AFRICAN CULTURAL HERITAGE AND CONTEMPORARY CHANGE
PERSON AND COMMUNITY
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: The Ghanaian Tradition of Philosophy by Kwasi Wiredu 1
PROLOGUE: Crisis in African Cultures by W. Emmanuel Abraham 13
PART I AFRICAN IDENTITY
1. Sources of African Identity by W. Emmanuel Abraham 39
2. Problems in Africa's Self-Definition in the Contemporary World by Kwasi Wiredu 59
PART II KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING
3. Knowledge and Truth: Ewe and Akan Conceptions by N.K. Dzobo 73
4. African Symbols and Proverbs as Sources of Knowledge and Truth by N.K. Dzobo 85
Part III ANTHROPOLOGY AND METAPHYSICS
5. Person and Community in Akan Thought by Kwame Gyekye 101
6. The Image of Man in Africa by N.K. Dzobo 123
7. Death and the Afterlife in African Culture by Kwasi Wiredu 137
8. Immortality and the Nature of Man in Gra Thought by Joyce Engmann 153
Part IV ETHICS AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
9. Moral Foundations of an African Culture by Kwasi Wiredu 193
10. Towards Moral Development in Contemporary Africa: Insights from Dangme Traditional Moral Experience by J.N. Kudadjie 207
11. Values in a Changing Society: Man, Ancestors and God by N.K. Dzobo 223
12. Traditional Political Ideas, Their Relevance to Development in Contemporary Africa
by Kwame Gyekye 243
INTRODUCTION
THE GHANAIAN TRADITION
OF PHILOSOPHY
KWASI WIREDU
Ghanaian culture is a highly philosophical culture. This is seen in the fact that `traditional life in our country is guided at many points by conceptions that might broadly be called philosophical.'(1) Thus customs relating to procreation, work, leisure, death and sundry circumstances of life are based on or reflect doctrines about God, mind, goodness, destiny and human personality that most adult Ghanaians will articulate at the slightest prompting. And if one were to come in contact with the genuine philosophers among our traditional folk, one would hear not only articulations but also explanations, elaborations, and critiques of these doctrines and much else besides. Readers of W. E. Abraham's The Mind of Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962) or Kwame Gyekye's An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987) will get a good idea of the contours of that public philosophy.
Given that Ghanaian life is suffused with speculative thought, it is not surprising that many of our eminent contemporary public leaders have attached the greatest importance to philosophy by both word and work. J. B. Danquah wrote The Akan Doctrine of God (London: Frank Cass & co. Ltd, 1944, second edition with an introduction by Kwesi Dickson 1968) in a busy life of legal practice, public service, political agitation and variegated literary productivity. He was to the last given to philosophical meditation and writing and produced, at the close of his life, a voluminous manuscript on The Akan Philosophy of Man, which, unfortunately appears to be missing.(2) He prepared himself for his life work with a training in Law and History, but most of all, in Philosophy in which he took a Ph.D in 1927 as John Stuart Mill Scholar in the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at London University with a thesis on The Moral End as Moral Excellence.
Kwame Nkrumah, the man who led the final phase of Ghana's struggle for independence and became her first president, disagreed with Danquah on many things, but one thing he did not disagree with him about was the practical importance of philosophy. Nkrumah lived in the United States of America for many years and studied Philosophy, Theology and other subjects in American universities, including Lincoln University and the University of Pennsylvania before moving to England in the mid-forties. But his interest in philosophy was not something he acquired from abroad; his mind was already impregnated with a philosophic curiosity and, to be sure, also with a nationalistic passion before he left our shores. While in the U.S he wrote an M.A. thesis on ethnophilosophy. He, of course, did not use the word `ethnophilosophy' with the pejorative significance which it now has acquired among many current African philosophers. In Britain he completed a doctoral dissertation on Knowledge and Logical Positivism at the London School of Economics under the supervision of A. J. Ayer--an odd combination, since Nkrumah was a convinced Marxist while Ayer, the leading advocate at that time of sanguine positivism in English speaking-philosophy, was not known for either a sympathy for, or an expertise on, Marxism. Be that as it may, history stood between Nkrumah and the oral defence of his dissertation, for in 1947, just before that was scheduled to take place there came the historic call from the United Gold Coast Convention. The nationalist organization in Ghana (then known as The Gold Coast) which had just begun demanding self-government from Britain, called him home to become its General Secretary. Nkrumah immediately obliged--to the doom of colonialism in Ghana and Africa at large.
The interplay, in Nkrumah's mind, between philosophy and practice, more specifically, the practice of radical nationalism, was, in any case, already evident in his Towards Colonial Freedom (3)which he published in London in 1947 before returning to Ghana. In that work he adopted Marxist-Leninist philosophy and adapted it to the purposes of the anti-colonial struggle. There is no reason why a Ghanaian philosopher may not make a creative use of a foreign philosophy in the service of Ghana, whether or not that philosophy has any affinity with Ghanaian traditional philosophy. But later, as President of Ghana, Nkrumah published Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization and Development with Particular Reference to the African Revolution in which it was argued that Marxism was, in fact, in harmony with African Traditional thought. Ghanaian traditional thought was not explored in any detail in that work, but that did not necessarily detract from its possible relevance to Ghana or to Africa, in general.
The detailed exploration of Ghanaian traditional thought has, however, been a notable concern among contemporary Ghanaian philosophers, a fact to which the above mentioned books by Danquah, Abraham and Gyekye bear eloquent testimony. This demonstrates that however deeply the Ghanaian mind has gone into Western philosophy or the philosophy of any other culture, it has never been in danger of becoming oblivious to its own indigenous tradition of philosophy. The concern with this tradition is also unmistakable in the work of K. A. Busia, Prime Minister of Ghana from 1969 to 1972, who though a sociologist by academic profession, wrote works of considerable significance for Ghanaian philosophy. Busia had a degree in History before he went to Oxford to study Politics, Philosophy and Economics. He afterwards specialized in Sociology in graduate study and earned his doctorate at Oxford with a dissertation on The Position of the Chief in the Modern Political System of Ashanti, which was subsequently published by Frank Cass and Company Ltd., in 1951. The book has now become a classic in the descriptive and analytical study of the Ashanti system of government. In virtue also of its treatment of the principles underlying that system of government, it has proved invaluable in the study of traditional political philosophy. Busia's book has a proud place in a time-honored series of studies of traditional politics and jurisprudence by Ghanaian thinkers dating back to J. E. Casely Hayford's Gold Coast Native Institutions (London: 1903), John Mensah Sarbah's Fanti National Constitution (London, 1906) and J. B. Danquah's Akan Laws and Customs (London, 1928). Kwame Gyekye's "Traditional Political Ideas: Their Relevance to Development in Contemporary Africa", which forms the last chapter of this work, is a contemporary continuation of this line of work which is fully conscious of its intellectual antecedents in the tradition.
Of even more extensive philosophical relevance than his work on Ashanti government was Busia's essay on "The Ashanti" which was included in Daryll Forde's anthology, African Worlds: Studies in the Cosmological Ideas and Social Values of African Peoples (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954). In this piece Busia provided a perspicuous account of the main features of the world view of the Ashantis and of their conceptions of human personality and social organization. Two other works of Busia deserve special mention, though that does not exhaust philosophically oriented contributions. The Challenge of Africa (New York: Frederick A. Praeger Publishers, 1962) and Africa in Search of Democracy (New York: Praeger, 1967) were mainly political, but Busia was deeply of the persuasion that an appreciation of African traditional philosophy was requisite for a true understanding of Africa's contemporary situation and its desiderata. Accordingly, he provided elegant expositions of elements of traditional philosophy in the first two chapters of each book, entitled, in the first case, (compositely) "The Challenge of Culture" and, in the second case, "The Religious Heritage" (Chapter 1) and "The Political Heritage" (chapter 2).
All the essayists in the present work explicitly or implicitly engage the legacy of indigenous philosophical thought available to them through the works of the statesman philosophers noted above and also through the oral tradition with which they are acquainted by way of both upbringing and scholarly research. But they also engage, in these essays as in other parts of their work, the rich accumulation of organized information about their traditional culture preserved in the writings of the first European scholars who made dedicated and prolonged--indeed in some cases life-long-- researches into our culture and its intellectual foundations.
Probably, the best known now, certainly the most productive, of these early European students of our traditional culture was the English anthropologist R. S. Rattray. In a number of goodly-sized volumes, the most important of which were Ashanti (Oxford University Press, 1923, second edition 1956), Religion and Art in Ashanti (Oxford, 1927, second edition 1958) and Ashanti Law and Constitution (Oxford, 1929) he gave well-researched accounts of various aspects of our culture, including the philosophical. Rattray focussed particularly on the culture of the Ashantis. He learnt their language, socialized with Ashantis of both sexes, and wrote about them with an insight born of both a keenness of observation and a genuine fondness for the people he studied.
In their own day, however, Diedrich Westermann was more famous internationally than Rattray. He also had some substantial insights into our traditional worldview and ethical thinking. Unfortunately, these were often vitiated, in the expression, by a certain attitude of superiority not uncharacteristic of the European anthropology of the period.(4) Indeed, even the excellent Rattray was not completely untouched by vestiges of that frame of mind--witness the sub-title of another of his otherwise deservedly famous works: Ashanti Proverbs: The Primitive Ethics of a Savage People (Oxford, 1916, reprinted 1969). In fact, in this book Rattray did a very useful job in translating a selection of Ashanti proverbs into English and providing them with explanatory annotations. The selection was made from a larger set of untranslated Akan proverbs published by the German scholar J. G. Christaller, entitled A Collection of 3,600 Tshi Proverbs (Basel: Evangelical Mission Society, 1879). To this German scholar is owed also the first major dictionary of the Akan language viz. Dictionary of the Asante and Fante Language called Tshi (Chwee, Twi) (Basel: Evangelical Missionary Society, 1881, second edition 1933.) He wrote also the first major grammar of the language (A Grammar of the Asante and Fante Language Called Tshi (Chwee, Twi), Based on the Akuapem Dialect with Reference to the other (Akan and Fante) Dialects (Basel: 1875))
The philosophical importance of these works is hard to overemphasize. The grammar of a language is not, indeed, a blueprint of its logic; but it is, most assuredly, a propaedeutic to it. In the formalization of the natural logic of our vernaculars--a task which still lies ahead of contemporary Ghanaian philosophy although there are some interesting hints in Gyekye's Essay(5)--the syntactic and semantical distinctions and classifications established in Christaller's work, along with subsequent efforts, will offer extremely convenient materials for critical evaluation and reconstruction. The dictionary also, which still remains to be supplanted by work from indigenous hands, is a great source of incentives for the study of the conceptual problems that arise in translations of speculative ideas between English and Akan and other Ghanaian vernaculars.
Since, to say the least, it cannot be assumed that the conceptual frameworks embedded in English and the other metropolitan languages in which our traditional thought has been expounded have any close fit with that system of thought, it is not unreasonable to fear that our indigenous thought may have suffered philosophically significant distortions in the process of exposition. Even more alarming is the consideration that the conceptual errors responsible for such distortions cannot always be laid at foreign doors; for, in truth, we and our statesman forerunners of old have been so strongly influenced by foreign conceptual models through religious and other forms of instruction that we have become unwitting foreigners to the conceptual infra-structure of our own indigenous thought, in spite of our unquestionable love for our culture. Thus conceptual dichotomies emanating from foreign philosophical vocabularies, such as the physical and the spiritual, the material and the immaterial, the natural and the supernatural, the secular and the religious, the immanent and the transcendent, and metaphysical notions like dependent and independent existence, creation out of nothing, absolute reality etc., are often used in the characterization of our traditional thought without a prior scrutiny of their applicability.
However, such influences upon the mind are never deterministic beyond repair, and we can justifiably hope that the task of conceptual self-exorcism, though difficult and possibly endless, is one in which we can make progress. This consideration is never far from my concerns in my own contributions to this volume, especially in chapter 2: "Problems in Africa's Self-Definition in the Contemporary World."
Perhaps, the one foreign example that we can follow unqualifiedly without danger to our cultural authenticity is that provided by the pioneering scholarly involvement of Christaller and Rattray with the proverbs of our culture. Actually, the example has already been taken to heart by our scholars. And this was inevitable, seeing the overwhelming importance of proverbs in our indigenous rhetoric. There are now quite a few collections of proverbs by Ghanaians. Among these the volumes of Ewe proverbs reproduced in the original language and translated, classified and interpreted by N. K. Dzobo are particularly noteworthy for their ethical interest.(6) These are proverbs that express Ewe moral teachings in dramatic imagery of arresting terseness. But our indigenous proverbs also frequently encapsulate abstract insights of a philosophical character, and Dzobo's discussion of "Symbols and Proverbs as Source Materials for Understanding African Culture" (chapter 4 below) is a particularly apt illustration of this fact.
Indeed, the use of proverbs in the portrayal and highlighting of doctrine in the exposition of traditional thought is a well established practice in the Ghanaian tradition of philosophy. Danquah (The Akan Doctrine of God) uses it to good effect. Abraham makes a sparkling use of proverbs in The Mind of Africa (chapter 2), and Gyekye not only makes use of proverbs in An Essay on African Philosophical Thought (passim) but also vigorously argues their philosophical relevance (chapter 2.1). This proverbial dimension to Ghanaian philosophical discourse is palpably present in almost all the essays in this volume. The day will come when this will not be so prominent a feature of Ghanaian philosophy, but that will not be until the proverbial and other sources of philosophical insight in our traditional culture have been well exploited in providing an accurate and adequate picture of our traditional philosophical thought. That will be a necessary phase of our effort at constructing philosophies that are also cognizant of the rich variety of sources of philosophical insight in the modern world.
At present, accounts of traditional thought, having emerged from the work and influence of Western scholars, not infrequently suffer from crass errors of interpretation and even of description. One of the inescapable duties of contemporary Ghanaian (and generally African) philosophy is to correct them. A quite common error is the supposition that because of the well-known communalism of African societies, African traditional thought lacks a non-trivial conception of the value of individuality. Gyekye lays this misapprehension to rest in his "Person and Community in Akan Thought". (See chapter 5 below.)
This work of correction also was started by our statesman forerunners. Danquah, for example, early in The Akan Doctrine of God (chapter 2) criticizes Rattray's suggestion in his Ashanti that the Ashanti worship their ancestors through fear, `pure fear'. Nor does he mince words in his critique of Westermann's somewhat contrary claim that Africans are not so much as moved to have fear of the Supreme Being. Westermann had said of West Africans in his Africa and Christianity (Oxford University Press, 1937) that they "acknowledge [the Supreme Being] but neither fear nor love nor serve him, the feeling towards him being, at the highest, that of dim awe or reverence". Danquah (op. cit.p. 9) quotes this and quickly picks out the inconsistency in denying fear and attributing awe. He then makes short work of the quotation--justly, in most part.(7) Another controversial remark of Westermann in the same book was that although it is "recognized" by the African "that the principles of good and evil are rooted in God, his will is that man should be good, and he hates evil-doings", yet "this is no more than a Platonic acknowledgement, it is not a sanction which guides him in his actions. Moral obligations are rooted in social bonds, not in God." To Westermann this is evidence of defective thinking. This, again, evokes very spirited criticisms from Danquah (op. cit., p 14 f.)
It is not the case, however, that Danquah approaches the works of Rattray and Westermann in a caviling spirit; in fact, he is generously appreciative of what he takes to be their positive insights. Indeed, shorn of the supercilious spirit in which it was made, the content of Westermann's last quoted remark suggests that, perhaps, he dimly espied an important truth about Ghanaian thinking on the foundations of morals. Careful study will reveal that while it is generally held in Ghanaian traditional thought that God is good in the highest, moral goodness is not taken to be definable in terms of his will but rather of considerations about human well-being. This finding is contrary to widespread accounts of the religious foundations of African ethics.
This issue has received quite some attention among Ghanaian philosophers. Danquah himself seems, on the whole, to come down on the side of an interpretation of traditional ethics which sees its foundations in humanistic, rather than religious, factors. This is the main impression one gets from the article "Obligation in Akan Society"(8) which he published in 1952. In his patiently argued paper, "Does Religion Determine Morality in African Societies?--A Viewpoint" (1976),(9) J. N. Kudadjie maintains that morality in African thought is determined in some cases by religion but in other cases by custom and other social factors of a non-religious nature.(10) In 1981 I gave an analysis of the issue in a paper on "Morality and Religion in Akan Thought."(11) It argued that if morality is taken in a strict sense and the concept of determination is interpreted in a logical or conceptual sense, there is no question but that according to Akan moral thinking, morality is determined, not by religion, but by practical considerations regarding human welfare in society. I pointed out that, if on the other hand, the notion of determination, for example, were taken in a psychological sense, different conclusions might be arguable. Gyekye also powerfully argues a basically similar position in his Essay (1987, chapter 8: "Foundations of Ethics"). Both our positions are, I believe, by and large--that is, subject to not necessarily simple conceptual disambiguations and interrelations--compatible with Kudadjie's.
In chapter 5 of the present volume ("Moral Foundations of an African Culture") I return to the issue just adumbrated. I attempt to articulate the outlines of an Akan-oriented definition of morality (in the strict sense) and to link it to the communalism of our society, an ethos that is being severely tested by industrialization (even such as it has been) and its social consequences. The problems of moral disorientation resulting from this clash of culture with historic circumstance are (independently) taken up by both Kudadjie (chapter 10: "Towards Moral Development in Contemporary Africa: Insights from Dangme Traditional Moral Experience") and Dzobo (chapter 11: "Values in a Changing Society: Man, Ancestors and God"). In each case there is a reasoned plea for seeking salvation from the moral resources of our traditional ethic, seen in its proper light. These two papers are thus eminently practical in motivation and orientation. This is true also, in varying degrees, of all the contributions in this work, a fact which prompts the following overdue reflection: Ghanaian philosophy, right from its origins in our traditional culture, has always been a speculative-theoretic effort at the understanding of experience and reality for the betterment of the human condition.
The reader will note also, in all the papers in this book, a comparative approach to philosophical discussion. The reason is obvious. The colonial intervention in our history, still a thing of the recent past, manifests itself at one level of our consciousness as a challenge to self-definition. That definition has necessarily to be by contrast to the colonial legacy. In chapter 2: ("Problems in Africa's Self-Definition in the Contemporary World") I confront a variety of aspects of this project of self-definition. Naturally, comparative considerations loom large in my considerations. An even more explicit exercise in comparative philosophy in our situation, though with a somewhat different motivation, was the Ghanaian philosopher B. E. Oguahs's interesting and lucid essay "African and Western Philosophy: A comparative Study" published in 1977.(12) But whether explicitly or implicitly, our work is going to have to be comparative for a long time to come. This need not--it ought not--overshadow our own direct philosophic contemplation of our culture or of reality. On the evidence of these essays, it has not.
Another imperative of Ghanaian philosophy is that of reconstruction. It would be clear, even on a little a priori reflection, that we cannot base our life and thought in the contemporary world on a wholesale retention of our traditional philosophy. That there are elements in the tradition from which we can profit in our present day existence is a conviction that informs all the contributions to this volume. But this presupposes an evaluative analysis, and it can be expected that such analyses will mount as our reconstructive efforts gain momentum. There are, indeed, hints of critical evaluation here and there in this volume; but that, obviously, is not its direction of emphasis. Apart from the axiomatic consideration that not everything can be done at once, one relevant reason is that the strengths of our culture and its philosophy are comparatively more ubiquitous in the areas of ethical and social thinking, which are the main focus of this anthology, than in the area of, say, the philosophical understanding of the world in the light of modern knowledge.
Philosophy is a dialectic, and a dialectic implies the interplay of opposites. Where two or three or more are gathered in a philosophic enterprise, there opposing points of view shall be found. Although there are lots of points of agreement here, this volume fails to be a counterexample to this generalization, for not all our interpretations of Ghanaian traditional thought coincide. One major point of doctrinal disagreement is, actually, between the two editors of this volume, namely, Gyekye and myself. Gyekye in chapter 5: "Person and Community in Akan Thought" strongly disputes the view, advanced by the Nigerian philosopher Ifeanyi Menkiti,(13) that personhood, as conceived in African thought, is not something that one is born with but rather an ideal that one may or may not attain in life. I happen to have arrived independently at basically the same view as Menkiti's, and, although I do not argue it in detail in any of my contributions to this volume--that belongs elsewhere--I do formulate a view of that sort in chapter 9: "Moral Foundations of an African Culture". Another major disagreement between Gyekye and me relates to another aspect of the traditional concept of a person. Gyekye understands the conception to be dualistic somewhat after the manner of Descartes while I interpret it to be quasi-monistic, featuring not an ontological duality of the material and the immaterial, but only differences in degrees of materiality between the body and the other elements in human personality. Joyce Engmann discusses this latter disagreement, among other things, in her elaborate piece on "Immortality and the Nature of Man in Ga Thought". (See chapter 8 below.)(14)
I perceive such disagreements as a sign of vitality in African philosophy. Our disagreements suggest that we are each struggling to make sense of our tradition. Short of resting content with pure narratives, supposing--what is open to severe debate--that such things were possible,(15) disparities of interpretations and also of reconstructions are inevitable. Gyekye and I do not see this situation as any manner of threat to our spirit of cooperation and mutual goodwill.
Incidentally, all the contributors to this volume are native-born Ghanaians except Joyce Engmann who is Ghanaian by marriage. But her treatment of the Ga concept of a person displays not only accurate knowledge but also real empathy. Moreover, her subject is generically of the most central importance to Ghanaian philosophy, to put it no wider.The concept of a person is certainly the most recurrent topic in this whole volume, and her detailed discussion should help the reader to plot the linkages effortlessly.
A volume on Ghanaian philosophy is a volume in African philosophy. Although there are differences of detail and, possibly in some cases, of principle between Ghanaian conceptions and those entertained in other parts of Africa, there are deep affinities of both thought and feeling across the entirety of ethnic Africa.(16) No doubt, in due course, both the commonalities and the disparities will be explored and mastered to the advantage of our continent. But, meanwhile, it is salutary to note that, as W.E. Abraham points out in the prologue to this book, `it is easy to be unduly impressed by the sheer number of ethnic groups, each endowed with its own ethnic heritage, and overlook, the repetitive elements and manifestations which they contain.' Accordingly, the Prologue provides a concrete continental contextualization, in terms of cultural institutions and mind-set, for the concerns articulated in this book. By a complementary contrast, Abraham's "Sources of African Identity" (chapter 1 below) connects the problem of African identity with an elemental crisis of the human psyche itself.
Finally, it might be well to note that the preoccupation of this volume with Ghanaian
traditional thought does not define the limits of the interests of the Ghanaian
philosophers represented therein. On the contrary, they all have broad interests and have
done work in various other areas of philosophy. They can be expected to apply whatever
gains in insight they may derive from that brand of work to the enrichment of the fruits
of their traditional preoccupations. That is the surest way of advancing the Ghanaian
tradition of philosophy in our day.
NOTES
PROLOGUE
CRISIS IN AFRICAN CULTURES
W. EMMANUEL ABRAHAM
ASPIRATIONS AND CONCERNS IN AFRICAN CULTURAL LIFE
The area discussed in this contribution covers in its northern reaches all of the African territories stretching from the Atlantic Ocean through Senegal across the desert of the southern Sahara as well as the semi-desert of the Sahel eastward through the highlands of Ethiopia to the Indian Ocean. Southward, it extends to the tip of the continent at the Cape, as well as taking in the island of Nadagascar. In terrain, this massive area is highly variegated, comprising forbidding deserts punctured by numerous oases, mountain ranges and their watered valleys, arid steppes, rain Savannah and rain forests. In climate, it spans tropical, temperate, and Mediterranean types.
Its peoples are as diverse as its terrain and climatic types. They include Black Africans, who are by far the most numerous of its inhabitants, Khoisan (formerly known as Bushmen and Hottentots), and Pygmies. These different peoples are also culturally diverse, especially if culture is understood to include the whole distinctive complex of spiritual, material, intellectual, ethical and emotional features which characterize the heritage of a society or social group.
The diversity of cultures indeed attests to the richness of human creativity and invention; it also ensures, however, that there will be variations in the mind-set of human cultures, variations in the specific aspirations and concerns of their peoples, variations in the principles of action and sensibility which they invoke in their attempts to solve culturally rooted problems as well as variations in their efforts to advance reality towards ideals.
Even so, the institutions and customs are, in the end, animated by mankind's common intellectual, emotional and physical dispositions. Indeed, such common human dispositions constitute one reason why the salient problems besetting people all over the specified territories have universalist aspects. A second reason is the general interconnections today among the societies of the world, with the consequent intermingling of their cultures through their mutual acknowledgement and the mutual influences of their politics, economics, religion, literature, art and education. In this way, the aspirations and concerns within local cultures come to take on a hue and a complexion not homegrown. Although this hue and this complexion can become locally present only through local expressions and cultural idioms, the dimensions which problems within societies acquire cannot be explained or resolved completely through the idea of local cultures, operating in isolation, and without beneficial infusions from other cultures.
How deeply these interconnections affect African cultures depends on several parameters. Among these are the sources and the depth of the individual's feeling of identity within his or her own culture; beliefs and practices which govern the individual's relation to the community; those mores of the culture which express the individual's relation to nature; demands of the technological culture on the individual; and concerns about the felt role and destiny of the local cultures in the world comity of cultures.
Perceived as a cultural being, the African today is highly complex, being in fact an accumulation of a variety of cultural fragments. He is endowed with a base of his traditional culture, which is by now irreversibly impregnated at various levels by elements of other cultures, some of which were imposed and others sought and acquired. His base of traditional culture is informed with beliefs about the nature of human beings as members of his society, beliefs about the ethics which should regulate human behavior within the family and its extensions as well as regulate general behavior towards members of the same society, and even higher beliefs which inspire the ethics. It is informed by beliefs concerning the place of human beings in the environment of nature, and the ethics which should govern human behavior towards that environment.
The populations of African countries are, like those of every other country on earth, ethnically diverse. In Africa, this is because the erstwhile colonial administrations created congeries of numerous culturally diverse ethnic groups within each colonial territory, and almost without exception the colonial boundaries have been retained and maintained by the independent countries. For this reason, every African, as a bearer of one basal traditional culture, is called upon to interact with fellow citizens who are themselves bearers of different basal traditional cultures.
Again, all African countries have experienced urbanization and technological expansion. These are processes which have brought with them influxes of populations from the country into the cities. These movements have disrupted the protective connections and the certitudes which generate the bonds and fellowship of rural life. The material facet of rural life, including property systems, and relations to land and labor; the institutional facet of rural life, including customs, ritual, political and social relations; the value facet of rural life, including ethics, religion, art, and the aspirations and wisdom which they enshrine: everything falls, in different degrees, into abeyance in the face of such mass population movements. In this context, even leisure becomes a problem because its setting is new and now unfamiliar.
There are many ways to explain this great population drain from rural areas, which has in some African countries transferred more than half of the national population to urban areas. In the end, however, lying behind all of the explanations, and making them possible, is the frustration of these traditional cultures. This frustration has been brought about because the new centers of political authority have not evolved from the traditional cultures, but have either been continued, with modifications, from colonial models which were earlier counterpoised to local institutions, or have been installed through coups d'etat. In consequence of their lacking roots in earlier African traditions, visions of the good life, problems involved in its pursuit, and stocks of ideas relating to the problems' solution are no longer generated (even in rural areas where traditional cultures hold the most sway) within the parameters of traditional institutions and their begetting cultures. In hopes of a solution, many flock to the cities, which are perceived as today's centers of administration, power, and authority. Indeed, the more centralized the administration, power and authority, the greater the rural drift.
The masses that move to urban areas, being mostly illiterate, also mostly lack the active skills and mental outlook relevant for acquiring the means to a satisfying life in an urban setting. This lack exacerbates problems of urban unemployment, and severely distorts the urban burden of welfare and social security. In this way, it creates within the urban areas wildernesses of homelessness and impoverishment.
The rural migrants bring some of the attitudes and domestic practices of rural life to urban areas; for example, they bring a fertility rate which would compensate for high infant mortalities in rural settings. But in urban settings, with their reduced rates of infant mortality, such fertility rates lead to high population growths which existing African urban economic, social, and cultural institutions are unable to accommodate properly.
Modern means of communication and central political authorities have a great reach indeed, and nowhere are traditional cultures able to insulate their people and hold exclusive sway over them. Still, in rural settings, the largest masses of people continue to conduct their lives against the background of their traditional cultures. There, the able are self-motivated to be productive, and the ability of cultural institutions to guarantee the welfare and protection of those too old, too young or too ill to be productive is never overtaxed. But now, examples of the desirable life held up by modern mass media and the rhetoric of governments have convinced many that they ought to be dissatisfied with their circumstances; and it comes to seem a matter of enlightenment and ambition to succumb to the lure of the city and to abandon their ancestral homes.
The frustration of traditional cultures mentioned earlier has increasingly dislocated the traditional cultures from their aims and weakened their credibility. Everywhere in Africa, this has been a major goad to migration. There have been several other local causes -- some natural, others man made. The periodic devastation of the Sahel region by protracted drought, compounded by the reluctance or inability of the national governments to introduce palliative measures to relieve their own people, has cost millions of lives, and triggered incessant wanderings and cultural collapse among its victims. The scale of the tragedy has been limited only by the heroic efforts of various nations, agencies, and sundry arms of the United Nations Organization.
Civil war is another man-made calamity and disrupter of cultures in Africa. In some areas, internecine war has been pursued without cessation for thirty years. Sporadic acts of irredentism and attempts at forced religious suppression and domination have wreaked their own havoc. These acts have especially intensified the cultural dislocation experienced inside the rural areas. Farms, grazing lands, livestock and entire villages have been overrun by armies, with bands of brigands following in their wake.
Elsewhere, there has been cultural suppression. The Hottentots of south Africa have been partly assimilated, and partly pushed into the area of the Cape, the Land's End of the continent, as cattle herders. The Bushmen, too, have been decimated, and their remnants pushed into the Kalahari Desert. Like the Pygmies of the Ituri forest, they were originally awesome warriors and exquisite hunters, immensely courageous, skilled trackers, and fantastic experts in their knowledge of poisons, people whose ancestors left records of their own prowess on rock paintings. Exploited by farmers of different races, a people without chiefs and brooking orders from none, Bushmen have been forced to retreat into the desert depths for self-protection. Remnants of them live in Botswana, on the veldt of Namibia and south-west Zambia, as well as in the Republic of South Africa.
The cultural problems of sub-Saharan Africa are by no means confined to its rural populations. Indeed, wherever western educational, economic, and social practices have been established in Africa there too the greatest dislocation from traditional cultures has occurred. Among administrators, among managers of the national economy and all who work in it, among educators and those they teach, in the armed forces, in religious institutions, in art and literature, and in family relations, problems take shape, and the manner of their resolution becomes determined, without significant consideration of the canons of traditional cultures.
Urban Africans and Africans trained for urban living think, learn, work, conceive their hopes and aspirations within a new belief system which comes with its own axioms and postulates, its own norms, and its own ethic. In consequence, problems of the individual psyche, problems of the relations between individuals, problems relating to the responsibilities of individuals to the group, and the individual's attitude to nature, indeed the very idioms of interpersonal discourse, are deprived of the context of traditional cultures, and arise like outcroppings of rock in a bed of sand.
These western practices and norms have undermined the westernized Africans' moorings in their traditional cultures. Where before they were driven by a sacred sense of responsibility towards their immediate families, their lineage groups and their societies, now they have a greatly weakened sense of their lineage groups, and almost replace a sense of their cultural society with a still developing national sense.
The purposes and contexts of labor become mutated. Before, work would be possible only in groups, an exception being made solely in the case of the artist. Work would regularly be with other members of one's family or age set; and its purpose would be the sustenance and well-being of the family, lineage group or community. In general, there would be no hiring of labor, each person carrying out family or social obligations as a matter of ethical imperatives. Now, labor is individual, and its competence, just like its rewards, is the individual's. To-day, its driving force is economic necessity.
The beneficiary of labor is now the employer; and its products are not chosen within the framework or dictates of traditional cultures. Even agricultural crops are to-day often cash crops rather than the producers' staples. Hired farm hands who would have enjoyed usufructuary rights in the land, and that only in virtue of their membership in their lineage groups, now work instead for wages, and have neither the inclination nor the power to continue the attitude of solicitude and respect towards the land, which the clan demands and fosters.
In the urban environment, the very idea of a family becomes different. The couple usurps the functions and prerogatives of the old lineage group in the education and upbringing of children. In their upbringing, urban children tend not to pursue the ideals of their cultural patrimony, and, as a result, tend not to be well acquainted with its traditions. In the past, and to-day in rural settings, their age-set would supply a framework for their training in social institutions and their initiation as adults. In the new urban settings, street gangs are as likely as not to take the place of the age-set. Social control is typically weakened, as the instruments and sanctions of traditional cultures are thwarted without equivalent substitutes. Punishment in its urban practice appears formal and cold, and its very purpose becomes a topic of debate among different theories, whereas in the traditional society its purpose is always agreed.
The new and complex set-up has not shown the same efficiency or success in establishing social coherence and unity as traditional cultures show where they have authority and dominance. In their hey-day, traditional cultures satisfied the wants which were defined and accepted, and generally achieved the cultivation and coherence of their societies. The new set-ups have been unable to satisfy wants which they themselves defined and accepted, and have almost everywhere fallen into regression. The difficulties and perplexities which people experience today have encouraged the strengthening of ethnic and religious factors in politics, and these do not aid the cultivation and coherence of the multicultural complexes that all African countries today are.
Many Africans do not even live in their ancestral lands anymore, and are in Diaspora in technologically advanced countries. Least able to follow the traditions of their original cultures in their new surroundings, in them or in their children the cultural lines from their ancestors will come to an end. Like urban Africans, their way of life is not bound by the ethical and social norms of their original cultures, and they hold aspirations of individual (as distinct from family) success. They are little inclined to sacrifice their own opportunities in favor of their siblings, or their children's opportunities in favor of their nephews and nieces. Their decisions on important matters of their lives are taken without calculation of the interests of their lineage group or kin group.
What makes all of the above problematic and disturbing to the mind-set of today's Africans is the fact that most urban Africans are only the first generation of their lineage to be urbanized. They, in fact, carry within themselves a base of traditional cultures upon which profoundly wrenching demands are made. Indeed, the process of westernization which began even before colonialism in Africa, and continues under the aegis of African governments, has created a cultural transition everywhere in Saharan Africa.
Every country of the region now exhibits different cultural systems which are not complementary fragments of one whole, but are divergent in their structure, in their inspiration and orientation, and in their aims and methods of inculcation. The family, which is the traditional inculcator of the cultural education of the youth, the western-style school, which is the inculcator of a new education with a different conception of the individual and his responsibility to others as well as a new attitude to nature, and the street, whose gangs constitute the new age sets -- these are the disparate systems by which the development of the youth must now be guided.
Sub-Saharan African governments look to western schooling to equip the people with the means of transforming their societies into effective and prosperous modern nations. And yet, on the basis of performance, these aspirations and promises appear to have seen fulfillment only with educated individuals, but not with the societies at large. While individuals prosper, the economies of most sub-Saharan African countries have become retrograde, and hopes for recovery and progress have become entrusted to the tutelage of international monetary organizations.
Western schooling, as well as aspirations for the occupations and ways of life which it makes possible, dominates the growing child's life and determines his future. The African family has not constructed a composite of values and norms culled from the traditional culture and the ideals of western education by means of which inclusive yet coherent models could be set before its growing youth.
THE CHARACTER OF THE TRADITIONAL BACKGROUND
The area discussed above is the home of over one thousand different ethnic groups. Nevertheless, in addition to pragmatic necessity, there is empirical justification for considering African cultural phenomena across wide areas. As a matter of fact, it is easy to be unduly impressed by the sheer number of ethnic groups, each endowed with its own cultural heritage, and overlook the repetitive elements and manifestations which they contain. Categories of such repetitive elements include belief systems, relations between art, on the one hand, and, on the other, political, economic, religious, and familial institutions and practice, social stratification and political systems, other specific institutions, basic rules for counting descent.
The aim of this section is to discuss some of the characteristics and elements of the traditional cultures, and the history which has brought them to the circumstances described in the previous section. Like any other society, African societies are preexisting networks into which individuals are born. These networks define relations which its new members are to bear to one another, and relations through which their personal growth is to be nurtured and sustained. Through their cultures, the members are nurtured on common beliefs, ranges of values, attitudes, and actions, which make life in their society orderly. Through the same cultures, the members acquire skills and develop initiatives, by which life in society becomes satisfying. The family is the initial institution through which this formation and nurture are fostered.
The institution of family life is surely a human cultural universal; and the needs which it is primed to serve are among the deepest seething in the human psyche. This institution creates a constant and well understood social framework for the nurture of the young until maturity; it establishes a hospitable and forgiving ambience in which the young can safely and securely train for eventual social responsibilities and intercourse; it also provides a regulated and protective framework for the responsible advancement of sexual life.
Kinship in Africa is unalterably social in focus, and where social kinship and the biological kinship diverge, the social prevails. Thus, in many east and west African societies, and among many Bantu-speaking peoples, a child may call his natural mother's sister's husband "father". In many areas, a woman is permitted to undertake rites of marriage to another woman, and act as, and be, father to the progeny who come about by the action of a chosen sexual partner for the mother. Among many Bantu-speaking peoples, e.g. for the Mukongo, the terms "father" and "mother" are not even restricted to the biological parents of a child, but are applicable to every adult member, male or female, of the father's siblings in the one case and the mother's siblings in the other. Hence, some fathers turn out to be female, and some mothers male. The same practice exists among the Kitara, the Ndaw, the Yao and the Huana. It is more usual, however, to call one's father's brother father, and one's mother's sister mother.
The simple point underlying these complex facts is that in African tradition, fatherhood is a social concept, at whose center lie systems of sacral, legal, and economic relations and responsibilities. Children are held to be born into the society via the clan. The elementary family is in this context merely the child's gateway into society. Accordingly, it is whatever group to which the duty of raising the child to the status of a full and competently functioning member of society is entrusted which constitutes its parents. This group may be a man and his wife, or, may include their own agnate.
Even so, one can still say that two sorts of kinship relations define and knit the members of African families together: descent and sexual. Descent can be uterine or semenal. When it is uterine, the issue are full siblings. When descent is merely semenal, there are co-wives, whose children from their joint husband are linked by descent. The co-wives themselves are related only by virtue of their joint husband, and so merely sexually. Marriage is that institution which forgathers members of both kinship relations.
In African traditions, marriage is procreative in its primary purpose. Accordingly, women who have attained menopause do not in general remarry, and, in some societies, e.g. among the Nargi, their current marriage can be terminated in this circumstance. Men, likewise, are not expected to marry, unless they have a chance of fathering children; and subsequent impotence or sterility in a married man can cause him to lose his wife.
Even so, the procreative purpose has been traditionally regulated, and children of the same mother are by custom separated by three years or more, except in the case of infant death, in order to safeguard the physical and mental health of the nursing mother and her children, as Kikuyu elders, for example, painstakingly explain to young initiates. This spacing was achieved by absolute abstention, reinforced by a series of taboos, forbidding sexual contact during the period of nursing, by husband and wife maintaining separate rooms, often in separate houses, and by the new mother retreating to the home of her own folk.
A traditional African marriage is a linking of two families through the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others on the part of both, except in the case of the man in a polygynous marriage. The state of marriage bestows mutual rights on man and wife, and thereby imposes entailed obligations on them, and indeed on members of their original families. These rights and obligations are explicit, and are designed to foster conditions of domestic peace and tranquillity for the procreation and upbringing of children. Reliance is placed on the common knowledge as well as on the breeding of the partners. On this dual basis, the partners execute those silent adjustments which tailor practice to ideals.
Apart from these, marriages are maintained by legal connections as well as by prescribed economic responsibilities towards wives, children, and, if need be, other kin; sacral duties, rights, and privileges, social sanction, and the reverence required of children and wives. Stylized behavior is often instituted for the purpose of strengthening positive relations between the families. In some societies, this is sought through the display of exaggerated respect. Thus, among the Ganda, as an exaggerated expression of respect, tete-a-tete encounters and conversations between a man and his wife's mother are traditionally proscribed. Among patrilineal societies, the person to avoid is a man's wife's father. Traditionally, both the Toro and the Lendu scrupulously avoid such contact. In many societies of southern Africa, a woman cannot mention her husband's father by name. In other societies, good relations are sought through the stylized reduction of chances of adversarial encounters between the families, which would force upon a wife a choice between her husband and her own family. For this, a certain amount of bantering is enjoined between members of the two families as a method of conflict prevention, especially between a man and his brothers- sand sisters-in-law, none of whom can take umbrage at the seeming insults.
The relations created in the marriage rite are involuntary, and inherent in the state of marriage. They may in many cases persist after the death of the husband. For example, among the Nuer, the Zulu, the Margi and others, who recognize levirate obligations, a deceased man's wife, if she so chooses, can continue to bear him children by the action of his surviving brother, as his surrogate regarding his rights as well as his obligations. The complex of relations between husband and wife can only be dissolved, barring an annulment, through divorce and only in societies where provision for this exists. Some of the rights of the husband, apart from reciprocal sexual rights, are rights in rem, such that the man, aggrieved by reason of the adultery of his wife with another man, or of her death at the hand of another, or of her abduction, or of the alienation of her affection, can demand adjudication and the invocation of sanctions. Rights in rem may also be shared or collectively held. The woman's kin however retain the right of protecting her against abuse and ill usage by her husband.
A wife can hold independent wealth, since the duty of support rests with the husband, and the means of one wife cannot be used to support children of a second wife. She enjoys legal rights and discharges sacral and political responsibilities which add up to a high social position. In societies where there is a king, there also is a queen-mother. To wives is entrusted the initial training of a children and the transmission of the traditions, religion, morals, manners, tastes of the society. A wife enshrines the moral force of a society; a being more mysterious than a man, she is more sacral, and is the object of many taboos and rites, and is often revealed as the innermost secret of male religious societies.
Wives have the same rights even in a situation of polygyny. In general, a man cannot even take a second wife without the consent of the first, the consent being signified by the acceptance of a pacification fee. In polygamy, steps are taken to foster a spirit of cooperation and friendliness between the wives. To this end, it is important that they do not share kitchens. In the spirit of cooperation and friendliness, they afford one another the companionship and conversation of adults.
Marriage in African traditions is the joining of two families through the union of one man and one woman and their children, always to the exclusion of all other men as regards the woman, and in monogamous societies to the exclusion of all other women as regards the man. The first step is the selection of a maiden on the basis of her own beauty, known character and good health. Besides, she must not be related to murderers or the insane. The proposal of marriage is made through a deputation from the man's kin-folk to the woman's father and kin-folk. As earnest of their good faith, and as an expression of the degree of honor and esteem held for the woman's family, they make a series of prestations consisting of items of wealth, however locally expressed - e.g. livestock, hunting implements, money. Without such prestations, any eventual liaison is only an irregular union and enjoys no protection. In some societies, the prestation is not material, and the man is required to serve the kin of the woman for a period of time, during which he is subject to exhaustive scrutiny. In yet others, they include an exchange of marriageable women into the two families.
