Africa is the land of spirits and occult forces.
Amadou Hampâté Bâ
Very few today manage to explain the extreme complexity of endemic African religious systems.
The task is all the harder because in reality we come up against the obstacle of defining a unity of practice and a stable definition of the divine in the eyes of Africans, across space and time.
Nevertheless, one common point seems to stand out and to be the common religious vector across the whole of Africa, and that is the “cult” of ancestors. Studying the place the ancestor holds in the traditional African imaginary thus helps us understand the sacred character of reproduction in it.
Preserving the lineage, honouring the ancestors and oneself later becoming one is one of the major reasons why offspring are, in a way, the ultimate fruit of an accomplished life.
The individual can then smile in the face of possible physical death – because he never really dies – since his descendants will not fail to honour him in the beyond, thus perpetuating the chain of life of the lineage.
Indigenous African religions thus proceed from common principles: a relationship of closeness between the living and the departed ancestors (expressed through rituals and ceremonies), the spirits of the latter being able to interfere in the present and the future (positively or negatively); a materialised symbolisation of the elements of worship; through a creation, a sacred art, taking mainly the form of statuary and masks, richly decorated tombs, performing arts (songs, dances); belief in one (or several) supreme being(s) creator(s) of the universe; the recurrence of an original myth.
These cults are perpetuated by oral tradition, within families of fetish priests (among the Ewe), of blacksmiths (Bambara region), of ombiasy, mediums and possessed people (tromba and bilo cults of Madagascar). They generate elaborate artistic expressions and a mythological heritage that evolves and grows richer, because, as Lévi-Strauss analyses, mythical thought is by essence transformative. Each myth, barely born, transforms by changing narrator.
The ancestors are credited with the power to interfere in the present as in the future. That is why it is never good to upset them. Highly codified sexual rites can also be observed among the Bahutu and Batutsi of Rwanda.
Finally, the whole African land itself is considered sacred. Our trees, springs and lakes are all places of worship linked to the vital essence of the planet.
Indeed, it is essential to have numerous descendants, both to honour the departed ancestry and to become an ancestor oneself and to inscribe oneself creatively in the chain of the continuity of life.
The richest expressions of this cosmogony are certainly those generated by what Pierre Vérin defines as the osmosis between the original Asian contributions and African identity elements in that world apart that is Madagascar. On this singular large island, deeply Asian as much as African, the great majority of the population honours the ancestors in sophisticated rituals, the best known of which are the famadihana ceremonies (after taking them out of the tomb for a few hours, the living make the dead dance before offering them new shrouds) and tromba (possession ceremonies during which the spirit of a deceased person enters the body of a medium, as in Yoruba rituals and their derivatives santeria, macumba, etc.)
Malagasy funerary art joins that of Egypt and China in the architecture of tombs adorned with frescoes and steles, while burials are integrated into the landscape.
Here, the ontological link is signified symbolically by the magnificent so-called “erotic” Sakalava statuary that Jacques Lombard analysed with finesse: the statues represent couples of men and women, but also birds, having sexual relations. And this expression, which seems strange to the most Eurocentric travellers, has nevertheless a most explicit meaning: on the tombs in which the dead rest, the artistic figuration of a logic tied to Madagascar is displayed: Mandrosoa. The communion of the living with the ancestors: famadihana procession.
In the endogenous cosmogony: sexuality is voluptuous pleasure as much as a movement perpetuating the continuous thread of life, in the sense that “the sexual act can indeed be experienced as a symbolic return to the invisible land of origin from which everything arrives at birth, immanent in the womb of every woman where the lost point of the person moves (…) The physical consummation of love then becomes the supreme ceremony of fertile and convulsive reunion with the highest point of fascination.”
Eros transcends Thanatos in a dialectical paradigm represented by the statuary and the frescoes. And beyond the ancestors stand Andrianahary or Zanahary, the primordial ancestor, the lord of ancestors.
This is a supreme being whose theoretical representation is close to the celestial emperor of traditional Chinese religion. The Malagasy tribute to their ancestors passes through funerary constructions (tombs, statues, steles, standing stones) and through ceremonies, the most emblematic of which remains the famadihana (cf. Madagascar, island of ancestors / Madagascar, mother island)
Continental Africa has also, of course, developed highly organised religious systems.
Thus, the Nigerian Nobel Prize in Literature winner Wole Soyinka recalls that “the Yoruba pantheon is particularly rich and complex”. Because of local migrations from the Yoruba region to Ewe villages, this African religion saw in 2000 an extension of its influence, amplified by the official recognition of Vodun festivals in Benin, Ghana, Nigeria and Togo.
On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, the descendants of the slaves deported during the Trade readapted the cults that left for America in the collective imaginary of the men and women torn from African soil. And in the places of servitude of the West Indies, the Caribbean and the Americas, the cults derived from the great African religion of the Yoruba expressed insubmission, revolt, the search for identity roots, refuge from torture, rape and humiliation.
The names of the cults vary according to local specificities issuing from the same common ground: in Cuba santeria, in Brazil macumba, in Haiti vodou… These are genuine structured religions: “The Vodou pantheon has many loas or spirits, among them Damballah-Wedo, the treacherous and powerful serpent god, Erzulie Freda, goddess of love, flirtatious, selfish and sensual, and Agwe, the light-eyed god come from the sea. The loas love each other, hate each other, envy each other, leave each other and find each other again because nothing can separate them.” And the analysis made by Alfred Métraux in 1958 is of increased relevance in the 21st century: “As a religious system, Vodou has lost none of its creative force”
We also find a certain sacralisation of sexuality. Not relegated to the rank of a marginal act in an individual’s life, nor judged in the light of an assumed Manichaeism that could be attributed to certain contemporary religious inclinations, religion left to the sexual act and its symbolism the space to express itself fully in the collective unconscious.
The body, thus demystified through story, shows a desire for deep understanding of it and for passing on this same understanding to future generations. It is neither rare nor disconcerting to hear someone’s anus mentioned in a tale meant to be told to individuals of all ages, including young children.
A part of the body like any other, it belongs to a whole that is thus normalised. The anus like the reproductive organs, the breasts, so many elements which, out of modesty, in some societies would not fail to be hidden in other cultures, are here described without complexes, sometimes mocked, sometimes glorified; they are the representatives of a deep symbolism of the multiple states and functions of the human soul and its relationship with the invisible.
It is said, moreover, in Malinké country that there are 7 human gateways. 7 representing the number of visible bodily orifices, namely the ears, the eyes, the 2 nostrils, the mouth and finally the anus.
Sources :
– Afriques secrètes, Didier Mauro
