African Spirituality and Ethics: Decolonising a False Dichotomy [1st ed. 2023] 3031455894, 9783031455896

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African Spirituality and Ethics Decolonising a False Dichotomy Munyaradzi Felix Murove

African Spirituality and Ethics

Munyaradzi Felix Murove

African Spirituality and Ethics Decolonising a False Dichotomy

Munyaradzi Felix Murove University of the Free State Bloemfontein, South Africa

ISBN 978-3-031-45589-6    ISBN 978-3-031-45590-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45590-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been written without the inspiration I got from African traditional doctors and healers in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Indeed, I was fascinated by their immense knowledge of healing and foretelling. The discussions were had about indigenous African spirituality and healing. Most of the interviewees were men and women who were practitioners in indigenous healthcare and healing. I had an informal discussion with African traditional doctors and prophets from indigenous African churches on African spirituality with specific reference to African spirituality, the environmental crisis and health and healing. To say the least, these discussions were intellectually an eye opener and spiritually enriching. The whole approach that was adopted in this book was comparative between African spirituality and the Judeo-Christian religious heritage. The informal discussions I had with Ms. Nyamande and Mr. Nyamande on spirituality in indigenous African churches were extremely informative and intellectually stimulating. Ms. Robina was more than passionate to share her experiences as an African traditional doctor and healer. I am very grateful to them. I am very grateful to all these people.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 The Politicization of Spirituality in Southern Africa 17 3 Essentials of African Spirituality 39 4 A  Symbiotic Relationship Between African Spirituality and Ethics 53 5 African Spirituality as the Foundation for a Relational Ethic 83 6 African Communitarian Ethics and Spirituality 91 7 Healing in African Spirituality and Ethics113 Index135

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Vongayi was a devout Catholic who always took her Christian obligations as a Catholic seriously, if not neurotically. Indeed, she was not only a devout catholic, rather she was renowned for her conservatism in the Church and the whole village. In her family, the day started with a prayer session which involved the reading of the Bible and discussion of the biblical passage which was read, followed by prayers which were mainly about requesting God for a blessed day. After supper, the whole family prayed the rosary, requesting the intercession of Mary the mother of Jesus for a blessed night rest and protection from evil spirits that roamed in the dark during the night. One day Vongayi fell sick from an illness which could not be diagnosed by the doctors. What doctors could only prescribe were pain killers such as Panadol and paracetamol. The sickness went on unabated, and she was getting weaker and weaker by the day. Pastors visited and prayed for her day and night, but her health continued to deteriorate rapidly. Out of desperation, her relatives decided to consult a traditional doctor who told them that Vongayi’s sickness was a sign of a calling from her ancestors who wanted her to take over the gift of healing which had existed in the family three generations ago before the advent of colonialism. This revelation came as a shock to Vongayi and her family, because they did not expect such a diagnosis. The traditional doctor prescribed that Vongayi and her family were supposed to perform a ritual of acceptance and appeasement to the ancestors. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. F. Murove, African Spirituality and Ethics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45590-2_1

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Vongayi’s family decided to perform the prescribed ritual. On the day of the ritual, the whole community came together to celebrate with music and dancing to the rhythm of the drum that was played throughout the night. It was in the midst of music and dance that Vongayi was possessed by the spirit of her ancestor who was legendary renowned for healing. A previously frail Vongayi became a different person who was very energetic and danced in a state of frenzy to the rhythm of the drum and the traditional lyrics. During the celebration, Vongayi started bellowing and speaking with a male voice. This is usually regarded as a sign of someone who has been possessed by the spirit. The spirit went on to speak through Vongayi saying that it has seen the suffering of his grand child and has come to settle and work through her and that the sickness was just a way of showing his presence. The ancestor who had possessed Vongayi declared that he was going to heal people through Vongayi. Before the spirit temporarily departed from Vongayi, it advised people to live lives that were in sync with the ethos of land. In the light of the above story, it is evidently clear that African people have two spiritual heritages. The first heritage is bequeathed from African traditional spirituality. The second one is that which has been inherited from Christianity. A scholarly discussion of African spirituality in Southern Africa will be superficial without paying attention to the spiritual influence of Christianity in Southern Africa. The Christian religion bequeathed its spirituality among the Africans with an uncompromising hegemonizing attitude. Early missionaries were transmitting their knowledge of God and religious experiences from the perspective of western cultural and religious experiences as the only source of communication with God. Indigenous Africans were required to renounce their God(s), ancestors and modes of worship. The economic, political and cultural colonial conquest of Africa was precipitated by a spiritual conquest (Vambe 1972). Many scholars have persistently argued in their various ways that Christian spirituality in Southern Africa had some serious shortcomings. The shortcomings of Christian spirituality in Southern Africa can be organized in three hypotheses. Firstly, it is common knowledge that Christian spirituality is individualistic in the sense that Jesus is usually referred to as “a personal Lord and Saviour”. Jesus is portrayed as inserting favours or salvation into the life of individuals who whole heartedly acknowledge him as their own personal saviour, not a saviour for the whole community. The salvation that is offered by Jesus is not for the whole community, but for individuals in their insular subjectivity. It is Jesus who is portrayed as the

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mediator between God, the primordial spirit, and individuals. Within its hegemonizing mode, Christianity promulgated the solo mediatorship of Jesus Christ as the unifying being for all humanity. St. Paul had it that Jesus Christ was the first born of all creation, thus intimating his prior existence before all that was created. Such kerygmatic assertions are imbued in an aura of totalizing hegemonic world outlook that logically discounts spiritual experiences of God as the primordial spirit that manifested in the relativity of other world cultures. Secondly, the rest of creation exists outside the life of God and has a decorative purpose whose telos is primarily in the glory and grandeur of God. Consequently, God is anthropomorphized as a male figure who is endowed with a conglomeration of personalities. Among these personalities is a God who is ruthless, vengeful, jealousy, a king who is completely absorbed with the throne, loving and warrior, to name but a few of his personalities (Miles 1995; Mazrui 1990; Cobb 1965). A human being is endowed with a spirit whose survival in the afterlife entirely depends on the salvation of Christ. God intervened in the world in the person of Christ even though s/he is not directly involved in what goes on in the world (see Prozesky 1992). But the orthodox Christian God is also portrayed as possessing three persons which are ultimately regarded as one. This is doctrinally taught as the Trinitarian God. Thirdly, for Christians, virtuous or good acts are aimed at securing salvation in the afterlife after their mortification has ensued in the modification of their errand evil behaviour. One finds that from a Christian religious perspective, spirituality and ethics are discussed as distinct disciplines which have a scant bearing on each other. In Southern Africa, Christian ethics was poised at changing African traditional value systems, a process that carried with it an acceptance of self-negation and an acceptance of western value systems as the only intelligible existential truths for a life which was regarded by its propagators as the only available truth ultimately inimical to the life of a Christian. In southern Africa, a prototype for an African Christian is someone who denied his or her culture and ancestors whom missionaries condemned from time to time as demons or evil spirits. Missionaries venerated their own dead countrymen and women as saints who interceded for the converted Africans before God. This inevitably set in an irreversible process of spiritual deAfricanization. An African who was deAfricanized became a suitable candidate for the advancement of political and economic machinations of colonialists. The most effective way of wresting absolute control over the colonized was to erase their original spirituality and substituting it with the spirituality of the colonizer.

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Such a colonial tactic has been ruthlessly implemented throughout Southern African indigenous societies. For instance, when Cecil John Rhodes’ Pioneer Column company which was later on characterised by missionaries as a deity’s odyssey in what they sarcastically called God forsaken heathen lands went on conquering African lands in Zimbabwe, regardless of their sacredness, such a colonial expedition was regarded as a God given mission in the eyes of colonialists a settlers! (Decle 1974). A sacred place such as Matopo hills was profaned with impunity by Rhodes when he stated in his will that he wanted his body to be buried there. Rhodes’ conquest of Zimbabwe was synonymous with the conquest of the Shona God Mwari who resided in the rocks at Matopo hills. All those majestic hills and their cascading, ever green valleys were unscrupulously profaned since those values were regarded as wild which needed to be domesticated. Thus, Rhodes himself would set out his combination of splendour and recreation in his will as follows: “I admire the grandeur and loneliness of the Matopos in Rhodesia” (cited in Ranger 1999: 39). Whilst for the indigenous peoples of Southern Africa, Matopo Hills had strong traditional spiritual significance with specific reference to the general fertility of the land, for Rhodes there was nothing spiritual besides “grandeur and loneliness” of Matopo Hills which he admired. Rhodes’ desire to be buried on top of the Matopo Hills had some spiritual symbolic significance among the colonialists and missionaries. Six years in the aftermath of his death, a Bishop of Mashonaland poetically celebrated Rhodes as an ancestor deity who had set forth from South Africa to defeat the Mwari deity of Zimbabwe by actually having his remains buried at Matopo Hills which indigenous peoples of Southern Africa visited from time to time to hear the oracles which came forth from the rock (Murove 2016: 24–26). Thus, Rhodes wanted indigenous Southern African peoples to pay pilgrimage to his grave instead of the shrine of Mwari. His conquest of Zimbabwe and Matopo Hills/Mabwe aDziva catapulted religious imaginations of missionaries as the invincibility of Rhodes when compared to Mwari and the African ancestors. In the poem, the colonial Bishop had this to say, It is his will that he took forth Across the world he won… And there await a people’s feet In the paths that he prepared The immense and brooding Spirit still Shall quicken and control.

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Living he was the land, and dead His soul shall be her soul. (Cited in Ranger 1999: 30–31)

Indeed, to some of the missionaries, Rhodes was a Deity whose powers were incomparable to all sacred powers that have for so long been the object of veneration and worship. Rhodes’ military conquest coupled with his unbridled economic predatory instincts were spiritualized as part of the grand plan of the universal colonial God of missionaries. As such, both missionaries and colonialists found it befitting to name the Southern African territory which he brutally conquered as Rhodesia. In the psyches of colonialists and missionaries, Rhodes was indeed an ancestor deity for the conquered people of Zimbabwe such that he was immortalized for having supposedly triumphed over the Mwari deity (Murove 2016: 24–25). The legacy of Rhodes was not simply in the colonial and economic conquest of Zimbabwe, for colonial settlers, his legacy was in defeating African ancestors and Mwari, the national supreme deity of the land. Those whose God is defeated are also expected to embrace the spirituality of their conquerors. For missionaries, colonialists and anthropologists, Africans did not have a spirituality but only superstitious beliefs that are weaved around mythical stories which were basically aimed at explaining the functioning of what they called “primitive society”. The concept of “primitive society” which was used by colonialists, missionaries and anthropologists to characterize pre-colonial Southern African societies implied that such societies were bereft of spirituality. Like in any other parts of the colonized parts of the world, colonialism in Southern Africa was facilitated by the Christian religion and its spirituality. The concept of God as a controlling power which is central to Christian monotheism bred a culture of colonial totalitarianism and intolerance towards the African God who was immersed in creation and shared Godly power with ancestors and all creation. The subjective feeling of colonialists as the chosen messengers of God to Africa obviated a feeling of racial purity and superiority, a feeling that precluded any notion of equality of races. Conquest and political domination of Southern Africa by colonialists was carried out on the basis that it was under the auspices of Christian spirituality as the only source of salvation. The special relationship with God which missionaries and colonialists accorded to themselves denigrated the role of African spiritual sources of political power such as the ancestors and spirit mediums. As such, African spirituality was relegated to

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primitiveness, superstition and animism. Consequently, the politicization of spirituality culminated into the total marginalization of Africans from their authentic religious sources and modes of being in the world. Thus, one finds that the colonial condescending attitude towards African spirituality extended into the domain of African ethics because African spirituality and ethics are intrinsically conjoined to each other. The wholesale bastardization of African spirituality and ethics was a colonial attempt to present an African as someone who was in dire need for Christian spirituality and its ethos and mores (see Decle 1974). The early colonial anthropological motif of the savage ethic—implying African modes of existence and mores was based on the Darwinian theory of evolution which saw African traditional societies as evolving towards the adoption of Christian spirituality and western cultural mores. The justification for the beneficence of colonialism in Southern Africa was based on the argument of “spreading” and “protecting Christian civilization”. In the case of Zimbabwe, ruthless oppressors such as Ian Smith justified their oppressive rule and the political exclusion of indigenous Zimbabweans on the pretext of what he called “protecting civilization and Christianity” against what he imagined as marauding barbarism of African military nationalism. Among the indigenous Africans, Christian spirituality served as a pacifier for the colonized peoples of Southern Africa. Christian spirituality was presented by early missionaries as ostensibly enlightening the “Dark Continent”. Western civilization was also conflated with the process of Europeanization of the indigenous African realities. To most of the missionaries, what was of primary concern was to spread Christian spirituality to the exclusion of African experiences of colonial subjugation. Such a simplistic and biased religiosity was dovetailed by utter disregard of African culture. The trivialization of African culture by early missionaries precipitated a perennial tension between Christian praxis and African spirituality. Consequently, there was a variance of conception with regard to what spirituality means between white people and indigenous Southern African people. The former regarded the later as bereft of spiritual experiences. Christian spirituality gave impetus to the institutionalization of racism in the colonial Southern African political context whereby indigenous Southern African people was politically and economically brutalized under the colonial assumption that they lacked the essence of a human being—that is, the soul or spirit. For this reason, segregation in all walks of life became the perennial experience of indigenous peoples in the Southern African colonial/apartheid context. For this reason,

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Christian spirituality was entangled in a contradiction whereby its evangelical message of equality before God was just an empty verbiage which was not put into practice. The unsaid truth which remains unsaid even in the aftermath of formal colonialism is that Christianity and colonialism were two sides of the same coin. Being a Christian with a Christian name was a requirement for the African recognition within the colonial socio-political ordering. What Christianity promulgated as the essence of its spirituality was incompatible with the indigenous African spirituality, especially the image of God as wholly immersed in creation. Christianity insisted on the oneness of God—thus providing a breeding ground for a culture of imperial intolerance. It was not only all human beings who were created in the image of God, but only those who professed the Christian faith. Contrary to the hegemonizing tendencies of Christianity, one finds that African traditional religion did not convert people or condemn those who did not participate in it, rather, every person is presumed religious by virtue of being human and belonging to the human society. Because of the emphasis that is placed on the ethical values of our human common belonging, every person participates in the religious rituals of the community without any prior confession to some dogmatic commitment. Western Christian spirituality was synonymous with the spiritualization of western socio-economic and political values which were given some form of hegemonic imperialism. It does not come as a surprise that those who propagated the Christian faith were also responsible for the colonization of Southern Africa. Apartheid South Africa used the Bible in its support of the exceptionalism of the Afrikaner peoples as the chosen people who were divinely mandated to rule over other races in South Africa (see Maimela 1990). In this chapter, I will argue that many peoples’ ethical outlook is strongly influenced by their spiritual presumptions about God as the ultimate reality. People respond to various social, political and economic issues based on their spiritual assumptions about God as the supreme spirit and creator of all that exists. I have indirectly demonstrated this hypothesis in Chaps. 1 and 2. Among the indigenous peoples of Southern Africa, ethics and spirituality are inseparable because they constitute a single reality of human experience. Most of the essentials of African ethics are basically derived from African traditional religion. For example, concepts such as God, ancestors, community, persons, relationality, life and the natural environment are pivotal to African traditional religion as the conceptual

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basis for African ethics. Religion is not a mystical experience which can be divorced from day-to-day ethical living. Because of the symbiotic relationship that exists between African traditional religion and ethics, the fate of African traditional religion was also the fate of African ethics. Both African ethics and spirituality were denigrated as oasis of primitivism that were to be supplanted by Christian spirituality and the moral values that arise from it. African ethics was presented as wholly devoid of the idea of God—that it lacked any form of a spiritual foundation. For this reason, African ethics is regarded as lacking any form of transcendency. Because of the history of colonial subjugation and brutalization, some post-colonial African scholars have discussed the nature of the ethical religion in parenthesis to an unethical religion. In this scholarly discussion, because of its symbiotic relationship with colonialism, Christianity’s ethical teachings in the Southern African context came under heavy criticism from indigenous African scholars. What has conceptually presented itself to subjective discussion are the characteristics which constitute a religion that is unethical. It is also argued in this chapter that most of these scholarly discussions are usually focused on organized monotheistic religions and their religious teachings that go against some of the indigenous African values such as a general concern for the wellbeing of others, intrinsic value for all nature, gender equality and an inclusive general life outlook. African ethics and spirituality cannot be separated from each other because of the overarching reality of the cosmological and ontological causal influence of everything that exists. Obviously, the above assertion anticipates the argument that is proffered in this chapter which says that it is a reckless abstraction to presume human acts as exclusive outcomes of subjective decisions of the individual. Both African ethics and spirituality are weaved around the motif that a person is not composed of matter only, rather, he or she is endowed with an imperishable spirit which survives death and goes on to exist into the realm of immortality in the ranks of the ancestors. The spirit or Mweya (Shona) or Umoya (Zulu) survives death because of its originality from the primordial spirit (God) and begotten through ancestors, Mweya goes on to reincarnate in the lives of the progenitors. Through Mweya/Moya the objective reality of materiality interacts with the immaterial and such an interaction does not end with death. For this reason, normative judgements on the person’s ethical predisposition are based on the goodness or badness of his or her Mweya. By virtue of the immortality of Mweya, a person shares and continues to share a

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common existence with yester fellow human beings, ancestors, the natural environment and God. It is important that in this chapter I should proffer a discussion that focuses on the main features of African spirituality in Southern Africa. African spirituality has the following features which makes it exceptional to other spiritualities of the world’s organized religions. Within the spiritual realm or the realm of immortality, there is God the creator of humanity—Musikavanhu (Shona) and everything that exists has its origination in Musikavanhu, who is a primordial spirit. This primordial spirit—Musikavanhu—shares a life of immortality with the ancestors. Ancestors are the source of communication with their progenitors as protectors of life and guardians of the moral order of society. The moral order of society determines the state of relationships that exist between the living and their ancestors. Every person is presumed to be religious, hence, she or he participates in the life of the ancestors and God. It is common knowledge that the word religion as to imply rituals and belief systems does not exist in Southern Africa because everything that is real is related and interrelated with everything else in existence. What happens to the individual has some material and spiritual causation. Thus, the African cosmology can best be characterized as a cosmology that is permeated by the primordial spirit in unison with the ancestors and creation in its mode of generality. The primordial spirit permeates all that exists, even those entities that are regarded as lifeless. This follows that in African spirituality, there is no dichotomy between science and the supernatural and concrete reality because apprehension is simply a totality that includes everything. The second cardinal feature in African spirituality and ethics is the ancestors. The founding spirit of the nation is the original ancestor who is the founder and original owner of the land upon which the present descendants reside. The founding ancestor imparted certain leadership values such as those that are indispensable to ethical political leadership, peaceful co-existence, harmonious existence with the natural environment and reverence for all life. The spirit of the founding ancestor is concerned with the ultimate wellbeing of all the people who live in the land and the wellbeing of the natural environment. It is regarded as Mhondoro (Shona) or Ngonyama (Zulu). There are spirits of ancestors who are immediate relatives of families that are still living. These ancestral spirits act as mediators between their living descendants and the realm of immortality. It is an ethical imperative that the living should be conscious of and acknowledge the symbiotic relationship that exists between themselves and the spirits of their ancestors. This

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ethical requirement is fulfilled through remembrance or anamnestic solidarity which is actualized in communal rituals of appreciation and propitiation. Through rituals, the living appreciate the assistance they received from their ancestors during those life episodes of adversity. They also propitiate the spirit of ancestors for the wrongs or evils that have been perpetuated by their relatives, either in the past or present through rituals. Ancestors communicate with their living descendants through spirit mediums and traditional doctors. In this communicative relationship, observance of the ethical values of the community are the primary determinants for the future wellbeing of the living and their ancestors. It is therefore the main thesis of this book that African spirituality cannot be divorced from ethics. The individual’s spiritual outlook mirrors his or her ethical predisposition. A belief in ancestors presupposes a belief in immortality of the human soul. African ethics is regarded as ancestral ethics because ancestors are the originators of the moral code of the community. The relationship between the ancestors and their descendants is best described as symbiotic because ancestors are wholly immersed in the lives of their descendants. Ancestors have a spiritual and ethical role which is synonymous to that which Christ has in the lives of Christian believers. A good person is endowed with all the virtues that have been passed on from generation to generation and improvised in accordance with the present needs. Present existence is a continuation of the past, hence when the present becomes the past, it will influence the future either positively or negatively. In African spirituality, the spirit(s) of those who have been wronged in the past usually supervene negatively in the lives of the present generation. It is for this reason that virtuous living in the community guarantees harmonious relationships in the future. African ethics is primarily a relational ethic because human acts are judged based on their teleological effects on others at present as well as in the future because our humanity remains intrinsically entangled with the humanity of others. If human beings are related to their ancestors who existed in the past, they are even more related to each other. The universe works in such a way that everything that exists has a causal influence on each other. These relationships are ontological to the extent that nothing should be conceptualized as existing independently from the existence of other things within the overall generality of existence. Human beings are not only related biologically or materially, they are also spiritually related and do influence each other ontologically. This ontological relatedness is cosmologically replicated among all the entities within the universe. For

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this reason, it is argued that communicability remains a pivotal feature on what it means to be a person. Human beings are open systems who communicate life or energy to other members of the community or those they encounter in their day-to-day social intercourse. A person is primarily a being-in-relationships instead of a being-in-relationship to the self (Uzukwu 1995; also see Sithole 1968). It is for this reason that a human being is a multiplicity of relationships that are both immanent and transcendent. A thorough analysis of human existence reveals a multiplicity of relationships that are too complicated to disentangle in meaningful isolated parts. Our humanity subsists in the humanity of others materially and spiritually. Biologically, our humanity has been contributed to by other people who existed in the past as well as the present. Spiritually, human beings are spiritual beings who are endowed with the spirit which survives death, and the spirit is the source of energy or vitality. In African ethics, the natural environment and the universe as a totality exudes vitality. For this reason, the natural environment is internal to human existence because of the reality of internal relations between human beings and the natural environment. This idea is well embedded in the Shona concept of Ukama in which human relationality transcends anthropocentricism so as to embrace the natural environment, God and the ancestors. It is mainly for this reason that African spirituality can best be described as a pantheistic spirituality. It is one of the proffered theses of this book that African spirituality can best be described as pantheistic because everything in existence is permeated by the primordial spirit which is the source of energy for all creation. The natural environment is internally related to humanity because humanity has its ancestry in the natural world. Equally, God and nature are not separate from nature, rather they are wholly immersed in nature. God, ancestors, nature and humanity share and participate in a common existence. Human relationship with nature is sacrosanct to the extent that humanity predicates its historical origins and identity to the animal species as is the case with the totemic system. This attitude towards nature shows the prominence that is given to pantheism in African spirituality because there is no difference between humanity, God and nature. God is not separate from nature as it is assumed by monotheists. Everything that exists is endowed with vitality or energy from the primordial spirit, and this at a certain existential level blurs the difference between humanity and the natural world. Sacredness is not only restricted to the nature of God,

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rather the whole of nature is endowed with sacredness by virtue of its origination from God who is the primordial spirit. The pantheistic basis for African spirituality has led many indigenous peoples in Southern Africa to identify themselves and ancestral origins with a totemic species. This implies that there is continuity between humanity and nature. The spirit or soul did not only exist in human beings, rather, it also existed in nature. Respect for nature has been a well-­ established tradition in African spirituality. In African spirituality, God exists in continuity with nature. Though conceptually God is above nature, s/he is in actuality also immanent in nature. Among the Shona and Ndebele people of Zimbabwe, the primordial spirit which is Mwari resided in rocks called Mabwe aDziva (stones of the Pool) from which oracles about the wellbeing of the nation were given to the spirit mediums. Whilst monotheism presented a God who exists in dissociation from creation, African spirituality espouses a God who is immanent in creation. In African spirituality, all that is created participates in the life of God as the primordial spirit that is inherent in all that exists. The Judeo-Christian idea of attributing the spirit or soul solely to human beings is unintelligible in the light of African pantheistic spirituality. The conclusions that are arrived in this book will show that African spirituality and pantheism has a strong bearing on environmental ethics. From an Afro-centric perspective, spirituality and ethics are not about hypothetical and lofty imaginations, rather spirituality and ethics must be concretized in real contemporary life crises. In this chapter, I shall discuss the contemporary environmental crisis as a spiritual and ethical crisis from an Afro-centric perspective. The environmental crisis which is currently confronting humanity has defied any solution because of the simple fact that human beings are the main culprits in the destruction of the natural environment. This is because of some religious teachings that allege that human beings are different from the rest of nature because of the soul which God imparted on human beings at the beginning of creation. Other scholars have attributed the current environmental crisis to the culture of individualism which has dominated human societies, especially western societies. Western individualism deprives the individual a sense of concern for other constituencies in existence because all concern is wholly focussed on the self. The destruction of the ecosystems to extinction is primarily done by human beings. The destruction of the earth is not something that will happen in the future, rather, it is already taking place and manifesting itself in the form of global warming. Amidst this crisis, the human

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confidence in scientific solutions to the ongoing environmental decay and the global warming has proved fruitless because the original scientific worldview was premised on the presumption that the natural environment had an external existence to that of humanity. Consequently, the natural environment and its ecosystems are denied of any teleological value besides the utilitarian satisfaction which the capitalistic economic system has accorded them. The ongoing destruction of the natural environment and its ecosystems has contributed enormously to the currently debated global warming. This gloomy environmental scenario is posing a threat to the wellbeing of those who will exist in the future. African spirituality regards the natural environment as sacred on the basis that it was the abode of God and the ancestors. For this reason, the destruction of the natural environment is synonymous with the destruction of a relationship between humanity, God and the ancestors. Among the totemic indigenous peoples of Southern Africa, there is a strong belief that human identity is in continuum with the natural environment. Thus, there is a sense of common belonging between humanity and the natural environment. Charles Darwin’s theory that human beings had their ancestry in the natural environment is a well-established belief in African spirituality. The main objective of this book is to argue that African spirituality and ethics offers humanity with a plausible relational environmental ethic that will serve as the foundational basis for a plausible environmental ethic that is restorative to injustices that have been perpetrated by humanity against the natural environment. Humanity and the natural environment need to be reconciled and healed of divisive worldviews that are causal factors to the current environmental decay. Finally, it is shown that healing plays a critical role in African spirituality because it is what spirituality is about. The individual’s physical and spiritual wellbeing is a primary indicator of healthy relationships between the individual, community, ancestors, God and the natural environment. Healing is the restoration of the individual’s or community’s fractured relationships. Fractured relationships are the main causal factors for sickness and death. In African spirituality, sickness has a strong spiritual dimension because physical sickness finds its ultimate explanation in the spiritual realm of ancestors, the natural environment and God. The main presumption is that there should be harmonious relationships in all these realms of existence. Disharmony in one of these realms of existence can cause cataclysmic consequences to human life in the present as well as in the future. Healing is not only about medical treatment of sickness within the

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individual’s body, rather it involves effecting bodily and spiritual harmony in the life of the individual. Communal harmony remains an essential prerequisite for healing. It is not only the individual who is healed, but the whole community is healed as well. In African spirituality, healing is a communal process whereby consultation with a traditional doctor involves the participation of the family members. These family members can also mean the whole community—hence it’s not a nuclear family. The individual’s ailment diagnosis which is given by the traditional doctor is a diagnosis that always involves the whole family. The salient presumption is that “your sickness is my sickness, and your health is my health”. In most of the cultures in Southern Africa, formal greetings are always about the health of the present individual and that of his or her whole family. For this reason, healing is a collective process which is augmented by the participation of the community. Here the community involves the living and the ancestors. When the individual is healed, it is the whole community that is healed, not the individual alone. It is for this reason that African bioethics is based on a holistic approach to healing. A holistic outlook towards healing is different from a functionalistic approach. From a functionalistic perspective, the human person is seen as a machine. The motive for treatment of a patient is to enable a well-­ functioning human body. This implies that the telos for healing is to effect well-functioning body parts. A well-functioning human body is required for economic productivity. Colonialists wanted healthy Africans for economic purposes. A healthy worker was deemed productive compared to a sickly one. From a functionalistic perspective, the individual’s health is a private issue that must be dealt with by the individual on his or her own. On matters of health, the issue of individual privacy is deemed sacrosanct. Healthcare providers see themselves as solely dealing with the individual qua individual. Another instance of functionalistic healing can be found in missionary hospitals. In these missionary hospitals, healing through western modern medicine was intended to demonstrate the Lordship of Christ. This type of healing neglected the spiritual dimension to sickness because the African idea of connecting sickness to spirituality was derided upon as superstition. Thus, healing in African spirituality is connected to bioethics. These two realities cannot be disentangled from each other. In Southern Africa, traditional doctors are revered as highly spiritual people by virtue of their inert ability to communicate with both worlds of mortality and immortality. For this reason, moral uprightness has remained a primary requirement for a genuine traditional doctor. It is by abiding with moral

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virtues of the community that the traditional doctor can affect spiritual healing which is always complemented by physical healing. Physical and spiritual healing cannot be severed from each other. In African spirituality, healing is not about demonstrating the individual’s power over other persons but to serve the common good.

