Indigeneity in African Religions

Oza Worldviews, Cosmologies and Religious Cultures

Afe Adogame

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781350274358
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350008274
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: African History

Based on religious ethnography, in-depth interviews and archival data, Indigeneity in African Religions explores the historical origins, worldviews, cosmologies, ritual symbolism and praxis of the indigenous Oza people in South West Nigeria. The author's locationality and positionality plugs the book within decolonizing knowledges and indigeneity discourses, thus unpacking the complexity of "indigeneity" and contributing to its conceptual understanding within socioreligious change in contemporary Africa.

The future of Oza indigeneity in the face of modernity is illuminated against the backlash of encounters, contestations with multiple hegemonies, transmissions of Christianity and Islam and indigenous (re)appropriations. Thus, any theorizations of such encounters must be cognizant of instantiations of indigeneity politics and identity, culture, tradition and power dynamics. Through decolonizing burdens of history, memory and method, Afe Adogame demonstrates a framework of understanding Oza indigenous religious,sociocultural and political imaginaries.

1 Decolonizing history, memory and method

The burden of history and memory: A cursory note on method

The history of Ọza people in Edo State of Nigeria is a dynamic story, an unfolding narrative in motion that entails a critical and reflexive reminiscing into a real and imagined historical past with a view to reconstructing, looking forward to the future of that past as well as the past of the present and the future. We pay crucial attention to the complexities, burdens of history and memory in attempting to reconstruct Ọza historical, cultural and religious imagination. I employ social, cultural and epistemic reflexivity in exploring Ọza indigeneity, and in locating their complex religious, sociocultural and political history within decolonising discourse. My locationality and positionality helps to plug the book within decolonizing knowledges and indigeneity discourses, thus unpacking the complexity of ‘indigeneity’ and contributing to its conceptual understanding within socioreligious change in contemporary Africa. This often involves a delicate process of retooling, retracing, reinterpreting and retelling. This book privileges the voices of Ọza people in telling their own stories, histories and narratives through their own cosmological imaginaries, mental maps of their cosmos, and how this is shaped by people they encounter and who live around them. Several themes dominate Ọza historiography: world views, cosmologies and religious cultures. As a category of analysis for the study of Ọza culture and society, religion is quintessential to our understanding of its indigenous cultures. I contend that the perception of religion as a phenomenon separate from culture, language and politics is not a suitable reflection of the embedded nature of ‘religion’ in Ọza indigenous cultural imagination.

Based on scanty extant published material on the historical origins and migration of the Ọza (Ọja/Ọjah)¹ people, this book has depended largely on oral traditions, storytelling and historical myths in reconstructing this mostly undocumented history. Information gleaned from archival sources, and the few existing published and unpublished works, is contrasted and critically appraised with the robust data gathered through extensive field ethnography including interviews, focus-group discussions and participant observation at various rituals, ceremonies and festivals. Perhaps two of the earliest published secondary sources with sparse information on Ọza are the two volumes of Northcote W. Thomas’s (1910) Anthropological Report on the Edo-Speaking Peoples and Ray E. Bradbury’s (1957) comparative ethnographic survey of the Benin Kingdom and the Edo-Speaking Peoples of South-Western Nigeria Including the Ishan, the Northern Edo, the Urhobo and Isoko of the Niger Delta.² These books, the former by a government anthropologist and the latter being part of a larger publication project – the Ethnographic Survey of Africa – are fairly dated and provide a limited and sometimes inaccurate treatment of these diverse peoples and contexts in many places. They nevertheless serve as colonial information banks about the early histories and cultures of the Benin Kingdom and the Edo-speaking peoples. As D. Forde noted about Bradbury’s book then,

despite the fame of the sculptural art of Benin and the considerable travel literature on Benin City, there has hitherto been very little scholarly work and publication on the culture and social institutions of the kingdom or of the other Edo-speaking peoples. The present account benefits from the lengthy and intensive field studies of its author and represents a preliminary outline of the results of his researches so far … During these three years, while working most intensively in the capital and in the villages of the kingdom, he made an ethnographic reconnaissance of the other Edo-speaking groups. (1957: vi)

Nevertheless, the dearth of published works on the Benin Kingdom or the Bini-Edo has shifted with the growing proliferation of research publications over the last few decades. The history and cultures of Ọza people, one of the Northern Edo towns as described by Bradbury, share commonalities with several towns and villages in Northern Edo but also among Benin and other Edo-speaking peoples. Herein lies the import of this early colonial ethnographical survey in documenting the early history and cultures of Ọza people, particularly during the colonial era and interwar years. The historical myths of origin and migration, and cultural, social organization and political systems have contrasting features. It is therefore logical to attempt to reconstruct Ọza traditions of origin and history within the broader historical tapestry of Benin and Edo-speaking peoples. This book has relied mostly on mixed methods and multiple sources in gathering, synthesizing and analysing primary and secondary data, albeit reflexively. The sources avail robust data, but we have also used the data with some caution and circumspection, paying careful attention to the pitfalls of hagiography, emic-etic dilemma, power dynamics, accuracy and precision in detail, memory and the politics of remembering and forgetting in the process of redacting the multiple source texts and narratives.

