Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism

The Politics of Religious Synthesis

Rosalind Shaw, Charles Stewart, Rosalind Shaw, Charles Stewart

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134833948
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Sozialwissenschaften
• Categoría: Anthropologie

Syncretism - the synthesis of different religious - is a contentious word. Some regard it as a pejorative term, referring to local versions of notionally standard `world religions' which are deemed `inauthentic' because saturated with indigenous content. Syncretic versions of Christianity do not conform to `official' (read `European') models. In other contexts however, the syncretic amalgamation of religions may be validated as a mode of resistance to colonial hegemony, a sign of cultural survival, or as a means of authorising political dominance in a multicultural state.
In Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism the contributors explore the issues of agency and power which are integral to the very process of syncretism and to the competing discourses surrounding the term.

1
What ‘Alhaji Airplane’ saw in Mecca, and what happened when he came home
Ritual transformation in a Mende community (Sierra Leone)

Mariane Ferme

‘Alhaji Airplane’ (Alhaji balui) often sat down to talk at the centre of his compound after a day on the farm. His torn work clothes still on, he kept his hands busy making one of the mats for which he was well known, while telling stories about

‘what he had seen’ on his pilgrimage to Mecca. His words—the words of a rural

Mende imam who until the hajj had never been to the capital city, let alone abroad

—were accompanied by verbal and facial expressions of wonder. Firstthere was the airplane: he actually had his own seat on it, a seat which no one else could take. He was tied into it by a belt with a metallic clasp, probably because the white people who owned the airplane knew that he might try to leave it in fear.

Anyhow, this was a far cry from the shoving and pushing and squeezing that characterized travel to market in the lorries driving by the junction four miles from Kpuawala.

Then there were all these white women (puu bla, ye nyahanga) serving him. ‘Can you imagine’, he would tell me in amazement, ‘white women just like you, serving an old black man like me, with such dark skin (nu lεlei sia lee nya, nya luwui lεing

m

m

)?’ He would run a finger up and down his forearm to emphasize this point. ‘Allahu akbar, God is the greatest! To think that we used to serve them as our masters, when “Mammy Queen” governed us.’ ¹

Oh my ears did hurt, up there in the airplane, and we looked out of windows… a min, tai!³ And the land went away so fast, everything was so small. Ah, God is awesome (ngew

masubang

). I could not see land, up in the clouds. And when we got off the plane, in Jeddah, there was so much sand (•anyεi), not a tree around. No bush (nd

gb

), the sun really burns there, and it never rains. Imagine, people have to buy water, even water! Ah, poor people…but they are rich (gbatcbla mid)! And there were so many white people, and Arabs there (Arabubld). I used to think that Muslims were mostly black people (nu lεlei), but in Mecca I saw that there are more white Muslims than black ones in the world.

The pilgrimage to Mecca transformed Alhaji’s identity, becoming a key element in his new social persona. He became ‘Alhaji Airplane’. This new consciousness lead him to envision a different social order.

At times Alhaji would call the whole village together early in the morning to recount a dream from the previous night, and to interpret its meaning. On one occasion, he told us he had dreamt that white people had offered to exchange the village’s mud houses for a modern town of cement buildings, paved roads and water wells. For several years, the community had been trying to get a proper well dug, as well as road improvements through the area’s development scheme. These efforts were recalled by people on the margins of the meeting, while Alhaji told of his dream. He concluded by asking the gathered community to bring ‘small sacrifices’ of food (fangani jaa) to ensure the auspicious outcome. He also exhorted them to pray to God like ‘good’ Muslims (M

libla ye yekpeisia), instead of being jealous of their neighbours and fighting all the time.

Alhaji’s vision for Kpuawala—the community of some 260 people in which he lived—was compelling to those around him. This was due in part to the cosmopolitan authority lent to his stories and projects by the narration of what he ‘had seen in Mecca’. After returning from the pilgrimage, he had worked to make religious and ritual practices in Kpuawala conform to his ideal of ‘good’ Muslim behaviour in the larger Islamic world, and particularly in what he saw as its conceptual and spatial centre—’Mecca.’ Alhaji’s efforts to bring about spiritual and material improvements were also bolstered by links between the chiefdom’s political leadership and high-ranking Muslims in the region.

