‘AN INCOMPREHENSIBLE MIRACLE’
Central African clerical intellectualism versus African historic religion: A close reading of Valentin Mudimbe’s Tales of Faith (shortened version)
Wim van Binsbergen
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‘AN INCOMPREHENSIBLE MIRACLE’ Central African clerical intellectualism versus African historic religion: A close reading of Valentin Mudimbe’s Tales of Faith (shortened version) Wim van Binsbergen |
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edited
version of the shortened argument as presented orally at SOAS,
1st February 2001; click here for the full text
version (4x longer);
or for the present,
short version in downloadable TXT format [1]
‘Tales of Faith[2] is also, and perhaps mainly, about an incomprehensible miracle — that is, an extraordinary event in the world. These lectures constitute an invitation to meditate on my composite narrative, which contemplates difficult statements that are contradictory in their effects and, in any case, unbelievable for the agnostic that I am.’[3]
to Patricia Saegerman, my beloved wife, born in Stanleyville, Belgian Congo
This
text was first presented as the first lecture in a series around
Valentin Mudimbe, organised by Louis Brenner and Kay Kresse. Born
in 1941 in the former Belgian Congo (subsequently Zaire and
Congo), and now holding appointments at Stanford and Duke in the
United States, as well as being Chair of the Board of the
International Africa Institute, London, Mudimbe is one of the
leading Africanist scholars of our time. His large oeuvre spans
the fields of belles lettres (poetry and novels), philosophical
essays, classical philology, the history of ideas, and edited
works assessing the state of the art in African studies
especially philosophy and anthropology. In Africanist circles he
is probably best known for two books which trace the political
and intellectual trajectory of concepts of Africa from Antiquity
to the late twentieth century: The invention
of Africa, and The idea
of Africa.[4] There is no way in which, in the scope of the
present argument, I can begin to do justice to what is clearly
one of the great creative cosmopolitan minds, and one of the
great intellectual and literary oeuvres, of our times. I have to
substantially narrow down the scope of my argument, and I will do
so on the basis of a number of related considerations. In this
opening seminar, I think it is fair to situate Mudimbe in a
particular social and intellectual context, and this is not
difficult since his publications abound with salient
autobiographical detail — not to say that his entire oeuvre
may be read as a sustained attempt at autobiographical
self-definition.[5] One
of his latest books, Tales of faith
(1997) happens to be an intellectual and spiritual autobiography
disguised as a detached history of ideas of Central African
intellectuals and their work and aftermath in the twentieth
century.
The study of Central African religion has for decades been my
main contribution to African studies, and has brought me in
contact with Louis Brenner, my host today. Moreover, Tales
of Faith was originally delivered as the
Louis H. Jordan lectures at the School of Oriental and African
Studies in 1994, so that this specific argument by Mudimbe may
still have considerable resonance in this room by its own
original impetus. I will therefore concentrate on Tales
of faith, but connecting as much as possible
to the rest of Mudimbe’s work, and to his person to the
extent this transpires in the published texts. I will be very
critical, not out of lack of respect and admiration, but because
the fundamental issues of Africa and of African studies today
manifest themselves around Mudimbe as a central and emblematic
figure, and we need to bring out those issues. After briefly
indicating Mudimbe’s surprising methods I shall pinpoint
what Tales of faith is
about (the adventure of clerical intellectualism in Central
Africa during the twentieth century), what metacontents it
contains (homelessness as Mudimbe’s central predicament),
and what all this means for the practice and the study of African
historic religion,[6] the
uninvited guest of Tales of faith
and of Mudimbe’s work in general.
When
we try to pinpoint the method by which Mudimbe constructs his
texts, the first thing that meets the eye is that his method is
kaleidoscopic and eclectic. In Tales of Faith,
his approach is alternately
•
definitional (especially the first chapter, where he seeks to
define religion).
•
autobiographical (passim,
and especially parts of chapter 2, where he most convincingly
evokes and clarifies the micropolitics of Central African
education for the priesthood in the middle of the twentieth
century by reference to his own trajectory through this
education;[7]
micropolitics is here taken in the Foucaultian sense[8] of
the instilling, in individual minds through the construction and
manipulation of small-scale interaction situations, of the
preconditions for submission to, or for the hegemony of, a
macro-level system of domination, such as (in this case) the
colonial state and the Roman Catholic church.
•
exercises in the field of the history of ideas (especially in the
second and third chapter, where he explains the processes through
which, in African-based ethnotheology and philosophy during the
twentieth century, the liberation of
difference was effected within the seedbed
of missionary Roman Catholicism.
• critical, in the
narrowly described manner of the book review
neatly summarising, situating and appraising one or more specific
items of academic or literary production within the limited space
and with the limited ambitions of a published book review.
• deliberately and
explicitly hagiographic, in his treatment of Ishaku Jean and of
Alexis Kagame.
• philosophical,
when he seeks to articulate differnce, identity, knowledge and
representation in the context of his Central African historical
narrative.
The kaleidoscopic effect of the intertwined use of various genres, the frequent lapses into autobiographical reminiscence, the fact that his book is more of a heterogeneous (and hasty!)[9] collage than a sustained argument, has a deeper significance, especially since as a literature scholar Mudimbe knows full well what he is doing. What these stylistic and compositional techniques convey is the fact that he resigns himself to his incapability of resolving the contradictions of his situation, and that instead he mediates these contradictions in a fairly unprocessed form to his readers. This resignation at incomplete consistency marks Tales of faith as primarily a literary collage, whose constituent elements happen to look like fragments of state-of-the-art scholarship. In fact Mudimbe is and expresses the contradictions between and within the constituent elements of his tale, and he is the homelessness which the heterogeneity of their genres suggests. At a function organised on the occasion of his delivering the Jordan lectures in 1994 at the School of Oriental and African Studies, he solemnly passed around his United Nations passport for the stateless, as if this constituted his main or only existential and academic credentials.[10]
As a result of his departures from common expectation among
Africanists, Tales of faith
is scarcely about ‘religion and politics in Central
Africa’ as many empirical Africanists would expect it to be.
