Hiplife and the Power of the African Gods

image source: http://www.ghanaflash.com/

Great video by hiplife (Ghanaian hiphop) artist Obour [1][2][3]. Click here to view video from Facebook. 

The video has lots of evocative imagery about the power of African spirituality[4] (along with Japanese Samurai and Indian Hindu images). It strikes me as a counterpoint to an annoying trend in Nollywood (Nigerian) films which featured stereotypical depictions of African Traditional Religions being used for evil or to inflict harm. The "evil" African religion was always triumphed over by the benevolent power of the Holy Ghost [5][6].

I am also reminded of a recent conversation I had with a Ghanaian friend:

ghetto intellectual: So you mean you would never go to a [traditional religion] shrine?

Akos: Eiiii! Kwame, you talk about such things too much! People go to the shrines to do evil.

GI: You mean the shrines are only for evil?

Akos: Yes!

GI: Africans go to the shrine to ask for long life. Is that bad?

Akos: No.

GI: Africans go to the shrine to request bountiful crops. Is that bad?

Akos: No.

GI: Africans go to the shrine to pray for good health. Is that bad? 

Akos: No.

GI: You see? I think you will agree that African religion is not always used for bad. Also note the implication that our Ancestors were engaged in evil acts before the coming of the white man and Christianity. 

Akos: Yes...I even recall my grandmother leaving food at a shrine for good health. I'm not sure if the Gods actually ate the food, but I see your point. African religion was not always used for evil.

GI: Yes. All religions have been used for good and bad. Christianity is no different. In fact  the whites annihilated people all over the planet in the name of the Christian God.

Now I don't imagine that "Akos" is planning on abandoning Christianity. But I think its really important that we challenge these negative depictions of indigenous African ritual life that have been internalized and perpetuated by us Africans. It is good to see Obour taking up the challenge too. 

Notes:

[1] Official Website of Obour
[2] Another great tune by Obour, in collaboration with Samini (then known as "Batman"), is Konkontiba (Tadpole). This tune is about a tadpole growing into a frog--a clever metaphor that is actually a critique of ageism or the gerontocracy (overrule of elders) in Ghana. The message is that young people should be given a chance to do big things.
[3] Obour "Youth for presidency campaign"
[4] Another good vid is Congo-based: Baloji feat Konono n 1 - Karibu ya bintou
[5] MARRIED TO A WITCH is one of numerous examples of "good" Christianity/"bad" African religion themes. It also happens to be an entertaining movie so check it out.

[6] For a good critique of this tendency in Nollywood, have a look at the essay The Near Nullity of Nollywood - Making African Movies  by Unoma Azuah. Note the essay is a few years old. Nollyhood is slowly moving away from this theme. I should note too that from what I have heard, Yoruba language films depict African spirituality in a far more favorable light.


tags: African traditional religion, Christianity, film, media, nollywood, stereotypes, Nigeria, ghana, gerontocracy

See also:

• Can we be a free people while taking on the values of the people that enslaved us?
• White Jesus indoctrination vs. Black Jesus on the Margin
• Office Hours with J. Lorand Matory on African-Inspired Religions
• Rastafarian pilgrims still searching for respect: Africa Review
• "The Pestilence of Imported Gods"
• Archbishop Sarpong: Innovator of the Africanization of Catholicism or cultural imperialist?
• Do Christian missionaries serve some useful purpose or do they contribute to "mental slavery"?

Malidoma Somé makes rare trip to Los Angeles November 17, 2010

Krst Unity Center of Afrakan Spiritual Science (photo: credit)

Acknowledgment of African Traditional & Diaspora Religions - The Petition Site

The egregious injustices of the slave trade will continue to linger in so long as the United States government denies the many centuries of suppression of the human rights--especially the religious rights--of African Americans. GI

Marie Laveau

(September 10, 1794 – June 16, 1881)

Legendary Voudoun (Voodoo) Priestess in New Orleans 

During transatlantic slavery, the millions of Africans transported across the Atlantic into the North American continent and its protectorates, were active African Traditionalists, who were denied their religious freedoms during and after their enslavement.