The marriage is itself concluded in a public ceremony which proclaims the new status of the partners. Unless it is a remarriage on the woman's part, proof that she was not virginal at the consummation of the marriage can be sufficient cause for its immediate annulment. Her persistent infertility after consummation can be sufficient ground for the termination of the marriage and a demand for the return of the prestations. However, in societies with a sororate tradition, the marriage can be saved by the provision of the wife's sister to bear children for her.
The children of the marriage are in general filiated into the father's kinship group or the mother's depending on the social determination of descent. In some societies of both east Africa and west Africa, this determination takes into account the size of the prestations. And in a few, filiation is cognatic. The children absorb the traditions, mores, and etiquette of their kinship groups, are instilled with the deepest feelings of affection and esteem for their kinship group and its members, and are cushioned and nurtured by a substantive kinship group whose motivation is sacral, and into which the children are bonded. Grandparents hold a position of special honor and affection, enjoy special friendship with their grandchildren, and act to prevent parental excesses. As elders, they are cherished as the repository of communal wisdom, and their words are regarded as stronger than an amulet.
A man, his wives, their unmarried children, and, sometimes, also their married children with their spouses and children live together in a set of buildings collectively making a household. A household thus constitutes a kinship group of kin descended from common ancestors, but only to a shallow depth, typically spanning three generations. It is strictly exogamous. It is a corporate body, holding land in trust for the exclusive use of its members. A collection of such households, which trace their kinship to a deeper and commonly known level, is an exogamous lineage group. Also a corporate body, it renews and strengthens the inter-household relations by retaining responsibility for the rites of passage of all members of its constituent households. It fixes a man's social status, and determines his succession to office. In general, it performs and supervises sacral rites.
A wide net of households which are interconnected through unilineal descent to great depths, whose details are known only in the lore of the clan, fuses the households together. As a means of mutual recognition, each clan is associated in a totemic manner with a natural species of plant, bird or other animal. Members of a clan who are otherwise mutual strangers come through such totemic association to recognize their mutual kinship, and to invoke the responsibilities and privileges designed into the kinship of the clan. Although in theory, a clan must ensure the welfare of each member, actual solicitude regarding this in practice falls on members of the household. The clan is the vehicle of multilineal social organization. It is the true land owning body, holds it in perpetuity, and has no power to alienate it in part or in whole. The clan regulates production, and constitutes a political and supreme religious body, which apportions social responsibility to lineage groups, and determines fields of succession. Differences between the assigned responsibilities cause some lineage groups to take precedence over others in the succession to political and religious offices. Likewise, although each clan is entrusted with special responsibilities of state, the differences between the social and political offices and duties create differences in prestige and status between clans.
Almost all African societies traditionally are unions of clans, and the administration of the union of clans is most often through the instrument of the state. The state is the more or less organized sum of the legislative, judicial, administrative and coercive organs of the society instituted for the order, protection and welfare of its citizens. The highest authority in this scheme of functions in centralized states, as most African traditional states are, is the paramount chief or king. Societies, like the Tiv, are not really stateless, but only diffuse and decentralized in their manner of carrying out functions of state.
A king or paramount chief is to be distinguished strictly from the office which he bears. The office itself is a sacred one, the object of awe and reverence, and the focus of the deepest religious performances. It is defended by a system of taboos and observances. It is the legitimizer of the hierarchy of authority and power by which the functions of the state are carried out. It is only derivatively, and not inherently, that the person of the king is likewise sacred. His accession is on the basis of the consent of electors, and his continuance in office is at the sufferance of his council and his people. Without inherent power to subjugate his people or territory, his own ascendancy is entrenched by the mystique he derives from his office as sacerdotal leader. Accordingly, he is required to be a paragon of the spiritual and moral purity of his people and a repository of their intellectual virtues and wisdom. He is the symbol of the fecundity of society and the fields, and is celebrated at harvest festivals. In line with this, his virility and fruitfulness should be evident, or he could be deposed.
The king is surrounded by a council of chiefs and courts. It is an African saying that there are no bad kings, only bad counsellors. Even so, he can be deposed for a variety of causes. These include contumacy with respect to his council, oppressiveness, corruption in office, neglect of affairs of state, moral turpitude, and physical or psychological incapacitation.
Although the king's council is subordinate to him, it has inherent rights and competencies, and powers reserved from the king. From the council devolves the authority whereby many functions are carried out by families and village committees, and, in some places, age-sets and religious societies. Typically, there are lower chiefs acting as local governors, who in many societies are kinsmen of the king. They make local rules, raise taxes and tribute, extract labor, sacrifices, and the means of festivals and public celebrations. They must be acceptable not only to the king but also to the people.
The local governors or provincial chiefs were entrusted with judicial functions. They presided over courts which comprised members of principal social groups in the area, like clans, lineage groups and kinship units, and in areas age-sets also. Trials were attended by the principals in the suit, their witnesses, their local supporters, and members of the community at large, who were there to see to it that cases were equitably adjudicated. At the end of all the statements by the principals and their witnesses, opinions were delivered including disquisitions on civic responsibilities in an ascending order of privilege and protocol from the most junior judge to the president of the court who gave the final decision, after weighing all testimony and the opinions of his colleagues. The community saw to it that the decisions of the court were obeyed under threat of social and religious sanctions. Even so, the aim of the court is not purely punitive. Its intent in the arbitration of disputes is the restoration of norms, restitution for injuries inflicted, and in general reconciliation. Always, dissatisfied parties retained a right of appeal.
Of course, there are African societies whose traditions do not include a strong centralized authority, like the Logoli, the Tallensi, the Tiv and the Nuer. In such societies, however segmented, procedures nevertheless exist for preserving and defending public peace, and for establishing and sustaining public harmony. Disputes are thrashed out not in regularly constituted court, but in moots attended by factions from the same or different lineage groups. The aim here is to secure a consensus upon which the restoration of social norms could be based. In centralized and diffused states, alike, in cases where witnesses are unavailable or inappropriate, recourse may be made to oracles and divination to obtain the judgment of interested gods. Steps are often taken to correct the possible bias of one oracle by a demand for the opinion of a second oracle.
The institutions were expressions of comprehensive belief systems, which were organized around mythic creeds. These creeds define a view of the character of the world and the place therein of human beings. Typically, society is conceived as having a sacral unity, which comprises its living members, its dead (who survive in less substantial form) and its as yet unborn children. The living are in constant communion with the dead on grounds of kinship.
Each class of members is credited with distinctive privileges and responsibilities. The shades of the dead are ascribed a vision made clear by their acquaintance with the past, made wise by their selflessness and their solicitude for living generations, and made prophetic by their diachronic insight into the future. Ever watchful, they admonish and rebuke the living in whom alone dwells the right of decision. On account of the peculiar vision by the shades of the dead and the succor which they are able to give, they are invoked as a group, and the most distinguished among them celebrated by name.
Powerful as the spirits of the dead are believed to be, they themselves are subordinate to higher powers and, in almost all sub-Saharan cultures, to a supreme being. This supreme being is held to be the original source of order in the world, which he generally administers through the intervention of minor powers. It is these subordinate powers which are associated with various natural objects, such as mountains, groves, trees, rivers and lakes, where they can be summoned through the right invocations.
The supreme being is variously described. In many cultures, he is a sky deity, whose unhappy intervention in human affairs led to the birth of culture, as the Ganda account has it. This is true of the Dinka account, too, in which the birth of human culture comes with the cessation of human dependence on the sky deity for daily sustenance. With the Acholi, the supreme being is more a power with many local presences than a single individual which depends on the services of subordinates. Among the Bantu, generally, there is a vital essence in which lies the unity of all living things, and which is manifested in the highest degree by the supreme being and in lower degrees by ordinary members of the vegetable and mineral kingdoms.
A human being was thought of as a complex whole of various constituents derived from the mother, the father, the clan, and the supreme being. Some of these constituents outline his personality, his character and his destiny. Others represent an ineducable and unswerveable element in him and are the basis of the fatalist tendencies in sub-Saharan cultures. A few represent an element educable through precepts, example, and sanctions. Still more mark an element connected with the tutelary spirits of the clan, and which is molded by the prescription of due practices and the avoidance of others. Above all, there are factors ensuring that a man was amenable to reason. Finally, a person's well-being was based on the harmonious functioning of all these constituents.
The same mythic creeds dominated artistic expression. Saharan African art, whether figurative or not, convex or concave in lines, symbolic or imitative in representation, is mostly functional. The artist, who is almost always a sculptor, accepts a long apprenticeship, during which he perfects his skills, and also studies themes of festivals and ceremonies, the stylizations associated with the themes, the prescribed media and the prayers and incantations required for their rightful use.
When the sculptures are not totemic, they rely on an exaggeration of physical forms and disproportion. Some of these features at first struck mystified observers as frightfully grotesque, and of the same order of degradation as gargoyles. As a result of the subsequent influence which the same features exerted on the minds of non-African artists like Picasso and Braque in Paris, Kirchner and the German Expressionists, Henry MNoore and Jacob Epstein in England, they gained a different appreciation, and the same vibrant conatus and Immediate power of most African sculptures which made them so effective in African ritual ceremony have become more widely experienced.
It is true that in certain African societies, mainly in west Africa, there was a late court art which was decorative in effect, though still functional in intent. It placed symbols and motifs on walls and entrance arches of palaces. These symbols and motifs were supposed to proclaim the power and glory of kings, and the sacred sources of their authority. It also placed symbols on the weapons of hunters and canoes of fishermen. In perhaps every case, except with artistic doodling, the finished work was described, among the Tiv, for example, as the self-expression of the supreme being relying on human instruments.
No account of African art can be complete without mention of the centuries-old highly representational Benin and Ife bronzes. These applied Yoruba discoveries in metallurgy and alloys. They are Iconic and monumental images of the head rather than the full figure, which when depicted at all is given a truncated body with a disproportionately large head. Severed heads and stunted torsos would indeed be grotesque if intended to be decorative. Many African cultures, including the Benin, in fact associate the perpetual constituent of a human being with the head. This is the constituent in charge of a person's destiny and the person's intelligence and craftiness. The bronze figures were without doubt connected with such beliefs, and in all probability depicted the heads of the most successful and powerful kings, kings of a manifest and accomplished destiny.
As a whole, sub-Saharan African cultures achieved considerable triumphs. Throughout the west, east, and south of the continent, they constructed a succession of empires and kingdoms from the 5th century A.D., strong monarchies with effective administrations and systems of taxation, as well as a flourishing external trade. The most renowned include the Ghana and Songhai empires in the west, the Azanian empire in the east, and the Monomotapa kingdom of Zimbabwe in the south. The stone ruins of Monomotapa still arouse wonder today. Indeed, one of only nine autochthonous cities in the history of the world was founded by the Yoruba in west Africa; and with its Vai script, Africa is one of only three continents to originate a system of writing.
The traditional cultures described above were penetrated by Islam and Christianity and dominated by colonialism. Colonial administrations in sub-Saharan Africa irreversibly put an end to the political hegemony of local cultures, not only by their assumption of the powers of coercion and the introduction of new social institutions, new ways of doing things, and new reasons for doing them, but also by their juxtaposition of the local cultures within newly defined geographic boundaries, which did not coincide with any previously existing.
Colonialism brought in new systems of education, an inquisitive and acquisitive attitude towards nature, the promise of mass literacy, scientific approaches to disease, the infrastructure of modern communication and commerce, cultural and religious enrichment, an expanded vision of moral ideas and ideals, the suppression of tribal warfare, party politics, and techniques of management and government unavoidable in the modern state. It brought ideals of constitutional government in contrast with sacred tradition, the ideal of legal egalitarianism and an impartial judiciary intended to pursue it, an efficient though impersonal civil administration, and the promise of a free press.
Colonialism also ushered in unbridled economic exploitation and sapped sub-Saharan cultures of their vitality. They became deprived of direction and internal impetus, and increasingly survived mainly as pageant and ceremonial. New ideas concerning individual accountability and individual reward, the spreading sense of individual vision and the ascendancy of self-interest in contrast with community interest as a basis of action, the growing sense of private power arising from self-action rather than clan direction, all of these atomizing factors, acting in concert, have loosened the internal bonds and efficacy of lineage-based clans.
The penetration of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa is extensive, and it is a force in different degrees in west, east and south Africa, along with Christianity. The nature of its presence and the effect which it has through its presence on traditional cultures is, however, diverse. In some cultures, it is hardly a factor. Among others, it is overwhelming. Where it is a factor, some local cultures acknowledged and coexisted with it, took advantage of its talents, while insulating the centers of its own traditions from Muslim influence. The Asantes are the clearest example of this. Their king was not permitted to convert to Islam, but his kingdom freely used Muslims as accountants, conductors of its external trade, scribes and indeed ambassadors.
The Asantes also sought to graft onto a substratum of their vigorous culture approved elements of Christian doctrine and ethics, selected ideas of western science and some technological practices.
Some other cultures were more receptive as regards Islamic acculturation. Many in the Yoruba culture, for example, in response to some racialist attitudes in colonialism, converted to Islam which preached the equality of believers.
There are cultures however which were completely receptive to Islam. Prime examples of this are the Hausa in west Africa and certain Swahili cultures in south-east Africa, where the Islamic experience is vastly longer. Indeed, the Swahili language can be traced back to the 9th century, and its literature began to be set down in Arabic script only a few centuries later.
It is however only since the 19th century and through force majeure that Islamic hegemony has been attained. Many Muslims in such areas consider that elements of traditional African religion have been duly purged, and that what survives is but custom as distinct from the prophetic tradition and revealed religion. The continuance of traditional religious practices are however evident in all rites of passage. Islamic and traditional African practices run parallel.
Christianity, like Islam, enjoyed its most formative influx into sub-Saharan cultures in the 19th century. However, ancient African kingdoms had very early presence contact with it. The ambassador of Queen Candace's court mentioned in the Book of Acts hailed in all probability from Meroe beyond the southern borders of Egypt.
The Nubian kingdoms, whose territory is now part of the Republic of Sudan, had a very early established presence of Christianity. It was in the 6th century that Monophysite and Orthodox missions were sent from Constantinople and brought their theological disputes and practices to Nubia. This early Nubian Christianity was, however, to vanish under pressure of Muslim traders and adventurers, and the strong intervention of the sultans of Egypt in the 12th and 13th centuries. While it lasted, however, it injected African ideas and practices into Christian observance. Its iconography was distinctly African, and its nativity scenes depicted African donkeys and cattle and a black royal wet-nurse as well as three black kings bearing gifts. Under the leadership of Unesco and through a vast international effort, many of its relics were rescued before they could be swamped by the flooding arising from the construction of the great Aswan High Dam.
Somewhat eastward, Ethiopia displays both a Judaic and a Christian influence. The Jewish presence in Ethiopia dates by tradition from the days of King Solomon. The Falasha, descendants of the Ethiopian converts to Judaism of that time, combine ancient forms of Judaism with ancient African practices. Presumably, today's Falasha are descendants of those who declined to convert to Christianity in the early centuries.
The history of Christianity in Ethiopia goes back with certainty to the 4th century when it was connected with the archbishopric of Alexandria. Through the centuries, it engaged in a program me of proselytization of non-Muslims and non-Christians, all the time, like African religions, connecting Christianity with issues of daily existence. Its traditional African features are quite evident, and include more than the religious integration of drumming, singing and dancing. Its achievements include the spectacular architecture of the churches at Lalibela, excavated out of one solid rock, an eclectic artistic tradition which combines early Christian styles with African motifs and ideas, illustrated manuscript texts of early Christian works now disclosed to the world, hagiological works and works of critical philosophy.
The changes wrought in sub-Saharan Africa since the 19th century reach deeply. The main problem posed is one of acculturation. The problem exists because up till the middle of the 19th century and in many places down into the 20th century, traditional cultures provided a close interconnection between social structure, laws, belief system, and work and art, and was the cradle of certitudes according to which people led generally harmonious lives. To-day, sub-Saharan African countries are transitional agglomerations of ill assorted cultures, racked at present with the conundrum of generating and supporting coherent and unified nations.
TRENDS IN THE CULTURAL TRANSITION
The culture of a people has many dimensions. They include a pedagogical one, teaching the common wisdom to succeeding generations and yielding the symbols and means for communicating that wisdom; an ethical one, declaring principles of sensibility and action, and sketching out the basis and limits of tolerance and cooperation; a prophetic one, bearing on the norms and future history of its people. All in all, it is a fecund womb of national identity. Acculturation in sub-Saharan Africa will be the means for interweaving the present diversity of cultures into a coherent whole from which can be derived the ends and the means of the general flourishing of society.
The anticipated result of the acculturation will be the re-invigoration of sub-Saharan African cultures, enriched by the colonial, the Islamic, and the Christian experience in a manner and to an extent which are beneficial to the peoples of the areas. The goal is the evolution of cultures within which the transformation from disrupted, diseased, untechnical and largely illiterate post-colonial societies into harmonious, literate, technical, industrial, prosperous and thoroughly emancipated ones can be assured.
The social problems in the midst of which the acculturation is taking place are many, forbidding, and unequally distributed among constituent cultures. They include problems of refugees, education, communications, health, food, water, rural development, urban planning, economic progress, and unappeased and recrudescent tribalism.
These problems are already being vigorously tackled. The civil wars, chief cause of refugees, are winding down and yielding to negotiations. Medical facilities and delivery have improved dramatically; agricultural production of selected crops has increased tremendously; considerable expansion of the economic infrastructure has been engineered. However, an exclusive concentration on the technical problems of economic development, without attention to cultural development and support, has led to general steep declines in gross national products and per capita incomes. Sub-Saharan African reconstruction ought to mean not simply the creation of a productive economy but also the fostering and sustaining of culturally coherent, vibrant and tolerant societies.
Indispensable to any such reconstruction will be a literate population. The dynamics of consciousness, the will to progress, the skills and the psychological attitudes necessary for progress can only accrue from widespread education based on soundly designed curricula. Universal, compulsory and consequently free education for all children in urban as well as rural areas will be the means to bring all into the context of the modern state. Already, scores of millions of children are already in school, with education at all levels locally available.
Sub-Saharan African illiteracy to-day is not confined to children. Much of it is adult illiteracy, and it cannot be glossed over. After all, education is the means of liberation from some of the limiting factors in our immediate environment--physical, social, and cultural.
THE MIND-SET OF AFRICAN CULTURES
The above sections have discussed characteristic features of the cultural scenes in Africa, the aspirations and concerns in that cultural region of the world, the original world-views of its peoples and the historical encounters which have contributed to the formation of their present mind-set together with its trends.
African societies traditionally were mostly unions of clans. These clans consisted of a wide network of households which were interwoven through lineal descent. The clans were generally responsible for instilling common beliefs, social norms, and living skills in members in order to bring about loyalty to communal purposes and assurance of security and provision for all.
The traditional societies were irreversibly penetrated by brand of Islam and Christianity, and dominated by colonial powers. These encounters altered the force and direction of the host cultures, altered social relations and the rationale underlying the organization of traditional societies, introduced new ways of doing things and new reasons for doing them, and brought within common territories cultures which before were highly territorial. In a word, these encounters changed in many different ways at one and the same time relations between individuals and relations with the environment.
Whereas the host cultures provided a coherent interconnection between social structure, laws, belief system, work, and art, a coherence providing the certitude and trust making for harmonious lives, the historical encounters have produced accumulations of cultural fragments still struggling to promote and support unified nations. Here lies a new challenge.
Since its beginnings in Africa, human culture has responded to great changes in its physical and social environments by creative adaptations and adjustments; but to-day, the changes and challenges facing African cultures are at their most acute and most pervasive yet. The perplexities thus caused have to some served as the occasion for devising programmatic social theories and cultural proposals, in whose light certain features of African cultures, which are held to be non-traditional, are to be curbed, because they are thought of as corrupting; at least, they are deplored because they are still thought of as being inauthentic and alien; for others, these same features are, with some caution and conscious purpose, to be integrated and internalized, and welcomed as triggers of beneficent evolution and catalysts of progress.
The stress of the changes is manifest at the seams of society, where individuals are bonded to one another and to groups, and groups are bonded to one another and to the ethnic society. The stress tends to weaken and to dissolve some of these bonds which make a society solidarist and cohesive. In view of the cultural realities of Africa, a few observers have also proposed theories of the traditional and ancient society, and have, besides, suggested hypotheses concerning its origins and the motives of its cultural forms. Relying upon these, they have developed grounds of comment, clarified a basis of acculturation, and synthesized principles meant to govern the crystallization of cultural identity. The cultural facts besetting Africa pose two general needs: i) the need to achieve cultural coherence and cohesion in the modern trans-ethnic nations of Africa, and ii) the need to establish new comprehensive ways of life, which will be grasped as being of value, and to incorporate a more or less common understanding of that value.
This weakening, this dissolution of bonds, is sufficiently widespread to suggest an approach of methodological atomism to the problem of fostering national cultures in today's Africa. It is a similar methodological atomism which underlies the universal suffrage with its "one person one vote" principle as a way of ascertaining the will of the group. However, a methodological atomism does not in itself carry any further philosophical implications. In particular, methodological atomism does not imply a social atomism, and is quite consistent with the general African view in which a person is an ethical being, inescapably rooted in social life, and subject to well-defined norms, typically imparted in the framework of the clan.
To-day's juxtaposition of diverse cultural strands in Africa, coupled with the general absence of an imperative culture, turns the people of Africa into cultural atoms, each person, it is true, imbued with cultural tendencies and cultural predispositions, but at the same time having open to him or her the attractions and the promise of every one of a rich and variegated landscape of cultures present. In this post-colonial era, when the power and authority of decision making lie with Africans themselves, there exists an embarrassment of riches in the shape of theories and methods upon which political and social decision makers can draw.
There is in Africa today an unabated and constant objective need for a consensus on the nature of the societies which are thought by African themselves, and the encouragement of positive impulses towards fostering such societies. The cultural features and practices which make up Africa today reflect the degree of diversity whose acceptance is necessary both for the growth of trans-ethnic national cultures and for regional, inter-regional, and international cultural communions.
The subjective need to form national cultures is a keenly felt one in Africa. There is clear realization that, without such trans-ethnic cultures, provincial cultural differences are apt to sprout separatist tendencies and actions, which have led to apprehension, oppression, civil war and general unrest. Certainly, the basis for such trans-ethnic cultures exists in the internal similarities among African cultures themselves and in the similarities between the historical experiences of the cultures. If the internal similarities are sufficiently acted upon by elements of cultures from Europe, Asia, and the Americas, which are present in Africa and belong in the historical experience of African cultures, the similarities can be enhanced and can eventually spur the irreversible flowering of national cultures.
Elements of cultures from Asia, Europe, and the Americas are already well known to enough millions, among whom they are admired and indulged. The scientific, technological, literary, and artistic content of these cultures, the goods which they have generated, and the high degree of self-expression which this content permits, all find great favor in Africa. These are all goals approved and desired in Africa for Africa; and there exists a brimming eagerness to engage in fruitful dialogue with the respective cultures, not only as the cultures supported by those achievements, but also as the cultures whose fruit they are.
In a way, these elements are only making a return to Africa, home of the Adam and Eve
of cultures, where all culture first arose in the mists before recorded history. They are
elements which resonate in every department of human life in Africa. In political concepts
and organization, in economic practice and structure, in educational institutions,
methods, and curricula, in employment patterns and labor practices, in agricultural crops,
farming methods, and husbandry, in the forms and uses of leisure, in music, dance,
literature, and the arts, in family relations and practices, in the rites of birth,
marriage, and death, in language, belief, values, dress, and manners, cultures from all
continents of the world have found firm footing in Africa.
THE OPENNESS OF AFRICAN CULTURES
On gaining political independence and sovereignty, African nations sought to fortify their independence by an assertion of an African personality or negritude. Attempts were made to characterize what is African and to declare an imperative to preserve and foster it as a way of exploiting political independence for the reclamation and pursuit of an African destiny, a destiny believed to have been interrupted by the colonialist episode. The attempts led to brilliant philosophical essays. Their cultural as well as their programmatic content was, however, quite sparse. They advanced philosophical speculation rather than a way of life. The concrete African features which they envisaged often consisted in ceremonial and pageantry, in spectacle rather than in conviction. It was more a promulgation for official functions than an expression of the life of the people.
Indeed, as regards the life of the people, such speculations represented a real danger. In terms of the a land, a language, a belief system, mores, customs, savoir faire, and art, nothing in the heritage covered anything like the entire territory of Africa. Proposals to pursue the African personality were bound, if taken seriously, to promote a divisiveness, dissolving the links forged in the colonial era. The independent African countries were amalgams of such collocations.
Because the certitudes of "negritude" and "the African personality" tended to be discovered by officials of government and the political parties in power, the practical expression was in an area of most interest to government: the very form of government itself. Attempts were made to establish instruments of rule and practices which officials conceived as conforming most closely to their vision of the African personality and negritude. In practice, this meant the introduction of a high degree of centralization, paralyzing to local initiative, and forgetful of the checks and balances conceived in the wisdom of African traditions.
The practices were called African socialism and communalism. In fact, they were by and large species of authoritarianism which were neither African in spirit nor communalistic in manifestation. The proposal to create political institutions which would be African in spirit was however not amiss: it is not that the specific nature of the institutions was inscrutable, but that the spirit of Africa, to which the institutions would give manifest expression, has not yet taken secure form. A confident and secure culture is an indispensable condition for workable political institutions, the source of their effective authentication, their defence and their sustainer. National political institutions call for national, and so, trans-ethnic elements of culture. This national culture will be a complementarity of local cultures, coopting their virtues and their psychic strengths and creative power, and the inspiration of its people.
The times are now favorable for such a development. The political and social upheavals which African countries have experienced have now concluded the first stage of their post-colonial era. That stage was marked by a dogmatism, inflexibility, and general combativeness, which, cumulatively, were the assertion of a separate identity, the specification of a cloak and a persona, through which thoughtful spokesmen for their African compatriots sought to be grasped, for the departing colonialism had left Africans naked. This is hardly a unique reaction, and is entirely similar to the efforts of various European spokesmen, in particular, certain German thinkers, to describe and thereby constitute the `Volkgeist' or `Spirit of the people' in reaction to the eighteenth century domination of Europe by French culture.
To-day, there is a greater intellectual acceptance as something applicable to Africa, too, the fact that all national cultures are now syncretist, that this is an inescapable existential condition of modern viability. The valorization of African cultures in this post colonial era requires an impulse forward from an idealized and static conception of traditions to the espousing of a vital syncretist heritage of elements derived from diverse sources, able to constitute for Africans a total resource for living, and to offer to non-Africans a familiar feeling.
This should not be an indiscriminate syncretism. The problematique of African cultures was not the cause but the result of the colonial impact; with national sovereignty gained, such consequences of colonialism as remain harmful persist in spite of the withdrawal of their cause. Their acceptance is what is often called the colonial mentality. They have no place in the syncretism.
African countries formerly ruled by France have always showed a greater acceptance of French influences, at least. They had a tradition of participation in the political and cultural institutions of France, which on account of its `France overseas' conceptions practiced somewhat assimilationist policies. In turn, French personnel participated in notable numbers in the administration and other institutions of the countries. The willing cultural openness in those countries led in some of them to a readiness to seek political, military, and other institutional assistance from France even in matters relating to internal politics. The same openness led to suggestions of an eventual multinational confederation with France.
All in all, however, the new openness in Africa derives to some extent from an appreciation of the realities of the African condition as described in the first section. Some national problems indeed need to be tackled internationally. Not only is there an increasing cooperation with reconstructive agencies like the World Bank, there is also a greater sense of trust in regional and pan-African contacts and undertakings. A more thorough inter-penetration among ethnic groups has also made for mutual acceptance and cooperation. In fact, religious difference is a greater cause of mistrust and exclusion in Africa now than is sheer ethnic affiliation, even though the trans-ethnic dimensions of religion in Africa have helped to foster transethnic harmony.
Another harmonizing factor is the relatively low number of high schools and universities. These are often residential and have served as centers of re-acculturation for students drawn from different areas and ethnic groups and even countries. With the effect of uniform curricula added, cultural barriers are broken down and loyalty to more universal cultural norms is advanced.
The role of government in all of this is not the reconciliation of well developed and self-propelled interests, but the fostering and nurturing of new and more comprehensive societies through initiatives in areas like education, personal liberty, health, agriculture, the facilitation of cultural contacts, support of enlightened rural policies, and the maintenance of public peace. These aims can be advanced through free public discussion and recommendation.
In the past, African governments have proclaimed the public good as the motive of their
decisions and actions. In this, they have only proclaimed a democratization of ends. In
social and national development, no end however lofty in idea can justify every and all
means. The democratization of means, of practice, and of institutions that recognize and
defend practice is an unexcludable and irreplaceable expression of human dignity in the
political life of a nation. In the belief systems of Africa, in which human beings are
typically invested with an ultimate and ineradicable dignity, there should be no
justification for any kind of authoritarianism, least of all one in which citizens have no
inalienable rights in their own country. The pursuit of democratic aims and practices all
the way down to regional and local assemblies holds the best promise for arousing the
faith of people in their destiny, for galvanizing their energies, and for fostering the
degrees of self-realization and self-creation needed by each individual for rewarding
participation in cultural life.
PART I
AFRICAN IDENTITY
CHAPTER I
SOURCES OF AFRICAN IDENTITY
W. EMMANUEL ABRAHAM
The most massive segment of African society is traditional, and yet not purely so. By now, it is irretrievably impregnated at a variety of depths by elements of a succession of once alien cultures. It is natural for current accounts of traditional societies to adopt an empirical approach with regard to this most massive segment, just as it is inevitable for them to resort to speculation concerning its past. The union of the two approaches is often made to spawn programmatic social theories. In their light non-traditional features are to be blanched since corrupting, or condemned since inauthentic and alien, or--with much caution--integrated and internalized as triggers of beneficial evolution and catalysts of progress.
I propose two discussions: one, suggesting a theory of the traditional and ancient society, an hypothesis concerning its origins and the motives of its cultural forms; and a second discussion which relies upon the first and from them develops a ground of comment, clarifies a basis for acculturation, and synthesizes principles governing the crystallization of cultural identity.
SOCIETY AND THE CULTURAL FORMS
The Existential Predicament
Social stress operates at seams: it creates or dissolves them; it makes society solidarist or fissiparous. Its actual effect evidently depends in part on the extent of its homogeneity. When this is sufficiently extensive, the stress is experienced as an existential predicament; and yet it may become a welding power if tapped, and if untapped a disruptive force and breeder of anarchy. Let humanity's first realization that nature is independent of man, of his needs, his desires and his motives be an original existential predicament. In any age before the practical mastery of nature, this perception of nature as intractable is bound to be traumatic. This threatening condition would call for a pragmatic resolution through practice first, and subsequently an intellectual resolution through theory. The theory would initially rationalize the practice and thereby subsequently guide it. In the latter stage, it would define the goals and moments of practice, and it would create the ground for its optimism. In turn, with each appearance of success, practice would give an air of confirmation to theory, and thus help entrench it.
At their first appearance, practice would comprise a variety of formulae, incantations, magical rites and ceremonies, all calculated to bind nature to the ends of man; and theory would take the form of nested myths. There are reasons for these forms. One can imagine that our earliest attempts to overcome the shocking discovery concerning nature were oneiric. This would cause our earliest dreams to have the character of nightmares; for in order to come to terms with our distress, we must first re-enact the shocking discovery in circumstances in which there is certitude of a continued escape from the distress. The re-enactment of the shocking discovery in dream constitutes the nightmare, and in the measure that we are successful in overcoming it, we ourselves may become heroic agents in our dreams, inexplicably equipped with the power to overcome refractory nature. We herewith create the prototype of the wish-fulfilling dream.
Alternatively, and more likely, agents other than ourselves intervene in the dream in our behalf, presenting unguent for the distress, solace for the unhappy consciousness. These agents act not as benevolent aliens, but as subjective surrogates, imbued on the occasion of the dreams with anima and thus enabled to communicate and to act, although in themselves they are known to be inanimate and inert objects.
In this latter kind of dream, we do mythify our experience of nature, for we personify objects, which indeed are recognizably inanimate, and imbue them with a supra-human efficacy. That they are recognizably inanimate may be gathered from the fact that not every instance of objects of the kind in question is held to be thus efficacious. The object which is imbued with the anima is thus untypical of its kind. The personification likewise is hardly metaphysical in import, for at that juncture in the history of human culture, the only genre of explanation or account familiar to man is historical, or, rather, biographical. Myth as an account must accordingly rely at this time on the biographical mode. Since this mode calls for a sense of human agency and human causation; objects otherwise known to be inanimate come in myth to be apprehended as willful agents endowed with purposes and motives. The failure of nature which causes the existential predicament comes in turn to be felt not as a mere sparseness but, under the same biographical mode, as a determination to tantalize our hopes, and to be indifferent to our wishes and welfare. This perception of a personalized and yet insufficiently understood nature now suggests the need for a supra-human efficacy in order to overcome it and coerce it to our ends. Even so, nature is only somewhat personified, for unlike real persons, it cannot be trained or bound through mere cunning or strength.
Indeed, infants too seem to experience a similar existential predicament when they discover that their circumambient world is occasionally refractory. Typically, they are thrown into a rage which solicitous mothers may pacify by conformable behavior. If infants too were highly conceptual, their rationalization of these facts would be mythic in content. One surmises that their earliest dreams would likewise and in any case be nightmarish, re-enacting the refractoriness and devising oneiric means to overcome it. In the adult life of the society, however, mere rage would be impotent, and circumambient nature, disposed more like a stepmother than a doting mother, would require to be tackled by other means, if the threat of the abortion of mankind so posed is to be stalled.
I know that a widely held view is that our first experience of nature is symbolic and mythic. What I am suggesting, on the other hand, is that our first experience is in fact thoroughly literal. The experience of slaking our thirst from rivulets and springs, or of assuaging our hunger from harvests in the wild must from the very first have been a matter of course, and completely devoid of symbols. The sure instinct which leads infants to the mother's breast, or man to the abundance of nature, completely lacks metaphysical or speculative motives. Pre-prandial or postprandial grace surely must be a later and non-instinctual development. Rather, it must take the distress of our existential predicament--when rivulets turn brackish or springs dry up, when wild harvests fail a fruit-gathering and improvident society, in a word, when nature is experienced as independent of our will, and a threat of the abortion of man can be smelled--to compel us to resort to mythification and mystery. The resulting imbuing our dreams of otherwise ordinary objects with anima and supra-human efficacy can be accepted also as the prototype of sacralization. And, if sacralization be the paradigm of a symbolic perception of nature, then the present contention is that it only ensues upon the existential predicament, by which it is evoked as a response, and does not precede it at all.
Myth as Existential Response
The overriding pre-occupation of man in this condition would surely be to overcome and mold nature at all costs. The two levels of components in implementing this purpose are practice and theory; these mark the real and pregnant beginning of human culture, the substitution of plan for instinct. The overriding purpose of both the practice and the theory is to situate man safely in the world. To guide will and plan, mankind devises ritual and myth.
This overriding purpose imposes certain typic features upon both ritual and myth. That myth devised in response to the original existential predicament will be called original myth. Three things evidently need to be addressed by it as desiderata which impose typic features upon it. These features will distinguish original myth, irrespective of its actual origins and initial circumstance; they are universal features.
The first of these is that original myth must offer assurance of dependability in nature. This requires that nature be conceived as being subject to rule and as order made manifest. So anxious has myth been to offer that assurance that it has often conceived the order as inexorable, and has expressed it in terms of idioms of necessity or fate and its handmaidens. Because its genre must still be biographical, original myth assumes the form of a genesis account, an account of the beginnings of the world as a whole, and also of society. It is also in the context of society that the course of nature poses a threat of an abortive humanity, and it is only in the same context that the survival of humanity can be conceived and preserved.
The intended orderliness of nature is not to be grasped as a sheer datum. This much has been apprehended in the felt intractability and the existential distress it begets and which may occasion unexpected famine through blight, and physical destruction through sudden flood, earthquake, or spontaneous conflagration. In the light of this, the first task of original myth is to create an account which depicts nature as really orderly, and explains the threatening variation as an aberration. The practical interest in this first thrust of myth is eventually to make the orderliness so revealed accessible to human will and purposes. The key to this access is ritual practice.
The second typical feature of original myth is connected with another urgent task; this is to present the threat so posed in the aberration as gratuitous. Were it not gratuitous but merited, there might well be no way to evade it or to prevent it, no way to bend nature to human purposes and will, with the consequence that humanity might yet be aborted. The second feature is therefore an account of fault and the causes of the aberration. The third typic feature is connected with a third task, that of securing the means of making these optimistic conceptions fruitful. It rationalizes the rites calculated to thwart the intractability of nature and render its orderliness once again beneficent.
The characteristic manner in which the original myth introduces the orderliness is through the idea of creation, conceived as an operation upon a pristine chaos or indeterminateness or even nothingness. Creation is thus portrayed as the eduction of a paradisiac state out of this pristine nebulousness. The anthropocentric emphasis of this cosmogony is unmistakable, and as regards man this beneficent orderliness is expressed in terms of the subjection of nature to his dominion. Yet this universal and original existential predicament is connected with the fear that nature might not be antecedently primed to serve the purposes and needs of man. This inspires little confidence in the idea of an initial paradisiac state. A contradiction arises in paradise, for it is in paradise that the aberration is experienced. It is the psychic terror so generated by this contradiction that original myth seeks to relieve through its genetic explanation of the aberration and through its theory of fault.
The right conception is desperately crucial, for if the aberration were to be due to some failing in man, the refractoriness of nature would loom as a recoiling or alienation of a paradisiac nature from man; and this would entail man's expulsion from paradise. Original myth transforms this experience of alienation, and infuses it with optimism. This is its second typic feature. The chaos, the indeterminateness, the nebulousness is external to man and is the ultimate source of the refractoriness of nature. It is the mother of this possibility. The fruition of the possibility is, however, due to some specific event, an event which brings about a disconnection of human society from the beneficent order of nature. The event initiates a regress into the nebulousness. Man himself must be blameless in this event.
Man's blamelessness in this event suggests an early conception of fault as a merely external blemish and not an internal failing--something essentially superficial which can be removed or reduced through cleansing means, rites or other benign enactments, possessing a restorative power. In this light it is easy to correct that austere idea which attributes to the barbarousness of ancient society the certainty of affliction for every faulty act. The fault should be conceived after a geological parallel, and not ethical at all: it is simply disconnection from the beneficent order of nature, and such disconnection, howsoever brought about, is an inconvenience to any person or group situated at that point. Notions of desert and vengefulness are not required in the least. This much is confirmed by the antecedent inchoateness from which the paradisiac state itself is coaxed. The inchoateness poses a continual threat of perturbation and regression.
The third typic feature of original myth lies in a prescription of rites and usages able to restore aberrant nature to its beneficence. With these, a new conception of fault emerges, for further lapses of this beneficence or, what is phenomenally the same, the apparent failure of the rites, must now be attributed to acts of omission or commission, whether voluntary or involuntary, on the part of individuals or groups of individuals, in short, to human mistakes. With this arises the ascription of blame and the meted punishment. This new view of fault with its associated vengefulness seems needed for the general credibility of the ritual usages, for now their apparent failures can be promptly explained in terms of such reprehensible mistakes, and so in terms of interference. By now a transition has occurred from impersonal fault to authored offense.
These ideas can indeed be illustrated from extant myths. There is clear reference to the prehistoric chaos from which an orderly world is induced and begotten. In the Bakuba, for example, Mbombo ruled when earth was nothing but water shrouded in darkness. Overcome by the pangs of birth, he exgurgitated the heavenly bodies. Meteorological processes brought about the formation of the clouds and the emergence of dry hills. By further acts of exgurgitation, mankind, animals and other terrestrial life were begotten. Similar antecedents of the created world may be found in the Tao, which Lao-Tzu described as formless, unknowable, and nonsubstantial. In Hesiod's Theogony, a primal chaos, a vast immeasurable abyss is described, waste and wild, from which at length earth arose and in the end, mankind. In the Rig-Veda, there is a song of an indeterminable state preceding the gods themselves. In the Zuni tale of the Pueblo region of New Mexico, a void and desolate space is described and subsequently filled by Awonawilona by dint of sheer thought and strong will. The Maori account details nine successive states of the universal and cosmic void. Even the Timaeus puts forward the formless, indeterminate and recalcitrant bounty upon which order is imposed by the demiurge.
Less obvious embodiments of the same idea are myths relating to creation from the dismembered body of a god or especially a monster or hybrid being or other distorted and not well-formed figure. Attenuated and perhaps parochial, but nonetheless similar, is the idea of the original commixture of earth and sky from whose separation earth and sky are articulated. The fashioning of a living and sentient man from inanimate earth, clay or mud, or his simple emergence from the ground, are but more forgetful variations on the same theme: the emergence of defined forms from the nebulous.
To recapitulate briefly, the leading part of what I have called original myth is cosmogonic in content, and its form is most commonly biological because its idiom must be biographic as earlier explained. The second substantial part relates to the dangerous influence of the pristine chaos on the scheme of things. The manifestation of this influence is seemingly recounted, not only in accounts of a specific fall leading to the loss of paradise, but also in recurrent images of disorderliness and its continual threat and similar themes welling up from the primitive well-springs of human nature and pre-historic experience.
The loss of paradise should, in my opinion, be sought in tales depicting the origin of death, and not in stories of meteorological disasters. Such stories do not relate to the original distress, but rather to potential consequences of ritual, infraction and offense, and accordingly are late. They appear to be connected with widespread maculation and general infractions of commandments designed to safeguard society.
I have mentioned that in order to wrest optimism from the maws of catastrophe, and explain the survival of man in spite of the introduction of death, original myth has to absolve man from responsibility. The most common device used to convey this in Africa as elsewhere is the message that failed. The Creator sends a message of blessing to man, which is corrupted into a curse by the time man receives it; the corruption usually takes place through an eavesdropper delivering the wrong word ahead of the authorized messenger. Sometimes, the authorized messenger himself tarries too long and corrupts the message through faulty recollection. The identity of the messenger varies from region to region, and almost from people to people. It might be the cat, the duck, the frog, the chameleon, the goat, the praying mantis, the tortoise, or the centipede. One way or another the assurance of human immortality is corrupted into a message of death. The Book of Genesis conforms to this structure also. Two trees are involved in the story of the Fall: one the tree of life, and the other, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2.9). The former bestows immortality (Gen. 3.21) and the latter, mortality. The prohibition regarded the latter only (Gen. 216 ff). What the serpent did was to pervert gratuitously the word which God himself had given to man, and to describe the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and of death as though it were a tree of knowledge and life (Gen. 3.4 ff).
Original myth also relies on other motifs to indicate the blamelessness of man in the appearance of death. In the Ruandan account, Kazi Ramuntu, common ancestor of all mankind, was directly created by Imana. Man did not die initially. One day, however, Imana was in hot pursuit of Death, so that man would never die. An old woman, in ignorance of the reason for the chase, pitied the quarry and offered Death refuge. Imana then decreed that as man had invited and welcomed Death, Death would thenceforth have its abode with man. It was not long before fratricide and other degradations appeared and spread. Man thus became liable to die in consequence of a virtue of supererogation. Whatever the motif, what is common to all such accounts is the repudiation of all human responsibility in the original distress. The early state of innocence which they preach is not an ad hoc supposition, but is crucial for the survival and integrity of the human psyche.