There is hardly any discussion here of the way in which the
political as an institutional sphere linking local and regional
processes of power and performance to the national state and to
intercontinental power relations, takes a religious guise or is
informed by religious phenomena, however defined. Such major
popular responses in the religious history of Central Africa as:
Kongo religion, cults of affliction in the field of diagnosis and
healing, Kimbanguism, the emigration of the defeated Lumpa church
from Zambia to Congo, the close alliance between church and state
under the Mobutu regime, the selective caricatural virtualisation
of African historic culture in the context of Mubutu’s politique
d’authenticité, the emergence of local
independent churches and mass movements such as Le
Combat spirituel (see below) which
specifically address the effects of colonial intellectual and
spiritual alienation in a framework that has departed very widely
from missionary Roman Catholicism and from the existential and
signifying predicaments of Roman Catholics priests as an
intellectual elite — all these and many other themes are
surprisingly and shockingly absent from this book.
A subtitle like ‘religion as political performance’
makes the uninitiated reader expect a discussion of a wide range
of religious contexts in which political performance may be
detected and subjected to exegesis: not just the struggles of
Christian (more specifically Roman Catholic) and post-Christian
African intellectuals, but also those of the millions of
non-intellectual adherents of the same Christian denomination. I
shall come back to this point towards the end of my argument. And
if the explicit aim of the book is to present ‘stories of
faith and adventure in intercultural problematics created by the
expansion of Christianity in Africa’[11]) one can hardly entertain (like Mudimbe seems
to do in the present book) the illusion that such an expansion
took place in a context where religious alternatives to
Christianity were entirely absent, muted, insignificant, or too
insufficiently documented to deserve explicit discussion.
Territorial or ecological cults, royal cults, professional cults
of hunters and blacksmiths, ancestral cults, diagnostic and
therapeutic cults of affliction, prophetism, sorcery beliefs and
sorcery eradication movements, and to top it all the expansion of
Swahili-related Islam towards the continent’s interior
— the very texture of nineteenth and early twentieth century
socio-cultural life in Central Africa was saturated with
non-Christian religion, and one cannot simply take for granted
(as Mudimbe through his silence on these issues appears to do)
that the prospective clerics who entered the study for the Roman
Catholic priesthood, did so without the slightest exposure to or
knowledge of these alternatives and were completely indifferent
about them.
Let me add that Tales of faith,
one of Mudimbe’s latest books, is extreme in this respect.
Elsewhere he did touch on aspects of historic African religion,
e.g. prophetism,[12] creation myths, and everyday African life in Parables
and fables,[13]
whereas sorcery forms the topic of the important book by the
Congolese anthropologist Buakasa entitled L’Impensé
du discours,[14] which Mudimbe discusses in a short chapter of
his L’Odeur du père.[15]
Provisionally, before even examining what Tales
of faith is about according to its author
(Central African clerical intellectualism), and what my close
reading suggests that it is really about (Mudimbe’s
homelessness in the face of death), the above discussion of his
method and his making light with any disciplinary canon and
method allows us to define what I would call the poetics of
Mudimbe’s writing in this book. The book is composed of many
heterogeneous small parts, which collage-fashion are only loosely
connected, and many of which in their internal structure and
conception are not manifestly consistent with any disciplinary
canon of scholarship. These parts could be considered modules,
most of which appear in the trappings of philosophical or
empirical historical argument (others are autobniographical or
hagiographical). What integrates them is not a sustained academic
argument on African philosophy or the history of ideas, but a
highly personal narrative of defining the author’s personal
identity and itinerary. The modules are like the paragraphs in an
experimental novel and especially like the lines and stanzas in a
poem. Tales of faith is
primarily a literary product to be judged by literary standards;
its artistic originality consist in the fact that it rather
effectively, and deceptively, manages to conceal its literary
building bricks as pieces of consistent scholarly argument. This
also explains the moving and revelatory effect which the text of Tales
of faith has on the reader, at an
existential level, prodding the reader to examine her or his own
identity and life at the same earnest level of historical
self-definition, loss, and hope. The book testifies to a great
creative and scholarly mind who can afford to play with the
canons of scholarship, first of all because his qualifications in
this field are incontestable, secondly and more importantly
because to him these canons are merely effective stepping-stones
(the Wittgensteinian ladder he may cast away after climbing up),
leading towards something even more valuable: the articulation of
identity and personal struggle in the face of death and
homelessness — expressing the culturally transmuted person
that he is, that many African todays are, that all human beings
are, and thus expressing the human condition in a unique yet
recognizable and identifiable way.
Mudimbe
situates himself in a multi-generation process of conversion
which begins, two or three generations before his, with adherents
to African historic religious forms dwelling in some Central
African village or royal court environment, and which concludes
with him and his fellow clerical or post-clerical intellectuals.
In the latter’s experience African historic religion has
become completely eradicated. Instead they have gone through
Roman Catholicism or other Christian denominations, either
remaining there or proceeding to agnostic, atheistic, materialist
etc. positions. In the process of affirming their difference in
the political context of missionary Christianity, they have ended
up in full command of globally circulating universalising skills
and qualifications: fluent in several Indo-European languages as
well as in several African ones; writing poetry, novels, and
philosophical and historical treatises; operating libraries,
computers, Internet, academic committees, and publishing
resources. Thus they have reached a vantage point from which, as
intellectual producers, they both serve, and critique at the same
time, the power-knowledge structure of North Atlantic hegemony,
using Africa as an exemplary reference point in the process.
Mudimbe describes the situation of the exemplary African clerical
intellectuals of an earlier generation, such as Mveng, Kagame,
Mulago, and Kizerbo,[16] in
terms of cultural métissité,
let us say ‘the condition of being of mixed cultural
descent’.
It
is almost as if in Tales of faith the
politics of performance are reduced to the essayistic performance
of autobiography concealed under the trappings of a chain of
objectifying literature reports, philosophical intermezzi and
other detached modules of scholarly production.
‘Tales
of Faith is about the strange constructed
place I chose to inhabit so that I could think about the
unthinkable: how well the predicament of Sartre’s pessimism
in ‘Hell is other people’ meets the supreme beauty of
‘I am an Other’. The two positions are inseparable in
this space, in which identities are always mixtures facing each
other as competitive projects aimed as, to use Schlegel’s
language, an impossible ars combinatoria[17] — I mean a universal and definitive
‘logical chemistry’.[18]
This
is the only real home he may claim as his own. He certainly does
not perceive Africa as such a home, and he perceives his
Africanness as problematic:
Although as much as anyone else aware of the unique complexities
and potentialities of Africa as a situation,[19] Mudimbe is extremely concerned not to fall into
the Afrocentrist trap which Stephen Howe caustically
characterised as the construction of ‘mythical pasts and
imagined homes’.[20] As a
literature scholar Mudimbe is expertly at home in the realm of
textual imagination (hence titles such as Parables
and fables, and Tales of
faith, for books in which he analyses
crucial aspects of the twentieth-century experience in Central
Africa), but he considers it his task to deconstruct such
products of imagination, not to believe in them.