The Diaspora were forced to suppress their ancestral religious practices, customs, culture and spiritual values, in lieu of Christianity. Hollywood, sensationalists tabloids, baised academic journals, mainstream media and Christian evangelicals have all aided in creating an atmosphere of fear, ignorance, hostility and myth by perpetuating negative stereotypes and encouraging the marginalization of African Diaspora ancestral religious study and sacred ritual and practices.This system of repression,

discrimination and cultural malignment has continued even after the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791.

Read entire statement and sign petition @ Care 2


tags: African traditional religion, new orleans, slavery

"Can we be a free people while taking on the values of the people that enslaved us?"

Unveiling of statues of first leader of the Afrikania Mission,
Ɔsɔfo Ɔkɔmfo Kwambena Damuah in his hometown,
Asangragwa, Western Region, Ghana (photo by kwame zulu shabazz)

...This was a question posed by a Congolese sister. But before getting to her very insightful video remarks, I wanted to share a Ghanaian response to the issue of African spiritual liberation. 

On 15 December, 1982, Vincent Kwabena Damuah, a Ghanaian who had been a Catholic priest for 25 years, left the church. What was scandalous in the eyes of many Ghanaians was his determination to defend African tradition religion and culture using his newly founded institution, the Afrikania Mission. Damuah continued to champion African Tradition Religion until his death in 1992; the Afrikania Mission lives on.

Third Leader of Afrikania Mission, 
His Holiness Ɔsɔfo Ɔkɔmfo Atsu Kove.
(photo by kwame zulu shabazz)

The overarching goal of the Afrikania Mission is to counter European cultural imperialism by encouraging Africans and their descendants to “return to their roots” and embrace the “Sankɔfa Faith” (Lit. “return, go, take.” Sankɔfa is an Akan adinkra symbol frequently glossed as “return to your [African cultural] roots.”

Afrikania is a critical response to globalization that is predicated on presumably “authentic” African ways of being and knowing and the imagined historical-cultural connection of all people of African descent.

Some African critics equate this effort to look inward, to look at ourselves, as being "insular," as if we are cutting ourselves off from the "modern" world. This is untrue. I think this sort of response actually reflects the fears of the critic more than the reality of Africans. African people are a global people. 

African Traditional religion devotees
Klikor, Volta Region, Ghana 
(photo by kwame zulu shabazz)

The Sankɔfa movement is not a negation of globalization per se, nor is it a repudiation of “the West” in a strict sense; rather, it is a rejection of the Western terms of global engagement. It is a declaration of our determination to be global on our own authentic African terms.

The choice is ours.

Do we, African people, have the courage to reclaim our Gods and our spiritual roots? Or will we continue to be slaves to foreign religions that empower other peoples' Gods (Allah, Jesus, Jehovah, Yahweh, etc.)?

"Can we be a free people while taking on the values of the people that enslaved us?" Have a listen to the wise and inspirational thoughts of a young Congolese sage on this topic. To view and listen, go to YouTube - Spiritual Freedom = True Freedom

Sɛ wo werɛ fi na wosan kɔfa a, yenkyi (It is not wrong to go back and retrieve what you have lost)! GI


tags: African traditional religion, ghana, globalization, authenticity, pan-African cultural nationalism, congo, Sankofa


See also:

     • The pestilence of imported Gods
     • What is Liberation Theology
     • The African-centered truth About Christianity  
     • Why Kwanzaa?
     • What is Afrocentrism? (Kwame Zulu Shabazz)
     • Afrikania Mission (Elom Dovlo)


© 2010 Kwame Zulu Shabazz. All rights reserved.

Archbishop Sarpong: Innovator of the Africanization of Catholicism or cultural imperialist?

Archbishop Peter Kwasi Sarpong cultural innovator or cultural imperialist?

Beginning around 1970, Ghanaian Archbishop Peter Kwasi Sarpong, drawing upon his extensive insider knowledge of Asante customs and Catholic religiosity and his training as a cultural anthropologist, embarked upon a flexible interpretation of Catholicism filtered through the lens of the Asante worldview. Libation rituals, for example, were conceptualized as cultural and not religious, modified by excising the "minor or lesser" deities, calling on the Supreme God and venerating (but not worshipping), the Ancestors and equating them with the Catholic Saints.

