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5

Founding Ancestors

THE IMPLACABLE PARSON HAD NOT IN FACT GONE THERE TO SEE FOR himself, and there was little photography in those days to help the armchair traveller. But Dean Farrar was quite sure that he understood what manner of creatures these Africans were. Their features, he was able to report in 1865, were ‘invariable and expressionless’, their minds ‘characterised by a dead and blank uniformity’. They had ‘not originated a single discovery . . . not promulgated a single thought . . . not established a single institution . . . not hit upon a single invention’.

There might be something almost frantic about this piling up of negatives. But Dean Farrar had not written of the woes of little Eric for nothing. Give the Devil an inch, he knew, and the Devil would take a mile. He was not for giving the Devil even half an inch. Among the Africans, he declared at a time when the great majority of African peoples had not so much as been glimpsed by any European eye, ‘generation hands on no torch to generation’. Left to themselves, they were beyond salvation.

This was to become the great theme song of colonialist paternalism. Taking material simplicity for proof of primitive savagery, the most commonplace of men, when raised to positions of dominion, became as suddenly convinced of their civilising mission. ‘We have in East Africa’, opined Sir Charles Eliot, Britain’s first high commissioner there, ‘the rare experience of dealing with a tabula rasa, an almost untouched and sparsely inhabited country where we can do as we will.’ Elsewhere it was the same. When British pioneers in 1890 rode into the land which became Southern Rhodesia, they could not believe that ‘natives’ had raised the patterned walls of masonry they found there.

These ideas are among the mysteries of non-African belief that have somehow survived the colonial period. In the case of Southern Rhodesia, as it happens, more than half a century later an ethnologist began asking old men who lived in the rolling grasslands of the Mount Darwin district, north of modern Salisbury, whether they knew anything of the distant past. They hesitated and then they began telling him the history of their people and its kings. They went back to Mutota, the first of their strong rulers, who was ‘still the heart of the nation’ and whose burial ground was the hill of Chitakochangonya. They admitted that ‘we no longer talk about these matters very much, now that the Europeans have taken the place of Mutota’s sons’. But they remarked that there were elders still alive, even in the 1950s, ‘who say that if you listen carefully you can hear the roll of Kagurukute, the great drum of Mutota, at the time of the new moon, as you stand looking down upon the river Dande, beside the lofty grave’. Now Mutota had died in about 1450. The old men were recalling five centuries of statehood.

In truth the history of the Africans is nothing if not the ‘handing on of the torch’ from generation to generation. It is quintessentially concerned with the accumulation of ancestral wisdom, with the demonstration of a tabula piena of ancestral knowledge. For it is the appointed ancestors who have given peoples their identity and guaranteed the onward movement of life. They may be private ancestors or public ancestors, ‘family’ guarantees or ‘national’ guarantees, but in any case their role is crucial. They it is who have drawn up and sealed the beliefs and laws by which men reasonably live.

This statement is of course a simplification. Beliefs and laws were always subject to change, while the ancestors in their own time had themselves been men and, as such, subject to the pressures of everyday life. Yet it is a simplification which gets to the heart of the matter. Leaving aside the religious aspect for a while, I want here to consider the political and social meaning of ancestors, and especially of those ‘founding ancestors’ who, as Africans say, ‘began our life and brought us into the lands where we live’.

If the everyday thought of Early Iron Age peoples lies beyond our grasp, we can at least perceive something of their predicament. It is fairly certain, for example, that the remote ancestors of the Shona-speaking peoples, whose descendants appeared so history-less to the British pioneers of the 1890s, settled in the grasslands between the Zambezi and Limpopo more than a thousand years ago. Very typically for African history, they took shape from a mingling and eventual composition between incoming migrants and peoples already living in the land.

These were the early syntheses of cultures that contain the ‘beginning’ of the story. They must have been many, for the whole of recorded history tells repeatedly the same tale. Historians probing back through oral tradition come again and again upon the evidence for dispersal and migration as these relatively empty lands were gradually settled: dispersal of the Bantu-speaking peoples from a formative homeland that was probably the Congo savanna country; dispersal of the Luo-speaking peoples from a formative homeland in the plains to the west of the southern Nile; dispersal of other Sudanic speakers from this or that ‘initial zone’ of growth and multiplication.