SOURCES OF NATIONAL AND COMMUNAL IDENTITY:
MYTH, ART AND PHILOSOPHY
Myth
The original events which myth records and ritual reenacts are events involved in our discovery of the independence of nature. If memory of them has been preserved, the myth of creation will introduce a power able to create the world, not as a pile of bodies, but as an ordered system. Man would be created in a state of innocence, which would be disrupted by some mythic event occasioning the distress. Even though potentially fatal, the threat is treated as being in the end futile.
These events are, of course, not now datable. They are both primordial and continual: they are also potentially fatal. The sedimented experience of the threat of abortive humanity is recovered in myth; but even now, in periods of great exigency, many are driven to science fiction and the most remote fantasies.
Myth is a universal, and is not bound by the particular time and space of the original
events which it represents. Myth reconstrues what is truly historical into that which is
historic. The first step is to shear off from that which is historical every element which
renders it spatially and temporally determinate. The events and kinds of objects so
treated must in the first place have been involved in a profound experience which becomes
sedimented and is capable of recovery in diverse ways. The experience, along with being
deeply affective, must also be universal. The second step is to reconstruct the experience
in a narrative form, thereby replacing the original principals with personas
conceived as bringing about their substantiation. It is through such substantiation alone
that myth is able to present history, indeed universal history. It is thus that myth
becomes universally applicable, when events which are originally locked in time and space
lose their provin
cialism and acquire the valency of the historic.
This substantiation encourages a conception of objects and events which invests them with a certain energy that reaches beyond their concrete span. It is when we limit real existence to the palpable and physically continuous that the conception of objects assumed in myth appears symbol-laden, mysterious or superstitious. The principle of comprehensive objecthood should certainly allow historical objects posthumously to acquire properties. Thus, one may say that a deceased person, rather than his estate, can be cheated by his lawyer.
If the motivation of myth is to promote an account which treats potentially fatal threats as being in the end futile, if the primary intent of myth is pragmatic then ritual will be crucial. Its aim will be a retracing of steps to ensure correction, a re-enactment calculated to evade the disruption and ensure control. To be useful for this purpose, ritual enactments will possess an identity transcending their local confines. This enables objects to be involved in a re-enactment, for the re-enactment is not merely mimetic or allegorical; it does not rest upon an analogy with the originals. It is precisely this substantiation which is reflected also in the mythic identification of image with object, and of word with essence.
I am well aware that the foregoing views do not consort well with those accounts which are accorded favor. In fact, it owes something to them. According to one not so current account, myth arises from the bewitchment which language casts upon thought. This view is philosophically interesting if not particularly so to anthropologists today, for Ludwig Wittgenstein too once suggested a similar origin for speculative philosophy. The best basis of this view lies in the linguistic phenomenon of paronymy, whereby one etymological root possesses different significations. For example, the root connection between the two Greek words laoķ (men) and lāoi (stones) is pronounced to be the source of the myth of Deucalion and Pyrrha, according to which men grew from stones. The general idea in such accounts is that adults used colorful and concrete language in their communications, and children lost the original meanings while retaining the colorful expressions. This forgetfulness brings about a pathology of language, whereby figurative expressions are misconstrued, and a mythopoeic etymology promoted for the vocabulary of morality and nature. Views like this have been held even in our own day by Ernst Cassirer.
A second view advocates a psychological mythology. Here, myth is said to result from the play of the subjective fantasy, and this derives from the sphere of affectivity and will. This is put forward as the origin of art and religion, and myth becomes the daydream of the race, to be explained by plumbing the subconscious and by producing symbols of psychoanalytic exegesis. This is of a piece with the species of accounts which regard myths as allegories of profound meaning.
A third kind of view, endowing myth with cognitive content, treats it as a highly subjective account of objective events. In this view myth is cultural tradition, a repository of ancient history or science. This view of myth, championed by Andrew Lang, Thomas Carlyle and Tylor, portrays myth as primitive science in which the human self is relied upon as model. The inward life, expressed in dream and imagination, is projected onto a nature which thus becomes peopled by animated and wilful plant, animal, and natural phenomenon, creatures to be influenced by imitation and propitiation. A limited form of this position was held in Germany by schools counting among their members stalwarts like Ehrenreich, Siecke, and Winckler, and also Müller, Frobenius and Kuhn.
The other view, held by people like Rivers and Bellamy, is that myth records history, rather than science. Related to this is the class of views which treat myth as ideological and social in purpose. With a little violence, commentators as diverse as Frazer, Malinowski, and Freud can be saddled with such views. Society justifies and enforces tribal customs, especially those relating to economic relations, by putting forward legend as tribal history.
No review of theories of myth, however cursory, could overlook the highly influential ideas of Levi-Strauss, who gives to myth the purpose of devising a logical model to overcome a contradiction, and makes mythical thought work always from an awareness of oppositions onto their progressive mediation. The views of Levi-Strauss in fact apply nicely to those subordinate myths devised to handle parochial loci of predicament. If the view I am putting forward is accepted, then Levi-Strauss can also be said to apply to original myth the contradiction lying now in the opposition between the beneficent orderliness of nature and the suppressed chaos in it which causes our original existential predicament. The whole function of original myth would then be to procure a mediation of the two. Levi-Strauss himself, however, applied his views to what I call subordinate myths dealing with specific predicaments and their loci. Not only could such predicaments arise from ritual infractions, also subordinate myths would need to be instituted to regulate and safeguard society. In the end, however, Levi-Strauss' account is purely structural, and is not directed at the question of origin or the typology of content.
There is much which none of the customary accounts will explain. Neither the claim of paronymy nor the psychological account as it commonly occurs will explain the typic and structural similarities among myths of widely scattered peoples, where historical and linguistic connections cannot be assumed. In the view I am advocating, a comparability of mind set in early man, irrespective of locale, and the comparability of his existential predicament and its cause, lead to a mythic similarity in the character of content, type and structure. Indeed, the original causes of the predicament are always parochial, local, and historical; but because their effect and significance are universally the same, they can be freed from the unities of time and space without historic travesty. The dramatic and miraculous transformations noted in psychological accounts in fact relate to the existential predicament and its imperative of resolution. Their reference to unceasing frustrations and bold deeds in fact merely imposes upon dream and myth the character of the epic. According to the present account, the frustrations reflect the experienced intractability of nature, and initial myth in fact gives a promise that they are not intrinsically unceasing. The bold deeds refer to the actions required to stifle that intractability and promise the same eventual optimism and relief.
In my opinion, the severest weakness of the above accounts lies not in any detailed limitation, but in their perception of myth as cultural tradition; for in this, they lose sight of the inevitability of myth and its salvific aspirations. The experienced intractability of nature and the danger thereby directed at man are what made nature worth knowing and categorizing; they are what shaped the nature of that knowledge and made it pragmatic.
Art
I have proposed the foregoing ideas because I would like to base upon them a theory of national or communal identity. Such identity has dimensions which are fostered, on the one hand, by social norms and artistic forms and, on the other, by philosophical schemes; dimensions arise by an unbroken ancestry from conceptions such as I have put forward.
Let me first explain the connection with social norms and artistic forms. These create a pre-disposition of deportment and reaction, an axiological framework within which priorities are ranked and goals imposed. In their artistic expression they explain also ceremonial music, dance, and the plastic arts, and literature.
Art is originally functional, and not a free or idiosyncratic expression at all. It is not a testament of personal taste or intimations, nor a creation intended for the museum or gallery for contemplation, study or enjoyment. Art for art's sake can only be a comparatively recent shibboleth. It is only when a people have been freed from the exigencies of functional art that art becomes a personalistic creation, an expression in which the individuality of the artist is paramount. It is certain that a society which dwells under the ever-present threat of the recurrence of an existential predicament of the sort which I have described will need to contrive corrective measures which of necessity can be repeated, a cycle of rites and ceremonies, until such time as it can invent a knowledgeable technology. The society will be organized around mythic creeds, and will embrace a view of the world and its own place in it which is metaphysical.
This given, the rites which are calculated to foster society cannot ignore the mythic theory of nature, and this theory is metaphysical in viewpoint. This viewpoint would imbue the rites not just through a general metaphysical preface, but by actually determining the very form and idiom of their devices. The ritual must rely on visible objects and palpable actions, and when correctly employed these are to re-enact original events. Now these potent objects and actions cannot achieve the substantiation and re-enactment of the past, unless, like the figures or personas in the early nightmares which I discussed at the outset, they are imbued with supra-human power and efficaciousness. Indeed, society itself is conceived correspondingly as being a sacred unity, comprising its living members, its dead which survive in disincarnate form, and its as yet unborn and unincarnate children. Each group by its peculiar attributes possesses its appropriate privileges and responsibilities. The spirits of the dead have a vision which is made clear by their acquaintance with the past, and in its behalf they can rebuke the present. They have a vision made wise by their selflessness of motive and by their single-minded insight into the present, about which they are ever solicitous. They have a vision made prophetic by their intimate appreciation of possibilities of the future, and in its behalf they admonish the living. Privileged in this magnitude, they still have to concede to the living the right of decision. At the same time, on account of the peculiar vision possessed by the dead and the succor which they are able to give, much consideration is due them. Accordingly, they are celebrated at appointed times, and invoked for help in time of need. The imposition of the appropriate form on the objects and events, which are the instruments of ritual, is the very same thing as art.
Art objects are central to such celebration and invocation, and could be so widespread that each family would possess such objects. Their forms may be dictated by the totem of the clan to which the family belongs, or by characteristics conceived as embodying the essential nature of a revered ancestor. The art object is not simply declared to represent such characteristics; it must itself be felt to embody and substantiate them, and this it can be acknowledged to do only if it itself exhibits a compelling form.
The most striking art objects have the society at large for the setting of their use, during public festivals and religious ceremonies in accordance with the calendar. These ceremonies are calculated to restore and strengthen the orderliness of nature and of society, and to evade the tragedy which a disconnection from that orderliness would entail. Again, the art objects were required to embody and substantiate the relevant forces, not by allegation, by description or by stipulation, but by credible and manifest being, something which could not be achieved without imposition of appropriate physical forms on ordinary materials. These art objects were creations of specialists who throbbed with artistic talent honed and informed through many years of apprenticeship to the master artist. During the long period, the apprentice studied themes of festivals and ceremonies, the stylizations of art associated with these themes, the prescribed medium and the prayers and incantations required for their rightful use. It is true that the creations would often bear the imprint of a particularly gifted author, but never in such a way as to register his individuality. His signature would lie in the entrancing degree to which his work is compellingly affective.
The ceremony itself would include drumming, dancing, chanting, and sacrifice. It might last for days, and its instruments by design encourage the building up of destructive feelings and passions. At the peak of the ritual, there is typically a massive release of tension and passion, and the mood of the participants becomes relaxed and even jovial. The art objects are then stored away from public view.
It is evident that these objects cannot re-enact dangerous forces nor the actions substantiate threatening events if they are representational and natural in style. When they are not totemic, they rely on an exaggerated physical form and disproportion, in order that directly and without interpretation they may induce the desired feelings and expected state of mind. These art objects were empathically fearsome, and incautious individuals who came into unauthorized contact with them during the ritual were believed to be in awful danger.
These abstract works of art were early regarded by foreigners as possessing only an ethnological interest, and no artistic value. From this point of view, they were judged to be frightfully grotesque, and of the same order of degradation as gargoyles. Subsequently, as a result of the influence which the same works exercised on others like Picasso and Braque in Paris, like Kirchner and the German Expressionists, like Henry Moore and Jacob Epstein in England, they were differently perceived, and their vibrant conatus and immediate power were more widely disclosed.
It is true indeed that in certain African societies, mainly in the Kwa language group (e.g., Benin, Yoruba, Fon, Ewe, Akan), there was a court art which I surmise to be in every case late. Even this art was still functional, and not decorative in intent. It was applied to the walls and entrance arches of palaces, and was supposed to proclaim the power and glory of kings, and the sacred sources of their authority. It is also true that certain societies, like the Tiv and the Fanti, permitted anyone who so wished to assist with their sculpture and canoe decoration. In neither case, however, was the finished work regarded as the individual or collective expression of the artists. Especially among the Tiv, it was described as the self-expression of the Supreme Being himself relying on human instruments.
The case of the highly representational Benin and Ife bronzes must loom as a notable exception to this view that all art is originally functional. They cease to seem so once it is realized that those pieces tend to be images of the head and not of the full figure, and that when they do depict a full figure, the body tends to be truncated and the head made disproportionately large. Severed heads and stunted torsos would indeed be grotesque if intended to be decorative. A clue to their real purpose should instead be sought in the fact that many African societies, and certainly the Kwa-speaking, which include Benin, do associate a spiritual factor with the human head, that factor thought to be responsible for unfolding a person's destiny and expressing itself in brand of intelligence and craftiness. The bronze heads were evidently connected with such beliefs, and in all probability depicted the heads of the most successful and powerful kings, kings of a manifest and accomplished destiny. In a full figure, the stunted torso would now draw dramatic attention to the enlarged head, as if the king were all head. The import is the same as that of an image that is only head. Head, palace wall, and arch would alike proclaim an accomplished destiny.
The artist who produced the ritual objects was himself regarded as a kind of priest. He was steeped in the metaphysics of his people and possessed the skill to concretize it in his creations. His mode of work has often been described in African novels, for example in Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God. At the peak of his work, he enters into a trance-like condition and becomes oblivious of the public and its doings. The trance-like condition insulates him from all distraction, and fixes him in tune with the forces which he seeks to concretize. His product is to be functional, and all has to be right, from selected materials, to incantations and propitiations. The artist invokes the very forces which are to animate his creation; by fashioning a work which embodies these forces, he becomes a channel of communication with them, the means of mediation between them and his society, he constitutes a priest-like figure. William Fagg, who has long studied the forms of these productions, has found that it is precisely the metaphysical purpose which explains the exponential design of much of African art.
The art objects which I have been discussing are obviously structural. I am prepared to suggest that the same functional intent imbues music and drumming, that in their original and principal setting their complicated rhythm, cadences, and counterpoint are evocative, calculated to induce a state of mind, and indeed to take its public through a pre-set range of emotions. It has often been noted by ethnomusicologists that in those societies which are closest to the traditional society, namely, those of Asia and Africa, indigenous music is connected with metaphysical and moral conceptions of its people. Where by reason of a triumphant technology there is little dread of nature, music comes to be appreciated for its form and techniques.
The situation is different, though not to this extent, for African sculptors and composers of today. Those who have tried to work in the style of past masters have failed to project the power of their works. Many factors are no doubt responsible here. Obviously, they have not been apprenticed to the old masters. More important, however, is their indifference to the old metaphysical vision and inability to commit their work to its service. When a society loses its credal commitments, and creative individuals do not serve such an outlook, a work of art truly become the expression of the creative talent of the artist, and may possess no function beyond its own aesthetics. It lends itself to exhibition, even to contemplation, and to pure aesthetic enjoyment. In the early centuries of the Christian era, when Councils defined a unitary creed, Christian iconography was functional, and relied on elements of distortion to proclaim its power. As the credal grip loosened, first under assault of heresy, subsequently through sectarianism, and finally through demythologization, differences in style have become profuse, until we now have the inoffensive, blue-eyed blond Jesus depicted with such overwhelming banality as to make it a religious farce. When society becomes atomistic and is no longer felt to be sacred, artistic skills lose their original focus and now serve individual perceptions and vision. The forms of art are then due solely to individual conceptions, and its products meant for contemplation and enjoyment.
Philosophy
It is not only art and artifacts which are connected with the purposes of original myth. Philosophy too has its roots in myths. I do not merely connect philosophy with myth, but propose to root the two in the same original experience, and oppose them not so much on the basis of their content as of their style. Plato believed that philosophy was born of wonder, and it was left to Aristotle to add that the wonder was not about esoteric matters, but exoteric ones like space, time, motion, perception. The principle of collection, not suggested by the list itself, is clear on the supposition that myth and philosophy are rooted in the same original experience. The psychically distressing phenomenon which occasions myth is universal; likewise the intellectually distressing features which occasion philosophic wonder belong within the common purview. Evidently, the existential distress can be safely intellectualized only if nature has been harnessed to a comfortable degree and its independence sufficiently overcome. Accordingly, Aristotle also noted that a pre-condition for the emergence of philosophy is the availability of leisure to a people or a class of persons whose material welfare was already assured.
Even so, the wonder which begets philosophy is not curiosity for its own sake, but a continuation of the original alienation. Its actual impetus is founded in a memory, in the recovery of a sedimented experience, and it is directed at a still distressing experience of nature. Fortunately, it is still possible to substantiate this in the genesis of Western philosophy among the ancient Ionians. As is commonly agreed, the early Greek philosophers saw a problem in change and devised philosophical accounts purporting to make it intelligible. Change is a generalized version of the original intractability of nature; it may even be distressing, and to the Ionians it was intellectually puzzling. Wonder now replaces the distress which occasions myth; and for its intellectual alleviation it occasions philosophy. If the effect of myth is to offer reassurance concerning the distressing phenomenon, the effect of philosophy is to offer illumination concerning the puzzling phenomenon.
The philosophical puzzlement was not sudden. The poetic tradition which preceded Greek philosophy also saw a conundrum in change, but it did not present it as an intellectual problem. It was presented as an existential one, responsible for a profound alienation. The poetic tradition was quite obsessed with the phenomenon of change. In fact the Ionians, who produced the first known philosophers among the Greeks, very early started to murmur about the vicissitudes of life. They were already successful enough in harnessing nature to build a surplus of material wealth and a surplus of nature, but they could have no assurance of continuing life to enjoy either. They soon broke into open accusation of the gods.
Homer, the oracle cited as authority for settling moral disputes, questions of etiquette, irredentist claims, and just about any dispute with respect to which one could find apt quotations, held out little comfort. He had indeed compared men to leaves. We only have a seasonal life, new generations arising as old generations cease. Mimnermos of Colophon, writing in the second half of the seventh century B.C., complained that man, without help of the gods, won material abundance, only to be cheated out of its enjoyment by old age and death. Could not the gods have bestowed perpetual youth on man in place of the torments of tantalization? Picking up Homer's image of leaves, he went on to list the ills of elderly life as poverty, disease, sterility, and indeed sexual fumbling. In passage after passage, he blurted the same lamentations: man was powerless before the gods, and old age was to be dreaded more than death.
Semonides of Amorgos, enlarging upon the same themes, even thought that Homer's comparison between men and leaves was the best thing he ever said. He himself compared men to cattle in the eyes of Zeus, who brought people to their end as he pleased. He exceeded all others in his melancholy. He proclaimed evil everywhere, "ten thousand dooms, woes and griefs beyond speaking are the lot of mankind." Semonides, too, although more cosmopolitan than most, still shared the dejection over the generations of men that fell like leaves of the forest.
The Ionians found no consolation with the poets, and certainly entertained no sanguine ideas about the after-life. The passage from life to death appeared to them like that from sickness or old age to ghostly existence. The ghost itself was held to be a weak, pale shadow of a real man. Accordingly, Achilles could say to Odysseus that he would "rather be a laborer to a poor man on earth than rule as king among the dead".
This distress which the Greeks felt at the fact of change was assailed in different ways. Initially, they attempted to overcome it through rites and myth. In myth, however, we have a poetic kicking against the goad, and not an unravelling of a puzzling concept. The solution offered by myth is, like its problem, existential in form and not conceptual. It is mythic, not philosophical. Even so, the myths sought to present a unified account of the world, and adumbrate the offices and arts by means of which nature could be controlled. These accounts were historic in content even though presented in historical modes. They relied on large natural masses like the water of the sea, the land of the earth, and so on, and turned them into personages. The vicissitudes which the Greeks resented were perhaps more painful than the original failures of nature, for now man is being cheated out of full possession of the rewards of his own labors. With myth, historical occurrences have been transformed into historic archetypes. The stage is set for the historic to become the philosophical.
Myth replaces the historical content with a historical style. Philosophy eschews both the historical content and the historical style in its handling of precisely the same experience as myth. Indeed, it is when a people have enough material self-assurance, and philosophy has emerged, that myth begins to acquire overtones of incredibility and figment. Until then it takes the place of philosophy. If we look upon myth and the historic as an abstraction and generalization from that which is historical, we can also look upon philosophy as further abstraction and generalization from myth. Myth has already shed historical facticity, but retains the idiom of personages, events and actions, not simply the use of proper names, but also the ascription of motives and purposes. The style of original myth may not be that of original philosophy; but its content is.
Philosophy, at its first appearance, represents a subsequent echelon to myth and, dropping the historical idiom, it adopts that of analysis and reduction. In place of biography, it substitutes explanation; in place of a human aetiology, it develops a technical vocabulary pressed into the service of a schematic account. Philosophy is neither biography nor aetiology; and yet it mimics biography with its literal ontologies, and mimics aetiology with its inferences. Perhaps the most profound misunderstanding of both myth and philosophy is represented in gnosticism, which treated myth and philosophy as at once history and aetiology; just as myth relied on rites for control, gnosticism relied on the understanding which a philosophy might provide for control. As a result, in gnosticism there is a recapitulation of the cosmic history of man, of an original alienating experience, a deterioration of perfection, which is sedimented. When this history is re-enacted, and the individual remembers who and what he is, he can overcome the original distress and thus works his own salvation. Salvation comes through knowledge, and knowledge is re-collection. It is evident that gnosticism shares with myth the idea of the original distress; it shares with philosophy the idea of the elimination of the distress through knowledge. Between myth and philosophy, the distress passes from being existential to being intellectual. With gnosticism, it is both.
Once philosophy emerges, it is all-embracing: it proposes a general account of the world as a whole. It is only later that it differentiates into branches, giving more detailed accounts of the parts which might make up a unified account. Similarly, myth too begins with an historic account of creation of the world as a whole, and subsequently differentiates ancillary myths of facets or factors which bring their own parochial distress.
Philosophy too is concerned with ethos, but now not the ethos of a people as such. It is therefore not obliged to make prescriptions. To the extent that it gives a narrative, it may recover embedded values. The rest of its business, analysis and argument is often conducted without prior commitment to the soundness or validity of its original descriptive narrative.
General myth and first philosophy are not contrasted in content but in idiom. One sign of the approach of the one to the other is the switch from a cosmogonical focus to a cosmological. Myth develops specialized forms to cope with more parochial alienations, especially those connected with institutions; philosophy, too, beginning with an all-embracing metaphysical concern, must and does generate specialized branches, provoked by the analogue of specific distress. The ascent of abstraction in the passage from the historical to the historic and on to the philosophical will be recapitulated in a comparable passage from the metaphysical to the epistemological to the logical, a sequence verified in the history of western philosophy, where first metaphysics, then epistemology, and finally philosophical logic and its variants become in turn the fundamental parts of philosophy. My meaning is as follows. Just as original myth may need to be safeguarded by the devising of additional and more specific myths dealing with the regulation of society and individual comportment, so it comes to be conceived that metaphysics will not be securely formulated until central questions in epistemology are solved, and in turn that epistemology will not be securely formulated until questions in philosophical logic and its variants are solved. This perception has experienced cycles and can be seen in the sequence from the pre-Socratics through Plato to Aristotle, and in the more stupendous ambit of medieval philosophy, seventeenth century rationalism and empiricism, and twentieth century philosophical logic and philosophy of language.
The following incomplete table sufficiently suggests the parallel intended:
Myth
Philosophy
Cosmogonical myth of origin
Cosmological metaphysics
Religion
Philosophical theology
Social institutions
Social and political philosophy
Ritual conduct
Ethics
Ceremonial
Aesthetics
All of the foregoing suggests a principle of appraisal which can be applied fruitfully to the case of Africa, for its original myths approximate in different degrees to that critical point where philosophy erupts.
This eruption counts, among the factors which determine it, the adequate mastery of nature as proved by reliable material wealth and the provision of leisure. At this point, there is a tendency for the hold of myth to weaken. Myth itself is not questioning or self-worrying; it does not isolate and examine. Instead, it reinforces itself by repetition and entrenches itself through sanctions; it protects itself by an immunity from skeptical investigation in the manner in which it is transmitted. Whether exoteric or esoteric in transmission, the cosmogonical myth itself--the most credal in character--may become with the passage of time and increased material confidence less concrete, sketchier and forgotten in detail.
The cosmogonical character of original myth makes certain weaknesses endemic to it. As a cosmogonical account, it cannot offer a general theory of being or of objects, and must rely on external relations between types of objects. Its style is historical, and yet gives no indication of historical destiny. If the source of the world of nature is itself rational, the account is liable to generate a vicious infinite regress. If the regress doubles back on itself, and puts the beginning in the end, it will close a vicious circle. And yet should the regress cease, it will only involve special pleading on behalf of some initial term chosen for the particular cosmogony.
Ancient cosmogonies tend to be genealogical. As genealogies, they are closed to discussion. We note that something begat something else, but cannot ask why it begat at all. The sources of such explanations ultimately lie in revelation rather than discovery, and we ourselves cannot deduce the mythic ancestors from our encounter with the world. Insofar as mythic cosmogonies are historical and genealogical, they must rely on personages and events. The first break introduced by philosophy lies precisely here. It was indeed appropriate for myth to adopt its personalist idiom, which made it comparatively brief and easily memorized. Its imitation of vision in relying on personages and action was well-advised. Philosophy, however, in representing further abstraction than myth, must abandon cosmogony for cosmology, personages and events for empirical and transcendental concepts, genealogy for reduction. The unity of the world can consist now not in the unity of its source but in the unity of its substance. Its motive is not to control nature but to understand it.
I have suggested a view of the origin of myth which connects with the origins of
dimensions of culture. I have tried to illustrate this connection through the example of
art and philosophy. The same connection holds for literature and music and, in general,
for ideas concerning the ethos of a people. Precisely because myth embraces society in a
common pristine era, it provides an archaeological, sedimented, and memorial basis for
social cohesion. Many are its dimensions: pedagogical, teaching people of their common
origins and yielding the symbols and instruments for communicating their wisdom; ethical,
deriving by subordinate myths principles of action and sensibility which are in general
supportive of their general myth; prophetic, bearing on the norms and the future history
of its people. A people deepen their understanding of their present by appropriating their
past not only through history, but also through myth and philosophy, for there is a larger
memory of the past which does not possess the conscious clarity of historical writing, a
sedimented cultural memory enfolded in myth. It is a fecund womb of national identity.
CHAPTER II
PROBLEMS IN AFRICA'S
SELF-DEFINITION
IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD
KWASI WIREDU
INTRODUCTION
From a logical point of view, it is a tautology to say that everything is identical with itself. In other words, it is a logical truth that everything is what it is and not another thing. Accordingly, any problem Africa may have as to her identity cannot be whether Africa is what she is, but only whether she is what she ought to be. The problem, that is, is normative rather than descriptive.
But why is there a problem of identity in the first place? Individuals, let alone nations and whole continents, do not start wondering whether they are what they ought to be if everything seems to be going well. It is when things go wrong that critical self-analysis tends to begin. However, not everything that goes wrong with a people precipitates a crisis of self-identity; it is only the kind of reverse that injures human dignity and saps self-confidence that causes that type of soul-searching. In Africa colonialism has been such an adversity.
Colonialism is not necessarily racist in the sense in which the concept involves claims of racial superiority on the part of the colonizer; but it frequently goes with some sense of superiority. The Roman colonizers of Britain were not of a different race, but they had a poor opinion of the level of civilization of the Britons. This was, by the way, in marked contrast to the Romans' appreciation for Greek civilization in spite of their conquest of Hellas. But when one race comes to dominate another of a different skin color by virtue of a superiority in science and technology, then a conqueror's racism is fairly inevitable. European colonialism in Africa has been true to this form. The racism associated with it was not just a state of mind, but an active programme which sought to change the African's supposedly inferior way of life to conform to European models in some important areas of human experience, such as education, religion, economics, politics, etc. It was therefore natural that the anti-colonial struggle should take the form of both a cultural and a political nationalism.
African political nationalism aimed at regaining national independence and then building viable modern states, while cultural nationalism aimed to restore to Africans their confidence in their own culture. This latter was particularly urgent as colonial racism had succeeded in alienating many Africans from their own culture.
In so far as cultural nationalism implied a rejection of foreign cultural influences it tended to take the form of a traditionalism. Thus the question of identity was, in effect, posed as "Are we what we used to be?' The obvious fact was that we were not; consequently the solution proposed was that we should discover what we were previously and take steps to become such again. There is a suppressed premiss in this reasoning, since, as we have seen, the question of self-identity is a normative one. The premiss in question is: `What we ought to be is what we used to be."
There are problems of principle with this mode of self-definition. It is obviously not true in general that what we ought to be is what we used to be. We were children to start with, but that hardly supports a nostalgia for infantilism. The concept of self-improvement implies that we ought to become something other than what we are currently or were in the past. Thus, unless we make the strange assumption that culture is not open to improvement, the premiss under discussion must be acknowledged to be faulty.
So, given that we do have a crisis of self-identity, the following question must press itself upon us: `Why should we be other than we currently are?' The answer of anti-colonial nationalism is: `Because we became what we are now, not of our own free will, but rather through a colonial imposition'. But suppose what we are now happens to be better than what we used to be? Or suppose that, even though what we are now is no good, still what we were in the past was either no good or, if good in its time, ill-suited to the present time. Then what?
These questions, though not framed in exactly these terms, begin to make themselves felt in post-independence reassessments in Africa. This is connected with the fact, noted early in this discussion, that independence was sought with the aim of building viable modern states in Africa. This purpose, of course, is the purpose of modernization. But modernization involves changing old ways of doing things. Thus, a tension develops between cultural nationalism and the quest for modernization in post-independence times. On the one hand, there seems to be a desire to return to the roots, to old ways of life; yet, on the other hand, there seems to be a desire to change the old ways along lines established, in some cases, by foreign peoples. The question is: `Is there a real incompatibility here?'
THE EXAMPLE OF JAPAN
Consider the case of Japan. This nation seems to have been able both to achieve modernization and preserve her distinctive culture. This would seem to suggest that modernization and cultural conservatism are not incompatible. There is something in this; but it can be misleading. Cultural conservatism is perhaps too strong a phrase. The striking thing about the Japanese is not their cultural conservatism, but rather their cultural adaptability. They are famous for their capacity to learn things from other peoples and adapt them to their own purposes. Modernization has certainly modified their culture, and this has come, not by the sheer force of events, but through a deliberate national policy. It was through a deliberate and systematic policy that the Meiji rulers of Japan in the second half of the 19th century worked to abolish Japanese feudalism while retaining (even by law) their traditional values based on the family. The absorption of Western science, technology and learning generally was done with open utilitarian
eyes.
The point, then, is not that modernization can go on without changes in a traditional culture, but rather that it need not involve the indiscriminate jettisoning of the elements of such a culture. Not only this. As far as cultural self-identity is concerned there is an important distinction still to be noted. Regarding the idea of indiscriminate changes in a culture, there is a difference between changes of this sort that are off one's own bat, so to speak, and ones that come about semi-consciously through impregnation with foreign cultural models inculcated by way of imposed systems. Indiscriminate conduct is, of course, not commendable in any sphere of life. Nevertheless, it seems better, if one is going to tamper with one's traditional culture indiscriminately, to do it by one's own decision than through foreign pressures. It is better because it displays a greater degree of free will, and free will is a basic human ideal. It is better, moreover, from the point of view of the present discussion because it does not necessarily generate an identity crisis. If you change aspects of your culture and adopt in their place new ones of your own devising, then, even when there is trouble, any malaise would not be owing to a sense of compromised identity. The question then to be asked might still take the form: "Are we what we ought to be?" and the solution to be adopted might consist in returning to tradition. At all events, however, the crisis of identity can pertain only to perceptions of the self in its distinctness from others.
We can distinguish at least three types of cultural change: (1) Change which is deliberate and self-initiated and which substitutes something original for an old cultural element; (2) Change which is deliberate and self-initiated, but which involves foreign substitutes; (3) Change which is neither self-initiated nor original in its replacements. From the point of view of the problem of identity, the first type is the least, and the third the most problematic. Japan's experience approximates the second, while Africa's seems at some stages to have been of the third type. It is understandable, then, why Japan, unlike Africa, has not suffered too deeply from a sense of subverted identity.
It is tempting, accordingly, to commend the example of Japan to Africa: `By all means import and assimilate Western science, technology and other forms of knowledge as the Japanese did, but be sure to decide for yourselves, just as the Japanese did, which elements of your culture to retain and which to dispense with in the process'. In principle, this advice is, of course, sound. But an over-enthusiastic recommendation of the Japanese model could betray an a-historical as well as an unanalytical underestimation of the problems underlying Africa's crisis of identity. Japan has indeed had her own period of nationalistic soul-searching, but she has never had an identity problem to anything like the extent of Africa's. The reason lies in a number of circumstances. Japan, unlike Africa, was never subjected to conquest or colonialism prior to her break-through in modernization. Unlike Africa, again, she is a homogeneous nation with a single national language(17) and a national religion which has developed in its own way, assimilating foreign influences at its own pace. Besides, Japan, unlike most of Africa, had a long tradition of writing and literary learning which, coupled with her possession of an indigenous national language, facilitated her appropriation of Western knowledge in her own conceptual medium. Added to all this is the fact that even before the concerted push towards modernization in the second half of the 19th century Japan had a reasonably sophisticated system of agriculture, which, in fact, proved to be the source of capital accumulation during the intense formative period of industrialization.
Nevertheless, one thing at least can be learnt from the case of Japan; it is that to maintain national self-identity it is not necessary to remain the same as in ancestral times. Some important elements of Japanese culture were consciously borrowed from other peoples. Thus Japanese religion and ethics are an eclectic combination of a native Shintoism, a Chinese version of Indian Buddhism and a transplanted ethic of Confucianism--all these pragmatically hinged onto a scientific attitude more recently acquired from the West.
THE PROBLEM OF COLONIAL MENTALITY
It follows, by analogy, that the answer to Africa's problem of identity in the contemporary world does not lie in a cultural traditionalism but in a critical and reconstructive self-evaluation. This self-evaluation is made extremely difficult, even now, decades after independence, by the colonial mentality induced in our people during colonial times. This is the mentality which makes a formerly colonized person over-value foreign things coming from his erstwhile colonial master. `Things' here is to be interpreted widely to include not only material objects but also modes of thought and behavior.
Were the dominance of this colonial mentality absolutely complete, there could not, of course, have been so much as a sense of identity crisis in our people. The obvious fact of this consciousness in Africa shows that indigenous modes of thought and action have not been totally eclipsed by colonialism. One circumstance that has limited the psychological penetration of colonialism is that the colonialists did not trouble themselves much to `educate' the populations in the rural interior of the African countries they colonized. Consequently, these people still retain large parts of their indigenous world-outlook. This has ensured, thanks to our `extended family' system, that even the educated class have never been completely cut off from their culture. But the problem is that elements of the colonial mentality have been so deeply ingrained in the consciousness of the African people that it is not unheard of for even the fiercest denunciation of colonialism or the most fundamentalistic affirmation of indigenous culture to betray unconscious traces of that mentality. The present writer does not claim exemption from this plight, and this essay can be considered as one personal exercise in the struggle for African mental decolonization.
It is important at the outset to understand why colonialism was able to make such deep inroads in the psychology of our people in most parts of Africa. The basic reason is that, as remarked earlier on, the colonialists came with superior science and technology. In many places they brought literacy where there was none. In these respects the gap was decisive; which, in the particular case of technology, is why the invaders were able to subjugate our ancestors in the first place. It was, of course, no mistake on the part of our ancestors to recognize this superiority. I mean the superiority in science and technology as manifested in the techniques and products of the colonialists. But the question is not so clear-cut when it comes to the religion, law, state-craft, mores, language, etc., which came as part of the colonial package. Having accepted one part, our people were led to transfer their approval to the other parts of the package. How were they `led' to this? It was principally through the teachings of the missionaries who came along with the colonialists to `civilize' us and save our souls. Their campaign was only too successful. The result? A formidable distortion of the African identity. Since the days of the anti-colonial struggle we have been witnessing a struggle to restore the sense of authenticity. But the problems have not only been many but also have frequently been buried beneath the surface of our experience.
CHRISTIANITY AND GHANAIAN CULTURE
Take the sphere of religion, and consider the case of Christianity. This religion is completely alien to most parts of Africa (In Egypt and Ethiopia its status is, of course, somewhat more complicated). By some estimates, approaching a third of the whole population of Africa is Christian. This large mass of Africans adhere to a Europeanized form of the Judeo-Christian religion complete with its own world-view and ethics. The question might be asked: Since Africa has her own religions and systems of morality, why should an African forget them in favor of alien ones? There is something misleading about this question in as much as it might seem to suggest that Christianity has usually been consciously chosen by its African flock. On the contrary, the modern African is frequently born into a Christian family; he attends a Christian school and becomes a Christian As a matter of course (rather than of conscious reflection) in the very process of his socialization. As for his forebears, they were, as we have seen, ingratiated into Christianity through importunate evangelism and the dazzle of certain aspects of the colonial package. Nevertheless, some form of the question posed has made itself felt in the consciousness of many an African Christian. He is now asking, `How can I be both an African and a Christian?'
The answer that seems to be being canvassed in the most influential circles of African Christians is that Africans can be Christians in good conscience only by Africanizing Christianity. But how can this be done? Well, where there is a will, there apparently is a way, and some Africans have even thought to Africanize Christ himself, witness those artistic representations in which the Son of Man is depicted as a black man; which shows, by the way, that the wisdom of the way that opens to a will cannot always be taken for granted. There have, of course, been more level-headed forms of Africanization; but, as far as one can see, they have been mainly concerned with the externals of the religion: liturgy, forms of apparel, personnel, etc. One should not underestimate the gains that have been made in the Africanization of these aspects of the Christian religion. It is not so very long ago that a African preacher in the Presbyterian church in Ghana was disciplined for mounting the pulpit in his native attire. Now, in the eighties, even the Catholic church permits songs in African rhythms and idiom, actually punctuated with drumming, right in the process of worship, a phenomenon which, a few years ago, would have seemed more inconceivable than that a donkey should transport itself through the hole of a needle. No one who observed the subdued demeanor of Africans during worship in the more rigidly colonized modes can help noticing the contrasting spontaneity and joy with which many of our people participate in Christian worship electrified with African music.
Nevertheless, it may be questioned whether such African admixtures in externals with the foreign doctrinal content intact can amount to any serious Africanization of the Christian religion. The nearest that I know any church to have gone toward doctrinal concessions in recent times is in their more relaxed attitude towards certain African customs. A very pervasive such custom is the practice of pouring libation to our ancestors at ceremonies of any importance. In the past not only was such a ritual out of the question inside chapel walls--it remains so to this day, but it was also forbidden to African Christians even in their cultural activities far outside church environs. Now, however, an African Christian can pour libation to his heart's content without fear of episcopal reprisals.
But, even here, relevant questions remain unpursued. The ritual of libation presupposes a cosmology which is inconsistent with the Christian one. The traditional Ghanaian does not bifurcate the world into a natural and a supernatural world. Life after death is, for him, in a world closely continuous with the present one; and our departed ancestors are conceived still to be participating members of their families, rewarding good conduct and punishing its opposite in their own spacial way. The pouring of libation is, accordingly, intended as an invitation to them to come and take part in important undertakings of the living and to grant them their propitious auspices. Very far removed from such conceptions is the Christian doctrine of a supernatural world of heaven and hell existing in metaphysical isolation from this world.(18) The question then arises: Does the mellowing of the Euro-Christian authorities in their attitude to the practice of libation imply the belief that the related cosmology is compatible with the Christian cosmology? There is no evidence that this is their frame of mind. More curiously, there is no evidence that the African Christians in Ghana who seem glad to be able to pour libation without any anxieties about clerical censure have considered the cosmological complications.
As far as the question of Africa's self-identity or self-identification is concerned, the crucial issue here is not as to which of the two cosmologies is the more viable intellectually or whether any of them is viable, but rather whether the contemporary African Christian has made a conscious and reflective choice between his own traditional cosmology and that of Christianity or has forged some kind of a selective synthesis of the two. No African Christian can lay much of a claim to authentic African identity if he adheres to an unexamined jumble of Euro-Christian and African cosmological conceptions. On the other hand, if, on due reflection, a modern African concludes that the Euro-Christian cosmology or conceptual frame-work, more generally, is preferable, this need not compromise his African authenticity just as the conscious adoption of Buddhism has not made the Japanese any less authentically Japanese. The present position in many parts of Africa is that in spite of much earnest and sincere nationalistic protestations, the African Christian has hardly started to think of a critical reappraisal of Christian doctrine vis-a-vis his own native religion. Until he can do so, all claims to African authenticity in this sphere must be suspended.
CULTURAL IDENTITY IN GENERAL
This is the appropriate place to call attention to a somewhat paradoxical condition for cultural identity. A culture can shed off many of its traits and gather foreign accretions without sacrificing its identity, provided that it does not lose its contingent features. The contingent is normally contrasted with the necessary, but in this case the contingent becomes the necessary. The explanation is as follows. Any culture has procedures, customs and usages that have no essential bearing on questions of either human well-being or truth or falsehood. Style of apparel or of address, for example, is frequently (though not invariably) of this nature. Adopting one style rather than another often makes no objective difference to human well-being or to one's beliefs about the world. Specifically because of this there cannot be any compelling reason to change such elements of a culture in favor of foreign ones.
It might be useful to mention a few more of such facts of culture here. Language, dance, music, recreation, style of courtship--all these and more are contingent in this sense in some of their aspects. Since it is not rational to give up such components in preference to foreign substitutes, to do so is a sure sign of the loss or diminution of cultural self-identity.
This is not to overlook the fact that cultures do evolve and that no part of a culture is immune to this process. The contingent elements of a culture can change imperceptibly over a long period of time or, on occasion, more abruptly without prejudice to identity. Such changes may be due to indigenous whims and caprices; and why not? What a people's cultural identity will not survive unscathed is foreign substitutions in this area. It should be noted, furthermore, that it is not being contended that to be authentic a culture ought not to accommodate some contingent elements from abroad along side its own. The conquest of distance through the tremendous developments in communication in the present century will see to it that there is an unceasing process of intercultural exchanges across the globe. But only weak cultures will permit this to eclipse what we might call, with an appearance but only an appearance of contradiction, their contingent essence.
Such components of culture as philosophy and religion, on the other hand, are anchored to truth value. Philosophy necessarily involves claims about what things are or should be and about what relations hold between various objects of thought. Basically, the same thing is true of religion. If it should turn out, for example, that it is not true that God exists (given some intelligible and stable conception of God, surely, certain religions would lose their foundation. Now, suppose, only for the purposes of argument, that unbeknown to a certain culture, God does not exist and that it has been shown in another culture that this can be conclusively proved. Then, for the first culture willfully to ignore the proof in the name of cultural self-identity would demonstrate nothing more glorious than a collective pigheadedness. It is obvious that this can be generalized for all beliefs as to what is or is not the case. Therefore it can be asserted that religion and philosophy (as also other domains of thought in which truth is sought, such as science) are areas of human experience in which the effects of cultural differences could conceivably be eliminated through the peaceful give-and-take of dialogue among cultures. It is conceivable, consequently, that the time might come when only humanly contingent features will individuate cultures. Should there be any qualms on this point, they can be blamed on the fallacies of relativism.
