'AN
INCOMPREHENSIBLE MIRACLE'
Central
African clerical intellectualism versus African historic
religion: A close reading of Valentin Mudimbe's Tales of Faith
(shortened TXT version)
Wim van
Binsbergen1
click here for the formatted short version; or for the full version (4x longer)
edited version
of the shortened argument as presented orally at SOAS, 1st
February 2001
'Tales of Faith2 is
also, and perhaps mainly, about an incomprehensible miracle -
that is, an extraordinary event in the world. These lectures
constitute an invitation to meditate on my composite narrative,
which contemplates difficult statements that are contradictory in
their effects and, in any case, unbelievable for the agnostic
that I am.'3
to Patricia
Saegerman, my beloved wife, born in Stanleyville, Belgian Congo
INTRODUCTION
This is the
first lecture in a series around Valentin Mudimbe, organised by
Louis Brenner and Kay Kresse. Born in 1941 in the former Belgian
Congo (subsequently Zaire and Congo), and now holding
appointments at Stanford and Duke in the United States, as well
as being Chair of the Board of the International Africa
Institute, London, Mudimbe is one of the leading Africanist
scholars of our time. His large oeuvre spans the fields of belles
lettres (poetry and novels), philosophical essays, classical
philology, the history of ideas, and edited works assessing the
state of the art in African studies especially philosophy and
anthropology. In Africanist circles he is probably best known for
two books which trace the political and intellectual trajectory
of concepts of Africa from Antiquity to the late twentieth
century: The invention of Africa, and The idea of Africa.4 There
is no way in which, in the scope of the present argument, I can
begin to do justice to what is clearly one of the great creative
cosmopolitan minds, and one of the great intellectual and
literary oeuvres, of our times. I have to substantially narrow
down the scope of my argument, and I will do so on the basis of a
number of related considerations. In this opening seminar, I
think it is fair to situate Mudimbe in a particular social and
intellectual context, and this is not difficult since his
publications abound with salient autobiographical detail - not to
say that his entire oeuvre may be read as a sustained attempt at
autobiographical self-definition.5 One of his latest books, Tales
of faith (1997) happens to be an intellectual and spiritual
autobiography disguised as a detached history of ideas of Central
African intellectuals and their work and aftermath in the
twentieth century.
The study of Central African
religion has for decades been my main contribution to African
studies, and has brought me in contact with Louis Brenner, my
host today. Moreover, Tales of Faith was originally delivered as
the Louis H. Jordan lectures at the School of Oriental and
African Studies in 1994, so that this specific argument by
Mudimbe may still have considerable resonance in this room by its
own original impetus. I will therefore concentrate on Tales of
faith, but connecting as much as possible to the rest of
Mudimbe's work, and to his person to the extent this transpires
in the published texts. I will be very critical, not out of lack
of respect and admiration, but because the fundamental issues of
Africa and of African studies today manifest themselves around
Mudimbe as a central and emblematic figure, and we need to bring
out those issues. After briefly indicating Mudimbe's surprising
methods I shall pinpoint what Tales of faith is about (the
adventure of clerical intellectualism in Central Africa during
the twentieth century), what metacontents it contains
(homelessness as Mudimbe's central predicament), and what all
this means for the practice and the study of African historic
religion,6 the uninvited guest of Tales of faith and of Mudimbe's
work in general.
MUDIMBE'S
METHOD IN TALES OF FAITH
When we try to
pinpoint the method by which Mudimbe constructs his texts, the
first thing that meets the eye is that his method is
kaleidoscopic and eclectic. In Tales of Faith, his approach is
alternately
•
definitional (especially the first chapter, where he seeks to
define religion).
•
autobiographical (passim, and especially parts of chapter 2,
where he most convincingly evokes and clarifies the micropolitics
of Central African education for the priesthood in the middle of
the twentieth century by reference to his own trajectory through
this education;7 micropolitics is here taken in the Foucaultian
sense8 of the instilling, in individual minds through the
construction and manipulation of small-scale interaction
situations, of the preconditions for submission to, or for the
hegemony of, a macro-level system of domination, such as (in this
case) the colonial state and the Roman Catholic church.
•
exercises in the field of the history of ideas (especially in the
second and third chapter, where he explains the processes through
which, in African-based ethnotheology and philosophy during the
twentieth century, the liberation of difference was effected
within the seedbed of missionary Roman Catholicism.
•
critical, in the narrowly described manner of the book review
neatly summarising, situating and appraising one or more specific
items of academic or literary production within the limited space
and with the limited ambitions of a published book review.
•
deliberately and explicitly hagiographic, in his treatment of
Ishaku Jean and of Alexis Kagame.
•
philosophical, when he seeks to articulate differnce, identity,
knowledge and representation in the context of his Central
African historical narrative.
The kaleidoscopic effect of the
intertwined use of various genres, the frequent lapses into
autobiographical reminiscence, the fact that his book is more of
a heterogeneous (and hasty!)9 collage than a sustained argument,
has a deeper significance, especially since as a literature
scholar Mudimbe knows full well what he is doing. What these
stylistic and compositional techniques convey is the fact that he
resigns himself to his incapability of resolving the
contradictions of his situation, and that instead he mediates
these contradictions in a fairly unprocessed form to his readers.
This resignation at incomplete consistency marks Tales of faith
as primarily a literary collage, whose constituent elements
happen to look like fragments of state-of-the-art scholarship. In
fact Mudimbe is and expresses the contradictions between and
within the constituent elements of his tale, and he is the
homelessness which the heterogeneity of their genres suggests. At
a function organised on the occasion of his delivering the Jordan
lectures in 1994 at the School of Oriental and African Studies,
he solemnly passed around his United Nations passport for the
stateless, as if this constituted his main or only existential
and academic credentials.10
As a result of his departures from
common expectation among Africanists, Tales of faith is scarcely
about 'religion and politics in Central Africa' as many empirical
Africanists would expect it to be. There is hardly any discussion
here of the way in which the political as an institutional sphere
linking local and regional processes of power and performance to
the national state and to intercontinental power relations, takes
a religious guise or is informed by religious phenomena, however
defined. Such major popular responses in the religious history of
Central Africa as: Kongo religion, cults of affliction in the
field of diagnosis and healing, Kimbanguism, the emigration of
the defeated Lumpa church from Zambia to Congo, the close
alliance between church and state under the Mobutu regime, the
selective caricatural virtualisation of African historic culture
in the context of Mubutu's politique d'authenticité, the
emergence of local independent churches and mass movements such
as Le Combat spirituel (see below) which specifically address the
effects of colonial intellectual and spiritual alienation in a
framework that has departed very widely from missionary Roman
Catholicism and from the existential and signifying predicaments
of Roman Catholics priests as an intellectual elite - all these
and many other themes are surprisingly and shockingly absent from
this book.
