African Religious Practices Research Articles

The Old Ship of Zion: The Afro-Baptist Ritual in the African Diaspora (review)

Reviews385 this most conscientious of historians of his people did not preserve his own papers. The only Carter G. Woodson papers that survive are in the Library of Congress, and they consist of documents about the history of black people all over the world. They are not personal papers, of which no collection exists. Carter G. Woodson is strong in the delineation of Woodson's enterprise, particularly in tracing the shifting sources of its funding. However, Goggin sUghts two aspects of Woodson 's life, one quite understandably, the other less so. Goggin's impressive research in a multitude of varying sources uncovers little of her subject's inner workings. Woodson never mamed, for instance, and we will never know why. Like a priest, it seems, he was married to his vocation, which may camouflage, as in the case of some priests, a problematic inner life. Like so many others of his peers (Charles A. Johnson among them), Woodson seems to have wanted his public role to obscure the rest of his being, and the documents that would illumine the thought and feeling behind the pubUc face are fugitive or nonexistent. The other missing dimension, a coherent account of Woodson's intellectual trajectory , is harder to explain. Although Goggin has done a superb job of showing how Woodson's Negro history mission was founded and sustained, she does not grapple with the content of his scholarship. As a result, this book's contribution is far more materialist than intellectual. Having neglected Woodson's writing, Goggin accepts as his intellectual legacy only what he could see himself before his death in 1950. Goggin appreciates his rescue of African American history from blindness and bigotry, but by overlooking Woodson 's role as a pioneer of southern history and the repercussions of black history in southern history, she ignores his long-term contribution to the study of southern culture. The Old Ship of Zion: The Afro-Baptist Ritual in the African Diaspora. By Walter F. Pitts. Oxford University Press, 1993. 199 pp. Cloth, $29.95. Reviewed by Jerrilyn McGregory, assistant professor of folklore and English at Florida State University. Her currentproject revolves around an ethnographic documentation ofthe Wiregrass region, which encompasses parts of Florida, southwest Georgia, and southeast Alabama. The results should appear as a publication in the University ofMississippi's "Folklife in the South Series." Walter Pitts's premature death, 20 July 1991, is our true misfortune, for his scholarship can be labeled cutting edge, groundbreaking, and most innovative. The Old Ship ofZion is a significant contribution to the fields of sociolinguistics, ritual anthropology, ethnomusicology , and African American folklore—a cross-cultural investigation that ultimately covering the African diaspora. Pitts's research offers an undaunted departure from more conventional studies of African American religion because he blazes his own analytical and interpretive trails. In the first chapters of his monograph Pitts contextualizes his phenomenological study of Afro-Baptist ritual in central Texas. For the study he served in the dual capacity of both an anthropologist and a pianist at various Afro-Baptist churches in the region. He terms these churches Afro-Baptist in recognition of the fact that their ritual structure is rooted in West African religious practice. Such claims are not new, but they have 386Southern Cultures generally lain fallow until recent decades because more conservative social scientists have demanded inordinate amounts of evidence. Nonetheless, Pitts provides exceptional historical examples. Pitts also does an excellent job of summarizing the history not only of the AfroBaptist church in the South but of Texas proper. He brings together fresh, convincing evidence to document the syncretisms that resulted from the cross-fertilization of African and European forms of religious expression. He notes that the prevailing traditional sacred performances are as old as the American Revolutionary War. Other histories are presented such as "The History of the Black Sermon," "The History of Prayer Speech," and "The History of Afro-Baptist Hymnody." It is important to Pitts's thesis to estabUsh that these seemingly Anglo-American forms of expression grew out of a burgeoning African American culture. Pitts contends that African and African-based ritual conform to a certain binary structure. The first structural frame involves the...