These high-ranking Muslims had been educated in important centres of religious learning in the Arab-speaking world, for example Cairo’s al-Azhar University. There they joined organizations such as the Muslim World League, which provided Arabic texts, and financial backing for building schools and mosques, and which sponsored occasional trips to conferences that helped keep Sierra Leoneans connected with the wider Community of Faith. Thus Alhaji’s dream of modernization going hand in hand with religious piety was shaped by his own spiritual and physical pilgrimage, but was also consistent with the rest of the community’s perception that material wealth and ‘advancement’ were aspects of the integration in a more cosmopolitan Muslim community.³

Alhaji’s modernist link between religious practices, the integration in an international Islamic community, and local development contrasted with a common perception among non-Muslim, urban Sierra Leoneans in this region, for whom Islam was equated with ‘tradition’, For example, take what the DO (District Officer) for the area told me when I informed him of where I intended to carry out my research. ‘Ah’, he had said, ‘good choice, they are very traditional Mende down there, good Muslims, you know. Very little schooling, development, or diamond mining. They just farm and are peaceful.’ The DO contrasted English schooling with rural illiteracy, and socioeconomic change (mining) with subsistence farming. He also made a connection between Islamic beliefs and practices, and ‘traditional’ Mende identity. His assessment of these connections was grounded in the historical legacy of British commercial and colonial presence in southern Sierra Leone, as well as of Christian missionary activities.

An English education in Sierra Leone was historically also a Christian education, given that missionary schools outnumbered government ones, which often had different policies regarding religious instruction and affiliation. ⁴ Thus opportunities for urban and government employment, and even for modern farming technologies, were generally linked with the cultural baggage brought to Sierra Leone by British commercial and colonial expansion. The cultural, economic and administrative expansion took place initially from the Atlantic coast, moving inland along navigable rivers. This south-north movement along waterways was supplemented by an eastward one on land, with the newly built railway line from Freetown, the capital city. Both phases affected territories occupied primarily by Mende, one of the two largest ethnic groups in Sierra Leone. By contrast, historically the country’s northern peoples had stronger religious, cultural and economic ties with Islamic agents and centres in the savannah belt to the North (Lewis 1966; Massing 1985; Rodney 1970; Skinner 1978; Trimingham 1962:165–70, 189–92, 224–7).

But the DO’s perception that Muslim practices were an integral aspect of ‘traditional’ Mende identity was also consistent with an earlier, emergent historical heritage in Mendeland, in spite of the region’s relative marginality to west African Islamic centres. This earlier Muslim heritage was linked to cultural and economic exchanges with traders and clerics from further north (Matthews 1788), and accounted—as we shall see—for a number of ‘syncretic’ beliefs and practices embedded in people’s common-sense world, which were no longer marked as religious. This raises the issue of consciousness, and of its role in any discussion of syncretic agency. Alhaji was consciously trying to change ritual and religious practices to bring them in line with what he thought acceptable ‘in Mecca’, in the larger Muslim world. However, his project articulated with other kinds of Islamic practices and identities, and with syncretic processes at different levels, which worked against Alhaji’s reforms. The outcome of this juxtaposition of syncretic processes at different levels was shaped in part by local strategies and interests. But it also articulated with elements of Mende history sedimented over time in bodily and spatial practices, in the unexamined domain of habitus outside the realm of conscious intentions (Bourdieu 1977; Mauss 1950).

People like Alhaji Airplane have increasingly appeared in studies of religious reform and conversion in Africa, their visions, prophesies, political alliances and timing shaping their roles as catalysts for change (see Ottenberg 1971; Peel 1968;

Simmons 1979). Indeed, different perspectives on the ‘catalytic’ role of Islamic and Christian reformers (and belief systems) were central to important debates on processes of religious change in Africa (Fisher 1973:28–30; Horton 1971:104– 07, 1975). Studies of religious and ritual change in particular settings suggest that the outcomes of such processes are highly variable over time, as specific configurations of power articulate with shifting communities of reference from the local to the ‘universal’ (see Comaroff 1985; Geertz 1968). Thus ritual transformations advocated by charismatic individuals like Alhaji, situated locally but oriented towards an encompassing, cosmopolitan, modern Islamic community, do not always ‘succeed’, as we shall see, and either lapse or are resisted in a variety of ways (Launay 1992: 132–48; Lienhardt 1966).