References Cobb, J. B. Jr. 1965. A Christian Natural Theology: Based on the Thought of Alfred North Whitehead. Philadelphia: Westminister Press. Decle, L. 1974. Three Years in Savage Africa. London: Methuen and Co. Maimela, S. 1990. Modern Trends in Theology. Johannesburg: Skotaville Publishers. Mazrui, A. A. 1990. Cultural Forces in World Politics. London: James Currey. Miles, J. 1995. God: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Murove, M. F. 2016. African Moral Consciousness: An Inquiry into the Evolution of Perspectives and Prospects. London: Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd. Prozesky, M. 1992. A New Guide to the Debate about God. London: SCM Press. Ranger, T.  O. 1999. Voices from the Rocks: Nature, Culture, and History in the Matopo Hills of Zimbabwe. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Sithole, N. 1968. African Nationalism (2nd Edition). London: Oxford University Press. Uzukwu, E. E. 1995. A Listening Church: Autonomy and Communion in African ChurchesI. New York: Orbis Books. Vambe, L. 1972. An ILL-Fated People: Zimbabwe Before & After Rhodes. London: William Heinemann Ltd.

CHAPTER 2

The Politicization of Spirituality in Southern Africa

The genealogy of politics in modern society can be traced to some religious belief systems that arose from the Judeo-Christian religion which is a monotheistic religion. Monotheistic religions are based on the belief in the oneness of God without any rival to his or her power. In the Old Testament, God is portrayed as a King who is completely absorbed with the throne. God never entertained any rival to his power. For this reason, the Yahweh deity was constantly waging a relentless war against the gods of the Canaanites as they were considered as rivalries to Yahweh’s absolute power. The relationship between spirituality and ethics has been given scant scholarly attention. Someone who professes some spiritual commitment is usually regarded as myopic and delusionary. In other words, spirituality is understood as impractical and divorced from day-to-day mundane life experiences imbedded in the world of materiality. It is usually argued that in the real world, anything that is about spirituality is illusory. For this reason, spirituality and materiality are regarded as incompatible. There is no dichotomy between spirituality and ethics. Genuinely spiritual people are most likely to be very sensitized to ethics in their day-to-day interactions with other people. Spirituality can be a very strong source of ethical motivation in people’s general life outlook. Individuals who are genuinely spiritual are prone to be very ethical beings because when ethics is grounded in genuine spiritual convictions, it becomes a very powerful source for humane relations in society and the natural environment. In © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. F. Murove, African Spirituality and Ethics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45590-2_2

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spirituality, people get into touch with what they regard as a transcendental truth about reality. For this reason, there is a strong belief that life cannot be reduced solely to the material dimension of existence, rather, there is more to life than what we currently know. Sometimes this realization has elicited different ethical responses in different people. For instance, some people have adopted an ascetic approach to anything sensually pleasurable whilst others have sought purification of souls in their day-to-day intercourse with material realities. For most of the people, ethics or morality is inseparably conjoined with what they believe to be that which is required by God. For example, for Muslims, the teachings of Allah as imparted by prophet Mohammed in the Quran dictates on how to live an ethical life. Christianity preached the Bible as the ultimate source of God’s revelation to humanity and how people were expected to live as per the message of the Bible. This ideal ethical life was usually based on the cultural contexts of the preachers of these exogenous religions. In Southern Africa, these exogenous religions ended up being regarded as the primary sources of ethics. Similarly, the Judeo-Christian religion regards the Bible as the source of ethical living pleasing to God for believers. Here it needs to be said that both exogenous monotheistic religions had a strong tendency of being uncompromising when it comes to enforcing their own cultural moral values upon the indigenous Southern Africans. These exogenous religions were also dovetailed by a culture of literacy which made it an imperative that what was to be regarded as intelligible was that which was in the written form. However, it is usually a few of us who are educated in the ways of systematic discriminative rationalization of reality that we tend to see ethics in terms of “plausible and implausible” moral reasons. This understanding of ethics is usually elitist because the inherent tendency is to conceptually exclude most of the citizens who are not accustomed to systematically compartmentalized modes of thinking. Sometimes the other tendency in this mode of thought is to deal with existential issues in an abstract manner which is entirely divorced from real concrete life experiences. Many peoples’ ethical outlook is strongly influenced by their spiritual presumptions with regards to what they deem to be the ultimate reality. People respond to various social, political and economic issues mainly on the basis of their spiritual presumptions about God. The presumption about God as a creative being is found in many religious traditions of the world. Within the plurality of these religious traditions, there is no religion that offers universal intelligibility. Heidi Holland articulated it well when

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she observed that there is no religion in the world which can claim to offer the “universal logic”. For example, the usual assumption that Catholicism is based on rationality can be used in the justification of witchcraft by those who live in a different cultural context such as Southern Africa. Catholicism worships a trinitarian God who is regarded as father, son and the holy spirit—thus implying that God was divine and human at the same time. These two religious systems give us some understanding “into the nature of the supernatural and human experience” which their believers adhere to passionately. In Southern Africa, God is regarded as a supreme being who exists in communion with the ancestors. The later continue to exist with their descendants as people who drink, eat and smoke whatever is offered to them by the living (Holland 2003: 5–6). Those who colonized Southern Africa did not bother to learn the nature of African spirituality, what Africans believed was dismissed by missionaries and their colonial partners as demonically inspired superstition. In fact, the colonized Southern African people were expected to wholly embrace Christianity and the colonial political establishment as citadels of civilization. African culture has a virtue of hospitality which is regarded as indispensable to what it means to be human. A stranger who is warmly received is regarded as a friend gained, and this resonated with a long tradition of warm acceptance of the wanderer in search of food and rest. This tradition of hospitality was used by colonial settlers to take land and minerals from the Africans. Colonial settlers and missionaries came to be understood by Africans as the same people with the same objectives of conquering and imposing their spiritual belief systems. The Portuguese seafarers who were under Vasco da Gama came between the border of Mozambique and South Africa. The generosity which these European seafarers received from the Africans led these Portuguese mariners to name that area Terra da boa gente which means a land of good people. Martin Prozesky observed that, “this striking but little-known episode of great moral goodness by Africans towards outsiders should be seen as a powerful indication of the importance of Africa’s ancient moral wisdom” (Prozesky 2009: 3). However, the tragedy is that African hospitality and moral outlook were inconceivable to missionaries and colonial settlers. Missionaries and colonial settlers had other motives and intentions which were unknown by the Africans. The later only realized late that missionaries and colonial settlers flagrantly disparaged Africans and their spirituality and moral values which they held dearly. African ancestors were labelled as demons by missionaries

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and sacred valleys, rivers and mountains were defiled by colonial settlers and missionaries. Africans do not find it repugnant to accommodate other peoples’ belief systems and their ethical traditions. For this reason, one can be a Christian and a practicing African traditionalist who resorts to African spiritual wisdom for solutions to his or her existential problems. This is another example of Africa’s fabled generosity which is dovetailed by the legendary fabled hospitality. Among Africans, as Holland retorted, “Being a Christian or subscribing to other religions in no way conflicts with traditional beliefs, even for those called to the priesthood as diviners. Large numbers of Africans have been Christianised for four generations but have maintained a compound rather than a single belief” (Holland 2003: 6). The African ethos of accommodating led missionaries and colonial settlers to nurse a dehumanizing attitude and maltreatment of Africans in all walks of life. Christianity and the colonial political establishment were uncompromising when it came to propagating their spirituality and value systems to the Africans. Christianity was uncompromising in its refusal to recognize the role of ancestors in the lives of the living and all African religious beliefs. Africans were expected to embrace Christian spirituality only and nothing was to be embraced outside that. To make matters worse, the religious and philosophical assumptions of monotheism which was at the heart of Christianity implied that there was only one God who had all the powers and did not share any power with any other beings. To a great extent, this belief system created a culture of religious intolerance towards African spirituality. In the Old Testament, the image and character of God is portrayed as a conglomerate of personalities. God the creator is also a destroyer, a merciful God is also a vengeful God, a forgiving God is also an unforgiving God, a God of peace is simultaneously presented as a God of war, a God who liberated the Israelites from slavery is the same God who sent them to Babylonian slavery, a God who created human beings in his/her image is the same God who destroys that very same image, a God who loves sacrifices is also a God who abhorred those sacrifices. Besides all these personalities that were predicated on God, a persistent motif that lingers throughout the Old Testament narratives is the idea that he/she is a God who pleasures in Righteousness above anything else. For this reason, ethical living was supposed to supersede ritualistic devotions because rituals were to be dovetailed by ethical commitments.

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The Old Testament projects a cosmic order that was complemented by some ethical commitments. People project their beliefs in God and what they would wish to be the ideal moral character that should concur with what they presume to be the moral character of God. In Southern Africa, missionaries projected their religious and ethical belief systems as if those ethical belief systems were divinely inspired. It is a strong belief among many philosophers of religion and sociology that a belief in God is actually a projection of human personality. If this assertion is true, we can make a deduction to the effect that in their preaching about God, missionaries were projecting the personality of Western people. The Western ethical system and religion have been inherited from the past or from the ancestors of Western people. Miles declared that, “we must at least recognize the empirical fact that many human beings, rather than project their own personalities upon gods wholly of their own creation, have chosen to introject – take into themselves – the religious projections of other human personalities” (Miles 1995: 4). Those who preach about “the fear of Lord as the beginning of wisdom” are usually themselves who would like to be feared by their subordinates. The Old Testament stories of the deluge which God is said to have unleashed on humanity, the burning of Sodom and Gomora and the slaughtering of the Philistines by the Jewish people all fed in the human consciousness of the Christian West whereby cruelty and mendacity were justified as natural human social ordering. In the hey days of Christianity within the Western world, the Bible was not about what humans said about God, rather, it was regarded as an archive of the human encounter with God. For colonialists and settlers, the administration of colonies was to be ruled according to the teachings of the Bible, especially those biblical passages that were deemed to be supportive of brutality, mendacity and oppression. Such biblical passages became an introjection in the psyche of Western people which they acted out in Southern Africa. In Southern African history, one could find some clerics proclaiming that the Afrikaner like the Israel of old that was taken as vine stock from Egypt and planted and nurtured in Canaan was taken, by God’s providence from Holland, France and Germany, and planted and nurtured as a people in Africa. The Afrikaner’s historical event of The Great Trek became the national epic, an odyssey, the formal proof of God’s election of the Afrikaner people and God’s special destiny for them. This epical event became the dominant trait of the majority of Afrikaner consciousness. They felt that they were called and led by God, their King, Ruler and

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Judge, to glorify him by establishing his Kingdom among the heathen Southern Africans. Africans were seen as creatures that were not fully human. For the Afrikaners, Africans were cursed children of Ham. As Andre du Toit retorted, “It was a chosen race that Israelites had received a divine injunction not to intermarry with the Canaanites. The non-whites of South Africa were identified therefore not only with the children of Ham but with the Canaanites of the Promised Land” (du Toit 1983: 922–928). The observation that was made by du Toit as shown above is that Afrikaners believed that they were empowered by God to dominate black people whom they wittingly regarded as subhuman. The Old Testament’s story of the Israelites as the chosen people served as an introjection for the divine destiny which God had supposedly set apart the Afrikaner people among the heathen African. The Afrikaners understood themselves as people who have been chosen by God to undertake a special mission among the Africans. It was this belief that later on led to the genesis of systematic segregation in Southern Africa. In Southern Africa, the heinous apartheid political system was based on the belief that Afrikaner people were God’s chosen people who were chosen by God for a specific message that was to be delivered to black Africans in Southern Africa. Afrikaners actually formed a secret organization called the Broederbond (brotherhood) which defended and justified apartheid as a political system that was willed by God. Ivor Wilkins and Hans Strydom had this to say about the Broederbond, “The organization takes as its uitgangspunt (premise) the conviction that Afrikaners were placed by God on the southern tip of Africa to fulfil a spiritual, religious calling. With missionary zeal, it believes that its actions and thoughts are, in fact, ordained by God” (Wilkins and Strydom 2012: 290). The history of the Afrikaner people was thus deemed inseparable from the history of the Afrikaans churches. In fact, the Church was a pillar of spiritual and political strength for the Broederbond. The South African apartheid state declared itself as a Christian state and that all its draconian apartheid rules were part and parcel of God’s providence to South Africa.

The Bible and Political Power The culture of literacy which has been pivotal to the Judeo-Christian religion has been accompanied by the idea that the western character was influenced by what has been taught in the Bible. The Bible as a book that

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archived the human encounter with God was regarded as the origins of the Western moral ideals. To the believers, the Bible was not a story of God, but God’s word in reality. However, the question that arises is whether Western ethical ideals were prescribed in the Bible or was it a matter of projecting Western social ideals into the Bible? It is common knowledge that individual personal, cultural, economic and political ambitions have been historically camouflaged as integral to God’s plan alleged to be enunciated in the Bible. Lest we forget, history is replete with stories whereby conquerors justified the conquest of other peoples as a morally inspired adventure common to the general existence of all humanity. Economically, the Bible has been interpreted by the Reformed Puritans in a way that produced a type of work ethic which invigorated the meteorite ascendency of the spirit of modern capitalism in Northern America. In those instances where the ethic of the common good was projected as integral to the social moral teachings of the Bible, the consequent result was the rise of an egalitarian ethos which inhibited the spirit of capitalism. As shown in the preceding section, the history of colonialism and apartheid found its moral justification from the Bible. Gabriel Setiloane is more nuanced on this point when he stated that, It is universally accepted that the Gospel preached by missionaries, and taught by the Church in mission schools and enforced by Church discipline in everyday life of the converts was shaped and moulded by the missionaries’ own view and attitude to life which they called Western civilization. (Setiloane 1988: 29)

Because of its various stories about God who is presented in the Bible as a being endowed with a conglomerate of personalities, it was inevitable that the Bible was readily susceptible to be used for various human nefarious political and economic reasons. The Biblical message which was preached by the missionaries was aimed at advancing the political and economic interests of the colonialists and imperialists. Whilst other scholars have maintained that the primary goal for missionaries was to use the Bible with the specific objective of supplanting African traditional religion with Christianity, there is also overwhelming evidence that suggests that missionaries were directly assisted by imperialists to carry out the political and economic objectives of imperialism. Thus, Christianity was instrumental in the pursuit of the economic and political objectives of imperialism. The instrumentalization of

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Christianity is well demonstrated in the story of King Leopold II of Belgium who had colonized the Congo Free State. In his letter to the missionaries, King Leopold II advised missionaries that the real objective of missionary evangelization was to plunder resources in the land of the Congolese people. Thus he wrote, “You will go to interpret the gospel in the way it will be the best to protect your interests in that part of the world. For these things, you have to keep watch on disinteresting our savages from the richness that is plenty in their ground”. Leopold went on to say that, “Your knowledge of the gospel will allow you to find texts ordering, and encouraging your followers to love poverty, like ‘Happier are the poor because they will inherit heaven’” (Okoro 2005: 1). Hence, the Bible was being used for imperial material acquisitive purposes. For Leopold II, the Bible was an instrument for pacifying and deceiving the Congolese people. There was no spirituality in the Bible. As such, he would put it bluntly that, “Sing every day that it’s impossible for the rich to enter heaven. Make them pay tax each week at Sunday mass” (Ibid). The target of the Gospel was also to pacify Africans by the news of the beauty of the spiritual heaven which required detachment from their wealth. Missionaries and colonial pundits vied with each other over opportunities to plunder African material and spiritual resources. The alliance between the missionaries and colonialists fostered a heavy cultural environment imbued in a patronization and condescending attitude masquerading as necessary for advancing the objective of salvation of African souls and civilization. The Judeo-Christian image of Yahweh as a King who was wholly absorbed with the throne had some serious political ramifications. One of those ramifications is that it gave rise to the ethical justification of the ethic of political totalitarianism. In other instances, it also became the moral justification for colonial conquest and the ruthless subjugation of the colonized Southern African people. Missionaries adopted the same attitude of cultural, religious and racial superiority as they despised the values, beliefs and traditions of the indigenous African people who were under colonial subjugation. Southern African people believed in many divinities as a way of coping with the reality of the complexity inherent in nature. As a monotheistic religion, Christianity adopted a totalizing tendency as it claimed monopoly of God. This Christian conceptualization of God was logically exclusivist and intolerant to other cosmologies such as those they found existing in the Southern African context. Both coloniality and Christianity did not entertain an inclusive outlook towards indigenous Southern

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African culture. Obviously, such an exclusive outlook towards African religious experiences led to a condescending attitude against African culture and religion. The colonial and missionary exclusivist approach was politically and religiously intended to deprive Southern African people of having a frame of existential reference. Religious dogmatism and literacy were absolutized to the exclusion of any form of religious and cultural exceptionalism, especially in the context of Southern Africa. The indigenous view of religious experience was inevitably distorted and bastardized as primitivism and the manifestation of the incarnation of demonic forces. Southern African experiences of spirituality were thus regarded as a phenomenon of absurdity and savagism which needed total eradication. Christian and colonial cultural reference lacked an understanding of the frame of cultural conditioning. Cultural conditioning inhibits all the pretense to universalizability of particular religious experiences, ethical and cultural mores. Instead of evoking their energies towards constructive spiritual enrichment for all people, missionaries were found wanting as their efforts were focused on deconstructing the foundations of African spirituality. This rendered Africa a tabula rasa or a spiritual wasteland. To the missionaries and colonialists, what Southern Africans believed was all barbarism which was supposed to be renounced. The wanton disparage of African spirituality was done with an attitude of unsavoury hypocrisy. As an example, missionaries construed that the African belief in witchcraft was evidence of evolutionary backwardness and incessant lack of rationality. Heidi Holand would put it poignantly that, Traditional Africa’s view of witchcraft is perhaps best described as an analogy with basic medical science. Just as westerners accept that they are constantly exposed to illness through germs, so many Africans believe there is a continual threat of disease and disaster from persons endowed with wickedness. (Holland 2003: 6-7)

In other words, there is an analogical similarity between the African belief in witchcraft and the western belief in the menace of germs in western society which is combated by physicians. Witchcraft is based on the idea that malevolent forces in the community can be manipulated by individuals who are spiritually gifted. It holds that every community since the beginning of time has controlled people with malevolent spiritual intentions who have caused destructive acts during their existence in the life of mortality. As such, the spirits of such individuals would incarnate in

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certain individuals who are known as witches “to possess and endow with wickedness. Extreme goodness and kindness is also believed to be hereditary. It is handed on by deceased relatives – ancestral spirits – to deserving individuals, namely, traditional healers” (Holland 2003: 7). Witchcraft dominates the African cosmology of health, and healing is the primary source of evil just in the same way germs dominate in western society. Africans have an optimistic outlook of human existence because of the prior “trust in the inherent good of worldly existence, destiny is linked to actions. Misfortune is not a matter of chance but is associated with the ire of the ancestral spirits or the evils of witchcraft” (Holland 2003: 7). Witchcraft arises from the human quest for power. This type of power is about controlling nature and destinies of other people. A witch is a potent of evil. He or she has no regard for the wellbeing of others and the idea of the sacredness of life. A witch or Muroyi (Shona) Mthakati (Zulu) is possessed by an evil spirit. The evil spirit is responsible for taking control of the host to such an extent that the host acts in ways that show unprecedented obsession. A witch has no regard for the wellbeing of other people, she or he is solely concerned with her or his self-interest.

The Religious Origins of Politics and Power To be ethical is to have a sense of concern for others, to be committed to the ideal of advancing the flourishing of others. If this proposition is correct, it is apodictic that self-interested behaviour that discounts the interests of others in one’s actions cannot be reconciled with ethics. In African spirituality, religion brings people together to share and celebrate life together. In African spirituality, the gathering of people ensued in the communion of people in the realm of mortality and immortality. Ultimately, it all comes down to sharing and celebrating life as the ultimate reality that unites all that exists together. On the other hand, the advent of Christianity has been closely related to the politics of power which involved subjugation and domination of other people, especially those who were conquered. A strong feature of a totalizing power has always permeated Christianity and the whole colonial, political and economic establishment. In such a context, the colonized and Christianized African had his or her material and spiritual needs charted for them under the auspice of “protecting Christianity and civilization”. For instance, when Ian Smith of the then Rhodesia usurped political power from the British in the then Rhodesia, he defended his actions by retorting that, “We have struck a

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blow for the preservation of justice, civilization and Christianity, and in the spirit of this belief, we have this day assumed our sovereign independence, God bless you all” (cited in Lapsley 1986: 15). Colonial oppressors undertook their oppressive activities on the grounds that they were doing it for “the Christian faith and civilization” and that it was God who was empowering them to do so. All oppressive colonial governments in Southern Africa have always declared that their oppressive actions were indispensable for the preservation of the Christian spiritual ideals. This was done despite the voices of the majority of the oppressed who clamoured for justice and fairness. To the majority of discerning and oppressed Africans in Southern Africa, the God of Christianity remained imbued in an aura of ambiguity which was an ultimate travesty of justice and irredeemable and unprecedented erosion of moral values. In another example, one finds that the annexation of Natal as a British colony was dovetailed by the bastardization of Zulu people. Thus, one finds the colonial Commissioner general of the then annexed Natal averring that, “When not effectually restrained and directed by the strong arm of power, the true and universal character of the Kefirs, as framed by their education, habits, and associations, is at once superstitious and warlike” (cited in Welsh 1973: 33). For colonialists, the African was supposed to be ruled through the application of brutal power or force. The ultimate intention was to effect total subjugation of the conquered African. The genealogy of politics in modern society can be traced to some religious belief systems that arose from the Judeo-Christian religion which is a monotheistic religion. Monotheistic religions are based on the belief in the oneness of God without any rival to his or her power. In the Old Testament, God is portrayed as a King who is completely absorbed with the throne. God never entertained any rival to his power. For this reason, the Yahweh deity was constantly waging a relentless war against the gods of the Canaanites as they were considered as rivalries to Yahweh’s absolute power. It is partly on these grounds that other theologians such as Jurgen Moltmann have deduced that imperialistic world conquerors have always tried to find monotheistic and a theocratic basis to legitimize their claims to political domination (Moltmann 1987: 51). In the Judeo-Christian religion, believers have been fascinated by God’s power. By virtue of the belief that God created everything ex nihilo or out of nothing, God became the originator of power and exercised it unhindered. Human beings exist in a state of absolute dependency on God because God has all the powers to himself and inserts that power to things s/he created. This Old

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Testament image of God as creator is also portrayed as a sadistic deity who used his own godly powers for self-serving purposes. It’s a God who created mankind for the sake of perpetuating his own image and yet s/he distanced him or herself from that image. It is a God who does not have a divine social life and he stays alone without a spouse, a friend or a pet (Miles 1995: 29). A God without a social life is meant to be a frightening God. Without any socialization, the only deduction that can be made is that such a God is self-centred and bereft of concern for the wellbeing of others. Socialization precipitates care and concern for all creation. The image of God that arises from the Old Testament is that of a God who is wholly narcissistic. Narcissus was a Greek mythical youth “who fell in love with his own image in the water”. In so doing, this boy is said to have died because of his withdrawal from relationships with the outer world. Scholars from various disciplines have come to associate narcissism with a person who is self-centred or a nation which is self-centred insofar as that particular nation sees other nations as inferior to it. The idea of seeing God as having created a human person for the sake of having an image thrives on a narcissistic understanding of God (Guiness et al. 1990: 160). The Old Testament image of God as an all-powerful king who exercised his power without any opposition to his power captured the imaginations of many believers to the extent that the worship of God has become synonymous with the worship of power. Due to the belief in power as something that originated from God who is worshiped by believers as the source of power, the idea that a leader is ordained by God has been regarded as indisputable. In the worship of God’s power, a political culture of intolerance and brutality which was attributed to the nature of God was being born. An Anglo-American philosopher and mathematician, Alfred North Whitehead was critical of the image of God as all-powerful because of the political culture of intolerance which it nursed in the psyches of believers. As such, he has this to say, “The worship of glory arising from power is not only dangerous: it arises from a barbaric conception of God. I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the bones of those slaughtered because of men intoxicated by its attraction” (Whitehead 1927: 17). Evidently, Whitehead was undoubtedly making some innuendo to the era of the crusades in the history of Western Christianity, an era whereby Christians were sent to kill those who were believed to be unwilling to bow to the power of God which the Catholic Church felt she was an emissary on earth. God was conceived as all-powerful and it was presumed

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logical that God’s power should be felt among the believers. Those who did not believe in the all-powerfulness of God as preached by Christianity were considered as sub humans whose humanity was to be flagrantly disregarded. The conceptualization of God as having absolute power can only be justified as a logical explanation for the inhumane treatment of those who were not Christians. If God alone had all the power as it was believed by orthodox believers of the Judeo-Christian religion, any rival to God’s power would only have to be destroyed as an affirmation of the all-powerfulness of God. Here again, we can postulate the religious origins of a political culture of intolerance. Power has a dual function whereby those who are attracted by it are prepared to be destroyed by it as well as to destroy others who do not submit to it. Here, a typical example are the suicide bombers who went to the extent of killing innocent civilians and in the process blowing up their own lives, all this being done in the name of Allah! Apart from the culture of intolerance which was mediated to human society through the belief of an all-powerful God, we can also postulate that the religious belief in an all-powerful God gave rise to the culture of political totalitarianism. The connection between the culture of political totalitarianism and the belief in an all-powerful God can be discerned from the early Christian religious doxology which said, “All glory, honour and power belong to our God for ever and ever”. The implication of the above doxology is that this power is never shared with anyone or anything. However, I think it is important for me to unpack on what we mean by “the culture of political totalitarianism”. David Robertson averred that totalitarianism implies that rules assume control of all the aspects of the individual’s life to the extent that the ruler has “extensive political power” and that “no liberty or autonomy in decision-making is left to individuals or groups outside the political system”. Robertson went on to declare that “[a] thorough-going theocracy, for example, where the Church has the ability to penetrate and organize all aspects of life, would be totalitarian” (Robertson 1993: 465). Under a totalitarian political system, all the organs of the State or organization are controlled by an ultimate authority that has all the power. Totalitarian states are popularly known for spreading their tentacles to all spheres of society such that nothing goes out of society without the knowledge of those in power. Whatever the citizens might want to communicate with those who are outside their country and what they receive in response is only permissible after going through a vetting process.

