Category: Culture

African spirituality is obviously an edifice of traditional practices and beliefs, however undergirding this is a conceptual infrastructure that reveals the structural dynamics of African spiritual practices and their social-psychological role.

One of the chief elements of this is the significance of divinity in African thought. African cultures do not posit separations between the sacred and profane, that is between the mundane and the spiritual. These overlap. Some might even argue that they are the indistinguishable.

As such, humans, nature, values, and so on all exist within the realm of the divine. Their sacredness is often attested to in the formation of ritual and beliefs pertaining to them. As such, as Jacob H. Carruthers has attested, there is no fundamental alienation in the traditional African worldview.

The construction of divinity in African culture must be understand as a process which seeks to represent all of the above, not only forces of nature, but also principles and ideals as representations of divinity—or more broadly conceived—as facets of reality itself. Hence African conceptions of divinity reveal a variety of forms as the following examples from Kemet, the Yorùbá, and the Akan demonstrate.

Divinity	Manifestations	Origin
Asase Yaa	Earth	Akan
Djehuti	Articulate speech and wisdom	Kemet
Maat	Truth, justice, and divine order	Kemet
Nana Adade Kofi	Iron, strength, and warriorhood	Akan/Guan
Nana Asuo Gyebi	The river and cultural reclamation in the Diaspora	Akan/Guan
Ogun	Iron, warriorhood, and technology	Ogun
Ori	Human consciousness and personal divinity	Yorùbá
Oshun	The river, beauty, femininity	Yorùbá
Re	The sun	Kemet
Seshat	Writing	Kemet
Shango	Lightening and thunder	Yorùbá
Yemoya	The sea	Yorùbá

What these examples suggest is that African spirituality reflects concerns with the elements which constituted human life in both its most functional and expansive senses. The need to live in harmony with nature and other human beings, the promotion of positive ideals, and the encouragement of aspiration and productivity are all represented in these and other concepts of divinity. Thus African spirituality is concerned with both issues pertaining to the unseen and immaterial, but clearly to the visible material world as well. In fact, the physical world of utu (humanity) was the arena wherein one’s (spiritual) journey was expressed as captured in the Igbo conception of chi or the Akan concept of nkrabea, both of which refer to the destiny of the human being.

Sources for further reading
Balla, Muriel. 2009. Handbook of Concepts in Kemetic Spirituality. Chicago, IL: Kemetic Institute.
Carruthers, Jacob H. 1984. Essays in Ancient Egyptian studies. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press.
Carruthers, Jacob H. 1995. MDW NTR: Divine Speech. London: Karnak House.
Kamalu, Chukwunyere. 1998. Person, Divinity, & Nature. London, England: Karnak House.
Karade, Baba Ifa. 1994. The Handbook of Yoruba Religious Concepts. Boston: Weiser Books.
Opokuwaa, Nana Akua Kyerewaa. 2005. The Quest for Spiritual Transformation. New York: iUniverse.

Cultural hybridity is perhaps an inevitable feature of human cultures in this era. The movement of people, goods, and information over the last five centuries accounts for this. This is no different for African people wherever we find ourselves. This is part of why I argue that cultural purity is an unrealistic striving. It is incongruent with the material condition of humanity. This, whether positive or negative, is simply an extant reality.

The manifestations of such hybridity among our people reveals itself in a myriad of ways–language, religion, music, movement-based practices, and so on. This is what I have referred to as a pattern whereby one will encounter Africans in the US whose cultural praxis spans a range of domains from the African Diaspora to Africa (ancient and “modern”) to India to China and so on.

Tomorrow there is a Odwirafo festival on the South Side of Chicago. This is a traditional festival from the Akan people of West Africa. The subject is healing and the keynote speaker is a long-time Tai Chi practitioner. Tai Chi is a traditional Chinese fighting art. This is a case in point of this tendency towards hybridity.

To use the tools available to you is intelligent. Thus, I think that our people’s embrace of various healing, combative, and other modalities has been intelligent, especially given that our access to traditional African knowledge of these kind remains limited. However, it is incumbent upon us to both maximally use those African knowledges available to us, in addition to seeking and constructing additional knowledge. There are many areas where such a process can be applied.

Naming is one such area. There are no discernible barriers preventing us from using and promoting African names.