A subtitle like 'religion as
political performance' makes the uninitiated reader expect a
discussion of a wide range of religious contexts in which
political performance may be detected and subjected to exegesis:
not just the struggles of Christian (more specifically Roman
Catholic) and post-Christian African intellectuals, but also
those of the millions of non-intellectual adherents of the same
Christian denomination. I shall come back to this point towards
the end of my argument. And if the explicit aim of the book is to
present 'stories of faith and adventure in intercultural
problematics created by the expansion of Christianity in
Africa'11) one can hardly entertain (like Mudimbe seems to do in
the present book) the illusion that such an expansion took place
in a context where religious alternatives to Christianity were
entirely absent, muted, insignificant, or too insufficiently
documented to deserve explicit discussion. Territorial or
ecological cults, royal cults, professional cults of hunters and
blacksmiths, ancestral cults, diagnostic and therapeutic cults of
affliction, prophetism, sorcery beliefs and sorcery eradication
movements, and to top it all the expansion of Swahili-related
Islam towards the continent's interior - the very texture of
nineteenth and early twentieth century socio-cultural life in
Central Africa was saturated with non-Christian religion, and one
cannot simply take for granted (as Mudimbe through his silence on
these issues appears to do) that the prospective clerics who
entered the study for the Roman Catholic priesthood, did so
without the slightest exposure to or knowledge of these
alternatives and were completely indifferent about them.
Let me add that Tales of faith,
one of Mudimbe's latest books, is extreme in this respect.
Elsewhere he did touch on aspects of historic African religion,
e.g. prophetism,12 creation myths, and everyday African life in
Parables and fables,13 whereas sorcery forms the topic of the
important book by the Congolese anthropologist Buakasa entitled
L'Impensé du discours,14 which Mudimbe discusses in a short
chapter of his L'Odeur du père.15
Provisionally, before even
examining what Tales of faith is about according to its author
(Central African clerical intellectualism), and what my close
reading suggests that it is really about (Mudimbe's homelessness
in the face of death), the above discussion of his method and his
making light with any disciplinary canon and method allows us to
define what I would call the poetics of Mudimbe's writing in this
book. The book is composed of many heterogeneous small parts,
which collage-fashion are only loosely connected, and many of
which in their internal structure and conception are not
manifestly consistent with any disciplinary canon of scholarship.
These parts could be considered modules, most of which appear in
the trappings of philosophical or empirical historical argument
(others are autobniographical or hagiographical). What integrates
them is not a sustained academic argument on African philosophy
or the history of ideas, but a highly personal narrative of
defining the author's personal identity and itinerary. The
modules are like the paragraphs in an experimental novel and
especially like the lines and stanzas in a poem. Tales of faith
is primarily a literary product to be judged by literary
standards; its artistic originality consist in the fact that it
rather effectively, and deceptively, manages to conceal its
literary building bricks as pieces of consistent scholarly
argument. This also explains the moving and revelatory effect
which the text of Tales of faith has on the reader, at an
existential level, prodding the reader to examine her or his own
identity and life at the same earnest level of historical
self-definition, loss, and hope. The book testifies to a great
creative and scholarly mind who can afford to play with the
canons of scholarship, first of all because his qualifications in
this field are incontestable, secondly and more importantly
because to him these canons are merely effective stepping-stones
(the Wittgensteinian ladder he may cast away after climbing up),
leading towards something even more valuable: the articulation of
identity and personal struggle in the face of death and
homelessness - expressing the culturally transmuted person that
he is, that many African todays are, that all human beings are,
and thus expressing the human condition in a unique yet
recognizable and identifiable way.
WHAT TALES OF
FAITH IS REALLY ABOUT: (1) THE NARRATIVE OF CLERICAL
INTELLECTUALISM IN CENTRAL AFRICA
Mudimbe
situates himself in a multi-generation process of conversion
which begins, two or three generations before his, with adherents
to African historic religious forms dwelling in some Central
African village or royal court environment, and which concludes
with him and his fellow clerical or post-clerical intellectuals.
In the latter's experience African historic religion has become
completely eradicated. Instead they have gone through Roman
Catholicism or other Christian denominations, either remaining
there or proceeding to agnostic, atheistic, materialist etc.
positions. In the process of affirming their difference in the
political context of missionary Christianity, they have ended up
in full command of globally circulating universalising skills and
qualifications: fluent in several Indo-European languages as well
as in several African ones; writing poetry, novels, and
philosophical and historical treatises; operating libraries,
computers, Internet, academic committees, and publishing
resources. Thus they have reached a vantage point from which, as
intellectual producers, they both serve, and critique at the same
time, the power-knowledge structure of North Atlantic hegemony,
using Africa as an exemplary reference point in the process.
Mudimbe describes the situation of
the exemplary African clerical intellectuals of an earlier
generation, such as Mveng, Kagame, Mulago, and Kizerbo,16 in
terms of cultural métissité, let us say 'the condition of being
of mixed cultural descent'.
WHAT TALES OF
FAITH IS REALLY ABOUT: (2) HOMELESSNESS AS MUDIMBE'S CENTRAL
PREDICAMENT
Beyond the
dream of an African home
It is almost
as if in Tales of faith the politics of performance are reduced
to the essayistic performance of autobiography concealed under
the trappings of a chain of objectifying literature reports,
philosophical intermezzi and other detached modules of scholarly
production.
'Tales of
Faith is about the strange constructed place I chose to inhabit
so that I could think about the unthinkable: how well the
predicament of Sartre's pessimism in 'Hell is other people' meets
the supreme beauty of 'I am an Other'. The two positions are
inseparable in this space, in which identities are always
mixtures facing each other as competitive projects aimed as, to
use Schlegel's language, an impossible ars combinatoria17 - I
mean a universal and definitive 'logical chemistry'.18
This is the
only real home he may claim as his own. He certainly does not
perceive Africa as such a home, and he perceives his Africanness
as problematic:
Although as much as anyone else
aware of the unique complexities and potentialities of Africa as
a situation,19 Mudimbe is extremely concerned not to fall into
the Afrocentrist trap which Stephen Howe caustically
characterised as the construction of 'mythical pasts and imagined
homes'.20 As a literature scholar Mudimbe is expertly at home in
the realm of textual imagination (hence titles such as Parables
and fables, and Tales of faith, for books in which he analyses
crucial aspects of the twentieth-century experience in Central
Africa), but he considers it his task to deconstruct such
products of imagination, not to believe in them.
