Religion and Christian conversion in African history: A new model

Journal of Religious History

Volumn 23, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 8-30

  Landau, Paul ^a  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0009023226     PISSN: 00224227     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9809.00071     Document Type: Article

References (129)

1. Breyten Breytenbach, Return to Paradise (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), 170.
2. See Paul Landau, The Realm of the Word: Language, Gender, and Christianity in a Southern African Kingdom (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995), 17-19.
3. Vincente L. Rafael offers a thorough discussion of the jockeying of Tagalog and Castilian understandings of signification in Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).
4. Barry Hallan and J. Olubi Sodipo, borrowing from the philosopher W. V. O. Quine, have interrogated key Yoruba concepts by setting them in speech-act contexts, in Knowledge, Belief, and Witchcraft: Analytic Experiments in African Philosophy, 2d ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
5. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), 257.
6. "Religious Movements and Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa," African Studies Review 29(2): 1-71 (1986).
7. Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1989)
8. and Encountering the West: Christianity and the Global Cultural Process: The African Dimension (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993).
9. Sanneh has made the most important contributions to date on the issue of translation in evangelism. And see Richard Gray, Black Christians, White Missionaries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
10. Janet Hodgson, The God of the Khosa (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1982);
11. Elizabeth Elbourne. "Early Khoisan Uses of Mission Christianity," in Missions and Christianity in South African History, ed. Henry Bredekamp and Robert Ross (Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand Press, 1995);
12. and Jeff Peires, The Dead Will Arise: The Xhosa Cattle Killing of 1856-57 (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1989).
13. John K. Thornton, "The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491-1750," Journal of African History 25 (1984): 147-67
14. and John K. Thornton, The Kingdom of the Kongo: Civil War and Transition, 1641-1718 (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983);
15. Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
16. Jan Vansina now extends the main elements of these arguments to Angola; Vansina, "Notes on Catholicism and Angola, 1484-c. 1867" (paper presented at the conference, "African Expressions of Christianity in Eastern Africa," part 1, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 12-14 January 1996).
17. See also John Peel, "The Pastor and the Babalawo: The Interaction of Religions in Nineteenth-Century Yorubaland," Africa 60(3) (1990);
18. Karen Fields, Revival and Rebellion in Central Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985);
19. Cynthia Hoeller-Fatton, Women of Fire and Spirit: History, Faith and Gender in Roho Religion in Western Kenya (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996);
20. and Tilman Dedering, "Southern Namibia, c. 1780-c. 1840: Khoikhoi, Missionaries, and the Advancing Frontier," (PhD diss., University of Cape Town, 1989).
21. Quoted by Richard Elphick, "Writing Religion into History," in Bredekamp and Ross, eds, Missions and Christianity, 20 n. 34
22. citing Z. K, Matthews, Freedom for My People: The Autobiography of Z. K. Matthews: Southern Africa 1901-1968 (London: R. Collings, 1981), 15-16.
23. "There is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar's study. . . For this reason. . . [t]he student of religion must be able to articulate clearly why 'this' rather than 'that' was chosen as an exemplum. " Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
24. The Amish, Hassidic Jews, private Bible-belt fundamentalist communities, etc.
25. I am indebted to Atieno Odhiambo posing a key question to me here. The most important Africa-wide work in this vein stems from Joh Mbiti. For Mbiti's career, see Jacob K. Olupona, "A biographical sketch," and passim, in Religious Plurality in Africa: Essays in Honour of John S. Mbiti, ed. Jacob K. Olupona and Sulayman S. Nyang (Berlin: Gruyter & Co., 1993).
26. Mbiti's seminal work was African Religions and Philosophy (New York; Praeger, 1969)
27. and apropos the argument here, Introduction to African Religion (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1975).
28. I also recognize that I am subsuming the field of missiology under Africanist theological study here; see for instance John Samuel Pobee, ed., Exploring Afro-Christology (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Peter Lang, 1992), and my separate citations of Lamin Sanneh's work above.
29. An intellectual history for the notion of "African traditional religion" has already been begun, admirably, by Rosalyn Shaw, a scholar of West African religion, in a short essay called "The Invention of 'African Traditional Religion,' " Religion 20 (1990): 339-53.