Languages is another. There are many African languages that are quite accessible to us. The Swahili language is, by far, the most accessible for Africans in the US, but there are abundant resources for those seeking to learn the languages of Kemet (ancient Egypt), the Akan, and the Yorùbá as well. There is also a growing body of resources pertaining to the Igbo, Kikongo, and Wolof languages. What is required is our resolve to learn, use, and transmit these languages. I would argue that these are more of a problem.

Various movement disciplines are another area open to us. Capoeira and African and African Diasporic dance traditions are readily accessible to us. Fu-Kiau stated that dance is a modality of healing. Therefore, these practices have utility beyond the performative, utility that remains untapped amongst us.

Perhaps the areas of greatest importance however, are those which have been the preoccupations of African intellectuals for over a century–history and critical theory. History is, obviously, an area of culture and is indispensable to our regeneration as a people. By critical theory I am simply referring to the efforts of our people to formulate critical analyses of our condition and solutions to this malaise. Martin Delany, Ida B. Wells, Marcus Garvey, Kwme Nkrumah, Cheikh Anta Diop, Malcolm X, Marimba Ani, Frances Cress Welsing, Jacob H. Carruthers and others have offered us rich insights to build upon. In fact I would argue that the study of history and critical thought is necessarily a means to effectively inform our discernment of what non-African ideas and practices may be congruent or non-congruent with the broader and necessary process of Sankɔfa or re-Africanization.

Ultimately, I think that what must be remembered is that we bring an African essence to all that we do. That African essence, when we have studied our history and critical thought and have internalized them, enables us to transform whatever we touch, making it serve our interests.

The orientation towards hyperrelativism (that is, “truth” is whatever I as an individual determine it to be) is deeply embedded within this culture. It is something that classical or traditional African societies would regard as dangerous, corrosive to the social order.

In the context of kmt, truth, or Maat, was exceedingly important. In fact, Maat was seen as order itself. The so-called “Prophecies of Neferti” states: iw mAat r iyt r st.s isft dr.ti r rwty, which I translated as “Maat is in her place, above injustice. Cast out Isft.” isft, or “wrongdoing, disorder” was antithetical to truth. The negation of truth was in fact isft.

The Fulani also address the notion of truth in their deep thought when they state: Ko doole waawi goonga kono ko goonga sakitotoo; which translates as, “Power can overcome truth but it is the truth that lasts.” For the Fulani, like the kmtyw, truth is not ephemeral, not subject to the relativistic nature of fashion. In fact, they posited truth as that which endured, that upon which one should rely and build. On a certain level therefore, one must consider that African notions of truth are predicated on a certain valuing of tradition, and a valuation of tradition as that which truth has established, as we see this in the deep thought of other African people as well.

The Wolof address it this way: Lu bant yàgg-yàgg ci ndox, du tax mu soppaliku mukk jasig; or “Even if a log soaks a long time in water, it will never become a crocodile.” Here they posit that things possess an essential nature, one which is not susceptible to arbitrary change. Of course, things change, but in African cultures, changing circumstances did not necessarily result in the delegitimation of the entire edifice of tradition or traditional knowledge. The Swahili put it this way: Kila kitu chageuka isipoku wa kitu kimoja tu; or “Everything is subject to change except one thing. The leopard cannot change its spots.”

To me this raises pertinent questions about the nature of “truth” and the dangers in failing to apprehend it in African terms. Dr. Mario Beatty says, “In explaining Maat, this means going beyond the definition of it as truth, justice, righteousness, & universal order to provide some sense of what African people meant by these notions because they do not even remotely parallel the Western sense of these terms.” Thus we should be cautious in positing equivalency between African and Western conceptions of truth.

I argue that seeking to grapple with the Western notion of truth may be an exercise of limited utility. Whether we are speaking of hyperrelativism or specious scientism or some other construct, the imperative remains to see the world through African eyes. As Jacob H. Carruthers has stated, “We have been dealing with the alligators, we must now face the possibility that the solution to our problems may require that the swamp be drained. Too few of us have prepared ourselves to deal with this possibility.”

Many years ago, when at the Sankɔfa Conference, Baba Agyei Akoto observed that one of the primary tensions in the lives of African people is the struggle between tradition and modernity. He argued that many of our people have grown estranged from our traditions as they have progressively embraced the dominant Western paradigm, and with it, its notions of progress and universality.

This tension is dramatized in wonderful fashion in Julie Dash’s film, The Daughters of the Dust. In the film a Gullah family prepares to move to the mainland. The struggles surrounding the move were not merely logistical, but also epistemological and ontological as the relevance and perseverance of the African way was an indelible issue to be confronted. Thus, the Gullah Islands represented the spatial locus of tradition, while the mainland represented modernity’s locus—and their potential estrangement or alienation from tradition.