As early populations grew in size, so did their reasons for dispersal. Political disputes, above all for succession to inherited authority, would cause disappointed leaders to look for a land of their own. These founding heroes would shift away with their followers, few or very few, and find their freedom in another country, by conquest if they must and were able, or else by seeking lands not yet occupied. And as the causes of dispersal became more complex and political, so also did the modes and mechanisms of social change.

But consider the predicament of these early groups in the solitudes of ancient Africa. Each is alone, or feels itself to be so. By moving away from its parent community, each has cut or weakened its ancestral lifeline, and suffers a corresponding sense of anxiety and risk. Often the group is very small, perhaps fifty or a hundred men with a few women and children. Generally it will hope to find wives where it is going; but seldom or never does it know where it is going. Having moved, the migrant group becomes separate, distinct, different from any other. Confronted with an unknown country, it must apply its narrow fund of technical knowledge in new material situations. But it must also do this in new non-material situations: in these, too, the group must invent and adapt.

Above all, each group must relieve its sense of anxiety and risk: it must reach an assurance about its new identity, rules of life, customs and beliefs. As Sangree says of the Tiriki in Kenya, its members must be enabled to supply themselves with answers to the questions: ‘Where did I come from? Who cares whether I live or die? Upon whom can I depend for food, land and shelter?’ Only a new ancestral lifeline, a new ‘system of ancestors’ for the group as a whole but also for each evolving segment of the group, can do this. The ordering of a given society into interlocking lineage identities, each with its own forefathers linked in turn to one another, can then supply the necessary ‘sense of affiliation and continuity’.

Ancestral figures in carved basalt, the larger one about 108 cms. high, from Ekoi country in south-eastern Nigeria. Drawn in the bush before its removal to the Jos Museum, the larger is from the lands of the Nnam people. Many such shaped and engraved stones exist in this country, but little is known of their origin.

This constant shaping of new identities and separate systems was a worldwide phenomenon, so that early societies in different continents must often have resembled each other in their underlying concepts. This indeed is what modern research affirms for later societies. Every group has needed to define itself in order to believe in itself. So as to enter a firm claim upon the future, every group has had to give itself a name and heritage. But this has supposed agreement on a common group-origin, even if fictional or deliberately contrived. The children of the United States of America derive from many ancestral origins; but they sit in school beneath the daily sign and symbol of the Stars and Stripes, ever visible and reassuring demonstration of their joint identity and common heritage, and hence their common future. The children of Africa have gone through educational academies of a different kind. Yet the ‘initiation’ courses and ceremonies, seminars and examinations through which they have passed were no less aimed at ensuring joint identity and common heritage as well as common future; and the shrines of the appointed ancestors—the constitutionally crucial ancestors—were there to confirm it.

Constitutionally crucial? Not all ancestors were important, but only those who were recognised as standing in the line of succession back to ‘the power without beginning’. These were the appointed ancestors who channelled that power to living men, and who in so doing provided the means of protecting the present, guaranteeing the future, and generally assuaging the doubts and worries of pioneering groups in the wilderness where they wandered and settled. There is thus no true dividing line between founding ancestors and superior spirit guardians. Back beyond Mutota, the founder of their long dynasty of the Mwanamutapas, the Shona think of their great ancestral spirits, their mhondoro who, as founding heroes, first taught how to smelt iron from the rocks and how to grow millet and sorghum. ‘With this iron the people made hoes, and the mhondoro taught them in dreams to till and plant crops.’ In that dry country it has always been the rains, rare and irregular, which have made the difference between food and famine: above all, then, the mhondoro presided over the giving or withholding of rain, and logically so, for how could the ancestors, in preparing a land for their people, have failed to solve the problem of rain?