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The imagery of God as possessing absolute power gave rise to totalitarian tendencies which one finds in Catholicism. Since God in heaven is understood to have kept all the powers to Godself, it also followed that there was only one leader within the Church upon whom the power of God is imparted for the whole Church. Consequently, in Catholicism, the Pope is understood as the holder of all moral values and powers, of God, of Christ, of the Church and believers. The Bulgarian novelist, Elias Canetti, pragmatically stated that through its absolute centralization of power and its ritual, Catholicism has been susceptible of rendering people into unsavoury submissiveness. Believers are not allowed to preach to each other as their words are considered to be incapable of imparting Godly power to fellow believers. Priestly and the hierarchical power of the Church authorities or magisterium is considered as the only legitimate power that is deemed to have come from God. The word of an ordinary believer has no authority. S/he is presumed to understand that which is explained to him or her (Canetti 1962: 182). Through the teaching of doctrines, the ordinary believer ends believing that her or his life is meaningless without salvation from the Church and its hierarchy. This teaches the ordinary believer that it’s the only sources of communication between her or him with God. For this reason, the ordinary believer delivers himself or herself entirely into the hierarchical authorities of the Church. The ordinary believer is not allowed to take any personal initiative in matters that pertain to the dogmatic teachings of the Church. Rituals and scriptural readings are centrally determined. Believers are not allowed to debate or dispute whatever is prescribed to them by the hierarchy of the Church which is regarded as endowed with the power of Christ which is believed to originate from God.

Power is preserved through the severing of communication among believers in such a way that they become wholly dependent on the one who has all the power. In this way, the lack of communication among believers renders them in a situation of absolute dependency. One finds that there were other religious conceptions of God as impassible and as a Controlling Power which have contributed enormously to an understanding of God as an all-intrusive power in the lives of everything that exists. The human response to this awesome power is supposedly to come in the form of complete submissiveness on the part of the believer. The idea that human beings should only respond to this type of power through submissiveness implies that it is the type of power which is imagined to be exercised in an arbitrary manner because no one knows what will happen in the next instance of one’s existence. This type of Godly power is a type of power that estranges humanity from God as creator. In the book of the

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prophet Isaiah 55: 8–9 it is said that, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts”. It is evidently clear that this type of power is a power which human beings should not even dare fathom participating in its execution. This type of power can be said to be a type of power that is alienating. Gregory Bauman observed that such an image of God was critiqued by Hegel as the God of the Old Testament who was alienating. As Bauman puts it, “Here God was the God over and above history, the divine stranger in the heavens, who ruled the earth and its peoples from above and only intervened in their history at certain moments” (Baum 1975: 8). The implication is that the God of the Old Testament was someone who has all the power to himself or herself and at the same time being aloof from what was happening to creation and more specifically to human beings. This God did not share in the life experiences of people. It is mainly on the basis of such an image of God that God is introjected by oppressive regimes in their quest to legitimize their hold on power. It is usually assumed that God ordained such ruthless rulers to impose oppressive rules on people. Ruthless rulers regard the people they rule as evil and mendacious. Within such mode of thought, God as a being that does not tolerate evil is regarded as on the side of the oppressive regime and distant from people (Baum 1975: 15). When God is understood as distant from people or remote from people she or he becomes an object of alienation because people cannot identify with such a God in their day-to-day life experiences. The relationship of such a God with humanity becomes that of domination whereby those who are dominated can only respond to such power through submission. To dominate implies being in absolute control over the dominated. The dominated respond to that domination by adopting an attitude of submissiveness. Those religious practices of submissiveness are usually motivated by the belief that God is a Controlling Power who knows in minute detail whatever is happening to the whole of creation. The idea of God as a Controlling Power has also given rise to the religious belief that everything has been predestined by God. For Canetti, Calvinism and Islam were brands of religion that are most likely to believe in the doctrine of predestination because of their understanding of God as a Controlling Power. As for Canetti, the religious consequence of this belief is a tendency to cultivate a religious attitude of absolute submissiveness. This submissiveness becomes some form of addiction in the

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believers, especially those who belong to Islamic and Christian fundamentalism. As Canetti observed, “Their believers yearn for God’s force; His power does not satisfy them; it is too distant and leaves them too free” (Canetti 1962: 328). What such believers want is to experience the command from God and are prepared to follow that command to its ultimate conclusion. Such an attitude “creates a soldierly type of believer, men to whom battle is the truest representation of life and who feel no fear in actual battles because for them the whole of life is a battle” (Canetti 1962: 328). In the above quotation, the believers who are being referred to are those who are known as religious fundamentalists. In secular language, religious fundamentalists are usually referred to as extremists who can do anything without reasoning or evaluating the pros and cons of their actions. Fundamentalists believe that everything that happens in the world and the universe is happening according to God’s plan. In the Christian religion, fundamentalism thrives on a literary interpretation of the Bible as a book that came directly from God and reveals the nature of God in relationship to the whole of creation. Religious fundamentalism is usually based on monotheism—a belief that God is one, hence all that happens in the universe emanates from the power of this one God. When religious fundamentalism is combined with politics, such a combination becomes socially vitriolic. An example of this can be found in the history of South Africa. The early Afrikaner people who were steeped in the sixteenth-century doctrines of early Calvinism saw themselves as the Chosen people of God in South Africa, whilst the British imperialists were regarded as the Pharaohs of Egypt and the majority of the indigenous Africans as the Philistines who were mentioned in the Old Testament as the protagonists against God’s plan for his people the Israelites. This was actually a literal reading of the Old Testament. In this regard, Dunbar Moodie observed that the Afrikaners believed that God was sovereign and highly involved in the goings of nations. As he puts it, “Like Assyria in the Book of Isaiah, the British Empire was not only the incarnation of evil; it was ultimately the foil against which God revealed His magnitude and glory to His Afrikaner people” . He went on to say that, whilst the Zulu army symbolized the black danger, swart gavar, to the purity of Afrikaner racial identity, “in theological terms the Zulus became God’s agents for uniting His people in holy covenant with Himself. The civil theology is thus rooted in the belief that God has chosen the Afrikaner people for a special destiny” (Moodie 1980: 11). In such mode of thought, undoubtedly the Zulu people were regarded as agents of evil who were deliberately

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set up by God in order to bring into realization the destiny of Afrikaner people as God’s chosen people with a mission in Southern Africa, a dark part of Africa. The generally shared theology of Afrikaners was premised on the idea that God chose the Afrikaners for a special destiny (Moodie 1980: 12). The God-given destiny of the Afrikaners was in ruling and dominating the whole of Southern Africa and subjugating through wanton expropriation of vast tracks of land from indigenous Southern African peoples who were forcibly driven in inhabitable lands. The biblical story of the Israelites driving out the Philistines from the Promised Land became the source of inspiration and political consciousness of the Afrikaner people. For the indigenous Southern African people, to be forcibly removed from a land which carried the remains of one’s ancestors was to be robbed of one’s identity and connection with the ancestors. Being dispossessed of the land meant to be spiritually impoverished. Suffice it to say that the image of God as the only ruler who was ultimately in charge of directing the destiny of the Afrikaner people as God’s chosen people in South Africa became the foundation of their belief in racial exceptionalism. The subjective feeling of being a chosen people of God among other people obviated a feeling of racial purity, a feeling that precluded any notion of equality of races. In this regard, the historical epoch of The Great Trek became the national epic, the formal proof of God’s election of the Afrikaner people and God’s destiny for them. They thus saw themselves as a people that were set apart among the heathen Africans to fulfil God’s predetermined grand plan. Whilst the Afrikaners felt that they were chosen for a particular mission which they were supposed to fulfil among the majority of the indigenous Africans whom they regarded as heathens, their sense and execution of that mission was imbued in an aura of ambiguity whereby their mission was undertaken with unprecedented violent conquest of indigenous African peoples that consequently ensued in the establishment of racial Republics. André du Toit narrated the early Trekboers’ understanding of themselves as a chosen race among other races as follows: The belief in God as someone who predetermined the Afrikaners as an elected people became integral to the history of racism and the political ideology of apartheid in South Africa. Apartheid was a violent institutionalization of racism whereby the essential value of indigenous Africans and other people who were not of Caucasian by origins was subjected to untold dehumanization. This dehumanization was augmented by the Calvinistic religious belief in which the Afrikaners believed that they were

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a chosen people, a people that was set apart by God for a divine purpose among the heathen indigenous Africans. As such, the political ideology of apartheid and its inherent bigotry led to the formation of an Afrikaner political semi-cultic secret organization called the Afrikaner Broederbond (Afrikaner brotherhood). Whilst this secretive group claimed to have been formed with the aim of promoting Afrikaner culture, it had such a tremendous influence on all South African spheres of life. This point was well stated by Ivor Wilkins and Hans Strydom when they said, Its All-pervading influence has made its indelible mark on South Africa. The Bantustan policies, the Christian national education policy, the sport policy, the coloured and Indian policy – all the major political peculiarities which have shaped South Africa into a constitutional oddity bear the stamp of the Broederbond on their formulation and execution. (Wilkins and Strydom 2012: 2).

Thus the main mission of the Broederbond was to exclusively promote the domination of Afrikaners in all spheres of South African lives. The ascendency of the National Party into power was as a result of the political activities of the Broederbond. The first chairman of this secretive organization who was known as H. J. Kooper gave a speech at the 50th anniversary of the Broederbond in 1968 in which he said, Do you realise what a powerful force is gathered here tonight between these four walls? Show me a greater power on the whole continent of Africa! Show me a greater power anywhere, even in your so-called civilized countries! We are part of the State, we are part of the Church, we are part of every big movement that has been born of the nation. (Wilkins and Strydom 2012: 2-3)

One can easily deduce from the above utterance that the Broederbond was an organization that was dedicated to the promotion of the control of power in South African society in order to advance the ideal of the Afrikaner people as a special people that was destined to rule and dominate South Africa politically and economically. Another religious contribution to politics has been entrenched in the Christian doctrine of salvation. The belief in being a chosen people of God usually goes hand in hand with the doctrine of salvation. The idea that pre-colonial Africans were living in a state of sin was prominent in the writings of missionaries and colonial anthropologists. The African belief in

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ancestors, healing and the sacredness of the natural environment was relentlessly attacked as the ultimate manifestation of heathenism which was supposed to be combated by Christianity. Under the auspice of salvation, Africans were expected to denounce their ways of being in the world which was central to their spirituality. Among the colonized Africans, conversion to Christianity was thus carried with it two privileges. Firstly, those Africans who converted to Christianity became privileged within the colonial society for their subservient manner of contact with the colonial authorities. Those who were converted to Christianity were regarded as civilized. Civilization meant the readiness of a Christianized African to abandon her or his traditional ways of doing things. To further the political aspirations of colonialists, education became an instrumental for the furtherance of colonial social ordering. According to the colonial mind, there was nothing good which could arise from the African initiative, be it in religion or in education. African traditional religion was condemned as heathenism which Christianity was to overthrow. Secondly, salvation introduced the ethos of exclusion. Those who converted to the Christian religion were expected to live a life that was radically different from that which was lived by their fellow human beings who were not converted to Christianity. The converts marginalized their traditional community as they regarded it as living under the spiritual condition of sinfulness. The Christian ethos of exclusiveness led to the creation of Christian villages. Christian villages were habitats that were created for converted Africans to live lives that differed remarkably from that of their traditional neighbours. The Church owned the people who lived in the Christian villages. In Zimbabwe the Catholic Church created a Christian village which was called Chishawasha whereby it controlled all the spiritual affairs of the VaShawasha people. In this Christian village, the Church exercised absolute control of all the aspects of people’s lives. Lawrence Vambe who experienced life in the Christian village of Chishawasha had this to say, “Like the air we breathed, the Church was everywhere, as much in the loud peals of its bells which rang out continually each day and was heard for miles around, as in the authority of its dogmatic but largely mystifying teaching” (Vambe 1972: 14). Those who lived in the Christian village felt oppressed by the Church as they were not allowed to openly express their traditional spiritual experiences. Within the Christian village, the main teaching was that the Catholic Church was the only avenue where Africans were saved from eternal damnation. Within such a context, people would not dare to have an honest dialogue with the Church. Within the Christian

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village Africans were subjected to a culture of pretense whereby the virtue of honest was turned into a vice which led to ostracism from the Christian village. Ethical questions of right and wrong were judged according to the teachings of the Church and not according to African traditional ethics. Through the creation of Christian villages, Christianity became a divisive force to the Africans who lived in closed knit communities by virtue of sharing the same cultural values. The absence of shared moral values between Christian villages and traditional communities created a perennial state of psychological insecurity. This psychological insecurity arose from the fact that those Africans who lived in Christian villages felt that their existential state was the epitome of salvation whilst those who lived in traditional villages felt that their traditional ways of life were being threatened by the very presence of Christianity. To make matters worse, the autocracy of the colonial government which was by its very nature divisive Communities that previously lived in harmony were at loggerheads because of the lack of shared moral values that were previously shared as the bedrock of communal common belonging. In the Christian village the Church had become the landlord who declared that which was right and wrong. For those who remained in traditional communities, the Christian village epitomized the erosion of traditional ethical values. To those Africans who were rooted in their traditional values, the Christian village became a symbol of the encroachment of communal ethical insecurity since families which existed in harmony were now at constant loggerheads. The concept of salvation which the Christian village represented was dovetailed by the bastardization of African traditional values, moral values and religious belief systems.

References Baum, G. 1975. Religion and Alienation: A Theological Reading of Sociology. New York: Paulist Press. Canetti, E. 1962. Crowds and Power. London: Penguine Boos Ltd. Du Toit, A. 1983. “No Chosen People: The Myth of the Calvinist Origins of Afrikaner Nationalism and Racial Ideology”, The American Historical Review. Vol. 88, No. 4 (October), pp. 920-952. Guiness, A.  E. et  al 1990. ABC of the Human Mind: A Family Answer Book. New York: Reader’s Digest Association. Holland, H. 2003. African Magic: Traditional Ideas that heal a Continent. Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd.

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Lapsley, M. 1986. Neutrality or Co-option? Anglican Church and State from 1964 until the Independence of Zimbabwe. Gweru: Mambo Press. Miles, J. 1995. God: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Moltmann, J. 1987. “The Inviting Unity of the Triune God”, in Concilium. 177/1. Moodie, T., & Dunbar, D. 1980. The Rise of Afrikanerdom. Carlifornia: University of Carlifornia Press. Okoro, C. 2005. Letter from King Leopold II of Beulgium to Colonial Missionaries. Available at: http://allafrica.com/stories/1200510060035.html (Accessed 15 December 2022). Prozesky, M.  H. 2009. Cinderella, Survivor and Savior: African Ethics and the Quest for a Global Ethic. In African Ethics: An Anthology of Comparative and Applied Ethics, ed. M.  F. Murove, 3-13. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-­ Natal Press. Robertson, D. 1993. The Penguine Dictionary of Politics. London: Penguine Books. Setiloane, G. 1988. African Theology. Johannesburg: Skotaville. Vambe, L. 1972, An Ill-Fated People: Zimbabwe Before and After Rhodes, London: William Heinemann Ltd. Welsh, D. 1973. The Roots of Segregation: Native Policy in Colonial Natal, 1945–1910. Cape Town: Oxford University Press. Whitehead, A.  N. 1927. Religion in the Making. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilkins, I. and Strydom, H. 2012. The Super Afrikaners: Inside the Afrikaner Broederbond. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers.

CHAPTER 3

Essentials of African Spirituality

Whilst many injustices have been perpetrated against the people of African ancestry during the era of colonialism and the advent of foreign religions, a particular type of injustice which has been given scant attention by many scholars is the injustice that is related to the marginalization of African spirituality. African spiritual experiences have not been taken seriously because the main presumption from many scholars is that what Africans experience spiritually is what Christianity and Islam have already taught about. African spirituality was regarded as fetish animism and primitiveness which was destined for extinction in the advancement of civilization. One day I was watching a television programme called Umoya (which means spirit in Zulu).1 The young lady who hosts this programme said that she was endowed with the ability to communicate with other peoples’ ancestors or other peoples’ departed relatives. But this young lady was not just making some speculative claims. She could approach someone whom she even didn’t know and tell him or her messages which she received from the other person’s departed relative(s). When asked how and where she got this talent, her response was that she just found herself with such a talent from childhood up to the present day. Her ability to tell people what happened to them in the past and what the departed relatives were saying to their living relative(s) was just amazing because it was something beyond the ordinary. However, this young lady said that what she was doing was not something out of the ordinary, rather as she put it, “What I am doing is part of African spirituality which has remained unknown to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. F. Murove, African Spirituality and Ethics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45590-2_3

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us as Africans and to the whole world…Its time we should take African spirituality seriously”. The insight from this young lady gave me food for thought as an academic. It motivated me to reflect on whether there is some relationship between African ethics and the spirituality of indigenous African people. It also made me think through the type of spirituality which African ethics can bequeath upon our contemporary world which is facing enormous problems such as the ongoing global climate change and environmental decay, diseases such as COVID-19, wars, poverty and the incessant social phenomena of violence against women and children. All these gloomy realities signify the urgent need for a new spirituality for humanity, a spirituality that will be based on ethics. As already shown in Chap. 2, in the Judeo-Christian religion, spirituality was based on the Bible—understood as a chronicle of God’s encounters with human beings and the lives of saints as models for individuals to emulate. In this understanding of spirituality, the main presumption is that spirituality was a matter of the individual’s vertical relationship with God in a way that was private and individualistic. A talk about the spirit is also understood to exclusively imply some religious individual or organizational faith convictions. In indigenous African culture, the word “religion” as to imply belief systems and rituals does not exist because everything in existence or anything that is real is related and interrelated with everything else in existence. The divine and the profane are intertwined with each other to such an extent that they cannot be disentangled from each other because Mweya/Umoya (Spirit in Shona/Zulu or Sotho) is the reality that connects the departed or ancestors to share a common existence of mutual dependence and interdependence. The African universe is a universe which is permeated by the spirit(s). In many African cosmogony stories, God was the original spirit that brought everything into existence and remained immersed in the whole of creation. It is this primordial spirit that permeates and entangles everything in the whole universe. In the mythology of the Karanga people of Southern Africa, the divine primordial spirit, Mwari, resided in the Mabwe aDziva, a cave which is currently found at Matopo Hills in Zimbabwe. From these rocks, the voice of the primordial spirit, Mwari, gave oracles concerning the wellbeing of the people and the land. Thus, the whole land and the universe were wholly saturated with Mweya waMwari—the primordial spirit. The word Mwari implies someone who is contained within something which is analogous to a pot or a cave. It is for this reason that this primordial spirit of Mwari was connected to life or fertility. Through life or fertility, the spirit of Mwari manifested itself in history and continues to do so in the present.

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Harmonious existence among human beings and everything that exists is the basis of the teleology of morality. Disequilibrium or disharmony in existence is the reason for all the ills that are common in human society as well as environmental disequilibrium and chaos. The spirit of Mwari is a spirit that enjoys peace and serenity in the generality of existence. For this reason, human acts such as murder, cruelty, rape and pollution of the environment, just to mention a few, are regarded as offensive and repulsive to the spirit of Mwari. A morally perverted individual is thus described as someone who is endowed with Mweya wakaipa (a Shona phrase which literally means she or he has an evil spirit). The individual’s character is inseparable from the type of Mweya which she or he is endowed with. Mweya is not preordained into the very being of the individual, rather it is consciously or reflectively acquired throughout life. It is that spirit that tends to drive the individual into behaving in ways that are inhumane and antisocial. Virtuous acts would tend to attract the virtuous person to the spirit of Mwari. But this spirit of Mwari is a spirit that envelops everything in existence and has also manifested itself with greater intensity in human existence as per human experiences.

The Spirit Since the spirit is understood as life, the telos of existence is to maximize life in all its other manifestations. As alluded to previously, the primordial spirit was the spirit of life which ushered the reality of life into being instead of nothingness. Those entities which we are accustomed to describing as lifeless do exude life within their own realm of being. The idea of the all-encompassing reality of the spirit was well observed by early colonial anthropologists though in a rather bastardizing manner. Whoever dared to read their works will find that the phenomenon of the spirit is very common in Southern Africa and if not most of the African peoples in sub-Saharan Africa. For Africans, the spirit was immortal, and the spirit existed in everything that exists such as rocks, streams, trees, mountains, rivers, valleys, mountains, caves, animals and human beings. In a rather disparaging manner, Marquard and Standing would put it erroneously that, “Round this spirit life was built a system of magic which pervaded the whole of their life, with its accompanying taboos and rigid customs” (Marquard and Standing 1939: 52–53). Evidently, such racially biased writings masquerading as objective anthropological scholarship only show

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the predominance that was given to the spirit in the lives of indigenous Africans. However, putting aside the gloomy racially biased view of colonial anthropologists, the spirit permeated everything that exists in such a way that it is the nodal point of inclusion for the variety of all beings in existence. What is usually regarded as an exclusive nature of a particular reality becomes an abstraction of the particular from the totality. When such an abstraction is taken into extremes where it is accorded some autonomous existence, such a process degenerates into some falsified conceptualization of reality. The classification of things into various categories of existence is scientifically useful but the pitfalls inherent in a such a mode of acquiring knowledge is that it nursed the illusion that things are not intrinsically related to each other. Our current environmental crisis which is presenting itself in the form of global warming is nothing but the outcome of a human false consciousness whereby humanity acted under the illusion that its polluting activities were external to its own wellbeing. The popular anthropological narrative of “the savage” as to designate indigenous peoples thrived on the idea that the primitiveness of “the savage” was inherent in the failure of such a people to differentiate or categorize various forms of entities into types. Most of the western anthropological scholarship after the wake of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution denigrated the African understanding of spirit as the principle of general inclusiveness as an affirmation of human backwardness as opposed to progress. In the “progress” frame of mind, the anthropological reading of Darwin’s theory of evolution comprised of “two fundamental aspects: the ideas that a common form becomes differentiated, and that a simple form becomes more complex”. Consequently, the twin notions of differentiation and increasing complexity underlay all anthropological applications of evolutionary reasoning. For this reason, it was presumed that technological differentiation and complexity were the criteria upon which to issue the standard criteria that differentiates that which was deemed savage as opposed to civilized cultural practice (Cheater 1994: 2–3). In African cosmology, as entrenched in traditional thought, there was no dichotomy between science and the supernatural, reality and religion because apprehension is simply a totality that includes everything. African traditional thought is primarily “concerned not only with what was, but also with what ought to be and with why it ought to be. It was mandatory as well as explanatory” (Davidson 1973: 117). Spiritual beings or

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immortal beings are involved in the day-to-day unfolding of events in human society and in all other constituencies in existence. The spirits warn and advice about the impending catastrophic events and how to deter such events from happening. Permissible and impermissible actions constituted things that were not ought to be done as a precondition for harmonious existence between humanity and all created things. Taboos which enforce moral conduct in human society do regulate relationships between human beings in human society and relationships that should exist between human beings and the natural environment. In taboos, organic dimension of cause and effect are inseparable from each other. Human consciousness is immersed in rhythm with the generality of existence where spirits are intertwined with all that ever exists. An animal that is regarded as a totem is revered by human beings as the embodiment of the spirit of the founding ancestor of a particular people. The founding spirit of a nation who is usually revered as the original owner of the land upon which the present descendants reside is symbolically represented by an animal, a mountain, a river or a particular plant. Traditional political authority has some spiritual origins. For example, among the Basotho people, King Moshoeshoe is revered by the present generation of the Sotho people as the founding spirit of the Basotho nation or the kingdom of Lesotho. As the founder of the Kingdom of Lesotho, it was upon him that the primordial spirits of the Basotho people had conferred their ideals for ethical leadership. According to Martin Prozesky, “the ancestors (Balimo) told [Moshoeshoe] in a dream to rule with wisdom and justice and to care for the needy. As well as being a leader and skilled healer, he was a thinker who pondered such questions as the nature of the universe and of life” (Prozesky 2016: 9). As the founding spirit of the Basotho nation, there are certain political leadership values such as Khotso (peace) and botho (humanness) which his spirit imparted among his people and are thus highly cherished among the Basotho as the ultimate values that endured amidst the vicissitudes of life. A ruler is supposed to be a spiritual and ethical person who was also a healer. Obviously, such an expectation differs radically from the modern westernized rulers who are more attracted to the Machiavellian rulers who were expected to be cruel, treacherous and self-centred. The Karanga people who dwelt in the Southern African historical capital city called Great Zimbabwe had a national guardian spirit which incarnated in the bird called Hungwe. The founding spirit of the Karanga or Kalanga people was the Sun. Apart from being the founders of the

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Southern African city of Great Zimbabwe, the Karanga/Kalanga people have originated from North East Africa. Etymologically the word Kalanga/ Karanga comes from the word LANGA, a word which means the Sun. Indigenous peoples in Southern Africa such as the Nguni, Xhosa, Sotho, Ndebele, Shangans, Angoni and the Shona consider themselves as descendants from the ancestors who originated from the Sun. The Sun was a spiritual being that was closely associated with human spiritual wellbeing. After the birth of the child, these indigenous people introduced the child “to the outside world at sunrise when it was thrown into the air three times towards the sun which was beckoned to look after the baby and make it prosperous” (Chigwedere 2016: 9). Thus, at birth, a child had to be offered to the Sun for protection and a prosperous life. It is an irrefutable fact that the Sun contributes generously to all life forms by giving its radiant energy that goes into different directions within our known universe and more so, specifically to planet earth. Brian Swimme cannot be bettered when he said, “The Sun’s story will find its climax in a story from the human family of those men and women whose lives manifested the same generosity…Human generosity is possible because at the centre of the solar system a magnificent stellar generosity pours forth free energy day and night without stop and without complaint and without the slightest hesitation” (Swimme 1996: 43–44). When Karanga peoples of Southern Africa offered the child to the rising Sun, such a symbolic act was done in recognition of the reality of their spiritual interconnectedness with the Sun. Among the Basotho people, spirits of those who die go to Ntsoanatsatsi—a place where the Sun rises, which is the east. The significance of Ntsoanatsatsi is related to the idea of the primordial origin of life as a place of perpetual rest and blissful spiritual tranquillity. For the Karanga/Kalanga people, the Sun was the source of their origins, it was understood as where the spirits of the ancestors resided and where their own spirits were going to go after death. Thus, the Sun was the source of their origins. Issues of ethical living, life and death were interpreted in terms of the ethos and cultural mores which were inherited from the primordial ancestor—the Sun. Kuita chikaranga—doing those rituals which were inherited from the people who originated from the Sun. Karanga people behaved in a way that enhanced equilibrium between the spirits of the ancestors and their descendants. The spirit of the founding ancestor was more concerned with the wellbeing of all the people who lived in the land and the natural environment.