I fear that this drama has not only played itself out in the lives of African people, but that it continually plays itself out the world over at least for the past three or more centuries. We are confronted by a social and political order, ultimately a cultural order that decries tradition, our tradition as anachronistic—that it is outmoded, dated and irrelevant. And while we have not universally ventured towards the setting sun (that is the Western horizon) as the presumed apex of human possibility, it possible that most of us have been fundamentally decentered due to the disruption and destabilization of African life as a result of the Maafa. Thus, much of what has survived as our tradition, is often fragmentary, or worse corrupted.

It should be noted that this malaise has not only been visited upon us, but upon much of humanity, who have also witnessed an intergenerational weakening of their cultural moorings, thus leading to calls for various forms of re-indigenization, of which our own struggle for re-Africanization may also be understood.

Before proceeding, I should elaborate on an operative definition of tradition. Elsewhere I have attempted to problematize notions of tradition that ascribe to it a static quality. As such, “Tradition is a moving target. We seize upon one of its transitive states, claiming to have captured the essence of a thing, only to glimpse a temporally and spatially contingent phenomenon.” Tradition, can be considered as the collective cultural productivity of a people as it unfolds through time and across space that is reflective of their asili, that is their core cultural values, beliefs, practices, and so on. Marimba Ani employed the term asili in this manner in her work Yurugu. Here I am arguing that tradition is not merely what people were doing “back then”, but rather that tradition entails past, present, and future practices that that are consanguine with the asili of a culture.

Consanguinity, I argue, is critical in discerning the continuity of tradition, as it, like all else in reality, is subject to incessant change. Thus, if we are to consider African people’s movement through time and space, “tradition” has been variable in form, yet I argue constant in essence. Jacob H. Carruthers’s discussion of the significance and symbolism of speech in African cultures from antiquity to the present captures this. Such an analysis can be applied to a range of bodies of cultural activity including food production and preservation practices, theology and ritual, language, kinesthetic practices, and so on.

Cultural transmission and its adaptation and adjustment is one of the principal means whereby tradition is sustained and adapted over time. Fu-Kiau offers a wonderful portrait of this in his work Kindezi: The Kongo Art of Babysitting. He captures the ways in which such processes animated the texture of daily life. Thus, in the traditional society, cultural transmission was embedded in the day-to-day practices that sustained the community. Its disruption, as in the case of our Maafa¹, has been achieved via both the dismantling of many of these communal structures and also subjecting various community members—especially children—to a form of mis-education² designed to facilitate European dominance. European dominance requires, not merely the eradication of communal infrastructure, but also the appropriation of the process of socialization. Absent this, those tendencies within the traditional culture which might compel the revitalization and renewal of the culture and the restoration of sovereignty could provoke sustained resistance to European dominance. As such, tradition—which represents a kind of societal trajectory towards one’s ancestral traditions is supplanted by modernity—a societal trajectory towards the Western model of society, one which necessarily devalues the former, while idealizing the latter. All of this occurs while ignoring that modernity has been achieved, in large part, due to the disruption and decimation of the aforementioned tradition, in addition to negating a deep engagement with tradition as a repository of wisdom and solutions for many of the challenges confronting us.

Ultimately, while it is important to note the possibilities within tradition of supporting processes of re-Africanization, it is also necessary to acknowledge that this process is not without difficulty. At that same gathering, Baba Agyei Akoto said that “Everything is broken.” Thus, many of our systems have been dismembered, making our fragmented memories of our past a mirror for the state of our cultural infrastructure. What protocols have we devised which enable us to reach across the chasm of disruption in order to restore the African way? Are we resolved to make a home for ourselves within the promise and possibility of the African way? Or have we been seduced by the myopia which suggests that nothing is either possible or desirable outside of modernity?

Our answers to these questions inevitably animate actions, vectors towards the future.

 

1. Maafa is a Swahili that translates as disaster or calamity. It is a term that Dr. Marimba Ani offered to describe and identify the interrelated processes of slavery and colonialism, and their legacies.
2. Mis-education is a term coined by Dr. Carter G. Woodson to describe a formal process of socialization focused on perpetuating the dominance of Europeans via the utilization of African accomplices whose socialization via schools has prepared them for little else.