CONCEPTUAL PROBLEMS IN REALIZING
AFRICAN IDENTITY
Any interaction among cultures, however, has to be on the basis of equality; otherwise some cultures are compromised, as ours has been in Africa. It is not only at the levels of our social, economic, political and religious institutions that the unequal cultural relationship with the colonialists has affected our life but also at the deeper levels of our fundamental conceptual frame-work. And this I take to be the most far-reaching explanation for the tardiness of our African Christians in seeing the necessity for a critical reassessment of Christian doctrine. Such concepts as `God', `Spirit', `Soul', `Salvation', `the Mystical', `the Supernatural', `Creation', `Omnipotence' have wormed their way deep into our scheme of concepts and are used by us, Western educated Africans, especially the Christians among us, as if their intelligibility or internal coherence in all human language and thought can be taken for granted. So that the exposition of even our own traditional religious thought is couched in these terms without a thought of possible conceptual incongruities. I happen to think that these concepts have the most imperfect fit, if they have any fit at all, with our indigenous categories of thought. But the issue here is not whether this is true or false but rather whether the relevant question has been seriously raised and considered. To the extent to which we use cardinal concepts assimilated through a foreign education uncritically, to that extent is our African identity thrown into question.
The conceptual problems in defining our African identity are not restricted to the sphere of our religious thinking; they range, in fact, over the whole gamut of our intellectual life. It is a well-known fact that, intellectually, we think in the metropolitan languages in which we were educated. As far as concepts such as `Being', `existence', `Entity', `Nothingness', `Substance', `Quality', `Truth', `Fact', `Reality', `Matter', `Body', `Mind', `Person', `Space', `Punishment', `Free Will', etc., are concerned, we might, many of us,just as well be called Europeans. Yet, there are very radical differences between the manner in which the matters involved are conceived in our indigenous languages and thought, on the one hand, and in the metropolitan languages and thought, on the other. This being so, the least that an African of an abstract bent, mindful of his own cultural identity, ought to do is to elicit these conceptual differences through a comparative analysis and try to assess them objectively. That an objective assessment of such things is possible is a substantial thesis. Here I cannot even begin to argue it; I can only throw it up as a plausible presupposition. But it is relevant to note that if an objective treatment of such conceptual disparities were not possible, there would be little point in any attempt at intellectual dialogue between different peoples.
The considerations of the last paragraph bring it out clearly, I hope, that, at its most fundamental level, Africa's problem of identity is a philosophical problem, a thought which should strengthen our sense of the importance of the current debate among African philosophers and others about how best to define African philosophy itself. This question is, in fact, one to be answered, at this historical juncture, not with a definition per genus et differentia but rather with a programme for intellectual construction and reconstruction in the service of Africa and ultimately the world. Any such programme will have, at the very minimum, to include the conceptual exorcising of the colonial mentality alluded to at various points in this discussion. It emerges, thus, that in properly defining the African identity of their calling, African philosophers will be ipso facto helping to define and establish Africa's identity in the contemporary world.
POLITICAL IDENTITY
In approaching the close of this discussion, let me touch on an issue in the political field that has an obvious relevance to Africa's quest for identity. It is the question of African socialism. Almost all African countries have now won their independence. But, if anything, they have been faced with problems that are, intellectually, more difficult than any faced in the struggle against colonialism; and our leaders, not necessarily philosophers to start with, have been constrained to do some quite fundamental thinking. Some of the most important of these problems may be formulated as follows: What form of social organization is best suited to Africa, having regard to her history and aspirations and to the requirements of social justice in general? And what political forms are to be adopted for the achievement of these social aims. Many African leaders have declared an adherence to socialism as the best social system. Generally, this choice has been predicated on the contention that socialism is the only system that avoids `the exploitation of man by man'. But an additional reason of the greatest significance has been the claim that this system is but a natural development of traditional African communalism. This is sometimes exaggerated into the assertion that the latter was in fact already a form socialism practiced in Africa in precolonial times. Be that as it may, it is clear that the reason why our leaders have linked their socialism with the communalistic past of Africa is that they are anxious to demonstrate to the world that they did not struggle for independence only to imitate the social and political forms of either the East or the West (ideologically speaking). Accordingly, the term `African socialism' has been used to contrast socialism in Africa with socialism elsewhere.
Unfortunately, serious conceptual problems have arisen in the elaboration of this contrast. The impression is sometimes given that African socialism is different in concept from other socialisms. But there cannot be one definition for socialism in Africa and a different one elsewhere. What may conceivably differ in socialism from place to place is the way in which the basic concept of socialism is developed and implemented. As a minimum, socialism must be a system in which the main means of production and distribution are owned and controlled by society as a whole and in which distribution is conducted on egalitarian principles. A little reflection on this definition will disclose why attempts to realize this concept in actual practice result in the well-known proliferation of brands of socialism. The point is simply that concepts such as social ownership and (more notoriously) egalitarianism invite different interpretations from different thinkers.
The question then is: when one talks of African socialism is one referring to particular African interpretations of the concept of socialism or to particular African routes to socialism? Considerable confusion has arisen due to the apparent inability cf various analysts to distinguish between an interpretation of the concept of socialism as a social form and a route through which some interpretation of the concept might be pursued in practice. Thus it is frequently said that one respect in which African socialism differs from Marxist socialism is that the exponents of the former do not believe in the doctrine of class struggle. [Senghor of Senegal and Nyerere of Tanzania come to mind here. The late Nkrumah of Ghana, was not an enthusiast of the class struggle prior to his overthrow, but become one afterwards.] But the question of the class struggle is really only relevant to the way in which socialism might be achieved. Of course, if, as some have claimed, there is no class struggle in Africa or, more breath-takingly, if there are no classes in Africa, then the quest for socialism will not go through the stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Africa. But this would not necessarily disclose a different interpretation of the concept of socialism as a form of society from that of Karl Marx. The difference here would only be between the African and the Marxian routes to socialism.
An even more subtle confusion in the way in which African socialism has been contrasted with Marxist socialism is displayed in the habit of citing the rejection of dialectical materialism by some leading African socialists as a difference between the ideologies of African socialism and Marxist socialism. Lost here is the distinction between an ideology and a theory of reality. Dialectical materialism is a theory of reality, not an ideology. The same is true of even historical `materialism'. These are theories of what the world is, has been, and will be like, not what it ought to be like. An ideology is a conception of what society ought to be like. Of course, if any such conception is to have a chance of being realized in the world, it will have to take full account of what the world is like. But what the world is like does not logically prejudge the issue of what it ought to be like. The general relationship between "is" and "ought" is a contentious philosophical issue, but it seems clear from the considerations just adduced that if a given African thinker rejects dialectical materialism as an account of reality,that does not logically preclude his believing in Marx's conception of the classless society of the socialist millennium. For the same reason the play made on the contrast between Marxist atheism and the alleged pervasive piety of the African is not to the point.
The comparison of African socialism with Marxist socialism is sometimes beset by even grosser errors. Thus the suggestion has been made that one distinguishing characteristic of some forms of African socialism is that they give room for a substantial private component in the economy. But in view of the definition of socialism, an economic system, in Africa or outside Africa, which harbors a substantial permanent private component can never be called a type of socialism in any full sense.
CONCLUSION
In all this what is of paramount relevance to our concerns in this paper is that the faulty comparisons noted above seem, at least in part, to be motivated by what might be called the fallacy of uniqueness. It seems to be supposed that for Africans to have an authentic identity, they need to be unique in their social and political forms and in many other things besides. As suggested earlier on, however, in questions of truth or falsity as also in questions of what does or does not minister to human welfare there is no particular virtue in being different. What is required for authentic identity is that belief, decision or choice should be based on one's own conscious reflection. The important issue, then, is not necessarily whether socialism in Africa is of a peculiarly African species but rather whether, if socialism is chosen, this is done on due reflection. The same holds, of course, with respect to any other choice of ideology. To be sure, if Africa had a unique ideology of her own, in no way indebted to either the East or the West, no one could possibly quibble about her identity, politically speaking; but it is of the last consequence to understand that an African nation's identity need not be jeoparized by the choice of a social ideal already known and pursued elsewhere, such as social democracy or liberal democracy or Juche, provided that it is based on her own reflective thinking.
But now, how can Africa do her own thinking when, as pointed out already, the minds of very many Africans remain colonized in the deepest reaches of their conceptual framework? This brings us back to our earlier finding that Africa's problem of identity is at bottom a philosophical problem.
NOTES
PART II
KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING
CHAPTER III
KNOWLEDGE AND TRUTH:
EWE AND AKAN CONCEPTIONS
N.K. DZOBO
This study will be based upon an analysis of the epistemic conceptions found in the everyday speech and oral literature, e.g., the proverbs and wise sayings, of the Ewe and Akan of Ghana. The paper will be concerned mainly with critical remarks, clarifications and definitions of epistemic terms. Some synthesis and interpretation of the analytical findings will be attempted in the concluding sections.
Indigenous African societies consider knowledge and truth as the key factors in living a meaningful and satisfying life; the capacity to comprehend these has been used as the principal criterion for differentiating human beings from the lower animals. A human being is therefore indirectly defined by both the Ewe and the Akans as "the being that knows things." That is to say, only humans have the intellectual faculty for acquiring knowledge and for grasping reality through the medium of ideas.
Because of this understanding of the essential nature of man, one way to say that a person is stupid is to say that "he does not know things" (Menya nu o - Ewe; Onnin hwee ade - Akan), or simply to say that "he is an animal" (Enye la - Ewe; Oye aboa - Akan). The head is believed to play a very important role in knowing, and so of a person who is not intelligent it is said that "his head is dead." (Efe ta ku - Ewe; Ni ti awu - Akan). In other words "to be human is to have a live head," that is to say, to be intellectually alert or to grasp things mentally in terms of correct principles.
Thus, to be human is to know and understand things, especially the fundamental ideas and principle of life. For this reason one proverb says, "the child who goes about inquiring to know what is happening is never an animal (fool)." (Vi-bia-nya-ta-se medzoa - la o. Ewe).
THE METHOD OF KNOWING
The main questions we shall address our inquiry will be:
1. What does it mean to know, or what is knowledge?
2. How do we know?
3. What are the sources of knowledge?
4. What are the categories of knowledge?
5. How is knowledge validated?
Indigenous African society is never skeptical about man's ability to know; it strongly believes that man can and does know. Therefore the question is not "Can man know?" but "How do we know"? Indigenous society is therefore concerned first and foremost with the manner of knowing.
How do we know? To answer this question we shall examine carefully the different Ewe and Akan synonyms for `to know.' There are four very important words for this, two in Ewe - nya and dze si, and two in Akan - nim and nya.
(i) To Know as Nya. The most common Ewe word for `to know' is nya, which has an object nu meaning `a thing.' Thus, the expression nya nu implies the certainty of something known; it rules out any room for doubt.
Dietrich Westermann, the celebrated German authority on the Ewe language, translated the verb nya into English as `to know', `to understand' `to be able' (Westermann, 1928). These, however, are secondary meanings of the verb nya. Its primary meaning can be translated as `to observe,' `to take a look at,' `to note,' and `to look.' These meanings of the verb appear in such expressions as:
a. Nya nusi wom viwo le da - "look at or observe what your child is doing."
b. Nya asiwo da, efo di - "Look at your hand, it is dirty!" This expression is similar to another perceptual expression, See da!: "Listen to this." The two expressions call for the use of the senses of perception. Nya nu then means "to gain knowledge by observation or seeing, by the use of the senses." Here observation is the means by which we come to know; what is known is therefore referred to as nunya, meaning `thing observed'; the result of observation then is knowledge (nunya).
This basic understanding of the verb nya is supported by its Akan use. Nya is perhaps originally an Akan word or a common inheritance. In Akan it means `to find', `to experience', `to gain', `to come by' as found in such expressions as Manya asem: `I have got trouble"; Wanya sika: "He has found (made) money"; Wonyaa wo he?: "Where did you find it?" The uses of nya in these sentences always imply that the subject of the sentences is `doing something,' i.e., `going through an experience and getting something from it.' Therefore, if the verb nya is used epistemically it implies that the subject of the verb nya is doing something - observing or experiencing something and then deriving something out of it. What is derived from such an experience is nunya (knowledge).
According to John Dewey, the process of acquiring knowledge from experience/observation has two phases: active and passive. The active phase of experience consists of trying or experimenting with something; the passive phase is undergoing the consequences of what has been done. The value of the experience lies in connecting the two phases - that of trying and that of undergoing. Dewey went on to say "when an activity is continued into the undergoing of consequences, when the change made by the action is reflected back in a change made in us, the mere flux is loaded with significance."(19) The mere action then has a meaning; and thus is knowledge.
Knowledge arises when the doer is able to connect what the first phase of experience means in terms of its second phase or consequences. The ability to deduce the correct lesson from experience is highly valued in the indigenous society. One proverb emphasizes this by saying "It is only a fool who allows his sheep to break loose twice." (Okwasea na ne guan te mprenu. - Akan.) Another proverb making the same point says: "It is only a fool (animal) who falls down twice on the same mound." (Ame le ye dzea anyi zi eve le ko deka dzi - Ewe). Observation and inference then are methods of obtaining knowledge: experience is a source of knowledge.
(ii) To Know as Dze Si (Ewe); Nim (Twi). The infinitive dze si means `to know', `to note', `to recognize'. It is used in such expressions as: Medze sii: "I have recognized him," or "I have seen him once"; it is equivalent to Menyae, meaning `I have known him'. Dze si always implies the use of the sense of sight or observation in knowing; in this sense it is equivalent to one sense of the Akan word nim meaning `to know through observing an external reality'.
To sum up what has been said so far about the indigenous method of knowing: observation and inference have emerged as the relevant methods of knowing. There are two steps involved in the knowing process: first, observing an external phenomenon by the senses and receiving the necessary sense-data from it (the experiencing phase of knowing); second, the process of organizing and interpreting the sense-data into ideas which come to be referred to as knowledge (nunya - Ewe; nimdee - Akan). Knowledge then is the end-product of intellectual processes which begin in sensation. Sensations are therefore regarded as stimuli to reflection and inference; they are the beginnings of empirical knowledge.
The Passive Way of Knowing
The method of knowing discussed above was referred to as the active method of knowing. There is, however, the passive method of knowing. The two most common terms used to represent it are le, meaning `to seize,' `to grasp,' `to encounter,' `to grip,' and wu, meaning `to kill,' i.e., `to experience passively.' Examples of their uses appear in the following expressions:
a. Do le lem: "Illness has seized me" - I am sick.
b. Do le wu yem: "Hunger is killing me" - I am hungry.
c. Tsiko le wu yem: "Thirst is killing me" - I am thirsty.
d. Tro le asii: "The god has seized him/her to be his wife; i.e., A god has elected him/her as his priest/priestess. He has experienced/known the power and presence of a god.
In all these and similar experiences the subject knows something, not by what he does, but by what happens to him; hence this type of knowing can be described as passive and subjective. The subjective nature of such knowledge does not ipso facto make it invalid because such knowledge is best verified by its positive fruits.
In the indigenous society, then, knowing is the result of two different types of experiences, one active and the other passive.
CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE
There are four main categories of knowledge in Ewe, each traceable to sensory experience as their sources. They are nyatsiname, susununya, nusronya, and sidzedze.
1. Nyatsiname usually refers to knowledge that is passed down by word of mouth. This may be described as traditional knowledge, where traditional is used to mean that which is passed down from one person or from one generation to another. Knowledge that is passed from parents and elders to the next generation and contained in proverbs and other forms of oral literature is a good example of knowledge as nyatsiname.
2. Susununya is knowledge gained from reflection. Its nature is deductive or contemplative. This does not require an immediate experience as its source, but relies on deduction from premises that have been already established.
3. Nusronya is knowledge acquired through the process of learning from formal education. Its popular designation is `book knowledge' (agbalemenunya). Nusronya is not highly valued by the traditional society because it tends to be foreign and thus is divorced from the realities of the African experience.
4. Sidzedze which is the knowledge that is gained as a result of acquiring a
certain level of awareness or gaining a certain understanding of things, relations and
situations. This knowledge is gained as a result of understanding things in terms of their
fundamental principles. The Ewe term sidzedze, refers to insight gained through
the grasping of fundamental principles. One proverb says: "Knowledge of self without sidzedze
makes a person a slave." (Simadzemadze ame dokui fe ablode de wodoa kluvi ame).
This is a way of saying, "The only self-knowledge that is worth having is that based
upon fundamental principles." This type of knowledge makes us free.
NYANSA AS WISDOM
The word nyansa is usually used to translate the English term `wisdom', but sometimes it is used to translate knowledge. I will limit its use to wisdom in order to avoid any confusion in a philosophical discourse.
Nyansa, as wisdom, is an Akan word, made up of nya and nsa meaning `that which is obtained and is never exhausted', i.e., a lesson which is learned from experience and is lasting, an important lesson from experience. Nyansa then is a special type of knowledge: it is drawn from experience and is cherished because of its value for one's life. The elders are usually credited with the ability to draw appropriate lessons (nyansa) from the various experiences of life. For this reason one Akan proverb says: "Wisdom is something we acquire through learning; it is not something we buy" (Nyansa vesua na vento). This proverb implies that nyansa is based upon a considerable experience of life. Thus, reliable inferences of this sort are usually only associated with the elders, who in Ewe are called ametsitsiwo or `the mature ones'. One proverb sums it up this way, "You get palm-wine only from mature palm trees" (De tsitsi me aha nona - Ewe). The nyansa, that is, the lessons of wisdom are stored by the elders in the proverbs and other wise sayings of the indigenous culture.
Nyansa as careful and mature lessons derived from experience cannot be regarded as sophia, i.e., a complete vision integrating the various fragmented experiences of life. Some examples of such particularistic but consistent teachings about life are found in the following proverbs:
a. "Knowledge is like a garden, if it is not cultivated it cannot be harvested."
b. "You do not keep the dish in which your neighbor has sent you food, (you return it with your own food in it)," that is, reciprocity is one principle that guides successful social behaviour.
c. "Once you get hold of a snake's head what is left is just a piece of rope," that is, the most effective way to solve a problem is to tackle it at its roots.
Having Nyansa, however, is not just being in possession of a series of guides to conduct; it is an attitude or fundamental disposition which shapes the behaviour of the person who has it. The wise men of the indigenous society (nunyala - Ewe; anyansato - Akan) are therefore not just knowledgeable men and women, but persons who have a consistent mode of response to life's experiences. In this regard they can be said to be people who practice a philosophy of life informed by nyansa.(20)
Both knowledge (nunya) and wisdom (nyansa) therefore must have a practical bearing on the conduct of life. This attitude to knowledge and wisdom is made quite clear in two Akan proverbs which say: "Wisdom is not (like) money which may be kept in a safe" (Nyansa nye sika na woakyekyere asie); and "One does not collect wisdom in a bag, lock it up in a box and then come to say to a friend `Teach me something'."
Nyansa is a highly valued commodity in the indigenous society. Indeed, it is maintained that the whole world is founded on wisdom. That is, the wisdom of Mawu, the creator, organizer and sustainer of the world, who is regarded as the source of all wisdom. An interesting aspect of the "indigenous conception of wisdom is that it is closely associated with calmness or coolness. Thus one of the praise names of God is Fafato which means `The source of coolness'. This also leads to a connection between wisdom and women. Because of their characteristic cool, calm and pacific nature, women are generally said to give wise judgments in disputes. Owing to this conception of women, traditionally before a judgment is delivered at a chief's court the elders always go into council, as the saying goes, "to consult the old lady" (abriwa) for a wise judgment. In the past the elders really did consult an old lady.
Chiefs also, because of their role as decision-makers, are expected to acquire the cool
nature of women or of the gods to enable them to make wise judgments. The chief's title
among the people of Benin is therefore Dada meaning `Mother', among other Ewe he
is addressed as Togbui and as Nana among the Akan. These titles are
associated with maturity, cool-headedness and wisdom.
ATTITUDES TO KNOWLEDGE
Apart from the general attitude to knowledge discussed above there are some specific indigenous attitudes to nunya and nyansa. The first attitude to knowledge is that there is a limit to what any one individual can know, even though there is no limit to what can be known in principle. One proverb expresses this attitude thus: `Knowledge is like a balobab tree (monkey-bread tree); no one person can embrace it with both arms' (Nunya adidoe, asi metune o). Since knowledge is limitless, any person who claims to know everything knows nothing: "Knows all, knows nothing" (Nim, nnim - Akan).(21) Because of this attitude to knowledge a chief alone is not expected to give judgment in cases at his court, for wise and sound judgment is supposed to come from several heads: "One head does not go into council."
The next attitude to knowledge is figuratively expressed by the proverb, previously quoted, which says "Knowledge is like a garden, if it is not cultivated, it cannot be harvested." The main point of this proverb is that the individual has an active part to play in the acquisition of knowledge, or, as another proverb puts it: "Knowledge is not the gift of the gods" (Nunya mele aklama me o). Man is not born with knowledge; whatever he knows is acquired through experience and through a deliberate effort on his part to know. One proverb therefore says: "The one who keeps asking never loses his way" (Obisafo nto kwan. - Akan). The other one says: "The child who goes about asking to know what is happening will never be a fool." Lack of knowledge, ignorance, on the other hand is said to make a fool of a person (Numanya-manva de wodoa bometsila ame - Ewe). This attitude to knowledge even though it does not completely rule out a priori and revealed knowledge; it nevertheless indicates a bias towards a posteriori or empirical knowledge.
The third specific attitude to knowledge is the conception of knowledge as light and as the source of freedom. We see this attitude in two proverbs. One says "The lamp of ignorance misleads in the night" (Nu manyamanya fe akadi tra ame za - Ewe). In this proverb ignorance is likened to darkness and so its lamp cannot be expected to provide light, while knowledge is light considered especially as moral enlightenment. As enlightenment, knowledge makes the individual free and in this sense it is said to be creative of a better life. To the indigenous society therefore, "knowledge is, in the words of Dewey, "not something separate and self-sufficing, but is involved in the process by which life is sustained and evolved."(22)
THE CONCEPT OF TRUTH
The examination of the concept of truth is a logical follow-up to the study of knowledge. The main question to be examined is: What makes our knowledge claims true or false? What is the indigenous concept of, and attitude to, truth? To answer these questions we shall examine some truth terms and expressions in both the Ewe and Akan languages, especially as they are found in everyday utterances and proverbs of the people.
There are six main terms for truth in Ewe, namely: nyatefe, nyanono, nyagbagbe, nyagba, nyadzodzoe, and anukware. The last term, anukware, is borrowed from the Akan language and the remaining terms which are Ewe in origin have the root word `nya' which, as we have seen, plays a very important part in the conception of knowledge and wisdom and can best be translated here as `statement', `word', `matter' and `case'. In other words, to the indigenous mind truth is a knowledge-claim with a specific characteristic. We must search out this characteristic.
Truth as Nyatefe: The most common Ewe term for truth is nyatefe, which has been made popular by its use in Christian communication. Etymologically, it is built upon nya. Tefe means `place' or `spot'; it is a common suffix in Ewe language, as seen in such words as Ametefe, nutefe, kutefe. Thus, nyatefe literally means `the statement/word that is at its place', i.e., a correct statement. A statement is said to be correct when it describes accurately the state of affairs as it is. Another way therefore to say in Ewe that a statement is true is to say Nya la le etefe: "The statement/word is at its place," as is usually said about the report of an eyewitness. According to the nyatefe conception of truth, a statement is true if it describes an object or event as it really is, and such statements are generally known to be made by eyewitnesses. Thus one proverb says: "Nobody doubts the death of the crocodile's mother if it is reported by the fish." This is another way of saying that the report of an eyewitness can be trusted to be true because such reports normally give accurate accounts of the state of things. For this reason when the elders at a court want to question the validity of a report they ask its author either `Eno nya la tefea,' which means literally: "Did you sit down (witness) at the place where the event occurred"? Or `Ekpo etefea?': "Did you see the place where the event happened"?
Nyatefe then is an on-the-spot-account of an event reported by a person who witnesses it. The belief is that there is a higher degree of reliability and accuracy in an on-the-spot statement than in hearsay. This, however, does not rule out the fact that there may be errors in the reports of an eyewitness; so the essence of the nyatefe concept of truth is to be found in its high degree of accuracy and reliability, not in its being a facsimile of reality. Truth as nyatefe then consists in a high degree of correspondence between the truth-claim and the objective state of affairs so stated; its validity also lies in its high degree of accuracy and reliability. The nyatefe concept of truth assumes that there are certain kinds of statements that can be made about objects, events and relations which are true because of the intrinsic nature of such realities. The truth-value of such statements is therefore determined by the nature of the realities under consideration.
Truth as Nyanono (Nyano): The second truth term is nyanono or nyano which is made up of nya and no. As no means `mother' or `female', nyano means literally `mother/female statement or word.' This is a metaphorical expression in which `mother' or `female' is used as a symbol of life, of that which creates life and promotes growth. Nyano as truth, then, means `the statement that is alive' or has a creative power, just as the woman in the indigenous thought is seen as the principle of life, creativity and growth, while man represents the principle of death and destructivness. The Nyano concept of truth emphasizes truth-value as a living, creative and productive principle. It has the power to create new situations, to promote growth and effect rejuvenation. This is a dynamic understanding of truth. So one way to say `speak the truth' is `do nyanono/nyatefe', which literally means `plant the truth', the understanding being that if it is the truth it will germinate, grow and bear fruit. Falsehood, which is called nyakudu or `dead word/statement' will not germinate. The nyano conception of truth implies its method of verification: truth is known by, and consists in, its power to create new situations and make things better.
Truth as Nyagbagbe: Nyagbagbe means the word/statement that is alive (nya and gbagbe - alive). Gbagbe is used in such expressions as nu gbagbe, meaning `living thing'. Thus nyagbagbe means `living word or statement' in contrast to falsehood, which is termed nyakuku - `dead word/statement'. Again, truth, nyagbagbe, is conceived as a female principle, a principle of life, creativity and growth. Thus truth can be described as the statement of life or life-statement. As such, truth is regarded as of the greatest importance.
Truth as Nyagba: The other term for truth, which derives from nyagbagbe, is nyagba, and is made up of nya and gba which means `first,' `distinguished,' `genuine.' `important.' Gba appears in such expressions as nu gbae: `the real thing,' or ame gba: `an important person.' Truth, then, is an important statement because it contains the word of life.
The last three conceptions of truth may be designated "the Creativity or Nyano theory of Truth." This can be said to be unique to the indigenous concept of truth. It is different from the pragmatic theory of truth in that it is not only the workability of an idea that makes it true, but its power to bring about a better human situation and continuously to improve the conditions of life. The defining characteristic of the creativity theory is its emphasis on the ameliorative nature of truth.
Truth as Nyadzodzoe: Nyadzodzoe is the fifth Ewe term for truth; it is a forensic term which is heard often in the settlement of dispute. Like the others, it is made up of two words - nya and dzodzoe which means `straight'. Truth as nyadzodzoe therefore means literally `straight statement/word;' falsehood is referred to as nyagoglo or nyamadzomadzo, meaning `crooked statement/word.' Nyadzodzoe is usually pronounced as a judgment in a dispute to mean `not guilty' or `you have behaved correctly,' but this correctness of behavior is judged on the basis of the truth or falsehood of the statements one makes about what has happened.
The straight-statement conception of truth presupposes the existence of normative standards of truth-statement which are used to measure other truth-statements. This understanding of truth as a statement that is judged to be straight by an already accepted `straight-statement' is brought out in the proverb: "It is only the liar who loses his teeth three times in his life time." Normally people lose their teeth twice in their life time, once in childhood and lastly in old age. Thus, the statement that corresponds to this fact of life is: "Men lose their teeth twice in their life time." Any person who says he lost his teeth three times is not making a `straight-statement', and no behaviour emanating from such a statement will be considered straight.
The normative truth-statement is therefore what is generally known by the society, represented by the elders, to be true in speech as well as in deed. The truth of a statement is therefore in its identity with what has been known to be the case in such matters. The knowledge of normative truth-statements is acquired through long years of experience and is passed down from generation to generation. In non-literate societies the memory is the repository of truth as nyadzodzoe.
Truth as Anukware: Anukware is an Akan word for truth, where it is spelled nokware. This is made up of ano - meaning `mouth,' and koro meaning `one', hence anokware (anukware) means `one mouth'. Truth as anukware means a statement that is made with one mouth', i.e., made with consistency and without contradiction in the description of the same reality. Internal consistency and harmony are therefore held as the marks of a true statement. Dr. K.O. Agyakwa of the Faculty of Education at the University of Cape Coast is of the view that `speaking with one mouth' rather means several people saying the same thing about a given state of affairs, so that "truth is the sum-total or consensus of what people are saying about a given state of affairs." He concludes that consistency "becomes a test for truth" which "resides in the collective mind of the community."(23)
The consistency that Dr. Agyakwa referred to as the criterion of truth is an `external' one; that is to say, the consistency is between truth-statements made by two or more people about the same reality, and not the consistency among truth-claims made by the same person about one and the same reality. This latter consistency might be called `internal' consistency and is generally required by people in establishing the validity of statements. For this reason as soon as an individual contradicts himself (which means speaking with two mouths) he is said to be speaking a lie. An individual who corroborates what others have said is confirming and not necessarily `speaking' the truth which is always first established by one person. Moreover, the ubiquity of an opinion cannot be used as a criterion of truth, because the voice of the people (Vox populi) is not always the voice of God (truth). It can be concluded then that the anukware conception of truth is the `internal' consistency and harmony that exists among statements made by the same person about one and the same reality.
This conclusion is upheld by several indigenous conceptions of falsehood. To say that `you are telling a lie' the Ewe living around Ho in Ghana say `enyi ve', which literally means, `you are an alligator lizard' which has a forked (double) tongue. `You are an alligator' is a metaphorical way of saying `you have two tongues,' `you speak with two tongues (mouths).' Another way of saying that `you are telling a lie' is `you have two heads.' As proverb puts it: "One person does not grow two heads" (Ame deka metoa ta eve o). This is a way of saying `stop contradicting yourself." Other expressions are: "There are two tongues in the mouth of a liar"; "It is the liar who grows the tongue of an alligator `His mouth is twin (two-pronged)' (Nano ye nta - Akan), i.e., "he is a liar." A local term for falsehood is venyinyi (venyenye) which means `the state of being an alligator' which is representative of those who have `two tongues/mouths.' All these expressions for falsehood indirectly stress consistency and harmony among the statements made by one and the same person as the criteria of truth conceived as anukware.
Four clear concepts of truth have emerged from the preceding examination of the indigenous truth terms. First, truth is the knowledge-claim that, to a high degree, corresponds to reality as it is. Second, truth is the identity of a new statement with other statements that have been accepted as true. Third, truth is the `internal' consistency and harmony that exist among statements made by the same person about the same reality. Finally, truth, like knowledge and wisdom, is the statement that has the power to create new and better situations of life. Truth in this sense is a dynamic and creative property of statements.
CONCLUSION
The preceding discussion shows that, even though truth has a formal aspect, it is essentially dynamic and creative. Hence, one proverb says "Truth makes things good" (Nyatefe nyoa nu - Ewe). Also "Truth is woman," as woman has the power to bring forth new life. So, truth has creative power, while falsehood is destructive and disintegrative. Therefore, if truth is ignored the result is disaster, for only truth can settle falsehood. Truth is accordingly cherished as the greatest spiritual value. As one proverb puts it, "Sebe, if truth lies in your mother's vagina and you use your penis to bring it out you have not had sex with her,"(24) which is a way of saying that truth stands at the very top of our values and all other values can be sacrificed if need be to get truth. Nothing can destroy truth; the person who loves truth will live long while the person who loves falsehood will die young, because truth is life while falsehood is death.
The ability to know, i.e., to grasp reality in terms of fundamental ideas, and the possession of knowledge are critical properties that makes one a human being in the conceptions of the indigenous society. One method of gaining knowledge of an object is through the process of observation and intellectual assimilation through the medium of ideas. The knower must detach him/herself from the reality to be known as much as possible so as to be in the position to have that knowledge of the object which can be described as nyatefe. The other method of knowing is that of making appropriate inferences from a passive experience in which one is acted upon by objects encountered.
Knowledge (nunya) then may be defined as inferences or ideas derived from
experience, be they active or passive, and expressed as statements or propositions. Nunya
becomes nyansa (wisdom) when it can be regarded as a complete principle of
comprehension for a fairly large segment of experience. Without knowledge (nunya)
and wisdom (nyansa) human life returns to animality; they are the divine creative
Intelligence and Principle at work in the creation, organization and support of the
universe and of life.
NOTES
CHAPTER IV
AFRICAN SYMBOLS AND PROVERBS
AS SOURCE OF
KNOWLEDGE AND TRUTH
N. K. DZOBO
The purpose of this chapter is not to explore in detail the indigenous symbol system of Africa, but to discuss individual groups of symbols as sources of insight into African orientations to life. Many people regret the fact that, besides Egypt, the rest of Africa has not invented an alphabetic system. They overlook the fact that Africans have been using both visual and oral "picture words" for a considerable time to express, transmit and store their thoughts, emotions and attitudes. All over Africa, visual images and ordinary objects are used symbolically to communicate knowledge, feelings and values. As symbols play such an important role in the African conception of reality, a sound understanding of African patterns of thought and feeling requires an appreciation of the nature and function of symbolism as a medium of communication in African culture.
CONCERNING THE USES OF SIGNS AND SYMBOLS
Because the nature and role of signs and symbols in the process of transmitting information are easily confused, a clear notion of the difference in the way they are used in communication is necessary for appreciating the cognitive value of indigenous symbols.
Natural Signs
For our purpose it is necessary to identify two main types of signs, namely natural and artificial signs, both of which are used to provide stimuli for fairly determined appropriate responses.
In everyday communication, natural objects and events are employed as natural signs, thus smoke is taken to indicate the presence of fire, gives rise to the proverb, "There is no smoke without fire." Sometimes wet streets are a sign that it has rained; and a student's yawning in class may be a sign that he is tired, sleepy or that the lesson being given is boring. A scar on the body may indicate an accident.
A natural sign is thus a part of a greater event of a complex condition, and indicates the rest of the situation of which it is a notable feature. Sign then is a symptom of a state of affairs.
There are three significant features to be noted in the use of signs in communication: the sign, its object and the subject who relates the sign and the object signified. The sign and its object (for example, smoke and fire) are logically related to form a pair. In any such combination one of the terms is less important--smoke, in this case--than the other--fire. The less important term, smoke, becomes the sign of the more important one, fire. The less important term is normally more easily available than the other term in the pair. For example, a scar as a sign is more easily available than the accident which is inferred from the presence of the scar. The accident then is the meaning of the scar as a sign.
Artificial Signs
Sometimes we produce artificial or arbitrary objects and actions and correlate them with important ones that serve as their meanings. These are called artificial signs. Traffic signs are good examples of artificial signs. For example, red light has been used arbitrarily to mean "stop" or "prohibition." Colors are also used arbitrarily to mean many different things. Thus in the indigenous Ghanaian culture brown is used as a color for mourning and so brown clothes are customarily worn to funerals and memorial services. Placing the arm or arms across the middle of the head or clasping both hands at the back of the head is used as another sign of mourning in Ghanian society.
Similar artificial signs abound in other African cultures. They do not form parts of conditions which they naturally signify, but are used arbitrarily by the culture to impart specifically agreed-upon information. There is no limit to what such signs may mean, and so a sound of a bell may indicate any of the following: to begin church worship or classes, to change lessons, to call attention to what is being said, etc.
A sign can be taken or designed to mean so many things that a misinterpretation of signs is a real possibility. A "stick-up thumb" in Ghana is an insulting and vulgar sign, but in America it is used as a way of asking for a lift. Even within the same Ghanaian culture the left hand is ritually an unclean sign; but because it is not used normally to do evil as the right hand sometimes is, it has also become a sign of peace and is used, especially among the Ewe of Ghana, to prepare the reconciliation libation water called dzatsi.
However ambiguous be the use of signs, they furnish information about the environment and about intentions and feelings of people, and elicit appropriate reactions. Their major limitation, apart from the ambiguity in their use, is in the fact that they do not point characteristically beyond themselves to hidden meanings and information as to symbols.
Symbols in General
One great difference between the use of signs and symbols is the degree of qualitative information that is conveyed through them. While signs provide simple information, symbols are used to communicate complex knowledge, abstract truths and ideas about life and its meaning. The simplest example of a sign might be the use of a personal name, in introducing someone. For example, if Fidel Castro were present and introduced, everyone present would stand up. In this case, the name is used as a sign and so calls forth an appropriate action. But if the name, Castro, were used in a discourse it would make us think of what the person bearing the name represents in consciousness. In other words, the name in this case is used as a symbol; it will not call forth actions appropriate to their objects, but will make us think of its objects in certain ways. A symbol is therefore a vehicle for the conception of an object, enabling us to conceive or form a view of an object; it calls forth mental images. Thus, for example, Fidel Castro in his relationship to the United States of America might give rise to the thought of a modern Old Testament David who stood against a Goliath. The conception of a symbol therefore consists in what it means, and Castro as a symbol may mean the fact of the continued existence of the weak and the powerless in spite of threats from the mighty or it may mean the spirit of defiance. A symbol is therefore a powerful instrument of thought and conceptual abstraction.
Below are some examples of indigenous African symbols and the conceptions they evoke in the mind:
1. The elephant: symbol of power and kingship
2. The lion: symbol of ferocity, danger and royalty
3. Woman: symbol of peace, productivity, creativity, life and growth
4. Rugged Triangle: symbol of stability and inner repose; true life is secure, stable and lasting or has safe and stable foundations; life that has a solid basis (see figure 1).
5. The ram and its horns: symbol of pacific disposition combined with strength
and power (see figure 2).
Figure 1. Eto Figure 2. Dwinnimmen
In all the examples given, the conception of the objects are derived from certain unique and relatively enduring traits noticeable in the objects used as symbols. Thus, the two traits that are characteristic of the ram are "peaceful nature" represented by the general nature of sheep and "strength and power" represented by the horns and their use in fighting.
The meaning of a symbol, like that of a sign, is determined by the subject using it, so
sheep can be a symbol of humility in one culture and a symbol of stupidity in another. The
serpent can be a symbol of evil in one culture and of life and continuity in another. The
subject and his culture then are responsible for the meaning given to any particular
symbol. This synthetic process of giving meaning to symbols is aptly expressed by the
proverb: "The Potter, and not the pot, is responsible for the shape of the pot."
Thus, the egg as a symbol in Ghanaian culture has several symbolic meanings: feminine
beauty for those who think that a girl with an egg-shaped head is a beauty; it can be a
symbol of easy labour in childbirth, because some people are of the opinion that the hen
does not labour much in laying eggs. The egg is also a symbol of new and creative life, of
fertility and fecundity. Finally, it is used as a symbol of love and of state power, which
are considered very fragile. The top of a linguist staff in Ghana is therefore sometimes
made of carved hand with an egg in it, and this is translated as: "Power held in one
hand is not safe."
In positive terms the symbol recommends the virtue of sharing political power and so could be called a "symbol of democracy"
Figure 3. Asi kple azi
Suitability of Symbols
The preceding discussion of African symbols leads to the question: What generally makes an object a suitable symbol? Usually objects, plants and animals are found more suitable as symbols because they run true to type, e.g., the egg is characteristically fragile and so can be effectively used to represent the delicate nature of love and the loving relationships; fire is always warm and so can be used to symbolize the warmth of sincere love. Human nature, even though complex and changeable, is used to represent certain broad traits. Thus, woman in the indigenous culture has come to represent the creative principle of life and man has become a symbol of strength and destructiveness. Boys and girls among the Ewe and Akan of Ghana, Togo and Benin are therefore given names that are characteristic of their natures. A boy may be given a name such as: Oko (Akan), "War"; Bekoe (Akan), "He has come as a fighter"; Tukpe (Ewe), "Coolness"; Nyuinyo (Ewe), "The good is not a taboo to anyone"; Blewusi (Ewe)--"Take it easy"; to reflect what they normally bring to people's minds.
As observed earlier, human beings, objects, animals and plants are found suitable as symbols on the basis of any enduring traits they may have and in the minds of people represent these enduring traits. Thus, in the indigenous folklore and proverbs the antelope is a symbol of puniness and powerlessness.
TYPES OF INDIGENOUS SYMBOLS
The indigenous cultures of Africa are replete with symbols and symbolic expressions. In the indigenous Ghanaian culture, symbols are used in different life situations, and on the basis of the types of contexts in which they are used, they may be classified into six major groups with unavoidable overlappings. The six groups are adinkra symbols, stool symbols, linguist staff symbols, religious symbols, ritual symbols and oral literary symbols.
Adinkra Symbols. The adinkra symbols derive their name and popularity from one of the national cloths of Ghana called adinkra. The word adinkra comes from the Twi words di nkra(25) meaning "to say goodbye." The adinkra cloth is traditionally a mourning cloth and is normally worn "to say goodbye" to the dead and to express sympathy for the bereaved family, and so is commonly seen at funerals and memorial services. It is usually adorned with symbols that express various views of life and death.(26) Four adinkra symbols are given below.
1. Owu atwedee, "the ladder of death, everybody will climb it one day to go to God." This is a
symbol of the inevitability of death, which is not a curse but a homegoing to one's
father.
Figure 4. Owu atwedee
2. Bewu "Unless God dies, I will not die" is a symbol of the immortality of the soul (se [Ewe])okra [Akan]. The two symbols are used to give a true African meaning to human existence: life and death are two aspects of one reality and one cannot be had without the other.
Figure 5 Myame Bewu
ana mawu
3. Gye Nyame, "Only God" is an abstract symbol representing the dependability
of God. Its Ewe version called Mauw ko is a right hand drawn with a clenched fist
and the finger pointing straight up meaning "I lean only on God alone" because
he is dependable (see figures 6 and 7).
Figure 6. Gye Nyame Figure 7. Mawu Ko
The people of the indigenous society use the adinkra cloth as an appropriate canvas for displaying traditional symbols which express their unique apprehension of reality.
Stool Symbols. The traditional stool of Ghana, like the adinkra cloth, is used
as a medium for displaying various symbols. The stool itself is a symbol in its own right
and is considered as the abode of the soul (se, okra) of a nation or an
individual. Every individual or state must therefore have his or her stool. Formerly a
bride was given a stool by her husband so as to settle her soul in the husband's
house. In some cases, a mother is given a
Figure 8 Sankofa Figure 9 Nyansapow
new stool on the birth of a child. This act is to reinforce the continued stay of her soul in her husband's house (see figure 8).
The stool as a symbol of the individual's soul has become a highly valued personal property. Thus, if the owner is not sitting on it, theoretically nobody else is allowed to sit on it and so it is generally laid on its side.
The stool is conceived as a female principle and its seat part is shaped like a crescent and represents the warm embrace of a mother welcoming her beloved child home from a journey or from the day's labors. The crescent part of the stool is called atuu, which is a word used to embrace a person arriving from a journey.
The middle portion of the stool is carved as a symbolic representation of an object such as an elephant, a sankofa bird, or of an abstract idea such as "Gye Nyame". The stool usually derives its name from the symbol that is used in its middle portion, which is called (in Ewe) titina (middle) or nufiala (teacher), because the particular message of any stool is found in its middle portion. The message of the Nyansapow (Wisdom) Stool (see figure 9) may be used as an illustration. It is rendered as: "The present generation cannot lay aside easily the wisdom of the past; and they can only do this if they have something better to replace it." The stool is therefore used as a seat as well as an aid to teach something important.
Linguist Staff Symbols. At the court of any Ghanaian chief, there is always an important official called (in Akan) "okycame." He is a linguist or spokesman through whom the chief speaks to his elders and the people, and through whom the chief is, in turn, spoken to on both private and public occasions.