In a book which discusses the cultural and religious dimension of
the colonial conquest, the devastating effects of Christianity
upon African culture and spirituality, the Colonial Library as an
objectifying ordered caricature of African socio-cultural
realities, etc., Mudimbe finds mildness and patience for most of
what came to Africa from the North Atlantic, but he is very
dismissive of the Afrocentrists who, after all, seek to explode
the heroic epic of cultural transmutation which Mudimbe sings in
this book: the sage of clerical intellectualism. Afrocentrism is
reduced by Mudimbe to a mere act of banal Freudian transference,
i.e. distorted self-projection out of touch with reality.
Elsewhere in the book the young African critics of Kagame,[21] or of the European missionising of Africa,[22] are dismissed by Mudimbe in similarly
distancing terms. Here he finds himself in the company of Kwame
Appiah, another cosmopolitan African philosopher who has endeared
himself North Atlantic audience by rejecting the essentialism of
Africanness and by mediating, instead, a sensible,
middle-of-the-road image of Africa that no longer posits a
radical defiance of universalising North Atlantic categories and
procedures of thought.[23]
We would do injustice to Mudimbe if we did not realise that his
reservations vis-à-vis Afrocentrism and the Black
Athena debate, and his ignoring African
historic religion, is not
simply an idiosyncratic expression of his cultural and
geographical homelessness and nothing more. At the back is a
profound methodological dilemma, which attends the entire
empirical study of African religion through participant
observation or through African believers’ introspection, and
which comes out clearly in Mudimbe’s discussion of
Mulago’s project:
‘Theoretically,
Mulago’s project can be summed up as follows: in the name of
the truths of a locality or place, it questions the pertinence of
colonial ‘scientific’ and ‘religious’
dominant discourses. Yet the project itself has recourse to the
same controversial logical empiricism it wants to relativize. In
fact, the invocation of the truths of the place against those of
the interpretive space implies that there is somehow (almost
necessarily) better reflections of the locality in the
insider’s discourse; and this hypothesis then becomes an
ideological framework and a means for negotiating a right to the
authentic speech in the field of discourses about the native
place.[24]
But by posing the question, and by contesting the validity of the
local perspective by reproaching it for its claim of superiority,
Mudimbe in fact claims for himself and his North Atlantic
academic universalist science a similarly privileged, superior
outside position — which apart from begin hegemonic would be
very un-Foucoultian. African historic culture and religion have a
right to affirm themselves for their own sake — which is why
eleven years ago, as an accomplished North Atlantic
anthropologist of religion, I opted to become a
diviner-priest-therapist in the Southern African sangoma
tradition. Moreover, there is another
reason, one to be found within universalising science, why
Mudimbe should be far less dismissive of Afrocentrism: beyond its
consciousness-raising it contains major, testable hypotheses
concerning Africa’s cultural past and Africa’s
contribution to global cultural history — as I have argued
in detail on a number of recent occasions.[25]
Because
of Mudimbe’s relentless insistence on origininality, there
is an essential unpredictability about Mudimbe’s work, which
markes it incomparably more difficult to read and to grasp than
the average Africanist academic text production along
disciplinary lines (African anthropology, history, religious
studies, philosophy, theology etc.), and renders this oeuvre one
of the most impressive, moving and original bodies of texts to
have risen from the modern (post-eighteenth century CE) encounter
between Africa and the North Atlantic. Like
all true poets, Mudimbe’s writing is essentially a writing
in the face of death. It took a while before
this insight dawned upon me. I was at first puzzled by the
uncanny prominence of references to parricide (often solemnly and
in Freudian fashion called ‘the murder of the father’)
in his approaches to African literature, ethnotheology and
philosophy.[26] Thus when Paul-Michel Foucault in early adult
life drops the ‘Paul’ which was the given name of his
father and grandfather, and lives on with only the
‘Michel’ which his mother gave him, Mudimbe interprets
this in the line of Lacan and Freud as parricide, even though by
the same time Mudimbe claims to have proceeded to a Jungian
perspective[27] which would lay less stress on the sexual
scheme but instead would favour an interpretation in terms of a
heroic mother-son myth.[28]
Likewise it is Kasavubu’s rejection of Lumumba’s
parricidal challenge of the former colonising power at the moment
of Congo’s Independence, which, in Mudimbe’s off-hand
analysis, led to Lumumba’s isolation and murder.[29] Parricidal is the revolt of younger African
philosophers against their African predecessors,[30] while Kagame himself seems to have incited yet
another form of parricide:
‘Within
a few weeks, I saw him convert entire annual classes of students
to a ‘‘nationalistic’’ view of African
history and philology. I told him that I feared that such a
perspective, by generously glossing over the epistemological
preconditions of the murder of the Father, ran the risk of
further perverting the discipline of the social sciences in
Africa, already so encumbered by a priori ideological assumptions
of ‘colonial science’. His response was surprising to
me in its simplicity: ‘‘obsession is also a path to the
truth’’ ’. [31]
From
his own itinerary, this forms of parricide appears to be what
Mudimbe fears most. For when in the middle of the twentieth
century Central African Roman Catholic clerical intellectuals can
be seen to struggle with how much of global Christianity and
North Atlantic philosophy and science they can retain while
asserting their rightful difference vis-à-vis that imported
foreign body of ideas and vis-à-vis the hegemonic power of the
Europeans who persuaded or forced them to accept that body and
built it into their very lives, that retention is suggested to be
a refusal on their part to proceed to parricide.
The fact that, in the face of overwhelming evidence concerning
the eradication of African historic religion, Mudimbe refuses to
make a definitive statement against Christianity and its negative
effects on Africa, means that (as Tales of
faith makes very clear) even though he has
become an agnostic, he cannot bring himself to commit parricide
vis-à-vis the Roman Catholic Church.