Vodou Vatican: A Prolegomenon for Understanding Authority in a Synthetic Religion

1986 was a year of living dangerously for Haiti. In February, Jean-Claude Duvalier and his rapacious wife Michele fled to France along with her furs and his primitive art and $800 million or so from the treasury. In the wake of this popular dechoukai (Creole for uprooting) of the Duvaliers, came a far more ambiguous cultural uprooting. Almost as soon as Duvalier fils settled near the Cote d'Azur, attacks began on Vodou. Houngans (priests) and mambos (priestesses) were murdered, or forced to recant their religion. Hounfors (temples) were sacked. The mud pits at Plaine du Nord, where every year pilgrim devotees of the Iwa (deity) Ogun gather to immerse themselves in primal sludge (on the days preceding the canonical feast of St. James), were attacked by a group of cement carrying fundamentalist Christians intent on sealing up this source of Vodou grace. That attack was repulsed, but the ferocity of the dechoukai inspired a debate on the future of Vodou as the common religion of Haitians (or the national patrimony as the post-Duvalier constitution lated described it). To engage in that debate we must examine the question of authority within Vodou, especially in light of efforts by Max Beauvoir, Herard Simon, and other Houngans to construct a framework for a segmented, non-authoritarian religion. Causes for these attacks against Vodou are themselves a cause of some controversy. The most common rationale offered by those opposed to the religion is political: the Duvalier regime had co- opted Vodou. Papa Doc and his grossly inept son Baby recruited heavily from the ranks of the houngans to man the Ton-Ton Macoute: the infamous thugs in sun glasses and para-military gear who constituted a kind of SS for the Duvaliers. It is further argued that the Duvaliers were Vodou practioners, and that the family maintained itself in power through the powerful oungas (evil charms) of the religion. 1 Vodou defenders call these charges bogus. The most flamboyant houngan in Haiti, Max Beauvoir of the Port au Prince suburb of Mariani, points out that the Duvaliers co-opted every institution and everyone who remained in Haiti. Hougans, Catholic bishops, Protestant pastors were all Duvalierist in like proportion when it was expedient to be so. According to Beauvoir, the bishops and the pastors, in nefarious collusion with the minions of Ronald Reagan and John Paul H, have used the political revolution to uproot Vodou. They are attempting to transform the oldest African religious practice in the world into

Complexity, astonishment and power: the visual vocabulary of Kongo Minkisi

Nkisi is a Kikongo word that has no near equivalent in English. 'Fetish' is a usual but inadequate translation; nkisi and its cognates in many Bantu languages can refer to a spirit, an amulet, a medical treatment, a mask and certain specially qualified human beings. 'Fetish', moreover, brings with it a load of prior assumptions about fetishism, derived from the speculations of nineteenth-century anthropology, that may not apply to nikisi but instead tend to obscure our understanding of the phenomenon. Like similar forms of African religious practice, minkisi (the plural form) have adapted very well to changing social conditions, whereas some better-known forms such as ancestor cults and central shrines may have declined. Minkisi, however, are difficult to study because they are multitudinous, secret and expensive. Knowledge of them must be acquired piecemeal, often in the form of an extended initiation, yet only in considerable numbers do they reveal the principles of their composition and use. The practical difficulties of research into fetishism are largely overcome in the unique case of the BaKongo of western Zaire, thanks to the work of K.E. Laman in the first two decades of this century. He collected both a large number of minkisi and an even larger number of indigenous texts describing their origins, composition, uses and ritual context. His Congolese research associates, the authors of the texts, were teachers and leading members of the Swedish Missionary Church, which was at the time in the forefront of the European occupation of what had recently become Belgian Congo. Laman and his collaborators were deliberately attempting to create an authentic record for posterity of every aspect of Kongo culture, which they knew to be in the process of rapid and destructive change. With respect to minkisi the record that has come down to us, whether in the form of objects or of words, has been somewhat mutilated. An object haphazardly selected as representative of a given nkisi and subsequently labelled 'fetish' in a museum collection may be only a small part of a complex material apparatus. Even that part is likely to have suffered in the process of collection, losing its colour and some or all of its attachments. The present essay is based on a study of some 40 such objects in the Laman Collection of the Swedish Ethnographic Museum, Stockholm, chosen because

Word and Spirit in Contemporary African Religious Practice and Thought

Word and Spirit in Contemporary African Religious Practice and Thought

Word and Spirit in Contemporary African Religious Practice and Thought: Some Issues Raised by Translation into Swahili

Word and Spirit in Contemporary African Religious Practice and Thought: Some Issues Raised by Translation into Swahili