Any decolonizing knowledges project, such as in this book, must take due cognizance of how the official archivization of memory has the potential of privileging certain aspects of historical and cultural memories, while at the same time producing archival silences and in that process trapping other forms of historical and cultural memories into oblivion, the dustbin of history. Decolonizing knowledges is an intentional, intricate negotiation process of ‘messing things up’, that is problematizing imposed, hegemonic epistemologies with a view towards uncolonizing, reinterrogating and relearning indigenous epistemologies within the framework of multiple, contested ways of knowing and knowledge production. It is a delicate process of first decentring colonial European knowledges, often taken for granted as the be-all and end-all of knowledge production; and then recentring and reimagining indigenous epistemes within embodied knowledges. Such a delicate process has the potentiality of envisioning and unpacking the blind spots and upsides of memory. We shall briefly highlight some challenges in the methods we utilized in collecting, harnessing and analysing oral and written sources, and reflect on their downsides as the burden of history and memory.

Generally, the historiography of African religions and spiritualities provides a significant template for understanding and deconstructing indigenous epistemologies within global academic studies (Adogame 2015:1813–26). The growth, development of old and new forms of religions and spiritualities in Africa, and the academic, public, insiders’/outsiders’ discourses they engender are laced with interpretational powers that are often conflictual in nature. This historiography is burdened, on the one hand, by competing claims for the power of interpretation between African and non-African scholars, and, on the other hand, the different academic orientations, scholarly approaches and historical phases aimed at defining, explaining, interpreting and (de)legitimizing African religious beliefs and ritual systems.

Encumbering historiography: Africa as object, Africa as subject

The historical trajectory of the study of religions in Africa has evolved through several phases, each involving different purposes and points of view. Jan Platvoet best categorized these overlapping epochs paradigmatically as ‘Africa as Object’ and ‘Africa as Subject’ when its religions were studied virtually exclusively by scholars and other observers from outside Africa, and as ‘Africa as Subject’ when the religions of Africa had begun to be studied also, and increasingly mainly, by African scholars (Platvoet, Cox, and Olupona 1996: 105). Descriptions and theories of Africa’s religious history have been essential elements of the cultural contacts since the very first encounters and remain so up to the present (Ludwig and Adogame 2004: 2). As Platvoet demonstrated, travelogues and missionary and colonial historiographies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries pioneered the study of and writing about the religions of Africa. These early genres were essentially non-scholarly collections of random observations, superficial opinions and inaccurate information often impregnated with cultural bias and prejudices. Such accounts by Victorian travellers such as Sir Samuel Baker, Richard Burton and James Hunt, and Christian missionaries including Thomas Bowen and David Livingstone had their target audience. They were designed to appeal to the popular Western mind and so were written for this specific public. While some accounts denied Africans any modicum of religion, others made African religions appear as a morass of bizarre beliefs and practices. Most scholars in this phase were ‘children of their age’’, ultimately regarding Africans as culturally ‘degraded’, thus reinforcing popular prejudice. Nevertheless, their accounts were useful to the extent to which they served as an ‘information bank’ upon which several scholars later depended. The traits of prejudice that dominated these accounts continue to haunt some learned minds and the academia today. The basic terminologies such as ‘primitive’, ‘nonliterate’ and ‘premodern’, which still find some space in contemporary scholarship, are hardly value-free. They still characterize Africa as the sharp opposite of the West, or the ‘heart of darkness’ (Conrad 1993), thus reinforcing a negative perspective.

It is therefore expedient that (African) scholars reinterrogate the concepts and terminologies we employ in describing African histories, religions and cultures. The earliest phase, as described by Platvoet, was supplanted by armchair ethnographers and evolutionary anthropologists who propounded theories on the origin and evolution of human culture following evolutionary paradigms. One feature of this phase was classical approaches championed by nineteenth-century theories such as those by Edward B. Tylor and James G. Frazer. This era produced a barrage of opprobrious labels including animism, fetishism, idolatry, primitivism, totemism, superstition, heathenism and magic to designate the indigenous religions of Africa. These incongruous terms stamped indigenous religions of Africa with an appearance of sameness and primitiveness, and a stigma of inferiority, especially in comparison with Islam and Christianity.