Death appears not only as the murder of the father contemplated
as possible but, after all, undesirable, or as the others’
parricide to be condemned, but particularly as Mudimbe’s own
death:
On the one hand Mudimbe affirms, against the tide of the
Africanist anthropology of the turn of the twenty-first century
CE, the irreducible plurality of African cultures (the same
plurality around which the Colonial Library was built and
ordered). Mudimbe’s sympathy for the gems of classic
anthropology as produced by Fortes, Middleton, Griaule en de
Heusch, as discussed above, suggests that he sees them as an
anthropological opening up to the liberation of African
difference. But as he affirms, a greater liberation still lies in
the realization that death
(the central undercurrent in his work) is the hallmark of
cultural purity (the kind of cultural purity affirmed by the
classic anthropological model of ethnic diversity and
boundedness), so that the affirmation of cultural métissité
is nothing but the only effective strategy of survival:
Mudimbe analyzes other people’s Tales of
faith, Parables and
Fables, Ideas
and Inventions of Africa,
but for his personal needs retreats to the bare and windy rocks
of agnosticism. His Africa is that of other people, it does not
exist as a tangible reality for himself, but at best constitutes
a context for contestation, a laboratory for the politics of the
liberation of difference.
Let
us dwell a bit on the notion of cultural métissité, which
(although used by Mudimbe in an English-language book) I propose
to translate as ‘the condition of being of cultural mixed
descent’. The concept is borrowed, ultimately from the
French colonial language of race, and more directly from an
important critical reflection upon colonialism and its language,
notably Amselle’s seminal discussion of African ethnicity[32] as a recent invention within colonial society.
Schilder and I have tried to distance ourselves from the
constructivism and presentism associated with Amselle’s
view, albeit in terms which probably created misunderstanding and
which Amselle declared a caricature of his views.[33] However this may be, the concept of métissité
has implications which cast a critical light
on Mudimbe’s analysis. In the first place it is a biological
metaphor, evoking the necessity of the blind play of genes, as
against the freedom, choice, contingency of cultural strategies.
Mudimbe’s heroes, the clerical intellectuals, could freely
contemplate and reject the idea of parricide on their European
clerical superiors and intellectual predecessors while their
historic African allegiance had already been killed by others
then themselves; this shows that the biological metaphor of blind
genetic necessity is misleading. Mudimbe must be aware of this,
considering his lucid and state-of-the-art treatment of race as a
biologically non-viable political ideology in contemporary
science and society.[34]
The biological metaphor is also misleading for another reason. In
the biological process of genetic mixture, the genotype displays
the more or less equitable combination of two sets of
identifiable factors (genes, chromosomes), each set making for
either of the original two phenotypes involved; depending on how
many different genes control the specific traits looks for in the
original phenotypes, the features of the resulting mixed
phenotype may range somewhere in between both originals, or (if
few genes are involved and some of the values these genes take
are dominant, other recessive) the mixed phenotype may look
rather like one of the two originals. Neither situation obtains
in the case of cultural mixed descent as described by Mudimbe.
There is no evidence that in in the case of these clerical
intellectuals African historic religion and Christianity have
somehow achieved an equitable mixture, or that at least deep
down, in subconscious layers of their personalities, the African
cultural elements linger even though these do not directly
manifest themselves in their overt behaviour, in their
‘performance’. They are in
fact mutations within the global clerical intellectual order
— mutation here being defined in the original Hugo de Vries
sense of a radical and unsystematic change (in genotype) leading
to a radically new and unpredictable manifestation (in
phenotype). These clerical intellectuals represent a new
cultural form, whose Africanness perhaps consists in the somatic
and geographical features of their bearers, and in the
geographical provenance of the cultural material they distantly
and selectively appropriate and transform in intellectual text
products. Their Africanness does scarcely consist in any sort of
lived and professed continuity with the African historic
religion. What Mudimbe describes in Tales of
faith is the emergence of a new local
variant of global culture which has become dominant among the
religious, educational and political elite of Central Africa,
with similar forms elsewhere in Africa and in the Third World in
general.
But again, Mudimbe seems to do himself to African historic
religion what he exposes as a colonial hegemonic strategy: does
he not himself, vis-à-vis African historic religion, assert,
like the very Colonial Library he is critiquing?[35]
The point is not that Mudimbe’s understanding of the
conversion process is to be faulted. Most illuminatingly he
argues this process to consist of a triple negation: of
otherness, of the plurality of histories, and of any rationality
to be found outside the respectable Judaeo-Greek philosophical
canon.[36] He demonstrates how in a nineteenth century
North Atlantic thought spell-bound by Hegel, which does not allow
for a plurality of histories, Africa does not and cannot exist.
The point is that Mudimbe does not seem to realise that his very
critique of this conversion process, which produced him and hence
has taken on a personal reality from which he can as little
detach himself as from his body or from the air (!) he breathes,
overdetermines him to take such deconstructive, dismissive views
of Africa and of African historic religion as he does take.
‘Consequently,
conversion is an imperative, a sine qua non condition
for inscribing oneself into a history.’[37]
Of
course Mudimbe means this statement as a rendering of the
hegemonic preconceptions of missionary Christianity. But that
does not take away the fact that, in banning African historic
religion from the substance of his argument, denying it
rationality, repeatedly dismissing it as incredible as if it can
be totally assessed by epistemological criteria, and in
glorifying the project of clerical and post-clerical
intellectualism from which his own career and mutant identify
have sprung, he takes the personal fact and necessity of such
conversion for granted.
Remarkably,
I have not yet spotted any passage in Mudimbe’s oeuvre (but
I may easily have missed it considering its size and bilingual
nature) where the concept of parricide is equally applied to the
unmistakable lack of demonstrable retention of any historic
Central African religion on the part of these clerics and (like
Mudimbe himself) post-clerics. They tended to be second or third
generation Christians, and hence one might surmise that others
had done the killing of local historic religion for them: their
own parents, and the missionaries who had somehow managed to
substitute themselves as father figures in the place of the
paternal kin of these African clerical intellectuals. The
message, so implicit as to be entirely taken for granted, of
Mudimbe’s kaleidoscopic and multi-genre narrative of the
itinerary of these African clerical intellectuals in his book Tales
of faith, is that by the middle of the
twentieth century none of them was in direct personal contact any
more, as a practitioner, with Central African historic religion.
