Time, Space and History in African Divination and Board-Games

Abstract

Heinz Kimmerle’s fascination with Africa has been a move, not so much away from main-stream Western philosophy (to whose Hegelian overtones he has been particularly tuned), but towards modes of thought which might help to relativise and fertilise the Western tradition, in preparation for the global philosophy the world shall need for the third millennium CE. In the process he has developed an interest in the implicit forms of philosophising as contained in African literary productions, rituals including divination, and games. It is significant that his recent collection Philosophie in Afrika/Afrikanische Philosophie (Kimmerle, 1991) contains a poetic section in which Abimbola (1991; cf. 1975) rephrases the highly standardised interpretational catalogue of the Nigerian Ifa oracle. Incidentally, one of Kimmerle’s latest Ph.D. students comes from a family of diviners and seeks to render this background in his academic writing (Uyanne, 1994). Much more than in the North Atlantic world today, divination has remained part and parcel of the African everyday experience (Devisch 1985), and as such it constitutes a important perspective upon African processes of thought. There is no African society that does not have a variety of divination systems, and while many of these are highly confined in space and time, others have crossed cultural and linguistic boundaries and are found, in thinly disguised form, all over the continent. Thus Ifa is the most famous West African variant of a dominant and amazingly wide-spread family of geomantic divination systems which, first attested (under the name of ‘ilm ar-raml) in the Arabian high culture around 1000 CE, has spread over West Africa (and from there to the Caribbean), East and Southern Africa and the Indian Ocean, Iran, India and medieval and Renaissance Europe. The structure of all these variants is identical: by simple manual chance operations2 and involving signs which can take two values (yes/no; one/two; black/white), a specific value out of a total range of 2n values is generated (typical values for n are 4, 6 or 8), as a specific entry in a astrologicallyinspired (but locally divergent) interpretational catalogue of 2n such entries (van Binsbergen, 1994, 1995b, and references cited there). Very likely, in his visits to Africa Kimmerle has also come in contact with another formal practice ingrained in African daily life: the mancala board-game consisting of 2 or 4 (occasionally 3) rows of holes (typically between 5 and 20 per row) along which identical tokens (usually seeds) travel according to elaborate rules conducive to complex strategies. The game has been considered to be typical of subSaharan Africa (cf. Culin, 1896; Kassibo, 1992), not only because of its ubiquity there in a great number of variants, but also because, of the five main types of board-