 

Other local cultural elements incorporated into Asante Catholicism include festivals (e.g., adae, a celebration held in honor kings who have become Ancestors); symbols of royal authority (e.g., asipim, ceremonial chair of the ɔhene or “king”); kingly honorifics (e.g., Otomfo, “mighty” or “powerful”); adinkra symbols (e.g., nkabom, “unity” and gye nyame, “except God”—denotes the superiority of God). [1]

 

 

Although some local Christians and traditionalists objected to the “mixing” of Catholicism and indigenous practices, Archbishop Sarpong’s efforts have been, by most accounts, an unqualified success. To date, there several million Catholics in Ghana. Sarpong is widely credited with fostering the growth of the Catholic faith in the Asante region and enhancing the profile of Catholicism on the national scene.

 

 
But one could also view Sarpong’s “indigenization” as a more subtle form of cultural imperialism. Christianity is rendered timelessly and fundamentally true. Whilst beliefs and practices of Asante traditionalists are folded into Christianity and reduced to non-essential variations on a Christological scheme.

 

 

 So what are your thoughts? Are Archbishop Sarpong's interventions an example of the "Africanization" of Catholicism or are they yet another variation of western cultural imperialism that undermines African Traditional Religion?

 

 

[1] Asante Catholicism: Religious and Cultural Reproduction among the Akan of Ghana (1996) By Pashington Obeng.

 

© 2010 kwame zulu shabazz

 

Photo credit: [Enoch stories for graphic]

In the video below, Archbishop Sarpong explains that pouring libations to one's Ancestors is not anti-Christian. He compares African veneration of Ancestors with the prominence of Saints in Catholicism (if viewing from Facebook, click here.)

Archbishop Peter Sarpong, "Ancestors, saints and idolatry." Excerpt from "African Christianity Rising: Stories from Ghana" from james ault on Vimeo.
tags: Christianity, Ghana, African traditional religion, Akan, Ashanti, Asante
 

Related articles by Zemanta

• Libation Prayer for Mama Abbey Lincoln (imperfect-black.blogspot.com)
• John Coltrane's spiritual-sonic quest
• The fate of Catholic Europe: The void within (economist.com)
• The Ancestors and our connectedness to them
• Out of Africa: the next pope? (beliefnet.com)
• Ethiopian Orthodox Church Christmas Song

Black Fact: Afrikans never really die...

Today is a good day to remember that in Haiti, nobody ever really dies. The many thousands who've had the breath crushed out of their bodies in the earthquake, and the thousands more who will not physically survive the aftermath, will undergo instead a translation of state, according to the precepts of Haitian Vodou, some form of which is practiced by much of the population. Spirits of the Haitian dead — sa nou pa we yo, those we don’t see — do not depart as in other religions but remain extremely close to the living, invisible but tangible, inhabiting a parallel universe on the other side of any mirror, beneath the surface of all water, just behind the veil that divides us from our dreams. Read more @ Haiti in Ink and Tears: A Literary Sampler - NYTimes.com

photo: credit

tags: haiti, vodou, African traditional religion

"Pestilence of Imported Gods" (dap @ usa africa dialogue)

Written by Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh

Monday, 22 March 2010 09:16

Franklyne Ogbunwezeh

1. Libation to Foreign gods: A society that imports her gods, has offered to live under the caprice of foreign pestilences. She has mortgaged her destiny to the insular enclaves of alien theologies. Her doctrines and dogma are overthrown by derivatives of alien thought patterns, rendered canonical by capricious and absentee conclaves. In such a theatre, foreign metaphysics rises to displace local values.  Irreverent incoherence isolates and devastates local cosmologies. Local mores are alienated to make way for the import to march to supremacy. Such is the trajectory of the contact between an occupying power and native reality. This inheres in the fact that conquering powers are also epistemic imperialisms. For every conquest to be total, it must principally devastate the mental universe of the conquered; making it an ideological no-man’s land or tabula rasa, upon which the conqueror and its agents proceed to rewrite or rewire the conceptual genetic blueprint of the conquered, to suit the designs of empire. This is why every imperialism battles to dethrone local conceptual schemes, usurp the role of local values in the lives of the conquered; lording it over local pedestals of meaning and theories of value, with all the inquisitorial decisiveness and totalitarian recklessness that has underwritten every enterprise of imperialism.