If African historic religion is no longer the dominant cohesive
social force in the urban and intellectual context of Kinshasa,
Lubumbashi and other Congolese cities, this does not mean that
such religion has entirely disappeared from the contemporary
Congolese social life in the rural areas; recent ethnographic
research by accomplished ethnographers like Devisch and de Boeck
has demonstrated its continued vitality and viability.[38]
If African historic religion has succeeded to survive to some
extent in the countryside of Central Africa, why is it far less
conspicuous in the big cities? Like in Belgium, Roman Catholicism
was something of a state religion in Belgian Congo, Rwanda and
Burundi. This does not mean that there is a 100% overlap between
the religious and the statal domain; for as Mudimbe acknowledges
that the Central African colonies, like Belgium, had a certain
plurality of European ideological expressions (Protestantism,
Freemasonry, and one may add socialism) rival to Roman
Catholicism, and some of them with rather disproportionately
great power in national politics. However, the effect of the
practical coinciding of state and world religion is a particular
form of micropolitics, which has a direct bearing on the eclipse
of religious alternatives to Roman Catholicism from public and
even private life. There is a constant reinforcing between statal
and religious sanctioning in the policing of citizen’s
everyday life. The state, which in its twentieth century form is
primarily a democratically legitimated oligarchy, assumes reality
partly through the citizen’s submission to and veneration of
the representations of the church; and the intangible sanctions
of the church somehow receive a vicarious backing from the
display of physical force (the prison, the police, the army) and
the powerful bureaucratic procedures proper to the state. The
Enlightenment rationality of the modern state nicely matches the
verbose doctrinal rationalisations of Roman Catholic theology.
The result of all this is that in the consciousness and practices
of the citizens all heterodoxy tends to be shunned as criminal
and as an act of national treason, by virtue of strongly
internalised modes of assessment, self-control, and
domestication. Heterodoxy instils the ordinary law-abiding
citizen with a sense of horror and especially shame, comparable
to the shame adults feel in cases of imperfect public concealment
of their own bodily functions (signs of incontinence, of
menstruation leaking through, etc.). In a system of evaluation
along such axes as child versus adult, animal versus human,
stupid versus intelligent, exclusion versus inclusion, punishment
versus reward, heterodoxy thus installs itself on the negative
end. Mudimbe is as good a guide as any critic of colonialism to
identify these social pressures towards compliance with
world-religion orthodoxy, but it is important to realise that
these pressures are not limited to the colonial situation. They
can still be seen to work in post-colonial African societies:
among the citizens as a mode of acquiescence; while among the
political elite the semi-secret semi-public display of heterodox
horrors (for instance in the occasional display of violence,
sorcery, and human sacrifice) reinforces such acquiescence, since
these horrors are profoundly threatening to the citizens.[39] Therefore, in the public culture of Central
Africa from at least the middle of the twentieth century if not
earlier, much like in the public culture of Botswana,
considerable sections of the population (especially the urbanites
and middle classes) are effectively shielded off from African
historic religion by an effective screen of internalised shame.
In Zambia in the early 1970s I detected (as a youngerand less
sensitive observer) nothing similar, but over the past thirty
years I have seen the gradual installation of a precisely such a
screen. Today this altered state of affairs occasionally makes me
appear a social fool in that country, when unthinkingly I
publicly mediate a historic African religious identity as someone
who has obviously not permanently resided in the country
recently, whose main Zambian identity was formed in of the rural
areas of central western Zambia in the early 1970s when African
historic religion was still a dominant idiom there, who
subsequently became a diviner-priest in Botswana according to a
religious idiom which meanwhile has gained considerable public
currency in Zambia as well, and therefore as someone who does not
always realise that it is no longer socially acceptable to
mediate African historic religion in the public space of the town
and the open road.
One may wonder why Mudimbe should stop, like he does, at the
evocation of the few heroes and saints of the cultural mutant
order of clerical intellectualism (Kagame, Kizerbo, Mulago,
Mveng), and not trace the installation of that mutant order
throughout Central African society in the second half of the
twentieth century. With the general spread of formal education
(however low its level), and the prominence of clerical
intellectuals in the educational system, the main conditions were
set for the percolation of (admittedly: attenuated, compromised,
versions of) this mutant order far outside the seminaries,
convents and universities where it was originally engendered, to
become, perhaps, a standard cultural orientation among tens,
possibly hundreds of thousand of people of the urban middle class
in Central Africa. Did this happen? If it did, how did this
influence the political and religious itinerary of the societies
of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi in the second half of the twentieth
century? If it did, how did it help to explain Mobutuism, its
politics of authenticity (which, much like clerical
intellectualism, amounted to a virtualisation and thus
effectively an annihilation of historical African cultural and
religion), the specific form of proliferation of church
organisations which took place in Congo, and the general
emergence of a contemporary social order in which Christianity
and literacy have become the norm, and African historic religion
has been eclipsed or at best has gone underground, mainly to
emerge in highly selective and virtualised form in certain
practices of African Independent churches. Is perhaps the
violence (more specifically the death) which forms the refrain of
Mudimbe’s spiritual itinerary, and which I am inclined to
interpret as the murder on African historic religion, akin to the
extreme and extremely massive violence which has swept Congo,
Burundi and Rwanda throughout the second half of the twentieth
century? Anthropologists like Devisch and de Lame have struggled
with the interpretation of the latter form of violence in Central
Africa,[40] and their sociological interpretations, while
adding a social scientific dimension to the psychoanalytical and
philosophical hermeneutics of Mudimbe, certainly do ring somewhat
naive in the light of Mudimbe’s essayistic philosophising,
although the latter does lack sociological imagination and
manifests the literature scholar’s disinclination to think
in terms of large-scale social categories and their institutions.
