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4

Unity and Variation

IT SEEMS TO ME THAT THIS RUSTIC CIVILISATION OR GROUP OF civilisations may be regarded as a large achievement in the annals of mankind. But it is one which has had scant attention from the outside world. By contrast, many writers have celebrated the ancient Greeks for the ways in which they overcame an utter ‘lack of precedent’, devising and codifying laws ‘constitutional, civil, sacral and criminal’ with no one to guide or help them—not even, we are told, in the midst of that geophysically so small and helpful Mediterranean world—until they produced what Finley has called a ‘situation of compulsive originality’. Yet even while admiring the ancient Greeks, one may perhaps still wonder how far their ‘lack of precedent’ really existed in the wake of the high civilisations of antiquity which preceded them. Didn’t Herodotus, after all, tell us that the names of the gods came to Greece from Egypt?

Without suggesting that the achievements of the ancient Africans were ‘the same’ as those of the Greeks, it may be reasonable to think that they were in one great aspect superior. They really did evolve much out of little, or out of nothing at all. If one should praise ‘the Greek spirit’ as splendidly creative and inventive, one may perhaps express some admiration for an ‘African spirit’ which was far less favourably placed for the elaboration of the arts of life, but none the less made this continent supply the needs of man. Where, after all, lay the precedent for the social and ideological structures built by the Africans, so various and resilient, so intricately held together, so much a skilful interweaving of the possible and the desirable? Where did these systems draw their sap and vigour except from populations who evolved them out of their own creativeness? Even allowing for the distant precedents of Egypt, the peoples who settled Africa had surely less to go upon than the ancestors of Pericles. The balance needs adjusting here.

How great was the African isolation? The evidence that we have, still fragmentary and tentative, points insistently to some kind of ‘common fund’ of long ago. Peoples separated by vast distances have similar ideas which suggest the same Stone Age source. Creation legends offer a good example.

Among the Dinka of the southern Sudan, latterday descendants of those ‘blameless Ethiopians’ whom Homer praised, it is held that long ago in a golden age God lived among men and was in no way separate from them. Separation came to this African Eden when a woman with her eagerness or greed for cultivation happened to hit God with a hoe, whereupon God withdrew into the heavens ‘and sent a small blue bird to sever a rope which had previously given men access to the sky and to him. Since that time the country has been ‘spoilt’, for men have to labour for the food they need, and are often hungry . . .’ At which point, for good measure, Death came also into the world.

Several thousand miles away, in the forests of Ghana, the Akan have much the same idea, though there is nothing to suggest that they ever knew any contact with the ancestors of the Dinka or with neighbours of the Dinka who tell the same general story. ‘Long long ago’, says the Akan legend, ‘God lived on earth or at least was very near to us. But there was a certain old woman who used to pound her fufu [cassava meal], and the pestle used to knock up against God. So God said to the old woman, “Why do you always do that to me? Because of what you are doing I am going to take myself away up into the sky.” And of a truth he did so.’

Such parallels could be multiplied. ‘Beast burials’ have been found among ancient peoples as far apart as the Nile Valley and southern Africa. Cattle folk as distant from each other as Uganda and Zululand have customarily buried their distinguished dead in shrouds of oxhide. Rams were the symbol of God in ancient Egypt and Nubian Kush, and have so remained among many West African peoples. The python is a similarly prestigious beast.

Simple diffusion from a ‘common fund’, or an effect of like circumstances producing like results? Probably we shall never know. The same basic conceptions of socio-religious belief and organisation appear again and again. But so they do throughout the world of antiquity. Anyone who cares to try his luck at tracing everything to Egypt, or Sumeria, or some other single ‘fount and source’ will find no lack of helpful evidence. The Babylonians, for example, evolved from the Sumerians a ‘universe of seven’, counting the seven steps of their ziggurats by the names of the seven planets corresponding to seven great gods, seven gates to the underworld, seven winds, seven days of the week. Faraway in western Africa, as it happens, there are peoples with a comparable symbolism.

The Dogon of the Middle Niger lands are said to consider that creation began with an egg containing the elemental germs of the world’s things: these germs developed ‘first in seven segments of increasing length, representing the seven fundamental seeds of cultivation, which are to be found again in the human body, and which . . . indicate . . . the organisation of the cosmos, of man, and of society.’ Their near neighbours the Bambara, though of a different history and language grouping, have the same idea. For them ‘the earth is divided into seven parts corresponding to seven heavens’, and was so arranged by Faro, the agent of Creation. Yet it will be a lively step in imaginative speculation that makes the Dogon and Bambara derive these ideas from Babylon.