If not, how can a society commission its own collapse? How can a society hand over its head on a platter to a conqueror because he asked for it? How can a people yield their gods to be decapitated or burnt at the conqueror’s fires simply because the conqueror just showed up, knocked on the door and politely asked for that? No society commissions its own self-destruction. Any society that ever collapsed succumbed to some force or pressure. Those societies were conquered; either from within or from without. They bow to the onslaught of one or more complex set of factors. Most of them succumbed either to the conquest of invincible ignorance; the arrogant over, or underestimation of its capabilities and chances in the face of novel threats; or the overwhelming firepower of conquerors guns, germs, treachery, or steel as Professor Jared Diamond tried to articulate.

By conquering the native epistemic authority, the conqueror secures either their timid acquiescence in the face of their exploitation, or the collaboration of their ignorance in their own destruction. To that end, whenever imperialism makes a landfall, it shocks and awes local sensibilities with the crude violence it advertises, the superlative savagery it consults, and the ruthless perfidy it deploys. It massacres opposition into submission.  Treachery is the software of its transactions in such instances. The ruthlessness of the violence shocks the recipients into psychological immobility. It knocks their resistance cold. They are frozen in awe of the new phenomenon. It assaults the citadels of local meaning. It rapes local epistemologies, which have no response to this onslaught. It mocks the local deities which neither anticipated such catastrophes, nor have responses to them. This creates a social psycho-trauma that packs the destructive equivalent of Giga-tons of Hiroshima-grade nuclear explosion. Many societies cannot but succumb to this ruthless force or risk instant extinction. At this, the conquering power then gains a foothold. With this foothold, the conquered society is then ‘invited’ to cannibalise itself; pressurized into participation in its own funeral; or genetically re-engineered into convoking its own self destruction by instalments.

One major reservoir of a culture’s epistemic authority is its language. And a culture is conquered when the conqueror succeeds in imposing its own language as the vehicle of meaning upon the conquered. At this, the accreted putrescence of other climes rides roughshod infecting native conceptual flora; engendering some toxic erosion of local meaning and significance. It is just a matter of time before such societies end up importing every other thing; from the pseudo-sublime to the most ridiculous rejects of the conqueror. This is a normal trajectory. Since such a society has ‘chosen’ the pontificating pronunciations of foreign epistemologies to interpret her values for her, she has offered to see reality from the eyes of her conquerors. Everything the conqueror canonizes, even if that piece of shit does not speak to local realities; one usually sees the conquered falling over themselves to incarnate it in their lives, and re-echo it in their circumstances. There have been cases were the conquered even began loving their conqueror’s in a Stockholm syndrome gone awry. Such slaveries are total. They last forever. Liberation from such chains is almost impossible. This is because the conquest of a society’s epistemology means a total control of its perceptual faculties, value system, and sources of psycho-social legitimacy. Whatever would compel a society to exile its own gods and assume that of its conquerors; keep silence at its own plunder; participate in its decimation; help its own cannibalisation and finance its own funeral; must engender some tsunamic bout of self-destruction, before it can succeed.  Ndiigbo of Southern Nigeria has it that whatever can out-bite a dog has got quite some teeth.