In a book which discusses the
cultural and religious dimension of the colonial conquest, the
devastating effects of Christianity upon African culture and
spirituality, the Colonial Library as an objectifying ordered
caricature of African socio-cultural realities, etc., Mudimbe
finds mildness and patience for most of what came to Africa from
the North Atlantic, but he is very dismissive of the
Afrocentrists who, after all, seek to explode the heroic epic of
cultural transmutation which Mudimbe sings in this book: the sage
of clerical intellectualism. Afrocentrism is reduced by Mudimbe
to a mere act of banal Freudian transference, i.e. distorted
self-projection out of touch with reality. Elsewhere in the book
the young African critics of Kagame,21 or of the European
missionising of Africa,22 are dismissed by Mudimbe in similarly
distancing terms. Here he finds himself in the company of Kwame
Appiah, another cosmopolitan African philosopher who has endeared
himself North Atlantic audience by rejecting the essentialism of
Africanness and by mediating, instead, a sensible,
middle-of-the-road image of Africa that no longer posits a
radical defiance of universalising North Atlantic categories and
procedures of thought.23
We would do injustice to Mudimbe
if we did not realise that his reservations vis-à-vis
Afrocentrism and the Black Athena debate, and his ignoring
African historic religion, is not simply an idiosyncratic
expression of his cultural and geographical homelessness and
nothing more. At the back is a profound methodological dilemma,
which attends the entire empirical study of African religion
through participant observation or through African believers'
introspection, and which comes out clearly in Mudimbe's
discussion of Mulago's project:
'Theoretically,
Mulago's project can be summed up as follows: in the name of the
truths of a locality or place, it questions the pertinence of
colonial 'scientific' and 'religious' dominant discourses. Yet
the project itself has recourse to the same controversial logical
empiricism it wants to relativize. In fact, the invocation of the
truths of the place against those of the interpretive space
implies that there is somehow (almost necessarily) better
reflections of the locality in the insider's discourse; and this
hypothesis then becomes an ideological framework and a means for
negotiating a right to the authentic speech in the field of
discourses about the native place.24
But by posing the question, and by
contesting the validity of the local perspective by reproaching
it for its claim of superiority, Mudimbe in fact claims for
himself and his North Atlantic academic universalist science a
similarly privileged, superior outside position - which apart
from begin hegemonic would be very un-Foucoultian. African
historic culture and religion have a right to affirm themselves
for their own sake - which is why eleven years ago, as an
accomplished North Atlantic anthropologist of religion, I opted
to become a diviner-priest-therapist in the Southern African
sangoma tradition. Moreover, there is another reason, one to be
found within universalising science, why Mudimbe should be far
less dismissive of Afrocentrism: beyond its consciousness-raising
it contains major, testable hypotheses concerning Africa's
cultural past and Africa's contribution to global cultural
history - as I have argued in detail on a number of recent
occasions.25
The prominence
of death in Mudimbe's work
Because of
Mudimbe's relentless insistence on origininality, there is an
essential unpredictability about Mudimbe's work, which markes it
incomparably more difficult to read and to grasp than the average
Africanist academic text production along disciplinary lines
(African anthropology, history, religious studies, philosophy,
theology etc.), and renders this oeuvre one of the most
impressive, moving and original bodies of texts to have risen
from the modern (post-eighteenth century CE) encounter between
Africa and the North Atlantic. Like all true poets, Mudimbe's
writing is essentially a writing in the face of death. It took a
while before this insight dawned upon me. I was at first puzzled
by the uncanny prominence of references to parricide (often
solemnly and in Freudian fashion called 'the murder of the
father') in his approaches to African literature, ethnotheology
and philosophy.26 Thus when Paul-Michel Foucault in early adult
life drops the 'Paul' which was the given name of his father and
grandfather, and lives on with only the 'Michel' which his mother
gave him, Mudimbe interprets this in the line of Lacan and Freud
as parricide, even though by the same time Mudimbe claims to have
proceeded to a Jungian perspective27 which would lay less stress
on the sexual scheme but instead would favour an interpretation
in terms of a heroic mother-son myth.28 Likewise it is Kasavubu's
rejection of Lumumba's parricidal challenge of the former
colonising power at the moment of Congo's Independence, which, in
Mudimbe's off-hand analysis, led to Lumumba's isolation and
murder.29 Parricidal is the revolt of younger African
philosophers against their African predecessors,30 while Kagame
himself seems to have incited yet another form of parricide:
'Within a few
weeks, I saw him convert entire annual classes of students to a
''nationalistic'' view of African history and philology. I told
him that I feared that such a perspective, by generously glossing
over the epistemological preconditions of the murder of the
Father, ran the risk of further perverting the discipline of the
social sciences in Africa, already so encumbered by a priori
ideological assumptions of 'colonial science'. His response was
surprising to me in its simplicity: ''obsession is also a path to
the truth'' '. 31
From his own
itinerary, this forms of parricide appears to be what Mudimbe
fears most. For when in the middle of the twentieth century
Central African Roman Catholic clerical intellectuals can be seen
to struggle with how much of global Christianity and North
Atlantic philosophy and science they can retain while asserting
their rightful difference vis-à-vis that imported foreign body
of ideas and vis-à-vis the hegemonic power of the Europeans who
persuaded or forced them to accept that body and built it into
their very lives, that retention is suggested to be a refusal on
their part to proceed to parricide.
The fact that, in the face of overwhelming evidence concerning
the eradication of African historic religion, Mudimbe refuses to
make a definitive statement against Christianity and its negative
effects on Africa, means that (as Tales of faith makes very
clear) even though he has become an agnostic, he cannot bring
himself to commit parricide vis-à-vis the Roman Catholic Church.