This means that we might yet take seriously Mudimbe’s claim
that Tales of faith is
about any post-colonial individual,[41] and not just about himself and a handful of
fellow clerical and post-clerical intellectuals from Central
Africa. Despite his exceptional erudition, cosmopolitan
orientation, and success, Mudimbe’s predicament is to a
considerable extent that of the contemporary Central African
middle classes in general. A glimpse of what lies at today’s
far end of the itinerary that started with Kagame c.s., may be
gathered from the following impression, which I owe entirely to
the ongoing Ph.D. research of Julie Duran-Ndaya:
‘In
July, 2000, Kinshasa was the scene of a major church conference
of the Combat Spirituel (Spiritual Combat) movement. The
conference involved close to 20,000 people, many of whom have
travelled to Kinshasa from western Europe and other places of the
Congolese diaspora. Obviously we are dealing here with a highly
significant social phenomenon at a massive scale. The movement
caters for upper middle class and professional people, especially
women. Women also play leading roles in the movement’s
organisation. The movement’s doctrine and ritual combine an
original re-reading of the Bible with techniques of
self-discovery and self-realisation under the direction of female
leaders. The spiritual battle which members have to engage is, is
a struggle for self-realisation in the face of any kind of
negations or repressions of personal identity, especially such as
are often the fate of ambitious middle-class women in diasporic
situations. In order to achieve this desired self-realisation, it
is imperative that all existing ties with the past, as embodied
in the traditional cultural norms of historic Central African
society, and as represented by the ancestors, are literally
trampled underfoot. Thus a major part of regular church ritual is
to go through the motions of vomiting upon evocations of the
ancestors, and of violently and repeatedly stamping on their
representations. The catharsis which this is to bring about is
supposed to prepare one for the modern, hostile world. Some
members experience very great difficulty in thus having to
violently exorcise figures and symbols of authority and identity
which even in the diffuse, virtualised kinship structure of urban
Congolese society today have been held in considerable respect.
But while this predicament suggests at least some resilience of
historic African religion (otherwise there would be no hesitation
at tramspling the past and the ancetors), it is practically
impossible for diasporic Congolese to tap, for further spiritual
guidance, the resources of historic African religion in the form
of divination, therapy and protective medicine: not one reliable
and qualified Congolese specialist in historic African religion (nganga)
is to be found in, for instance, The Netherlands or
Belgium.’[42]
The
make-up of this topical situation is reminiscent of that of the
clerical intellectual mutation half a century ago: the literate
and Christian format appropriated as self-evident yet subjected
to personal selective transformation, the rejection of an
ancestral past and of African traditional religion, the total
inability to derive any spiritual resources from the latter, and
the effect of being propelled into a mutant cosmopolitan cultural
and spiritual solution which is African by the adherent original
geography and biology, but not in substance.
Mudimbe is a capable, creative and courageous thinker — one
who can stand the vertigo of high anxiety, being fundamentally
homeless and alone without other illusions than the quest for a
placeless science and truth. To him, the rest is
‘incredible’, is belles lettres.
Mudimbe’s Tales of faith amount
to an ‘act of faith’ in the sense of auto-da-fé,
the most terrible destructive act to which Roman Catholicism as a
regime of control was capable of. The transmutation which
produced clerical intellectualism and thus gave us Mudimbe, was
also an auto-da-fé eradicating historic African religion from
visibility and accessibility in Central African life today.
Both
Mudimbe and myself have ended up, from socially very peripheral
points of departure, in a secure central North Atlantic position,
cherishing the comforting qualified universalism that comes with
academia, philosophy, classics, belles lettres. For Mudimbe, the
African heritage that was never to be his (because the
micropolitics of clerical education denied him access to and
accomplishment in African historic religion) continues to
intrigue him. He has made it its life’s work to pinpoint the
intellectual history and philosophical implications of these
micropolitics, and to define, critique and increasingly control
through his highly influential writings, how the image of Africa
has been constructed and should be deconstructed. He has become
the most qualified, almost plenipotentiary censor of his own
spiritual and cultural loss as a post-African. For him, the
Africa of historic local religious forms is a domain of the
imaginary, of make-believe: fable, tale, myth, performance etc.
I feel that Mudimbe is stating only one side of the story. He has
fallen victim to what we might call the deceptive politics of
translocalisation, much as I have fallen victim to the deceptive
politics of locality by becoming and remaining a sangoma.[43] The gods I pray to in a loosely African fashion
(some of them as particular as my own or my patients’
ancestors, others tending to universality such as Mwali, or the
Virgin Mary, or the God whose mother she is) do not need an
epistemological validation because the rite turns them from
imaginary into real and into social facts which make a difference
since they decisively govern the behaviour of sizeable sets of
people.
Performance is more than the liberation of difference for
difference’s sake, it is the creation of a world which,
while man-made and make-believe, yet takes on a logic and a
relevance of its own, reshaping the contingencies of life into a
place to inhabit, to cherish, and to heal. Religion is more than
a definitional exercise, more than a defective epistemology
believing the incredible: it is the symbolic transformation
through which the locality created by performance is kept alive
so that it may issue life, even in death and through death. And
politics is more than ethnocentric textual comments produced in
order to keep North-South hegemony in place (as Mudimbe defines
politics); it is also the parochial struggle over meaning and
resources which make up the smaller, local universe, turning it
into vital locality. African spirituality,[44] whether historic of Christian or Islamic or
syncretistic, is a social technology of sociability, whose forms
create meaning, power and healing regardless of the Western
epistemological status of its alleged dogmas and the supernatural
entities features therein.
Thus conceived, African historic reeligion does go against the
course of hegemonic history, and forms a genuine challenge for
the self-congratulatory mildness with which Mudimbe depicts the
project of clerical and post-clerical intellectualism in Central
Africa, taking for granted the very impasse in which he ended up
and from whihc he appears to bne incapable of escaping: North
Atlantic academic rationality, and the end of African historic
religion.
[1] An earlier version of this paper was read at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, 1st February, 2001, as the opening lecture in a series of four, entitled ‘Reading Mudimbe’, organised by Louis Brenner and Kai Kresse. The present text comprises, in revised form, the full text of my oral presentation at SOAS; that presentation however covered only 1/4 of the actual written text, to which I must refer the reader for greater detail on the topics dealt with here, and for major topics which had to be omitted from the 45 minutes presentation. I am grateful to the organisers for creating a stimulating framework in which I could articulate and refine my thoughts about Mudimbe’s work; to the African Studies Centre, Leiden, and to SOAS for financing my trip to London, and to Patricia Saegerman, Louis Brenner, Kai Kresse, Richard Fardon, Graham Furniss, and other participants in the seminar for stimulating comments on an earlier draft.
[2] Mudimbe, V.Y., 1997, Tales of faith: Religion as political performance in Central Africa: Jordan Lectures 1993, London & Atlantic Highlands: Athlone Press.
[3] Tales, p. 202.
[4] Mudimbe, V.Y., 1988, The invention of Africa: Gnosis, philosophy, and the order of knowledge, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press/London: Currey; Mudimbe, V.Y., 1994, The idea of Africa, Bloomington, IN and London.