It was in these senses that religious needs were seen as lying at the heart of social evolution. Social needs, that is, were conceived in religious terms. ‘After settling in an area’, Kimambo has noted of the Pare, ‘each group established its sacred shrine at which they connected themselves with the ancestors who had founded their group’, as well as with any ‘local ancestors’ whose spiritual powers were important. They did this neither from blind superstition nor from want of a ‘sense of reality’, but because no group could feel itself secure, settled and at peace with the logic of events until, by setting up the necessary shrines, it had identified itself as a defined community with a ‘natural right’ to live where it had chosen. Nor did they set up these shrines, generally, in order to worship their ancestors as gods, but to ‘connect themselves’ with those ancestors to whom suprasensible power had revealed the land and how to prosper in it. The parallel, perhaps, is with saints in the Christian canon. They, too, are forerunners of living men and women. Yet despite their human origins it is through them that many Christians have sought to link themselves with the ‘power without beginning’, and in ways which have ranged from mere reverence among the sophisticated to outright idolatry among the simple. Just so with the Africans and their appointed—that is, canonised—ancestors.

This bare model may be an abstraction, but it can still convey the essence of the truth. In thinking about it one needs continually to envisage the acute and actual problems of small communities at grips with strange and often hostile circumstances. There are many Biblical parallels. A Kenya historian of the Luo has compared their reactions with those of the wandering tribes of Israel. For the Israelites it was Moses who, as founding hero, brought them out of the sorrows of Egypt to the borders of a land flowing with milk and honey, who spoke with God and knew the ways and wishes of the ‘power without beginning’, and who defined the laws by which alone the Israelites could prosper. The God they named, however, had not been their own, for he was Jahweh of the Canaanites and lived on Mount Sinai; but they took over God in this Canaanite garb because it was he who had given them a home. Around AD 1500 the Padhola Luo came into eastern Uganda from the north-west. They too had wandered far and wide before finding their home. Once installed there they stopped calling God by the name they had used before, Jok, and began calling him Were. For it was God in his local garb as Were who had given them their Canaan, and so deserved their worship.

An interweaving of ideological traditions was obviously a continual process. Many of their early elements have survived in recognisable form. The Yoruba of southern Nigeria show this very well. Few peoples have so elaborate a cosmogony. The Yoruba think of divinity as a family of gods and goddesses who prefigure the social life of man but combine what appear to have been two quite separate traditions: those of the incoming ancestors, arriving in Yorubaland at some time before AD 1000, and those of other peoples who were already in the land.

In the Beginning there was Olodumare, God the archetypal Spirit. Having decided to create the world, Olodumare engendered Orishanla and sent him down to do the work. This he rapidly completed with the aid of other ‘archangels’. Orishanla then brought mankind out of the sky. They settled at Ife; and from Ife they spread across the Earth and made it fruitful.

But that is only half the story. In another large facet of Yoruba belief, it is not Orishanla who created the world at the bidding of Olodumare, but Oduduwa. Coming from somewhere far away in the east—from Arabia according to a later tradition doubtless inspired by Islam—Oduduwa then brought the Yoruba into their land, ruled them from Ife, and begat the men and women who were to rule or provide rulers for other Yoruba communities. ‘His eldest daughter, it is said, was the mother of the Olowu of Owu; another was the mother of the Alaketu of Ketu. One son became the Oba of Benin, another the Alake of Ake, another the Onisabe of Sabe, another the Alafin of Oyo.’

How reconcile Oduduwa with Orishanla? In Yoruba traditions as we have them today, there seems to have been conflation of two initially separate social charters. According to this conflation, ‘it was indeed Orishanla who got the commission from Olodumare but, through an accident, he forfeited the privilege to Oduduwa who thus became the actual creator of the solid earth’. The incoming Oduduwa tradition, in short, became woven with another, lying behind the Orishanla tradition, which presumably belonged to the population whom the incomers found and mingled with.