30. For Southern Africa, the work of Bengt Sundkler, Gerardus Oosthuizen, B. A. Pauw, and Martinus Daneel is important. The best treatment in the genre is Gabriel Setiloane, The Image of God Among the Sotho-Tswana (Rotterdam: Balkema, 1975).
31. Oosthuizen does not believe that African "spirit" churches are in touch with the real Holy Spirit (but therefore takes the "real" Holy Spirit as the sine qua non of his analysis): see Post-Christianity in Africa (London: Hurst, 1968).
32. Daneel credits the churches more, and sees the real presence of the Spirit: see The Quest for Belonging: An Introduction to the Study of African Independent Churches (Gweru, Zimbabwe: Mambo Press, 1987). For historians I think this is an entirely misguided debate.
33. Adrian Hastings, The Church in Africa, 1450-1950 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), e. g., 330. This is a very fine and useful book, the product of many years of scholarship.
34. See J. R. S. Philips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
35. I thank David Schoenbrim for clarifying my thinking here.
36. See for instance Allen Anderson, Moya: The Holy Spirit in an African Context (Pretoria; Sigma Press, 1991).
37. The role of India is convincingly discussed by Martin Bernai in Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985 (New York: Atheneum, 1987).
38. Benjamin C. Ray, African Religions (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall), 14 and passim;
39. and Jacob K. Olupona, ed., African Traditional Religions in Contemporary Society (New York: Paragon House, 1991), in which one of the express objects is to elevate African "religion" in the eyes of Christians and Muslims and in the discipline of Religionswissenschaft (3).
40. "Religion, then . . . pertains to beliefs and practices which arise from events and experiences of a mystical nature. According to such a definition ATR can be viewed as a valid religion. " S. A. Thorpe, African Traditional Religions: An Introduction (Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1991), 6.
41. One finds the same persistent ahistoricism in Pacific history, again despite excellent work; Jeannette Marie Mageo and Alan Howard, eds, Spirit in Culture, History, and Mind (New York: Routledge, 1996).
42. Okot p'Bitek, African Religions in Western Scholarship (Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1970), chap. 6.
43. For p'Bitek, scholars of African religion are all "heavily influenced, limited and controlled by the forces against which they react" (41).
44. See John S. Mbiti's still enlightening Concepts of God in Africa (New York; Praeger, 1970)
45. and E. Bolaji Idowu, Olodumare: God in Yoruba Belief (London: Longmans, 1962)
46. and African Traditional Religion: A Definition (London: SCM Press, 1973).
47. The argument often goes something like this: (a) Western monotheistic religions are abstracted as "high god"-type religions. (b) The type is applied in the understanding of the practices of diverse societies. (c) Unstated but implied: God exists (as a universally applicable concept, or as the Supreme Being). (d) Therefore diverse societies which partake of the "high god" type are worshipping God. For my remark about "claiming otherwise," see below.
48. For two early examples see G. C. Baëta, ed., Christianity in Tropical Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968)
49. and T. O. Ranger and I. N. Kimambo, eds, The Historical Study of African Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). Again I must stress here as I do with reference to divinity studies that I am not dismissing the value of the work done under the paradigm I am critiquing, and in fact hold much of it in great regard.
50. In this latter category one must place many explanations of supposedly "inchoate" acts of defiance, from the 1857 Xhosa cattle-killing to Mau-Mau. This categorization did not prevent useful work from being done on "religious movements," but such scholarship worked around, not through, the concept of religion.
51. See David Chidester's excellent discussions of this process in southern Africa in Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press. 1996).
52. Including, in a sense, Terence Ranger in his first and seminal book on the Shona rising of 1896: Terence Ranger, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia: 1898-1930 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967).
53. Quote: Wyatt MacGaffey, "African Ideology and Belief: A Survey," African Studies Review 24 (1981): 227-74
54. cited in M. Crawford Young, "Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Class in Africa: A Retrospective," Cahiers d'Études Africaines 26 (1986): 421-95.
55. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon, 1937);
56. Robin Horton, "African Conversion," Africa 41(2): 85-108 (1971);
57. "African Traditional, Thought and Western Science," Africa 37(1): 50-71 (1967) and 37(2): 155-87 (1967);
58. and "On the Rationality of Conversion, Part I," Africa 45(2) (1975).
59. In an article first published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 90(2) (1960)
60. republished as "A Definition of Religion, and its Uses," in Robin Horton, Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1-49. Horton it seems to me gives away too much for a proper definition, by taking "gods" and "spirits" as meaningful universals. His views are preconditions for demonstrating fascinating congruities and disjunctures between Western categories and African ones, however, and he is a penetrating thinker.
61. "Religion as a Cultural System," chap. 4, in Clifford Geertz, ed., The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), esp. 90-1.
62. Talal Asad, "Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections of Geertz," Man 18 (1983): 327-59;
63. and Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
64. Asad argues that Geertz's model draws on the Western conception of Christianity from the seventeenth century onward. If the authority of the Roman Catholic Church had not fragmented, Geertz's model would not now seem appropriate. Religion would not seem like a personal matter ("belief") and so not akin to a system of thought (as opposed, in other words, to other systems); Catholicism, previous to the seventeenth century, was more an attribute of life, sanctioned by an incontestable institution. The location of the creation of religion in Christians' encounter with other peoples does not contradict Asad, since the era from which comparative religions were first elaborated was also the colonial seventeenth century.
65. Geoffrey Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 150
66. cited in Fritz Kramer, The Red Fez: Art and Spirit Possession in Africa, trans. Malcolm Green (New York: Verso, 1993), 58.
67. The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1933), "Religion". I am not claiming that this etymology defines the term. It simply offers a historical insight into the term's use.
68. See further John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 170-1.
69. Chidester, Savage Systems, passim. The co-opting of missionary negations can be clearly seen, for instance, in Geoffrey Parrinder's Religion in Africa (New York: Penguin, 1969). Chidester's argument is stimulating, although a close look at some of the sources he draws on offers a more nuanced view.
70. For the Middle East, see Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978)
71. and for India, see Bernai, Black Athena, vol. 1, 255ff.
72. In fact, scholarship on "religion" in the history of Africa has lost much of its academic cachet, and the term "religious historian'" has become anathema in some circles.
73. Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land, Marquesas 1774-1880 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1980), 40.
74. There is a sense in Jeff Peires's excellent and readable book, The Dead Will Arise (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1989), that Xhosa culture as a whole slips into the domain of religion; a rigorous situation of the concept of religion itself in the unfolding narrative might perhaps have stopped this slippage.
75. The literature I am variously thinking of here embraces many excellent works. For instance, Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991);
76. Adrian Hastings' second volume, The Church in Africa, 1450-1950 (after African Christianity, 1950-1975, published in 1975);
77. Richard Gray, Black Christians and White Missionaries;
78. Elizabeth Isichei, History of Christianity in Africa: From Antiquity to the Present (London: SPCK, 1995);
79. and Thomas D. Blakeley, W. E. A. van Beek, and Dennis L. Thomson, eds, Religion in Africa (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1994), a compendium of diverse contributions.
80. For Southern Africa, see Bredekamp and Ross, eds, Missions and Christianity, which emerged from the 1992 conference at the University of the Western Cape, "People, Power and Culture: The History of Christianity in South Africa, 1792-1992";
81. and Leon de Kock, Civilising Barbarians: Missionary Narrative and African Textual Response in Nineteenth-Century South Africa (Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand Press, 1996);
82. Norman Etherington, "Recent Trends in the Historiography of Christianity in Southern Africa," Journal of Southern African Studies 22 (1996): 201-19;
83. and J. D. Y. Peel, "Historicity and Pluralism in Some Recent Studies of Yoruba Religion," Africa 64 (1994): 150-66. I refer to other important work in the introduction to Landau, The Realm of the Word.
84. Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
85. Mary Snell-Hornby, Translation Studies: An Integrated Approach (Amsterdam and Phila-delphia: Benjamins, 1988).
86. A translation from one discourse to another may be made in the same language-God as true in one sentence may become false in another sentence which is an analysis (and a subsumption) of the first.