Death appears not only as the
murder of the father contemplated as possible but, after all,
undesirable, or as the others' parricide to be condemned, but
particularly as Mudimbe's own death:
On the one hand Mudimbe affirms,
against the tide of the Africanist anthropology of the turn of
the twenty-first century CE, the irreducible plurality of African
cultures (the same plurality around which the Colonial Library
was built and ordered). Mudimbe's sympathy for the gems of
classic anthropology as produced by Fortes, Middleton, Griaule en
de Heusch, as discussed above, suggests that he sees them as an
anthropological opening up to the liberation of African
difference. But as he affirms, a greater liberation still lies in
the realization that death (the central undercurrent in his work)
is the hallmark of cultural purity (the kind of cultural purity
affirmed by the classic anthropological model of ethnic diversity
and boundedness), so that the affirmation of cultural métissité
is nothing but the only effective strategy of survival:
Mudimbe analyzes other people's
Tales of faith, Parables and Fables, Ideas and Inventions of
Africa, but for his personal needs retreats to the bare and windy
rocks of agnosticism. His Africa is that of other people, it does
not exist as a tangible reality for himself, but at best
constitutes a context for contestation, a laboratory for the
politics of the liberation of difference.
Métissité
Let us dwell a
bit on the notion of cultural métissité, which (although used
by Mudimbe in an English-language book) I propose to translate as
'the condition of being of cultural mixed descent'. The concept
is borrowed, ultimately from the French colonial language of
race, and more directly from an important critical reflection
upon colonialism and its language, notably Amselle's seminal
discussion of African ethnicity32 as a recent invention within
colonial society. Schilder and I have tried to distance ourselves
from the constructivism and presentism associated with Amselle's
view, albeit in terms which probably created misunderstanding and
which Amselle declared a caricature of his views.33 However this
may be, the concept of métissité has implications which cast a
critical light on Mudimbe's analysis. In the first place it is a
biological metaphor, evoking the necessity of the blind play of
genes, as against the freedom, choice, contingency of cultural
strategies. Mudimbe's heroes, the clerical intellectuals, could
freely contemplate and reject the idea of parricide on their
European clerical superiors and intellectual predecessors while
their historic African allegiance had already been killed by
others then themselves; this shows that the biological metaphor
of blind genetic necessity is misleading. Mudimbe must be aware
of this, considering his lucid and state-of-the-art treatment of
race as a biologically non-viable political ideology in
contemporary science and society.34
The biological metaphor is also
misleading for another reason. In the biological process of
genetic mixture, the genotype displays the more or less equitable
combination of two sets of identifiable factors (genes,
chromosomes), each set making for either of the original two
phenotypes involved; depending on how many different genes
control the specific traits looks for in the original phenotypes,
the features of the resulting mixed phenotype may range somewhere
in between both originals, or (if few genes are involved and some
of the values these genes take are dominant, other recessive) the
mixed phenotype may look rather like one of the two originals.
Neither situation obtains in the case of cultural mixed descent
as described by Mudimbe. There is no evidence that in in the case
of these clerical intellectuals African historic religion and
Christianity have somehow achieved an equitable mixture, or that
at least deep down, in subconscious layers of their
personalities, the African cultural elements linger even though
these do not directly manifest themselves in their overt
behaviour, in their 'performance'. They are in fact
mutations within the global clerical intellectual order -
mutation here being defined in the original Hugo de Vries sense
of a radical and unsystematic change (in genotype) leading to a
radically new and unpredictable manifestation (in phenotype).
These clerical intellectuals represent a new cultural form, whose
Africanness perhaps consists in the somatic and geographical
features of their bearers, and in the geographical provenance of
the cultural material they distantly and selectively appropriate
and transform in intellectual text products. Their Africanness
does scarcely consist in any sort of lived and professed
continuity with the African historic religion. What Mudimbe
describes in Tales of faith is the emergence of a new local
variant of global culture which has become dominant among the
religious, educational and political elite of Central Africa,
with similar forms elsewhere in Africa and in the Third World in
general.
But again, Mudimbe seems to do
himself to African historic religion what he exposes as a
colonial hegemonic strategy: does he not himself, vis-à-vis
African historic religion, assert, like the very Colonial Library
he is critiquing?35
The point is not that Mudimbe's
understanding of the conversion process is to be faulted. Most
illuminatingly he argues this process to consist of a triple
negation: of otherness, of the plurality of histories, and of any
rationality to be found outside the respectable Judaeo-Greek
philosophical canon.36 He demonstrates how in a nineteenth
century North Atlantic thought spell-bound by Hegel, which does
not allow for a plurality of histories, Africa does not and
cannot exist. The point is that Mudimbe does not seem to realise
that his very critique of this conversion process, which produced
him and hence has taken on a personal reality from which he can
as little detach himself as from his body or from the air (!) he
breathes, overdetermines him to take such deconstructive,
dismissive views of Africa and of African historic religion as he
does take.
'Consequently,
conversion is an imperative, a sine qua non condition for
inscribing oneself into a history.'37
Of course
Mudimbe means this statement as a rendering of the hegemonic
preconceptions of missionary Christianity. But that does not take
away the fact that, in banning African historic religion from the
substance of his argument, denying it rationality, repeatedly
dismissing it as incredible as if it can be totally assessed by
epistemological criteria, and in glorifying the project of
clerical and post-clerical intellectualism from which his own
career and mutant identify have sprung, he takes the personal
fact and necessity of such conversion for granted.
MUDIMBE AND
HISTORIC AFRICAN RELIGION
Remarkably, I
have not yet spotted any passage in Mudimbe's oeuvre (but I may
easily have missed it considering its size and bilingual nature)
where the concept of parricide is equally applied to the
unmistakable lack of demonstrable retention of any historic
Central African religion on the part of these clerics and (like
Mudimbe himself) post-clerics. They tended to be second or third
generation Christians, and hence one might surmise that others
had done the killing of local historic religion for them: their
own parents, and the missionaries who had somehow managed to
substitute themselves as father figures in the place of the
paternal kin of these African clerical intellectuals. The
message, so implicit as to be entirely taken for granted, of
Mudimbe's kaleidoscopic and multi-genre narrative of the
itinerary of these African clerical intellectuals in his book
Tales of faith, is that by the middle of the twentieth century
none of them was in direct personal contact any more, as a
practitioner, with Central African historic religion.