[5] Unfortunately, I have not yet been able to consult his explicitly autobiographical book: Mudimbe, V.Y., 1994, Le corps glorieux des mots et des choses, [ place: publisher ] .
[6] I prefer the expression ‘African historic religion’ to alternatives such as ‘African traditional religion’ or ‘African religion’ tout court, in order to denote forms of religious expression which existed on the African continent more or less independently from and often prior to the penetration of such world religions as Islam and Christianity, and which have persisted in changed but recognisable form into the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when many of these forms were drawn into the orbit of professional outsider description. The word ‘traditional’ has been used in so many ideologically charged contexts as to have become meaningless; and Islam and Christianity have ranked among the religious forms of Africa ever since the first millennium of the common era.
[7] Tales, pp. 50-55.
[8] Foucault, M., 1975, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison, Gallimard: Paris.
[9] Apart from the used of unintegrated scraps of book reviews, the book’s level of copy-editing is remarkably low. The spelling of proper names in Mudimbe’s work is often defective to the point of dyslexia; e.g. Blummebach, Tales, p. 150, and Blumenback, p. 188, for Blumenbach; cf Blumenbach’s contemporary Hereen read Heeren, Mudimbe, ‘African Athena?’, p. 119; Barret, read Barrett (Barrett, D.B., 1968, Schism and Renewal in Africa, Nairobi: Oxford University Press), Tales, p. 74; Livingston, read Livingstone, Tales, p. 44, p.188 has it correctly; Al-Hjj Umar, read Al-Hajj ‘Umar, Tales, p. 90 and index (if he has the translitteration jihâd whereas that -i- is usually not explicitly represented in written Arabic, then he should also have the common translitteration Hajj for whose -a- the same is true). It is not only the copy-editing of Tales of faith which is surprisingly defective. Also the biliography shows major lacunae. The entire, massive oevre of Kagame is cited in the text (Tales, pp. 139-141) without a single entry in the end bibliography. And a Temples publication of 1959 is quoted without appearing the bibliography (Tales, p. 155); probably this is simply the English translation of Bantoe-philosophie, so for 1959 read 1979; Sally Falk Moore’s 1984 book is mentioned in the text but not listed in the bibliography. Fortes, M. & G. Dieterlen, 1965, eds, African Systems of Thought, Oxford University Press for International African Institute, is listed as edited only by Dieterlin, yet in Tales of faith, p. 161 a reference to ‘Fortes 1965’ appears which can only be this book; a very important quote is derived from a 1978 article by Mveng which does not appear in the bibliography (Tales, p. 173).
[10] Personal communication, Richard Fardon, Graham Furniss, and Louis Brenner, London, 1st February, 2001.
[11] Tales, p. ix.
[12] Early eighteenth century Christian Kongo prophets, and twentieth-century Christian prophets in Southern Africa, are discussed briefly in Tales of faith, pp. 71f.
[13] Mudimbe, Parables and fables. Especially in his discussion of the Luba genesis myth Mudimbe poses as one who, while not an anthropologist, has rubbed shoulders with anthropologists and moreover lays claim to a relevant lived experience apparently considered by him as the equivalent of anthropological fieldwork as a source of ethnographic authority:
‘One may ask: Whence comes this authority [ to speak on aspects of Luba or Songye culture in anthropological terms ] . (...) My answer will be simple. It is true that I am not an anthropologist and do not claim to be one. I spent at least ten years of my life studying ancient Greek and Latin for an average of twelve hours each week, with more than that amount of time devoted to French and European cultures, before being eligible for a doctorate in comparative philology (Greek, Latin, and French) at Louvain University. I do not know many anthropologists who could publicly demonstrate a similar experience about their specialty in order to found their authority in African studies. (...) My experience would define itself somewhere between the practice of philosophy with its possible intercultural applications and the sociocultural and intersubjective space which made me possible: my Luba-Lulua mother, my Songye father, the Swahili cultural context of my primary education in Katanga (Shaba), the Sanga milieu of my secondary education from 1952 to 1959 in Kakanda, near Jadotville (Likasi), and, later on, at the Catholic seminary of Mwera, near what was then Elisabethville, and my brief sojourn in a Benedictine monastery in Rwanda.’ (Parables and fables, pp. 124-125)
[14] Buakasa Tulu kia Mpansu, 1973 L’Impensé du discours: kindaki et nkisi en pays kongo du Zaire. Kinshasa: Presses universitaires du Zaire.
[15] Mudimbé [ Mudimbe ] , V.Y., 1982, L’Odeur du père: Essai sur les limites de la science et de la vie en Afrique noire, Paris: Présence Africaine, pp. 144-155.
[16] Mveng, E., 1965, L’art d’Afrique noire: Liturgie et language religieux, Paris: Mame; Kagame, A., 1955 [ 1956 ] , La philosophie bantu-rwandaise de l’Être, Bruxelles: Académie royale des Sciences coloniales; Mulago, V., 1965, Un visage africain du Chrstianisme, Paris: Présence africaine; Ki-Zerbo, J., 1972, Histoire de l’Afrique d’hier à demain, Paris: Hatier.
[17] Cf. Platzeck, E.W, 1971, ‘Ars combinatoria’ in: Ritter, J., ed., Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Band 1, A-C, Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe & Co, col. 521-522; a famous author of an Ars combinatoria was Leibniz, published in Frankfurt am Main, 1666.
[18] Tales, p. 202.
[19] Cf. Tales, p. 198:
‘the stories I have chosen to share in these lectures on conversion are, indeed, not only unthinkable outside of a space circumscribed by African elements but also well determined by anthropology and the colonial saga, as well as the practices and missionizing of Islam and Christianity’; italics added.
[20] Howe, Stephen, 1999, Afrocentrism: Mythical pasts and imagined homes, London/New York: Verso, first published 1998.
[21] Tales, p. 143.
[22] ‘For people familiar with African Christianity, the conversion model [ i.e. the approach to Central African Chrstian intellectual history as propounded in Tales of faith — WvB ] in both its intention and realization would describe the African critique as generally violent and often, alas, excessive, not only in its evaluatrion of conversion policies but also of the missionary.’ Tales, p. 56; italics added.