The linguist is usually appointed on the basis of his mature experience, expert knowledge of traditional matters, tact and diplomacy. He is a close adviser of the chief and pronounces judgment at the court on behalf of his chief and his elders.
Each linguist has a staff of office, which is carved in wood and topped with a symbolic emblem, usually covered with silver or gold leaf. The emblem depicts a proverb or expresses a highly cherished value in the society. The five popular symbols that are seen on the tops of linguist staffs are given below.
1. "Three heads joined together" (figure 10). This depicts the value of
consultation and discussion in arriving at mature decisions especially at the court of the
chief. It is based on a proverb that says: "One head does not go into council."
Figure 10 Tikro
2. "The crowing rooster (cock)" (figure 11). This is a symbol of good
leadership. The belief among the Ewe is that a good leader is a person who wakes up his
followers to their responsibilities and privileges. This symbol is used as a guiding
principle of administration by the Chiefs of Anyako in the Volta Region of Ghana.
Figure 11 Kpodola nyui
3. "A hen stepping on her chicks" (figure 12). This is a symbol of parental
disci pline. It is the duty of parents to correct their children, and parental correction
should not be taken as lack of affection for children but a deep concern for their good.
Figure 12 Akoko nan
4. "The pineapple" (figure 13). The pineapple symbol represents the value of
deliberation and careful thought, prerequisites for sound decisions at the Chief's court.
The symbol is derived from a proverb which says: "If you are in a hurry to eat a
pineapple, you end up eating a green (i.e. unripe) one."
Figure 13 Aborobe
5. "A man holding a snake's neck" (figure 14). Like many other symbols, this
one is based on another proverb which says: "If you get hold of the head (neck) of a
snake, what is left is a piece of rope." This is advice to chiefs to address
themselves to the essential elements of their administration and to the important needs of
their people.
Figure 14 Owo ti
It has become clear from the preceding discussion that in the indigenous Ghanaian society, the clothes that people wear, the stools they sit on and what they use as aids are means of self-expression and a medium for teaching both the young and the old.
Religious and Ritual Symbols. All the preceding visual symbols were born of
religious or philosophical beliefs. But there are other symbols that express specific
beliefs about the High God and reveal the conceptions of his nature. Thus,
"Nyame-dua" (see figure 15) symbolizes the belief in the abiding presence and
protection of God. [insert figure 16] in the Mawu-cult among the Ewe, the rugged triangle
made of sticks is a symbol derived from the opening proverb of a traditional prayer which
runs as follows: "Three things make life" (see figure 16).
Figure 15 Nyame Dua Figure 16 Eto
This is another way of saying: Anything put on a tripod (in this case, of the traditional outdoor stone stove) will not fall down. This is a symbol of stability and inner repose called Eto, i.e., three. This state of being is also described as "cool" (efa in Ewe) and is one of the defining characteristics of the Ewe High God. Segbo, who is therefore referred to as Fafato, "the Father of Owner of Coolness." Peace has consequently become a necessary condition of a life, of human creativity and of growth. So one proverb says: "The yam thrives well when its mound is cool."
The other very important religious symbol is the woman, who is used as a symbol of the Ewe High God in the capacity of the primordial cosmic unity-totality and the creative principle of life. The unity of the godhead is referred to as Segbo, which represents the fullness of the divine being; it is referred to in its totality as Mawu-Lisa or Dada Segbo-Lisa. The dual name for the High God comprises the female and the male principles, which are the creating principles of life; one is invalid without the other. But the High God as a creative principle is characteristically symbolized by a woman.
This makes it clear why among some African ethnic groups a woman officiates at puberty rites and at weddings. These rituals have their symbolic meanings. The purpose and essence of life to the indigenous African society are to be creative and productive, and the whole of life is seen as a field in which the individual plants the seeds of his life. The personal Ewe name agbefanu, meaning "Life is like sowing," and the proverb, "Woman without man is like a field without seed," sum up the indigenous creative view of life. This is an essential component of Africanity.
PROVERBS AS ORAL LITERARY SYMBOLS
In speaking and thinking, oral literary forms such as fables, myths, maxims and proverbs are used in the traditional society to express beliefs, values and feelings. Proverbs which are normally short and pithy sayings are very popular devices used to state metaphorically certain general truths about life. One Yoruba proverb says: "A proverb is a horse which can carry one swiftly to the discovery of ideas."
Proverbs and Meaning
This Yoruba proverb defines accurately the symbolic function of a proverb and helps us to understand, the general function of proverbs. Instead of being an old-fashioned way of communication, proverbs lead us to conceive and understand the essence of human relationships, events, life's situations and the behaviour patterns of people. They establish certain value bases to help us comprehend and order our actions, and they enshrine the vital conclusions filtered from life's experiences. Take for example the philosophical question: "What is knowledge?" Several answers are given to this question, not in the form of learned treatises, but in the form of simple proverbs. One says, "Knowledge is like a baobab tree and so no one person can embrace it with both arms."(27) This is another way of saying, "Knowledge grows and grows and so there is no end to what any one individual can know." Another proverb states the same truth thus: "He who knows all, knows nothing." This understanding of knowledge is designed to lead to the development of an attitude of intellectual curiosity and open-mindedness.
A proverb normally has primary and secondary meanings, sometimes referred to as denotative or manifest meaning, on the one hand, and connotative or latent meaning, on the other. In the proverb, "The lion and the antelope live in the same forest yet the antelope has time to grow," the lion and the antelope firstly denote carnivorous and herbivorous quadrupeds, respectively; connotatively, however, the "lion" represents "forces of destruction" while the "antelope" represents man in his puniness and powerlessness. The main point of the proverb is "There is a power in the universe that preserves the life of the weak and helpless in the face of all that threatens it."
It is not always easy to make out the connotative meaning of a proverb, but, if its connotative meaning is grasped, it is found to be a vehicle used by our fathers and mothers to approach, apprehend and recollect reality in their experience.
Uses of Proverbs
Proverbs are a very effective mode of communication, and their correct and persuasive use in speech is always taken as a sign of sound education, maturity, cultural sophistication and wisdom. Among their many uses we can discern the following:
To Express Abstract Truths. Proverbs are generally used to communicate truths that may be abstract and difficult to grasp. Such a proverb usually dramatizes and configures the bare truths in the facts of everyday life and world. In the proverb form the truths become so substantial that they stimulate the imagination and challenge the understanding.
Examples:
Proverb
Abstract Idea
1) There is no quarrel between
the eye and sleep.
Learn to tolerate each other--Tolerance
2) The freedom that comes from
ignorance enslaves the one
who entertains it.
Knowledge is freedom
3) It is only the stupid slave who
says that his condition of
bondage is good after a heavy
meal.
The freedom of self-determination is better than material well-being
Guide to Conduct. Many proverbs are used as bases for judging unacceptable modes of behaviour and thus function as general guides to conduct.
Examples:
Proverb
Principle
1) If you visit the country of frogs and you find them squatting, you must squat too even though you may find it inconvenient.
You need to make some adjustment in a new situation of life.
2) You do not use the left hand to
point the way to your father's
village.
Learn to appreciate and admire what you have.
3) Once you have made up your mind to cross a river by walking
through it, you do not mind
getting your stomach wet.
Be firm in carrying out your resolutions.
As Commentary on Human Behaviour. Some of the proverbs are careful
observations and commentaries on human behaviour and so provide useful insight into human
nature.
Examples:
Proverb
Commentary
1) A person who does not lick his
lips cannot blame the harmattan
for drying them.
People who are not prepared to help themselves are usually misrepresented and badly
treated by others.
2) It is usually the insect in your
cloth that bites you.
Sometimes it is your relatives or close friends who will ruin or betray you.
3) Ti is the coward who says, "They are insulting us."
It is the coward who leaves the defense of his honor to others
To Express Values
Proverbs display unmistakably the main value-orientations of indigenous African society. They express all kinds of values from the moral, spiritual, humanistic, economic and intellectual to the material.
Examples:
Proverb
Value-Orientation
1) There is no wealth where there
are no children.
The importance of children.
2) It is one's deeds that are
counted, not one's years.
The meaning of time is in positive deeds. (Creative living.)
3) Goodness sells itself;
badness walks around.
The value of a thing is in the inherent power that it has to satisfy human needs, and
it is this power that attracts people to it.
In the following two extended Ghanaian proverbs, the value of man features in the first
one and the value of life in the second:
a. It is the human being who counts,
Call on gold, gold does not respond;
Call on clothes, clothes do not respond;
It is the human being who counts.
b. Don't let me die in the day,
Don't let me die at night,
Don't let me die at all,
But let me die.
The point of the first is fairly obvious, but that of the second needs some explaining. In the second one, which is a prayer proverb, the individual expresses his desire to see and appreciate the beauty of life and nature (line one) and to be sexually active (line two) so as to fulfill his creative being and have many children who may perpetuate his name, beliefs and philosophy of life (line three). After he has fulfilled his destiny he would be happy to join the fathers (line 4). In this proverb we see the indigenous understanding of life and death as polar opposites which complement each other.
From the examination of the various indigenous symbols, it is clear that they
constitute valuable source-materials for the understanding of African orientations to
life.
NOTES
PART III
ANTHROPOLOGY AND METAPHYSICS
CHAPTER V
PERSON AND COMMUNITY
IN AFRICAN THOUGHT
KWAME GYEKYE
INTRODUCTION
The existence of a social structure is an outstanding, in fact, a necessary feature of every human society. A social structure is evolved not only to give effect to certain conceptions of human nature, but also to provide a framework for both the realization of the potentials, goals and hopes of the individual members of the society and the continuous existence and survival of the society. The type of social structure or arrangement evolved by a particular society seems to reflect--and be influenced by--the public conceptions of personhood held in the society. These conceptions are articulated in the critical analyses and arguments of its intellectuals.
Questions raised by the intellectuals, especially the moral and political philosophers among them, relate, in this connection, to the metaphysical and moral status of a person (or, self). The metaphysical question is whether a person, even though he lives in a human society, is a self-sufficient atomic individual who does not depend on his relationships with others for the realization of his ends and who has ontological priority over the community, or whether he is by nature a communal (or, communitarian) being, having natural and essential relationships with others. Moral questions, which may, in some sense, be said to be linked to, or engendered by, metaphysical conceptions of the person, relate to: (i) the status of the rights of the individual--whether these are so fundamental that they may not be overridden in any circumstances, (ii) the place of duties--how the individual sees his socio-ethical roles in relation to the interests and welfare of others, and (iii) the existence and appreciation of a sense of common life or common (collective) good. Moral or normative matters may be expressed in sophisticated and elaborate conceptual formulation; but as practical matters they have their best and unambiguous articulation or translation in the actual way of life of a people--in the way individuals are expected or not expected to respond to one another in times of need, to spontaneously care for one another, and so on.
My intention in this paper is to explore the above questions which bear on personhood and community; how the two concepts feature and are understood in African culture will be my point of departure. In an earlier publication(28) I discussed the concepts of individuality and communalism as they are understood in Akan philosophy in the traditional setting. In this paper, however, I shall focus my attention mainly on the normative aspects of personhood and community.
COMMUNITARIANISM IN AFRICAN SOCIO-ETHICAL THOUGHT
The communal or communitarian (I use the two words interchangeably) aspects of African socio--ethical thought are reflected in the communitarian features of the social structures of African societies. As remarked by many scholars or researchers on the cultures of Africa, these features are not only outstanding, but the defining characteristics of those cultures. The sense of community that characterizes social relations among individuals is a direct consequence of the communitarian social arrangements. This sense of community according to Dickson, is a "characteristic of African life of which attention his been drawn again and again by both African and non-African writers on Africa. Indeed, to many this characteristic defines Africannes."(29) According to Senghor, "Negro-African society puts more stress on the group than on the individuals, more on solidarity than on the activity and needs of the individual, more on the communion of persons than on their autonomy. Ours is a community society."(30) Kenyatta made the following observation with regard to the traditional life in Kenya: "According to Gikuyu ways of thinking, nobody is an isolated individual. Or rather, his uniqueness is a secondary fact about him; first and foremost he is several people's relative and several people's contemporary."(31) Elsewhere he observed that "Individualism and self-seeking were ruled out. . . . The personal pronoun `I' was used very rarely in public assemblies. The spirit of collectivism was (so) much ingrained in the mind of the people."(32) The communitarian ethos of the African culture is also echoed in the works of some African novelists. Clearly, then, the African social structures with its underlying socio-ethical philosophy, was and very much still is, communitarian.
Now, what would be the conception of personhood held in such a communitarian socio-ethical philosophy? The question is appropriate and would need to be explored, for it is possible for people to assume offhandedly that with its emphasis on communal values, collective good and shared ends, communitarianism invariably conceives the person as wholly constituted by social relationships; that it tends to whittle down the moral autonomy of the person; that it makes the being and life of the individual person totally dependent on the activities, values, projects, practices and ends of the community; and consequently, that it diminishes his freedom and capability to choose or question or reevaluate the shared values of the community.
The communtarian conception of the person needs to be critically and thoroughly examined before making a final judgment on those assumptions. In making the communitarian self, as variously understood in African culture, my point of departure, I shall set off from the views clearly expressed in an interesting paper published sometime ago by Menkiti.
Making Mbiti's understanding or assessment of the status of the person in African culture expressed in the statement "I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am"(33) the basis for his analysis, Menkiti maintains that the African view asserts the ontological primacy, and hence the ontological independence, of the community.(34) He says that "as far as Africans are concerned, the reality of the communal world takes precedence over the reality of the individual life histories, whatever these may be."(35) From this assumption, Menkiti infers, (i) that in the African view, in contrast with the Western "it is the community which defines the person as person, not some isolated static quality of rationality, wills or memory";(36) (ii) that the African view supports "the notion of personhood as acquired,"(37); that "person hood is something which has to be achieved, and is not given simply because one is born of human seed";(38) and (iii) that "as far as African societies are concerned, personhood is something at which individuals could fail."(39)
He infers the notion of an acquisition of personhood also from the use of the pronoun it "in many languages, English included" to refer to "children and new borns."(40) I take issue with the views or conclusions expressed in (i) to (iii), for they do not necessarily follow from the notion of the priority of the community. Menkiti's views on the metaphysical status of the community vis-a-vis that of the person and his account of personhood in African moral, social and political philosophy are, in my opinion, overstated and not entirely correct, and require some amendments or refinements. I will in the fullness of time justify my criticisms of his views.
However, I should perhaps point out, that the metaphysical construal of personhood in African thought such as Menkiti's, which gives the community priority over the individual person, has a parallel in the conceptions of the social status of the person held by some scholars, both African and non-African. Their position was grounded in the ideological choice of socialism--"African Socialism"--made by most African political leaders in the early days of political independence. Or, is it the case that the social conception of the individual's status is a logical consequence of the metaphysical? The social conception holds a view of communitarianism which may be either radical and unrestricted or moderate and restricted, with either extreme or moderate socio-political consequences for the individual person. Thus, the advocates of the ideology of African socialism, such as Nkrumah, Senghor and Nyerere, in their anxiety to find anchorage for their ideological choice in the traditional African ideas about society, argued that socialism was foreshadowed in the African traditional idea and practice of communalism (communitarianism). Thus, Nkrumah observed that "If one seeks the socio-political ancestor of socialism, one must go to communalism . . . in socialism, the principles underlying communalism are given expression in modern circumstances."(41) And Senghor also opined that "Negro-African society is collectivist or, more exactly communal, because it is rather a communion of souls than an aggregate of individuals."(42)
These statements clearly suggest the conviction of these African leaders or scholars that the African social order, in the traditional setting, was communitarian and would, for that reason, easily translate into modern socialism. Hence the euphoric and unrelenting pursuit of socialism by most African political leaders for more than two decades following the attainment of political independence. But in as much as they do not appear to have allowed room for the exercise of individual rights, the view of communitarianism held by them may, most probably be said to be radical, excessive and unrestricted--a view of communitarianism I find unsupportable.
Communitarianism immediately sees the human person as an inherently (intrinsically) communal being, embedded in a context of social relationships and interdependence, never as an isolated, atomic individual. Consequently it sees the community not as a mere association of individual persons whose interests and ends are contingently congruent, but as a group of persons linked by interpersonal bonds, biological and/or non biological, who consider themselves primarily as members of the group and who have common interests, goals and values. The notion of common interests and values is crucial to an adequate conception of community; that notion in fact defines the community. It is the notion of common interests, goals and values that differentiates a community from a mere association of individual persons. Members of a community share goals and values. They have intellectual and ideological, as well as emotional, attachments to those goals and values; as long as they cherish them, they are ever ready to pursue and defend them.
It is an obvious fact, of course, that an individual human being is born into an existing human society and, therefore, into a human culture, the later being a product of the former. As an Akan maxim has it, when a person descends from heaven, he descends into a human society (onipa firi soro besi a, obesi onipa kurom). The fact that a person is born into an existing community must suggest a conception of the person as a communitarian being by nature, even though some people insist on the individuality of the person. The communitarian conception of the person has some implications: it implies, (i) that the human person does not voluntarily choose to enter into human community, that is, that community life is not optional for any individual person; (ii) that the human person is at once a cultural being; (iii) that the human person cannot--perhaps must not--live in isolation from other persons; (iv) that the human person is naturally oriented toward other persons and must have relationships with them; (v) that social relationships are not contingent but necessary; and (vi) that, following from (iv) and (v), the person is constituted, but only partly (see below), by social relationships in which he necessarily finds himself.
The fundamentally relational character of the person and the interdependence of human individuals arising out of their natural sociality are thus clear. It is the necessary relationships which complete the being of the individual person who, prior to entering into those relationships, would not be self-complete for, as we are reminded by an Akan maxim, a person is not a palm tree that he should be self-complete or self-sufficient (onipa nnye abe na ne ho ahyia ne ho). It is evidently true that in the social context, in terms of functioning or flourishing in a human community, the individual person is not self-sufficient; his capacities, talents and dispositions are not adequate for the realization of his potential and basic needs. What accrues to his natural sociality--and hence his natural rationality--provides the buttress indispensable to the actualization of his possibilities.
All this presupposes the priority of the cultural community in which the individual person finds himself. Yet it might be supposed that if a community crucially consists of persons sharing interests and values in some sense, wouldn't this fact establish the priority of the individual rather than that of the community, and that therefore the community existentially derives from individuals and the relationships that would exist between them? We may here turn briefly, but critically, to the Akan maxim that says that one tree does not make or constitutes a forest (duo baako nnye kwae). This means that for there to be a forest there should be a number of individual trees; the reality of the forest derives from the individual trees. In the context of the relationship between the individual and the community, the analogical meaning of the maxim is that one individual person does not constitute a community. Just as we would not speak of a forest where there is only one tree, so we would not--cannot--speak of a community where there is only one person. Even though existing or ongoing communities are of course of varying sizes, yet not even the smallest one is constituted by one individual person. According to the maxim, a community emerges, that is, comes into existence, with the congregation of individual persons: the priority of the individual vis-a-vis the derivativeness of the community appears implicit in the maxim.
The analogy the maxim seeks to establish between the forest and community, however, is a defective one, even though the notion of the metaphysical priority of the individual person implicit in the explanation of the maxim I have provided may be found attractive by some people. The analogy is defective in that whereas the individual tree can grow in a lonely place, in isolation from other trees and, thus, without any relationship with them or assistance from them, an individual human person cannot develop and achieve the fullness of his potentials without the concrete act of relating to other individual persons. Also, whereas the individual person is born into an existing community, not into a solitary wilderness, and is naturally oriented toward other persons, the individual tree can sprout from, or be planted, in a lonely place. But it would be pointless to strain the analogy of the maxim whose intention is to establish that the whole is a function of its parts, and hence to establish the ontological derivativeness of the community.
The ontological derivativeness of the community, however, cannot be upheld. The reason is that the view of the priority of the individual, logically implied by the notion of the ontological derivativeness of the community, makes relationships between persons merely contingent, voluntary and optional. That conclusion may not yield or lead to the emergence of a community, which, however, is necessary as a basis, not only for defining and articulating the values and goals shareable by individual persons, but also for realizing the nature or possibilities of the individual person. The community alone constitutes the context, the social or cultural space, in which the actualization of the possibilities of the individual person can take place, providing the individual person the opportunity to express his individuality, to acquire and develop his personality and to fully become the kind of person he wants to be, i.e., to attain the status, goals, expectations to be, etc. The system of values which the person inherits as he enters into the cultural community and the range of goals in life from which he can choose--these are not anterior to a cultural structure but a function of the structure itself: they are therefore posterior to--indeed the products of the culture, i.e. the community. Thus, in so far as the cultural community constitutes the context or medium in which the individual person works out and chooses his goals and life plans, and, through these activities, ultimately becomes what he wants to be--the sort of status he wants to acquire--the cultural community must be held as prior to the individual.
COMMUNAL STRUCTURE AND PERSONHOOD
The articulation of, (i) the ontological primacy of the community, (ii) the natural sociality of the human person, (iii) the organic character of the relations between individual persons, and (iv) the all-importance of the community for the total well-being or complete realization of the nature of the individual person--all this as explicated in the foregoing section certainly cam give rise to a hyperbolic and extreme view of the functional and normative status of the community. The characterizations of the nature and status of the community just provided may be true; in fact they are true, to my mind. Yet one could err in at least some of the conclusions one may draw from them by overlooking the logic or relevance of attributes that can be delineated as belonging essentially to the human person qua person. A consideration of other aspects of human nature would certainly be appropriate: a person is by nature a social (communal) being,yes; but he is by nature other things as well (i.e. he possesses other essential attributes). Failure to recognize this may result in pushing the significance and implications of a person's communal nature beyond their limits, an act that would in turn result in investing the community with an all-engulfing moral authority to determine all things about the life of the individual person. One might thus easily succumb to the temptation of exaggerating the normative status and power of the cultural community in relation to those of the person, and thus obfuscating our understanding the real nature of the person.. It seems to me that Menkiti succumbed to this temptation.
Menkiti in his interesting paper deploys arguments to prove that African thought considers personhood as something defined or conferred by the community and as something that must be acquired by the individual. In my critical examination of his paper I shall start with arguments that arrive from his understanding of African cultural practices or beliefs and his attribution to African thought of an analysis of a characteristic of English grammar.
Menkiti, as I have already mentioned infers the notion of acquisition of personhood from the use of the neuter pronoun `it' in many languages, including English, to refer to children and new borns but not to adults. The point he wants to make is that the use of the neuter pronoun for children and new borns means that they are not yet persons--the community has not yet conferred personhood on them. They are now gong through the `process' of becoming persons. The inference Menkiti draws would most probably be incorrect for a number of African languages. It is surprising that an inference based on the characteristics of a non-African language is being regarded as having serious implications for African thought!
It would have been more instructive and appropriate for him to examine how the neuter pronoun `it' functions in some African languages, and whether it functions in the same way in African languages as it does in English. What he says about the pronoun `it' does not at all apply to the Akan language, for example: the neuter pronoun `it' does not exist in this language for animate things. Thus: "He is in the room" is translated in Akan as w dan no mu; "she is in the room" as w dan no mu; and "it (referring to a dog) is in the room" also as w dan no mu. However, `it' is used for inanimate things. Thus, the answer to one question `where is the book?' will be wo dan no mu, that is, `it is in the room.' Thus `e' is used as the neuter pronoun for only inanimate objects. Children and newly borns are of course not inanimate objects. Since the Akan neuter pronoun `' applies to all the three genders (strictly only to a part, i.e. the animate part, of the neuter gender, though), it would follow, on Menkiti's showing that not even the adult or oldest person can strictly be referred to as a person! For the answer to the question, "where is the old man?" (if we want to use a pronoun) in Akan will be w dan no mu, that is, "he/it is in the room."
In Ga-Dangme languages, also in Ghana, the pronoun `e' is used to refer to everything-- stones, trees, dogs and human beings (of both the masculine and feminine genders). The pronoun `e' (= it/he/she) is thus genderneutral, encompassing all the genders: masculine, feminine and neuter.(43) In this group of languages there is no pronoun used solely for inanimate objects, as there is in Akan, for the pronoun `e' is used for both animate and inanimate objects. Clearly, then, neither the neuter pronoun in the Akan language for animate things, nor the gender-neutral pronoun in Ga-Dangme languages, gives an indication as to the real nature of its designatum. The argument that "it" used of new borns and children (in the English language), implies that they are not yet persons therefore collapses when examined in the context of these languages, for `it' in Akan and Ga-Dangme languages is, as we have observed, used to refer to adults and older peoples as well as to children and new borns. Are those older people persons or are they yet to acquire their personhood? The semantics of the neuter pronoun in the African languages I have examined does not in any way lead to a view of nonperson. Thus Menkiti errs.
Menkiti also argues that the relative absence of ritualized grief over the death of a child in African societies in contrast to the elaborate burial ceremony and ritualized grief in the event of the death of an older person, also supports his point about the conferment by the Community of personhood status.(44) It is not true that every older person who dies in Al African community is given elaborate burial. The type of burial and the nature and extent of grief expressed over the death of an older person depend on the community's assessment, not of his personhood as such, but of the dead person's achievements in life, his contribution to the welfare of the community, and the respect he commanded in the community. Older persons who may not satisfy such criteria may in fact be given simple and poor funerals and attenuated forms of grief expressions. As to the absence of ritualized grief on the death of a child, this has no connection whatsoever with the African view of personhood as such, as alleged by Menkiti. It stems rather from beliefs about the possible consequences, for the mother of the dead child, of showing excessive grief: one belief, among the Akan people, is that excessive demonstration of grief in the event of the death of a child will make the mother infertile, as it will make her reach her menopause prematurely; another belief is that the excessive show of grief over the death of a child will drive the dead child too `far away' for it to reincarnate, and so be reborn; and so on. These beliefs are of course superstitious, but that is beside the point.
Thus no distinctions as to personhood can be made on the basis of the nature and extent of ritualized grief over the death of a child or of an older person. A human person is a person whatever his age or social status. Personhood may reach its full realization in community, but it is not acquired or yet to be achieved as one goes along in society. What a person acquires are status, habits, and personality or character traits: he, qua person, thus becomes the subject of the acquisition, and being thus prior to the acquisition process, he cannot be defined by what he acquires. One is a person because of what he is, not because of what he has acquired. Thus, the contrast Menkiti wants to establish between the African and the Western views of the nature of personhood by describing the former as "processual"(45) or "some sort of ontological progression"(46) and the latter as grounded on "some isolated static quality"(47) is, in my opinion, misguided.
However, there are some expressions in the Akan language, and judgments or evaluations made about the life and conduct of people, which give the impression that it is the community that defines and confers personhood. When an individual appears in his conduct to be wicked, bad, ungenerous, cruel, selfish, the Akan would say of that individual, that "he is not a human person" (onnye' nipa). Implicit in this judgment is the assumption that there are certain basic norms and ideals to which the behavior of a persons, if he is a persons, ought to conform, and that there are moral virtues that the human person is capable of displaying in his conduct. And because he is thought to be capable of displaying those virtues, it is expected that he would, when the situation arises, display them in his conduct and act in conformity with the accepted moral values and standards. Considering the situations in which that judgement is made about persons, these norms, ideals and moral virtues can be said to include generosity, kindness, compassion, benevolence, respect and concern for others; in fine, any action or behavior that conduces to the promotion of the welfare of others. And the reason for that judgment made of an individual is that that individual's actions and conduct are considered as falling short of the standards and ideals of personhood.
In Akan cultures, then, much is expected of a person in terms of the display of moral virtue. The pursuit or practice of moral virtue is held as intrinsic to the conception of a person. The position here may thus be schematized as: for any p, if p is a person, then p ought to display in his conduct the norms and ideals of personhood. Thus when a person fails to exhibit the expected moral virtues in his conduct, he is said not to be a person' (nnye 'nipa). The evaluative judgment opposite to the one we have been considering is, "he is a person" (oye 'nipa). The judgment here is not a descriptive one at all, though it can be used descriptively, for instance, to distinguish a human being from a tree. A descriptive use of that judgment would be obvious. It is, however, the normative form of the judgment that I am concerned to point up. The judgement, "he is a person," used normatively, means, `he has good character', `he is peaceful--not troublesome', `he is kind', `he has respect for others',`he is humble'."(48) The Akan, fully satisfied with, and profoundly appreciative of, the high standards of the morality of a person's conduct, would say of such a person: he/she is a real (human) person" (ye onipa paa).
Now, the moral significance of `denying' personhood to a human being on the grounds that his actions are dissonant with certain fundamental norms and ideals of personhood, or that he fails to exhibit certain virtues in his behavior is extremely interesting and is worth nothing. It means that human nature is considered in Akan culture to be essentially good, not depraved or warped by some original sin; that the human person is basically good, can and should do good, and should in turn have good done to him/her. It means, further, that the human person is considered to possess an innate capacity for virtue, for performing morally right actions and therefore should be treated as a morally responsible agent. I may here refer to the Akan maxim or belief that "God created every man (to be) good" (Onyame b obiara yie). The meaning of the statement that "God created every man good" is ambiguous. It is ambiguous as between man's actually doing good, that is, actually behaving virtuously and man's being capable of moral choice, that is, having the moral sense to distinguish between good and evil or right and wrong. In other words, it is not clear whether the statement means that man is determined to do good, to pursue virtues, or that he is merely endowed with a sense of right and wrong. How do we interpret the meaning of the statement then? In view of man's evil and unethical actions, the first alternative interpretation cannot be accepted as the correct meaning of the statement: the first alternative is plainly contradicted by man's moral experience. The correct interpretation of the view that man was created a moral beings then might be that man is a being endowed with moral sense and capable of making moral judgments. Man can then be held as a moral agent, a moral subject--not that his virtuous character is a settled matter, but that he is capable of virtue.
The foregoing discussion of some morally significant expressions in the Akan language or judgements made about the conduct of persons suggests a conception of moral personhood; a person is defined in terms of moral qualities or capacities: a human person is a being who has a moral sense and is capable of making moral judgments. This conception of a person however, must not be considered as eliminating or writing off children or infants as persons even though they are not (yet) considered as moral agents, as capable of exercising moral sense. The reason is that even though children are not morally capable in actuality, they are morally capable in potentiality. Unlike the colt which will never come to posses a moral sense even if it grew into an adult (horse), children do grow to become moral agents on reaching adolescence: at this stage they are capable of exercising their moral sense and thus of making moral judgments. Menkiti in fact accepts the characterization or definition of personhood in terms o moral capacities when he says:
The various societies found in traditional Africa routinely accept this fact that personhood is the sort of thing which has to be attained, and is attained in direct proportion as one participates in communal life through the discharge of the various obligations defined by one's stations. It is the carrying out of these obligations that transforms one from the it-status of early childhoods, marked by an absence of moral functions, into the person-status of later years, marked by a widened maturity of ethical sense--an ethical maturity without which personhood is conceived as eluding one.(49)
This passage surely commits Menkiti to saying that a person is defined in terms of "some isolated static quality"--the quality of moral sense or capacity in the African case--which he thought was a characteristic of Western conceptions of personhood!
Yet to explicate personhood in terms of moral capacities is not to imply by any means that it is the community that fully defines or confers personhood, even though it can be admitted that through such activities as moral instruction, advice, admonition and the imposition of sanctions the community can be said to play some role in a person's moral life. Moral capacities as such cannot be said to be implanted or catered for or conferred by the community
Now, I wish to turn briefly to other forms of judgments made about persons which are not particularly moral in nature. In the communal setting of the African life, an individual's social status is measured in terms of, (i) his sense of responsibility, expressed, in turn, through his responsiveness and sensitivity to the needs and demands of the group; (ii) what he has been able to achieve through his own exertions - physical, intellectual, moral; and (iii) the extent to which he fulfills certain social norms, such as having marital life and bringing up children. Faced with such social demands and requirements, an individual would strive in several ways to demonstrate his sense of personal responsibility, to achieve some measure of success in life, and to have a family (that is, immediate family). All these strivings are aimed at attaining some social status. The individual may fail in his strivings and, in the Akan community, for example, may consequently be judged as a "useless person" (onipa hun), an opprobrious term. But it must be noted that what the individual would be striving for in all his exertions is some social status, not personhood. The strivings are in fact part of the individual's self-expression, an exercise of a capacity he has as a person. And even if at the end of the day he failed to attain the expected status, his personhood would not for that reason diminish, even though he may lose social respect in the eyes of the members of the community. So that it is social status, not personhood, at which individuals could fail. Mankiti is mistaken in thinking that individuals can fail at personhood.
The foregoing arguments I have deployed are intended to prove that the view, such as held by Menkiti, that personhood is defined or conferred by the communal structure cannot be wholly true. This is so despite the natural sociality of the human person which at once places him in a system of shared values and practices and a range of goals--which, in short, places him in a cultural structure. I have made the observation that, besides being a communitarian being by nature, the human person is, also by nature, other things as well. By `other things', I have in mind such essential attributes of the person as rationality, having a capacity for virtue and for evaluating and making moral judgments and, hence, being capable of choice. It is not the community that creates these attributes; it discovers and nurtures them. So that if these attributes play any seminal roles in the execution of the individual person's life style and projects, as indeed they do, then it cannot be persuasively argued that personhood is fully defined by the communal structure or social relationships.
It is true that the whole gamut of values and practices in which the individual is necessarily embedded is a creation of cultural community and is part of its history. For this reason, it can be said that some of our goals are set by the communal structure. Yet the following questions may be asked: (i) Is it possible for the communal structure to set the whole or a seamless complex of the values, practices, and ends of the individual that will perfectly reflect the complexity of human nature, values and practices--at least some of which, we know, do change and so cannot be considered monolithic? (ii) Does the communal, and therefore cultural, character of the self really imply that the self is ineluctably and permanently held in thrall by that structure? (iii) Does the ethos of the communal structure preempt or permanently nip in the bud a possibly radical perspective on communal values and practices that may be adopted by a self? All of these questions can be answered in the negative.
The reason is that individual persons, as participants in the shared values and practices, and enmeshed in the web of communal relationships, may find that aspects of those cultural givens are inelegant, undignifying or unenlightening and can thoughtfully be questioned and evaluated. The evaluation may result in the individual's affirming or amending or refining existing communal goals, values and practices; but it may or could also result in the individual's total rejection of them. The possibility of re-evaluation means, surely, that the person cannot be absorbed by the communal or cultural apparatus, but can to some extent wriggle himself out of it, distance himself from it, and thus be in a position to take another look at it; it means, also, that the communal structure cannot foreclose the meaningfulness and reality of the quality of self-assertiveness which the person can demonstrate in his actions. The development of human, i.e., communal culture results from the exercise by individual persons of this capacity for self-assertion; it is this capacity which makes possible the intelligibility of autonomous individual choice of goals and life plans. The fact of the changes that do occur in the existing communal values--for some new values are evolved as some of the pristine ones fall into obsolescence--this fact is undoubtedly the result of the evaluative activities and choices of some autonomous, self-assertive individual persons.
The capacity for self-assertion which the individual can exercise presupposes, and in fact derives from, the autonomous nature of the person. By autonomy, I do not mean self-completeness, but the having of a will, a rational will of one's own, that enables one to determine at least some of his own goals and to pursue them. (The word `autonomy' consists of two Greek words `autos' [self] and `nomos' [rule]; thus, it means, self-governing, self-directing). The actions and choice of goals of the individual person emanate from his rational will. Thus, the self-determining is also self-assertive. The communitarian self, then, cannot be held as a cramped or shackled self acting robotically at the beck and call of the communal structure. That structure is never to be conceived as, or likened to, the Medusa head the sight of which reduces a person to inactivity and supineness--in this case, cultural or rational or intellectual supineness.
In concluding this section, then, I wish to say again that even though the communitarian self, such as is held in African moral and political philosophy, is not permanently detached from its contingent communal features and the individual is fully embedded or implicated in the life of his community, nevertheless the self, by virtue of--or by exploiting--its other natural attributes (beside the natural attribute of being communal) essential to its metaphysical constitution, can from time to time take a distanced view of its communal values and practices and reassess or revise them. This possibility implies that the self can set some of its goals and, in this way, participate in the determination or definition of its own identity. The upshot is that personhood can only be partly, never completely, defined by one's membership of the community. The most that can be said, in my view, is that the person is only partly constituted by the community. This view constitutes an amendment to Menkiti's position, put forward without any qualifications that the community fully defines personhood: " . . . in the African understanding human community plays a crucial role in the individual's acquisition of full personhood."(50) Menkiti's view of communitarianism, which appears to have support in the writings of African political leaders (whose view I adumbrated in my introductory remarks), appears to chime in with unrestricted or radical or excessive communitarianism. That view differs from the one I am putting forward which is that of a restricted or moderate communitarianism. It seems to me that restricted communitarianism offers a more appropriate and adequate account of the self than the unrestricted or radical account in that the former addresses the dual features of the self: as a communal being and as an autonomous, self-determining, self-assertive being with a capacity for evaluation and choice. There are, to be sure, other reasons for preferring restricted or moderate communitarianism over unrestricted or radical communitarianism which I discuss in the section that follows.
RIGHTS, DUTIES AND THE COMMUNAL STRUCTURE
It might be supposed that communitarianism with its emphasis on, and concern for communal values will have no truck with the doctrine of rights, for that doctrine is necessarily an individualistic doctrine. Rights belong primarily and irreducibly to individuals; a right is the right of some individual. Yet the supposition that communitarianism will have no places or very little, if at all, for rights will be false both in theory and practice, especially in the case of restricted or moderate communitarianism.
Communitarianism will not necessarily be antithetical to the doctrine of rights for several reasons. In the first place, communitarianism, cannot disallow arguments about rights which may in fact form part of the activity of a self-determining autonomous individual possessed of the capacity for evaluating or re-evaluating the entire practice of his community. Some of such evaluations may touch on matters of rights, the exercise of which a self-determining individual may see as conducive to the fulfillment of the human potential, and against the denial of which he may raise some objections.
Second, the respect for human dignity, a natural or fundamental attribute of the person which cannot, as such, be set at nought by the communal structure, generates regard for personal rights. The reason is that the natural membership of the individual person in a community cannot rob him of his dignity or worth, a fundamental and inalienable attribute he possesses as a person. Some conceptions of human dignity are anchored in theism, in the conviction that the dignity of the person is a natural endowment by God, the creator of humankind. One maxim of an African people whose social structure is communal has it that "all persons are children of God; no one is a child of the earth" (nnipa nyinaa ye Onyame mma; obiara nnye asase ba). The insistent claim being made in the maxim that every person is a child of God does seem to have some moral overtones or relevance, grounded, as it must, on the belief that there must be something intrinsically valuable in God. A person, being a child of God, presumably by reason of his having been created by him and regarded as possessing a divine spark called soul (okra), must be held as of intrinsic value, an end in himself, worthy of dignity and respect. It is possible to derive a theory of individual rights from theistic conceptions of the intrinsic worth of persons. One conception of rights famously known to be grounded on an act of God is in the preamble of the American Declaration of Independence (1776). "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights . . . ."
However, it is possible to derive a conception of human dignity and hence individual rights, not from theism, but from reflecting on human nature, particularly on the qualities that will dispose the human being to function at his best in human society and realize his full potentialities as a person. Thus the eighteenth century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, on the basis of his rational analysis, grounds the notion of human dignity or intrinsic worth on the capacity of the person for moral autonomy, i.e. rational freedom. Thus conceived, argues Kant, the person ought to be treated as an end in himself: "Now I say that man, and in general every rational being, exists as an end in himself, not merely as means for arbitrary use by this or that will: he must in all his actions, whether they are directed to himself or to other rational beings, always be viewed at the same time as an end."(51) Kant thus formulates his famous Categorical Imperative, considered by him as the supreme principle of morality, also as: "Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means but at the same time as an end."(52) This leads Kant to a notion of moral rights which he refers to as "innate rights" but which belong to everyone by nature and so could be called natural rights, which are our fundamental ethical end. Thus a conception of human dignity and moral or natural (human) rights which concomitantly flow from it can be reached through purely rational reflection on human nature. But howsoever the conception of human dignity or rights is derived, whether from theistic considerations or from sources independent of God, that conception is linked with, and in fact compels, the recognition of rights, and not only in an individualistic but also communitarian situation. In other words, the derivation of individual rights from naturalism (humanism) or supernaturalism cannot be confined to an individualistic framework; the derivation is not an activity or a characteristic or a possibility solely of an individualistic social ambience.
Third, at both the theoretical (conceptual) and practical level, communitarianism cannot set its face against individual rights. For, implicit in communitarianism's recognition of the dual features of the self as an autonomous, self-determining entity capable of evaluation and choice and as a communal being, is a commitment to the acknowledgement of the intrinsic worth of the self and the moral rights which can be said necessarily to be due to it. The recognition by communitarian political morality of individual rights is a conceptual requirement. At the practical level communitarianism must realize that allowing free rein for the exercise of individual rights-- which obviously includes the exercise of the unique qualities, talents and dispositions of the individuals--will enhance the cultural development and success of the community. If communitarianism were to shrug off individual rights, it would not only show itself as an inconsistent moral and political theory, but in practical terms would also saw off the branch on which it was going to sit.
However, it can be said that restricted or moderate communitarianism is a consistent and viable theory, one that is not opposed to individual rights, even though it may, for a reason to be stated presently, consciously and purposively give greater attention or care to other communal values of the community. The foregoing discussions then, has, I hope, clearly shown the falsity of the view that communitarianism will have no, or very little place, for individual rights.
Having said all this, however, it must be granted that communitarianism cannot be expected to make a fetish of rights; thus rights talk will not be brought to the front burner of its concerns and preoccupations. The reason is not far to seek; it is deriveable from the logic of the communitarian theory itself: it assumes an overwhelming concern for communal values, for the good of the wider society as such. Even so, the absorbing interest in the common good, in the provision for the social conditions which will enable each individual person to function satisfactorily in a human society, does not --should not--result in the gleeful subversion of individual rights. The reason is that even though rights belong primarily to individuals, as we said, nevertheless, in so far as their exercise will often, directly or indirectly, be valuable to the larger society, their status and roles must be recognized by communitarian theory. But the theory will disallow separating rights from the common values of the community and conferring on them a preeminent status. It must be noted that in any scheme of value ranking occurs or is resorted to when situations require that preferences for some values be made over other values. This is so whether the system of ethics is deontological (i.e. moderately deontological(53)) or teleological. Thus, in the communitarian political morality, priority will not be given to rights if doing so will stand in the way of attaining a more highly ranked value or a more preferable goal of the community. Rights would not, therefore, be held as absolute in the communitarian theory, even though I think they will--in fact they should-- have some place in that theory.
However, although it is conceivable, as has already been explained, that the communal structure will allow the exercise of individual rights, yet it can be expected that communitarianism would not suggest to individuals incessantly to insist on their rights. The reason, I suppose, is the assumption that rights, i.e. political, economic, social, are built into the ethos and practices of the cultural community. Thus, the economic, political and social needs of the individual members, which are the concern of most individual rights, would be expected to have been recognized, if not catered for, to some degree of adequacy by the communitarian structure. Individuals would not have a penchant for, an obsession with, insisting on their rights, knowing that insistence on their rights could divert attention to duties they, as members of the communal society, strongly feel towards other members of the community. Rights and duties are not polar concepts, even through they could be: if I insist on my right to all my possessions or to all that has resulted from the exercise of my endowments, I may not be able to show sensitivity to the needs and welfare of others, even though showing sensitivity to the needs of others is an important plank in the ethical platform of communitarianism. The danger or possibility of slipping down the slope of selfishness when one is totally obsessed with the idea of individual rights is, thus, quite real. In a social situation that, as a matter of ethical testaments stresses social relations, concern and compassion for others, and other communal values, insistence on rights (some rights) may not be necessary.
