly general among converts from some form of “paganism” to Christianity, and may help to explain some features of the early Christian period, such as the rise of Arianism.
9 For that matter it is not clear that anthropologists always mean the same thing by marriage. Levi‐Strauss's basic argument in The Elementary Structures of Kinship is that kinship systems are generated by marriages; Esther Goody in The Context of Kinship sees marriage as an aspect of the formation and dispersal of households. While Dr Goody's argument is tied to one society, the Gonja of Ghana, I suspect it is capable of much wider application.
10 For this see Fr. Fabian Parmisano's extremely interesting articles on medieval attitudes to marriage in New Blackfriars, July and August, 1669.
11 See Afer (The African Ecclesiastical Review), 1972, 3 p 273.
12 Cf. the treatment of this point in E. SchBlebeeckx Marriage, Vol II, 1965.
13 The case which the authors seem to have in mind is one where a limited number of prosperous men are polygamists and can use their wealth to keep on good terms with their affines. Even here, however, there is not a one‐to‐one relation between polygamy and marital stability. The really significant factor is the economic stratification of the society.
14 Page 125.
15 The Growth of the Church in Buganda 1958. The best book I have ever read on missions.
16 The article in the Ranger and Wellei volume is concerned with fte shrine's interaction with the missions, that in Regional Cults with its position in the local social structure.
17 This is the crucial question of Zimbabwean historiography, since on it depends the interpretation of the origin of Zimbabwean nationalism, either as the resurfacing of a previously existing moral community, or as primarily a reaction to colonisation.
18 See New Blackfriars May 1978. It is rather difficult to give a Nietzschean interpretation to a religion centring on standardised techniques of decision‐making. Some Yoruba cults had “Dionysiac” aspects, for instance, the spirit‐possession experienced by the priests of Sango.
19 “Aladura” refers to a‐group of indigenous Nigerian churches, characterised by faith‐healing and speaking in tongues.
20 Thus, Sembene Ousmane is surely influenced by the French tradition that goes back to Germinal, and Mongo Beti reflects an equally French anti‐clericalism.
21 Dryden, Pope, the non‐romantic Byron, and the earlier Auden.
22 African Religions in Western Scholarship, East African Publishing House, 1972 is forceful, though largely negative. The Religion of the Central Luo is more positive.
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