If African historic religion is no
longer the dominant cohesive social force in the urban and
intellectual context of Kinshasa, Lubumbashi and other Congolese
cities, this does not mean that such religion has entirely
disappeared from the contemporary Congolese social life in the
rural areas; recent ethnographic research by accomplished
ethnographers like Devisch and de Boeck has demonstrated its
continued vitality and viability.38
If African historic religion has
succeeded to survive to some extent in the countryside of Central
Africa, why is it far less conspicuous in the big cities? Like in
Belgium, Roman Catholicism was something of a state religion in
Belgian Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. This does not mean that there
is a 100% overlap between the religious and the statal domain;
for as Mudimbe acknowledges that the Central African colonies,
like Belgium, had a certain plurality of European ideological
expressions (Protestantism, Freemasonry, and one may add
socialism) rival to Roman Catholicism, and some of them with
rather disproportionately great power in national politics.
However, the effect of the practical coinciding of state and
world religion is a particular form of micropolitics, which has a
direct bearing on the eclipse of religious alternatives to Roman
Catholicism from public and even private life. There is a
constant reinforcing between statal and religious sanctioning in
the policing of citizen's everyday life. The state, which in its
twentieth century form is primarily a democratically legitimated
oligarchy, assumes reality partly through the citizen's
submission to and veneration of the representations of the
church; and the intangible sanctions of the church somehow
receive a vicarious backing from the display of physical force
(the prison, the police, the army) and the powerful bureaucratic
procedures proper to the state. The Enlightenment rationality of
the modern state nicely matches the verbose doctrinal
rationalisations of Roman Catholic theology. The result of all
this is that in the consciousness and practices of the citizens
all heterodoxy tends to be shunned as criminal and as an act of
national treason, by virtue of strongly internalised modes of
assessment, self-control, and domestication. Heterodoxy instils
the ordinary law-abiding citizen with a sense of horror and
especially shame, comparable to the shame adults feel in cases of
imperfect public concealment of their own bodily functions (signs
of incontinence, of menstruation leaking through, etc.). In a
system of evaluation along such axes as child versus adult,
animal versus human, stupid versus intelligent, exclusion versus
inclusion, punishment versus reward, heterodoxy thus installs
itself on the negative end. Mudimbe is as good a guide as any
critic of colonialism to identify these social pressures towards
compliance with world-religion orthodoxy, but it is important to
realise that these pressures are not limited to the colonial
situation. They can still be seen to work in post-colonial
African societies: among the citizens as a mode of acquiescence;
while among the political elite the semi-secret semi-public
display of heterodox horrors (for instance in the occasional
display of violence, sorcery, and human sacrifice) reinforces
such acquiescence, since these horrors are profoundly threatening
to the citizens.39 Therefore, in the public culture of Central
Africa from at least the middle of the twentieth century if not
earlier, much like in the public culture of Botswana,
considerable sections of the population (especially the urbanites
and middle classes) are effectively shielded off from African
historic religion by an effective screen of internalised shame.
In Zambia in the early 1970s I detected (as a youngerand less
sensitive observer) nothing similar, but over the past thirty
years I have seen the gradual installation of a precisely such a
screen. Today this altered state of affairs occasionally makes me
appear a social fool in that country, when unthinkingly I
publicly mediate a historic African religious identity as someone
who has obviously not permanently resided in the country
recently, whose main Zambian identity was formed in of the rural
areas of central western Zambia in the early 1970s when African
historic religion was still a dominant idiom there, who
subsequently became a diviner-priest in Botswana according to a
religious idiom which meanwhile has gained considerable public
currency in Zambia as well, and therefore as someone who does not
always realise that it is no longer socially acceptable to
mediate African historic religion in the public space of the town
and the open road.
One may wonder why Mudimbe should
stop, like he does, at the evocation of the few heroes and saints
of the cultural mutant order of clerical intellectualism (Kagame,
Kizerbo, Mulago, Mveng), and not trace the installation of that
mutant order throughout Central African society in the second
half of the twentieth century. With the general spread of formal
education (however low its level), and the prominence of clerical
intellectuals in the educational system, the main conditions were
set for the percolation of (admittedly: attenuated, compromised,
versions of) this mutant order far outside the seminaries,
convents and universities where it was originally engendered, to
become, perhaps, a standard cultural orientation among tens,
possibly hundreds of thousand of people of the urban middle class
in Central Africa. Did this happen? If it did, how did this
influence the political and religious itinerary of the societies
of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi in the second half of the twentieth
century? If it did, how did it help to explain Mobutuism, its
politics of authenticity (which, much like clerical
intellectualism, amounted to a virtualisation and thus
effectively an annihilation of historical African cultural and
religion), the specific form of proliferation of church
organisations which took place in Congo, and the general
emergence of a contemporary social order in which Christianity
and literacy have become the norm, and African historic religion
has been eclipsed or at best has gone underground, mainly to
emerge in highly selective and virtualised form in certain
practices of African Independent churches. Is perhaps the
violence (more specifically the death) which forms the refrain of
Mudimbe's spiritual itinerary, and which I am inclined to
interpret as the murder on African historic religion, akin to the
extreme and extremely massive violence which has swept Congo,
Burundi and Rwanda throughout the second half of the twentieth
century? Anthropologists like Devisch and de Lame have struggled
with the interpretation of the latter form of violence in Central
Africa,40 and their sociological interpretations, while adding a
social scientific dimension to the psychoanalytical and
philosophical hermeneutics of Mudimbe, certainly do ring somewhat
naive in the light of Mudimbe's essayistic philosophising,
although the latter does lack sociological imagination and
manifests the literature scholar's disinclination to think in
terms of large-scale social categories and their institutions.
This means that we might yet take
seriously Mudimbe's claim that Tales of faith is about any
post-colonial individual,41 and not just about himself and a
handful of fellow clerical and post-clerical intellectuals from
Central Africa. Despite his exceptional erudition, cosmopolitan
orientation, and success, Mudimbe's predicament is to a
considerable extent that of the contemporary Central African
middle classes in general. A glimpse of what lies at today's far
end of the itinerary that started with Kagame c.s., may be
gathered from the following impression, which I owe entirely to
the ongoing Ph.D. research of Julie Duran-Ndaya:
'In July,
2000, Kinshasa was the scene of a major church conference of the
Combat Spirituel (Spiritual Combat) movement. The conference
involved close to 20,000 people, many of whom have travelled to
Kinshasa from western Europe and other places of the Congolese
diaspora. Obviously we are dealing here with a highly significant
social phenomenon at a massive scale. The movement caters for
upper middle class and professional people, especially women.