However, while the communitarian structure would not have a fetishistic attitude to individual rights, it would certainly have one toward duties that individual members have or ought to have toward other--perhaps the least advantaged--members of the community. The communitarian theory will expectably give priority to duties rather than rights. Concerned, as it is, with the common good or the communal welfare, the welfare of each and every member of the community, communitarianism will, perhaps undoubtedly, consider duty as the moral tone, as the supreme principle of morality. By `duty', I mean task, service, conduct or function that a person feels morally obligated to perform in respect of another person or other persons. The duties, which some members of the community feel they owe others by reason of our common humanity and should demonstrate in practice are such as the duty to help others in distress, the duty not to harm others, and so on. Duties to the community as a whole or to some members of the community would not derive from a social contract between individuals. The contract theory is a contrivance for voluntary, not natural, membership of the community, regarded by some people as a mere association of individuals. In a communitarian framework, however, there would be no place for the contract theory to set forth the duties and rights of individuals who are to inhabit a society that is being contemplated.
Even though such duties as caring for one another, concern for the welfare and needs of others, may not be said to be idiosyncratic to the communitarian system alone and an individualistic system can also evince or practice them, it seems to me that the pursuit of those duties in the latter system will be less spontaneous and less successful because of its obsession with individual rights. And it appears that some of the American philosopher Rawls' notions treated in his monumental work will fit better in a communitarian framework than an individualistic one which he makes the basis of his arguments. Rawls makes the following statements:
". . . the difference principle represents, in effect, an agreement to regard the distribution of natural talents as a common asset . . ."(54)
"In justice as fairness men agree to share one another's fate . In designing institutions they undertake to avail themselves of the accidents of nature and social circumstance only when doing so is for the common benefit."(55)
"The two principles are equivalent . . . to an undertaking to regard the distribution of natural abilities as a collective asset so that the more fortunate are to benefit only in ways that help those who have lost out."(56)
". . . the members of a community participate in one another's nature; we appreciate what others do as things we might have done but which they do for us. . . .(57)
Rawls' language unmistakably resonates with communitarian expressions, meanings and content.
The notions of "sharing one another's fate," "common assets," "collective assets," "common benefit," "participating in one another's nature" --these notions and others related to them in Rawls' scheme will surely find a more ready embrace in the communitarian home than in the home artificially and instrumentally constructed by individuals in pursuit of their own egoistic advantages or ends. Those notions, it seems to me, are more appropriate, much less idealistic, for a communitarian political culture, where they will elicit greater significance and understanding and less philosophical controversy or resistance, than in a system, like Rawls', which seeks to give priority to individual rights rather than to duties. The point I am at pains to make, in other words, is that Rawls' essentially individualistic frameworks determinedly poised to secure and cordon off individual rights, can hardly provide an effective support for those "communitarian notions" he so well articulates, let alone bring them to practical realization.
The question may be raised as to the justification for giving priority to duties over rights in the communitarian political morality. The priority is, I think, based on, and is most probably required by, the demands of the relational character of the person in the wake of his natural sociality. The sociality of the person immediately makes him naturally oriented to other persons with whom he must live in relation. Living in relation with others directly involves a person in social and moral roles, duties, obligations and commitments which the individual person must fulfill. The natural relationality of the person thus immediately plunges him into a moral universe, making morality an essentially social and trans-individual phenomenon focused on the well-being of others. Our natural sociality then prescribes or mandates a morality that, clearly, should be weighted on duty, i.e. on that which one has to do for others.
The success that must accrue to communal or corporative living depends very much on each member of the community demonstrating a high degree of moral responsiveness and sensitivity in relation to the needs and well-being of other members. This should manifest itself in each member's pursuit of his duties. Also, the common good, which is an outstanding goal of the communitarian moral and political philosophy, requires that each individual should work for the good of all. The social and ethical values of social well-being, solidarity, interdependence, cooperation, compassion, and reciprocity, which can be said to characterize the communitarian morality, primarily impose on the individual a duty to the community and its members. It is all these considerations that elevate the notion of duties to a priority status in the whole enterprise of communitarian life.
It is often said that rights are correlated with duties, that if there are rights, then there must be corresponding duties, and vice-versa. This hackneyed statement seems to me not to be wholly true, certainly not true in aspects of moral relationships between individuals, or in cases where individuals feel they owe their community some duty or duties. It is true that if I have a right to education, then, it is the duty of someone, a parent or a local authority or the state, to provide what is necessary for my education; similarly, if I have the right to work it is the duty of the state to make jobs available for me. In such cases, where rights are asserted against the state or against some persons in specific roles or positions, the correspondence or correlation between rights and duties will clearly be on track. However, it is possible for a person to carry out a duty to someone else without our having to say that the duty was carried out because of the right of this other person, that is, the person for whose sake the duty was done. (Here I am not thinking of what is called an act of supererogation--an act that a person does not have to do, even though it would be morally commendable if he did it. I am thinking, rather, of an act that a person morally feels he should do, and does it. It seems to me that communitarian ethics will rightly obliterate the distinction between duties and so-called supererogatory acts or acts of charity, and consider all of them as our moral duties. If I carry out a duty to help someone in distress, I would not be doing so because I think that someone has a right against me, a right I should help fulfill. I would be carrying out that duty because I consider that person as worthy of some moral consideration by me, as someone to whose plight I ought to be morally sensitive. (I am here not referring to duties enjoined upon persons by reason of certain specific social roles, positions or statuses they occupy in society.)
When we want to carry out some duties, especially of the positive kind, such as providing some aid to someone in distress looking after aged parents, conferring benefits, we do not first ask ourselves whether the persons to whom we owe those duties have any rights against us and whether we should perform those duties because of their rights. People in societies in which the concept of rights has not gained (much) currency in their moral or political vocabulary, would carry out their duties to their fellow human beings, yet without the conviction that the latter have rights against them. Our positive duties toward others, then, are not based on their rights: it is not so much a consciousness of the rights of others as our moral responsiveness to their particular situations that impinges on our decision to carry out our duties toward them. This, I think, is generally true, and would be very much so in a social structure like the communitarian, which does not lay any particular stress on rights. A rider is, however, required here: negative duties, such as not to harm others, to refrain from killing or robbing others, do have corresponding rights. For, one's right not to be harmed imposes a duty on others not to harm him. Even so, it can be concluded that the correlation between rights and positive duties collapses and becomes a one-way, asymmetric relation, for as I have explained, there are duties without corresponding rights, as far as the individual moral agent is concerned. The upshot of the foregoing discussion is that it is possible for communitarian ethics to hold the moral status of duties in high esteem without this being mandated or induced by a consciousness of rights.
Yet in stressing duties to the community and its members rather than the rights of the individual members of the community, the communitarian political and moral theory does not imply, by any means, that rights are not important; neither does it deny duties to the self. As pointed out earlier in this sections, communitarianism acknowledges the intrinsic value of the person and the moral rights that the acknowledgement can be said to entail. Individual rights, such as the right to equal treatment, to our property, to freely associate with others, to free speech, and others, would be recognized by communitarianism, especially of the restricted or moderate type. However, in the light of the overwhelming emphasis on duties within the communitarian moral framework, rights would not be given priority over the values of duty and so would not be considered inviolable or indefeasible: it might on this showing, be appropriate occasionally to override some individual rights for the sake of protecting the good of the community itself. As an autonomous, self-determining being, the individual person must, within limits, care for his well-being or needs just as he cares for the needs of others. Altruistic duties cannot obliterate duties to oneself. This is because the pursuit of altruistic duties does not lead to the dissolution of the self. The individual person has a life to live, and so must have plans for his life and must see to the realization of those plans. The attainment of the goal imposes on the self the responsibility or duty to develop his natural abilities. Therefore, the duty one has toward the community and its members does not--should not--enjoin him to give over his whole life and be oblivious of his personal well-being.
What the communitarian ethic will enjoin, then, is dual responsibility, a proposal--or better, an imperative--which on more than one occasion will be on all fours with the dual features of the human being I referred to earlier. The successful pursuit of the dual responsibility requires that, through the development of his capacities and through his own exertions and strivings, and hence through self attention, the individual person should himself attain some appropriate status socially, economically, intellectually, and so on. One is not saying that all the needs or interests of the individual person should be taken care of before he embarks on his duties and commitments to others. Yet it is surely a necessary requirement that the individual be in a position to do so--hence the need to carry out duties to himself. If the notion of duties to oneself, if self-attention, makes sense even in a communitarian context, as I maintain, so does the notion of individual rights, which, as a reflexive notion, must be conceptually linked to that of self-interest or, as I prefer to say, self-attention
CONCLUSION
Communitarian ethical and political theory, which considers the community as a fundamental human good, advocates a life lived in harmony and cooperation with others, a life of mutual consideration and aid and of interdependence, a life in which one shares in the fate of the other--bearing one another up--a life which provides a viable framework for the fulfillment of the individual's nature or potentials, a life in which the products of the exercise of an individual's talents or endowments are (nevertheless) regarded as the assets of the community as such, a life free from hostility and confrontation: such a life, according to the theory, is most rewarding and fulfilling.
It is the moderate or restricted version of communitarianism that, to my mind, is defensible and which I support and have argued for in this paper. It is not too clear which of the two versions, if any, is espoused in African cultural traditions. But the position I have taken generally appears to run counter to that of the African political leaders whose writings in the period following the attainment of political independence unmistakably suggest a radical or extreme type of communitarianism traced by them to African cultural traditions.
Moderate or restricted communitarianism gives accommodation, as has been shown, to
communal values as well as to values of individuality, to social commitments as well as to
duties of self-attention. Even though in its basic thrust and concerns it gives prominence
to duties toward the community and its members, it does not--can not--do so to the
detriment of individual rights whose existence and value it recognizes, or should
recognize, and for a good reason. I believe strongly that an ethical and political theory
that combines the appreciation of, as well as commitments to, the community as a
fundamental value, and the understanding of, as well as commitment to, the idea
of individual rights will be a most plausible theory to support. Guided by the assumptions
about the dual features of the self with an implied dual responsibility, it should be
possible to deflate any serious tension between the self and its community.
NOTES
CHAPTER VI
THE IMAGE OF MAN IN AFRICA
N.K. Dzobo
INTRODUCTION
People usually see the question: "What is the image of man in our indigenous culture?" as connoting any one of the following three sub-questions:
a) What is man?
b) What is the nature of man?
c) Who is man?
The first sub-question--`What is man'?--is an empirical question which may yield an answer based upon an objective description of man's observable behaviour. Such answers as `Man is a bio-social being', `Man is an aggressive and predacious being', or `Man is a sexual being' are the consequences of empirical investigations based on such a question.
`What is the nature of man?' strictly speaking is a metaphysical question, even though some people take it to mean the same as `who is man?' As a metaphysical question it asks for what constitutes the elements of man's being. The essence of man's being is often a matter of speculation, and one may come across such answers as `Man is a spiritual being', `Man is a rational being', `Man is nothing but matter', `Man is both matter and spirit', or `body and mind'. Such speculative views of man vary from one school of thought to another, and are based upon one's metaphysical presuppositions.
`Who is man?' on the other hand, refers to man's understanding of himself. Because one understands oneself in a certain way, one projects a certain image and becomes responsible for who one is. The image of man taken as his self-understanding varies from culture to culture. This page limits its examination of one's self-understanding to that found in the indigenous African culture. The term `culture' as used here refers to the totality of Africa's basic orientation to life. As the emphasis is upon the foundations of Africa's culture we will speak of Africa's culture, not cultures.
Since the image of man is self-understanding, it helps to shape the very phenomenon it describes, namely, man; it gives meaning to one's behavior, relationships and history. This understanding of the function of one's image implies an interaction between one's understanding of oneself, that is, one's picture of oneself, and what one actually is, that is, one's existence at any moment of one's life. One's essence emerges as a result of this interaction. Let me illustrate this point with two African proverbs. The first proverb says: "The chameleon says people respect you as a king if you respect yourself, that is why he walks like a king." In this proverb the chameleon understands himself to be a king and so he behaves like a king; thus royalty becomes his image. The second proverb says: "Disgraceful behaviour is unbecoming of an Akan born." The image of an Akan in this proverb is that of a morally well-behaved person; this is the picture of an Akan that shapes his/her character. Therefore as John Macquarrie said: "Within limits, man is what he thinks he is."(58) The person then is responsible for his/her own essence.
It is not enough, however, to form a grandiose and kingly image of oneself; there must be the means to realize the picture conceived of oneself, otherwise one will be building in the air an image of oneself as a king. Man's self-understanding therefore must be accompanied by a motive force which is not external to man, but an integral component of man's being. As an Ewe proverb says "Life is like an anthill, it is built from within out." In other words, what one considers the basic and ultimate moving force of one's behavior is the true and basic image of oneself, one's true and basic self-understanding. We therefore tend to think of the image of man in terms of some internally generated basic prime movers or forces. Thus the question "who is man in Africa"? can be reduced finally to "What do Africans consider to be the basic and ultimate force that motivates human passions and desires"? This basic and ultimate force, if found, will be the image of man in Africa.
To a considerable degree human motivations can be said to be the same for people in all cultures with varying contextual modifications and emphasis. They can be divided into two major groups, namely: the physiologically determined (sometimes called survival) drives, comprising such master drives as hunger, thirst and sex and their derivatives such as money and what it can buy; and the trans-survival drives such as the need for security, peace, safety, love, recognition, status, honor, influence, happiness, solidarity, human creativity and productivity, motherhood, fatherhood, success and prosperity. These drives may be described as secondary or penultimate motivations of behaviour, which means that they are not basic and ultimate. It is usually what people consider to be the basic and ultimate moving force of human behaviour that differentiates one culture from another and also reveals the true common identity of any two cultures. Let us now look briefly at three classical conceptions of this ultimate and basic motive force of human behaviour as found in the Western and Middle Eastern cultures which have come into direct contact with the African one.
THEORIES OF HUMAN NATURE
We preface our discussion of the African view of man with the Western and Middle Eastern images for the following reasons. These alien views of man have, to a considerable extent, penetrated our world-view and in some cases have displaced the African view of the person for some Africans. Such Africans have therefore been alienated from their own healthy and well-balanced view of man.
The second reason for a prior examination of the Western views of man is the fact that some contemporary Western view of man such as those found in the writings of authors such as Erich Fromm and June Singer are very close to the African view--and, in fact, identical to it in some respects. This provides both a meeting point of the two views and at the same time clarifies their point of divergence. We shall consider two classical theories of man, namely, the conflict and the Freudian theories of human nature, and one contemporary theory: Fromm's polar theory.
The Conflict Theory of Human Nature
The conflict theory of human nature,(59) which was scientifically formulated in Darwin's theory of evolution and in the nineteenth century economic liberalism as developed by Thomas Robert Malthus, contends that conflict and aggression are locked into the natural order of things, and that by nature man is an aggressor and predator. This theory stresses instinct and animality as the essence of man, and contends that human nature and society develop through conflict, competition and elimination of the weak and the peaceful. In short, the conflict theory portrays man as evil, brutish and destructive; he is moved by the instinct to survive and sees every other member of his species as an enemy. Believers in this theory see co-operation and mutual help as derived or learned motivations of behavior: people learn to co-operate and help each other as they realize that they cannot satisfactorily accomplish difficult tasks alone. Man is therefore seen by nature as a solitary being who joins forces with others out of his finitude and only to fight a common enemy.
The view of human behavior as motivated by struggle for survival and competition is deeply entrenched as man's chief self-understanding in the West and the Middle East. Growth and progress are seen as resulting from the friction of competing individual interests. It is believed that each person must stand on his own feet and fight for what he gets; in this way the common welfare throughout the entire culture is achieved. What the individual needs above all else in order to succeed in this competitive existence is power, i.e., the ability to realize one's aim in the face of opposition from others. Man is thus portrayed as a being motivated by a single master force: the will to survive through struggle and competition. The basic image of man is that of aggressor and predator. Thus the white man of the colonial days came to Africa to plunder and rob, because he understood himself to be a predator and aggressor. The colonial empire and the present economic empire of the West were established through this picture of man.
Freudian Theories of Human Nature
Before World War I and right after the War, Freud developed two theories to account for the basic motivation of human behavior. He advanced, first, the theory of sexuality (libido) and then, in 1920, the theory of the life (Eros) and Death (Thanatos) instincts.
First, according to Freud, man is driven primarily by a sexual energy called libido. This major and basic force of human behavior is instinctual. Man's major concern in life is to satisfy either directly or indirectly his sexual needs. The sublimation of this sexual drive results in the development of culture and civilization; its suppression leads to neurosis.
Probably as a result of his experiences during World War I, Freud became dissatisfied with the sexual theory for explaining human behaviour and so between 1915 and 1920 he formulated a new theory of man's nature. According to this theory two basic instincts, namely, the Life instinct (Eros) and the Death instinct (Thanatos), are the moving forces of human behaviour. The Life instinct combines the old concept of libido and part of the preservation drive of the conflict theory. The Death instinct is an innate destructiveness and aggression directed primarily against the self. While the Life instinct is creative, the Death instinct is constantly working towards death and ultimately towards a return to the original inorganic state of complete freedom from tension or striving.(60)
Both instincts, however, operate constantly within man and fight with each other. According to Freud, the Death instinct as the principle of destructiveness is the stronger force and in the end becomes victorious over the Life instinct and leads eventually to the death of the individual. Man therefore cannot help wanting to destroy, for the tendency is rooted in his biological constitution. He either destroys himself or something outside himself, and has no chance to liberate himself from his tragic dilemma.(61) Freud thus had come round in the end to the same view propounded by the conflict theorists: Man is essentially destructive and an aggressor.
In Freud, however, the Western view of man began to approach the African view in one significant way. By postulating the temporary existence of two conflicting principles--life and death--existing in the same body, Freud saw man, as does the African, as having a dual or polar nature. According to the African view of man, moreover, the two conflicting principles are not only physiological but universal to all creation, applying equally to human nature and other entities and structures. That is, according to the African world view, polarity is the essence of reality. But whereas the death principle is victorious over the life principle in Freud's theory, in the African theory of being it is the life or Creative principle which is the foundation of reality and of the meaning of existence. This does not obliterate the death principle because the two constitute one reality. More will be said about this later.
The Polar Theory of Human Nature
There are many reactions to Freud's pessimistic and forlorn view of man. Notable among those is that of Erich Fromm who maintained that "destructiveness is a secondary potentiality in man, which becomes manifest only if he fails to realize his primary potentialities."(62) With Fromm, Clara Thompson holds that "the tendency to grow, develop and reproduce seems to be a part of the human organism."(63) She goes on to say that aggression is not a product of the death instinct, but an expression of the organism's will to live. Both writers hold that the life principle or principle of creativity is basic to human nature. This is a radical departure from Social Darwinism and the Freudian views of man, and is in harmony with the African view according to which the life principle which is the principle of creativity, is not only basic to human nature, but is woven into the very fabric of society and of the universe.(64)
It is Fromm, however, who developed a distinctive theory of human behaviour based upon polarity. Fromm views man as evolving from his critical instinctual (animal) level of existence to that of the rational or human, and hence is unable to live by repeating the instinctual pattern of his species. Therefore, man now experiences his existence as a problem to be solved, a part of which is that he must proceed to develop his reason until he has become master of himself and of nature.(65) Man is therefore condemned to find a new home, not in the realm of instincts, but in one which he creates himself by making the world human and becoming truly human himself. This then is the goal of human existence: to become truly human and to make society truly human.
For Fromm the condition is, however, characterized by polarity, i.e., by conflicting tendencies: man has fallen out of nature, as it were, but remains in it; he is partly animal and partly human, partly finite and partly infinite.(66) He is torn between progressing to become fully human and regressing to live according to his instinctual nature. Man's essential nature, therefore, is constituted by two opposing tendencies and an inner contradiction is lodged at the heart of human existence. This drives man to seek an ever new pattern for resolving the existential problem of being. Thus man's very nature is to transcend himself through the act of creativity: "In the act of creation man transcends himself as a creature, raises himself beyond the passivity, and accidentalness of his existence into the realm of purposefulness and freedom."(67)
To summarize Fromm's main contributions and to indicate where they harmonize with the African view: Fromm sees man as inheriting two conflicting natures, one rational and the other instinctual, which form the basic structure of his being. An inner contradiction or polarity therefore is lodged at the heart of human existence. This has become the basic and ultimate motivation of human behaviour, not towards destructiveness and aggression, but towards creativity and productivity. Man's existential problem then has become the ground of his creativity, which is rooted in the very peculiarity of man's polar nature. Creativity thus becomes the essence of being and of human existence, and the goal of man's existence is to become creative. This is the only way man becomes truly human; in other words, to be human is to be creative and productive.
THE AFRICAN VIEW OF MAN:
SYNTHESIS MODEL OF HUMAN NATURE
Unity in Duality
The African view of man is derived from the African view of reality which is found in the indigenous religion, creation myths, personal names, symbols and proverbs. This view is expressed simply by a Tanzanian proverb: "In the world all things are two and two." This is a basic ontological statement of the African perception of reality. The two which form the nature of everything in the universe are made up of opposites which become one while remaining two. The Mende of Sierra Leone express the dual origin of all things by saying that the High God, Mangala, created the twin varieties of eleusine seed conceived as twins of opposite sex in the "egg of God" which is also called the "egg of the world."(68) The Ewe cosmogony expresses this same view of reality in more detail. It says that in the beginning there was only one androgynous High God called Nana Buluku (Bruku, Briku) who gave birth to siamese twins called Mawu-Lisa, whose union has become the basis of the organization of the world. In this divine duality Mawu, the female, is envisaged as a Janus-like figure. One side of its body being female, with the eyes forming the moon and bearing the name Mawu. The other portion is male, whose eyes are the sun, and whose name is Lisa. P. Mercier pointed out that "their dual and conflicting nature expresses, even before the world of men was organized, the complementary forces which were to be active in it."(69) He went on to report from his study of the Fon of Benin (Dahomey) that Mawu, the female principle, is fertility, motherhood, life, creativity, gentleness, forgiveness, night, freshness, rest and joy, while Lisa, the male principle, is power, warlikeness, death, strength, toughness, destructivity, day, heat, labor, and all hard things.(70)
Those two references express very well not just a fundamental theory of man, but a theory of reality that conceives the basic structure of reality as unity in duality. The primordial unity referred to either as the Egg of God or the Androgynous High God called Nana Buluku is the one in which all the opposites are contained. But, as June Singer pointed out, one pair is basic, i.e., the female and male pair which serves as the symbolic expression of the power behind all the other polarities and forms the creating principle.(71)
The opposites in any duality and their relationship are therefore modelled on the paradigm of the female and male relationship paradigm, i.e., on the principle of creativity, complementarity, tension, balance and otherness. The female-male polarity as seen in the indigenous cultures of the Wolof,
SUMMARY OF THE VIEWS OF MAN
Type of Theory
Basic Moving Force
of Human Behavior
Image of man
Conflict Theory
The instinct to survive through struggle, competition and destruction is the main force of human behavior.
Man is an aggressor, a predator by nature. He is not different from the animals.
Freudian Theory
The drive for pleasure and to destroy is the main motive force of man's behavior. The drive to destroy is stronger and final.
Man is an aggressor and destroyer by nature.
Fromm's Theory
The drive to solve the problem created by the presence of an inner contradiction lodged at the heart of human existence, so as to become truly human by being creative and productive, is the moving force of human behavior.
Man is a creator by virtue of his polar nature which is basic. Man is evolutive.
Synthesis Model of Human Nature
(African)
The drive to realize a synthesis of being through creativity. Since polarity is a basic category of being the drive to realize a synthesis of being is a never ending force of human behavior.
(1) Man is a creator being with polar elements which are basic to his nature.
(2) Man then is a subject and not an object of history.
(3) Man is not evolutive, his conflicting tendencies are original to his nature.
(4) Man is a communal being.
(Gambia) Mendes (Sierra Leone), Ewe (Ghana, Togo and Benin), Akan and Tallensi (Ghana), Herero (Namibia), Burundi (Central Africa), Lango (Uganda) and in the religion of ancient Egypt, to mention a few, is a primordial image of reality. It is an archetype which the whole human race has inherited, and so is a universal collective image of reality and of man. It appears in us as an innate sense of a primordial cosmic unity, having existed in oneness or wholeness before any separation was made and still remaining one. W.J. Argyle commenting on the polar view of reality as found in the religious tradition of the Fon of Benin said, "Mawu-Lisa (the Dual High God) expresses together the unity of the world conceived in terms of duality."(72) The Akan of Ghana express this by giving siamese personal names to people, one half of the name being female and the other half male. An example is Dua-Agyeman, in which dual name Dua, meaning `tree', is the female principle and Agyeman, meaning `warrior', is the male principle. In the religious tradition of the Akan the Sky God, Nyame, and the Earth God, Asase Yaa, are paired together: Nyame is the male principle and Asase Yaa is the female principle in the pair. The Ga of Ghana have such a dual name for their High God called Ataa-Naa Nyonmo which literally means `Father-Mother Sky God'.
In sum, Africans see reality, including the reality of man and society, structured as unity in duality comprising two conflicting elements. Polarity and unity are, therefore, basic categories of being. Since the female and male pair is basic to all polarities, creativity becomes the essence of polarity as is the case in the union of woman and man. Leopold S. Senghor was right therefore when he observed that, while Western and Middle Eastern view of reality is founded on separation and opposition, on analysis and conflict, the African conceives the world, beyond the diversity of its forms, as a fundamentally mobile, yet unique, reality that seeks synthesis.(73)
Creativity is thus the goal of human striving, and the polar elements find their unity in creativity. Paul Tillich stated a similar idea thus: "A polar relation is a relation of interdependent elements, each of which is necessary for the other one and for the whole, although it is in tension with the opposite element. The tension drives both to conflicts and beyond the conflicts to possible unions of polar elements."(74)
Man as Possibility
The whole of life therefore is perceived in Africa as oriented toward creativity and is symbolized by woman; Man, used generically, is seen as an integral part of this creative process of life. Thus, the drive to create is the basic and ultimate force behind all human behaviour; the goal of human creation is to realize a synthesis of being.
The creative principle in man is given different names by the different ethnic groups, but its essential oneness with the High God is always maintained. The following are some of its names: se or kra (Ewe), okra (Akan), kla (Ga), ori (Yoruba), Chi (Igbo) dya (Mende) and we (Kassem of Ghana). Some of these names for the creative principle, which is the principle of life in man, are fragments of the names for the High Gods. Thus se comes from Segbo, meaning "The Source of the Creative Principle of Life," Ori from Orise meaning, "The Source from which Beings Spring," and Chi from Chukwu meaning "The Great, Immense, Undimensional Source of Being."
Man's ultimate goal as an individual and as a member of his clan therefore is to multiply and increase because he is the repository of the creative power, the right use of which is his chief responsibility. Likewise, when a woman marries the most important thing that she takes to her husband's house is her productive powers because this is the essential part of her nature.
The creative process is not limited to bringing forth children, but is seen as embracing the whole of man's life and his relationships. The individual therefore is to grow in the development of a creative personality and to develop the capacity to maintain creative relationship. He is to see his individual life and that of his society as fields that are sown with life's experiences and which should yield fruit. This understanding of life is expressed in such personal names as Agbefanu (Ewe) "Life sows seeds," Agbefovi (Ewe) "Life hatches things." The person who has achieved a creative personality and productive life and is able to maintain a productive relationship with others is said "to have become a person." (Ezu ame-Ewe; Oye onipa pa-Akan). The persons who are considered models of creative life are the chief, the elders and the ancestors. Such a life is counted as the greatest value in the indigenous culture.
Man as an Agent
The conception that creativity is the essence of true human personality implies that man is not just a being who thinks but also a being who acts to change his world. This implies that man is free and self-determining and has a say in shaping his own history and destiny. Through his free action he releases forces which shape the world and society, and because of his dual nature he also can release forces which will destroy society and the world. These two forces are basic to his nature and he does not evolve from one into the other. Since this capacity for action is essential to being a man it follows that, where freedom to act is denied there is a diminution in the fullest sense of humanity; one's dignity is taken away and one's capacity for creativity is destroyed.
The most devastating effect of Western colonization and missionary proselytization on Africa is the removal of a genuine capacity for free action from Africans who have been made into objects of history instead of being its subjects. To a considerable extent Africans have lost their capacity for creativity; instead of assuming the active role of self-creators and makers of culture they have adopted the passive role of acquiescence before alleged immutable cosmic laws imposed on them by foreign religion and education.
Man as a Communal Being
One important deduction from the fact that polarity has been woven into the fabric of the universe and of society is that community belongs to the very being of man. The origin of all being is existence in a polar relation. The individual's being emerges from a prior social whole which is truly other; it comes into being for the sake of him and exists for his development and growth. Hence, an individual who is cut off from the communal organism is nothing. In Africa it is true then to say: "As the glow of a coal depends upon its remaining in the fire, so the vitality, the psychic security, the very humanity of man, depends on his integration into the family."(75)
By living creatively the individual is also contributing to the life and quality of his community and so can say 'we are, therefore I am, and since I am, therefore we are'.(76)
DEATH AND LIFE
The End of Death is Life
Contrary to the popular view that the end of life is death, the Ewe of West Africa believe and affirm that the end of death is life. This same view of the relationship between death and life is stated by the father of the lost son when in the Bible he said, "For this son of mine was dead, but now he is alive, he was lost, but now he has been found" (Luke 15:24). Jesus was referring to this understanding of the relationship between death and life when he said, "I am telling you the truth: a grain of wheat remains no more than a single grain unless it is dropped into the ground and dies. If it does die, then it produces many grains." (John 12:24, also see chapter 11:25).
The new idea in the passage quoted above, which can be added to the conception of life as an offspring of death, is that the absolute beginning of life is power which may be compared to the power in a seed. Life begins as possibility or potentiality which has the power to realize its inherent capability. The seed concept of the origin of life implies that life is a sleeping power that has to be released and harnessed for creative and productive living. This sleeping power which forms the absolute beginning of human reality is referred to as Se by the Ewe and as Okra by the Akans of Ghana. Se is the seed of life, expressing itself as the beginning creative power or energy.
This Ewe conception of the absolute origin of life in death is not influenced by any
Christian or extraneous teachings. It is an original and indigenous concept which so far
has not been explored: it is one of the fundamental points of convergence of the
indigenous African and the Christian religious awareness.
God as the Seed of Life
The Ewe conception of death as the seed of life comes out clearly in the Ewe word for both death and seed which is ku. This means that as seed is the beginning possibility and enabling power of a plant, so death (ku) becomes the seed of life, i.e., the enabling beginning power of life. To illustrate the point further, as a mango tree is "dead" or "asleep" in the mango seed (ku) so the human life is "dead" or "asleep" in its beginning life, which the Ewe call ku--i.e., death, and has to be awakened. In other words, life always begins as "dead potens" i.e., as sleeping and potential power which has to be released to become a realized capacity.
As indicated above, the Ewe call this enabling beginning power which is "asleep," Se. This is the basic Ewe name for God, that is to say, God as Se is the enabling power of life with which every individual is endowed. Se, as an enabling power, is referred to as ku, i.e., death, when it is unreleased and uncultivated; it becomes agbe, i.e., life, when it is released and cultivated. The Ewe therefore primarily conceive of God as Principle where principle is used as the Origin or Primary Source of all life. The terms "Father" (Fofo - Ewe) and "Mother" (Dada or No - Ewe) are used metaphorically to represent God as Principle or Origin. God is therefore both Father and Mother called Mawu-Lisa where Mawu is the female principle and Lisa is the male principle.
These two principles are united in Se as the seed power of life. Life and death then are not antithetical, but rather two complementary forces which are joined together as Se but remain two. To the Ewe mind, then, there is no question of life confronting and overcoming death. So far as the Ewe are concerned you cannot have life without death. Any time you pray for life you are also praying for death, because, as one Ewe name puts it, "Agbeziodeku" meaning "Life and death are insolubly coupled together." Conflict is then eliminated in the Ewe conception of the relationship between life and death; complementarity, balance and reciprocity are the principles that unite them.
The Meaning of Life
Let us return again to the seed concept of the origin of life. As seeds sprout into living plants by breaking the bonds of their beginning seed life so also human life springs up and out by breaking the bonds of death. Life has to be freed from its own sleeping enabling power to realize the fullness of its splendor through the cultivation of its potential.
Life, then, has no a priori meaning. It starts as a sleeping enabling power and acquires meaning through existence, where existence is used in its original Latin sense of ex-sistere: going forth or coming into being through a process. The Ewe refer to human existence conceived as a process of releasing and developing the imprisoned enabling power of life as amenyenye, which means `to realize being in space and time through the process of struggle'. As a pregnant woman has to labor to bring out her new baby, so human life has to struggle to acquire meaning. To the Ewe then to be is to be engaged in the process of becoming. One Ewe proverb puts it this way, "There is no resting place on the journey of life" (Dzudzo mele alifo o).
Meaning, then, is given to life in the process of living, which is characterized by making choices. Life's decisions, however, are made in the light of life's master purpose, called in Ewe du. This is given to both individuals and nations in a dispensation from God, called Fa (Daryll Forde, African Worlds, p. 225. 1970). The main content of the individual's du may be summarized as the realization of creative humanity. Where life is seen as possibility it always has unlimited meaning and its success depends upon the individual's ability to see "the sign" of life that is coiled in the heart of death.
Finally, to the Ewe physical death is neither a threat nor an annihilation, but a transformation and communion of the individualized and personalized se with what the Ewe call Segbo, i.e., the Big and Supreme Se, for the sake of rejuvenation and rebirth of a new being. This cycle continues ad infinitum.
NOTES
CHAPTER VII
DEATH AND THE AFTERLIFE
IN AFRICAN CULTURE
KWASI WIREDU
THE THIS-WORLDLY CHARACTER OF THE AFTERLIFE
IN AFRICAN THOUGHT
There is a mildly paradoxical unanimity in African studies about the African belief in, and attitude toward, the afterlife. It is universally noted, on the one hand, that Africans generally believe that bodily death is not the end of life, but only the inauguration of life in another form. But, on the other hand, it is equally universally remarked that the African attitude to life is a this-worldly one. The paradox is, in fact, only apparent; but quite some conceptual clarifications are needed to see why.
The crucial conceptual issue concerns the nature of the after-world. In what sense is it an other world? Not all African peoples are given to talking about death and the afterlife,(77) but wherever there are any intimations at all of what life in the land of the dead is like, the similarities between that form of life and the earthly one are striking. The similarities are indeed so striking that the characterization of this life as `earthly' in contrast to the afterlife is already metaphysically inappropriate. In West Africa, for example, where people are not excessively reticent about eschatology, descriptions of the afterlife generally include explicit indications that the transition from this life to the next is by land travel; and of course, if you travel from one part of the earth by land, you can only arrive at another part of the earth. In traditional Africa boundaries are often marked by rivers. Not surprisingly, the high point of the post-mortem journey is the crossing of a river. Once having crossed the river, one enters the land of the departed and joins the society of the ancestors, a society which replicates the political order of pre-mortem society to the extent that rulers in the one retain their status in the other.
It would be interesting and relevant to speculate who or what this `one' is who is supposed to do the afterlife travelling, but it might be appropriate to call attention immediately to the this-worldly orientation of the conception itself of the afterlife. Remaining in West Africa for the time being, it is important to note that the whole point of going on the last journey is to become one of the ancestors. Now, the significance of the ancestors consists simply in this, that they watch over the affairs of the living members of their families, helping deserving ones and punishing the delinquent. If an ancestor is a ruler, the scope of his activities goes beyond his own family to the whole of his town or kingdom. In either case, ancestors are there to see to the good of the living. There is, of course, a reciprocal side to this. Reciprocity is a strong feature of African society; it is, in fact, a feature of any moral community. Accordingly, the living feel not only beholden to the ancestors for their help and protection, but also positively obliged to do honor to them and render service to them as appropriate.
How is honor done to the ancestors? In two connected ways, one general, the other particular. The first way is simply to live uprightly. Just to live uprightly is to be a source of honor to one's family, and one's ancestors constitute an integral part of one's family. Bad conduct, on the other hand, brings disgrace to the living family and displeasure to the ancestors. The ancestors, in their post-mortem condition, are credited with veritable moral perfection and are therefore not accessible to disgrace, but just because of their elevated moral status they are thought to be even more scandalized by wrong doing than the living elders of the family. Wrong doing may take three basic forms, namely, trifling with the moral law, falling foul of civil regulations or of the customs and taboos of the community, and failing to take as good a care of family affairs as in one lies.
The last heading may involve quite particularized imperatives or even injunctions. Perhaps a departed member of the family has left his successor a half-completed project together with adequate resources for its completion. To go ahead and complete it is to do honor to the dead. Or if he has left some debts to be paid, then that is an opportunity to uphold his honor. There may be dependents to be taken care of, or specific instructions may have been left before death for certain things to be done. These, and such like, form the second, more particular, way in which the living can do honor to the dead, or perhaps we ought to say the dead-but-living.(78)
Since these matters imply definite duties, non-performance may elicit punishment from an ancestor, which usually takes the form of unaccountable illnesses.(79) These are, incidentally, the form of lapses from right conduct that the ancestors are most apt to punish. This restriction does not, however, indicate an abridged interest, on their part, in the general morality of their relatives; it just means that in the ethical division of labor there are other sources of sanctions. Nor does the restriction diminish the conviction of the living that right conduct redounds to the credit of their departed relations and, besides, warms their hearts.
In the way of direct services to themselves, the ancestors are remarkably undemanding. Occasional dedicatory drops of ceremonial schnapps or modest servings of food in the right place overnight from time to time seem to be all that is required. Nevertheless, such acts, especially those of libation, are of the last consequence, for it is through them that the living communicate their assurances of respect to the ancestors and solicit their timely assistance in connection with specific enterprises. In this way there is maintained an on-going relationship with the departed.
What then, to reopen a question previously raised but not explored, must the inhabitants of the land of the dead be like to sustain this social relationship with their mortal brethren? If we recall the land travel and river crossing, not to talk of the schnapps sipping and more solidified pickings, it must occur to us that they must be conceived as of a somewhat psycho-physical constitution.4(80) That they must have some analogue of a body is an inescapable inference from the physicalistic setting of their activities and, in any case, from embodied descriptions of sightings of dead individuals which, though rare, are culturally typical. It is no less apparent that they must have minds, since they are supposed to exercise the function of assessing the conduct of their relatives and apportioning blight or blessing as the case may require. After all, for at least some African peoples, such as the Akans of Ghana, mind is not an extensionless substance a la Descartes, but simply the capacity to do just such things.(81) From all of this it emerges not only that the land of the dead is, geographically, not altogether dissimilar to our own but also that its population are rather like ourselves.(82)
Actually, this is not a surprising idea, for it is a natural outgrowth of a conception of personhood which is entertained among the peoples of West Africa with only variations of detail and, indeed, among most African peoples with only slightly more substantial differences. According to this conception, a human being has two types of constituents. The first is the material body as commonly perceived; this presents no immediate conceptual problems. The second, on the other hand, is not easy to characterize; it is not of identically the same type as the material body, and yet it is not of a diametrically opposed category; it is, as the phrase goes, a cross between the two. This second factor of human personality is taken to be what accounts for our being alive or for our having a particular destiny; it is that whose presence means life and whose departure means death.(83) But it is itself conceived on the model of the living body or, better still, of the living person; so much so, that it is frequently spoken of as a replica of a person and credited with the office of a `guardian angel'.
The ontologically interesting thing about this kind of being is that although it is conceived in the image of a person, it is exempted from the grosser characteristics of the material body. Thus, it can appear at, or disappear from, places without regard to speed limits for matter in motion or to the laws of impenetrability. Moreover, it is capable of action at a distance in which a living person may be severely affected without perceptible contact. The question of perceivability brings us to an important property of the entities in question. They cannot be seen with the naked eye nor heard with the unaided ear, except on rare occasions when they themselves elect to make themselves sensibly accessible to particular persons; otherwise, they can be seen or heard only by people with medicinally heightened powers of sight and hearing.
Even so sketchy a characterization of the second basic constituent of a person in the West African conception should make it clear that it would be a substantial oversimplification to describe it as spiritual in the sense of this word which implies total immateriality. There is in the conception under discussion only a reduced materiality, and the reduction affects not its imagery, but its dynamics. Since at death it is this quasi-material entity which departs to the world of the dead, it is natural that talk of the afterlife should be replete with a this-worldly imagery. This remark is applicable to the thought not only of the peoples of West Africa but also of many other African peoples, perhaps of most or all African peoples. It certainly explains Okot p'Bitek's insistence, in the specific case of the Central Luo, that the `entities which they believed they encountered at the lineage shrines were not spirits but the ancestors as they were known before death' (my italics; recall the quotation from Bitek in footnote 6 above).
If, mindful of all the foregoing, we now return to the question: in what sense is the African world of the dead an other world? the answer must be that it is in no sense another world, but rather a part of this world, albeit a conceptually problematic part. The problem is that the attenuations of the materiality of the place of the dead and its residents seem to leave us with a material imagery without a solid anchorage. Nevertheless, this imagery has been marvelously efficacious in motivating conceptions of the cultural unity of the living with the dead in the thought of many African peoples. Given this conceptual framework, it becomes intelligible how this life can be seen as a preparation for an afterlife whose whole significance nevertheless consists in securing the welfare of the living. It follows, by an obvious transitivity, that in this way of thinking whatever the meaning of life is, it is to be defined in terms of the circumstances of this life.
AFRICAN AND WESTERN CONCEPTIONS OF THE AFTERLIFE COMPARED
I shall return to this last point below, but it might be helpful to cast a brief comparative glance at some other conceptions of life after death. Proceeding in the order of descending immateriality, we may note Plato's theory of survival after death. What survives physical death is the soul, which, for Plato, is an absolutely immaterial entity.(84) During the life of a mortal, this entity is `imprisoned' in the body so that death is actually something in the nature of a liberation. When this occurs the soul reverts to a totally rarefied realm of being containing the immaterial and changeless originals of which the things in this world are imperfect copies. There it becomes again directly conversant with the true realities which in mortal life it was at best only capable of remembering. This soul is, of course, indestructible, and enjoys both a pre-natal and post-mortem existence. However beautiful this conception may be, it offers no possibility of a social interaction between the dead and the living and is as far removed from African conceptions as anything can be. Indeed, I doubt that it can be translated into the African language of which I have an inside knowledge, namely, the Akan language (spoken in parts of Ghana and the Ivory Coast).