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Ancestors The second category are spirits of ancestors who are immediate relatives of families that are still living. These spirits continue to act as mediators between their living descendants and the realm of immortality which is the abode of God and other primordial spirits. Spirits of ancestors are members of the living community who are consulted for enlightened guidance by their descendants on daily basis. On times of social and natural calamities, African people are mostly prone to see such phenomenon as a result of the absence of equilibrium and harmony between the living and their ancestors. Rituals and prayers of supplication are indispensable to the restoration of harmony and equilibrium between the living descendants and their ancestors. Ethical values that foster social and environmental wellbeing are regarded as the most durable solution for a situation for the enhancement of social and cosmological harmony and equilibrium within the generality of existence. It is an ethical imperative that the living should always be conscious of the symbiotic relationship that exists between themselves and the spirits of their ancestors. Here, let me take the liberty of enhancing this observation by quoting Ali Mazrui who saw Africa’s perennial social-economic and political problems as a result of the existence of severed relationships between modern Africa and her ancestors. Mazrui argued that modern Africa has failed to forge continuity between the traditional and the modern. The present depends on the continuity between ancestors and future generations. Without ancestors, there cannot be future generations. To guarantee a prosperous future, one must learn from the past. He or she who is prepared to learn from the past will not repeat mistakes that have been made by one’s ancestors (Mazrui 1986: 11–12). The past always has the tendency of supervening in the present. Our present existence cannot be severed from that which transpired in the past. It is mainly for this reason that African people feel that their ancestors or the spirits of their ancestors are in communion with them. Things can only work well when people learn from the wisdom of the ancestors which represents the ability to enforce cultural continuity between the past and the present. Severing the modern existence from the ethical ways of the ancestors is analogous to an infant severing herself or himself from the mother’s umbilical cord. The existence of the ancestors or the continuous existence of the dead is an African reality which many people have come to take for granted as the nature of life. As John Mbiti puts it,

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The living-dead solidify and mystically bind together the whole family. People say that they see departed members of their family coming and appearing to them. When they do, the living-dead enquire concerning the affairs of the human family, or warn against danger, rebuke the living for not carrying out particular instructions, or ask for food (usually meat) and drink. (Mbiti 1970: 139)

As we shall see later on, the relationship between the living and their ancestors is integral to African accounts of paranormal experiences. This implies that life is endless in the sense that there is life in the realm of mortality which we live now and life in the realm of immortality which the ancestors are living. These two realms of life are entangled with each other to the extent that they cannot be disentangled from each other. In Zulu there is a proverb which says that, Indoda eqotho ikhotwa amadlozi—which literally means a good or a virtuous man is he who is licked by the ancestors. The invisible world of ancestral spirits is in constant intercourse with the visible world of the living. The spirits of ancestors warn and protect their descendants about the impending dangers that is to beset the community or family, a situation that can only be avoided on the condition that the living descendants live in a way that promotes equilibrium and harmony in society and with the natural environment. The living must abide by the moral traditions which they inherited from their ancestors and the ancestors will assist the living with all the good things of life such as “a good harvest, to produce healthy children, to ensure adequate rain, to pick the wisest chief” (Maier 1998:52). Thus, it can be emphatically postulated that the relationship between the living and their ancestors is a symbiotic one. This symbiosis is conditional on the continuous existence of solidarity between the ancestors and their living descendants. Ancestral spirits who are renown for protecting the progenitors in the present life can refrain from doing so if there is disharmony in the community. Misfortunes and bad luck are signs of severed relationships between ancestors and their descendants. Harmonious relationships are a precursor to communal harmony and a prosperous future. Misfortune finds its ultimate explanation in the metaphysical question of what is the cause of the misfortune which has just occurred in the life of the individual and why to that individual at that particular time in life? As Holland retorted,

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Displeased ancestor spirits usually reveal themselves in dreams. An offending descendant then consults a traditional healer, who prescribes immediate appeasement of the ancestors through ritual ceremonies featuring ancient heirlooms and sacrificial feasts. Family quarrels are the surest way to excite the rage of the ancestors, so keeping peace with everyone at home is a constant preoccupation. (Holland 2003: 8)

Whilst ancestral protection is premised on the continuous existence of righteousness based on abiding by the values that have been passed on to posterity, a symbiotic relationship that exists between the ancestors and their descendants must be actualized through communally condoned actions and rituals. The material world and the spiritual world are connected through individual and communal righteousness. Through ethically condoned actions, the world or materiality and spirituality are brought into a consummation that ensues into a symbiotic relationship between the existential realms of mortality and immortality. The symbiotic relationship that exists between the ancestors and their descendants is not premised on an assumption, rather ancestors are experienced in other states of human existence such as those that are in western languages described as paranormal states of certain members of the community. For this regard, Holland cannot be bettered when she averred that Traditional healers, including herbalists, are the mediators of the spirit world and fulfil a three-fold function: religion, divination and medicine. They keep in touch with the ancestors, ascertaining the cause of misfortune and prescribing remedies; they expose evil-doers and identify witches, providing charms and medicines with mystical properties to ward off evil; and, through the study of plants, they administer herbal extracts in the treatment of disease. (Holland 2003: 8)

In other African cultural settings, ancestors communicate with their descendants through spirit mediums. These spirit mediums interpret messages from the ancestors which are sometimes imparted through symbols. In the ancient city of Great Zimbabwe, the Bird of Bright Plumage, or Shiri yaMwari (the bird of God), Chaminuka the national spirit medium was responsible for interpreting the oracles behind the cries of this bird to the King with specific reference to the wellbeing of the kingdom (Davidson 1973: 111–112). The gift to interpret symbolic language from ancestral spirits was a spiritual power which the spirit medium is given by the ancestors. Hence the phrase “spirit medium” implies that the individual upon

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which the gift of interpreting the symbolic language from the ancestors is someone who is wholly at the disposal of the community as the modicum of communication between the ancestors and the living. Ancestral spirits do influence the behaviour of the living—in a positive and sometimes in a negative way. The powers which the individual might have such as “hunting or music or healing or whether they are the evil powers of a witch, are attributed to the spirits of the ancestors” (Bourdillon 1991: 219). Bad behaviour and mendacious character traits are usually a reflection of the influence of evil spirits which Shona people refer to as Mashavi and Zulu/Ndebele people call them Moya omubi. As such, Shavi or Moya omubi is not an ancestral spirit or Mudzimu or Indlozi, rather it is an evil spirit that has been rejected in the ranks of ancestral spirits. An Archbishop of the Catholic Church by the name of Emmanuel Milingo of Zambia formed his own ministry of healing Mashavi, evil spirits. As Holland puts it, “Milingo’s new ministry was based on Africa’s belief in what he called ‘the world in between’ – a spirit world located between the kingdom of God and realm of humankind; a world which included ancestral and other protective spirits but was also the abode of evil spirits” (Holland 2003: 121). In the case of Milingo’s ministry, African traditional spirituality was not understood by the Catholic Church which is in most cases dominated by Euro-centric values and modes of thought. The ecclesiastical actions that were aimed at silencing bishop Milingo demonstrated yet that Catholicism did not understand nor appreciated African spirituality and modes of healing that accompanied this type of spirituality (Holland 2003: 122). The action of the Catholic Church against bishop Milingo demonstrated that its interest was in maintaining its grip on power instead of healing people. A genuine healing charism cannot be institutionalized because its source of origins is above human control and manipulation. In Southern Africa the most powerful healers are those who are initiated into healing by ancestral spirits who reside underneath the waters. From time to time, water spirits recruit the chosen ones and take them underneath the waters to teach them the art of healing.

The Call Though she was in her early 40s, she looked frail as if she was a 70-year-old woman. It was only after a general discussion with her that I discovered that she was in her early 40s. She was never married and never had any child in the whole of her life, neither was she in any intimate love relationship with anyone at the present. She was very cheerful and always smiling

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from time to time. But something strange about her is that she had her snuff which she sniffed from time to time without sneezing nor coughing as one would expect from someone who takes snuff with her nostrils. From time to time, she interrupted our conversations with her bellowing. She told me that she used to be a prophetess in an African founded Church of Apostles, but she left the Church to respond to her calling from the ancestors. Her ancestors wanted her to be a traditional doctor. In one of her dreams, she was told by her ancestors that all the healings and the prophecies which she believed were coming from the Holy Spirit were actually coming from them. She also said that her call to healing was coming from her ancestors under the waters or Njuzu. Within a very short period of time, a whirlwind carried her to a nearby pool of water in a river that meanders through many villages with its waters gently flowing to the east where it ultimately joins the mighty Sabi River which in turn continuously contributes its water into the Indian Ocean. She remembered walking in the company of two ladies who were human from the waist upwards and fish downwards. To her astonishment, even though she had dived into the pool of water in the river, she remained dry throughout the journey beneath the waters. She was taken by the water spirits or Njuzu (Shona). When she finally arrived in the abode of Njuzu she discovered, to her amazement, that the abode of Njuzu was very beautiful with well-decorated houses. The dressing was made from skins of wild animals—a type of dressing that existed in pre-colonial African society.

Water Spirits: Njuzu Whilst the spirit was weaved in everything that exists, other cosmologies in some parts of Africa posited different categories of spirits whose origination could be traced to the primordial spirit. For example, the Kalabari of the Niger delta who lived in southern Nigeria had a cosmology that was constructed around three spirits. Firstly, “there are the spirits of the founding heroes who first settled in Kalabari country and fathered their remote ancestors. These spirits are considered to be instrument of collective village welfare, since it is they who first framed the Kalabari way of life; and it is to them that one turns in all matters which affect the whole community”. The second category of spirits “are the ancestors of different Kalabari lineage segments, considered as instruments of collective descent-group welfare. These are capable of being opposed to one another in defence of their respective living descendants, so that conflicts at this level may have to be referred to the spirits of the founding heroes” (Davidson 1973:

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115). The third category is composed of roaming “spirits – water people who are thought to live at the bottom of the Kalabari creeks and who cater for individualistic competitive aspirations. The water-people are ready to confer their benefits on all corners according to the offerings made to them. They are not associated with any of the permanent social groupings in the community” (Davidson 1973: 116). The third category of spirits are ancestral spirits that reside in water which in Shona are called Njuzu and in Zulu they are called amadlozi ase manzini (ancestors who reside in waters). In English, they are called mermaids. Water spirits are usually regarded as healing spirits because they initiate those whom they chose in the waters. Such spirits are reported to stay in deep pools of water in rivers or dams that are not polluted. Those who are initiated as traditional doctors by Njuzu are known to be very powerful traditional healers who usually have the ability to diagnose the ailment of their clients without any input from the client herself or himself. In my informal discussion with her, she explained that she heals through the assistance of the healing powers of the water spirits or Njuzu. When she goes back to the place where she was initiated by the water spirits, Njuzu starts with a ritual of divination after which Njuzu packs medicines for her which she carries in her traditional bag. Njuzu can also come in dreams and instruct her to look for medicines they revealed to her on the land. She can also be summoned to come for a traditional dance in the abode of Njuzu. On such occasions, Njuzu accompany their initiate in the form of a whirlwind when she leaves their place. Njuzu are spirits of ancestors who have died and exist under the waters. Ancestral spirits that exist on the land do work in unison with Njuzu when it comes to the practice of divination and healing.

Land Spirits In Southern Africa, land spirits have been described by many names in accordance with the reality of the diversity of cultures which are indigene to that part of Africa south of the Sahara. Land spirits are experienced in their various manifestations in accordance with the charisms which the spirit had prior to its graduation into the realm of immortality. Its either the spirit(s) will come back into their previous family of mortality as a spirit medium, traditional doctor or a national spirit or Mhondoro. Those who are possessed by such spirits do experience strange sensation of not being not in control of themselves, talking things which they did not know

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about. They also fail to have control of thought and speech such that they feel that someone will be telling them what to say, talking about certain people one doesn’t know about such as great-grandfather or grandmother who was a traditional doctor, talking about wrongdoers in the family. The possessed member of the family usually tells the living relatives to desist from doing evil. A family friend told me that his wife was given to him by his ancestors and that they both experience spiritual possession from their respective ancestors. Before this spiritual experience, he said that he was not fully aware or conscious of African spirituality. Since the episode of spirit possession, he experienced lots of dreams that were accurate. For instance, he once dreamt that his passport was not in good condition. Early in the morning he checked his passport and only to discover that his small child had stamped it with his office stamp which he had mistakenly brought home. At birth, he was given the name of his grandfather who was a traditional doctor by profession and charism. Since then, the grandfather has been spiritually present in his life. From these spiritual experiences, he deduced that a person is given his or her destiny at birth. The wife of my friend also had some strange feelings of spiritual possession. After consultation with prophets of the indigenous apostolic church popularly known as Madzibaba (the fathers) and Madzimai (the mothers) and African traditional doctors, she was told that she was possessed by the spirit of her grandfather who died a century and some decades ago. Whenever the spirit of her grandfather took possession of her, she addressed her husband as grandson. This implied that it was not herself who was speaking, but her grandfather who was speaking through her. Those who experience ancestral spirit possession are regarded as having some psychological problems or some psychiatric sicknesses. Confusion and cultural self-alienation in Southern Africa are perpetuated by modern post-colonial Pentecostal churches and other independent churches that are regarded as churches of the spirit. African spirituality is seen as the actualization of the grand narrative of witchcraft and primitivity. However, most of the African independent Churches have adopted an ambivalent stance when it comes to African spirituality. This ambivalent stance is more nuanced because even though African independent churches are regarded as “churches of the spirit” where emphasis is put on prophesying and healing as a sign of the presence of the spirit in the church, these churches are steeped in the colonial tradition of condemning African traditional spirituality as heathenism. Ancestors and traditional doctors are

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frequently sermonized as demons and their practices as a manifestation of the presence of the devil. Thus, implying that those who gave birth to the present progenitors were demons and hence these progenitors are descendants of demons. On the other hand, they use ancestral spirits and traditional healing symbols in their prophesying and healing activities. Sometimes when they are in trance, they bellow in a way that is similar to those who are possessed by ancestral spirits. The mushrooming of African indigenous churches popularly known as churches of the spirit has remained overshadowed in inexplicable mystery. For instance, in the whole of Southern Africa, these churches use African symbols that are usually used by traditional doctors and at the same time they condemn those same traditional doctors and ancestors as demons. These indigenous churches are ironically committed to African traditional moral values.

Note 1. This South African TV programme is shown on Channel One—Moja Love.

References Bourdillon, M. F. C. 1991. The Shona Peoples: An Ethnography of the Contemporary Shona, with Special Reference to their Religion (Revised Edition). Gweru: Mambo Press. Cheater, A.  P. 1994. Social Anthropology: An Alternative Introduction. Gweru: Mambo Press. Chigwedere, A. 2016. Dziva Hungwe Kalanga Communities (Book 9). Marondera: Mutapa Publishing House. Davidson, B. 1973. The Africans: An Entry to Cultural History. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd. Holland, H. 2003. African Magic: Traditional Ideas that Heal a Continent. London: Penguin Books. Maier, K. 1998. Into the House of the Ancestors: Inside the New Africa. New York: John Willey & Sons, Inc. Marquard, L., & Standing, T. G. (1939) The Southern Bantu. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mazrui, A. A. 1986. The Africans: A Triple Heritage. BBC Publications. Mbiti, J. 1970. African Religions and Philosophy. London: Heinemann. Prozesky, M.  H. 2016. “Ethical Leadership Resources in Southern Africa’s Sesotho-speaking Culture and in King Moshoeshoe I”, Journal of Global Ethics. Vol. 12, NO. 1, 6-16. Swimme, B. 1996. The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos: Humanity and the New Story. New York: Orbis Books.

CHAPTER 4

A Symbiotic Relationship Between African Spirituality and Ethics

A genuine discourse of African ethics remains deficient without the inclusion of ancestors in such discourse. No concept in Africa has had plethora of mixed reactions which surpasses that of the ancestors. Some Christians, especially those who belong to the contemporary African Pentecostal churches, have described African ancestors as demons and those who believed in the existence of ancestors as lost souls destined to the category of those who belong to perdition. Here the presumption of these Christians is that since ancestors are evil spirits, those who follow or believe in their existence are treading the path of evil spirits. This presumption is premised on the idea that a true believer or a true Christian is the one who has a special vertical relationship with Christ as “the only true lord and savior”. Thus, Christ is usually preached about as the only lord and saviour for the whole world.

Ancestors and Ethics This type of teaching has its genealogy in the writings of early Christian missionaries and western anthropologists about African ancestors. The writings of these early Christian missionaries and western anthropologists are replete with the motif that African ancestors were evil spirits and that Africans cared very little about God. Thus, one finds early western anthropologists such as Marquard and Standing speculating that, “Perhaps the chief reason why the Bantu normally cared very little about the supreme © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. F. Murove, African Spirituality and Ethics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45590-2_4

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being was that they believed he must be approached through the ancestral spirits, who were therefore of far more immediate effect. The Bantu religion may be defined as a very debased form of one that has been very common amongst primitive people and has existed in higher forms amongst the Chinese, Japanese, and the ancient Greeks and Romans – the worship of dead ancestors” (Marquard and Standing 1939: 52). In other words, the African belief in ancestors was nothing else but a manifestation of a primitive religious outlook which existed in the antiquity of other societies. On the other hand, for early missionaries, ancestors were outright evil spirits which were supposed to be subdued to the universal power of Christ whom they preached as the saviour of all human beings. Thus, those Africans who were converted to Christianity were expected to shun away from the ways of their ancestors. It was for this reason that the so-­ called African converts remained steeped in their African traditional practices. According to the historian David Edwards (1997: 542), “The usual question [from Africans] was: the European Protestants protested against the Catholics, so why should Africans not protest against white Protestants?”. Edwards went on to say that most of the African indigenous churches broke away from the mainline churches because they wanted to infuse their African indigenous values with the received Christian values. For the African indigenous Churches the main thrust was to restore African values and spirituality which were previously bastardized by missionaries. In the mainline Churches, all the teachings about spirituality and values originated from western culture. Thus it became difficult for indigenous Africans to differentiate western culture and the Christian religion. For instance, baptism required an adoption of a western name and renunciation of African traditional values. Obviously this was blatant oppression of indigenous Africans. It is no wonder that African indigenous Churches came to be known as independent churches. Africans did not experience a sense of belonging in the Christian religion because the foundations of their spirituality was derided upon by early missionaries as pure superstition and heathenism. One of the main reasons behind the founding of African independent churches was the need to incorporate African customs in the Christian religion as expressed in the Bible beyond western missionary interpretations which were often based on western culture and ethos. Scholars such as John Taylor (1963: 5–6) have observed that the Christian religion was mediated to Africa and Asian countries in a way that

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facilitated the expansion of western political and economic interests. He writes, “For more than four centuries the expansion of the Christian Church has coincided with the economic, political and cultural expansion of Western Europe”. When seen from the perspective of the Asiatic peoples, and to a large extent from that of the peoples of Africa, this expansion has been an aggressive attack on their own way of life. For this reason, inevitably the Christian faith in these lands has been inextricably bound up with this Western aggression. Christian spirituality has been instrumental in the advancement of western colonial interests. But it has also to be admitted quite frankly that during these centuries, the missionaries of the Christian Church have commonly presumed that Western civilization and Christianity were two aspects of the same gift which they were commissioned to offer as a gift to the rest of humankind. It is in such observations that one can easily deduce that the early missionary Christianity was not interested in learning about indigenous African spirituality because for these missionaries what they felt to be their divine mandate was to spread western interests to the colonized Africans. For this reason, indigenous Africans who were presumed to have been converted to the Christian religion failed to identify themselves with a type of religion that estranged them from their customs and ethos.

Spirit and Ethics Because of the spirit of domination and intolerance in which missionary Christianity was wholly suffused into, little attention has been given to African spiritual experiences. Thus, the marginalization of African spiritual experiences in the Christian religion prompted Taylor to say that, “Our first task in approaching another people, another culture, another religion, is to take off our shoes, for the place we are approaching is holy. Else we may find ourselves treading on men’s dreams. More serious still, we may forget that God was here before our arrival” (Taylor 1963: 10). What Taylor is admonishing is that tolerance is an ethical value which should be put in the forefront when one come across people who do not share the same cultural values with him or her. His prognosis about African conflicts is that, “The spiritual conflict in Africa is a striving to reestablish that primal unity of man [sic] with both the material and the spiritual universe which African man instinctively feels to be true ‘being’, and which hardly exists anywhere in African today” (Taylor 1963: 10–11). In such an observation, there is a realization that all people within their cultural settings

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have an experience of God which should not be judged as inferior by other people outside that culture. Taylor went on to say that ancestors do play a crucial role in the humanization of a person in African societies. In Africa, a human being is understood literally as a family tree, a single branching organism whose existence is continuous through time, and whose roots, though out of sight below the earth, may spread further and wider than all the visible limbs above. Death, it is true, makes a difference: the dead continue to exist in communion with their progenitors, but their mode of existence is greater and more mysterious. Yet in this single, continuing entity, there is no radical distinction of being between that part of the family which is “here” and that which is “there”. A child’s life is the prolongation of his or her grandparents and the whole lineage. In this way of thinking, a child’s life is a continuity of the life of the ancestors in the sense that he or she remains related to them in a symbiotic way. The individual’s existence cannot be abstracted from the shared existence with the ancestors. The living descendants exist in continuum with the life of the existence of their ancestors. Through rituals which the living offer to their ancestors, the living enter into a spiritual communion with their ancestors. The relationship between the living and their ancestors can best be described as a symbiotic relationship. The idea of a symbiotic relationship between the living and their ancestors means that the living are in constant communion with their ancestors in a way that is similar to when the ancestor existed in the realm of immortality. The relationship which existed between the child and her or his parents when they were still alive is deemed to be the same relationship that exists when the parents departed from the world of immortality. The respect which the child gave to his or her parents when they were still alive continues even when they departed. Thus, the relationship that exists between the living and their ancestors is integral to the relationship that exists between the individual and other members of the family. Through the rights of passage, the child is introduced to the ancestors as a full member of the family. For this reason, one finds that in Southern African societies, a child can be named after the name of grandfather, grandmother or aunt who might have passed on. The implication is that the child is an agglomeration of the ancestral spirit, hence the child becomes the prolongation of the ancestor’s life. The child is also made aware of his or her descendants through the recitation of stories and songs about the founder of his or her own kinship group. He came to know by heart the names of the ancestors through hearing frequent invocations and myths and to

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explain the present by referring back to the beginning of things and to the founder of the family from whom that human family came from (Taylor 1963: 101). From a very tender age, the child is made aware that his or her own existence is intertwined with the existence of his or her ancestors and that his or her own community weaved into a web of relationships permuted by the reality of dependence and interdependence whereby mutual responsibilities and obligations are the whole mark of social, political, economic and religious ordering of the community.

A Spirituality of a Relational Cosmology From the African cosmological outlook which posits the endlessness of life, ancestors are regarded as “the living timeless” because in African ontological and cosmological categories of thought, life is continuous. Death is thus a passage from one form of life to another because ancestors do remain related to the living in such a way that they come from time to time to celebrate with their families. For this reason, life is a continuous flow instead of being seen as constituted by the Christian alpha and omega understanding of time. The concept of “the living timeless” can best be understood when life and death are seen as the same ontological reality of being. Through death, the spirit is freed from the existential limits imposed by materiality, thus graduating into another form of existence that is far much superior when compared to that of materiality. Ancestors intervene in the affairs of the living without changing the primordial order of things as they originated from the primordial spirit which is God. Everything that exists in the universe is internally related to everything else in the universe in such a way that there is a causal influence among all things that exist in the universe. Everything that exists permeates into the existence of everything else. Placide Tempels (1959: 25) posited that the African cosmology is based on the concept of “Vital Force”. He went on to allege that the Bantu ontology which evolved around “Force” or “Vital Force” had some cosmological origins in which “Force” is the ultimate cosmological organizing principle. For this reason, he asserted that God was the supreme Force and the spirits of ancestors which are “highly exalted in the supernatural world, possess extraordinary force inasmuch as they are the founders of the human race and propagators of the divine inheritance of vital human strength”. On the other hand, ancestors are venerated on the basis of their ability to “increase and perpetuate their vital force in their progeny”. …

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All created things “in the universe possess vital force of their own: human, animal, vegetable, or inanimate” (1959, 25). Thus, the Bantu cosmology was cascaded by the hierarchy of Forces that could only be differentiated on the principle of the intensity of force within this hierarchy of being. The concept of Being for the Bantu means Force because “there is the divine force, celestial forces, human forces, animal forces, vegetable and even material or mineral forces” (1959, 24–24). Evidently, this implies that the Bantu cosmology was a cosmology that originated from the cosmogony of Force, and hence such a cosmology could only be saturated by Force through and through. Force provided a thread of interconnectedness or ontological relationality among all that exists. Tempels alleged that African people are incapable of analytical thinking whereby things can be categorized in terms of substance. Instead, African people see all created things sharing a common bond which is rather an ontological relationality. The relationality among created things ultimately binds creatures with God. Nothing exists in isolation from other creatures. There is always a causal influence among all creatures which make creatures to behave in a way they do. In a nutshell, the African cosmology and ontology is relational and everything that is real exists in a state of permanent dependency and interdependency on each other. Everything that is real feels the existence of other things and they contribute to the existence of each other in a reciprocal manner. Everything emanates life to each other in such a way that they influence the existence of each other since they inherit life from each other. Our human identity is inherited from others and our nature has been made in such a way that we feel the existence of everything in existence. This means that nothing exists in isolation from the rest of creation. It is illusory to postulate realities that exist in isolation disregarding their togetherness. Each entity is constituted with the rest of creation. In their togetherness, all creation constitute a totality which is held together by the principle of force. Because of life, cosmologically and ontologically it can be said that created things influence each other either positively by reinforcing or negatively by weakening each other. This causal influence of each other among all beings presupposes mutual interdependence of ontological subordination of life. This entails that the universe is not a multitude of self-enclosed entities that exist independent from each other, rather, all creatures remain ontologically relationally constituted because the world of life is held like a web of which no single thread can be caused to vibrate without shaking

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the whole network. What happens to the individual reverberates throughout the universe. Because of life, everything that exists is cosmologically and ontologically related to everything else in a way that logically ensures mutual influence of all Beings. In human existence, those who have died intervene from time to time on critical occasions to make known to the living the impending dangers. It usually depends on the living to hide the message from the ancestors but the living do not change the nature of those realities of life which were preordained by God and the ancestors. Because of the reality of the continuity of life, ancestors cannot be understood as having vanished from existence, rather they continue to intervene in the affairs of the living without necessarily changing the preordained order of things. The reality of life guarantees immortality of those who are dead or the ancestors who continue to communicate with those who are living in the realm of mortality. The communication between the ancestors and the living demonstrates the predominance of paranormal experiences among the indigenous peoples of southern. The existence of paranormal experiences is the consequent result of the human primordial connection to God and the ancestors because as human beings, we participate in the transcendent life. As such, the existence of ancestors is the basis for understanding paranormal experiences in African spirituality. Stories which I have narrated previously about spiritual possession in Africa demonstrate the existence of paranormal experiences in the Southern African context. Since ancestors have experienced life in its fullest, it is by virtue of their primogeniture as superior power which make them amenable to perpetuate life among their progenitors. These ancestors remain integral to the lives of those who are still existing in the earthly life of mortality. Everything that exists has a causal influence on each other. In African philosophical anthropology, everything that exists causally influence each other, whilst God sui generis inserted power horizontally to all categories of creatures. It is God and all creatures who maintain control over the distribution of life in the cosmos. Whilst the universe is thoroughly populated by various creatures, God is internally related to these creatures. Placide Tempels used the concept of force to describe the African cosmology. The concept of force was analogous to energy or vitality which is a term that was used by systems theorists. However, the question that arises is what exactly did Temples have in mind when he coined the concept of “Force”? The concept of Force has been very popular among many scholars who wrote about African ontology and cosmology. Tempels