Whether or not they mean anything in terms of diffusion, there is no end to such parallels. In ways that match with the cosmological symbolism of the Mossi, Fon and other peoples, the Dogon conceive of life’s development as ‘the perpetual alternation of opposites—right and left, high and low, odd and even, male and female—reflecting a principle of twin-ness, which ideally should direct the proliferation of life’. This dialectical principle is said to be enshrined in another: in a ‘conception of the universe that is based, on the one hand, on a principle of vibrations of matter and, on the other, on a general movement of the universe as a whole’. The pairs of opposites ‘support each other in an equilibrium which the individual being conserves within itself’, while ‘the infinite extension of the universe is expressed by the continual progression of matter along this spiral path’.

But there too the diffusionists can have a field day if they wish. For the Mesopotamian origin of the world was likewise ‘seen as a prolonged conflict between two principles, the forces making for activity and the forces making for inactivity’, a dialectical concept that is likewise found among the ancient Chinese. This strife of opposites, so infinitely more persuasive to modern science than the merely lineal explanations of European tradition, was American as well. Among the Aztecs ‘an eternal war was fought symbolically between light and darkness, heat and cold, north and south, rising and setting suns’; and this was the Sacred War that ‘permeated the ritual and philosophy of Aztec religion’.

If the comparative study of religion has so far had little to say about the extension of such parallels to Africa, this is chiefly because African religions have often been regarded as no such thing. In forms less crude but remarkably pervasive, the dictum of Sir Samuel Baker has held sway: Africans have been ‘without a belief in the Supreme Being’. They have bowed down to wood and stone; and that was that. Yet it has proved to be nothing of the kind. Many studies have subsequently shown Africans to be fully conversant with the notion of a High God who created the world in a time of happiness, before the coming of Death and Work, and with other beliefs common to other branches of mankind. They too, for example, have had the notion of a filial divine saviour such as Nummo, the son of the High God Mawu of the Ewe who was sent down to earth ‘to clear the forests and make tools’: beliefs, one may add, which have owed nothing to Christian teaching. As elsewhere, monotheism could subsume polytheism in a ‘conjunction of the one and the many’ so as to allow for varying degrees of cosmological explanation. God might be the remotely theoretical scientist who understood and controlled the total workings of the Universe. But lesser gods and spirits were available as workaday technicians to keep the world in motion.

African writing will tell more about this. Some British anthropologists at present suspect their French colleagues, and notably Griaule, of over-systematising the cosmological ideas of Africans, and of turning into regular philosophies what may be little more than patterns of symbols. To accusations of this kind the French reply that the British have failed to perceive African ontologies simply because they have failed to look for them; and this particular Anglo-Gallic war, for the moment, robustly continues. But what neither side seems to doubt is the genuine existence, in Goody’s words, of ‘a rich symbolism and elaborate cosmological ideas of the general variety to which Griaule draws such energetic attention’.

One may reasonably suppose that Africans drew upon a ‘common fund’ of Stone Age thought that was available to other ancient peoples. Yet it needs to be remembered that most of Africa was in relatively great isolation over a long period, and especially after desiccation of the Sahara had set in seriously around 2000 BC. This means that the great formative time of Early Iron Age growth and spread occurred when the channels of effective communication with the outside world were long since cut or much reduced. These peoples had therefore to evolve out of their own energy and genius, applying whatever they conserved of the antique fund of Stone Age thought to situations that were new and were specific. The manner of their doing so is the cultural history of Africa.

A few other preliminary points should be made. Some reading back into the past from recent or fairly recent evidence will be unavoidable. How great will the distortion be? Less, perhaps, than one might fear. Social anthropologists acknowledge this when they use their ‘ethnographic present tense’. With this they describe an observed situation which appears to have been largely the same in the past, and sometimes the remote past. All societies observable today or recently have changed during the past century or less, and often changed greatly. But many of their traditions have held sufficiently firm for the trained observer to spot the important points of transition, and to list to some extent the consequential changes. By taking these into account it is possible to arrive at broadly reliable assumptions about the pre-colonial situation.

These societies were never static over long periods, and seldom over short ones. They constantly evolved. The base line, then, is necessarily a blurred one. Aside from one or two written accounts with helpful clues, we cannot know except by distant inference what men thought or believed in Early Iron Age times. What can be done is to perceive the nature of the institutional process and to describe systems, symbols, and beliefs which, however modified in detail, have had essentially the same content for a long while. Having got as far as this it may then be possible to understand the reasons why things happened as they did; and why they did not happen, and no doubt could not happen, in some other way.