The “Horror” of African Spirituality

Abstract

The Conradian journey into the African interior also signified, in the Western colonial imaginary, an encounter with a seemingly incomprehensible spirituality. African spirituality was the site of excess, epitomized by darkness, frenzy, madness, superstition, and illogicality. Based on a reading of Andrea Eames's The Cry of the Go-Away Bird and Peter Godwin's Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa, this article proposes that white-authored Zimbabwean narratives written after colonialism display a wider range of attitudes toward African spirituality, which are at once multiple and ambivalent. The two narratives, appearing at least a decade after Zimbabwe's independence from white minority rule, work against the dominant "white" fear of Christian decline and the attendant descent into spiritual darkness and enable a secondary non-secular experimentation with African spirituality. I use the core concept of horror from Heart of Darkness to treat jointly the experience among whites in Africa of encountering an "other" faith and the literary tradition of representing such an experience.