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advanced the idea that the African worldview is based on Force and that everything revolves around the concept of Force. Tempels’ theory of force should be understood as an attempt at conflating the African cosmology and cosmogony with the Vitalist theory which dominated the Western world in the nineteenth century as an alternative to the scientific mechanistic theory which posited that all life could be explained exclusively on the laws of physics and chemistry. Whilst acknowledging the role that was played by the laws of physics and chemistry in life, Vitalists maintained that, “in life processes in addition to the physical and chemical forces there was operating a specific agent which was only present in living matter. This agent was called antelechy” (Weckowizc 2000). The word entelechy was coined by the Germany biologist, Hans Driesch, at the turn of the nineteenth century. Driesch had adopted the term from Aristotle. According to Aristotle, entelechy “was a design or an organizing principle, a vital force, which imprinted a form or an organization on inert matter and gave it a potential for ordering growth and development. For this reason, vitalists regarded force as the mainly responsible “for sui generis life phenomena, for plasticity of living forms, for their adaptability to a changing milieu, for their growth and differentiation, and generally for purposefulness and goal directedness of life processes. It was an answer to the puzzle of life” (Weckowizc 2000). The main thrust of the theory of Vitalism was to provide what was to be regarded as a comprehensive understanding of life among living organisms. For this reason, one finds that a commonly shared outlook among Vitalists “was that matter in living organisms is organized and controlled by specifically vital factors which do not operate in the inorganic realm” (Sheldrake 1981: 228). This obviously implied that there was something inherent in all objects which makes them to behave in a particular manner. With reference to human beings, the organizing principle became a soul or intellect (Ibid). Whilst Vitalism was refuted by advocates of mechanistic science, there were other philosophers who proffered what they called a “philosophy of organism” as to suggest a holistic metaphysical philosophical outlook. Prominent among proponents of the theory of organism is Henri Bergson who opined that memories can act upon the brain even though they are not stored within it. In his Creative Evolution, Bergson postulated that species at particular points tend to evolve identically in form and instinct in the emergence of life (Sheldrake 1981, 238). Bergson’s philosophy has been described by other philosophers as dualistic because for Bergson, the

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world is constituted by two realities: Life and Matter, whereby the universe is characterized by a perennial clash and conflict of Life which is upward orientated and matter which is downward orientated. Life remains as that great force which can be regarded as the vital impulse of the universe. Life originated from the beginning of the world or when the world came into being. Life is in conflict with matter and is constantly struggling to “break away through matter, learning gradually to use matter by means of organization; divided by the obstacles it encounters into diverging currents” (Russell 1996: 715). This Bergsonian mode of thought finds its echo in Afro-centric mode of thought which says that whilst matter perishes, it is the spirit that endures. The Shona people of Zimbabwe have an adage which says that, Chinoora inyama, mweya hauori—it means it is the flesh that perishes and not the spirit. This adage reinforces the idea of strife between matter and spirit or life. The spirit is the source of life and its departure from anything leads to death of matter. Matter exudes life because of the presence of the spirit. The spirit is the reality that permeates everything that exists. The departure of the spirit through death does not lead to the death of the spirit because if that was the case there would not be the reality of the continuity of life and the evolutionary process. The evolutionary process is thus about the convergence and divergence in Life processes with Matter. In this regard, nothing in existence can be said to have been predetermined as implied in mechanism and teleology because predetermination would do away with the element of novelty in creation. Evolution was a result of the universal cosmological creative impulse which is usually not known until the desire to create has been fulfilled. In the universe new stars and galaxies are constantly being born whilst others perish. Here it can be postulated that God who is the primordial spirit is not permanent because she or he experiences the reality of creativity in her or his own existence. However, among those scholars who were partly influenced by Bergson’s theory of creative evolution is Alfred North Whitehead, an Anglo-American mathematician and philosopher who elucidated it unequivocally in his magnum opus, Process and Reality that his process philosophy was a “philosophy of organism”—a metaphorical expression that suggests a holistic philosophical treatise of life and reality in general (Whitehead 1929, vii; also see Jungerman 2000, 1–14; Prozesky 1995, 54–59). Whitehead’s holistic metaphysics as “a philosophy of organism” is a cosmological reflection on the reality of the relatedness and interrelatedness of everything that exists. Thus, in his other work, Adventures of Ideas,

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Whitehead declares that, “The universe achieves its value by reason of its co-ordination into societies of societies, and into societies of societies” (1933, 264). In other words, there was nothing that exists independently from its connectedness with all realities that constitute the generality of existence. According to Whitehead, everything that exists experiences the existence of others and is influenced by all that exists (Murove 2020: 183). This assertion provided the basis for the relatedness and interrelatedness of everything that exists. In his Process and Reality, Whitehead accounted for the relatedness of things that exist as follows, “All relatedness has its foundation in the relatedness of actualities; and such relatedness is wholly concerned with the appropriation of the dead by the living – that is to say, with ‘objective immortality’ whereby what is divested of its own living immediacy becomes a real component in other living immediacies of becoming” (1929, ix). The concept of objective immortality implies that when a living organism has reached its life span, it enters in the nature of God which is a state of objective immortality. Within such a state, the entity “becomes an object of possible prehension for the process of becoming for other actual entities, including God. It belongs to the nature of being that it is a potential for every becoming” (Hartshone and Peden 1981, 34). Other process thinkers such as John Cobb and David Ray Griffin opined that the term objective immortality implies that absorption of innumerable possibilities within a person’s life in two basic ways. These possibilities can either be part of the objective content of what is felt, or they can qualify the subjective form depending on how it is felt. For example, if one remembers apprehending something or someone with the subjective form of anger or love, one can now objectify anger or love as part of the content of one’s present experience. In other words, a possibility that which previously showed up in a subjective reaction is now in the objective content of an experience (Cobb and Griffin 1977, 22–28). From the perspective of Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, it was the reality of the relatedness and interrelatedness of things which holds things together. For Vitalists, it was the Vital force. Other scholars have argued that Vitalism gives room for the notion of the mysteriousness of life, especially when one takes into account the idea of consciousness which is described as indeterministic. Vital force is regarded by psychologists as responsible for controlling the mental processes of both animals and human beings (Sheldrake 1981, 238–239). Other scholars have thus argued for the need to come up with a unified theory of nature—something which Mechanism and Vitalism are not capable of doing. To

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overcome Mechanism and Vitalism, Alfred Hoernlé (1918: 630) argued that Vitalism needs to be replaced by a mechanistic and teleological worldview in the order of nature. His argument is that mechanism and vitalism cannot be reconciled and, for this reason, should be treated as cumulative in the order of nature, and therefore, teleology as logically dominant over mechanism in biology. Hoernle is refuting vitalism on the grounds that the spiritual aspect or the immaterial aspect of reality cannot be substantiated from a mechanistic perspective. Mechanism and teleology were found to be more appealing by Hoernlé (1918, 631) because of the Aristotlean metaphysical presumption that things in their respective natures exist in a way that shows some goal directedness which corresponds with their natures. Mechanism without teleology cannot give us an adequate explanation of “the phenomena of life”. According to Hoernlé, “teleology terms are required, not as substitutes for physico-chemical terms, but as fixing…the dominant character of life processes”. An appeal to teleological terms as a way of explaining life processes will be problematic in the sense that teleological and mechanistic terms do give the impression that everything in existence has been predetermined and there is no novelty in creation. Teleology and mechanistic terms cannot account for complexity. Life is characterized by the overwhelming reality of complexity. In their attempt to account for the reality of complexity which mechanistic and teleological scientific thinking could not do, some modern scientists have appealed to systems theory. The Austrian-born American physicist, Fritjof Capra (1996, 6–7) debunked mechanistic scientific thinking on the grounds that it fails to give an adequate account of reality. He writes, “The old paradigm consists of a number of entrenched ideas and values, among them the view of the universe as a mechanical system composed of elementary building-blocks, the view of the human body as a machine, the view of life in society as a competitive struggle for existence”. Yet contrary to this mechanistic worldview, Capra coined the term “Deep ecology” which he says does not separate humanity from everything that exists. “[Deep] ecology does not see the world as a collection of isolated objects but as a network of phenomena that are fundamentally interconnected and interdependent”. Critics of mechanistic science argue thatcomplexity demonstrates the need for humanity to acknowledge and learn to appreciate the source of qualitatively new questions, the possibility of a form of ignorance that cannot simply be deferred to future knowledge. It is the demand that we acknowledge a sensitivity of the world to our

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interest in it and to the forms in which this interest is expressed. This point might serve—in a programmatic way—as the informing principle for an analysis of the use of the term complexity in the context of systems’ theoretical approaches in contemporary biology (Greco 2005, 24). The phenomena of complexity in life is an issue that demonstrated the inadequacy of mechanistic science which had developed some form of scientific imperialism whereby for any phenomena to be admissible as authentic knowledge, it was supposed to be subjected to some predetermined scientific rules. In this regard, Vitalism became “a derogatory label associated with lack of intellectual rigour, anti-scientific attitudes, and superstition” (Greco 2005, 16). Those who refuted mechanistic science argued that life was rather complex than what was offered by the mechanistic scientific paradigm. Proponents of systems theory such as Ludwig non Bertalanffy advocated an organismic conception in biology which emphasized “consideration of the organism as a whole or system which see the main objective of biological sciences in the discovery of the principles of organization at its various levels” (Bertalanffy 1969: 12). An organism was a system and a subsystem within the whole system. From a systems’ theoretical perspective, a human being can only be understood in relationship to other systems within existence and not in isolation. The notion of complexity is integral to systems’ theoretical understanding of life. In this regard, systems’ theory is contrary to the reductionistic tendency which is integral to the Vital force theory. However, the question that is the main object of our investigation is about the real meaning of Vital force (Murove 2020).

Vital Force as Spirit and Life The concept of the Vital force implies the spirit. It is related to the belief that a human being consists of matter and spirit. Life itself is caused by the existence of the spirit. While matter perishes, it is the spirit that endures perishing. The existence of life is enabled by the spirit. In this vein, Kazipa Nalwamba and Johan Buitendag observed that, “The notion of vital force recalls the belief that human beings form part of the community of life within the realm of the cosmic spirit” (Nwalwamba and Buitendag 2017: 2). In other words, the whole of the universe or the cosmos is an emanation of the spirit. From a cosmological perspective, vital force can thus be discerned in terms of the energy that is exuded among all that exist.

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The above authors went on to say that we should avoid the idea of interpreting vital force in a “ghost-like way” (Ibid). Regardless of the objections that can be raised against Tempels’ theory of vital force, these authors went on to aver that “By looking at various ways (i.e. triangulating) in which the concept of vital force has been applied, …[We] are persuaded that vital force is an adequate concept of nature and spirit. It opens up the African concept and reality as unified and participative within the realm of interconnected and interdependent beings” (2017, 5). In other words, the concept of vital force ultimately captures the African cosmology of the relatedness and interrelatedness of all that exists. However, other critics of Tempels’ theory of vital force such as Harvey Sindima have argued that the concept of “Force” which has been used in Tempels’ work would have been intelligible if it was replaced by the concept of “Life” as a true characterization of the African cosmology and cosmogony. Sindima states that among Africans, the reason d’être that inheres in everything is life. Sindima went on to declare that life is the foundation for the African mode of thinking and conceptualization of the African worldview. As such, he insists that the African way of thinking is weaved together in a fabric of life. It is life which is the central and all-embracing concept in African mode of thought. An authentic understanding of the African cosmology has to start with an African understanding of life. For this reason, life is sui generis in African modes of thought. Any action that is taken must perpetuate life because life is the beginning and end of all actions that are taken by the individual as an ethical agent. The telos of human existence is to perpetuate life in all its manifestations. Life depends on other forms of life for its own sustenance and perpetuity. In African modes of thought, there is no bifurcation of nature because all creatures contribute to the ultimate wellbeing of the universe. Sindima asserted that the African universe is based on life as the foundational framework for conceptualization of the African world. As such, in traditional modes of thought, all life is weaved together in a fabric of life. For this reason, life, not force is the central and all-embracing concept in African thought. As he puts it, “Any attempt to grasp the nature of the African world, must begin with it, other ideas derive from it and it governs every action. Life is the beginning and the beginning and the end of all action, but life itself does not end” (Sindima 1995: 145). The teleology of everything that exists subsists in life and it’s impossible to think of existence outside life. All creatures seek to maximize the best which life has to offer for their common existence. It

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for this reason that when Africans in Southern Africa greet each other, they always enquire how the other person is faring in life. Life, instead of force, serves as the foundation for the African understanding and interpretation of the world. Everything exists in a state of ontological relationality because of life. For this reason, for us to venture into the nature of African cosmology and cosmogony, we have to start by reflecting what life means. From an Afro-centric existential perspective, the world and everything that exists are bound together by life. The perpetuation and preservation of life become the telos of human existence. One’s present and future existence is guaranteed on the basis of one’s ability to perpetuate and preserve life in the present. Thus, one finds that the futuristic outlook towards life is echoed in a Zulu proverb which says that Ukuzal’ ukuzilungelela—“To give birth to children is to add on to oneself” (Stewart 2005: 32). The implication of such a proverb is that children are a prolongation of one’s life from mortality into immortality. Children perpetuate the life of their ancestors in the realm of mortality (Murove 2016: 165–166). Thus, it is imperative that the individual lives a virtuous life because it is these virtues which will accompany the individual from mortality into immortality. Virtues such as truthfulness, humility, love, sympathy, self-discipline, forgiveness, mercifulness, pity, rectitude, gladden, purity, trustworthiness, patience, magnanimity, courage, industriousness and generosity are indispensable to one’s spiritual existence in the realm of immortality (Gelfand 1973, 65–81). Since a human being is conceptualized as ontologically relationally constituted, s/he imparts these life cardinal virtues to her or his progenitors. A relational ontology that exists between ancestors and their progenitors has been characterized by other African scholars as an ontology of anamnestic solidarity whereby the ancestors share life with their progenitors and have a sense of concern about what goes on in the lives of their progenitors. Ancestors have lived the fullness of life by virtue of attaining their current existential status of immortality. Bénézet Bujo postulated that anamnestic solidarity implies keeping the memory of the ancestors within the present existence. Through anamnestic solidarity, memories of the past life have an influence on the present in the sense that the community’s ethical decisions are inseparable from what transpired in the past. Through anamnestic solidarity, the present generation is conscientiously summoned to accept responsibility for the crimes that were committed by their fellow members in the past (Bujo 2001, 63–66; Murove 2016, 157; also see Samkange and Samkange 1980). The idea that the present

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generation is accountable for the misdeeds of its ancestors in the past is well observed by Bujo when he said that “solidarity requires that this be expatiated by their descendants” (2001, 66). Bujo’s observation echoes the argument that has been put forward by proponents of black reparations. For example, it has been argued by proponents of black reparations that the American economy was built upon the labour of black slaves. Some reparationists such as Aurther Andersen have made some monetary demands as some form of reparation for slavery. As Ali Mazrui puts it, “For the Black people who were in the forefront of the struggle for emancipation, therefore, reparations became an issue of great concern in the immediate aftermath of the abolition of the institution of slavery” (2002, 3). Sometimes the demands for reparation have also been made against those governments of the world who have been beneficiaries of colonialism. This implies that the descendants of slave owners and colonialists are deemed responsible for the misdeeds of their ancestors. A form of solidarity that exists between the ancestors and their descendants implies that the lives of the ancestors have some ethical implications on the lives of those who are existing in the present. The solidarity of the past and the present calls upon the present generation to appropriate what transpired in the past as something indispensable to the existence and experiences of those who are existing in the present. Thus, the lives of those who have been wronged in the past have to be appreciated through propitiatory acts. The past and its experiences continue to exist in the present and it also influences the future. There is life in the present which is in actuality a product of life that was experienced as originating from the past and when the present has become the past, it will also influence and be experienced by those who will exist in the future. It is on the basis of the continuity of life from the past, present and the future that life is basically conceptualized from an Afro-centric perspective as endless. To illustrate the above assertion, among the Shona people of Zimbabwe, the spirit(s) of those who have been wronged in the past have been wronged in the past usually supervene on the lives of the present in the form of Ngozi. The concept of Ngozi is based on the belief that a human being is essentially a spiritual being and it is the reality of the spirit which makes him or her to survive death. A person who has been wronged through human atrocious acts such as murder is mostly likely to exist in the realm of immortality as an angry spirit. The anthropologist who studied Shona people, Michael Bourdillon (1987: 233) observed that, “An angry spirit is terrifying. Such a spirit attacks suddenly and very harshly. It

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usually attacks an individual through his family causing a succession of deaths, or death followed by serious illness in other members of the family”. Bourdillon went on to say that among the Shona people of Zimbabwe, the spirit of a person who has been killed unfairly cannot be appeased easily. He states that the Shona people “believe that an angry spirit can also cause serious quarrels within a family, loss of property and wealth, or any devastating misfortune. In practice, the tensions and fears following death believed to be caused by such a spirit, and the difficulty in appeasing it do on occasion lead to the breakup of a family group”. In the light of such observations, it is evidently clear that the belief in Ngozi is also based on the presumption that a human being is essentially a spiritual being because at death the flesh perishes whilst the spirit lives on. The individual’s life as a spirit continues to interfere in the lives of those who are still existing in the realm of mortality. The concept of Ngozi is thus based on the Shona people’s belief in a relational ontology that exists between the past and the present. Since life is conceptualized as immortal, wrongs committed against those who existed in the past have some ghastly repercussions on those who are existing in the realm of mortality. Ngozi is committed when an individual takes the life of an innocent human being. The life of the victim has a tendency of coming back in the future requesting for redress or propitiation from the relatives of the villain (Samkange and Samkange 1980: 51–52).

Life as Supervening on Death The very presumption that life does not end with death shows that death and life cannot be disentangled from each other. The end of biological life does not spell the end of all life for the individual, rather the end of biological life ushers the individual to exist into the spiritual life—thus death is analogous to graduation into another form of life which is a life in the realm of immortality (Gelfand 1973: 56; 1981: 73; Mazrui 1994: 175; Boon 2007: 6; Bujo 2001: 66–67). The idea of immortality is again captured in a Shona proverb that says, Chinoora inyama, mweya wemunhu hauori—what perishes is the flesh, but the spirit of a human being does not perish. Such a proverbial wisdom conveys the idea that there are two categories that characterize human existence—mortality (fleshly existence) and immortality (spiritual existence). The idea that the human spirit survives death is commonly found among all African cultures. For example, anthropologists have observed that in many African cultures, human

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beings were buried with some crops and sometimes with the instruments and utensils which they used during their lives of mortality. The presumption was that even though the person has died, the spirit of that person lived on, hence it needed to be prepared to the other form of life which was a spiritual life. Burial rituals are mostly done in a way that shows that the diseased was going to live another form of life within the spiritual world. His or her life in the realm of mortality was thus a transition into a life of immortality as a spirit. The belief in the immortality of the spirit is not exclusively African, for example, one finds that the belief in the immortality of the spirit was central to the philosophy of the Pythagoreans and the Platonists and was also adopted by the Gnostics in the 2nd C.E. For the Gnostics, the spirit provided a bridge between a human being and God (see Maier 1998: 52; Simon 2016: 15–20). These two categories of existence should thus be construed as perennially supervening on each other as to constitute an existential reality of interminability. Janheizn Jahn (1958: 107) observed that in Kinyaruwanda, a human being is made up of spirit and flesh and that the two cannot be separated. “Biological life (buzima) and spiritual life (magara) meet in the human being. In a concrete human life neither the one nor the other can be present alone. It is not pure biological life that is embodied in man [sic], nor is the living human person ever without a ‘shadow’”. For this reason, it can be said that the unity between the spirit and flesh can thus be regarded as the essence of the living human person: that he [sic] partakes of both principles; only in this way is he a muzima, a living individual, who belongs to the category Muntu. In the light of the above observation, one can deduce that human life consists of a union between biological or material life and spiritual life. Both biological life and spiritual life are intertwined in such a way that they supervene on each other. A person’s life or Muntu’s life is thus characterized by the presence of these two principles. From birth to death, life is consequently experienced as continuous. Life does not end with death. The spirit survives the death of the body. The dichotomy between materiality and spirituality must be maintained if there is to be life after death. This African belief in the continuity of human life as ad infinitum was well articulated by the Senegalese poet, Birago Biop, as follows: Here more often things than beings, The voice of the fire listening, Hear in the wind

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The bushes sobbing, It is the sigh of our forebears. Those who are dead are never gone; They are there in the thickening shadow. The dead are not under the earth; They are in the tree that rustles, They are in the wood that groans, They are in the water that runs, They are in the water that sleeps They are in the hut, they are in the crowd, The dead are not dead. (Cited in Jahn 1958: 107)

In the light of the above stanzas from the poem of Biop, the African understanding of life as an endless reality is that the burial of the dead does not imply the end of life. Rather, it implies a graduation into another form of existence, in which time and space do not impose some limitation on such a mode of existence because the ancestors or the living timeless can still commune with those who are in the realm of mortality. This mode of thought was also echoed by a South African Zulu Shaman, Credo Mutwa, who is traditionally understood as a medium of communication between the world of mortality and immortality. He stated his professional experiences as follows: “I view myself as a non-person. I have no identity, I am nothing. I am simply a gateway through which ancestral spirits pass from the past into the present and into the future – and from the future back into the past” (Mutwa 2003: 11). Here, we can deduce that in such Shamanic experiences, the categories of existence—the past, present and the future—are woven into a single experience. It is partly for this reason that life is understood as endless in the sense that one cannot talk of its beginning and end. In African categories of thought, life is similar to what is regarded as the soul in the Judeo-Christian religion. Life or the soul originates from God in such a way that the existence of the soul is inseparable from the existence of God. The soul or life’s existence encompasses the whole of the universe from the very beginning up to the present. Thus, Mutwa articulated the Afro-centric idea of the pervasiveness of the soul as follows: “We exist because God exists, and our souls are fragments of this Universal Self” (Mutwa 2003: 18). This Afro-centric understanding of a human person and life is not usually shared by the western materialistic outlook

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which tends to espouse an imperialistic approach to life that is in most instances presented in the natural sciences as the model for an authentic or realistic outlook towards life. However, there are some western scholars who are arguing that modern science should desist from imposing a monolithic framework for the whole of reality as purely based on material phenomena. Such a perspective amounts to some dogmatic reductionism because of some prior salient commitment to discounting the possibility of the existence of a multi-perspective approach to human nature. Alister McGrath castigated (2018: 25) the modern scientific reductionism about humanity when he said that, “Reductive views of humanity represent a single aspect of human existence as if it were the totality of that existence – or at least the aspect that really matters. Often, such approaches treat one element of the human body which support life as if it were the ultimate reason for life itself”. McGrath went on to allege that “Humanity can be – and, indeed, ought to be investigated at the physical, chemical, biological and sociological levels (to mention a few of the possibilities), yet none of these multiple levels is to be regarded as normative or definitive; rather, each is to be considered part – and only part – of the complex reality that we know as humanity”. McGrath’s critique against modern scientific reductionism about human nature is that science as a knowledge system among other knowledge systems tends to simplify the reality of complexity that inheres in human nature. In this process of scientific reductionist simplification of human nature, the tendency is usually to select a particular aspect of that nature as if that aspect constitutes the totality of human nature. Scientific reductionism discounts the reality that human nature is complex and that no single formula captures this complexity in its totality. At the heart of his critique is that to reduce human beings to neurons, atoms and molecules “confuses a component or level within a system with the system as a whole” (McGrath 2018: 25). This materialistic reductionism does not give room to the possibility of a worldview that espouses the idea of life after death because from a materialistic scientific reductionism, the end of life is inevitably reduced to cessation of heartbeat and brain death. As such, any belief in life after death is usually dismissed on the grounds that such a belief amounts to some superstitious wishful thinking that cannot be authenticated through a process of objective scientific validation. The inherent lack of scientific empirical validation makes the belief system in life after death inconceivable. David Ray Griffin stated one of the arguments of the sceptics of life after death as follows: “The issue of the

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philosophical conceivability of life after death comes down primarily to the mind-body relation: Survival of the personality will be deemed possible only if we hold that what is normally called the ‘mind’, the ‘soul’, or the ‘self’ is related to the physical body in such a way that it could conceivably exist apart from it” (1997, 99). Put in other words, it is inconceivable for the mind, soul or self to exist outside the physical body. One cannot imagine a life outside one’s own body. For this reason, Griffin regarded the position of philosophical conceivability as based on naturalism—a philosophical presumption that is predominantly opposed to supernaturalism. However, in the African cosmology and cosmogony, the natural and the supernatural are usually presented as supervening on each other. In Afro-centric modes of thought as found in traditional accounts of cosmology and cosmogony, creation and the creator are usually presented as inseparable from each other. The created things were sacred because of their origins from the sacred source. Thus, one finds that human beings and God belonged to the natural world in such a way that the distinction between that which was sacred and that which was not sacred did not exist. The universe is thus construed as both material and spiritual which are the ultimate principles that are intertwined in Afro-centric cosmology and cosmogony (see Parrinder 1954: 20–24; Mbiti 1970: 37–46; Zvarevashe 1981: 297–305; Davidson 1973: 111–122). The natural sphere exists because of the existence of a causal relationship with the supernatural, and hence both spheres are consequently experienced in their unity. A common factor which serves as a glue that cements the natural and the supernatural is the experience of life. The idea of the existence of a relational ontology between the life of the natural and the supernatural was well articulated by the Zulu Shaman, Mutwa (1996: 201–202), as follows: “I think God could be the Source from which all living things come. There is a Source of all order and logic in creation. When one looks at a tree, for example, one can see the artistry and the logic behind each leaf, each branch and each layer of bark upon the tree”. Mutwa went on to admit that life cannot be comprehended adequately because of its complexity. In admission of ignorance the human mind amidst the complexity of life, he had this to say, “I don’t know much about these things, but I do know that behind life there is something fantastic. There are things that we cannot see, things that are just wonderful – if not more so – than those things that we do see”. In other words, the natural does not exclude the existence of the supernatural because our knowledge of the natural is simply not exhaustive of

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all that is to be known within the generality of existence. I should like to support Mutwa’s insight by shielding him with the modern scientific concept of complexity which implies that life is far much complex for a single knowledge system to provide humanity with a comprehensive view about it. In this regard, we should desist from seeing the scientific account of life as an exclusive truth about life. Alfred North Whitehead cannot be bettered when he chided those who held a dogmatic scientific view of reality when he said, “The Universe is vast. Nothing is more curious than the self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of its existing modes of knowledge”. What Whitehead is saying is that our human knowledge has not discovered all that has to be discovered about the universe. Our knowledge has not exhausted the vastness of the universe. “Sceptics and believers are all alike. At this moment scientists and sceptics are the leading dogmatists. Advance in detail is admitted: fundamental novelty is barred. This dogmatic common sense is the death of philosophic adventure. The universe is vast” (1948, 129). In the light of the above quotation, I thus submit that the vastness of the universe implies the existence of diversity of life experiences such that no single human experience should be held dogmatically to the exclusion of other life experiences. For example, in the African context, the experience of what is known as the paranormal in life is taken for granted because such experiences are integral to the African cosmology. In this regard, I shall restrict my discussion of life and the paranormal with specific reference to the experiences of African spirit mediums and traditional doctors as my final succinct reflection on the Afro-centric understanding of life.