I now turn to the larger Mende context that articulated with the ideas and actions ‘brought back from Mecca’ by a transformed Alhaji Airplane. Debates in Kpuawala over changes introduced in Mende initiation rituals to accommodate practices and beliefs marked as ‘Islamic’ suggested that, in spite of the DO’s views, the relationship between Muslim and ‘traditional’ Mende identities was far from unproblematic. Furthermore, these debates were often situated within a discourse of authenticity, in which reformed rituals were evaluated in relation to their efficacy. This pointed to the fact that often analytical and critical views of syncretism might be found in the very contexts in which it unfolded as a process. In the Mende case at hand, this debate revealed both the limitations and possibilities of a more articulated, historicized and contextual understanding of the notion of syncretism.

THE 1985 SANDE INITIATION IN KPUAWALA

In April 1985, the village chapter of the women’s Sande society held its initiation. As events unfolded over the following weeks, it became apparent that initiation rituals were undergoing or had already undergone a number of changes. These transformations were pointed out by bystanders or participants, whose opinions about the resulting rituals diverged widely. Sande women seemed to agree that things had changed since Alhaji’s trip to Mecca.

Sande initiation has historically marked the transformation of young girls into adult, marriageable and fertile women among a number of related ethnic groups in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. In the same region, men have undergone parallel rites of passage to enter their own society, the Poro, which emphasized training for warfare and politics (D’Azevedo 1962; Little 1965, 1966). Sande and Poro have been characterized as ‘secret’ societies—internally stratified societies in which leading members controlled bodies of esoteric knowledge, which could not be shared with lower-ranking initiates or outsiders (that is, children and members of the opposite sex). ⁵

In the last twenty years, anthropological studies of gender have linked women’s unusual access to political office in Mendeland to the gender solidarity established within the Sande society (MacCormack 1975). In particular, the analysis of the rise to power of particular female chiefs suggested that high-ranking Sande women could acquire political clout by shaping advantageous marriage alliances between the young women they initiated and men from powerful lineages (Hoffer 1974). Yet others have pointed out that the internal stratification of both Poro and Sande involved similar forms of control by senior members over the labour and resources of junior ones. Consequently, rather than taking at face value the model of vertical ‘solidarity’, this perspective stressed horizontal links between Sande and Poro leaders across gender lines, which involved the sharing of supposedly secret knowledge as well (Bledsoe 1984). Both solidarity and stratification models of the organization of Sande and Poro lacked analyses of their particular manifestations in local chapters embedded in wider communities, of their rituals, and of the historical forces with which they articulated.

In those early April days, Kpuawala’s leading women were busy negotiating the timing and conditions for initiating a new cohort of Sande members. The chiefdom authorities had been alerted, and the necessary licences obtained from them. Young men were enlisted to build the kpanguima, the enclosure on the edge of town which was to be the centre of Sande activities for the duration of the initiation.

Families of the seven girls who were to join Sande were visited assiduously by potential husbands, who negotiated their share of payments and gifts. Sande elders, female relatives, and women in the prospective husband’s lineage took an active role in these negotiations. Once an agreement was reached, the future husband was put to work by Sande elders, and had to bring his own share of firewood, water, food and gifts.

Activities in Kpuawala came to a feverish pitch on the day preceding the initiation. Female friends and relatives came to visit from near and far for the duration of the festivities. The initiates’ hair was braided in elaborate patterns, and their bodies were washed and rubbed with perfumed oil. Meantime, bands of women criss-crossed the village singing, making jokes and generally having fun —often at the expense of male bystanders who were shamed into giving them money, food and other gifts.

Among these women was Kaynge, who paraded around town ...