The ‘accident’ whereby Oduduwa supplanted Orishanla was the fruit of movements made long centuries ago. Yet its enduring sense of spiritual clash and redistribution of power has been so deep as to keep it vigorously alive. Even today, ‘the priests of Orishanla find it necessary to make a compensatory claim that even though Oduduwa once supplanted Orishanla in the honour of creating the solid earth, and therefore in seniority over all the other divinities, he could not maintain the machinery of the world, and therefore Olodumare had to send Orishanla to go and set things right and maintain order.’

The point here lies not in the picturesque details of a legendary compromise between incomers and aboriginals, but in the care that was taken, that had to be taken, to legitimise a new arrival and a new synthesis. What right could any people have to come from somewhere else and settle in a new land? The title to any piece of land lay with the Spirit of the Earth. To seal their right to occupy and settle, incomers must make their peace with this Spirit. They could do this only through a process of spiritual reconciliation sanctioned by appropriate rites. Otherwise the Spirit of the Earth would not recognise their legitimate existence in the land. Failing this act of connexion, even the appointed ancestors of the incomers would lose their spiritual power, for they would be cut off from its divine source.

This is to some extent translating African concepts into another language of religious thought. God as an entity or being has been usually a distant and even indifferent figure for Africans. What has mattered for them is not the hierarchical father of Mosaic tradition, whom they may think little concerned with the affairs of men, but the ancestral channel of spiritual legitimation through which flows the life-force, or whatever other limping definition one may use, that drives the world and makes it live. In this crucial matter of legitimation, however, ‘God’ and the ‘ancestral channel of the life-force’ come to pretty much the same thing. The examples are many.

At some time around AD 1350 a people living along the north bank of the Congo river, not far from its junction with the Atlantic Ocean, underwent a familiar split in their ranks. Needing more land, a chief’s son decided to leave home. He gathered followers and went south over the wide river near the modern town of Boma. Pushing into what is now northern Angola, they came into the country of the Mbundu and Mbwela peoples. Here, the traditions say, they conquered for themselves a little homeland near their later capital of Mbanza or São Salvador.

Having won this foothold they still had to legitimate their presence; mere conquest was not enough. The traditions are careful to note that Wene, chief of the incomers, thereupon married into one of the clans of the people already settled in the area. But the clan he chose was the one whose ancestors were recognised as holding the spiritual title to the land. Kabunga, the head of this clan in Wene’s time, was priest of the shrine of the Spirit of the Earth: the shrine, in other words, at which titular legitimisation must be sought through the only ancestors who were valid for the purpose. Marrying into Kabunga’s clan, Wene could affiliate himself and his successors to this all-important line of other people’s ancestors. He could properly take over Kabunga’s title of mani and rule henceforth as Mani-Kongo, Lord of Kongo, duly accepted by the Spirit of the Earth. Even today, six centuries later, this legitimation is still recalled in annual ceremonies.

Just how strongly such conceptions were rooted in African thought was afterwards shown in the Americas. There, wherever large groups of Africans could escape from slavery and rebuild their lives in freedom, they called at once for guidance from their own cultures. In Brazil the ex-slave quilombos, and most notably of all the famous seventeenth-century republic of Palmarès, were founded in laws and customs drawn mainly from the western Bantu peoples. The candomble associations of certain Brazilian cities were, to some extent still are, thoroughly African in content, however exotic in form. Only thirty years ago Herskovits found clear evidence among the so-called ‘Bush Negroes’ of Surinam—descendants of West Africans taken to this Dutch colony after 1600 who had escaped to the forest and conserved their independence—that the spirits of the Earth were regarded as the possession of the aboriginal inhabitants, of the ‘Indians’ whose ancestors had first inhabited this land.

The model was obviously subject to much local variation; and the variations became ever more numerous as African lands were filled with the forerunners of their present societies. But essentially it was a model which held good for every situation. It consisted in the framing of a social charter sanctioned by the sense of what was ‘right and natural’, the sense of walking in the ways of life: confirmed and elaborated, as will be seen, by the most purposive ritual, by a wide range of arts, and sometimes by systematic explanations of the universe. Yet all this structure of sanctioned behaviour had its foundations firmly on the ground. And the ground was that of subsistence economy and family life.