[23] Appiah, K.A., 1992, In my father’s house: Africa in the philosophy of culture, New York & London: Oxford University Press; cf. Tales, pp. 63f for a most sympathetic reading; and on Afrocentrism: Appiah, K.A., 1993, ‘Europe Upside Down: Fallacies of the New Afrocentrism.’ Times Literary Supplement (London), 12 February, 24-25.
[24] Tales, p. 89.
[25] van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 2000, ‘Le point de vue de Wim van Binsbergen’, in: Autour d’un livre. Afrocentrisme, de Stephen Howe, et Afrocentrismes: L’histoire des Afriocains entre Egypte et Amérique, de Jean-Pierre chrétien [ sic ] , François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar et Claude-Hélène Perrot (dir.), par Mohamed Mbodj, Jean Copans et Wim van Binsbergen, Politique africaine, no. 79, octobre 2000, pp. 175-180 — the next few pages of the present argument are an English rendering of part of my French article; van Binsbergen, Global Bee Flight; and: van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1997, ed., Black Athena: Ten Years After, Hoofddorp: Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society, special issue, Talanta: Proceedings of the Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society, vols 28-29, 1996-97.
[26] Mudimbe, V.Y. 1991 [ check ] , ‘Letters of reference’, Transition, 53: 62-78, 71ff; Mudimbe, V.Y. 1992 [ check ] , ‘Saint Paul-Michel Foucault?’ Transition, 57: 122-127.
[27] Mudimbe, Parables and fables, p. xi.
[28] Jung, C.G., 1987, Verzameld werk 8: De held en het moederarchetype, Rotterdam: Lemniscaat; Dutch translation of Part II of Symbole der Wandlung.
[29] Tales, p. 131.
[30] Tales, p. 104 (Diagne), p. 143 (Kagame).
[31] Tales, p. 140.
[32] Amselle, J.-L., 1990, Logiques métisses: Anthropologie de l’identité en Afrique et ailleurs, Paris: Payot. For a similar view on anglophone and lusophone Africa, cf. Vail, L., 1989, ‘Ethnicity in Southern African history’, in: Vail, L., red., The creation of tribalism in Southern Africa, Londen/ Berkeley & Los Angeles: Currey/ University of California Press, pp. 1-19; cf. Tales, p. 152.
[33] Amselle, intervention at a 1995 seminar at Leiden. Schilder, K., & van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1993, ‘Recent Dutch and Belgian perspectives on ethnicity in Africa’, in: Ethnicity in Africa, eds. van Binsbergen, W.M.J. & Kees Schilder, special issue of Afrika Focus, 9, 1-2, 1993: 3-15; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1997, ‘Ideology of ethnicity in Central Africa’, in: Middleton, J.M., ed., Encyclopaedia of Africa south of the Sahara, New York: Scribners, vol. 2, pp. 91-99; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1992, Kazanga: Etniciteit in Afrika tussen staat en traditie, inaugural lecture, Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit; shortened French version: ‘Kazanga: Ethnicité en Afrique entre Etat et tradition’, in: Binsbergen, W.M.J. van, & Schilder, K., red., Perspectives on Ethnicity in Africa, specia; issue ‘Ethnicity’, Afrika Focus, Gent (België), 1993, 1: 9-40; English version with postscript: van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1994, ‘The Kazanga festival: Ethnicity as cultural mediation and transformation in central western Zambia’, African Studies, 53, 2, 1994, pp 92-125.
[34] Tales, p. 184f.
[35] Tales, pp. 179f.
[36] Tales, p. 147.
[37] Tales, p. 59.
[38] de Boeck, F., 1991a, ‘From knots to web: Fertility, life-transmission, health and well-being among the Aluund of southwest Zaire’, academisch proefschrift, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven; De Boeck F. and R. Devisch, 1994 Ndembu, Luunda and Yaka divination compared: From representation and social engineering to embodiment and world-making. Journal of religion in Africa 24:98-133; Devisch, R., 1984, Se recréer femme: Manipulation sémantique d’une situation d’infécondité chez les Yaka, Berlin: Reimer; Devisch, R., 1986, ‘Marge, marginalisation et liminalité: Le sorcier et le devin dans la culture Yaka au Zaïre’, Anthropologie et Sociétés, 10, 2: 117-37; Devisch, R., , 1991 Mediumistic divination among the Northern Yaka of Zaire: etiology and ways of knowing. In P. Peek (ed.), African divination systems: ways of knowing. Bloomington: Indiana university press 104-123; Devisch, R., & Brodeur, C., 1999, The law of the lifegivers: The domestication of desire, Amsterdam etc.: Harwood.
[39] Toulabor, C., 2000, ‘Sacrifices humains et politique: quelques exemples contemporains en Afrique,’, in: Konings, P., van Binsbergen, W.M.J., & Hesseling, G., eds., Trajectoirs de libération en Afrique contemporaine, pp. 211-226.
[40] Devisch, R., , 1996 ‘Pillaging Jesus’: healing churches and the villagisation of Kinshasa. Africa 66:555-586; Devisch, R., , 1995 Frenzy, violence, and ethical renewal in Kinshasa. Public culture 7:593-629; de Lame, D., 1996, Une colline entre mille: Le calme avant la tempête: Transformations et blocages du Rwanda rural, Ph.D. thesis, Free University, Amsterdam; published by Tervuren: Musée Royale de l’Afrique Centrale.
[41] Tales, p. 198.
[42] This passage based on Duran-Ndaya, J., 1999, Rapport de recherche provisionnel, Leiden: African Studies Centre, internal report. I am grateful for the many discussions I had with Mrs Duran-Ndaya on her fascinating ongoing Ph.D. research.
[43] Appadurai, A., 1995, ‘The production of locality’, in: R. Fardon, ed., Counterworks: Managing the diversity of knowledge, ASA decennial conference series ‘The uses of knowledge: Global and local relations’, London: Routledge, pp. 204-225; de Jong, F., 2001, Modern secrets: The power of locality in Casamance, Senegal, Ph.D. thesis, Amsterdam University; van Binsbergen, ‘Becoming a sangoma’; van Binsbergen, ‘Sangoma in Nederland, o.c.
[44] Cf. van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 2000, ‘African spirituality: An intercultural approach,’ paper presented at the Dutch-Flemish Association For Intercultural Philosophy, Research group on Spirituality, Meeting of 6 June 2000, Philosophical faculty, Erasmus University Rotterdam; also http://come.to/african_religion; curiously, this paper was a belated response to an editorial request made by Mudimbe.
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