THE QUEST FOR SOCIAL REFORM IN THE CONTEXT OF TRADITIONAL RELIGION: A NEGLECTED THEME OF WEST AFRICAN HISTORY*

Abstract

IN APRIL 1976 the writer presented a paper with much the above title to the Annual Conference of the Historical Society of Nigeria. In it, I mentioned, but did not deeply explore, the fundamental question of value judgements: what is a reform, and in terms of which values ? But I was not allowed to get away with it so lightly. I encountered considerable criticism, both in my selection of specific 'reforms' and for imposing my own Christian Weltanschauung on a variety of highly diverse African experiences. The problem of value judgements became more acute in specific areas of discussionmy treatment of pacifism as an area of reform was attacked by a critic who saw war as a fruitful source of innovations-the conference was clearly faced with two different kinds of moral assertion, which seemed oddly out of place in a gathering of historians. Another claimed that my argument was not as novel as all that, that 'reform' was much the same thing as 'innovation', and that innovation-in spheres such as iron working and so on-had long been a key theme of the study of traditional societies. To which (inwardly lamenting the absence of a dictionary) I could only protest feebly that innovation was quite different from reform, and that iron working was a quite different kind of change from, for instance, critiques of human sacrifice. By this time we had moved into a sphere of the philosophers-what we say when we say what we think we mean. One critic indeed who was kind enough to make written comments on my paper, urged me to embark on the 'enormous literature' in modern philosophy, pertaining to relativism, universal values, and