Religions of South Africa (Routledge Revivals)

David Chidester

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138791183
• eBook ISBN: 9781317649861
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

First published in 1992, this title explores the religious diversity of South Africa, organizing it into a single coherent narrative and providing the first comparative study and introduction to the topic. David Chidester emphasizes the fact that the complex distinctive character of South African religious life has taken shape with a particular economic, social and political context, and pays special attention to the creativity of people who have suffered under conquest, colonialism and apartheid.

With an overview of African traditional religion, Christian missions, and African innovations during the nineteenth century, this reissue will be of great value to students of religious studies, South African history, anthropology, sociology, and political studies.

1 African religion

Religious beliefs and practices of the indigenous inhabitants of southern Africa have usually been called traditional African religion. These terms, however, require some clarification. First, the term ‘traditional’ has often implied something timeless and unchanging, as if it were a closed set of beliefs, practices, and social customs handed down from the past. Such an implication is misleading. Although achieving a certain degree of continuity with the past, a religious tradition necessarily changes in different historical situations and circumstances. Therefore, the term ‘tradition’ might better be understood, not as something handed down, but as something taken up, as an open set of cultural resources and strategies that can be mobilized in working out the meaning and power of a human world. Like any religion, traditional African religion has generated persistent, yet also always changing ways of being human in the world. The term ‘tradition,’ therefore, should not be used to obscure the dynamic, changing, and even inventive processes of religion in Africa (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983; Spiegel and Boonzaier, 1988).

Second, the term ‘African,’ referring to a geographical location, raises questions about the relation between the general and the particular in the study of African religion. Is there a general ‘African’ religion that can be discerned amidst the observable differences in the beliefs, practices, and social institutions of particular historical groupings in Africa? Differences among historical groupings have been distorted and reified by the notion of ‘tribalism,’ which has treated African political groupings as if they were permanent ‘tribal,’ ‘ethnic,’ or ‘racial’ groups. Conventionally, the classification of these groupings has been based on political alignments that emerged in the midst of nineteenth-century colonial history, but were frozen in the ‘retribalization’ of African societies under colonial rule during the nineteenth century and under apartheid domination in the twentieth century (Southall, 1970; Mafeje, 1971; Saul, 1979; Hall, 1984; Vail, 1989).

Unfortunately, academic classifications of people in southern Africa have reinforced the notion of ‘tribalism.’ Academic classifications have been based on three basic distinctions that have been much more fluid than they might suggest. Scholars have made the following distinctions: (1) a basic distinction between Khoisan and Bantu-speakers; (2) a division of people speaking Bantu languages into Nguni, Sotho–Tswana, Tsonga, and Venda groupings; and (3) the further differentiation of Nguni-speakers (Cape Nguni, Zulu, and Swazi) and Sotho–Tswana-speakers (Southern Sotho, Northern Sotho, and Western Sotho or Tswana). Arguably, these distinctions have been invented or imagined. Even the one-time government ethnographer N. J. van Warmelo insisted that these classifications were ‘fictions’ (1974: 60). As historians Shula Marks and Anthony Atmore have noted, they have been ‘flags of convenience’ for historians and anthropologists (1970: 125). But these classifications of people have also been hard, potent fictions for those who have maneuvered within the apartheid ideology of separate ethnic groups or have suffered from the consequences of apartheid domination. In any case, all of the people designated by these classifications basically underwent a similar, although not uniform, historical experience as their precapitalist social worlds were to one degree or another incorporated into a capitalist economic and political system in South Africa.

The basic distinction between Khoisan and Bantu has been made primarily on linguistic grounds. But scholars in the past tried to correlate differences in language with differences in basic physical characteristics or cultural traits. Khoisan has referred to a cultural complex comprised of Khoikhoi (formerly called Hottentots) and San (formerly called Bushmen) who occupied the Cape region. Khoikhoi lived by herding and the San by hunting and gathering, but all Khoisan were displaced, incorporated, or exterminated by the encroachment of European settlement in southern Africa beginning in the seventeenth century (Elphick, 1985; Marks, 1972). Khoisan religion will only be outlined briefly here.

Khoisan religion seems to have posited a supreme god – Tsui//Goab – who presided over the collective life of the community. This good god was worshiped through regular rituals for making rain or celebrating a harvest. In opposition to the good god of life was an evil god,//Gaunab. This evil god was an independent, superhuman agent that brought illness, misfortune, and death. Khoisan myth, therefore, assumed the form of a cosmic dualism in which good and evil gods operated in the universe. While Tsui//Goab protected Khoisan communities, the ancestor–hero, Heitsi-Eibib influenced the good fortune of individuals. Khoisan myth and legend recorded many tales of the adventures of this cultural hero, particularly relating the stories of the numerous times that Heitsi-Eibib died and came back to life. The graves of Heitsi-Eibib, scattered throughout the region, were represented by piles of stones, or cairns, by pathways or river crossings, at which individuals could stop and add stones for good luck whenever they passed. In the superhuman persons of gods and the ancestor–hero, therefore, Khoisan religion developed mythic resources for understanding the conflicts of individual and social life (Hahn, 1881; Bleek and Lloyd, 1911; Schapera, 1930; Carstens, 1975; Barnard, 1988).