Life and the African Paranormal Experiences In Afro-centric traditional categories of thought, the word “paranormal” denotes the communication that occurs between the living and the ancestors or spirits. Many individuals in the African context do communicate or receive messages from the spiritual realm or the realm of immortality. For example, among the Shona people of Zimbabwe, an ancestor is referred to as Mudzimu or the sacred spirit which is “the protector and giver of life and goodness” (Gelfand 1981, 38). Because of death, Mudzimu exists in the world of immortality and is related to the world of mortality through his or her descendants. Though existing in the realm of immortality, Mudzimu continues to communicate with his or her progenitors in the

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realm of mortality through spirit mediums or those members of the family who are naturally endowed with the ability to receive messages from the realm of immortality. As such, the individual predisposed with the ability to receive messages from the realm of Midzimu (plural) is known as Svikiro or spirit medium. The status of Svikiro is a gift which is given to the individual by the ancestors for the wellbeing of the community and not for individual self-aggrandizement. Since Svikiro is a gift to the community, it is usually typical that during those occasions when Svikiro is in trance she or he gives messages to the community which she usually does not remember after the end of the trance. Messages from Midzimu which are communicated to the community through the mediumship of Svikiro are usually messages of care and concern for the moral wellbeing of the community. The Svikiro’s paranormal experiences occur during ritualistic communal festivities of anamnestic solidarity. In these festivities, there is a vivid experience of the continuity of life between the ancestors and their living relatives. It is usually during those occasions of anamnestic solidarity that life manifests itself as an indivisible totality because those who exist in the realm of mortality enter into communion with those who exist in the realm of immortality. The experience of life as a totality is integral to the profession of African traditional doctors who are popularly known as the recipients of paranormal experiences. Mutwa (2003: 27) averred that African traditional doctors, among their other professional specializations, should be understood as “para-psychologists” because of their inherent capabilities to diagnose and interpret a patient’s life predicament in relationship to the physical social surrounding in relationship to the supernatural realm. According to Mutwa paranormal phenomenon is something common among human becaues of our inert ability to feel each other from a distance and our capacity to foresee the future. For him, what is usually regarded as the paranormal is something that is normal or natural. Thus, he writes, “There is nothing supernatural, everything is natural. …Man [sic] possesses the sense not only to foresee future events, but also to move out of his body at will sometimes. But this only happens in times of crisis”. To those who have paranormal experiences the whole experience is deemed as natural. African traditional doctors are popularly known as people who are gifted with paranormal experiences. These traditional doctors experience unique experiences which are not shared with everybody in society. Mutwa went on to say that, “If there

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is something dangerous involving my people in any way or any people that I know and love, then these things come. It is not something that one can put categories on and say it is like this or like that. It just happens. It’s one of those things that just happens”. Those who have paranormal experiences cannot explain those experiences because those who go through such experiences are usually oblivious to what happens to them. This is a common human experience. Mutwa maintained that the gift of paranormal is not unique to a particular people, rather it is common to all people and can be developed so as to make it manifest itself on the person. Thus, he declares, “The fact is that this thing is not unique; all people possess it as I have tried to point out. There are those who use it, who develop it. There are those who don’t. It is neither unusual nor supernatural at all. It is part of our beautiful human nature” (Mutwa 2003: 20–31). The above interpretation of paranormal experiences from an African Shaman shows that the manifestation of life experiences is just too complex such that one cannot adequately account for life by simply reducing it to biochemical material processes. Paranormal experiences within the African context as well as in other cultural contexts do constitute an intractable problem for a materialistic account of life. The idea that messages and events can be communicated by invisible phenomena shows that there is something more to what constitutes life, and this can also lead us into doubting whether our accounts of a human person are truly adequate. The African account of life through paranormal experiences hinges on the presumption that a person is an amalgamation of matter and spirit. On the basis of this presumption, it is the spiritual aspect which makes a person’s life to be pervasive throughout the universe. Paranormal occurrences are thus understood as the outcome of the non-locatability of the spirit. The Afro-centric understanding of the paranormal experiences is well articulated by Joseph Selbie in his account of the relationship between body and spirit with specific reference to some insights that are arising from quantum physics. As he puts it, “Our physical bodies are not fixed – they are energy masquerading as matter. Nor do they exist independently. Our physical bodies are the moment-by-moment result of nonlocal energies interacting with our nonlocal two-dimensional holographic energy template, resulting in our local, holographically projected, three-dimensional physical body”. Selbie is saying that even our physical bodies are energy which apparently appear as matter and yet in actuality are constituted by energy which cannot be localized. Selbie went on to assert that the

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mechanistic biochemical model cannot provide us with how changes occur in the body when it is claimed that as human beings we exist instantaneously in multiple realms—the material and the spiritual. Selbie went on to maintain that the “biochemical-machine model of the body has no answer for how instantaneous changes occur”, especially the scientifically proven “idea that we exist simultaneously in multiple realms” is an idea which should be seen as opening “the door for science to understand how there be life after death [his italics]” (Selbie 2018: 124-125). Science is popularly known for refuting the idea of life after death as pure superstition which cannot be proven through the scientific objective verification process. Any knowledge system that is not scientifically verified is thus deemed unacceptable. Now the huddle for science is the idea of multiple existence as espoused in quantum physics whereby an entity can exist as a particle or a wave. Mechanistic science is increasingly found deficient when subjected to the reality of interconnectedness of reality. For example, Donah Zohar (1990: 8-80) says that quantum theory is summed up in the “Principle of Complementarity” which says that “each way of describing being, as a wave or as a particle, complements the other and that a whole picture only from the package deal”. Zohar went on to say that in the quantum field, “even those particles which manifest themselves as individual beings do so only briefly. They exist for a short time, and then dissolve into other particles or return into a sea of energy”. From this scientific observation, Zohar declared that her purpose for relating quantum physics to social theory was primarily based on arguing that “quantum physics and more particularly a quantum mechanical model of consciousness, allows us to see ourselves as full partners in the process of nature”. According to Zohar (1990: 80–114), the experience which is offered to humanity, be it quantum physics, is that in any quantum system of two or more particles, each particle has both “thing-ness and relating-ness”, the first due to its particle aspect and the second to its wave aspect. This kind of relationship is called “relational holism”. It is called relational holism from the perspective that “the self-stops to be an isolated self, but overlaps with other selves in society”. The reason why the self-overlaps with other selves in society is due to the fact that the wave aspect entities give rise to relationships and the consequent birth of new realities through the entanglement of their wave functions. Because waves can overlap and become entangled with each other, quantum systems can form internal relationships which would not be possible if entities are seen as closed systems.

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Quantum physics does not rule out the existence of the spirit or life after death. The spirit and flesh cannot be separated from each other because there must be a holistic understanding of human nature. In this regard, a human being can exist as a wave or a particle. At death, a human being enters into a quantum state of existence whereby she or he can exist as a wave and a particle at the same time. In the Southern African context, there have been experiences whereby people saw their departed relative at different places. For this reason, Southern African indigenous people have insisted on having festivities for their departed relatives. The rationale behind such religious activities is based on the belief that the dead are not dead at all, rather they are existing in another realm of existence in which they can commune with their consanguinity from time to time especially in dreams and during times of crisis. What Selbie previously described as “energy” is what can be regarded as spirit/moya/mweya (Zulu/Shona) which is regarded as pervasive throughout the cosmos and serves as the primordial principle in the cosmogonic and cosmological ordering. But moya/mweya is thus regarded as the main life principle which encompasses all the realms of existence— mortality and immortality. Through paranormal experiences, it is a traditional Afro-centric belief that a person can exist simultaneously in the past, present and the future. As stated previously, from an Afro-centric perspective, death constitutes a moment of transition from one form of life to another because after death, the deceased continues to communicate with those who are still alive. For this reason, the paranormal experience can best be understood as a manifestation of the ongoing communication between the life of materiality and that of spirituality. A common feature in the African cosmology is that “the departed continue to live a life which is closely like the earthly human life” (Junod 1938, 128; also see Mbiti 1970, 97–102). Unlike the earthly human life, which is conditioned by materiality, the spiritual life is far much superior because it is the telos of all existence beyond the confines of materiality. Through paranormal experiences, a person is able to see what transpired in the past as well as to foretell that which will happen in the future. Such persons are thus psychically empowered to experience and see certain events or realities which are not readily available to others in ordinary experiences. Paranormal experiences are mostly described as manifestations of spirit possession from one’s ancestor(s). When possessed, the individual’s behaviour temporarily changes into the behaviour of the deceased ancestor. Marquard and Standing cannot be bettered when they said among African people,

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ancestral spirits do enter into the minds of human beings (1939, 53). In this regard, the deceased are still members of the living community and they participate in the affairs of the living. However, among some of the western scholars and also those who have been influenced by western modes of thought, the idea of the paranormal or the existence of spirits of the deceased among the living is a subject that has remained shrouded in perennial scepticism. For example, Christians believe that at the Second coming of Christ or the Parousia, the dead shall be resurrected from their graves for judgement verdict on what they did whilst on earth. Here, their belief is that since Christ rose from the dead, those who believe in Christ shall also rise from their graves. The Christian belief in the resurrection was premised on the resurrection of Christ as per the teaching of St Paul. Most of the western thinkers are sceptical about paranormal experiences. Such experiences are reduced to neurological activities that occur in the human brain. David Ray Griffin summed up this western scepticism about the paranormal as follows: “truly philosophical reflection about the paranormal is difficult in our culture because the occurrence of paranormal events is ruled out by the modern worldview, especially, in the academy, in its late modern guise” (Griffin 1997: 25). As Whitehead has alluded before, western science has been a rather dogmatic approach to reasoning. From the outset, western science has ruled out other ways of reasoning and experiences that deviate from what it regards as the normative. However, Griffin went on to say that “some people, nevertheless, are able to reflect open mindedly about the reality and possible implications of ostensibly paranormal happenings, even though they too have been educated in the same culture. To be adequate, an analysis obviously must be more complex” (Griffin 1997: 26). Whilst some of the western philosophical scholarship has been steeped in the tradition of scepticism about the possibility of life experiences about the paranormal, from an Afro-centric perspective as shown in the preceding chapters, the occurrence of the paranormal is a day-to-day lived experience that is taken for granted. From an Afro-centric mode of thought, life is understood as complex and mysterious in the sense that it manifests itself in ways which the human mind cannot comprehend to the fullest. Life creates experiences and not the human mind as it is generally assumed in the mainstream philosophical pragmatism. The assumption behind this philosophy is that whatever is claimed must work. Obviously, such a claim rules out subjective experiences and other phenomenon that do not easily render themselves to provability. Scientific observation and verifiability are

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taken as indispensable to truth. Pragmatism cannot deal with the reality of complexity which we find in paranormal happenings. Among the indigenous people of Southern Africa, paranormal happenings are caused by spirit possession as a result of the presence of the ancestors. An Afro-centric metaphysical thought is based on the presumption that the universe starts with life and continues to exist because of life. The predominance of life in African metaphysical thought is pivotal to Africa’s accounts of paranormal experiences. It was also argued that Tempels’ theory of force be understood as his own attempt at conflating the African cosmology and cosmogony with the Vitalist theory which was an attempt to explain how life came about in the universe. However, it was deduced that Tempels’ theory of Vital force should be understood to imply that the universe is composed of life and spirit. Everything exists in a state of ontological relationality because of life. From an Afro-centric existential perspective, the world and everything that exists are bound together with life. The perpetuation and preservation of life become the telos of human existence. A relational ontology that transpires between ancestors and their progenitors has been characterized by other scholars as an ontology of anamnestic solidarity whereby the ancestors share life with their progenitors. An Afro-centric conceptualization of life implies that life supervenes over death because the end of biological life ushers the individual into the realm of spiritual life. Paranormal experiences within the African context demonstrate that there is more to life which modern science with its prior commitment to mechanistic reductionism cannot provide us with an adequate explanation of life processes. In the African context, paranormal experiences are taken as integral to the manifestation of life in the sense that its common knowledge that people communicate with their ancestors from time to time. From an Afro-centric mode of thought, life is understood as complex and mysterious such that life manifests itself in which the human mind cannot adequately comprehend.

References Edwards, D. L. 1997. Christianity: The First Two Thousand Years. London: Cassell. Taylor, J. V. 1963. The Primal Vision: Christian Presence amid African Religion. London: SCM Press Ltd. Bertalanffy, L.  V. 1969. General Systems Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications. New York: George Braziller.

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Boon, M. 2007. The African Way: The Power of Interactive Leadership. Cape Town: Zebra Press. Bourdillon, M. 1987. The Shona Peoples. Gweru Mambo Press. Bujo, B. 2001. Foundations of an African Ethic: Beyond the Universal Claims of Western Morality. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company. Capra, F. 1996. The Web of Life: A New Synthesis of Mind and Matter. London: Flamingo Publishers Cobb, J.  B. Jr. and Griffin, D.  R. 1977. Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition. Belfast: Westerminister Press. Davidson, B. 1973. The Africans: An Entry to Cultural History. Ringwood: Penguine Books. Gelfand, M. 1973. The Genuine Shona: Survival Values of an African Culture. Gweru: Mambo Press. Gelfand, M. 1981. Ukama: Reflections on Shona and Western Cultures in Zimbabwe. Gweru: Mambo Press. Greco, M. 2005. “On the Vitality of Vitalism”. Theory, Culture & Society. London: Thousand Oaks. Vol. 22(1): 15-27. Griffin, D. R. 1997. Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality: A Postmodern Exploration. Albany: State University of New York Press. Hartshone, C. and Peden, C. 1981. Whitehead’s view of Reality. New York: The Pilgrim Press. Hoernlé, A. R. F. 1918. “Mechanism and Vitalism.” Philosophical Review 27 (6): 628–645. Jahn, J. 1958. Muntu: An Outline of Neo-African Culture. London: Faber and Faber Limited. Jungerman, J. A. 2000. World in Process: Creativity and Interconnection in the New Physics. New York: State University of New York Press. Junod, P. 1938. Bantu Heritage. Johannesburg: Hortors Limited. Maier, K. 1998. Into the House of teh Ancestors: Inside the New Africa. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Marguard, L. and Standing, T.  G. 1939. The Southern Bantu. London: Oxford University Press. Mazrui, A. A. 2002. Black Reparations in the era of Globalization. (Edited with an Introduction and Conclusion by A.  M. Mazrui), Binghamton: Institute of Global Cultural Studies. Mazrui, A. A. 1994 “From Sun Worship to Time Worship: Towards a Solar Theory of History”. In Philosophy and Ecology: Philosophy of Nature and Environmental Ethics, edited by H. O Oruka, 165-176. Mbiti, J. 1970. African Religions and Philosophy. London: Heinemann. McGrath, A. 2018. The Great Mystery: Science, God and the Human Quest for Meaning. London: Holder & Stoughton Ltd.

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Murove, M. F. 2016. African Moral Consciousness: An Inquiry into the Evolution of Perspectives and Prospects. Londo: Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd. Murove, M. F. 2020. An Afrocentric conceptualisation of life and immortality of values: A critical investigation on the paranormal and human dignity in southern Africa. South African Journal of Philosophy, 39:2, 179-193. Mutwa, V. C. 1996. Zulu Shaman: Dreams, Prophecies, and Mysteries. Rochester: Vt: Destiny. Mutwa, V. C. 2003. Zulu Shaman: Dreams, Prophecies and Mysteries. Rochester: Vt Destiny. Nwalwamba, K. M. B. & Buitendag, J. 2017. “Vital Force as a triangulated concept of nature and Spirit. HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 73 (3), 4506. https://doi.org/10.4102/hits.v73i3.4506. Parrinder, G. 1954. African Traditional Religion. London: Hutchinson. Prozesky, M.  H. 1995. “The Philosophical Anthropology of Alfred North Whitehead”. South African Journal of Philosophy. 14/2, pp. 54-59. Russell, B. 1996. History of Western Philosophy. London: Routledge. Samkange, S. & Samkange, T. M. 1980. Hunhuism or Ubuntuism: A Zimbabwean Indigenous Political Philosophy. Harare: The Graham Publishing Company. Selbie, J. 2018. The Physics of God: Unifying Qauntum Physics , Consciousness, M-Theory Heaven, Neuroscience, and Transcendence. Toronto: The Career Press. Sheldrake, R. 1981. “Three Approaches to Biology: Part II. Vitalism”. Theories to Theory. Vol. 14, pp. 227-240. Simon, B. 2016. The Essence of the Gnostics. London: Arcturus. Sindima, G. 1995. Africa’s Agenda: The Legacy of Liberalism and Colonialism. New York: Orbis Books. Stewart, D. 2005. Wisdom from Africa: A Collection of Proverbs. Cape Town Struik Publishers. Tempels, P. 1959. Bantu Philosophy. Paris: Presence Africaine. Weckowizc, T.  C. 2000. “Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972): A Pioneer of General Systems Theory”. CSR Working Paper No. 89-200. Whitehead, A. N. 1929. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: Macmillan. Zvarevashe, I. 1981. “The Problem of Ancestors and Inculturation”. African Ecclesiological Review. vol. 36, No. 6, 246-247. Zohar, D. 1990. The Quantum Self. London: Flamingo.

CHAPTER 5

African Spirituality as the Foundation for a Relational Ethic

Whilst in African ethics it is emphasized that by nature a person is a person because of other persons, a presumption that is encapsulated in the concept Ubuntu in the adage which says that Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (Zulu/Xhhosa), when this adage is meted with the Shona concept of Ukama, the end result is that my wellbeing as an individual has its ontological and cosmological meaning in relationship to my fellow human beings, those that are still alive, ancestors, God and the natural environment. In this way, the type of communitarianism that arises from African ethics surpasses anthropological communalism. My brothers’ children address me as father, never as uncle. Their mothers call me their husband and not as uncle. Whenever any of my brothers die, it is my responsibility to take care of the material and emotional needs of my brothers’ children in the same way that their fathers were doing when they were alive. I grew up with children from relatives who are usually referred to as distant relatives from the western cultural perspective. Our parents treated all of us equally without any form of discrimination whatsoever. Whenever we misbehaved, we were all reprimanded just in the same manner a parent would reprimand his or her own children. We were all treated in a way that showed that we all belonged to the same family. In no way did any of us their biological children fee that we belonged more to the family than the children from our relatives. Even though we parted as we grew up, from time to time these people who grew up with us in our

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family did continue to pay visits to our family and the emotional bond is usually that of common belonging with the family in which they grew up until the stage of adulthood. In times of celebrations and mourning they are always with us, sharing our joy and sometimes our pain. If ever a woman who is of the age similar to that of my mother calls me, I usually respond by saying “mom or mother” or mama/mai (Zulu/ Shona) just in the same manner I would respond to my mother’s call. Similarly, a man who is of the same age as my father is “dad or father” or baba (Zulu/Shona). Even though these people are not my biological parents or relatives, their social standing evokes in me a feeling of identifying them with my own blood parents. It is also common in African culture to hear people who do not share any form of consanguinity to address each other with affectionate titles such as “my son in law” mkhwenyana (Zulu) or mukuwasha (Shona) or “my daughter in law” makoti (Zulu) or muroora (Shona). All these titles convey a feeling that the person so addressed as such is entitled to the same respect which I would accord to my own mother-in-law or father-in-law. No matter that the other person might be a stranger, he or she is supposed to be treated in a way that shows that she or he belongs to our shared humanity and should not be made to feel that they are a stranger. In other words, relationality which in the Shona language is called Ukama implies that our humanity is a shared existential reality which should be affirmed in the way we talk and treat each other. No person is treated as a stranger or alien. The most profound way of expressing a spirit of generosity to the other person is to make sure that they feel that we are related, and together we are bonded in this earthly life and the whole universe. Hence, affectionate titles which African people give to people who are supposedly strangers are intended to instil a sense of common belongingness. In Ukama, there is a strong presumption that being human entails being sensitized to the reality of relationality. For example, it is customary among the Shona people that whenever they meet a person for the first time, the first thing is to enquire about his or her totem as part and parcel of formal greeting. In enquiring about the other person’s totem, the aim is not to discover how one is not related to the other person, but to affirm the existentially shared threads of our human common belongingness. A totem or Mutupo is usually an animal which is a totemic ancestor. For this reason, totemic peoples in Southern Africa believe strongly that they originated from the natural world and

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that it was in the natural world where they can trace the genealogy of their ancestors. Totemism was premised on the presumption that all human beings are related and that through totemic ancestorhood, human beings were related to the natural world and God as the creative primordial spirit. Herbert Aschwanden observed that, when praying to God, Shona people have always addressed God by totemic names. The following are some of the totemic names of God, “Museyamwa (eland), Shoko (vervet monkey), Dziva guru (the great pool)” (Aschwanden 1989: 202). Here the implication of attributing totemic names to God as the primordial creative spirit is that Mwari was intimately related to human beings inasmuch as Mwari was also related to the natural environment. A serious misunderstanding of totemism has been committed by many western scholars who relegated totemism as some sort of mechanism which was devised by Africans to protect their societies inbreeding so as to promote exogamy and that totemism was “a label to aid the identification of groups led by dynasty” (Beach 1990: 56–66). This interpretation of totemism trivialized totemism, it failed to decipher the significance of totemism with reference to ecological conservation. Totemic ancestorhood was thus the foundation of an ethic of environmental conservation because everybody did not eat every animal. The totemic species was essentially regarded as the real founding ancestor of a particular lineage, hence it is a symbol of origins and a predicate of a communally shared identity. The founding ancestor of a particular nation or lineage might have been a particular patriarchy, but those who are still living might not remember him and what they can only remember as their founding ancestor is a totemic species. Through the totemic species, the living descendants of this founding ancestor regard themselves as brothers and sisters, and even those of different generations will regard themselves as relatives who share the same historic blood. Since the totemic species is a predicate of identity, it vividly accentuates feelings of relationality and common belonging among people to the extent that they perceive themselves as existentially endowed with bonds of Ukama which cannot be disentangled with impunity. This means that there was no fine distinction between humanity and the natural world. John Mbiti stated it well when he said that a strong sense of kinship remains pivotal to African traditional life. He went on to say that the sense of common belonging or kinship unites the whole community in a way that includes animals, plants and the ancestors. Almost all the concepts connected with human relationship can be understood and interpreted through the kinship system. It is mainly this kinship

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system that governs the behaviour, thinking and whole life of the individual in the society of which he or she is a member (Mbiti 1970: 135). It is the totemic species or ancestor which is ultimately the reason why relationality in Africa embraces humanity and the natural world. For Mbiti, the kinship system is like a vast network stretching laterally (horizontally) in every direction, to embrace everybody in any given local community. This implies that each individual is a brother or sister, father or mother, grandmother or grandfather, or cousin, or brother-in-law, uncle or aunt, or something else, to everybody else. In this network of relationships, the individual is related to everybody else. Thus one finds that there are many kinship terms that are used to express the precise kind of relationship pertaining between two individuals. A meeting between two strangers is always dovetailed by sorting out their relationships. After discovering how they are related, they behave in a way that is expected from such a relationship, and having discovered how the kinship system applies to them, they behave to each other according to the accepted behaviour set down by society. It is possible also that from that moment on, the individuals concerned will refer to each other by the kinship term of, for instance, “brother”, “nephew”, “uncle”, “mother”, with or without using their proper names. Such being the case then, a person has literally hundreds of “fathers”, hundreds of “mothers”, hundreds of “uncles”, hundreds of “wives”, hundreds of “sons and daughters” (Mbiti 1970: 136). The emphasis that is put on human ontological relationality is based on the presumption that to be fully human, an individual identity must be deciphered in infinity layers of social and spiritual inclusivity. For this reason, the individual’s self-conception is infused with that of the other members of the community. It is for this reason that Mbiti (1970: 141) would declare later on that “the individual does not and cannot exist alone except corporately. He owes his existence to other people, including those of past generations and his contemporaries. He [sic] is part of the whole”. He went on to say that the individual subordinates her or his identity in terms of other people. It is other people who enable the individual to become conscious of his or her. For this reason, whatever happens to the individual happens to the whole community, and whatever happens to the whole community happens to the individual. The individual can only say: “I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am”. The overlap of the individual’s identity and that of the community is evidently a sharp contrast to the Cartesian philosophy of the individualism of insularity whereby the individual is presumed to be wholly self-enclosed in his experiences which

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cannot be accessed by others. In this regard, the community and society at large is understood as external to individual’s subjective experiences. From the perspective of African relationalism or Ukama, the individual’s identity cannot be differentiated from that of the family or community in which she or he is born. Here, I want to authenticate this claim with a common example in African communities or societies where individuals are usually addressed using their totemic names or clan praise names such as Hove (fish in Shona) or Shumba (lion in Shona), Mlambo (people from the waters Shona/Zulu), Dube (Zebra in Zulu/Ndebele) and so forth. The implicit understanding is that the individual is a conglomeration of the whole family or community even though she or he can be individuated at the social micro-conceptual level. African spirituality is thus regarded as based on the ethos of the common good instead of individualism. Since individuals are internally related to the community and society at large, their flourishing and ultimate spiritual and material wellbeing subsists within the community of the living and that of the ancestors. For this reason, Kenneth Kaunda did put it well when he said that in Africa life is about communal solidarity and whenever one is isolated from the community, she or he experiences some death of the soul. Critical moments in the individual’s life are ceremonially celebrated by the whole community with music dance. It is during such occasions that “the barrier between the natural and the supernatural crashes down. We are conscious of only one world – living generations sway in rhythm with gods and ancestral spirits” (Kaunda 1966: 35–36). In the light of Kaunda’s observation, it can be deduced that African spirituality is based on a worldview of enjoyment or merriment. This enjoyment and merriment is only possible because of the existential reality whereby the individual finds herself or himself being embedded within the community as the source of one’s flourishing in terms of spiritual and material wellbeing. A spirituality that arises from African ethics is unequivocally anti-­ individualism in which within the western society, the predominant understanding is that the individual’s spirituality is something subjectively privy to the individual and God. The South African theologian observed that, The cultural ideal of the Western industrialized world is the self-made, self-­ sufficient, autonomous individual who stands by himself or herself, not needing anyone else (except for sex) and not beholden to anyone for anything. He or she may consult a doctor or a therapist or a lawyer, but because

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these services are purchased, one can still see oneself as autonomous. Having one’s own money is of course crucial to maintaining this kind of independence. …Freedom and happiness are equated with independence and self-­ sufficiency. (Nolan 2006: 15)

In contrast to this western individualism, Nolan stated that, “From the point of view of all other cultures in the world, past and present, this is simply unintelligible. In other cultures, the person who is separated and isolated from the rest of the community would be regarded as very unfortunate. Interdependence, social coherence, and reliance upon one another are highly appreciated cultural values. In Africa we say: ‘A person becomes a person through other people’. In other words, your identity depends upon the family, the friends, and the community who relate to you and to whom you relate” (Nolan 2006: 16). In many African cultures, an individualist is regarded as someone who is possessed with an evil spirit or Shavi (Shona). The spirit of Shavi is regarded as an alien evil spirit which could not be accommodated in the ranks of ancestors of the family or community. The spirit of Shavi is thus regarded as endowed with the propensity to destructiveness because it usually compels its host to behave in a way that is antithetical to virtuous acts that are usually the bedrock for communal cohesion and the resultant flourishing of the common good. The spirit of Shavi is usually hell-bent on vitiating social and mystical harmonious relations that should exist between the individual and the community and the world of the ancestors. In their previous existence in the world of mortality, Shavi spirit could not relate harmoniously with other members or the family or community. Someone who is mostly obsessed with his or her self-interest to the total exclusion of the interests of others is usually regarded as possessed by the spirit of Shavi. It is common knowledge that the spirit Shavi can also give its host a special power of amassing enormous wealth on the condition that the host does not share that wealth with other people—be they relatives or other members of the community in a situation of excruciating poverty. By being driven to act excessively, the spirit of Shavi leads its host to self-ruining of his or her own life. Someone who is extremely egocentric is thus regarded as possessed by the spirit of Shavi, and in future such a behaviour will inevitably lead to the ruining of the life of the individual host. The spirit of Shavi is endowed with the propensity to do that which creates communal and cosmological disharmony because such a spirit is antipathetic to harmonious relations, be they ontological or cosmological. When an individual is possessed with

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the spirit of Shavi, he or she speaks in a language that is usually unintelligible to other people—a behaviour that shows the anti-social nature of Shavi. Such spirits are not Midzimu (ancestors) (Bourdillon 1991: 245). But not all Shavi spirits are negative because someone can be possessed by the spirit of farming, cleanliness, healing and hunting. In this regard, Shavi spirits contribute positively towards the general wellbeing of the community. It cannot be disputed that African ethics is an immensely rich ethical tradition that puts emphasis on the primacy of relationality. For this reason, the spirituality that arise from such an ethical tradition can best be described as a communitarian spirituality. Whilst the individual is understood as a communal being by nature, there are also implicit assumptions in this ethical tradition that the Afro-centric ethical tradition presumes community to encompass both cosmological and ontological dimensions of existence. What is needed within this understanding of community is to understand community so as to encompass all the dimensions of existence beyond the popular confines of anthropocentric assumptions of community which we are mostly accustomed to. For this reason, the spirituality that arises from the African ethical tradition invites us to speculate the concept of community so as to encompass human social relations, human relations with special reference to the natural world as well as human relations and the cosmology and its multifaceted dimensions. Whilst in African ethics it is emphasized that by nature a person is a person because of other persons, a presumption that is encapsulated in the concept Ubuntu in the adage which says that Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (Zulu/Xhhosa), when this adage is meted with the Shona concept of Ukama, the end result is that my wellbeing as an individual has its ontological and cosmological meaning in relationship to my fellow human beings, those that are still alive, ancestors, God and the natural environment. In this way, the type of communitarianism that arises from African ethics surpasses anthropological communalism. In this regard, the idea of human relationality becomes authentic when understood as encompassing everything in existence. The spirituality that arises from African ethics can best be described as a holistic spirituality.

