African Traditions in the Study of Religion, Diaspora and Gendered Societies

Ezra Chitando, Afe Adogame

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409446149
• eBook ISBN: 9781317184171
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The historiography of African religions and religions in Africa presents a remarkable shift from the study of 'Africa as Object' to 'Africa as Subject', thus translating the subject from obscurity into the global community of the academic study of religion. This book presents a unique multidisciplinary exploration of African Traditions in the Study of Religion, Diaspora, and Gendered Societies. The book is structured under two main sections. The first provides insights into the interface between Religion and Society. The second features African Diaspora together with Youth and Gender which have not yet featured prominently in studies on religion in Africa. Contributors drawn from diverse African and global contexts situate current scholarly traditions of the study of African religions within the purview of academic encounter and exchanges with non-African scholars and non-African contexts. African scholars enrich the study of religions from their respective academic and methodological orientations. Jacob Kehinde Olupona stands out as a pioneer in the socio-scientific interpretation of African indigenous religion and religions in Africa and the new African Diaspora. This book honours his immense contribution to an emerging field of study and research.

PART I
Religion and Society, Religion in Society

Chapter 1
Approaches to Peacemaking in Africa: Obuntu Perspectives from Western Kenya

Lucas Nandih Shamala

Introduction

There is a debate that has been active for many decades with respect to the origins of war and violence in human society. It has pitted those who believe that war is the result of human aggression innate in human biology against those who argue that it is socially learned behavior. The prevailing view today is that social conflict is a socially learned phenomenon, just like any other complex activity, such as the development of speech and the construction of language (Tuso 2003: 79). In the following analysis we will explore the manifestation of Obuntu, a Bantu communitarian way of existence, as it is exemplified through the aspect of peacemaking and conflict resolution. We will make the case that traditional non-Western forms of knowledge systems and practices, particularly the Obuntu of the Abaluyia community, provides an important alternative approach in the peacemaking and conflict resolution discourse and is, therefore, worthy of consideration by policy makers, intellectuals, public moralists, and peace activists alike as they seek viable alternatives for resolving conflict, making peace, and managing peace. In order to accomplish the above objective, we will outline the Obuntu value system as it is illustrated through the emilukha or emisango1 peacemaking ceremonies of the Abaluyia of Western Kenya. To attain this objective, the present study will analyze three sub-clans of the Abaluyia society: namely, the Abesukha, the Ababukusu, and theAbakabarasi.

Before proceeding with the discussion of the Abaluyia examples of peacemaking ceremonies, we will examine the roots of conflicts and wars on the African continent. An understanding of the causal factors of conflicts in Africa suggests the direction that could be followed in preventing, confronting, mitigating, and resolving a plethora of conflicts and wars on the continent. This important analysis is not possible without an explanation and understanding of the contribution of Western imperialism to the creation of violent systemic structures that engender an atmosphere of war, conflict, and other social pathologies on the African scene.

The Genesis of Conflicts in Africa

We contend here that the introduction of Western technological advances in Africa, rather than promoting peace, has unfortunately succeeded in creating an embattled continent that is riddled with various kinds of conflicts, insecurity, exploitation of the poor by the rich, subordination of the powerless by the powerful, ecological imbalance, and environmental degradation, among other social ills (Acholonu 2003: 89). Thus Western imperialism has engendered and significantly facilitated the process of acute social disintegration, social fragmentation, and social dislocation of the people and their communities due to wars and conflicts, such that Africa today may very well be described as the most conflict-ridden continent in the world. Africa is in this respect “a continent in chaos,” in the words of George Ayyitey (Kalu 2003: 18). The above state of affairs on the African continent is not accidental, but rather has been directly and indirectly caused by external and internal factors on the continent, which arguably are products of Euro-Western imperialism. How did this come about? Answering this important question requires a social, structural, and historical dissection of the causes of conflicts in Africa, as this reveals the erosion and distortion of indigenous African values and practices which held the social fabric intact—including the practice of Obuntu.

We begin by noting that, geographically speaking, contemporary Africa is a creation of European powers at the infamous Berlin Conference of 1884–85, convened by one of the architects of Western imperialism, the German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck. This conference shared and divided Africa among 14 foreign powers without the African people’s consent or knowledge. The dismemberment of Africa at this conference was undertaken through the slogan “The Scramble for Africa” which gave birth to the so-called “protectionist policies” among European powers. Thus the end of the summit saw the emergence of over fifty new colonial territories carved up at the stroke of the pen and tailored along the pattern of European metropolitan states. The imperial powers at the Berlin Conference failed to pay attention to aspects of the continent’s indigenous socio-political, historical, cultural, linguistic, and economic situations. The intruders were either oblivious to these factors or they were operating on the basis a scheme which was hatched to systematically conquer, subjugate, domesticate, exploit, and appropriate Africans and their resources.

The newly created artificial boundaries were bound to produce considerable social, economic, political, and religious strife and conflicts which have ravaged the African people and their continent for decades, and which Africans are condemned to contend with for many decades, if not centuries, to come.