Probably the most important Khoisan ritual practice was the medicine dance. This ritual dance was celebrated for healing, fertility, and the spiritual power that could be achieved through altered states of consciousness in trance (Marshall, 1962; 1969). This form of shamanism through which spiritual knowledge and power could be gained in trance states seems to have been particularly important in the religion of San hunters and gatherers. Archaic rock art found throughout southern Africa has been interpreted as evidence of San shamanism, representing symbols of ecstatic dancing, trance visions, and images of power associated with sacred animal forms (Lewis- Williams, 1980; 1981).

The term ‘Bantu’ was originally a linguistic classification proposed in the nineteenth century by the philologist W. H. I. Bleek. But it developed into a conventional term applied to all black southern Africans. Evidence of Iron Age settlements based on herding and agriculture has contradicted the European ‘myth of the vacant land’ which suggested that ‘Bantu’ groups had been recent immigrants to the region (Marks, 1980; Maylam, 1986: 2–19). Precolonial history, however, has remained largely a matter of conjecture. Any attempt to reconstruct precolonial African religion, therefore, must also remain conjectural. Nevertheless, certain elements of African religious worlds can be assumed to have had a fairly long history, even though their form and content certainly changed under the pressures of colonialism during the nineteenth century.

In very general terms, the traditional or ancestral religion of Bantu- speaking people in southern Africa can be inventoried. Despite widespread, general beliefs in a high god, African religious beliefs and practices concentrated on the role of ancestors – the ‘living dead’ – as superhuman persons active in bestowing blessings, as well as occasionally bringing misfortune to their descendants. Every homestead head was a priest in performing the domestic rituals – rituals of thanksgiving, rituals for healing – that invoked the deceased, yet spiritually present and active relatives of the homestead. Besides rites of thanksgiving and healing, another set of rituals – rites of passage, marking the major life-cycle transitions of birth, initiation, marriage, and death – were also important in the religious life of the homestead, as well as in the larger network of social relations. On a larger social scale, rites of power were performed to reinforce the political order and power of a chiefdom, through rituals of rainmaking, fertility, or strengthening the power of chiefs and armies. Sacred specialists, particularly diviners, also played important roles in African religion, offering their professional services to individuals, homestead heads, and chiefs. Finally, a symbolism of evil in terms of witchcraft and sorcery was a highly developed and persistent feature of religion. Although many particular, regional differences in beliefs and practices have been observed, the elements of this basic inventory provide a general outline of traditional African religion (Eiselen and Schapera, 1934; Hammond-Tooke, 1974b).

This simple inventory of basic elements of African religion, however, is inadequate because it does not begin to suggest how these elements were related to each other. Did these elements fit together in a coherent system? One way of organizing religious elements into a system has been to regard African religion as a set of symbolic maps. For example, Cape Nguni religion orchestrated its various elements in terms of a symbolic, cognitive, or mental map that opposed the domestic sphere of the homestead with the wild, uncontrollable, and potentially dangerous region of the natural world beyond. Within the centered space of the homestead, the ancestors and ancestor spirits maintained order, bestowed blessings, and protected the family from evil. Beyond the boundaries of that centered world, however, the wild forest region held evil spirits, demons, and witch familiars that threatened to unsettle the domestic order anchored in the homestead.

Between domestic order and wild chaos, however, a middle region was associated with the rivers in which spirits also lingered, especially the ‘River People,’ who were ambivalent, sometimes beneficial, sometimes harmful, in their interactions with human beings. In this symbolic map, therefore, religious actors could be located. Ritual elders built up the homestead by invoking the ancestors. Witches and sorcerers performed evil acts by contacting familiar spirits of the forest. In between the homestead and the forest, diviners contacted ancestors, fought witches, but also conversed with the spiritual forces associated with the river (Hammond-Tooke, 1975).

With some variation, a similar symbolic map, opposing the domestic, ancestral sphere of the homestead to the wild, dangerous, and uncontrollable periphery outside, could be drawn for Sotho–Tswana tradition (Comaroff, 1980; 1981; 1985: 54–60). In simple outline, these maps suggest the meaningful ways in which elements of traditional African religion might have been coordinated into a relatively coherent, systematic worldview. While these maps are helpful, however, they need to be supplemented by a further analysis of the power relations involved in the ongoing creation of religious worlds. By paying attention to power relations, it might be possible to outline three basic domains of power that operated in traditional African religion – the homestead, the chiefdom, and the disciplines of sacred specialists.