Whenever or wherever this is achieved, local gods are then coaxed to speak in foreign tongues. Alien ceremonies are convoked on hills where local ancestors, once poured libations to the memory of their forebears. Communion wafers are eaten in temples built upon the demolished shrines of our spirits; where our ancestors celebrated their kolanuts in commensality and brotherhood, with the gods of our land in attendance. Wines pressed off European grapes solemnly displace the nourishing and ritual potencies of the fruits of our palms.  As temperate wines displaced tropical gins, our Earth Mother was denied her due libations. Not only that we could not offer sacrifices to our ancestors due to the indisposition of our chained spirits, the imported deities and their armed convoy of mercenaries, in time, rose to criminalize even our thinking about the august memory of our forebears. We were forbidden even to sit down by our own tropical equivalents of the Rivers of Babylon to weep over our lost innocence. There was no funeral to propitiate our pain. We were not even allowed the luxury of mourning. We are even compelled to forget our mother-tongues, without our tongues cleaving to the roofs of our mouth. The earth housing our umbilical cords in its bosom was desecrated.  The buccaneers conscripted by foreign realms mocked us as the guardians of our land lay in their conquered state. Our earth was cosmic in her anger. She craved libation to appease her. Since the conquerors could not bring themselves to offer Her ‘Nkwu enu’*, they resorted to water-boarding her with the blood of her sons and daughters as an abominable libation, which she tearfully swallows; not to nourish herself, but to deny abomination a place in the sun, and spare the elements the pain of that desecration.

Africa is now a society of imported gods!!!!

This explains not only the massive violence with which foreign gods implanted their feet on our firmament; and with which they sustain their precarious hold on the minds and bodies of our people, but also the ease with which we tend to all things foreign as if to say that foreign is synonymous with good.

The soul of the African is now a battlefield for competing epistemologies; a casino for the rogue gambling of foreign nonsense. And we are paying for it in the blood of our people, massacred at the altars of rogue ideologies, to assuage the tenets of foreign dogmas. We are paying for it in the heritage of cognitive dissonance and inferiority complex that dog our individual and collective existence. We are equally paying for it in the destruction of millennium old heritages of our culture and civilization. We are also paying for it in the proliferation of various dysfunctional ideologies, arising out of the crosspollination of various tenets of defunct cultures, which we grant relevance in our lives, and which has continued to weigh down our march to true independence. We are paying for it in the eternal disharmony between our realities and the foreign ideas we profess as valid, even in a continent where many of them will never gain relevance due to the toxicity of these species to the local soil.

This recurring decimal of violence plaguing the relationship between various imported dogmas all over Africa is testament to the fact that the pantheons of our ancestors have been demolished. Our gods were forced into exiles. The deities that sanctioned our consanguinity seemed to have been conquered by the same forces that conquered our lands. We became estranged from our roots, and our most intimate acquaintances. Our brothers in this new conceptual scheme metamorphosed into games for our sport; commodities for our exploitation; and enemies to be massacred at will, because they fly the banners of a dissimilar, imported ideology. The Christian-Muslim conflict that paralyzed Jos, Plateau State a few days ago; and many other such explosions in other parts of Africa, are simply footnotes in this long history of violence that Africans were conscripted to inflict on each other, on behalf of foreign doctrines. 

Read more here.

tags: African traditional religion, cultural imperialism

Does Anthropology Belong to the White Man?

posted by the ghetto intellectual 2/27/2010

Update 1: Katherine Dunham timeline

Update 2: Katherine Dunham biography and photo gallery

Update 3: Another good Katherine Dunham website


***
The "A" Word


Comrade: You say you're an anthropologist?

Kwame: Yes.

Comrade: My brother, don't you know that the white man used it to colonize Africa!? How can you call yourself an anthropologist?

Kwame: Have you ever heard of Katherine Dunham?

Comrade: Katherine who?

Kwame: If you have never heard of Katherine Dunham then you only know the white man's version of anthropology. When I claim anthropology I invoke great Ancestors like Katherine Dunham and Zora Neale Hurston.

***
"How can you be down with black/Afrikan people and call yourself an anthropologist?" I get that question occasionally. It's a good question. It's an important question. I sometimes go into long ass explanations. But now that I have fielded this question many times, I have concluded that it makes more sense to name anthropologists I admire and do my best to produce work that honors their efforts, reflects our heritage and advances our political aims. The formal practice of anthropology was a child of colonialism, no doubt. But our Ancestors appropriated anthropology in ways that could never have been anticipated by those early white male founders. Furthermore, curiosity about cultural diversity is very Afrikan and fundamentally human. So imma take the good, the bad, and the ugly and try to create things that are more good than bad. 

