The Spirit of God, Pigs and Demons: the 'Samuelites' of Southern Africa'

Abstract

Popular modes of historical understanding in Africa are increasingly of interest to academic historians. They may be genealogies, cosmologies, royal and cultic traditions, state charters, praise poetry, migrants' and farmworkers' songs, church traditions, children's stories, rumour or gossip. They have no universal shape, nor do they give up their secrets to the uninformed. They are difficult sources. If one listens to them carefully, however, the hollowness of trying to understand Africans' intentions without them is starkly revealed. No longer, for instance, can Africans' historical behavior be taken simply to indicate responses to preconceived phenomena important to modern scholars.2 In looking at religion and religious narratives as such a means for comprehending African experience, I have found Terence Ranger's work especially helpful.3 Ranger has understood religion in the social history of Africa as a means for retrieving the categories of experience that historical Africans 'thought through.' Of course, as long ago as 1915 Emile