Within the Western intellectual tradition, however, there is a conception of immortality in which immaterial and quasimaterial factors are intermixed. This is the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body at Judgment Day. On this fateful day, mortal remains of dead people, the largest proportion of them long transformed into earth, will be reassembled and reanimated with their corresponding souls. One way or another, dead individuals will be reconstituted by body and soul being put together again in such a way as to recover their pre-mortem personal identities, with the one pleasant exception that the new editions of their bodies will be so vastly improved as not to be susceptible to any physical disabilities or carnal cravings. In this purified form they will live in eternal bliss, that is, if they are accorded salvation through the undeserved grace of God. In the alternative they shall be consigned, presumably in not so perfect bodies, to some extremely inconvenient mode of existence forever. St. Augustine, for one, was adamant on the justice of such eternal punishment. If it seems harsh, it is only because "in the weakness of our mortal condition there is wanting that highest and purest wisdom by which it can be perceived how great a wickedness was committed in the first transgression".(85)
Three points arise, one of near similarity, two of outright contrast. If we view the resurrected people as whole individuals, they are quite similar to the inhabitants of African lands of the dead. The resurrected and saved are like mortal persons in imagery, but unlike them in their mode of action. St. Augustine (op. cit., Bk. xxii: 29-30) actually speaks of them as being "clothed in immortal and spiritual bodies" which "shall live no longer in a fleshy but a spiritual fashion." The Saint remarks furthermore, "What power of movement such bodies shall possess, I have not the audacity to conceive. . . . One thing is certain, the body shall forthwith be wherever the spirit wills, and the spirit shall will nothing which is unbecoming either to the spirit or to the body." The bodies in question are obviously neither purely material nor purely immaterial (which in any case would be self-contradictory) but, in truth, quasi-material. There is, then, some similarity here between the African and the traditional Christian images of the dead-but-living. The similarity, however, is only skin deep, for the "risen" Christian is a combination of an immaterial soul and a quasi-material body whereas the "departed" African is, by original constitution, a quasi-material being. Nor does the latter have to wait as a split person in some transitional realm till `the Day of Judgment' to attain the wholeness of post-mortem personality.
The absence in the eschatology of many African peoples of a day of judgment together with its inexorable sequel, positive or negative, marks a very significant difference with the Christian variety.(86) The Day of Judgment by definition is an apocalyptic watershed, bringing the end of the temporal phase of cosmic history. Thenceforward, this world is no more. Hence the question of the relationship of the inhabitants of this world with those of the next does not arise. This life is a preparation for the next, but not only that; it is a waiting for the next. That still is not all; the very meaning of this life consists in the fact that there is a next one. Historically, this point of view has been held quite widely in the Western world, though of course, not universally or always within the confines of orthodox Christianity. Jacques Choron in his interesting book, Death and Modern Man,(87) has collected a number of striking expressions of that view from some remarkable men. Here are a few: "If immortality be untrue, it matters little whether anything else be true or not" (Henry Thomas Buckle, nineteenth century historian); "If there is no immortality, I shall hurl myself into the sea" (Lord Tennyson); "Without the hope of an afterlife this life is not even worth the effort of getting dressed in the morning" (Prince Bismark); "without immortality . . . all the generations of mankind are fighting a forlorn hope . . . our life is blind and our death is fruitless (A.E. Taylor, a generation ago, one of the leaders in Platonic studies in Britain); "without the belief in the existence of the soul and its immortality human existence is `unnatural' and unbearable" (Dostoievsky).
AFRICAN CONCEPTIONS OF THE MEANING OF LIFE
From a logical point of view it is difficult to see how the meaning of life can consist in even more life, but the interesting thing for our discussion is that most traditional Africans are likely to find such sentiments extremely surprising. A Nuer or Dinka elder, for example, though he takes the existence of life after death for granted, does not set much store by it. Their's, according to Evans-Prichard(88) (talking of the Nuer) `is a this-worldly religion, a religion of abundant life and the fullness of days, and they neither pretend to know, nor . . . do they care what happens to them after death'. In the society of the Nuer, either by nature or by convention, `every man has at least one son and through this son his name is forever a link in a line of descent. This is the only form of immortality in which the Nuer are interested. They are not interested in the survival of the individual as a ghost, but in the social personality in the name' (ibid., p. 163). Godfrey Lienhardt(89) duplicates the same observation in connection with the Dinka. "Children and cattle multiplying and prospering from generation to generation are the ultimate value of Dinka life". Or, as he says earlier on, `Dinka greatly fear to die without issue in whom the survival of their names--the only kind of immortality they know--will be assured'.(90) Thus, to the traditional Dinka, `notions of individual personal immortality mean little'.(91) Lienhardt's wording in these quotations might suggest that the Dinka do not believe in the existence of personal survival after death, but that cannot very well be his intent, for he himself gives accounts of how they try through various procedures to establish satisfactory relations with their departed ancestors. The point is simply that even though they do entertain that belief, that is not where they derive their sense of the worthwhileness of life. It is in this that the Nuer and Dinka are typical of Africans generally.
In not being specially thrilled at the possibility of eventually becoming ancestors in the country of the dead, the Dinka and Nuer are very much unlike, say, the Akans of Ghana and the Ivory Coast, the Yoruba of Nigeria and Benin or the Mende of Sierra Leone. In these regions the ancestors are highly prized and respected, and the notion of one day becoming an ancestor is indeed music to their ears. Yet, becoming an ancestor, as already pointed out, only enables one to help the living to realize human purposes. To a typical Akan, for example, a life that has meaning is one that makes reasonable achievements(92) in the direction of personal, family, and communal welfare. A life of that sort would be a meaningful one even if there were no belief in an afterlife. In point of fact, one's life after death does not figure in one's destiny. Human destiny begins and ends in this world. To hurl yourself into the sea simply because there is no life after death would strike a traditional Akan as equivalent to madness.
ln West Africa, indeed, living a full and meaningful life is a condition for becoming an ancestor.(93) This is probably not universally the case in Africa, but in the view of some peoples, such as the Akans of Ghana, a person whose life is cut short by an accident or an `unclean' disease or any other untoward circumstance does not gain immediate access to the country of the dead; he becomes a neighborhood ghost, an occasional source of frightening apparitions, until he can come back to be born again to try to work out a complete life. This, by the way, is the nearest approximation to purgatory in the Akan system. It is also one of the two forms of limited reincarnation postulated in that system. The second form is supposed to occur when a mother loses a baby and has another soon afterwards and there is a recurrence of the same sequence. In such circumstances, it is assumed that it is the same person that goes back and forth. Aside from those two types of cases, any talk of reincarnation is largely metaphorical. An Akan or Yoruba will speak of the second coming of an ancestor--to be sure there can be multiple comings of the same ancestor--and mean by this mainly that the new addition to the family bears striking physical or psychological resemblance to the ancestor in question. The literal component of meaning here would be that the influence of the ancestor himself is at work in the phenomenon.
It is not accidental that in such thought-systems belief in reincarnation is so definitively circumscribed. The ancestors being so important in the affairs of the living and status being enhanced by longevity, it is useful to have permanent ancestors. Any generalized and continuous turnover of ancestors would obviously detract from that scheme. Note again that this concept of immortality is a pragmatic one; it is immortality for the service of humankind. In this way of thinking a paradisal type of immortality in which people endlessly just enjoyed themselves (in however `spiritual' a fashion) without any responsibilities would be viewed as glorified idleness.
The African land of the dead, then, is not heaven in the Christian sense. The life of the ancestors is pictured as one of dignity and serenity, rather than of bliss. There are, of course, no temptations or tribulations in that life, but neither are there any excitements. The one preoccupation of that existence is with the good of the living wing of the family and clan. It is upon their ability to achieve this aim that the importance of the ancestors is predicated. Beneficial interaction with the community of the living, thus, is the first law of their being.
If we look for a substantially analogous concept of survival after death in Western thought, obviously it is not in orthodox Christianity that we will find it. The likeliest place would be in the theory of the astral body found in the literature of spiritualism. Death here is regarded as the departure of the soul, itself a kind of body, from the physical plane to another plane of existence, namely, the astral. The soul, in contradistinction from the physical body, is of a highly subtle constitution; but it is still basically corporeal. It is, moreover, of the form of the body, and although it is generally not visible to the ordinary eye, `those who have eyes' can see it and even hold converse with it. This gives the departed soul a certain sociability and helpfulness. Thus, it is not unknown for the dead to reveal the whereabouts of lost valuables or to help crime detection with crucial information, according to spiritualist claims. It may be said, accordingly, that in terms of ontological status and social relevance the astral survivor is akin to the inhabitant of the land of the dead as spoken of in African eschatology.
MORALITY AND THE ANCESTORS
In the Western tradition one can trace the notion of the soul as an astral body to Tertullian, the idiosyncratic early church father (160-220 A.D.). He argued that the conclusion that the soul is corporeal (though ethereal) can be inferred from the Christian doctrine of purgatory.(94) What contemporary spiritualism adds to Tertullian's conception is the social dimension. This social dimension is, however, unsystematic and desultory in comparison with that of the African idea of ancestors. The African ancestors rule their kin from the grave, so to speak; the same cannot be said of their astral counterparts. Because of their minimal social interactions with the living, the cultural significance of the latter (even among the persuaded) is not as great as that of the former.
What is the cultural significance of this? We have already mentioned the role of the ancestors in the enforcement of morals.(95) Morals, broadly construed, cover ethical rules proper as well as customs and taboos. It is with respect to their relevance to the last two kinds of rules of conduct, rather than to the first, that the ancestors have their greatest cultural significance. This is not because their status as guardians of the morality of their living relatives--morality being taken in the narrow sense--is not important, even though often restricted. The reason is twofold. First, in the case of morality, narrowly conceived, the ancestors can only enforce rules whose basis or validity is independent of their own wishes or decisions, whereas customs and taboos are frequently of their own making; and secondly, customs and taboos are more essential to the individuality of a culture than morality. These two considerations each require some elaboration, however brief they must be in the present context.
To take the question of morality (in the narrow sense), first: It is often supposed that in Africa morality is determined by the injunctions of the ancestors and other extra-human powers. This is usually inferred from the very evident influence that beliefs about these beings have upon African conduct. If `determine' is interpreted in a causal, psychological sense, the conclusion follows tautologically from the premiss, for the claim then amounts simply to the observation that the thought of the ancestors, as a matter of psychological fact, does actually cause traditional Africans to behave in certain ways. If, however, the alleged determination of morality by the ancestors is taken in a logical sense, the claim is false or, at any rate, not true of all African thought, for at least in the case of the Akans, the justification of moral rules consists solely in considerations concerning the harmonious adjustment of the interests of individuals with that of the community. The will of an ancestor, or a `god' or indeed, of God, may function as an incentive for an action, but never as its justification.(96)
Customs, on the other hand, are frequent!y held to be justified simply on account of having been laid down by our ancestors long ago. Even here it is pertinent to note that the rules concerned are supposed to have been laid down by the ancestors while they lived, so that their interest in them after death is only a continuation of pre-mortem concerns. Furthermore, although the average mind does not look beyond precedence for the justification of customs, the really wise men of the group can point out their rationale. This is probably also true of taboos. On the face of it, a taboo is an arbitrary prohibition based on the will of some non-human power and backed by threats of unusual consequences. In fact, on deeper scrutiny, such rules may be found not to be without some rhyme or even reason. For the purpose of our present discussion, the important point here is that the reason for a custom or taboo is always pragmatic. A pragmatic reason is one which may justify a practice without making it universally obligatory. Moral reasons, by contrast, are universal. It is because of this universality that moral rules cannot figure in the differentia of a culture, for morality is too essential to human culture to vary from culture to culture. But some things do vary from culture to culture, and custom is certainly one such thing. Since the ancestors--however one looks at the matter--are crucial for the existence in African societies of customs and taboos, their importance in the individuation of African cultures is obvious.
Besides the general relevance of the ancestors to custom and taboo, there are in many African societies elaborate and protracted customs relating to the process by which a person becomes an ancestor. Death, unfortunately, is the first necessary condition for ancestorhood. When that event happens, people feel an obligation to give the deceased a fitting send-off to the land of the ancestors. This involves both spontaneous and formalized mourning and various funeral ceremonies. The scale of a funeral process, judged in terms of the intensity of the mourning, the largeness of attendance and the meticulousness of the formalities, is taken to reflect the respect in which the deceased is held. On this account, people will go to no end of trouble to ensure grand funeral rites for their deceased relatives. There is much less ado about dead bodies, however, among some ethnic groups in Africa. Among such people the mortal remains of the departed are disposed of with very businesslike dispatch. The population of Ghana, for example, includes groups practicing both extremes, as well as groups with intermediate funeral habits. The peoples of the Northern part of Ghana are extremely brisk in their manner of sending off the dead to their new home, while the Akans, among others, devote major effort and time to that procedure. The Yorubas of Nigeria are even more famous for their lavishness of attention and expense in this respect, and I have heard it said that the Luo of Kenya are not far behind. Among peoples of such an orientation, funerals are among the most important and visible observances in cultural life. Since, sadly, people keep on dying, they are, perhaps, the most continual.
THE SOCIAL AFTERMATH OF DEATH
Two aspects of the great preoccupation with the mourning of the dead and associated rites among many African peoples are worth noting. On the one hand, the outpourings of feeling on such occasions have resulted in some of the most beautiful traditional poetry in Africa.(97)
Moreover, the frequent funeral gatherings offer constant opportunities for the exchange of assurances of sympathy and solidarity, and for concrete acts of mutual aid. On the other hand, in recent times the emphasis upon funerals has shown a tendency to degenerate into expensive exhibitionism, which, in view of the strong pressures for conformity in African societies, can drive even the reluctant to ruinous funeral expenses. In my opinion, we see here one of the most negative features of contemporary culture in some African countries.
The sense of tragedy in the face of death is, of course, not necessarily any less in communities with brief funeral rites than in those with extensive ones. The fact of death itself strikes many African peoples as something needing explanation beyond physical causes and effects: hence the many myths on the origin of death to be found in the folklore of many African peoples. The basic message of these myths is that the human species brought death upon themselves through their own disobedience of God. It should be observed, however, that, by and large, what particularly exercises the African mind is not the death of just anybody, but only the death of those who have attained adulthood but not ripe age. Thus, the death in old age of a person who has led a full and productive life is not strictly an occasion for mourning. The Akans would attend the funeral of such a person in white, instead of the customary black, brown, or red. This is taken as a mark of the recognition that the person was blessed by God with a full and completed term of life. In similar circumstances, the Yorubas actually speak of celebration rather than lamentation. The thought seems to be that when one has had ample time to work out one's destiny, it remains only to go and take one's place among the ancestors. On the other hand, for an individual who dies a minor, the question of joining the ancestors does not arise, and in many places there is not even the pretense of a funeral. Although a minor is recognized to be a human being, entitled, in an even greater degree than an adult, to help, affection, and all due consideration, still such an individual is not regarded as a full person and therefore cannot be a candidate for ancestorhood. Not even death is credited with the power to transform the immaturity of a child into the necessary maturity of an ancestor.
But death in immaturity, or, for that matter, at any stage short of ripe age, requires a special explanation. In the normal run of things a person should grow up, raise a family and also help his community in all desirable ways before giving up the ghost, or to speak in Akan terms, before giving up the `okra' (which is the Akan name for the life-principle). A life cut short, then, is an indication of an interruption of the normal sequence of events. Non-intelligent matter operates according to regular laws, which, of themselves, cannot account for such departures from normality. Only an intelligent agent or agency can cause such an estopal of the normal flow of affairs as the nipping of a whole life's potential in the bud. This is, in effect, the train of thought which leads the traditional African mind, when there has been a premature death, to inquire not whether some intelligent agency is involved but which.
Suppose a child playing with a loaded gun pulls the trigger accidentally and kills a promising young man. The gross mechanics of the situation does not elude the African mind, but why this particular young man and at this particular juncture of his life? If this question is answerable, it will be only in terms of reasons, purposes, intentions, etc. Our traditional African assumes that it can be answered,(98) since he considers that everything has a sufficient reason,(99) either by way of mechanical causation or by intelligent (or quasi-intelligent) design. This can be questioned, but that does not belong to our present purpose, which is to give some idea of the reverberations in African culture of the resultant mode of explaining what is taken to be anomalous death.
African ontologies almost always include a Supreme being and a whole hierarchy of extra-human beings and forces, many of whom (or which) are capable of abridging life in certain circumstances. There is, accordingly, a choice of explanations. Perhaps the young man has fallen victim to the envious machinations of a witch. Such a hypothesis, when seriously explored, can have the profoundest social consequences; for the suspicion would be bound to fall on some individual close by who henceforward becomes a spoken or unspoken enemy. The consequent tensions and dissensions constitute some of the most unhappy aspects of African communal life. Or perhaps the young man may have died as punishment from the ancestors for a grievous sin committed by him. He may, for example, have committed adultery with his uncle's wife, than which few greater enormities can be imagined in the family life of a people like, say, the Akans. The wages of sin, here too, sometimes is death.
There are still other possibilities of explanation, as one can easily surmise, but since all such explanations, beyond tentative suspicion, require extra-normal verification, the interesting thing to note here is that such modes of explanation inevitably call forth into existence the institution of divination, which is an extremely important component of many African cultures. Premature death, of course, is not the only problem requiring the expertise of diviners--there is no lack of others: sickness, personal adversities, or even communal reverses--but death is the most worrying of them. Divination occurs on varying scales and in varying degrees of development in probably all African societies; among the Yorubas it appears to have advanced almost to the level of a science complete with a sophisticated mathematical apparatus. It may be observed parenthetically that divination seems to take the place of revelation in many African cultures, a fact which accounts for the absence of prophets of God in the corresponding traditional religions. Our ancestors along with other types of beings are thought to vouchsafe adequate hints and advice to their people. The proliferation of prophets of God in the charismatic churches--a movement which has been sweeping across Africa in recent times like a wild fire, if we may be excused a rather mundane simile in connection with such a `spiritual' phenomenon--is another contemporary twist to a traditional African cultural trait. African divination seems to have domesticated Christian revelation!
CONCLUSION
It is apparent from all the above that, in one way or another, the idea of immortal ancestors dominates African thought about death and the afterlife. Will this belief in the ancestors survive rational investigation in the modern world? The question, perhaps, betrays a rationalistic over-optimism, for whole races do not indulge in intellectual self-examination. Unfortunately, however, they can be overtaken by intellectual events emanating from abroad. This is exactly what has happened in Africa. Her peoples--or a great proportion of them--have been overtaken by the intellectual packages embedded in Islam and Christianity. The question therefore should, perhaps, rather be: `Can the African belief in the ancestors and the associated cultural practices survive the impact of foreign cosmologies?' If such phenomena as religious conversion proceeded in a strictly logical fashion, it might be expected that the belief in question would, for large masses of contemporary Africans, be a thing of the past and that, in consequence, there would be quite radical alterations in their culture. In fact, however, what has often happened has been not alterations but accretions. Christian(100) practices regarding the mourning of the dead, for example, in spite of presupposing a different system of eschatology, have simply been added to traditional ones, thus compounding the extravagance of the funeral process where that tendency exists. This is typical of the general confusion in contemporary African life deriving from the uncritical acceptance of foreign ideas.
I might add that there is not necessarily anything wrong with accepting foreign ideas; what is regrettable is to take them without critical scrutiny. If the unexamined life is not worth living, then it can be easily appreciated that such an unexamining approach is unlikely to do anybody any good. In Africa today many of the living are dying through the chaos resulting, in practical life, from this intellectual situation. It would be comforting if there was an afterlife of peace and serenity. But unless we are to give in to wishful thinking, we must acknowledge that the question of the existence of an afterlife is one requiring both rigorous conceptual analysis and careful evaluation of evidence.
NOTES
CHAPTER VIII
IMMORTALITY AND THE NATURE
OF MAN IN GA THOUGHT
JOYCE ENGMANN
INTRODUCTION(101)
The Ga(102) theory of the nature of man has received little or no attention from philosophers. This may be because it has been assumed to be virtually identical with the often-discussed theory of the neighboring Akan. Thus Debrunner refers to "the Gas, whose psychological concepts are almost identical with the Twi terms," and adds in parenthesis: "It is remarkable that the Twis, Gas and even the Ewes use the same word kra, kla, klama--there is a great temptation to link this with the Egyptian concept of the ka."(103) Nor have the Ga beliefs about immortality received any philosophical discussion.
These two topics are obviously closely related. In this paper I shall explore them and attempt to elucidate the nature of the relationship: that is, in what way, and how successfully, the theory of man's nature provides a framework in terms of which his survival of death may be described and explained.
The major study of these matters from an anthropological point of view are the two chapters "The Dogma of Human Personality" and "The Cult of the Dead" in Margaret Field's classic Religion and Medicine of the Ga People.(104) For the purposes of this study I have supplemented the data in Field with some original field-work. In the enterprise of deriving generalizations about Ga thought from beliefs stated by informants and recorded in Field, two constraints presented themselves.
Firstly, the influence of Christianity in the area has been deep and widespread. When a statement is made which seems Biblical in content or expression, it is occasionally difficult to know whether this is a case of independent concurrence between Ga traditional thought and Christianity, or of the influence of the latter on the former. Instances of this will be indicated in footnotes.
Secondly, on some subjects informants differed from each other, or from the views recorded in Field. In this situation there are two possible stances on the part of the investigator. If he accepts the characterization (by Horton, etc.) of a traditional culture as one in which a single world-view has a monopoly on the intellectual assent of its members, then he will assume that one or another of the views in question is more representative of the traditional point of view and hence to be regarded as more authoritative. This approach, however, has often been contested, most recently by Gyekye, who stresses that traditional thought must have been formed by individual thinkers, and that therefore a monolithic orthodoxy is not to be expected. The members of a traditional culture, operating with concepts suggested by their common language, may arrive at and promulgate differing views, which in turn are accepted or rejected by others in accordance with the results of their individual reflection. In this way, competing views come to be at large in the community, and though one or another of them may predominate, all of them have a title to be regarded by the investigator as representative of the philosophy of the culture.(105)
For practical purposes, I shall adopt a modified version of the second stance. Where competing views exist, they will be indicated, and it will not necessarily be assumed that one of them is the Ga view. But this is without prejudice to the possibility that further consultation of custodians of traditional culture might yield grounds for regarding one view as more authentic than the other. Further, where external influence would seem to be a potentially viable explanation of a discrepancy among views, as is the case with concepts of the kla, I shall indicate as much.
The Ga have a tripartite theory of man. (The expression "tripartite" will later to be found to be misleading, but it will serve for the moment.) Within, or otherwise associated with, the body are two unseen entities, the susuma and the kla. There is no consensus on the proper translation of these terms. In my view "spirit" is a reasonably apt translation of susuma, but "soul" does not correspond to kla.(106) Further, "spirit" is required also for the translation of mum.(107) In order, therefore, to avoid erroneous associations and to preserve necessary distinctions, it seems best to transliterate both terms.
The three "parts" of man will respectively form the principal subject-matter of the three sections of this paper. Among the questions to be discussed will be the nature of the kla and the susuma, the grounds for postulating their existence, and their relation to the body and to each other. The Ga conceive personal immortality to take two main forms: survival of death in a disembodied state, and renewed life in a different material body. For reasons of space, however, the topic of reincarnation will have to be omitted in this paper. Since disembodied existence is precisely the independent existence of the susuma, it will be discussed in the course of the section on the susuma.
THE BODY
The Ga call the body of a man gbmtso, the same word being used for the body of animals. This is a compound word consisting of two elements, gbm and tso. Gbm, pl. gbmi, is the word for man or woman, person; m, pl. mi, also have this sense. (The latter may be applied to animals, but when it is, there seems to be always a degree of personification.) "Human being" is adesa, pl. adesai, or gbm adesa. Tso, pl. tsei, is used of plants with an upright and particularly a woody stem, as distinct from creepers and soft-stemmed plants, which are bai. Thus all trees are tsei. Tso may also be used of a piece of wood, a plank, stick, pole or staff, both in isolation and in compounds:
obonu k tso - drum and stick
nyimtso - walking-stick
denghimtso - lit. "a stick for holding in the
hand", such as an officer's staff
Tso also means the material, "wood". When it is used in this sense in compounds, the name of the object made out of wood normally follows the tso element:
tsotsu - wooden house
tsoshinaa - wooden door
tsosamfl - wooden window
tsogbm - wooden (statue of a ) human being
but:
saatso - bedstead (saa = bed)
In the last compound, tso occupies the same position as in gbmtso. The relationship between the two elements, saa and tso, is, as in the first list, tso-for-X, or, possibly, tso-of-X, and not, as in the second, S-from-tso. We may therefore conclude that gbmtso is "tso for, or of, gbm".
Given the meanings of each element of the compound in isolation and in other contexts, and given the suggestions carried by the structure of the compound, what conception of the body is conveyed by the word gbmtso? Two possibilities come to mind.
Firstly, is tso perhaps being used in an extended sense to mean material in general, and not just wood, so that gbmtso means "stuff of man"? Anyone acquainted with the ancient philosophy of the West is irresistibly reminded of Aristotle's choice of the Greek word hyle, meaning "timber", as the technical term for his new concept of matter. But the fact that tso seems not to be used in other contexts to mean 'stuff" makes this impossible.
Secondly, does the word have reference rather to the shape of the human body, with a central bigger part (the "trunk") and smaller parts going off it? This seems altogether more natural and likely. Three other considerations work in its favor. Firstly, the phrase tso kng, whose literal meaning is "shoulder of tree", is used to mean the crook of a brand or the branch itself. The analogy between the shape of a human body and a tree is thus registered elsewhere in the language. Secondly, tso is used in three other compounds referring to parts of the body: vitso ("head"), nkutso ("elbow") and nakutso ("knee"). In at least the two latter instances, the jointed form of a tree probably prompted the expression. Thirdly, the semantically equivalent Akan word onipadua (Twi) or nyimpaua (Fante), where onipa/nyimpa = "man" and dua = "tree", is normally taken by Akan scholars to carry a reference to the shape of the body. Christaller, for example, gives its basic meaning as "the figure, form, shape of the body".(108)
It is relevant to recall at this point that, as in most West African traditional thought systems, trees, and plants generally, are not regarded as inanimate objects. The Ga make the generalization that tsi f l, wji ji am: "all the plants are wji". Wng (pl. wji) may be translated according to context as "(minor) god", "spirit", "power", "juju": the central idea is that of an invisible thing which has real, though limited, power. The seriousness of the belief that plants are endowed with some kind of sentient spirit is shown in the practice of offering prayer before roots are gathered. Certain trees, notably the silk-cotton tree and the baobab tree, are regarded with especial awe, and rarely cut down.
The body then is conceived as tree-like in shape; and the word gbmtso may carry associations of power, dignity, even sacrosanctity. But the Ga conception of the body is as of a combination of the sublime with the ridiculous. For there is a saying that the body is a mask; and the word used for "mask" in the saying, kakamotobi, denotes a comic or grotesque mask, usually home-made, which is donned by young men who go round in groups especially at Christmas-time to amuse the adults and frighten the children. It is said that when we enter life, we choose the mask which we will wear. The implication of describing the body as a mask is that what you see when you look at a human being does not give you his real nature. Man is something other than his body, something more enduring than it. The next two sections will deal with what the Ga believe goes to make up a human being apart from his body.
THE SUSUMA
Akan Controversies
With regard to the possibly parallel Akan theory of mind, Gyekye has maintained that the tripartite superficies conceals a dualistic kernel. The sunsum is a part of the okra:
insofar as things asserted of the okra are not assertable of the sunsum, the two cannot logically be identified. However, although they are logically distinct, they are not ontologically distinct. That is to say, they are not independent existents held together in an accidental way by an external bond. . . . The sunsum may, more accurately, be characterized as a part--the active part--of the kra (soul).(109)
All earlier interpreters had held the view that the kra and the sunsum were logically distinct. But there were radically differing views to their respective natures. Danquah speaks of the sunsum as the "material mechanism" and says that "sunsum . . . is, in fact, the matter or the physical basis of the ultimate ideal of which Okara is the form and the spiritual or mental basis".(110) Wiredu, on the other hand, holds that the kra, while not a straightforwardly physical object, has some quasi-physical properties. For example, it can be seen by medicine-men or those whose normal powers of perception have been extended by medicinal means or those gifted with extra-sensory perception.(111) Thus Danquah and Wiredu each hold that one of the two non-bodily "parts" of man in Akan thought is physical or quasi-physical, but they differ as to which of the two is such. Gyekye, on the other hand, does not accept the attribution of physical properties to either the sunsum or the kra. He holds that the Akan position is basically a Cartesian one: the kra, an immaterial entity, inhabits the body during life, and leaves it at death. The kra and the sunsum survive death as a "spiritual unity", and it is on this basis that the Akan hold man to be immortal.(112)
I believe it will provide a useful orientation for the ensuing discussion of the Ga beliefs if I list in advance the positions which I shall take up vis-a-vis these points of controversy which have emerged with reference to the Akan beliefs. (This is not, however, to imply anything as to the validity of the parallel.)
(1) The susuma and the kla are ontologically distinct
(2) The kla is non-physical.
(3) The susuma has some physical properties.
(4) Kla and susuma do not survive death as a unity.
(5) Personal immortality in a disembodied form
consists in the continued existence of the
susuma.
It will thus be apparent that the position to be advocated in this paper bears more resemblance to Danquah's than to either Wiredu's or Gyekye's. Although these scholars were not dealing directly with the beliefs of the Ga, I shall at various points have to deal with arguments in their writings which are relevant to this subject-matter.
Towards Defining Susuma
The Ga say that when God created man, he breathed into clay, and activated it. That breath of God which gives life to the clay is man's susuma.(113) As already indicated, the word for breath is mumo. The susuma, therefore, is mum. The kla is also regarded as mum. The inter-relations between these concepts are at first glance puzzling. But I now believe they are explicable in terms of the following two theses.
Firstly, mum is a generic term applicable to anything that is conceived (a) as immaterial, i.e., not composed of gross matter like the body, and (b) as personal or quasi-personal. Susuma and kla are thus both species of mum. Other species of mum are wng (referred to in Section I) and gbeshi. Both of these are entities which do not form part of the normal constitution of a human being but which (because they are not material as the body is material) can superimpose themselves upon a human being and occupy the same space as his body or part of his body, and (because they are personal) can utilize that body to produce expressions, either vocal or motor, in which pattern or purpose is discernible. In the case of a wng, such expressions often involve displays of supernatural strength or stamina, such as frenzied dancing or running. They are therefore both limited in duration (not usually more than five or six hours) and easy to recognize. Possession by a gbeshi, on the other hand, does not give rise to such conspicuous manifestations (cf. Section III), and because its manifestations do not involve supernormal capacities, they may be of much longer duration than those characteristic of possession by a wng. Both wng and gbeshi, then, are thought capable of possessing a human being; and both are species of mum alongside susuma and kla.
Secondly, apart from being the genus comprising these four species, mum also has a narrower use: for as soon as any question of distinction or degree among the various spiritual entities enters in, there is a tendency for mum to slide up the scale in the direction of those seen as "higher", more divine, or less akin to matter. Mum is normally used in the Ga Bible, for example, to translate pneuma ("spirit"), which is seen as being higher than psyche ("soul"), on the grounds that God is pneuma.(114) Again, there is, as we shall see, a traditional doctrine to the effect that when a man dies his susuma goes to the World of the Dead, but his kla goes to God; and an alternative way of expressing this is to say that while his susuma goes to the World of the Dead, his mum goes to God.
These two and any other similar usages might lead to an objection that mum is not, as I have maintained above, the genus to which susuma belongs, for it is sometimes contradistinguished from it. To this I would answer that mum is used in two senses; that mum in its wider sense is the genus of susuma; and that it is when mum is being used in its narrower sense that it is contradistinguished from susuma.(115)
Within the class of immaterial personal entities, what distinguishes susuma
from the others? Like kla, but unlike gbeshi and wng, it is an
integral and not an adventitious "part" of a human being. How does it differ
from kla? One difference is that it can leave the body without causing death;
whereas the kla is associated with the body right up to death. The detachability
of the susuma from the body will be very prominent as we consider the susuma
in relation to consciousness.
Susuma, Mind and Consciousness
If one enquiries of an exponent of Ga traditional thought about the nature of man, one will invariably be taught about the body, the susuma and the kla; the mind will not be mentioned. Yet the word for mind, jwengm, exists; it is used for example in the phrase eb jwengm, literally "he hasn"t got a mind", i.e., "he has no brains". This situation prompts two questions. Why is mind scarcely mentioned in the account of human nature? And what is the relation between this Cindarella and the more important and interesting components?
It would be wrong to say that the mind, for the Ga, is part of the body. For a distinction is certainly drawn between the mind and the brain (ans). Nevertheless it would seem that the mind is regarded as a function of the brain. It is difficult to get definite statements on this issue; and the reason for this seems to be that thought was not traditionally regarded as posing philosophical problems or standing in need of explanation in terms of occult entities, as are some other phenomena associated with man. Wiredu has made a comparable comment in connection with the Akan okra:
The kra is postulated in Akan thought to account for the fact of life and destiny but not of thought. The soul, on the other hand, seems in much Western philosophy to be intended to account, not just for life but also for thought. Indeed, in Cartesian philosophy, the sole purpose of introducing the soul is to account for the phenomenon of thinking.(116)
Gyekye has taken up the reference to Descartes to cast doubt on the suggested contrast between Akan and Western philosophy. He points out that the Cartesian cogitatio is wider than thought in the sense of conscious ratiocination, which he believes (although it is not quite clear why) is the sense in which Wiredu is using the word; and
Any living being must have consciousness. This being the case, consciousness, which is equivalent to the soul or mind in Descartes, can be a translation of okra.(117)
It seems to me that the contrast can be defended against this criticism in the following way. The fact that a living being is a conscious being does not go to show that the okra is postulated to account for consciousness rather than to account for life itself. If, on the other hand, we do take thought in the narrow sense of ratiocination, it is possible to make the contrast quite sharply: Descartes certainly held that thought in that sense was a function of the soul; but the Akan do not connect it particularly with the kra, of which Gyekye's own preferred summary characterization is "the principle of life of a person and the embodiment and transmitter of his or her destiny (nkrabea)".(118) The fact that Descartes also attributed other conscious states or activities (e.g., perception and volition) to the soul does not affect the point that the Akan do not specifically attribute ratiocination to the kra.
We return therefore to the Ga concept of mind strengthened in the belief that conscious thought (ratiocination, daydreaming, etc.) was not considered to constitute a problem, and that this is probably the reason why so little appears to be said about the mind in their theory of human nature. The relative dearth of evidence constitutes an obstacle in ascertaining what the theory does maintain about the nature of the mind. But the impression I have formed is that the mind is regarded as a faculty of the brain just as hearing is the faculty of the ears, seeing of the eyes, etc. If this is correct, and the mind is a function of part of the body, then it is not surprising if the mind is not mentioned along with the body, the susuma and the kla in the theory of human nature. It is considered to be subsumed under the first of these components. We have thus a ready, though perhaps disappointingly simple answer to the first of the two questions with which we began, and to the first third of the second question, that is, the relation of the mind to the body.
We have now to consider the relation between the mind and the kla and susuma respectively. But the relationship between the mind and the kla forms an aspect of the relationship between kla and susuma-plus-body, and can usefully be considered in Section III, where the nature of the kla is discussed. The relationship between mind and susuma is a complex and interesting problem. Here we encounter a further sharp difference between this and Western theories of mind. For those of the latter which postulate, behind the succession of thoughts, perceptions and volitions, a self whose thoughts, perceptions and volitions these are, have usually made this single entity the subject of both conscious and unconscious thoughts. But on the Ga view conscious thoughts alone are attributable to the mind; unconscious thoughts are experiences of the susuma. This is not said in so many words, but I believe it is a generalization which may validly be made on the basis of scrutiny of the types of activities which are attributed to the susuma. These include the following activities, with reference to all of which the chief point stressed is that the susuma is separated from the body: (i) witchcraft activities; (ii) out-of-the-body experiences in terminal illness; (iii) dreaming/sleeping. Beliefs about the part played by the susuma in these activities will now be described.
With regard to witchcraft activities, I shall not have very much to say. The term is intended to cover diverse activities which witches are believed to perform out of the body by night, such as travelling to a meeting-place, taking part in a discussion or feast, and procuring food by a spiritual attack on a victim.(119) These activities, the reality of which is very widely believed in, are said to be performed by the susumai of witches which leave their bodies by night. This is the only instance among the activities we are reviewing where the separation of the susuma from the body is subject to volition.
It sometimes happens in a terminal illness that a patient who has appeared to be asleep reports, on awakening, that he has left his bed and travelled either to a familiar or to an unknown place, mixing sometimes with the living and sometimes only with the dead. This intermittent "travelling" may go on for days or weeks (rarely, months) before death. Here again it is believed that the susuma has actually left the body, and that the reported experiences are genuine experiences of the susuma in this independent state. When a person lies unconscious in a coma, it is supposed that his susuma has gone to Azizanya, the transition point into the World of the Dead, where he is being judged; if he were guilty, he would not come back.
In a very similar way, dreams are held to be veridical experiences of the susuma. It is believed that when we sleep, the susuma leaves the body,(120) visits other places, and interacts with the susumai of other people. This explanation of dreaming (common to many African peoples(121)), which is liable to seem very implausible to the outsider, Gas sometimes defend by two arguments.
Before stating the first argument, it must be mentioned that the susma is believed to be capable of travel in time as well as in space. So when we dream about a past experience, our susuma is said to leave the present and go back to the time at which the experience occurred. The fact that we sometimes dream about genuine past experiences is not thought to constitute any evidence for the veridical nature of dreams, or for the departure of the susuma to an earlier time-segment than that in which the body exists when the dream takes place. For in waking life we may remember the experience, so that a re-awareness of the experience is patently compatible with the temporal copresence of the susuma with the body.(122) The occurrence of premonitory dreams, however, is thought to constitute such evidence. The argument may be formulated as follows. Since some dreams "come true", the content of the dream must have been a real existent or occurrent, which, since it was not in the same time-segment as the existence of the body of the dreamer, the susuma must have travelled in time in order to be acquainted with it.
The second argument used is as follows. It sometimes happens that X expresses a belief that Y was dreaming about him on a particular night, when it is in fact true that Y was dreaming about X on that night. What could underlie X's possession of this true belief except some actual mutual encounter? And since the encounter did not involve the bodies of X and Y, it must have involved their susumai.
One is not obliged to accept these two arguments, but they are interesting as showing that empirical evidence is deemed relevant to establishing the existence and determining the nature of the susuma. The two arguments are each based on a fact: the first, that some dreams "come true", and the second, that two people sometimes dream about each other on the same night. One may think that the hypothesis of the existence and capacity for "travel" of the susuma is not the most economical way of explaining these two facts. But, at the least, the arguments show a willingness to relate facts to theories. Such an attitude does not fall under the heading of "superstition" as defined by Wiredu:
By "superstition" I mean a rationally unsupported belief in entities of any sort. The attribute of being superstitious attached not to the content of a belief but to its mode of entertainment. . . . When, however, we come to the traditional African belief in ancestor spirits--and this, I would contend, applies to spiritualistic beliefs everywhere--the position is different. That our departed ancestors continue to hover around in some rarefied form ready now and then to take a sip of the ceremonial schnapps is a proposition that I have never known to be rationally defended.(123)
The brief compass of our discussion of the susuma so far indicates that this judgment may be too severe. For we have already noted two other cases apart from dreaming where empirical evidence is brought to bear on establishing the existence and functions of the susuma: the alleged "travelling" of the susuma of a sick person as death approaches, and the alleged "travelling" of the susuma of a witch in pursuance of witchly purposes. Both of these rest on testimonial evidence: the patient's report and the witch's confession, respectively.
One may feel that adequately stringent criteria for assessing such testimonies are not always applied; but to stigmatize the "spiritualistic belief" based on them as "superstitious" must amount to either (a) discounting the relevance of human experiences or alleged experiences to the theory of human nature, which would be a remarkable and certainly untenable approach; or (b) a judgment that none of the particular experiences in question could be authentic, i.e., that all out-of-body experiences claimed by terminal patients or witches are either sincerely or mistakenly claimed--a judgment which could, it would seem, only stem from the perception of an incompatibility between the critic's theory of human nature and that to which the alleged experiences seem to point. If this were the case, the blanket repudiation of the evidence would be a kind of petitio principii, as dogmatic in its own way as the "superstition" on which it is a comment.
The approaches requisite in the context would seem to be rather (c) a careful assessment of the testimonies in question in terms of the generally accepted criteria for judging the worth of testimonial evidence; (d) consideration of whether the facts as claimed warrant the theory as propounded. If (d) yielded a negative result, then, as far as the evaluation of this theory was concerned (though not perhaps that of some alternative possible theory), (c) would be necessary. The adoption of approach (b) above would suggest that the critic's conduct of task (d) has yielded a positive result. Paradoxically, therefore, the blanket repudiation of the testimonial evidence could constitute an indication of approval, however reluctant, of the theory in another respect: the validity of its derivation from those particular alleged facts.
After this excursus into the grounds for belief in the susuma, I return to the topic of the relation of the mind to the susuma. I hope enough has been said to justify the statement that activities which in the West are attributed to the unconscious or subconscious mind, in Ga thought are attributed not to the mind, but to the susuma. Of this, indeed, the chief and perhaps the only example we have had is dreaming; for Western philosophy has scarcely thought it worth taking account of alleged out-of-body experiences such as the other two types of case consist in, nor, as far as I know, do parapsychologists or popular thought ascribe them to the unconscious. At this point may be mentioned the idiom Esusuma ke le wie, "His susuma spoke to him". This is a comment made when someone stops short of taking a disastrous step. Since it implies that one's susuma does not speak to one all or most of the time, it perhaps supports the view that the susuma is an unconscious or subconscious element of a person.
We cannot, however, say that the susuma is in effect the unconscious mind, and that the theory could be amended so that the susuma is past or unrecognized thoughts, wishes, fears, etc. of which the proper subject is the jwngm. We can see this from the way the theory interprets the experiences of the terminally ill patient. The patient characteristically expresses a desire for death during the period in question. This fact might be used to connect the supposed "travelling" of the susuma with Western concepts of the unconscious as a repository of wishes and fears--a connection which could probably be made unobjectionably in the case of dreams. But in the case of the patient, the desire for death is a fully conscious one; and the role of the susuma is as a would-be implementer of wishes to which the conscious mind cannot, by mere volition, give effect. The susuma has, as it were, a mind and a will of its own.
Three observations concerning the relation between the mind and the susuma now suggest themselves. Firstly, if there were a complete separation between the mind and the susuma during dreaming, we should suddenly receive a pack of dreams each time the susuma returns to us. But dreaming is a progressive experience, as can be seen from physical reactions on the part of the dreamer. Presumably, therefore, the mind is residually active during sleep, and is able to register the impression of the absent susuma in such a way as to produce the physical reactions appropriate to the dream. What, then, is the nature of the link between them, and how does it differ from that which obtains during waking life? This is left mysterious. There is supposed to be an "invisible thread" between the dreamer and his susuma, but as far as I know it is not further described.
Secondly, the out-of-body experiences of the sick person near to death seem to be accompanied by a clarity and sense of reality superior to that which characterizes dreams. How is this difference to be explained if they are both alike experiences of the separated susuma? The theory appears to be silent on this point.
Thirdly, there is a difference between the sleeper's dream and the patient's "journey" when each is looked at in the manner broached earlier, as an exercise in wish-fulfillment. For the desires which the susuma is supposed to execute in dreams are sometimes not desires which are given countenance to by its owner; indeed they may have been censored from admission to consciousness. This is not so however, of the desire for death in the other case. Moreover, that desire has the peculiarity that it is precisely a desire for a condition of the susuma (according to the Ga view whereby after death the susuma exists in separation from the body). But the desires which the susuma is supposed to execute in dreams are desires for a condition of the whole person. (It is conceivable that someone might hold, within the framework of the theory, that such desires are desires of the susuma for a condition of itself in relation to other susumai and not, after all, desires of the person in relation to other persons. But that would be to posit a much greater degree of independence between the mind and the susuma.)