With the decline of evolutionary theory and the advent of social anthropology, systematic fieldwork studies of African societies took root in the late nineteenth century. Anthropological approaches developed in different directions such as the fieldwork approach of Bronislaw Malinowski and the social-functionalist theory of Alfred Radcliffe-Brown. Edward Evans-Pritchard developed a new approach characterized by a shift from function to meaning. A new crop of British scholars including John Middleton and Victor Turner emerged. French anthropologists focused on African cosmological systems and implicit philosophies demonstrating that African religious systems are not simply reflections of socio-economic relations but form coherent and autonomous spheres of thought and action. A notable example is the work of Marcel Griaule among the Dogon of Mali (Griaule 1965). These systematic field studies slanted fieldwork studies according to author’s nationality and imposed a ‘colonialist’ structure upon the interpretation of African social and religious systems. Different colonial policies, backgrounds and experiences significantly affected the study of and research on religion in postcolonial African contexts.

While the government anthropologist Northcote Thomas’s report on the Edo-speaking peoples of Nigeria (Thomas 1910) was a product of an earlier phase of colonial historiography, Bradbury’s book was a product of the third phase in the study and writing about Africa. They represent the findings of the systematic fieldwork studies of the Benin Kingdom and Edo-speaking peoples of Nigeria. As one of the several volumes of the Ethnographic Survey of Africa, Radcliffe-Brown chaired a committee of the International African Institute to determine the scope and general arrangement, and undertook the editing of the Survey (Forde 1957: v). The generous collaboration of several research institutions and administrative officers in Europe and in the African territories, as well as the services of senior anthropologists, was secured. The project received collaboration from French and Belgian authorities and ethnologists such as Griaule and others. Forde aptly remarked, ‘Since the unequal value and unsystematic nature of existing material was one of the reasons for undertaking the Survey, it is obvious that these studies cannot claim to be complete or definitive; it is hoped, however, that they will present a clear account of our existing knowledge and indicate where information is lacking and further research is needed’ (1957: v–vi).

The 1950s and 1960s onwards marked the era of integrated and consolidated research on the history and religions of Africa, the transition from Africa as Object to Africa as Subject. The word religion is a latecomer to the scholarly discourse about Africa. It was only in the late colonial period of the 1950s that scholars began to use the terms religion and philosophy to characterize African religions in a positive way. Attention shifted to more recent limited forms of cultural and religious change through specially designed fieldwork projects, utilizing oral traditions, political history and contemporary socio-religious analysis. A small number of philosophically and theologically oriented comparative studies by both European and African scholars developed. Their interpretations greatly influenced European understanding of African religions. European scholars did not only dominate this endeavour, viz., the academic study of religions in Africa, but they also impinged their methodologies and brought their world views and epistemologies to bear. In fact, the academic study of religion in Africa has its roots outside the continent, just as the very category of religion itself has a European history.

Within this critical historical milieu, the colonial and missionary machineries invented ways of knowing and meaning-making that anchored and facilitated processes of subjugation, exploitation and expropriation. Alien forms of reasoning were entrenched while also laying claims to a ‘civilizing mission’. The ‘European’ knowledge introduced into Africa came on a collision course with indigenous knowledge systems in a spate of ideological contestation, culminating in a bricolage of knowledges. The knowledge funnelled through the colonial process took centre stage, assuming a dominant epistemology that marginalized and almost silenced alternative world views and conceptualizations of the universe. Such a hegemonic way of knowing and meaning-making was even presumed to be able to turn indigenous epistemologies on their head (Adogame 2015: 1815). In short, the colonization of memory has been clever in assaulting world views and religions (Falola 2007).

Legacies of the European Enlightenment filtered thought patterns that legitimized tropes of Otherness and binaries of difference espoused as tradition versus modernity, primitive versus civilized, superiority versus inferiority complex into the very fabric of the dominant knowledge. It was characteristic of the forms of reasoning that it privileged and superimposed on other cultures. This dominant knowledge was liberating and transforming but also entrapping. The contestation that ensued in the production of knowledge produced a c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Preface
• 1 Decolonizing history, memory and method
• 2 Historical origins, migration narratives, relationship with neighbours
• 3 World views, religious cosmologies, spiritual agency
• 4 Genealogies of kinship and sacral kingship
• 5 Kingship myth, leadership succession and legal imbroglios (1991–2011)
• 6 Rituals of passage
• 7 Gendering rituals
• 8 The future of Ọza indigeneity in the face of African modernity
• Notes
• Oral Sources
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Images
• Copyright Page