Women also play leading roles in the movement's organisation. The
movement's doctrine and ritual combine an original re-reading of
the Bible with techniques of self-discovery and self-realisation
under the direction of female leaders. The spiritual battle which
members have to engage is, is a struggle for self-realisation in
the face of any kind of negations or repressions of personal
identity, especially such as are often the fate of ambitious
middle-class women in diasporic situations. In order to achieve
this desired self-realisation, it is imperative that all existing
ties with the past, as embodied in the traditional cultural norms
of historic Central African society, and as represented by the
ancestors, are literally trampled underfoot. Thus a major part of
regular church ritual is to go through the motions of vomiting
upon evocations of the ancestors, and of violently and repeatedly
stamping on their representations. The catharsis which this is to
bring about is supposed to prepare one for the modern, hostile
world. Some members experience very great difficulty in thus
having to violently exorcise figures and symbols of authority and
identity which even in the diffuse, virtualised kinship structure
of urban Congolese society today have been held in considerable
respect. But while this predicament suggests at least some
resilience of historic African religion (otherwise there would be
no hesitation at tramspling the past and the ancetors), it is
practically impossible for diasporic Congolese to tap, for
further spiritual guidance, the resources of historic African
religion in the form of divination, therapy and protective
medicine: not one reliable and qualified Congolese specialist in
historic African religion (nganga) is to be found in, for
instance, The Netherlands or Belgium.'42
The make-up of
this topical situation is reminiscent of that of the clerical
intellectual mutation half a century ago: the literate and
Christian format appropriated as self-evident yet subjected to
personal selective transformation, the rejection of an ancestral
past and of African traditional religion, the total inability to
derive any spiritual resources from the latter, and the effect of
being propelled into a mutant cosmopolitan cultural and spiritual
solution which is African by the adherent original geography and
biology, but not in substance.
Mudimbe is a capable, creative and
courageous thinker - one who can stand the vertigo of high
anxiety, being fundamentally homeless and alone without other
illusions than the quest for a placeless science and truth. To
him, the rest is 'incredible', is belles lettres.
Mudimbe's Tales of faith amount to
an 'act of faith' in the sense of auto-da-fé, the most terrible
destructive act to which Roman Catholicism as a regime of control
was capable of. The transmutation which produced clerical
intellectualism and thus gave us Mudimbe, was also an auto-da-fé
eradicating historic African religion from visibility and
accessibility in Central African life today.
CONCLUSION
Both Mudimbe
and myself have ended up, from socially very peripheral points of
departure, in a secure central North Atlantic position,
cherishing the comforting qualified universalism that comes with
academia, philosophy, classics, belles lettres. For Mudimbe, the
African heritage that was never to be his (because the
micropolitics of clerical education denied him access to and
accomplishment in African historic religion) continues to
intrigue him. He has made it its life's work to pinpoint the
intellectual history and philosophical implications of these
micropolitics, and to define, critique and increasingly control
through his highly influential writings, how the image of Africa
has been constructed and should be deconstructed. He has become
the most qualified, almost plenipotentiary censor of his own
spiritual and cultural loss as a post-African. For him, the
Africa of historic local religious forms is a domain of the
imaginary, of make-believe: fable, tale, myth, performance etc.
I feel that Mudimbe is stating
only one side of the story. He has fallen victim to what we might
call the deceptive politics of translocalisation, much as I have
fallen victim to the deceptive politics of locality by becoming
and remaining a sangoma.43 The gods I pray to in a loosely
African fashion (some of them as particular as my own or my
patients' ancestors, others tending to universality such as
Mwali, or the Virgin Mary, or the God whose mother she is) do not
need an epistemological validation because the rite turns them
from imaginary into real and into social facts which make a
difference since they decisively govern the behaviour of sizeable
sets of people.
Performance is more than the
liberation of difference for difference's sake, it is the
creation of a world which, while man-made and make-believe, yet
takes on a logic and a relevance of its own, reshaping the
contingencies of life into a place to inhabit, to cherish, and to
heal. Religion is more than a definitional exercise, more than a
defective epistemology believing the incredible: it is the
symbolic transformation through which the locality created by
performance is kept alive so that it may issue life, even in
death and through death. And politics is more than ethnocentric
textual comments produced in order to keep North-South hegemony
in place (as Mudimbe defines politics); it is also the parochial
struggle over meaning and resources which make up the smaller,
local universe, turning it into vital locality. African
spirituality,44 whether historic of Christian or Islamic or
syncretistic, is a social technology of sociability, whose forms
create meaning, power and healing regardless of the Western
epistemological status of its alleged dogmas and the supernatural
entities features therein.
Thus conceived, African historic
reeligion does go against the course of hegemonic history, and
forms a genuine challenge for the self-congratulatory mildness
with which Mudimbe depicts the project of clerical and
post-clerical intellectualism in Central Africa, taking for
granted the very impasse in which he ended up and from whihc he
appears to bne incapable of escaping: North Atlantic academic
rationality, and the end of African historic religion.
1
An earlier version of this paper was read at the School of
Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, 1st February, 2001,
as the opening lecture in a series of four, entitled 'Reading
Mudimbe', organised by Louis Brenner and Kai Kresse. The present
text comprises, in revised form, the full text of my oral
presentation at SOAS; that presentation however covered only 1/4
of the actual written text, to which I must refer the reader for
greater detail on the topics dealt with here, and for major
topics which had to be omitted from the 45 minutes presentation.
I am grateful to the organisers for creating a stimulating
framework in which I could articulate and refine my thoughts
about Mudimbe's work; to the African Studies Centre, Leiden, and
to SOAS for financing my trip to London, and to Patricia
Saegerman, Louis Brenner, Kai Kresse, Richard Fardon, Graham
Furniss, and other participants in the seminar for stimulating
comments on an earlier draft.
2
Mudimbe, V.Y., 1997, Tales of faith: Religion as political
performance in Central Africa: Jordan Lectures 1993, London &
Atlantic Highlands: Athlone Press.
3
Tales, p. 202.
4
Mudimbe, V.Y., 1988, The invention of Africa: Gnosis, philosophy,
and the order of knowledge, Bloomington & Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press/London: Currey; Mudimbe, V.Y., 1994, The
idea of Africa, Bloomington, IN and London.
5
Unfortunately, I have not yet been able to consult his explicitly
autobiographical book: Mudimbe, V.Y., 1994, Le corps glorieux des
mots et des choses, [ place: publisher ] .