References Aschwanden, H. 1989. Karanga Mythology: An Analysis of the Consciousness of the Karanga in Zimbabwe. Gweru: Mambo Press.

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Beach, D.  N. 1990. The Shona and Zimbabwe 900-1850: An Outline of Shona History. Gweru: Mambo Press. Bourdillon, M. 1991. The Shona Peoples: An Ethnography of the Contemporary Shona, with Special Reference to their Religion (Revised Edition). Gweru: Mambo Press. Kaunda, K. 1966. A Humanist in Africa. London: The Camelot Press Ltd. Mbiti, J. 1970. African Religions and Philosophy. New York: Anchor Books. Nolan, A. 2006. Jesus today: A Spirituality of Radical Freedom (South African edition). Cape Town: Double Storey.

CHAPTER 6

African Communitarian Ethics and Spirituality

One day I decided to take a group of friends who were university students from overseas for a township tour which was predominantly populated by indigenous South Africans. As we drove around the various streets of the township, we saw a house which had many people who seemed to have been celebrating. When I suggested to my guests that we should visit that particular house, my friends from overseas were surprised by my suggestion as they told me that they did not recall us being invited to such a house nor knowing anybody who lived in it. However, my response to their queries was that in Africa, when you come across a people who are celebrating or mourning, you can just join in without any invitation card nor knowing someone in that particular place. My explanation came as a shock to my overseas friends who felt that such a practice was a blatant violation of the privacy of the family concerned. My western friends went on to explain to me that, for them, the issue of privacy was sacrosanct and it was a general western social expectation that individual or family privacy must be respected and failure to do so amounts to acting in a way that is disrespectful towards the person or family whose privacy has been violated. However, we all decided to go into that particular homestead with the aim of seeing what the reaction of the owners of the homestead would be, where the festivities were going on. To the amazement of my western guests, we were whole heartedly received by the owners of the festivities as if they have known us before and were waiting for us. After formal greetings and introductions, we were all given some chairs to sit down after © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. F. Murove, African Spirituality and Ethics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45590-2_6

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which some food and assortment of cool drinks and alcohol were joyfully served to us as if they had been expecting us. Everybody was so eager to talk to us. My western guests were left tongue-tied with this type of hospitality which they said they had never experienced in their lives. This short story shows that indigenous African people do value the presence of other people for the sake of it. A person is primarily regarded as belonging to other persons regardless of diverse cultural and religious backgrounds. By virtue of being a person, the individual belongs to the community. Since everything in the universe is interconnected, human beings are interconnected with the whole of the universe, and more so, they are connected to each other. As human beings, our thoughts and actions have a communal base from which they emanate and find confirmation for their authenticity. As human beings, we are by our very nature embedded in social relations from which we derive our identities. The individual’s general life outlook is derivative from what the community has mediated to the individual spiritually, historically, economically and politically. The individual’s “self” cannot be conceptualized without reference to the above communally supervening factors that are indispensable in the making of individual consciousness. Thus, a sense of being and personal identity subsists within the community as a micro-reality within the totality of the cosmos. From an Afro-centric spiritual perspective, cosmologically our origins can be traced from the primordial spirit which is ultimately responsible for everything that exists because everything that exists has the spark of this cosmological spirit. If everything in the universe is interconnected with everything else, this implies that as human beings, by virtue of our shared humanity, we are also interconnected to such an extent that we existentially enter into the subjective existence of each other positively or negatively. Positively, in life there are people whom as individuals do feel they have been, to put it in Christian terms, guardian angels in the sense that such people have unreservedly assisted us unconditionally during times of adversity in our lives. Consequently, we cannot help but to always treasure those acts of immense generosity. Negatively, there are also some people who have traumatized us by their inherent tendency of either paying good acts with evil or their dehumanizing tendencies which might have ruined the prospects of a fulfilling life. It is for this reason that African ethics makes a bold assertion that a human being belongs to the community and is moulded by the community into becoming what they are.

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Because of the premier emphasis that is put on community in the social and spiritual wellbeing of the individual, the spirituality that arises from African ethics can best be described as partly a humanistic spirituality on the grounds that emphasis is placed on harmonious relationships within the community. In African ethics, there is optimistic outlook towards human nature. This optimistic view of human nature can be deduced from proverbial wisdom like that of Ubuntu and UKama where it is posited that human beings are endowed with a nature that is predisposed to common belonging.

African Ethics and the Making of a Humanistic Spirituality The Judeo-Christian religion has a very pessimistic view of human beings. Whilst God has been persistently portrayed as a human being and a king in the Bible and immutable, the concept of immutability means that nothing enters into the life of God and that God is by nature a being that is self-contented. Some scholars have argued that such an idea of God cannot be deduced from the Old Testament and the New Testament. For this reason, the concept of immutability is attributed to Aristotle, more specifically to his metaphysics in which he posited God as “the unmoved mover, existing in a single, eternal moment” (Miles 1995: 12). The anthropomorphic imageries of God are rather given in superabundance in the Hebrew bible. For instance, in the book of Genesis (6: 11–13) we have a story where God is said to have regretted for having created human beings and after this realization, he decided to wipe out humanity from the face of the earth because of corruption and violence. But to Noah, whom God found to be a righteous person, he shared his disappointment and disgust towards humanity as follows: “I have determined to make an end of all flesh; for the earth is filled with violence through them, behold, I will destroy them with the earth”. Since Noah was God’s righteous human being, God spared him his wrath as he thus advised him, “Make yourself an ark of gopher wood; make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch”. After the deluge, Noah made a burnt offering to God after which it is said that God was deeply pleased with the aroma of the smell and repented as follows: “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I ever again destroy every living creature as a I have

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done” (Genesis 8: 20–21). In this story God was made angry by the evil of human beings and out of anger, he decided to destroy them through a deluge. After experiencing the nice aroma of the sacrifice which Noah offered to him, God decided not to destroy humanity because of its intrinsic evil nature. The Judeo-Christian religious sceptical view of human nature was also shared by other western philosophers and psychologists. The Germany philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1968: 43-44) argued that morality was a social artifice that was anti-human nature. He puts it, “The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity. A further triumph is our spiritualization of enmity. It consists in profoundly grasping the value of having enemies: in brief, in acting and thinking in reverse of the way in which one formerly acted and thought”. Nietzsche saw the existence of Christianity and its insistence on the destruction of enemies as to the advantage of immoralists and anti-Christians as a teaching that made it to the advantage of immoralists that the church exists. Immorality was not only prevalent in the Church, but in politics too. Thus, he aptly puts it, “In politics, too, enmity has become much more spiritual – much more prudent, much more thoughtful, much more forbearing. Almost every party grasps that it is in the interest of its own self-preservation that the opposing party should not decay in strength; the same is true of grand politics. A new creation in particular, the new Reich for instance, has more need of enemies than friends: only in opposition does it feel itself necessary, only in opposition does it become necessary” (Nietzsche 1968: 43–44). For Nietzsche, human nature was completely evil to the extent that the presence of enemies is a common reality in all human associations and cruelty was the main defining feature in human nature. Praising the weak and the poor was in itself a spiritualization or intensifying of cruelty. Those who succeed in society only do so by preying on the weak. Thus, the weak and the poor were not good examples to emulate. Nietzsche’s sceptical view of human nature was also articulated in his other book titled The Will to Power in which his political theory was anchored on the premise that those who become victorious in war and their progenitors are in most cases biologically superior compared to those who are defeated. Nietzsche’s scepticism about human nature as propounded in his The Will to Power was not just his own philosophical speculation, rather he was philosophically articulating what was already the dominant belief in his contemporary European society. Pope Nicholas VI (1447–1455) demonstrated this “will to power” in the papal bull, Romanus Pontifex when he

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gave the Portuguese king the authority of “ruler over the earth” and urged him “to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery”. When it came to supporting colonialism, conquest and brutality the Church fulfilled the writings of Nietzsche on morality—that humanity was evil by nature. Those who were to be conquered and colonized were thus deemed to be subhuman as they were slaughtered at the command of the Church (http:// caid.ca/Bull_Romanus_Pontifex_1455.pdf). Such ecclesiastical utterances are a justification of cruelty of colonialism and the subjugation of the defenceless indigenous peoples whose lands and wealth were expropriated from them under the guise of spreading Christianity and civilization. This conquest and subjugation of indigenous peoples through colonialism and slavery was rather an affirmation of Nietzsche’s philosophical dictum that the suffering of the weak was necessary for the ascendance of “a great man”. In such a philosophical outlook, there is an inherent presumption that whoever succeeded in imposing his or her own will upon others or the weaker members of society, then such an individual or individuals were simply reaffirming his or her natural superiority. In this regard, virtues such as sympathy, compassion and magnanimity would naturally be regarded as dangerous to human progress and civilization. The suffering of the weak was necessary for the ascendency of “a great man”. This ideal of the great human being was only possible through domination and dispossession of the conquered in the pursuit for the advancement of the conqueror’s self-interest. The so-called civilization had its genealogy in human cruelty instead of those highly talked about human virtues. This motif is well grounded in the work of the father of psychodynamic theory Sigmund Freud in his book Civilization and Its Discontents in which he advanced a sceptical outlook towards human nature. For instance, this psychological scepticism can be discerned when he declared that, “men[sic] are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but that a powerful measure of desire for aggression has to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment” (Freud 1946: 85). What this entailed was that a human being was by nature a predator to other human beings, to restrain him or her from unleashing of this self-destructive predatory instinct, she or he was to be tamed by institutions. These institutions are

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not spontaneous creations of human nature, but artifices that protect humanity from being enmeshed in a perennial war. The institutions that were created to contain human destructiveness were not instinctual spontaneous creations that originated from human nature, but artifices that were erected to protect humanity from its self-­ destructive primordial nature. On the basis of this sceptical hypothesis about human nature, Freud went on to allege that the evolutionary momentous step into human culture came about when the individuals renounced the right to take violence into their own hands. But lest we forget, Freud reminded us pragmatically that the first person who “flung an epithet to the enemy instead of a spear was the true founder of civilization”. However, while such an evolutionary step was indispensable, it also set the stage for the human existential discontents to which all societies are always susceptible. For him, this rather entailed the most drastic interference with the passionate desires of the individual, the suppression and repression of instinctual needs that continue to simmer in the unconscious and seek explosive utterances. Consequently, life in human society was an imposed compromise which remains essentially a perpetual insoluble predicament (Freud 1946: 105). The existential predicament of a civilized humanity was segmented in the fact that it is imbued in an ambiguity in which humanity could not live without civilization and at the same time they could not live happily within it. The reason why there is such a predicament could only be found in the nature of humanity which has been caught between the common good and egoistic impulses. But human nature is too aggressive to the extent that to talk about the common good remains an indulgence into a pure discourse about an ideal which actuality does not concur with real human nature. An aggressive human nature is originally not meant to work for the common good because the very ideal of the common good arouses a social situation of perpetual conflict and discontent. The existence of private property in human society was evidence enough to extrapolate the anticommunitarian nature of human beings. In the same vein with the Freudian motif of the discontents of civilization and morality, Robert Ardrey’s book African Genesis also hypothesized that human nature was aboriginally predisposed with an instinct of territorial aggression, an innate disposition to seek and defend territory because our ancestors were territorial killer apes whose nature was so fashioned in such a way that they could not live harmoniously in the community. A human being, he argued, “is a predator whose natural instinct is to kill with a weapon” and that

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“man, sooner or later, will obey his weapons instinct and wipe out life on the earth” (Ardrey 1961: 316). Human beings were not different in kind from other animals. Ardrey’s sceptical view of human nature led him to refute the Kantian-­ Christian idea of human beings as morally conscientious, rational and autonomous beings with a natural tendency to organize themselves around morality. This view of human beings was based on what Ardrey (1961: 387–390) called “The Illusion of the Central Position”. It was rationality and conscience that make social existence in the form of an ideal of cohabitation impossible. Rationality and conscience are in themselves ultimate expressions of “the state of nature”. As he puts it, “The human mind is uncommitted. In a single day it may dedicate its energies to the designing of a missile with no other known purpose than the massacre of millions; to the raising of funds to promote racial integration; to a quarrel with a neighbor, or a wife”. The human mind or rationality was completely untrustworthy, erratic and unpredictable. The idea of conscience as an inner voice for moral guidance was just “one of such small reliability that is prone to assume nearly the role of villain” because conscience evolved directly “from the enmity-enmity complex of our primate past” and “has acted as no force to inhibit the predatory instinct”. Thus, conscience was primarily concerned with the individual’s survival instinct. On its own, conscience was an ambivalent subjective mechanism which tends to make the individual or group to see social relations in terms of friends and enemies. Conscience was a survival instinct mechanism which safeguards the individual or group interest against those who are seen as outsiders because the same conscience “organizes hatred as it organizes love. …Conscience may direct the Christian martyr to die for the brotherhood of man [sic]. But the same conscience directs Christians to go forth and slaughter the same fellow men” (Ardrey 1961: 390–391). In the final analysis, conscience originated from the instinct of self-preservation which usually takes the form of individual self-preservation or group self-preservation. It is mainly this territorial nature of conscience that the moral ideal of universal human cohabitation is untenable. Konrad Lorenz shared the same sceptical deductions about human nature with Nietzsche, Freud and Ardrey. Lorenz advanced a thesis in his book On Aggression that “the fighting instinct in beast and man is directed against members of the same species” because human nature is endowed with “the great parliament of instincts” that can be regarded as the constitution of human nature. Thus, he metaphorically puts it, “This

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constitution resembles a parliament, since it is a more or less complete system of interactions between many independent variables; its true democratic nature has developed through a probationary period in evolution, and it produces, if not always complete harmony, at least tolerable and practicable compromises between different interests” (Lorenz 1967: 72). Such an observation implies that human nature itself is composed of adversarial instincts are remarkably different from each other. The very analogy of human instincts as similar to the parliamentary adversarial democracy implies that all moral agreements should be seen as artifices which are technical means towards the attainment of compromise. Many western scholars have upheld the sceptical outlook towards human nature when they argue that by their very nature, human beings are selfish egoistics who always relate to each other in terms of seeking that which ultimately furthers their selfish interests. For this reason, human beings are regarded as bereft of any sense of concern for the other. In as far as the sixteenth century, the western world was flourishing with the idea that it was actually human vices which are responsible for human economic progress and general social prosperity. Civilization did not come about through self-denial, but through what moralists regarded as moral weaknesses such as avarice, vanity, luxuriousness, ambition and the rest. Here, the Dutch physician Bernard de Mandeville remains a well-nuanced representative of this type of egoism. Virtue, in the sense of complete self-denial, was an illusion because all actions came from selfishness. Even those people who perform acts of self-sacrifice and self-denial were only doing so because they loved to be praised or they were afraid of being blamed. All human emotions and actions were thus reduced to selfishness. Thus, the human tendency of being generous to others was in itself some form of disguised selfishness. Even altruistic acts were supposed to be understood as acts that originated from concealed selfishness. A virtuous person was someone capable of concealing his or her selfishness—thus averting the wrath of the selfishness of others. Social relations, be they economic, political or religious, were themselves a manifestation of selfishness (Mandeville 1924: 68–78). Mandeville already had identified the irony inherent in Western civilization. As civilization gave rise to modern capitalism, it carried with it some morally negative connotations whereby exploitation and selfishness were the driving forces for all the various industrial and scientific accomplishments.

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A Crisis of Civilization According to John Armstrong, civilization is in a crisis because “The root of the problem appeared to be that the idea of civilization had kept bad company. …The view that industrially developed countries had a mission to rule less-developed societies  – and not merely an opportunity for increased wealth and power based on physical might – was facilitated by deployment of the term ‘civilization’. Civilization carries a moral implication: a civilized society is better than an uncivilized one; civilized life is fully human: noble and wise. But it also carries a suggestion of superior material development: more factories, more guns. Whole nations could convince themselves that they had a moral right to lordship over other lands, mistaking material superiority for moral legitimacy” (Armstrong 2010: 11). What has dominated the idea of civilization throughout history is mainly the Western way of being and doing. Western culture and religion are considered to portray a highly evolved homo sapiens. Conquest and material superiority are thus regarded as empirical evidence of a highly civilized human society. Civilization relates to the idea of identity. According to Armstrong, “The religious roots of the West are Judeo-­ Christian, with many bloody tensions around the interpretation of that heritage. The West, as a whole, encountered industrialization and its problems earlier than any other part of the world. These states were, in general, colonizers rather than the colonized from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Somewhere in the mix is a moderately robust attachment to individual freedom and rational, skeptical inquiry. For the last five hundred years the West has driven technological, scientific and commercial innovation” (Armstrong 2010: 16–17). The Western society which regarded itself as civilized had a habit of disparaging non-Western societies such as African societies as actually barbaric and uncivilized. However, many Western scholars are increasingly questioning the whole idea of equating Western societies with civilization as to imply a highly evolved way of life which should be embraced by all societies. These scholars reflect on the wars and the destruction of the natural environment and its echo ecosystem as well as the reality of global warming which has been unleashed by Western industrialization and doubt whether that should be seriously taken as civilization. For this reason, one finds Aidan Campbell arguing in a rather cynical manner that the Western world is slowly awakening to the idea that there was something valuable in the lives of the so-called primitives. As he puts it, “No longer

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is primitivism solely associated with atrocities and bloodletting. Whereas humanity used to be equated with civilization, that is, with independence from nature, the meaning of humanity has been transformed into proximity to nature. Indeed, many of the problems currently associated with society – wars, corruption, repression, pollution – are ascribed to the fact that humanity has lost contact with nature. In other words, it is the overcivilized who are now held responsible for the savagery of the world” (Campbell 1997: 13–14). The idea of seeing humanity as intimately related to nature which was previously disparaged by Western civilization is currently being embraced as a noble idea compared to the previously held idea that humanity was different in kind from nature. It was thus pivotal to Campbell’s observation that the contemporary Western appreciation of primitivism has been necessitated by the general loss of faith in Western ideals of a civilized society. Here, the main lamentable reason is that the Western ideals of civilization and human progress have produced untold suffering to humanity and nature. To give an example, there is a general agreement that something very urgent needs to be done if we are ever to avert some of the natural catastrophes associated with environmental pollution and global warming. Whilst something urgent needs to be done collectively as human beings, Martin Prozesky pointed out the dilemma that will be faced when trying to undertake such a collective action. Thus, his main observation in this regard is that there will always be conflict when humanity attempts to take such a collective action because of the prior existence of “the need of the absolutely poor and the greed of the absolutely rich”. Prozesky went on to elaborate on this human existential conflict as follows: “The poor damage the environment out of need, and it is not for the more fortunate to point the finger at their behavior. Things are different for the greedy. Not only are they the root cause of the problem but they have choices about what to do that the destitute do not” (Prozesky 2009: 301). Sometimes the need to overcome this conflict has come in the form of Western prescribed changes to lifestyles in a way that closely emulates the lifestyles of the previous peoples who were described as primitive and uncivilized. This Western change in lifestyles is seemingly turning the tables against those colonial Western scholars who had read evolution in terms of primitivism as destined to emulate the civilized. For Campbell, the primitive serves certain emergent needs in Western society that relate to the prevailing sense of discontent with what was previously celebrated as civilization.

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Other scholars have argued that the scientific thinking behind Western civilization has never been ecologically friendly because it put human existence and environmental harmony in a perennial antagonistic relationship. For this reason, a myriad of problems that have engulfed the world today are being traced to Western science. The Western scientific dogmatic commitment which is usually aimed at seeing reality as independent discrete units implied a precommitment to severing our human relationality with all that shares this existence with us. This idea was dovetailed with the belief that the natural environment was simply there to serve our human needs. African traditional civilization before the Western colonial interlude had a holistic understanding of reality whereby there was no distinction between knowledge acquired by reason, experimentation, imagination or faith. There was no dichotomy between science and religion, science and philosophy, or science and art. Scientific knowledge was not reduced only to the quantitative and the mechanistic. Thus, Western science could not begin to appreciate method or value in traditional science in Africa until the stage of relativity when Western science began to shift emphasis from discrete entities to the complexities in nature and the universe, and Western paradigms of progress and development began to be questioned (Mazrui et al. 1999: 635). An appreciation of other people’s cultures and their values becomes synonymous with descending into an abyss of savagery and primitivism. For Campbell, the authenticity of African indigenous knowledge systems is admissible subject to verification by Western science. What is usually not admitted in this type of thinking is the dominant contemporary idea that the Western scientific achievements have brought humanity and its habitat planet earth to its current cataclysmic future scenario of the wellbeing of planet earth and the future continuous existence of human beings. What has made Western civilization ethically questionable is its evolution with the idea of a human being as originally individualistic and self-seeking without any sense of concern with the wellbeing of others.

Civilization and Individualism Individualism has been described by other scholars as the dominant characteristic of modern western society which is currently influencing many cultures in different parts of the world. Contemporary individualism is being facilitated by the globalization of neo-liberal capitalism. According to Albert Nolan, “In this individualistic culture, therapists and counselors

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have seen their task as that of helping the individual to develop his or her ego in order to reach the great Western ideal of self-fulfillment. …The self-­ centered individualist loses touch with reality. It is now recognized that the ‘me-generation’ is thoroughly unhealthy” (Nolan 2006: 16). It is part of Nolan’s argument that even in western societies, people are beginning to recognize the futility of an individualistic social outlook and the type of spirituality that arises from it. For this reason, Nolan described individualism as destructive. He declared, “Nowhere is the destructiveness of selfish individualism manifested more clearly, dangerously, and dramatically than in our destruction of the environment. Ecologically, Western individualism has brought us to the edge of chaos” (Nolan 2006: 19). In this type of reasoning, Western selfish individualism does not have a sense of concern for the wellbeing of other constituencies of existence because all concern is wholly centred on the wellbeing of the self to the exclusion. Nolan summarized a survey that was made by other scholars which show mass extinctions which took place on planet earth over millions of years including the most famous of them, the fifth extinction, when the dinosaurs were wiped out. The sixth extinction is the one we are heading for now, only this time it is unlikely to be caused by an asteroid smashing into the earth. This time it will be the result of human selfishness (Nolan 2006: 19). For Nolan human selfishness will lead to the sixth extinction because of the current ongoing destruction of the earth in the form of “the pollution of rivers and oceans, the destruction of the parts of the earth, the greenhouse effect created by the burning of fossil fuels, the destruction of species, the over-fishing along our coasts, the effects of the population explosion in so-called developing nations, the dangers of nuclear waste and the unknown and perhaps irreversible effects of genetic engineering” (Nolan 2006: 19). The destruction of the earth is not something which will happen in the future. Rather, according to Nolan, it is already taking place in the form of global warming. “At present, such emissions send seven billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. All of this is collecting around the globe like a giant blanket that has the effect of warming the earth beyond the normal temperatures of the past. It is known as the greenhouse effect. There has always been a thin, delicately balanced blanket of carbon dioxide up there, but since the Industrial Revolution we have increased the thickness of this blanket by 30 percent” (Nolan 2006: 20). The point which Nolan is making about all this is that because of human selfishness, life on earth will be ultimately wiped out. Selfishness

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blinded humanity to see the symbiotic relationship that exists between humanity, the natural environment and the ecosystems upon which its own survival cannot be intelligibly disentangled. I will return to the issue of environmental crisis later. The main essentials of African ethics show that African ethics and the spirituality that arises from it can be regarded as a communitarian ethic.

An African Model of a Communal Spirituality African ethics is known as a communitarian ethic mainly on the grounds that the individual is primarily regarded as a communal being whose ultimate wellbeing cannot be disentangled from the wellbeing of others in the community. Within the African context, the importance of the community in the life of the individual cannot be underestimated or trivialized. One can easily discern the primacy that is given to the community in African congregations. In these congregations, there is a strong sense of communal solidarity which manifests itself in guilds such as guilds of St. Anne, guilds of girls of Mary, guilds of St. Joseph and so forth. People who belong to these guilds usually gather to spiritually support each other. A sense of common belonging in these respective guilds is visibly fostered in a form whereby members of the same guild express their shared spiritual identity by wearing the same uniform and reciting the same prayer of devotion. In this regard, there is a strong belief that individual spiritual wellbeing can only be nourished and sustained within the group or guild. The presumed relationship with God is not vertical as it is with individualistic spirituality, rather it is horizontal in the sense that it’s a spirituality that is shared within the group and experienced as the source of shared flourishing. In the African context, spiritual matters are not understood as individual private affairs, rather spirituality has a communal base because of the African traditional understanding of an individual as internally related to the community. What the individual does privately has some ripple effects that tend to affect the whole community. The individual’s own subjective experiences are mediated by the community. As such, his or her appropriation of these experiences as private experiences derives from our human tendency to appropriate that which has been externally mediated as uniquely one’s own peculiar experience without necessarily taking into account the contributory background factors which are usually discounted by the individual with the aim of avoiding the problems that arise with the

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externalization of decisions. The individual’s appropriation of decisions is evidence to the individual ontological reality of communicability within the general existential context of multiplicity of being. Elochukwu Uzukwu (1995: 42-45) gave a comparative analysis between African and Western conceptualizations of a person after which after which he said that the African conceptualization of a person is based on relationality. A person is understood primarily as embedded in ontological relationships. In such relationships, a person is understood as there for others instead of being understood as a self-enclosed entity which is incorrigible. In some of the western philosophical traditions, especially the philosophy of atomic individualism, a person is presumed to be a self-contained entity. As a self-­ contained entity, social relations are external to the individual’s being. The individual’s autonomy is subjectively inviolable and incommunicability is regarded as fundamental. In African communities, communicability or an attitude of openness to others is one of the main characteristics of a person who is endowed with a spirit of generosity. Such a person is easily available and ready to listen to the concerns of others. What the individual does finds fulfilment in the context of a communal process of communal reciprocal recognition. John Mbiti cannot be bettered when he said that, “Only in terms of other people does the individual become conscious of his own being, his own duties, his privileges and responsibilities towards himself and towards other people. When he suffers, he does not suffer alone but with the corporate group; when he rejoices, he rejoices not alone but with his kinsmen [sic], his neighbours and his relatives whether dead or living. When he gets married, he is not alone, neither does the wife ‘belong’ to him alone. …Whatever happens to the individual happens to the whole group, and whatever happens to the whole group happens to the individual” (Mbiti 1970: 141). The individual understands himself or herself on the basis of collective identity whereby his or her interests are predicated on the interests of the community as the source of collective consciousness which he or she shares with the community in which he or she is existentially imbedded. In African ethics, there is a strong strand of thought which maintains that our humanity cannot be disentangled from the humanity of others and that we socially and spiritually confer upon each other the fullness of humanness. The idea that our humanity is intertwined with the humanity of others has been seen as the foundation of African humanism as articulated in the concept of Ubuntu which is a verb that derives from the noun Muntu. According to Ali Mazrui, “Muntu is an indigenous African word meaning

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person, and sometimes meaning Man [sic] in the generic sense of humankind. In a sense it is the theme of humanism in Africa’s philosophical and political experience, involving a major transition in perception across the centuries” (Mazrui 1986: 295).