Axé!

Katherine Dunham (1909-2006)

"It was never just about steps--it was about your soul" Dunham student (click on video or here)



The Dunham Technique (excerpt from SF Gate article)

As a graduate student in anthropology during the mid-'30s, Ms. Dunham spent nine months in Haiti, Trinidad, Jamaica and Martinique filming indigenous dances. "When I got to Haiti," she said in the 1988 interview, "I saw that some of the body movements in their dances resembled the body movements I had seen in the black storefront churches of Chicago."

Ms. Dunham returned to the United States and incorporated the motions she had observed into the vocabulary of modern dance and ballet. "What I tried to do," she said in a 2002 interview, "is take the meaning and the feeling and the intensity of the things that were portrayed and prepare them with a well-trained company so that they would convey to the audience the full meaning of that particular ritual or act."

What resulted from this synthesis became known as the Dunham Technique. It proved influential not just in dance but also in other performing arts. "Miss D.," as Ms. Dunham was known to associates, oversaw for many years the Katherine Dunham School of Cultural Arts, in New York. Among its students were the choreographers Arthur Mitchell and Peter Gennaro, the ballerina Nora Kaye, and the actors James Dean, Marlon Brando and Chita Rivera.

Ms. Dunham saw the Dunham Technique as a spiritual as well as physical discipline. "Anyone who seriously works in Dunham Technique," she said in 1988, "comes out not only a good professional dancer, but also a humanist."

Such a melding of motion and morality was central to Ms. Dunham's life. One of her most famous dances, "Southland," portrayed a Southern lynching. Ms. Dunham, who would not let her company perform before segregated audiences, was enraged to find out during a 1944 appearance in Louisville, Ky., that no blacks had been allowed in the auditorium. Upon learning this, she went on stage wearing a "White Only" sign attached to her bottom.

For full article go to SF Gate.

@@@@@@

There are many Gods in the Vodou spiritual system. The Yanvalou dance honors the Ayisyen (Haitian) Lwa (God), Damballah ("Snake God").  For a demonstration of the Dunham Technique's interpretation of Yanvalou, click here. Incidentally, while I was in Ghana conducting dissertation research I had some fascinating conversations with Australian Aboriginal cultural performers touring in Ghana. One of the members explained to me that the indigenous people of Australia have a reverence for snakes. I can't recall all of the various qualities he named but they included the observation that snakes were nurturing and protective. This was all fascinating to me given that many Americans have a dreadful fear of snakes and snakes are literally demonized in Christianity. [Also check this link which claims that Australians are "well afraid of snakes." The entry should have said white people in Australia are "well afraid of snakes."]

Katherine Dunham on the "Circle of Energy" click here.

Katherine Dunham speaks on the Afrikan God Shango (click on video or here)




Charles Moore Dance Company performs Shango (click on video or here)




Katherine Dunham: Queen Mother of Black Dance by Courtney Thompson (click on video or here)




Katherine Dunhum's oeuvre showcased in St. Louis exhibit click here.

tags: activism, African traditional religion, anthropology, culture, dance, haiti

"The Ancestors and our Connectedness to Them" presented by Dr. Fu-Kiau (Dap @ Nkrumah)

Dig it!


Dr. Fu-Kiau is cited quite a lot in Afrocentric circles so I thought I might pass this video along to y'all, courtesy of Nkrumah Lucien. There is an additional audio of Fu-Kiau at the end of the post. Enjoy!

Part 1 of 8. Watch entire lecture on youtube.

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@


Click on the audio below to listen to Fu-Kiau's explanation of the Nkondi figure and the cosmogram.

"Nkondi is a like a diploma given to nganga, a specialist who deals with social issues"

                                 "The Kongo cosmogram is the foundation of Kongo society"

NB: For some reason I cannot see the MP3 audio player using the Firefox browser. It works with my primary browser, Safari. You can also listen to the audio by clicking on the source below.

Source: Seattle Museum

tags: African traditional religion, ancestors, congo, Fu-Kiau