From the second and third observations, we can see that there are differences between dreaming and the alleged "travelling" before death in regard to both their felt quality and the character of the purposiveness which they exhibit; and in view of these differences, the verdict seems inescapable that the identical explanation of them is too bare. Either dreaming should be eliminated here, or further details should be supplied which make the differences between the two types of cases comprehensible. Without such elaboration, and an account of the link between susuma and body such as was desiderated in the first observation, the complex question of the relation between the mind and the susuma cannot be fully resolved. Perhaps it can be said that the account of dreaming does not sit very comfortably with the rest of the theory.
The Susuma After Death
The susma leaves the body at death. Esusuma eshi l--"His susuma has left him"--means "He is dead". The departure of the susuma alone however, is not sufficient to cause death. It is when the susuma and the kla both leave the body that death occurs.
The question whether animals have a susuma, and whether, accordingly, the death of an animal either consists in, or is accompanied by, the departure of its susuma, typically does not meet with a very ready or assured answer. But some Gas at least hold that animals do not have a susuma, and that that is why (except for those traditionally regarded as gods, such as the hyena, the python, etc.) they are permitted to be killed. This position however, would seem inconsistent with the role ascribed to the susuma in human dreaming, in view of the fact that animals obviously do dream. Furthermore, how is the death of animals to be explained if they do not have a susuma? For animals apparently do not have a kla (at least in one sense of kla), and one presumably wants to explain their death in a manner parallel to that of human beings. Thus a positive answer to the question whether animals have a susuma would be more consistent with beliefs about the susuma of humans in relation to both dreams and death. The unwillingness of discussants to commit themselves in answer to this question is perhaps due (if my earlier suggestion concerning the empirical basis of the theory is correct) to the fact that in the case of animals no reported experiences are available.
In the remainder of this subsection I shall give a mainly descriptive account of those Ga beliefs concerning the fate of man after death which seem relevant to determining the nature of the susuma.
When the susuma leaves the body at death it travels very quickly(124) and reaches a river which it must cross. Before that, if very rapid action is taken, the susuma may sometimes be brought back. If the person's name is shouted three times at the nearest crossroads, and the person responds, then the fleeing susuma is said to have been recalled. Alternatively, the body may be besmeared with pepper or pepper may be burnt in the room. The susuma, which is believed not to like the smell of pepper may sneeze, and all is well.
The susuma of a person who has died in an accident or by violence (otfo) does not travel from the place of death until after pacification has been performed. An otfo is angry and may haunt passers-by in a rough and frightening manner until it is pacified and its spirit transferred.
The river which must be crossed is not identified with any geographical river (Christians tend to call it Yordon Faa, "the River Jordan"), but the arrival-place of the newly-dead is known by the name of a geographical town, Azizanya, which is sited where the River Volta flows into the sea. This is a picturesque expression of the belief that we are all one with eternity which we are eventually going to join. Money is put into the coffin as the fare to the further bank of the river. At azizanya the nose is said to be broken, for ghosts are reputed to speak nasally. The dead person thus irrevocably enters gbohiiajeng, "the World of the Dead" (from gbohii, "dead people", and jeng, "world"), also called sisaiajeng, "the World of Ghosts".
But on earth his ghost may be seen for up to about three weeks after death. This is about the period it takes for someone's susuma to become impotent and lose contact with people in the physical world. The ghost may be seen in different places, sometimes far apart, usually by people who knew the deceased well. It is most commonly seen in the first three days after death. It can enter a room through even the smallest hole. It may be seen by one or more of the people in a room without being seen by all. Its presence can be detected by a characteristic fragrance of krb(125) or by a sensation of cold even when it is not seen, or seen by only some of those present. To see a ghost is always a frightening experience. To sit on a chair upon which a ghost has been or is sitting is widely believed to result in impotence, infertility or even death. For sisa nii l, atasa he, "one does not touch the things belonging to a ghost". For this reason upright chairs are often faced about and tipped against the wall after use so that ghosts will not sit on them. Animals are also believed to be capable of seeing ghosts. When a dog starts barking furiously for no apparent reason, the explanation is liable to be given that he has seen a ghost.
The ghost is universally identified with the susuma: susuma l ji sisa ni ak le, "what we call the ghost is the susuma". To convey the meaning "I have seen a ghost", mina susuma is often used instead of mina sisa (as being less frightening). The Ga affirm that we receive a new body at death. But questioning always elicits that this new body is none other than the susuma. It is a new body in the sense that it has not previously been the person's outer garment, as it were; he is now unencumbered by the visible body, which he has laid aside. His new body can not only move faster but also see more than the old one; it is said picturesquely that ghosts have four eyes.
While the susuma goes to the world of the Dead, the kla, which is believed to be the presence of God in us, goes to God. What happens to it is not known. But some say that it loses its individuality. For example, one informant said "When you die you are in two different places. The spirit of God which is in me goes back to God. But what makes me Tettey is my susuma. That goes to gbohiiajeng. That is what has the scent of krb. It doesn't lose its individuality as the other does." The matter of the kla's loss of individuality belongs to the section below on the kla, where I shall attempt to cast some light on the doctrine, at first sight puzzling, of the dual destination of the dead. Here it may merely be noted that it appears to be a unanimously held doctrine, and that there also appears to be general agreement on the point that it is the susuma which sustains the individuality of the person. The susuma is the person who has died, but it is less than the person. God has taken his own power away; the body is in the grave; what remains is the susuma, and this still actively works.
Four kinds of powers are attributed to it in relation to the physical world.
Firstly, it may hover around and become visible, or otherwise perceptible, to the living as sisa, just described.
Secondly, it may possess a living person, usually a medium, as wng. There exist professional mediums who are reputed able to contact virtually any dead person. They make use of a ssi, a big wooden bowl containing water, herbs, etc. It is believed that the reflection of a ghost in a mirror, in water, etc., is sometimes visible when the ghost itself cannot be seen. After invocation the medium and the client see the dead person in the water; the medium may speak in a voice which the client identifies as that of the dead person.
Thirdly, it may materialize, assuming the appearance, voice, etc., which the person had while living, so as to deceive anyone who sees it into thinking that they are looking at a normal living person. This usually only happens only in an hour of need of a child or grandchild of the deceased. He appears not to them, but to an intermediary, sometimes a total stranger or a distant acquaintance who has not heard of the death, saying, for example, "Take this money and give it to Akeley. Tell her Auntie Akoshia sent it for her." Messages, for example, instructions as to the disposal of property, are believed to be sent in the same way. But the dead are shy of being seen and recognised by the living, except when they have a special purpose such as this in view. Anecdotes of people who have casually caught sight of an acquaintance looking just as he did in life are numerous. This is not considered a frightening experience. Indeed, the acquaintance may be addressed almost like a naughty child, to the effect that "I have spotted you". He is typically unwilling to engage in conversation, and gets out of sight as soon as possible.
Fourthly, the dead are believed to be able to influence events on earth by means not ordinarily perceptible, as they are in the other three cases. They are, therefore, not specified but the reality is firmly believed in to the extent that prayers to the dead for peace, prosperity and other blessings are a normal feature of traditional life. A considerable body of belief, into which I need not enter here, centers on the occasions and exigencies that stir the dead to exercise their powers of intervention in the world of the living.
With regard to the nature and quality of life within the World of the Dead, it is said that the dead who possess mediums do not reveal this. But some at least of the dead are thought to be more pure and holy than men on the earth, and their life to be more sublime.
As to whether judgment is a feature of the World of the Dead, there appears to be no belief in a general judgment, though it is left open that individuals might be rewarded or punished. The common phrase Nyngm baawo bo nym, "God will punish you", is often taken to refer to this life or to a subsequent life on earth, rather than to anything which is to happen in the World of the Dead; but the ancestors are believed to administer judgment upon the individual there.
The location of the World of the Dead is indeterminate. Gas see the world as composed of three main levels. Ngwei is "sky", "heaven"; it can also function adverbially as "on high", "upwards". Whatever is above us, like the moon, stars, airplanes, is at ngwi. It is the word used for the Christian concept of heaven, the place where God is, often conceived of as existing above us. Shikpng is the earth on which we tread; anything below it is at shishi, "underneath", "bottom part". Within this scheme the World of the Dead is assigned no definite place. It is not specifically held to be below the earth, as the Igbo believe; nor is it above us, as the Ewe believe.(126) The implications of the absence of any definite location for the World of the Dead will be considered below.
Much more might be said concerning beliefs about the after-life. For instance, the interesting Ga beliefs about the "sky family" have not been touched upon. But the above are the main beliefs relevant to establishing that for the Ga, personal survival of death consists in the continued existence of the person's susuma, and (in conjunction with the beliefs about the susuma of a living person described in the previous section on the susuma after death) to supplying a basis for analysis of the concept of the susuma, a task to which I now turn.
The Nature of the Susuma
The susuma cannot be understood behaviouristically as a set of dispositions belonging to a person. It is itself a substance or owner of properties. But is it an immaterial or non-physical substance, in effect a Cartesian ego as Gyekye has maintained the Akan susuma to be? I shall argue that the susuma does not answer to this description. For while one cannot say straightforwardly that the susuma is a physical thing, it yet seems to have some physical properties. I shall, firstly, indicate what these are; secondly, attempt to answer an argument brought by Gyekye against Wiredu's characterization of the Akan kra as quasi-physical which would apply equally to my characterization of the susuma; and, thirdly, show why (if we have to choose) it is better to say that the susuma is a physical thing than to say that it is non-physical. I shall then suggest a different characterization of the susuma.
The susuma is plainly not gross matter like the flesh and bones of the body. At the same time, it seems to have some of the properties of a physical object. In the first place, it exhibits movement through space. As we saw in the section above regarding the susuma after death, the susuma moves from the body in dreams and may also do so when the person is approaching death. Neither of these movements are subject to volition; but the susuma of a witch can move through space at will. And the susuma, as we saw, can move in time as well as in space. In either case its movement is extremely rapid. Perhaps we can compare the Western belief that the whole life of a drowning man passes before him in a flash. Now if the susuma can move through space (and time), this presumably means that it occupies space (and time). And this is surely the defining characteristic of a physical object. The same applies to the movements of the susuma after death which were discussed in the previous section. Whether manifesting itself as sisa, possessing a medium as wng, or materializing to appear just like a living person, it is present in a specific location, and, occupying space, must be physical in nature. If the word "occupies" is thought to be inappropriate, we could alternatively say that it "occurs in" space (and time). Then while it might not be appropriate to say that it is a physical object, yet still we would surely have to accept that insofar as it moves through space the characterization "physical" must be applied, just as, for example, a wave is physical, although not a physical object.
What about the collection of susumai which is gbohiiajeng? Because it is not assigned any specific place in the three levels of the physical world, should we draw the conclusion that it is not located anywhere and therefore (as Professor Gyekye has claimed of the seemingly parallel Akan asamando)(127) does not exist in space? This conclusion does not seem reconcilable with beliefs about the local presence of ghosts, etc. It would seem more consistent with these to suppose that the World of the Dead exists somewhere in the three levels, but we do not know where: perhaps in several "departments", some of which may be superimposed upon our level. How else could one accommodate beliefs about ghosts haunting places on earth? Thus the absence of any specific assigned location for the World of the Dead should not upset our conclusion that its inhabitants move in space and have spatial and temporal locations.
Secondly, the susuma has electromagnetic properties. When it becomes visible as a ghost, it presumably emits photons. The same applies to the "witch-light", a rapidly oscillating glow which the susuma of a witch is supposed to give off as it travels through the air. The susuma in its ghostly form is supposed also to be perceptible to the other distance senses, hearing and smell. In parenthesis, we note here again the prominence of observation as grounding for statements about the susuma: what counts as evidence of the presence of a ghost is visual, auditory and olfactory sensations.
Wiredu suggested that it is a reason for characterizing the Akan kra as quasi-physical, that medicine-men or people with ESP or medicinally-heightened perception are said to be capable of seeing the kra. This is in essence the same argument as the one I have just used about the susuma. Gyekye has objected that:
It must be noted, however, that these phenomena do not take place in the ordinary physical world; otherwise anyone would be able to see or communicate with the kra. This must mean that what those with special abilities see or communicate with is something non-spatial. Thus, the fact that the okra can be seen by such people does not make it physical or quasi-physical (whatever that expression means), since this act or mode of seeing is not at the physical or spatial level.(128)
But if the kra really is seen at a particular spot, we surely cannot rebuke the inference that it exists in space. At least, it would not seem possible to do so by means of the argument here used, that the object seen is not physical because the act of seeing is not physical, otherwise everyone would be able to perform it. For by the same token one might argue that dogs do not physically hear the high notes of a dog whistle, otherwise humans would be able to hear them.
How does Gyekye account for the mobility and perceptibility of the susuma on his Cartesian interpretation of it, or, more precisely, of the okra of which he takes the sunsum to form a part? The answer is contained in the following words:
[i]t cannot be inferred that they [spiritual beings] are physical or have permanent physical properties. It means that a spiritual being can, when it so desires, take on physical properties. That is, even though a spiritual being is nonspatial in essence, it can, by the sheer operation of its power, assume spatial properties.(129)
Gyekye here envisages a temporary assumption of physical properties by a spiritual being. Since he goes on to quote with approval Mbiti's statement "Spirits are invisible, but they make themselves visible", this is tantamount to an agreement that, when a ghost is seen, it is seen physically and in space. (Since ghosts are often not seen by everyone in the room, this admission would seem incompatible with his earlier position.) So the matter appears to devolve upon the following question: what is the nature of that being which, when it is physically observed, is a ghost, and again when it is not so observed, is a ghost? Are we to say it is physical or non-physical?
The theory wisely avoids committing itself here, and no doubt it would be better if we did the same. Once the contents of beliefs are agreed upon, and their implications drawn out, there is little point in pressing them for a decision on questions couched in terminology to which they have nothing to correspond. (There appears to be no word for "matter", "material" or "physical" in Ga.) But if we must make a choice, it would seem better to describe the susuma as "physical", rather than as "non-physical but possessing a capacity for materialization through the sheer exercise of its power"-- i.e., presumably, by thought. For the description of it as physical licenses a reason why it is now in a particular place which is familiar and comprehensible to us ("it has moved"). The other approach offers a reason ("it has thought") which is not comprehensible, or at least not familiar. And I think we may get some confirmation for the preference for the former alternative from the statement that we receive a new body at death. As was pointed out in II (d), this new body is agreed to be the susuma. If the susuma can be described as a body, it is presumably conceived as an organized physical entity.
It is appropriate at this point to consider the significance of the fact that the word susuma also means "shadow". Why is the susuma so called, and what, if anything, is it the shadow of? There is no agreement on these points among informants. Two hypotheses are worth considering.
(i) The susuma is the shadow of kla. It is the representation of it, the only thing which enables us to know what the kla is like. Here one must bear in mind the belief that one may see the reflection of something which is not itself seeable (for example, the reflection of a ghost may be seen in water or a mirror when it itself is not seen).
(ii) The meaning "shade", i.e., "ghost", is paramount. The ghost is a shadow of the body: it is not the body, but a reflection or projection of it. Because the in-life component of the person is taken as being identical with the post-death apparition, it is given the name "shadow", which is really or primarily appropriate to the shadowlike--seeable but untouchable--appearance after death.
(i) is supported by some highly knowledgeable informants. Otherwise one would have tended to prefer (ii), which is more straightforward and draws more closely on the literal meaning of "shadow". Moreover, one is familiar from other languages with the word for "shadow" being used for "ghost", e.g., Latin umbra, though it is a special feature of the Ga usage that the same word is used for an in-life component of the person.(130) Had (ii) been the correct explanation, it would perhaps have provided further support for the preference for the description "physical" over "non-physical" (for the perceptibility of the susuma would then be revealed as so essential a feature of it as to have determined even its name).
But even though this discussion of shadowness has not yielded clear support for our preference, it seems to me that the arguments which preceded it do show clearly that (whatever we may later find to be the case with the kla) we cannot give a Cartesian account of the susuma as pure consciousness devoid of any physical properties, such as is the sunsum of Akan thought on the Gyekyean interpretation of it. Far from being an immaterial entity inhabiting a body, the susuma is itself a body, and shares with the material body the properties of being organized and of possessing a spatial and temporal location, and the powers of movement through space and time and (intermittently) of perceptibility to the distance senses of human beings and animals.
Thus I suggest that the correct account of the susuma is that it is a Strawsonian person, to which both mental and physical predicates are applicable, and not a Cartesian ego, to which only the former category would apply. Strawson in Individuals argued that the fact that we apply predicates ascribing physical characteristics, and predicates ascribing states of consciousness to a person, should not lead us to think a person consists of two things: a body, which is the real subject of the mental predicates, and a mind, which is the real subject of the physical predicates (any more than when we say "The brick is square" and "The brick is red", we should then think that squareness and redness do not both characterize the brick, but independently characterize two distinct things, the brick's shape and the brick's color). Persons just are a kind of things to which both mental and physical predicates apply (just as bricks are a kind of things to which both shape- and color-predicates apply); and the notion of a person is logically prior to that of an individual consciousness. Since, as we have seen, the susuma possesses physical properties as well as mental ones, it falls under the concept of a person as that concept is analyzed by Strawson. It can only be represented as a pure consciousness or immaterial ego at the price of neglecting some beliefs which form a salient part of Ga conceptions of human nature and personal immortality.
If the susuma is a person in this sense, does this mean I am two persons, and not one? If so, (a) how do we reconcile this with our usual intuitions that I am only one? and (b) how are the two persons related? If not, what explanation can we give of why a person plus a person does not yield two persons? To these and other questions which are raised by our account of the susuma as a person in the Strawsonian sense, an answer can be attempted only after the nature of the kla has been considered.
THE KLA
Concepts of the Kla
The variety of the statements made by Gas about the kla is most striking, and creates initial bewilderment. For example, on the one hand the kla is said to be the highest element in man's nature, while on the other it is said that plants too have kla. Each of these statements is corroborated by a number of informants; and such apparent incompatibilities can be multiplied. One very obvious task which an analysis of the concept of the kla must fulfill is to account for these glaring discrepancies. It would seem that a fuller investigation must yield one of four possible conclusions.
(i) The inconsistencies are only apparent and disappear when the complex concept of the kla is understood. (ii) The concept of the kla is hopelessly confused. The best one can do is to document the various beliefs and idioms concerning it. But to articulate them in a coherent manner is an enterprise doomed to failure. (iii) Different people hold different concepts of the kla, and these rival views have taken hold--now here, now there--within the community. (Here one may invoke Gyekye's thesis of the importance of individual reflection in the formation of traditional thought systems.) (iv) With the kla, we are dealing not with one concept but with several, different to the extent that they could with a gain in clarity be expressed in different words. If (iii) were correct, thinkers a, b and c would all hold that we have a kla, but they would differ as to what kind of thing the kla was. If (iv) were correct, one and the same thinker would hold that we have a kla in sense a, a kla in sense b, and a kla in sense c. For (iv) to be correct, indeed it should be the case that many people are prepared to acknowledge, when they are invited to consider the matter, that they do have belief answering to each such statement.
The conclusion to which the evidence seems to me to point is (iv), that the kla is not a single complex concept, nor yet rival versions of the same concept, but more than one as relatively simple concepts which have gotten grouped together under the same name. (Indications that one of these is the original one, and the other or others later comers, will be mentioned as a matter of interest; but this is a historical matter on which I am not really equipped to comment.) As was stated above, a rich and varied collection of beliefs, linguistic idioms and customs has grown up around the kla, and the distinctions we shall draw between senses of kla must be based on and interspersed with short descriptive accounts of some of these.
The kla is said by Gas to be a part of God's nature in man. It is regarded by them as higher than the susuma. If it be asked "higher in what sense?", the answer is threefold.
Firstly, the kla is more powerful than the susuma. It can direct the susuma, whereas the susuma never directs it. The kla dictates a man's destiny, the message he is to bring into the world and the task he is to fulfill in it. We are said to take leave of our kla when we come into the world. It normally continues to guide and protect a man throughout his life. Someone who enjoys good fortune or has had a series of lucky escapes may be described as kla kpakpa ts, "the owner of a good kla". To say of someone that Ekla nyi ese, "His kla is following him", means that he is lucky. The kla is sometimes actually identified with destiny: Okla l,oshadi ni, "Your kla is your destiny".
A creative as well as directive power is sometimes attributed to the kla, for it is even said that Le ebbo, "He is the one who created you". Since it is his kla which makes a person what he is, gratitude to him may be expressed by referring to his kla: "Thanks be to your kla", "May God bless your kla". By the same token, a person's kla may be abused with all the insults which might be heaped upon its owner: "Your roguish kla", "Your kla's foolish face", etc. The kla is strongly associated with physical health and vigor. If you are allergic to something, your kla does not like it. Ob kla, "You haven"t got a kla", is a statement made to someone who is thought to be too passive, someone who puts up with things against which he should react or rebel.
Secondly, the kla is morally perfect. It is tarnished when its owner commits a serious misdeed, and because of its association with health, its displeasure may be manifested in sickness. Concerning this there is some evidence dating from the eighteenth century. The Moravian historian Oldendorp writes:
The priests of the Akkran [i.e., the Ga] have a theory about diseases. They see in them a result from a misunderstanding between spirit and soul. In their opinion as long as the two live together in peace and concord like husband and wife, man is healthy, but if one of the two commits a fault, the harmony is disturbed: the pure part wants to separate itself from the impure one, hence arise inner trouble and sickness of the body.(131)
It will be noted that Oldendorp records a belief that either the kla may be alienated from the impure susuma, or vice versa. But I have not found any informant who accepts the latter situation as a possible one, nor is there any evidence to that effect recorded in Field. The kla always seems to be regarded as essentially pure; any taint which falls upon it from the action of its owner should be washed off by means of a prescribed ceremony.
Physical illness is not the only possible outcome of offending the kla. It may withdraw its protection and offer no more moral or spiritual guidance. The consequences of this are supposed to be dire. Ekla eje es, "His kla has left him" (the opposite of Ekla nyi es) is a statement made when madness, alcoholism, etc., has befallen a person. The withdrawal of the kla's protection may be followed by the intrusion into the personality of an alien element known as a gbeshi. As mentioned in II (b), this seems to be regarded as a kind of spirit. Any form of socially unacceptable behavior which does not occur in a man's immediate family, and thus cannot be attributed to heredity, is liable to be attributed to a gbeshi. It is regarded as a disruptive force which interferes with the links binding the kla and the susuma, and prevents the victim from fulfilling his destiny. Some medicine-men are believed to be able to perform ceremonies which will rid a person of gbeshi.
Thirdly, the kla is regarded as more "honorable" than the susuma. After childbirth, recovery from a serious illness, survival of an accident, or a signal success of any kind, the kla is "washed" and thanked at a special ceremony. Some other ceremonies in connection with the kla have been referred to already; yet others are described in Field.(132) The susuma however, receives no such veneration.
A fourth point, more controversial than the preceding ones, may be added. This is that the kla is never seen; thus it is either immaterial, or further removed from the ordinary material world than the susuma which, as we have seen, is intermittently perceptible, either itself or through a reflection. However, some say that medicine-men can see the kla. But this is denied by others, who explain that what the client wants to be assured of is that the practitioner has really been in communication with the kla: a medicine-man might use the terminology of vision in order to satisfy him of that; but he does not, properly speaking, see the kla. The question stands in need of closer investigation.
To the question: How do we know that we have a kla? What is thought to make the postulation of it necessary? the answer is obscure. There is, or at least is considered to be, a lot of empirical evidence, known to the ordinary person, to support the theory of the nature and activities of the susuma. But the theory of the kla seems to enjoy no such backing. It is possible that the pronouncements of medicine-men, who, as just remarked are believed able to communicate with the kla, have formed an important source of the beliefs relating to it.
What conception of the kla is suggested by these beliefs, idioms and observances? I believe it is one which figured largely in the popular thought of the Western world in earlier times: that of an individual of a higher-than-human order of being, who determines one's destiny and watches over one's welfare: an attendant personal spirit like the Greek personal daimon, the Roman genius, or the Christian guardian angel. I have found that when this interpretation of the kla is put to informants, it is readily accepted. If correct, it explains among other thing the honors paid to the Kla after successes and deliverances from danger; why your kla may be said to abandon you or to follow you; why (a matter not touched upon above) prayers to the dead can continue even when a reincarnation of them is believed to be alive; and why Gas sometimes feel perplexity as to whether the kla is oneself or is outside oneself. Since a spirit of the kind in question is a more divine being than a man this interpretation of the kla also accounts for why the kla is said to be God's power in man.
A person's kla is sometimes said to be related to the day of the week on which he was born. Miss Field writes as follows:
The "day-name" which is given according to the day of
the week on which a person is born, if often known as
the "kla-name". It is said that "all people born on the
same day have the same kla". . . . The day-name may be used
by medicine-men in killing, and furthermore the killing
may reach the wrong person as well as the right one
through their common name. For instance, if you want to
kill a man named Kwaku (the name means "born on Wednes-
day") you call in a bad medicine-man and he prepares a
medicine using the name of Kwaku, lays it on the ground
and arranges that when Kwaku walks over it he will sick-
en and die. However, another Kwaku may walk over it and
die instead of the first.(133)
Any ceremony involving the kla is held on the day of the week on which one was born; and because of the belief that all those born on the same day have the same kla, the presence of people born on that day is considered especially appropriate. The belief that those born on the same day have the same kla is also found among the Akans. Eva Mayerowitz reported that the Akan assign each day of the week to the rulership of the deity of a particular planet who protects those born on that day and whose influence is responsible for the common traits of character supposedly possessed by them.(134)
It is difficult to see how this particular astrological conception of the kla, whereby there are only seven forms of kla, can plausibly by combined with a conception of the kla as the guardian spirit of an individual. What would happen when the interests of two Kwakus conflicted? But the Greeks and Romans also used to worship their daimn or genius on their birthday (once a year, however). The connection between astrology and the concept of a guardian spirit is a time-honored one, and therefore the difficulties in understanding any version of the connection, let alone the present simple one, should not necessarily lead us to feel that the indications that the kla is to some extent astrologically determined cast doubt on our interpretation of the kla as a guardian spirit. The belief that each person has an individual guardian spirit, and the belief that the character and destiny accruing to one from such a spirit are determined by the disposition of the planets at one's birth have, however mysteriously, often been conjoined in popular thought over the centuries.
Miss Field also records another view linking the kla with names. This concerns the Ga naming system whereby names determined by order of birth, one set for male children and another for female, recur in alternate generations of a family. According to Miss Field, it is a postulate of this system that a child (a) possesses the same kla as. and (b) is a reincarnation of, the grandfather, grandmother, great-uncle or great-aunt whose name he bears.(135) If (a) alone were believed, then one would be able to infer either (i) that possession of the same kla is not, for the Ga, constitutive of personal identity, or (ii) that personal identity is not, for the Ga, a one-one relation. For an eldest son, for example, who had several sons of his own, some of whom in turn had a son, would have the same kla as each of his eldest grandsons. If he is not regarded as the same person as them, then possession of the same kla does not constitute personal identity; if he is, then a single person can be identical with more than one person--not merely after his death, but during his lifetime. But Miss Field's explicit addition of (b) to (a) at first sight seems to necessitate (ii) (since a reincarnate is presumably the same person as he of whom he is a reincarnation). The only way of avoiding (ii) would be to infer (iii) that, for the Ga, "Y is a reincarnation of X" does not entail "Y is the same person as X".
If, then, these beliefs were held by the Ga, one would have to conclude that they had either a very unusual notion of personal identity, whereby a person could be identical with one or more of his contemporaries, or a very weak notion of reincarnation, whereby X may be a reincarnation of Y without being the same person as Y. It is also worth noting that there are obvious difficulties in combining the beliefs linking the kla with lineage-names with the beliefs referred to in connection with day-names; for two possessors of the same lineage-name might not be born on the same day, so that by the one criterion they had the same kla, but by the other they did not.
My inquiries however, yielded different results, which would not involve these difficulties; for my informants all denied that possessors of the same lineage-names necessarily have the same kla. They had, indeed, never heard of more than one person being supposed to reincarnate the same person at the same time, and evinced hesitation and unease at the question whether it was possible for this to happen. My impression was that they found the question conceptually odd. The explanation of this which most naturally suggests itself is that they look on personal identity as inherently a one-one relation. It is certainly often believed that children take on the characteristics of those whose names they bear. But this appears to be most usually attributed to a rather vague "influence" which comes short of full-scale reincarnation. One also hears of members of the grandchild generation who after the death of the member of the grandparent generation whose name they bear, are perceived by those around as becoming more like him. Whatever else this may suggest, it at least supports the conclusion that the junior is not regarded as a reincarnation of the senior either during his lifetime, or merely in virtue of bearing his name, and doubt is cast upon the assertion that namesakes are automatically looked upon as reincarnating their eponyms. For these reasons, I believe we can discount the suggestion that there is a relationship between the kla and lineage-names, and justifiably sidestep the task of deciding what conception of the kla would be involved in such a belief.
A further set of beliefs concerns the kla and witchcraft. Beliefs to the effect that witches operate by eating the kla of their victims are amply documented in Field and Debrunner, and I shall not dwell upon them here. Witches are said to eat the kla limb by limb and organ by organ, either on one night or over a longer period; when the heart is taken, the victim dies. Since each part of the physical body has a kla counterpart, the conception of the kla involved in such beliefs is, as Field describes it, "an invisible body, the perfect double of the physical body".(136) The kla is said to reside in the blood, and an alternative way in which witches are said to operate is by sucking the blood of their victims. The expression Obe kla, literally "You haven't got a kla", means "You are able to withstand witchcraft".
The conception of the kla involved in this set of beliefs, which for convenience we shall call kla II, has it in common with that of the kla as guardian spirit ("kla I") that in both cases the kla is essential to physical health and vigor. But otherwise they seem rather different from each other. Firstly, kla I is pre-existent--one takes leave of it in coming into the world-- whereas kla II resides in the blood of the physical body, and its existence is therefore presumably contemporaneous with that of the body. Secondly, kla I is a divine and powerful part of man and the susuma is subject to it; whereas kla II is something which can be preyed upon by the susuma of a witch. Thirdly, the results of kla I's abandoning a person are moral weakness, folly or madness and it abandons him as a whole; whereas kla II can be taken from him piecemeal, and the results are not moral or intellectual weakness, but physical weakness. Finally, kla II seems to be an impersonal entity, not the sort of thing which could be thanked for good fortune or in general to which agency could be ascribed, as it freely is to kla I.
Because of all these differences, I believe that kla I and kla II are actually quite different conceptions which have got grouped together under the same name. Kla II may perhaps be described as a "life-force", or what I believe theosophists call the "life-body". An indication of the difference may be found in the fact that the phrase Ebe kla ("He has no kla") has two quite different, and almost opposite meanings. These have already been explained: the phrase can mean "He has no spirit" (in the sense of "spunk") and "He is not vulnerable to witchcraft". In the former sense it speaks of weakness, and in the latter sense, of strength. The fact that identical sentences containing the word can have almost opposite meanings seems strongly to confirm the hypothesis that the word itself has two quite different meanings, and also to suggest that one of them is not original to the language; for languages normally tolerate ambiguous words only to the extent that they do not occur in similar contexts.
There is reason to think that, if one of these meanings is a later comer, it is kla II and not kla I. In the first place, the only area where kla II seems to enter in is attacks by witchcraft. And Miss Field observes that witchcraft may not be indigenous to the Ga, citing two facts. First, the witchcraft practices are less common among them than the neighboring ethnic groups; and secondly, there is no Ga word for a witch, instead, the Fante aye or the Twi Obeyefu is used.(137) Further, a view of the kla as capable of agency, which we have seen to be characteristic of kla I, is deeply entrenched in both language and custom. It would be tedious to demonstrate this in detail; a review of the idioms and customs referred to will make it sufficiently plain. Ēla I, therefore, has a title to be regarded as the original Ga concept, on to which kla II has been grafted--a process perhaps helped by the presumed connection of them both with physical life and health. But kla I is presumed to affect health in ways that kla II is not. For example, it is supposed to be displeased when its owner is a victim of neglect or improper treatment. It may manifest its displeasure, among other ways, in the person's falling prey to a long wasting sickness, which may lead those around to inquire into the cause of the problem and rectify the grievance. Kla II is not credited with motives of this nigh-personal type.
Relation of the Kla to the Susuma and the Body
It has just been suggested that the word kla is used in two quite different senses. In discussing the relations which the kla bears to the susuma and the body, it is obviously very necessary to determine whether we are talking about kla I or kla II in any given case. In practice, however, almost all the evidence bearing on this topic fairly clearly concern kla I. This is not surprising if, firstly, the suggestion that kla II is a latecomer to the Ga conceptual scheme is correct and, secondly, it is borne in mind that kla II seems to be mainly confined to contexts of witchcraft.
The doctrine that the kla leaves the body at death might be thought an exception to this. Might not this be referring to kla II if kla II is a kind of life-force? But a fuller statement of the doctrine runs, "The kla leaves the body at death and goes back to God", and it therefore almost certainly refers to kla I. In what follows then, "kla" will refer to kla I. What is the relation of the kla to the other two "parts" of the human being?
Presence "in" or "with" the body is ascribed to the kla by some Gas. This appears to be the only candidate for a physical attribute of the kla (apart perhaps from its being seen by medicine-men; although this was provisionally rejected). But others think of the connection between kla and susuma plus body (as a shorthand device I shall refer to the latter pair as "person" in the next few paragraphs) as a force binding them together rather than as a compresence.
A relation of possession or ownership holds between a person and his kla. The person is said to be the owner of his kla, and not vice versa. The kla is the kla of that particular person. Can we go further and say that the kla could only be the kla of that particular person? Probably not. There is, as far as I know, no evidence of the belief that your kla is uniquely yours. (Indeed, the belief that persons born on the same day have the same kla seems to be evidence to the contrary. But it is not quite clear whether this is so, and what is common to them is the full kla of each, or whether one of two other possibilities holds: (a) it is not the entire kla that they share, but there is an individual residue; or (b) the kla falls into types and those born on the same day have the same type of kla.)
On the other hand, we can say that the person could only have that particular kla, for "it is your kla that makes you what you are". Thus a causative, creative or productive relation exists between a kla and its owner. How this is implemented is left as mysterious as the nature of the kla itself. Whether the susuma resembles the kla, so that the kla's making you what you are consists at least partially in imparting its nature to you, is also left unstated; although if the view that the susuma is the shadow of the kla is correct, presumably some resemblance must obtain between them.
The role of the kla which most arouses the interest and engages the emotion is that of director of destiny. We must say that the kla directs, not that the kla controls. The person has freedom, has a mind of his own, and the unity between him and his kla is not that between a robot and his program. It will be recalled that a person may displease his kla to the extent that the kla withdraws his guidance and abandons him to an intrusive gbeshi. Again, the mechanics whereby the kla directs the person are not spelled out.
It will be seen that we have got along very nicely referring to the body plus the susuma as "the person". This has not led to any problems. The fact is symptomatic of the kla's being, in a sense, external to the body plus susuma, as they are not to each other. All the relations which hold between the kla and the body plus susuma--compresence (?), possession, causation, direction--are ones which may hold between two quite separate entities. The body and the susuma are connected in a close though not inseparable unity; but the kla cannot really be said to be a constituent of, or element in, the person.
This fact may help to explain why, after death, the identity of the person is sustained by his susuma, while the kla is said to lose its individuality. By this it is perhaps meant, as we can now see, that it loses its association with the individual who has owned it, not is own individuality; on our interpretation of kla I, its individuality and that of its owner are distinct. The import of the belief can now be seen to be as follows: that upon a person's death, the connection between him and his guardian spirit is dissolved; that the guardian spirit returns to God; and that the person, in the form of his susuma, enters the World of the Dead. The unity of the kla with the susuma does not persist through death, any more than does its unity with the body. The kla survives death, but the immortality of the person does not consist in its survival, but in the survival of the susuma, which is supposed to retain a considerable range of the characteristics of the living person. The separation of kla and susuma after death is one of the strongest indications that the susuma is not a part of the kla, as, according to Gyekye, the susma is of the okra, but is ontologically as well as logically distinct from it.
Personal Identity, Unity and Immortality
It was shown in II (d) that a person's survival of death, the identity of the person who exists after death with the person who existed before it, can be said to consist on the Ga view in the continued existence of his susuma, which is conceived as a substance or owner of properties. This sounds like a Cartesian account of survival, but the analysis of the concept of susuma in the above section on susuma after death will have made it clear that the susuma is vastly different. For the susuma is itself a body which exists in time and space, so that its movements should in principle be able to be mapped continuously in both dimensions for any beings with the means of monitoring and recording them. This view of personal survival would thus not face some of the logical difficulties which critics of Cartesianism have shown to attach to the notion of personal identity in the absence of spatiotemporal continuity. But at least two other problems arise from it. Firstly, since human beings do not meet the specifications of the beings by whom such continuity would be checkable, and hence usable as a criterion, what grounds can the theory proffer for maintaining that the susuma continues to exist and to retain its identity?
An answer to this question has to be elicited by the interpreter from the nexus of received ideas and arguments; he will not find the answer ready-made. I would hazard the following account as the kind of justification which is suggested by the views recorded in the above section on the Susuma after death. Reports of instances in which the dead have appeared to the living in any one of the three (or four) recognized ways--ghostly apparition, possession, materialization (and reflection)--are taken to license the statement "Some of the dead have been perceived by the living on at least one occasion". To the question "How do you know that the person exists before and after such a manifestation--or between such manifestations if there are more than one?" it might be answered that the assumption that he does so exist is rendered much easier than the hypothesis that he comes into being afresh on each manifestation, by the parallel assumption we make about human beings whom we meet intermittently in life. To the further question "Granted the authenticity of the evidence and granted the last-mentioned assumption-- supposing, that is, that some men survive death--how do we know that all do?" the answer might be to the effect that those who have been perceived cover such a range of variables conceivably relevant to fitness for survival that no such characteristics has yet been found which has not been instantiated both among those who have, and those who have not, appeared to the living. Pending therefore the discovery of some relevant difference between the two groups, the evidence points to the conclusion of the universal human survival of death.
Such might be the shape which a response to the request for a justification of assertions of survival consonant with Ga beliefs would take. It will be clear that the onus falls mainly on the question of the authenticity of the reported sightings, hearings and smellings. Here again, in the area of survival of death, we find the views of the Ga exhibiting the same empirical bias that we discovered in their account of the nature and activities of the susuma of a living man.
The grounds for supposing the susuma to continue in existence which have just been referred to involve positing a continuity of physical appearance (face, stature, voice, etc.) between the person in life and his susuma after his death. Psychological continuity in the form of identity of memories, affections, objectives, etc., is also held to exist. This gives rise to the second problem with which the Ga view of personal survival might seem to be faced. We have argued that the susuma duplicates the structure of the human being in possessing both physical and mental attributes. (This becomes fully evident only when the beliefs about the susuma after death are considered. For after death, the susuma is believed to be intermittently perceptible to waking human beings in a normal state, as it had not been in life--in dreams it may be perceived by the susuma of another person, but not by a non-dreamer or someone not exercising special psychic powers.) How is this duplication compatible with the unity of the person in life?
Again, one can only attempt an answer which is as far as possible consonant with known beliefs. Such an answer might appeal to the fact that in life there is no temporal overlap between the activities of the body and the susuma. They are like workers on different shifts and with different schedules. When the body (which includes the mind) is on duty, it might be said, the susuma is off duty, and neither is able to perform the other's functions. The well-known fact that dreams often occur in series might be cited to show that dream life has a continuity of its own, just as waking life does. Since body and susuma complement one another both temporally and functionally, they are candidates for a holistic union.
However, the more the lack of overlap between the body and the susuma be stressed, the more puzzling it becomes how the susuma alone can represent, or be, the person after death. For we seem almost to have the case imagined by Locke:
Could we suppose two distinct incommunicable consciousnesses acting in the same body, the one constantly by day, the other by night; . . . I ask . . . whether the day and the night man would not be two as distinct persons as Socrates and Plato.(138)
This can be sharpened by introducing some considerations about moral responsibility. I am surely not responsible for what my susuma does in dreams; and it is presumably not responsible for any conscious misdeeds committed by me in my waking life. Now in the World of the Dead, the susuma is punished for wrongs consciously performed by the person in his lifetime. How does it come to bear the responsibility for them? It should be noted that unlike the Akan, who speak of a "good sunsum", meaning a generous disposition,(139) the Ga do not appear to apply moral predicates to the susuma at all. This seems to be only consistent with the plausible position that it is conscious choices which determine our moral character. But how is it consistent with the belief that it is the susuma which faces reward or punishment hereafter? Is the susuma not being punished for what is not its fault, or rewarded for what is not to its credit? As Locke forcibly argued:
If the same Socrates waking and sleeping does not partake of the same consciousness, Socrates waking and sleeping is not the same person; and to punish waking Socrates for what sleeping Socrates thought, and waking Socrates was never conscious of, would be no more of right then to punish one twin for what his brother-twin did, whereof he knew nothing, because their outsides were so like they could not be distinguished.(140)
These considerations suggest that an attempt to account for the unity of the person cannot succeed by setting up a demarcation between our day-time and our night-time consciousness. Another consideration which tends in the same direction is that whereas the susuma can, when it is apart from the body (in dreams) function in the manner characteristic of it as an individual entity, the mind apparently has no such power. It can produce its own characteristic operations (i.e., ratiocination and other conscious thought processes) only when the susuma is present with the body. This leaves it open for thoughts which occur when the susuma is present with the body to be the product of the joint operation of the two of them. This is consistent with the fact that the human susuma is certainly regarded by Gas as being rational, and also with the fact that dreams may have reference to events of our waking life long since forgotten, whereas in our waking life we are unaware of most of our dream-experiences. To express this difference in terms of a distribution of knowledge between the mind and the susuma, we may say that the susuma has access to the mind's information, whereas the mind has access to only a limited amount of the susuma's information. Perhaps it is partly for this reason that Gas say that the susuma is "wiser than the man himself", or "knows more than the man himself". But the question of the unity of the person may be approached from another angle as well.
Adapting Plato, who said that life is a practice for death, Gas might well say that sleep is a practice for death. For, as we have seen, they believe that sleep consists in the existence of the susuma in independence both of the kla and of the body; and this is precisely the state it is in after death. Thus the Ga view of immortality has affinities to Christian descriptions of the pre-resurrection life after death as a sleep. This has to be inferred; it is not stated, because sleep would be an unsuitable metaphor for death from the Ga point of view. In the first place, death (i.e., here the mode of existence of the dead) is not regarded as essentially a halfway house to another mode of existence, for some but not all of the dead are reincarnated, and in the second place it is not seen as preparatory to a fuller existence, for there is no conception of a condition for human beings which would be superior to it.
If both sleep and death consist in the independent existence of the susuma, wherein lies the difference between the two states? One difference presumably stems from the more final separation of the susuma from the body which death involves. Whereas in sleep the susuma is bound to return to the body, and therefore it cannot establish a full life of its own, after death it has no such ties and is able to establish a life on its own account. Its powers of perception, feeling, thought and volition could attain whatever perfection they are capable of when their exercise is not continua