6
I prefer the expression 'African historic religion' to
alternatives such as 'African traditional religion' or 'African
religion' tout court, in order to denote forms of religious
expression which existed on the African continent more or less
independently from and often prior to the penetration of such
world religions as Islam and Christianity, and which have
persisted in changed but recognisable form into the late
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when many of these forms were
drawn into the orbit of professional outsider description. The
word 'traditional' has been used in so many ideologically charged
contexts as to have become meaningless; and Islam and
Christianity have ranked among the religious forms of Africa ever
since the first millennium of the common era.
7
Tales, pp. 50-55.
8
Foucault, M., 1975, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison,
Gallimard: Paris.
9
Apart from the used of unintegrated scraps of book reviews, the
book's level of copy-editing is remarkably low. The spelling of
proper names in Mudimbe's work is often defective to the point of
dyslexia; e.g. Blummebach, Tales, p. 150, and Blumenback, p. 188,
for Blumenbach; cf Blumenbach's contemporary Hereen read Heeren,
Mudimbe, 'African Athena?', p. 119; Barret, read Barrett
(Barrett, D.B., 1968, Schism and Renewal in Africa, Nairobi:
Oxford University Press), Tales, p. 74; Livingston, read
Livingstone, Tales, p. 44, p.188 has it correctly; Al-Hjj Umar,
read Al-Hajj 'Umar, Tales, p. 90 and index (if he has the
translitteration jihâd whereas that -i- is usually not
explicitly represented in written Arabic, then he should also
have the common translitteration Hajj for whose -a- the same is
true). It is not only the copy-editing of Tales of faith which is
surprisingly defective. Also the biliography shows major lacunae.
The entire, massive oevre of Kagame is cited in the text (Tales,
pp. 139-141) without a single entry in the end bibliography. And
a Temples publication of 1959 is quoted without appearing the
bibliography (Tales, p. 155); probably this is simply the English
translation of Bantoe-philosophie, so for 1959 read 1979; Sally
Falk Moore's 1984 book is mentioned in the text but not listed in
the bibliography. Fortes, M. & G. Dieterlen, 1965, eds,
African Systems of Thought, Oxford University Press for
International African Institute, is listed as edited only by
Dieterlin, yet in Tales of faith, p. 161 a reference to 'Fortes
1965' appears which can only be this book; a very important quote
is derived from a 1978 article by Mveng which does not appear in
the bibliography (Tales, p. 173).
10
Personal communication, Richard Fardon, Graham Furniss, and Louis
Brenner, London, 1st February, 2001.
11
Tales, p. ix.
12
Early eighteenth century Christian Kongo prophets, and
twentieth-century Christian prophets in Southern Africa, are
discussed briefly in Tales of faith, pp. 71f.
13
Mudimbe, Parables and fables. Especially in his discussion of the
Luba genesis myth Mudimbe poses as one who, while not an
anthropologist, has rubbed shoulders with anthropologists and
moreover lays claim to a relevant lived experience apparently
considered by him as the equivalent of anthropological fieldwork
as a source of ethnographic authority:
'One may ask:
Whence comes this authority [ to speak on aspects of Luba or
Songye culture in anthropological terms ] . (...) My answer will
be simple. It is true that I am not an anthropologist and do not
claim to be one. I spent at least ten years of my life studying
ancient Greek and Latin for an average of twelve hours each week,
with more than that amount of time devoted to French and European
cultures, before being eligible for a doctorate in comparative
philology (Greek, Latin, and French) at Louvain University. I do
not know many anthropologists who could publicly demonstrate a
similar experience about their specialty in order to found their
authority in African studies. (...) My experience would define
itself somewhere between the practice of philosophy with its
possible intercultural applications and the sociocultural and
intersubjective space which made me possible: my Luba-Lulua
mother, my Songye father, the Swahili cultural context of my
primary education in Katanga (Shaba), the Sanga milieu of my
secondary education from 1952 to 1959 in Kakanda, near Jadotville
(Likasi), and, later on, at the Catholic seminary of Mwera, near
what was then Elisabethville, and my brief sojourn in a
Benedictine monastery in Rwanda.' (Parables and fables, pp.
124-125)
14
Buakasa Tulu kia Mpansu, 1973 L'Impensé du discours: kindaki et
nkisi en pays kongo du Zaire. Kinshasa: Presses universitaires du
Zaire.
15
Mudimbé [ Mudimbe ] , V.Y., 1982, L'Odeur du père: Essai sur
les limites de la science et de la vie en Afrique noire, Paris:
Présence Africaine, pp. 144-155.
16
Mveng, E., 1965, L'art d'Afrique noire: Liturgie et language
religieux, Paris: Mame; Kagame, A., 1955 [ 1956 ] , La
philosophie bantu-rwandaise de l'Être, Bruxelles: Académie
royale des Sciences coloniales; Mulago, V., 1965, Un visage
africain du Chrstianisme, Paris: Présence africaine; Ki-Zerbo,
J., 1972, Histoire de l'Afrique d'hier à demain, Paris: Hatier.
17
Cf. Platzeck, E.W, 1971, 'Ars combinatoria' in: Ritter, J., ed.,
Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Band 1, A-C,
Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe & Co, col. 521-522; a famous author
of an Ars combinatoria was Leibniz, published in Frankfurt am
Main, 1666.
18
Tales, p. 202.
19
Cf. Tales, p. 198:
'the stories I
have chosen to share in these lectures on conversion are, indeed,
not only unthinkable outside of a space circumscribed by African
elements but also well determined by anthropology and the
colonial saga, as well as the practices and missionizing of Islam
and Christianity'; italics added.
20
Howe, Stephen, 1999, Afrocentrism: Mythical pasts and imagined
homes, London/New York: Verso, first published 1998.
21
Tales, p. 143.
22
'For people familiar with African Christianity, the conversion
model [ i.e. the approach to Central African Chrstian
intellectual history as propounded in Tales of faith - WvB ] in
both its intention and realization would describe the African
critique as generally violent and often, alas, excessive, not
only in its evaluatrion of conversion policies but also of the
missionary.' Tales, p. 56; italics added.
23
Appiah, K.A., 1992, In my father's house: Africa in the
philosophy of culture, New York & London: Oxford University
Press; cf. Tales, pp. 63f for a most sympathetic reading; and on
Afrocentrism: Appiah, K.A., 1993, 'Europe Upside Down: Fallacies
of the New Afrocentrism.' Times Literary Supplement (London), 12
February, 24-25.