The homestead was a symbol of the world, a central arena in which the symbolic relations of persons and place were negotiated. The home was the nexus of symbolic and social relations among the living and between the living and deceased relatives of the household who continued to live as ancestors or ancestor spirits. It was a place for being human. Although a human person was characterized by a moral or spiritual character, symbolized as a person’s shadow (isithunzi, sereti), a person was also regarded as a human person as a result of interpersonal relations, relations among the living, as well as relations between the living and the dead (Du Toit, 1960). As a center of power relations, however, the homestead was supported by religious beliefs and practices that reinforced unequal, hierarchical relations between males and females, adults and children, and the older and younger members of the homestead. The oldest, adult, male member of the homestead performed the role of ritual elder, but he also had an interest in the labor power and reproductive power of his subordinates in the homestead. Invoking the jural authority of the ancestors, ritual elders implicated ancestor religion in those relations of power that controlled the homestead, the basic unit of production in economic and social life.

The chiefdom represented a larger sphere of political authority that encompassed homesteads. But often that authority extended only to a chief’s claim to being the wealthiest homestead head among a coalition of homesteads. Nevertheless, religious beliefs and practices associated with a chiefdom were also implicated in power relations, especially when chiefs sometimes held a centralized power to distribute land and cattle to subjects. On this larger social scale, the chief stood at the apex of power relations that were simultaneously religious and political, responsible not only for political authority, legal administration, or military defence, but also for the ritual strengthening of the land. In the nineteenth century, the rise of powerful states, such as the Zulu, Swazi, or Pedi kingdoms, was invested with the emergence of royal ideologies that distinguished between ‘aristocratic’ and common chiefdoms in a new kind of political order, but also subjugated or excluded chiefdoms on the periphery (Guy, 1979; Bonner, 1983; Delius, 1983). The power relations of political authority, therefore, involved religion in a different range of symbolic, social projects than the ancestor religion anchored in a single homestead.

Between homestead and chiefdom, however, sacred specialists offered their services to both. While the ritual work of the homestead head was involved in familial relations and the religion of the chief was involved in communal, political relations, the sacred specialist pursued professional relations with clients that could be drawn from either sphere. In this respect, diviners in particular held a marginal position in which they claimed access to spiritual power that could heal, protect, and strengthen either the homestead or the chiefdom; but that power belonged to neither domain because it was achieved through the specialized, privileged initiation and discipline of the sacred specialist.

In an important sense, therefore, attention to power relations allows traditional African religion to appear as different spheres of interest that might even be regarded as three different religions. Those three African religions represented the different religious interests of homestead heads, chiefs, and those specialists who exercised sacred knowledge and techniques in ways that were made available to both homestead and chiefdom but belonged to neither. Although all three spheres were conversant with similar symbols, myths, and rituals, these different domains of African religion, or different religions, each advanced different symbolic and material interests in the power relations of social life.

MYTH

At the highest degree of abstraction, the existence of a high god overarched all the diverse religious interests in traditional African religion. The high god in African religion was an ultimate divinity beyond time, space, or human control. In general, however, no prayer, worship, or sacrifice was directed toward the high god (Nürnberger, 1975). Terms for the high god varied – umDali or uQamatha (Xhosa), Umvelinqangi or Unkulunkulu (Zulu), Modi- mo (Sotho–Tswana), or Raluvhimba (Venda) – but in most cases these god names referred to a remote, transcendent power beyond human understanding (Hodgson, 1982; Wanger, 1923–6; Setiloane, 1976; Schutte, 1978). Usually, there was no direct connection between the high god and ancestral spirits. However, Sotho–Tswana ancestors (badimo) might have been understood as mediators between human beings and the high god, Modimo (Mönnig, 1967: 57; Willoughby, 1928: 206–7); while the Zulu Unkulunkulu (‘the great, great one’) or Umvelinqangi (‘the first to emerge’) was perhaps identified as the first ancestor (Callaway, 1868–70: 47). Since ancestors had priority of place in ritual, the high god was not an object of ritual attention but a mythic reference point for explaining the origin of the human world (Smith, 1961).

Creation myths accounted for human origins in three basic ways. First, human beings emerged in the beginning from a hole in the ground. This emergence myth has been recorded among the Mpondo (Alberti, 1968: 13), among the southern Sotho (Casalis, 1861: 240), and among Tswana informants who could point to a particular hole in a rock at Lowe, near Mochudi, from which the original ancestors emerged, leaving their footprints in the rock at the beginning of the world. Venda and Tsonga traditions also recorded this creation myth of emergence from a hole in the ground (Stayt, 1931: 236; Junod, 1927: II: 349). Second, human beings originated from a bed of reeds, breaking off from that original source of life. This myth of origins from a bed of reeds also had a wide distribution throughout southern Africa, with accounts collected in Zulu, Swazi, Xhosa, Tsonga, and southern Sotho traditions (Callaway, 1868–70: 2; Kuper, 1947: 191; Brownlee, 1916: 116; Junod, 1927: 11:348; Ashton, 1952: 10)....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 African religion
• 2 Christian missions
• 3 Protestant churches
• 4 Independent churches
• 5 Religious pluralism
• 6 Religious legitimation
• 7 Religious liberation
• Name index
• Subject index