87. I recognize that had Mbiti and Idowu not accepted the rubric "religion," their voices might not have been heard.
88. There is little outward disagreement between these two blocks of scholars, partly because one must weigh the propriety of such debates in a world (and in university departments) filled with different faiths. The few forays across boundaries have simply been ignored. Anthropologists and historians have too often seen Africanist theology as simply irrelevant to their work on Christianity. I include my work in this criticism. On the other hand, Rosalyn Shaw's discussion in "The Invention of African Traditional Religion" has been ignored by theologians.
89. Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance;
90. and particularly Cornel West, Prophetic Deliverance! An Afro-American Christianity (New York: Westminster Press, 1982).
91. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1915; reprint, trans. and with an Introduction by Karen Fields, New York: Free Press, 1995), xvii. Durkheim writes about institutionalized, social circuits of meaning, and links certain varieties of them (concerned with soul, sacrifice, and ritual) together as one thing, called religion. But it isn't his definition that is most interesting or appealing in this brilliant work, and Durkheim himself seems to recognize as much when he compares religious feeling to nationalism and even scientific knowledge.
92. Philosophical Investigations (New York: Blackwell, 1958)
93. On Certainty (New York: Blaekwell, 1969)
94. and Zettel (New York: Blackwell, 1967)
95. all translated by G. E. M. Anscombe; and Philosophical Occasions, 1912-1951 (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993), a selection from his letters, articles and general Nachlass. In an earlier draft I referred to Wittgenstein's circuits of meaning as he does, as "language games" (Sprachenspiels); but the term "game" is misleading. To Wittgenstein, it signified interactions that "make sense," so that one could devise rules for them if one wished.
96. This latter point was brought home to me in discussion with Tom Spear and the other participants in the first meeting of the African Expressions of Christianity seminar.
97. Christopher Ehret, "Language Evidence and Religious History," chap. 2 in Ranger and Kimambo, eds, The Historical Study of African Religion, 47.
98. The word "articulated" is what confuses us in this formulation. Compare Robert Bellah's judgment that "primitive religion's" institutions are poorly differentiated, which make people conformist, in contrast to the duality of ideals and everyday life in the world religions, which push people toward "redemption. " Bellah, "Religious Evolution," American Sociological Review 29 (1964): 358-74.
99. Despite real differences in modes, as Sanneh has pointed out in "Translatability in Islam and in Christianity in Africa: A Thematic Approach," in Thomas D. Blakeley et al., eds, Religion in Africa, 22-45, one could perhaps make a similar point about Islam.
100. Although little attention has been paid to recent understandings of translation in literary or lexicographical studies (see Snell-Hornby, Translation Studies), many of the works on African Christianity that have appeared in the last ten years at least stress, as I am doing here, that translation is one key to understanding Christianity and religion in Africa. Much of this work borrows insights from Vincente Rafael's arguments in his book, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).
101. In Peter Van der Veer's words, "it is precisely the problem of translation that is at the heart of conversion. " Van der Veer, "Introduction," Conversion to Modernities: the Globalization of Christianity, ed. Peter van der Veer (New York: Routledge, 1996).
102. Paul S. Landau, "When Rain Falls: Rainmaking and Community in a Tswana Village, c. 1870 to Recent Times," International Journal of African Historical Studies 26 (1993): 1-30. I include Christians' rain-making in the analysis.
103. Isaac Schapera, Rainmaking Rites of Tswana Tribes (Cambridge and Leiden: Afrika Studie-Centrum, 1971).
104. First discussed by Norman Etherington. Preachers, Peasants and Politics in Southeast Africa, 1835-1880 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978).
105. Chris Lowe, "Revivalism and Independent Church Movements in Natal, 1890-1910" (paper presented at the Walter Rodney Seminar, Boston University, 26 February 1996).
106. John Janzen, "Tradition of Renewal in Kongo Religion," in African Religion: A Symposium, ed. N. S. Booth (New York: NOK Books, 1977), 69-115.
107. Richard Stuart, "Anglican Missionaries and a Chewa Dini," Journal of Religion in Africa 10 (1979): 46-69.
108. Pier Larson, "Capacities and Modes of Thinking: Intellectual Engagements and Subaltern Hegemony in the Early History of Malagasy Christianity," American Historical Review 102 (1997): 969-1002. Larson has also exchanged many of these ideas with me privately.