Before Africa was carved up by the various European states as a colonial territory, most local conflicts were between no more than two ethnic groups at any given time (Kalu 2003). With the absence of state boundaries, pre-colonial conflicts in Africa afforded the losers the option of living with the larger group or moving into a different autonomous territory. Here was a revolutionary form of democracy, which was imbedded in African roots, the African Obuntu. Rarely did such conflicts result in one party completely annihilating and exterminating the other. The practice of brutally eliminating your neighbor—termed “enemy” in Western lingo for jingoistic interests—was never part of the Obuntu value system. Rather, it was the unfortunate legacy of colonialism, as will become clear in this chapter. In fact, most social formations in Africa were confined within manageable land territories occupied by the same cultural and linguistic group with loyalty and obedience to the leader’s ability to provide for the group’s economic needs.

Furthermore, in most pre-colonial African societies, people were not restricted to specific land areas by coercion or force. In cases where force was necessary to hold the group together (usually as a result of one abomination or the other), individuals usually had the option to leave the group for another. Disputes within an Abaluyia sub-clan could lead to people breaking off from it and starting a new group on their own, so that small tsimbia or sub-clans came into existence from time to time, which, when relations with the parent group had been restored, continued as separate units partially dependent on the larger groups (Huntingford 1944: 23). Contrary to the above situation, European annexation of African peoples and their lands was executed through barbaric force and beastly brutality.2 The violence that colonial experience dealt to Africans at the hands of their colonizers remains a significant source of conflict in contemporary Africa, many years after the colonialists left. The exit of Europeans saw the entry of European/Western puppets, or the neo-colonialists, a situation well captured by Frantz Fanon’s notion of “Black Skin White Masks.”3 The so-called African independence saw the changing of the guard from a European one to an African one. However, there was no difference in the attitudinal, mental, ideological, as well as structural and systemic orientation of the neo-colonizers, who unequivocally mimicked their masters.

As we have already shown, the Berlin Conference partitioned Africa into European-style nation-states, and arbitrarily fragmented African nations, families, customs, and languages, and above all, trapped people within state boundaries providing no viable exit options in case of conflicts. As a consequence, conflicts over land and other economic resources that would previously have resulted in the defeated moving to different pastures have, for post-independence officials, become an excuse to seek at least punitive peace and, at worst, the total extermination and annihilation of their “enemies.” African leaders have imbibed and internalized the violence of their imperialist masters, which they repeat at the expense of their own brothers and sisters with impunity. They have, in this regard, undergone what Wa Thiong’o has correctly designated as the colonization of their minds.4

Unfortunately, the imposed African nation-state characterized by force and violence was neither contested nor reformed at the dawn of “flag independence” in the 1960s. The post-independent state, or what we designate in the present study as “flag independence,” has inherited Euro-Western practices that used force and coercion to produce stability and order. The question here becomes: how can a nation-state, an inherently violent institution, be utilized as a mediating agency in conflict-ridden situations as is the case in many parts of Africa today? How can such an institution be relied upon as the final arbiter of conflicts and as a provider of economic opportunities and resources for the survival of its citizens? Is it the case that the nation-state by its very constitution as a violent entity is incapable of resolving conflicts in the first place? These and other important questions deserve to be critically engaged in order to understand the mitigating role, if any, of the state apparatus in African conflicts. Since scholars tend to perceive war as a means of communication between warring parties (Von Clausewitz 1992), the nature of political culture and the general norms in the international globalized system are important considerations for understanding intra and inter-state conflicts, not only for the Abaluyia context but for Africa at large.

Viewed from a structuralist vantage point, the globalized international system is characterized by anarchy, making conflicts between nation-states inevitable. If we consider the view of anarchy and violence in the international arena as a given, it follows that a democratic form of government would tend to make a state a less ferocious entity especially toward other democracies. Two questions are pertinent here in so far as the African conflict situation is concerned. First, given the fact that peace is usually sought as an alternative to conflict, is peace then the absence of war? Second, if war is the absence of peace as understood in the West, is it even possible to maintain the conditions that sustain peace as an alternative that precludes war?

The above questions make clear that the sustenance of peace, especially in the African context, requires much more than the knowledge of its alternatives. This means that peace analysts and peace activists in Africa will do well to understand the structural and systemic conditions that make conflicts inevitable in this vast continent. Consequently, the creation of lasting viable structural and systemic imperatives are essential and must, of necessity, inform an understanding of the complex nature of external, internal, and regional factors and how these factors collude to produce conflicts.

The exploitation of Africa’s human and material resources by the international globalized system, which has created a scarcity of economic resources for the people on the continent, is a factor that funnels conflict in Africa. The point we are at pains to make here is that the sources of conflict in Africa are much more complex than many in Euro-Western circles would have us believe: that is, that conflicts are a product of a primitive, barbaric, atavistic war-like mentality on the part of African “tribes” (Wandibba 1985: 49). Such a careless and simplistic rendition of African conflicts readily removes the requirement critically to interrogate the underlying reasons for conflicts in Africa and seriously impedes our ability to provide lasting peaceful solutions to wars and conflicts. It also excuses and glosses over the rapacious colonial histories of oppression and subjugation with the concomitant plundering and social destruction among indigenous peoples the world over. Such a characterization of African conflicts also conceals the role of imperialism in the creation of such conflicts and other dehumanizing conditions, not only in Africa, but elsewhere in the global context. However, the details of globalization and its contribution to conflicts and strife in Africa, while important for analyzing the roots of African conflicts, fall beyond the scope of this study. In the next section we will explicate the ceremonies on peacemaking in the African context in general, and then examine the Abaluyia scene in particular.

