Ritual Performance in Africa Today

Abstract

Ritual has for too long been considered the most conservative and repetitive kind of performance, especially in Africa. In 1968, Victor Turner wrote that wherever individualism, novelty, and change develop, rituals perish within a short time (1968:22-23). He believed that only in stable societies with a strong corporate life-those least influenced by technological change-is ritual able to maintain its function and that only with stabilization would a widespread revival of ritual be possible. Even in his later writings (1982:85) Turner believed that ritual liminality in Africa largely meant the maintenance of an existing social order. My own experience in southern Nigeria, Togo, and Ghana suggests something else-that rapid social change stimulates a traditionalizing process in which rituals and ritual symbols proliferate, constructing their pasts at the same time that they construct themselves (see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1983:21 ). The studies which follow indicate a more far-reaching basis for this claim. The contributors here view ritual not as a relic from the past somehow mindlessly and uncritically passed on from generation to generation. Rather, they examine ritual as a vital, ongoing process. In gathering the essays for this issue, I made no attempt to cover all of Africa geographically and, as it turned out, most of the essays are focused on West and Central Africa. I also wanted integrated perspectives on entire events as opposed to studies of particular media-like dance or music. What interested me most was the wide spectrum of ritual performances in Africa today, and the different relationships these performances have to different kinds of social orders. The contributors wrote essays on rites of passage-marriage and both male and female initiations-divination, prophecy, masking and puppet performance, as well as possession trance performance. These are not parallel categories; indeed many rituals combine different types and modes of performance, such as initiation and masking, or divination and possession trance, or divination and initiation. What all of the essays demonstrate is that, broadly speaking, African ritual is dialogic in form, always a process of competition, negotiation, and argumentation, never simply a matter of repeating correctly (see Bloch I974). The first essay, by Kolawole Ositola, represents a practitioner's view of the rituals he conducts. He does not talk about ritual in the same way that academics do, nor does he provide a detailed description and analysis of his