24
Tales, p. 89.
25
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 2000, 'Le point de vue de Wim van
Binsbergen', in: Autour d'un livre. Afrocentrisme, de Stephen
Howe, et Afrocentrismes: L'histoire des Afriocains entre Egypte
et Amérique, de Jean-Pierre chrétien [ sic ] , François-Xavier
Fauvelle-Aymar et Claude-Hélène Perrot (dir.), par Mohamed
Mbodj, Jean Copans et Wim van Binsbergen, Politique africaine,
no. 79, octobre 2000, pp. 175-180 - the next few pages of the
present argument are an English rendering of part of my French
article; van Binsbergen, Global Bee Flight; and: van Binsbergen,
W.M.J., 1997, ed., Black Athena: Ten Years After, Hoofddorp:
Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society, special issue,
Talanta: Proceedings of the Dutch Archaeological and Historical
Society, vols 28-29, 1996-97.
26
Mudimbe, V.Y. 1991 [ check ] , 'Letters of reference',
Transition, 53: 62-78, 71ff; Mudimbe, V.Y. 1992 [ check ] ,
'Saint Paul-Michel Foucault?' Transition, 57: 122-127.
27
Mudimbe, Parables and fables, p. xi.
28
Jung, C.G., 1987, Verzameld werk 8: De held en het
moederarchetype, Rotterdam: Lemniscaat; Dutch translation of Part
II of Symbole der Wandlung.
29
Tales, p. 131.
30
Tales, p. 104 (Diagne), p. 143 (Kagame).
31
Tales, p. 140.
32
Amselle, J.-L., 1990, Logiques métisses: Anthropologie de
l'identité en Afrique et ailleurs, Paris: Payot. For a similar
view on anglophone and lusophone Africa, cf. Vail, L., 1989,
'Ethnicity in Southern African history', in: Vail, L., red., The
creation of tribalism in Southern Africa, Londen/ Berkeley &
Los Angeles: Currey/ University of California Press, pp. 1-19;
cf. Tales, p. 152.
33
Amselle, intervention at a 1995 seminar at Leiden. Schilder, K.,
& van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1993, 'Recent Dutch and Belgian
perspectives on ethnicity in Africa', in: Ethnicity in Africa,
eds. van Binsbergen, W.M.J. & Kees Schilder, special issue of
Afrika Focus, 9, 1-2, 1993: 3-15; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1997,
'Ideology of ethnicity in Central Africa', in: Middleton, J.M.,
ed., Encyclopaedia of Africa south of the Sahara, New York:
Scribners, vol. 2, pp. 91-99; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1992,
Kazanga: Etniciteit in Afrika tussen staat en traditie, inaugural
lecture, Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit; shortened French version:
'Kazanga: Ethnicité en Afrique entre Etat et tradition', in:
Binsbergen, W.M.J. van, & Schilder, K., red., Perspectives on
Ethnicity in Africa, specia; issue 'Ethnicity', Afrika Focus,
Gent (België), 1993, 1: 9-40; English version with postscript:
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1994, 'The Kazanga festival: Ethnicity as
cultural mediation and transformation in central western Zambia',
African Studies, 53, 2, 1994, pp 92-125.
34
Tales, p. 184f.
35
Tales, pp. 179f.
36
Tales, p. 147.
37
Tales, p. 59.
38
de Boeck, F., 1991a, 'From knots to web: Fertility,
life-transmission, health and well-being among the Aluund of
southwest Zaire', academisch proefschrift, Katholieke
Universiteit Leuven; De Boeck F. and R. Devisch, 1994 Ndembu,
Luunda and Yaka divination compared: From representation and
social engineering to embodiment and world-making. Journal of
religion in Africa 24:98-133; Devisch, R., 1984, Se recréer
femme: Manipulation sémantique d'une situation d'infécondité
chez les Yaka, Berlin: Reimer; Devisch, R., 1986, 'Marge,
marginalisation et liminalité: Le sorcier et le devin dans la
culture Yaka au Zaïre', Anthropologie et Sociétés, 10, 2:
117-37; Devisch, R., , 1991 Mediumistic divination among the
Northern Yaka of Zaire: etiology and ways of knowing. In P. Peek
(ed.), African divination systems: ways of knowing. Bloomington:
Indiana university press 104-123; Devisch, R., & Brodeur, C.,
1999, The law of the lifegivers: The domestication of desire,
Amsterdam etc.: Harwood.
39
Toulabor, C., 2000, 'Sacrifices humains et politique: quelques
exemples contemporains en Afrique,', in: Konings, P., van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., & Hesseling, G., eds., Trajectoirs de
libération en Afrique contemporaine, pp. 211-226.
40
Devisch, R., , 1996 'Pillaging Jesus': healing churches and the
villagisation of Kinshasa. Africa 66:555-586; Devisch, R., , 1995
Frenzy, violence, and ethical renewal in Kinshasa. Public culture
7:593-629; de Lame, D., 1996, Une colline entre mille: Le calme
avant la tempête: Transformations et blocages du Rwanda rural,
Ph.D. thesis, Free University, Amsterdam; published by Tervuren:
Musée Royale de l'Afrique Centrale.
41
Tales, p. 198.
42
This passage based on Duran-Ndaya, J., 1999, Rapport de recherche
provisionnel, Leiden: African Studies Centre, internal report. I
am grateful for the many discussions I had with Mrs Duran-Ndaya
on her fascinating ongoing Ph.D. research.
43
Appadurai, A., 1995, 'The production of locality', in: R. Fardon,
ed., Counterworks: Managing the diversity of knowledge, ASA
decennial conference series 'The uses of knowledge: Global and
local relations', London: Routledge, pp. 204-225; de Jong, F.,
2001, Modern secrets: The power of locality in Casamance,
Senegal, Ph.D. thesis, Amsterdam University; van Binsbergen,
'Becoming a sangoma'; van Binsbergen, 'Sangoma in Nederland, o.c.
44
Cf. van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 2000, 'African spirituality: An
intercultural approach,' paper presented at the Dutch-Flemish
Association For Intercultural Philosophy, Research group on
Spirituality, Meeting of 6 June 2000, Philosophical faculty,
Erasmus University Rotterdam; also
http://come.to/african_religion; curiously, this paper was a
belated response to an editorial request made by Mudimbe.
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