Ceremonies and Peacemaking in Africa: A General Overview

Before examining the Abaluyia approach to peacemaking and conflict resolution, a few general points about the nature and practice of ceremony in Africa are in order. Ceremonies, (emilukha), in Western Kenya, are at the center of African Obuntu. This is because emilukha are always a collective undertaking. They involve sharing, and the idea of interdependence. Sharing in community life is the availability and opportunity to join and participate in collective ceremonies. There is no reference to individual ceremonies. In fact, when an individual is absent from a communal ceremony, he or she endangers the cohesion of the group and runs the risk of being suspected of wanting to destroy it. This is the case because the ceremony is the bedrock of African Obuntu, seeking to bind people together. Thus partaking in a ceremony by all the members of a group ensures that none of the members is seeking to disavow the ceremony and that nobody holds hostility, anger, or envy in their hearts. This is the reason why the reconciliation or peacemaking ceremony in the Obuntu worldview is a fixed event, which is preceded by many other important rituals, functions, and festivals. The ceremonial moment in the African Obuntu is a process through which people seek and find peace with themselves, their relatives, their ancestors, their neighbors, and the environment. Ceremony binds together the living, the not-yet born, the departed ancestors, the creatures of the environment, and the animate relatives. It brings together the visible as well as the invisible. It enhances a web of interconnectedness and interrelatedness—Obuntu.

As we have already noted, peace cannot be an individual affair. Rather, peace in the African worldview is essentially linked with the community—it is not possible on your own. Here, peace is not understood in the Euro-Western sense of the term as simply the absence of strife or war; rather, peace means the ability to live in harmony, with balance, or to have balance in your community. Such peace includes the family, the neighbour, the domesticated animals and plants, and other aspects of nature—an interconnected and interdependent understanding—an Obuntu phenomenon.

It is the objective of peace to interconnect and repair the alienation caused by strife in the community. Failure to adhere to the expectations of the community in peace ceremonies may result in quite the opposite of the outcome: that is, instead of enhancing peace it could funnel strife. That is why Africans in general, but the Abaluyia in particular, are very keen to follow elaborately all the expectations of ceremonies.

Just what factors lead to war and conflict in the first place, as understood among the Abaluyia? According to Wandibba, a leading Abaluyia elder-scholar, cattle acquisition was a key consideration in the reasons for going to war among the Bukusu sub-clan of the Abaluyia. This was because the Abaluyia were mainly pastoralists, although they also engaged in subsistence farming and agriculture. Wandibba observes that the Karamojong, Pokot, and Turkana raided south of Mt. Elgon expressly to loot cattle from both the Sebei and the Ababukusu, especially at times when their own herds had been devastated by severe drought and epidemics (Wandibba 1985).

Raphael Wesonga, another Abaluyia scholar, reports that both the Nandi and Maasai peoples were also exclusively concerned with cattle raiding in Bukusuland (see Wandibba 1985). Nakabayashi has echoed this view (Nakabayashi 1981: 21). He observes that the Abaluyia in general, but the Abesukha sub-clan in particular, inhabited a zone that the Nandi frequently raided, and this made defensive wars a vital part of their history (Nakabayashi 1981). Yet the act of war among and between the Ababukusu and the Iteso, Bakhayo, Bawanga, and Elgon Kalenjin were as much about cattle as land, for they were neighbors who tended to expand at the expense of the others as their population grew. The point we are advancing here is that no matter how one may frame the issue, in the final analysis, it must be emphasized that war in the Abaluyia context, as in other African societies, was understood and sanctioned in terms of the preservation of the life of society or the common good—the interest of Obuntu. Put differently, war among the Abaluyia, as with many other indigenous peoples, was never indulged in for jingoistic interests. This view of war sharply contrasts with the reasons for going to war in Western societies as well as in some parts of Africa where jingoism and the self-interest of a few elites serve as the overriding reason to wage war and spill blood, often with impunity and beastly brutality.

Whenever the Abaluyia waged war, it was undertaken in the interest of the preservation of the life of the whole community. That is why the shedding of blood, including the “enemy’s” blood, was and remains. always inauspicious, and is invariably followed by elaborate ceremonial rites of pu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Preface (Ulrich Berner)
• Introduction: African Traditions in the Study of Religion in Africa: Contending with Gender, the Vitality of Indigenous Religions, and Diaspora
• PART I: RELIGION AND SOCIETY, RELIGION IN SOCIETY
• PART II: DIASPORA, YOUTH, AND GENDER DYNAMICS
• Index