Primal Understanding

I've been reading John V. Taylor, Primal Vision: Christian Presence Amid African Religion (Fortress, 1963). I was stunned by this paragraph (and many others besides— Taylor, an Anglican missionary with experience even in Uganda, is really, really good!):

The first ancestor in most African myths is, strictly speaking, the equivalent of Abraham. Most Africans recognize, of course, like the Banyarwanda, that ‘all men have indeed a common nature; they are ultimately the descendants of the same ancestor. But this notion does not seem to be very significant, for Banyarwanda are much more impressed by the difference displayed by the various castes.' [quoting African Worlds, ed. Daryll Forde: Oxford, 1954.] Our kinship group looks after itself, living and dead together; the other family, the other tribe, presumably has its own independent solidarity, its own ancestors and hero-gods, but that is not our concern. Responsibility and obligation do not extend to the outsider; he may be a threat and in any case is better left alone. As the Twi proverb puts it: The stranger who came says he saw no one in the town, and the people he met also say ‘We saw no one come.’ So Africans have built, and today are still building, their psychic and political security on the old, narrow claim: We have Abraham to our father. But the figure of Adam, when they have discovered him, grips the African villagers, like a revelation, so that they turn back again and again to spell out with undimmed wonder the opening chapters of the Bible. Here is the charter for a human solidarity which can outlast the breakdown of tribal and kinship ties, for they who know a common ancestor must share a common destiny, and the end, like the beginning, must be God’s creation. (pp. 122-123)

Raised on the Bible, schooled by Eliade, I kept wondering and asking my students— Who is your Adam? And no one could tell me. But now I understand: 'The first ancestor in most African myths is, strictly speaking, the equivalent of Abraham.' It's about the coming of our tribe to this land, and our life here in (buGanda, Teso, Acholi...)

Fascinating book. Between Taylor and Janheinz Jahn (Muntu: African Culture and the Western World: Grove Weidenfeld, 1961), I think i am finally beginning to understand what the deep language is, what life is about, and what therefore the 'good news' might sound like in Africa— and what has to be said from my side, to make sense! Because I found out as soon as I got there that the Chalcedonian Definition, mediated through European American academe, really didn't. Or at least, that I had a lot of work ahead of me to find where the connections were. Not what— but how?— did my students think— of themselves, of the world, of the church?

"The primal understanding of what Man is can be seen sociologically expressed in the traditional pattern of village life throughout Africa." I did glimpse this traditional pattern of village life when I visited a few of my seminarians' homes during the holidays. But both books were written long before Aids, and the horrors of corruption, continuing plunder, famine, genocide, and coups d'etat that we've seen since Independence. So Africa as I experienced it is a lot more complicated, and a lot less traditional than the Africa that even visionaries were writing about 45-50 years ago. Not least because all the wisdom-bearers who could tell those ancestral stories are dead now, and their children uprooted and urbanized. But it was pretty clearly breaking down already even then; the writing was on the wall, and even in 1963, Taylor was saying, "The pattern is being irretrievably smashed. But" —he continues— "the idea which it embodied is so central to all primal religion that we must first see what that pattern has been before we can understand the idea itself or discover whether it can survive in new forms" (p. 94). I think that pattern of thought, the basic orientation in life, is still there, despite globalization and all the rest. Jahn's notion of "skokian" is useful here.

Still, I felt it was a symptom of catastrophe that people are building square, brick houses with roofs of iron sheets now, and not the old round houses (which were actually comfortable to stay in!) The African cosmos embodied in those houses is not so different from the traditional Orthodox one— so I think Africa's confrontation with globalization and all the rest should be very interesting for us. You see things better when you can triangulate.

Dear readers: please don't forget the St Nicholas Uganda Education Fund (click link). We're trying to sponsor 25 kids in Uganda this year. Help us get 7 of them to their high school diplomas this year!