109. One finds the same sort of thing in non-Africanist work. Peter Brown writes of "saints" or holy men in late antiquity that they frequently battled pagans "at dangerously close quarters . . . sometimes one even senses that the one is a doublet, rather than an enemy, of the other. . . . [The saints] were impenitent bricoleurs. " What differentiated them from ordinary Christians was the certainty that they were filled with the Holy Spirit. Peter Brown, Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianization of the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 39.
110. Donald Donham, "Conversion and Revolution in Maale, Ethiopia" (paper presented at the program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University, 1 December 1995).
111. Taken from Chidester, Savage Systems, 48-54, 70
112. in part citing Peter Kolb, The Present State of the Cape of Good Hope (English ed., London, 1731 [first German ed., 1719]).
113. George Schmidt, "Account of the Voyage of Brother George Schmidt to the Cape of Good Hope, and of his Abode there from 1736 to 1744. Written by himself," in Periodical Accounts, Relating to the Missions of the Church of the United Brethren, Established Among the Heathen, Vol. 1 (London, 1790-4), 169
114. cited by Elizabeth Elbourne, "Early Khoisan Uses of Mission Christianity," in Bredekamp and Ross, eds, Missions and Christianity, 75-6.
115. Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message, 160
116. citing J. DuPlessis, A History of Christian Mission in South Africa (New York: Longmans & Green, 1911), 2. DuPlessis's intention was possibly familiar to them, since they evidently spoke Dutch. Sanneh uses this example as part of his argument that prior understandings of God among Khoikhoi (as among many African peoples) persisted in the messages of missionaries, even as the chauvinism (and mistaken exegeses) of missionaries were rejected by them.
117. Rob Gordon, The Bushman Myth (Boulder, CO; Westview, 1992), 217, citing Lorna Marshall, personal comment. Unfortunately I do not know if Marshall asked the question in Zhuor or Afrikaans.
118. Gordon, Bushman Myth, 217 n. 15
119. citing John Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains (London: H. Holt, 1913), 571.
120. citing Edward Terry, A Voyage to East India Wherein Some Things are Taken Notice of, In Our Passage thither, etc. (London, 1777 [1655]).
121. Old Lena, an original convert of Schmidt's, 5 January 1793, speaking to Marsveld, S. 39, in H. C. Bredekamp, A. B. L. Flegg, and H. E. F. Pluddemann, eds, The Genadendal Diaries: Diaries of the Herrnhut Missionaries H. Marsveld, D. Schwinn and G. C. Kuhnel, vol. 1 (1792-1794) (Bellville, S. A.: University of the Western Cape Institute for Historical Research, 1992), 68.
122. (London, 1881).
123. Elbourne, "Early Khoisan Uses," quotes, 76, 75.
124. citing Theophilus Hahn, Tsuni-//Goam (London, 1881), 58-9.
125. I have chosen Elbourne's analysis for my critique here partly because of the applicability of Khoisan notions of tui-qua, but also because the clear excellence of Elbourne's work will make it more apparent that my focus is not her particular treatment of evidence, but the conceptual apparatus of religion in African history. We await her book on the subject of nineteenth-century Christianity and Khoisan people in the Cape. See also Robert Ross, "The Social and Political Theology of Western Cape Missions, c. 1800-c. 1860," in Bredekamp and Ross, eds, Missions and Christianity
126. and R. Elphick and H. Giliomee, The Shaping of South African Society, 1652-c, 1840 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. 1989). In my forthcoming book, I make a much fuller attempt to trace the transformation of the SeTswana term modimo in evangelical encounters than I can do here with tui-qua.
127. Terrence Ranger, "The Local and the Global in Southern African Religious History," chap. 3 in Robert W. Hefner, ed., Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
128. See Ludwig Wittgenstein's discussion of Augustine's notion of meaning and its inadequacies, in the early pages of Philosophical Investigations. Language itself attaches to the real in a similarly multitudinous number of ways, not, as Augustine supposes, in one way.
129. Smith, Imagining Religion, 92.