Ubuntu and Being Human In Ubuntu, we come across an African traditional philosophy which celebrates human nature. In the African concept of Ubuntu, we have an African ethical understanding of persons based on the premise that human beings are what they are because of other human beings. Human beings remain intertwined in the humanity of fellow human beings and their identity is acquired in the process of communing with other human beings. Thus, human relations are given primacy than individual human beings as individuals. The adage that has been pivotal to convey the primacy of relationality in Ubuntu says Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu—which literally means a person is a person because of other persons. According to Mogobe Ramose (2005: 37), the adage of Ubuntu means that “to be a human be-­ ing is to affirm one’s humanity by recognizing the humanity of others and, on that basis, establish humane relations with them”. Ramose went on to say that “Ubuntu understood as be-ing human (human-ness); a humane, respectful and polite attitude towards others constitutes the core meaning of this aphorism”. In other words, Ubuntu is based on the humane relations that the individual fosters within the community by recognizing the humanity of others. Through the recognition of the humanity of others, the individual’s own humanity is also recognized by others. Ubuntu is realized in the recognition which the individual gives to others. This recognition arises from the individual awareness that his or her identity is affirmed through a process of mutual recognition within the community. Stanlake Samkange and Marie Samkange said that Ubuntu/Hunhu means “The attention one human being gives to another: the kindness, courtesy, consideration and friendliness in the relationships between people; a code of behavior, an attitude to other people and to life, is embodied in hunhu or Ubuntu” (Samkange and Samkange 1980: 39). As human beings, we impart humanness to each other by virtue of the way we treat each other. The being of a person is originally in relationality to the personhood of others. As African people, our philosophy of life is premised on the idea that we are people because of other people and relatedness and interrelatedness is a reality that supervene on all that exists

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ontologically and cosmologically. Ontologically, our humanity is woven with the humanity of others in all the dimensions of our existence. The notion of autonomous existence is an abstraction from the concrete. In actuality, what is concrete is the reality of ontological and cosmological interconnectedness. Human existence is enabled by the existence of others who recognize themselves in a web of ontological and cosmological relations. It is in the realization of human bondedness to each other and all that exists which makes it an imperative that a person is originally good because of his or her prior commitment to ethics. The African cosmology is weaved around the ontological principle of life and common belonging. For African people, all that exists or everything that is real are ontologically bonded to each other in a perennial state of an intimate ontological relationship. These relationships are causal ties that bind everything together. When the individual is abstracted from ontological belongingness, his or her relational identity can hardly be recognized. Ubuntu includes the living and the dead because ancestors are still recognized by the living as members of the living. As such, the living still eat and celebrate with them in the celebration of life just in the same way they used to do when they were still existing in the realm of mortality. From birth to death, persons are socialized into Ubuntu/Hunhu because of the indigenous African belief that human beings are originally endowed with goodness which can only be brought into full actualization through socialization. Amidst plurality that inherently typifies Southern African societies, Ubuntu remains the common source for the convergence of where social plurality is realized into oneness. This oneness does not imply blind conformity, but the reality of our shared humanity. This shared humanity is shared with God and the whole of creation. For this reason, communicability remains an essential defining characteristic of an authentic human existence and all creation. In the light of the preceding discussion, it should be evidently clear that the concept of Ubuntu presupposes that human beings are not self-­ enclosed entities. Communicability remains indispensable to what it means to be a person. A person is so regarded as a person because of his or her openness to other persons. This also implies that human beings are open systems who communicate life or energy to other members of the community or those they encounter in their day-to-day social intercourse. A person is related and interrelated with everybody else in society as well as with the other entities in the cosmos at large. This implies that a person is not a self-enclosed entity as is erroneously presumed in the western ethic

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and philosophy of individualism. A person remains eternally a being in relationships rather than simply being in relationships to the self. The self is basically an abstraction from the web of relationships because what is usually taken as a simple relationship is in actuality a manifestation of a multiplicity of relationships that are both immanent and transcendent. What this means is that whilst the individual’s existence might manifest itself as particular, a more thorough detailed analysis of this existence will reveal a multiplicity of relations that are too complicated to analytically disentangle into meaningful isolated parts. For example, the Shona people of Zimbabwe have an adage about relationships which says Ukama makore hunopfekana—literally meaning that relationships are like clouds, they interpenetrate each other. The imagery of clouds conveys the idea that one cannot disentangle oneself from the reality of relationality. The life experiences which the individual might go through is entangled in other factors within the generality of existence. Communicability is what makes us to be what we are as human beings. Gabriel Setiloane emphasized the primacy of communicability in Ubuntu by interpreting it in the light of the word seriti, a seSotho word which means vitality. As he puts it, “Physically perceived the human person is like a live electric wire which is forever exuding force or energy in all directions. The force that is thus exuded is called ‘Seriti’ – Isithunzi [in Zulu]” (Setiloane 1986: 13). In other words, as human beings, we influence each other because of energy or the spirit or energy within us. This force which is exuded is the source of Seriti or Isithunzi in our relationships with the world. We exude vitality or Seriti in society and the world at large through the way we treat each other. Ubuntu requires that we show our humanness by relating to each other with a sense of respect. In Zulu, the word respect means Inhlonipho and in Shona the same word means Kuremekedza. A person who respects others is thus regarded as endowed with the fullness of Ubuntu. Respect is shown in greeting elders, not standing whilst they are sitting, greeting everybody you meet and making sure that at any given moment, your words do not offend anyone around you. Respecting other people is another way of exuding vitality in one’s relationships with other people in the community. According to Prozesky (2016: 8), “The link between community (botho) and personal vitality (seriti) is as follows: the lively, vital person expresses that vitality in relation to other people, animals and nature, both resting on and reinforcing their relatedness”. Prozesky went on to say that such relatedness strengthens the community in a way that “enhances the prospects of a supportive context for the

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individuals in it. If, however, serving the community is not fully inclusive and does not extend to all its members, the result will have the potential to undermine the community because those neglected or  – worse  – oppressed will have good reason to seek ways to defeat that which neglects or oppresses them” (Prozesky 2016: 8). The context where botho is realized is the community whereby vitality or seriti is expressed through relationality. It is the community which remains as a pillar of support for the individuals. For this reason, the community must be inclusive in such a way that everybody feels a sense of common belonging. What it means to be a person is to be in the position to impart seriti or vitality and to be influenced by the lives of others within an all-inclusive community. The idea of human belongingness remains pivotal to what it means to be a person in Ubuntu. A celebratory outlook towards life implies that whatever good event that occurred in the life of the individual is shared with the whole community as an occasion for celebration. Within this context of celebration, the world of immortality and that of mortality are experienced as bonded into oneness. Here it is evidently clear that the reality of communicability becomes an all-pervasive reality within the generality of existence. Because of the pervasiveness of relatedness, in all the aspects of being, human actions have consequences that pervade the present in such a way that they interpolate into the future. As human beings who exist in the present, we are bound to communicate our present existence into the future for better or for worse. In the ethic of Ubuntu, the normative is that the individual should act in a way that takes into account the wellbeing of all the members of the community in the present as well as the wellbeing of those who will exist in the future. For this reason, one finds that in African ethics, there are proverbs that are based on the motif that one should always act in a way that does not compromise present relationships because harmonious present relationships are a guarantee for harmonious future existence. Within this ethical tradition, as Michael Gelfand puts it, “the present is the whole of the past looking into the future” (Gelfand 1981: 73). The implication of such an assertion is that the future existence is basically an extension of the present because that which will happen in the future is partly occurring in the present. Our present actions whether good or bad do influence those events that will occur in the future. In other words, whilst we exist in the present, we also communicate with the future.

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Another communicative dimension of Ubuntu comes in the form of a celebration of the solidarity that is deemed to exist between the past and the present. Human beings do not communicate only with other human beings in society, rather those who are still living actualize their communication with the past through a process of remembering. Thus, in this process of remembering, the living establish communication between themselves and their ancestors whereby traditional beer, water, meat and snuff are offered as an expression of fellowship between the living and their ancestors or the living timeless. Kaunda articulated the communication between the living and their ancestors as follows: “And it is at such times that the barrier between the natural and the supernatural crashes down. We are conscious of only one world – the living generations sway in rhythm with gods and ancestral spirits” (Kaunda 1966: 36). Benezet Bujo characterized the communication of the living and their ancestors as based on anamnestic solidarity—a spiritual practice of enacting a symbiotic relationship between the past and the present through the ritual of remembrance. Contrary to the indigenous Southern African concept of Ubuntu which exudes an optimistic view of human nature, the Judeo-Christian religion is based on pessimistic perspective of a human being as sinful because of a litany of human wickedness. Adam and Eve who are presented in Judaism, Christianity and Islam are the archetype of humanity. In the book of Genesis, human beings who existed in the original state of innocence were expelled from paradise because of sin. According to Edmund Hill, “Civilization began, in rudimentary form, with the expulsion of the man and woman from paradise clothed in skins (Gen 3: 21), and progressed rapidly with Cain, who was first of all a farmer (a ‘higher’ form of culture than Abel’s pastoral existence) who did not succeed in pleasing God; and then after murdering Abel founded a city (4:3, 5, 17). Civilizations built on blood” (Hill 1984: 23). Most of the stories in the book of Genesis are weaved around the motif of the sinfulness of human beings, and the consequent result of sin was human suffering and death. In the book of Genesis, corruption and violence characterized human existence. Thus, God used the deluge to annihilate all life which he had created on earth because of the evil of humanity: “Now the earth was corrupt, in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth” (Genesis 6: 11). From the very beginning the existence of human beings has been dovetailed by a tragedy of sin against God the creator.

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Thus, sin became a dominant nature of human beings. The existence of Christianity was necessitated by sin. Church sermons are usually weaved around the motif of a sinful human nature which is presumed to be in dire need for redemption. In the Christian religion, the coming of Christ who was later on proclaimed by Christians as God in human form reconciled the primordially estranged human nature with God. Human nature was originally sinful and was in dire need for God’s universal forgiveness. For that universal forgiveness of human sinfulness, it required the cruel death of God’s Son. That cruel death was to serve as a perennial reminder to all humanity about their horrific sinfulness which culminated in the brutal killing of God’s Son. In his Son, God assumed the sinful human nature in order to have a firsthand experience of the sinful human condition. After experiencing this sinful human condition, it is God who ultimately become victorious. The brutal murder of his Son propitiated God’s anger such that all humanity was automatically granted universal forgiveness. Whilst Christianity has taken many versions of response to human sinfulness after God’s propitiation for it, there has not been some unanimity on what is supposed to be done. The death of God in Christ was intended to right the wrongs of humanity in general because human nature could not attain the ideals of God without God’s intervention. The animalistic element in human nature implied that such a nature could not self-correct, hence there was a need for divine external intervention in the form of God’s grace. Christ a son of God who took upon human nature becomes God’s grace which fulfilled that which Adam had failed to fulfil in his purely human nature.

References Ardrey, R. 1961. African Genesis: A Personal Investigation Into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man. New York: Macmillan Pub Co. Armstrong, J. 2010. In Search of Civilization: Remaking a Tarnished Idea. London: Penguin Books Ltd. Bertalanffy, V. L. 1968. General Systems Theory. New York: George Braziller, Inc. Campbell, A. 1997. Western Primitivism: African Ethnicity: A Study in Cultural Relations. London: Cassell. Freud, S. 1946. Civilization and its Discontents. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

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Gelfand, M. 1981. Ukama: Reflections on Shona and Western Culture in Zimbabwe. Gweru: Mambo Press. Hill. E. 1984. Being Human: A Biblical Perspective. London: Geoffrey Chapman. Kaunda, K. 1966. A Humanist in Africa. London: The Camelot Press Ltd. Lorenz, K. 1967. On Aggression. Taylor, R. (trans.). Munich: R. Piper. Mazrui, A. A. 1986. The Africans: A Triple Heritage. BBC Publications: London. Mazrui, A. A. et al 1999. “Trends in Philosophy and Science in Africa”, in Mazrui, A. A. and Wondji, C. (eds.). General History of of Africa VIII: African Since 1935. Oxford: James Currey Ltd. Pp. 633–677. Mbiti, J. 1970. African Religions and Philosophy. London: Heinemann. Miles, J. 1995. God: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopg, Inc. Nietzsche, F. 1968. The Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ (R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd. Nolan, A. 2006. Jesus Today: A Spirituality of Radical Freedom (South African Edition). Cape Town: Double Storey Books, a division of Juta & Co. Ltd. Mandeville, B. de. 1924. The Fables of the Bees, Vol. 2. Kaye, F. B. (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Prozesky, M. 2009. “Well-fed Animals and Starving Babies: Environmental and Developmental Challenges from Process and African Perspectives”, Murove, M. F. (ed.). African Ethics: An Anthology of Comparative and Applied Ethics. Scottsville: University of Kwa-Zulu Natal Press, pp. 298-307. Prozesky, M. 2016. “Ethical Leadership Resources in Southern Africa’s Sesotho-­ speaking culture and in King Moshoeshoe I”. Journal of Global Ethics. 12:1, pp. 6-16, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17449626.2016.1146789. Ramose, M.  B. 2005 African Philosophy through Ubuntu (Revised Edition). Harare: Mond Book Publishers. Samkange, S. and Samkange, T. M. 1980 Hunhuism or Ubuntuism: A Zimbabwe Indigenous Political Philosophy. Harare: Graham Publishing. Setiloane, G. 1986. African Theology. Johannesburg: Skottaville. Uzukwu, E. E. 1995. A Listening Church: Autonomy and Communion in African Churches. New York: Orbis Books.

CHAPTER 7

Healing in African Spirituality and Ethics

In South Africa, two friends of mine ended up becoming traditional healers. One is a priest and the other one a nun in the Catholic Church. The nun whom I am not at liberty to name was already doing her masters in clinical psychology and was excelling very well in her studies. Whilst she was still a student, she was consulted by students and staff members on spiritual matters and was always available to help without charging any fee for her services. Whenever we had a friendly discussion, she always told me that she did not see any conflict between her calling as a catholic nun and that of traditional healing. She always emphasized that Jesus was a healer who alleviated suffering from people. She described her mission as primarily aimed at healing people and returning them to the traditional ways of their ancestors and that of God. My priest friend said that his calling to traditional healing occurred when he was already ordained as a priest. He told me that he believed that there was no conflict between his calling as a traditional healer and a priest because Jesus was a healer even though orthodox Catholicism does not accept the gift of traditional healing among Africans. Many of the faithful, black and white do come to him for his traditional healing services even though he has been prohibited from performing his priestly duties in public. Obviously, this is part and parcel of the Catholic church practice of trying to control people’s faith through the institutionalization of charism. The above story shows that my friends are devout Christian leaders as well as dedicated African traditional healers and they both don’t see any problem in relationship to their Christian faith. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. F. Murove, African Spirituality and Ethics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45590-2_7

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In Southern Africa, healing is a very prominent phenomenon and this encompasses physical and spiritual healing. As I said before, in Southern Africa, there are churches that are popularly known as churches of the spirit. They are known as churches of the spirit because it is believed that people are healed by the spirit of God. Recently, a newspaper in Zimbabwe published a sensational article saying that “A Johanne Masowe yeChishanu prophetess has sensationally claimed that all prophets who claim to be using the Holy Spirit are a bunch of liars”. The article went on to allege that “Gogo Miriam has been a prophetess for 30 years” performing healing within her church on the understanding that she was empowered by the Holy Spirit. She said she later on discovered that she was empowered by ancestral spirits. After discovering this, she “dumped her white garments in exchange for black clothes, spears and knobkerries”. Miriam’s story is a clear demonstration of the truism that ancestral spirits are involved in the healing activities within churches. Miriam claimed that a male spirit medium was possessing her and was helping her prophesying. As she puts it, “Whenever I was used to give to give prophesies, I would shake the whole of my body and would give accurate prophecies and then the night came, I would be ordered to leave the white garments”. Bulawayo 24 News. “Prophetess uses Spirit Medium”, 5 May 2022 at 20:32  h. Ancestors are mostly known for empowering their descendants with powers of healing. Traditional doctors are endowed with the charism of healing which comes from the ancestral realm. Healing is not simply about enabling or repairing body parts so as to enable the proper functioning of the body, rather it involves the spiritual aspect of the sick person. A person is healed when harmony has been restored between body and spirit. Sickness is caused when there is disequilibrium between body and spirit. A physical ailment cannot treated in isolation from the spiritual reality. The physical and the spiritual are reality that work in communion with each other. As shown before, in African modes of thought, a human being is not just perishable matter as presumed by most western philosophers and healthcare professionals. Two realities constitute what makes a human being—body and spirit. Traditional doctors do not only heal the body, they also heal the spirit or reconcile the spirit with the body. The healing of the individual is not only for the individual’s personal benefit, rather it is the whole community that is healed. The sickness of the individual is also the sickness of the community or the family. It is for this reason when the individual is sick, the whole family accompanies her or him to the traditional doctor. Though the sickness might be for the individual, the diagnosis which is given by the traditional doctor is usually for the whole

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family. As we shall see in this chapter, health and healing is not an individual affair but a community or family affair. In this chapter, my aim is to show how African spirituality has contributed to healing in Southern Africa. I will argue that Christian spirituality and anthropological scholarship has contributed enormously to the bastardization of African traditional health and healing practices. African traditional doctors were thus described as agents of the devil and architects of heathenism in African culture. The medical profession of the African traditional doctor was reduced to curing witchcraft and dealing with malevolent spirits. Post-colonial Southern African governments have recognized traditional doctors, but they have been met with stiff resistance from Christian believers and some modern medical practitioners who have been trained in western ways of medical practices, disregarding the fact that almost 80% of Southern African indigenous peoples consult traditional doctors for healing. Those who are readily available to these indigenous people are traditional doctors than most of the western trained doctors. Western trained doctors in private hospitals have commercialized the provision of healthcare.

African Spirituality and Healing Among the indigenous peoples of Southern Africa, healing is inseparable from spirituality. Traditional doctors are empowered by ancestors in their healing ministry. Ancestors work in communion with God who is the primordial spirit. A modern doctor who is trained in western modes of healing has a mechanistic or functionalistic approach to healing whereby focus is on physical manifestation of germs. In African modes of healing, “sickness touches on the individual’s physical and spiritual state, as well as the person’s relationship with the greater community, the living and the ancestors” (Maier 1998: 77–78). The African traditional doctor is endowed with the spirit of healing. This spirit of healing is passed on from generation to generation as a charism for healing in the community. The gift of healing is given to a particular individual from birth, and it eventually manifests itself at adulthood. Medicines for healing various diseases are given to the chosen individual in dreams. This is part and parcel of the manifestation of a paranormal phenomenon. No one can give an intelligible explanation on what really takes place. Sometimes the tendency among scholars is to describe the whole phenomenon as a manifestation of primitivity. Missionaries and anthropologists have been in the forefront of

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ruining African spirituality and healing as they relentlessly presented the African traditional doctor in a condescending manner. African traditional doctors are often described as witches, a word that means that they are evil forces. Christianity in all its various versions and colonial anthropological scholarship has done more harm to African spirituality and healing than what can ever be imagined. Some African born again Christians and those African doctors who have received western modes of healing have also joined the crusade of condemning African traditional doctors and their healing practices. African traditional doctors are usually described as unscientific and promoters of heathenism among Africans. In South Africa, a group of doctors who call themselves Doctors for Life (DFL) objected the post-apartheid South African government to recognize African traditional doctors. Here the main reason for their objection was that African traditional doctors were unscientific. The belief, as it is also common in the western world, is, what is real is supposed to be scientifically verifiable through an objective process that is supposed to verify the authenticity of whatever is claimed to have certain effects that can be submitted to physical observation. Anything claiming to compound spirituality and physicality is regarded as irrational. For this reason, the spiritual must be expunged from the physical if ever rationality has to prevail. It is claimed that scientific validation can only deal with the physical instead of the spiritual. The process of scientific validation is considered as the foundation for the reliability of the western medicines. Such a claim ignores the fact that health and healing is culturally conditioned. Among the indigenous peoples of Southern Africa, health and healing cannot be separated from the spiritual aspect of the human existence (Murove 2009: 159). African governments have been complicit with Christianity and colonial western anthropological scholarship in the suppression of African traditional healing practices. They have failed to legislate that African traditional doctors should also be allowed to practice alongside their western trained counterparts as is the case in other countries such as India and Brazil. As Maier puts it, “In India, traditional medicine is offered in the hospitals and university curricula. Research into traditional African medicines has been minimal, suffering equally from prejudice and widespread reluctance of the healers themselves to reveal their medical secrets” (Maier 1998: 78). Thus, Africans are participants in the suppression of their own medical knowledge system. Whilst colonial governments insisted that witchcraft does not exist and was based on superstition, it is surprising to

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find that colonial governments passed laws such as the Witchcraft Suppression Act. The question that arises is: How can someone proclaim an Act aimed at suppressing something which they previously proclaimed to be non-existent? What missionaries and colonialists regarded as superstition was a highly sophisticated medical system which combined the spiritual and the material in the process of healing. Up to the present day, as has been mentioned previously, over 80% of Africans resort to the assistance of the traditional doctor in their quest for holistic healing. Holistic healing implies that the sick individual is reconciled with the material, spiritual and the community. Mogobe Ramose declared that, “The individual is recognised from the perspective of the wholeness in the form of the family or communal relations that the individual experiences itself and is experienced by the community” (Ramose 2005: 68). Since the individual is understood primarily on the existential principle of wholeness, the individual’s health is also conceptualized holistically whereby the community of the living and the ancestors are involved in the healing process. Here Ramose cannot be bettered when he averred that, “The underlying idea here is that there must be a correlation between the bodily illness and the disturbance of harmony and balance in the relations between the living and the living-dead (ancestors)” (Ramose 2005: 69). There must be always a correlation between the spiritual and the material for healing to be effected. The realm of mortality and that of immortality are supposed to be reconciled if the individual is to attain holistic healing. In other words, a sick person must be reconciled with his or her ancestors. In the African context, the individual is related to the visible and invisible realm of existence, therefore the understanding of disease goes beyond physical causation. For this reason, Michael Kirwen states that African traditional doctors “know the African traditions regarding God, the ancestral spirits, the world, and life after death” (Kirwen 1987: 29). Disease has a metaphysical and spiritual causation. Contrary to the African traditional healthcare system, the western healthcare system is popularly known to be mechanistic and functionalistic. This healthcare system served specific ideological purposes which were aimed to serve the interests of the colonial establishment, especially the economic interests of the colonial masters. The need for healthy workers became the main reason for the provision of healthcare to the colonized Africans. After the advent of colonialism and Christianity, the diseases which infected Africans were mainly diseases of western origin that were mediated to Southern Africans through western industrialization.

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Christianity used western medicine to serve its own religious purposes which on the final analysis were aimed at penetrating African hearts. The Western medical system was used by missionaries as a way of demonstrating the healing power of Christ. In mission hospitals, the healing of Africans was regarded as combat against forces of heathenism of indigenous Southern African people. The battle was between western medicine and African traditional medical practices. Healthcare was compartmentalized in hospitals and the western trained healthcare professionals such as nurses and doctors. The world renowned historian stated that in this medical and healing combat, Christianity failed to recognize that Africans “looked for spiritual healing and were not offered it by a church that had compartmentalised healing off into the hospital and the dispensary as a task only for nurses and doctors” (Ranger 1992: 257). For most of the indigenous Southern African people, western indigenous medicine did not satisfy their healing needs which were holistic in the curing of disease. Missionaries were in the forefront of demonising African indigenous healing practices. Those who visited missionary hospitals were treated with the specific aim of demonstrating the healing power of Christ. In mission hospitals, Africans could not find spiritual healing which was provided by the African traditional doctor. Issues of health and healing are context specific and that means that no healthcare system should claim monopoly over another.

Cultural Relativity of Health and Healing Musa Dube advanced the argument that the universalization of western healthcare in the African context was the result of colonialism. Colonizing countries presented their cultural medical practices as the only acceptable way of dispensing health and healing in the colonized African countries. Thus one finds that in post-colonial African countries there is a dual healthcare system (Dube 2009: 190). The western approach to the provision of healthcare has been exclusivist whilst the African understanding of health and healing is inclusive. Indigenous African peoples do not find it repugnant to consult a modern trained western-oriented doctor and thereafter proceed to consult an African traditional doctor. An exclusive approach is usually intolerant to any other types of healthcare. This was the approach that was adopted by missionaries and colonialists in the provision of healthcare among the indigenous Africans. Here, the slogan was “its either you are with us or

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against us”. The African inclusive frame of reference derives from the African ethic of tolerance whereby diversity is cherished as the heartbeat of life. The most cherished African pearl of wisdom is that no culture has absolute claim to truth. Each culture expresses what it deems to be true about health and healing in its own way. For this reason, Akin Makinde cannot be bettered when he puts it that theories and practices of medicine are socially conditioned. For this reason, Makinde asserted that African medical practices “must have taken root from the beliefs and cultures of the African people. From this point of view the concept of illness, diagnosis, treatment, life and death must also have a cultural dimension” (Makinde 1988: 91). Cultures understand and treat disease and illness differently. Disease and causation are understood differently depending on the cultural context. Gloria Waite puts it that we should understand that the African conceptualization of disease is that physical causation presupposes spiritual causation. This implies that a healthcare system that concentrates only on materialism in its treatment of disease will inevitably fail to take into account the spiritual dimension of human sickness. A fatal mistake in scientific medicine is that it is based on a purely materialistic worldview. In this materialistic worldview, a person is understood as a machine and the treatment of disease is understood in terms of repairing the organs. From an African cultural perspective, such a healthcare practice is dehumanizing because the human body is not treated with dignity, but an object without feelings. Western medicine is obviously incompatible with the African worldview. Augustine Shutte (2018: 184) argued that western medical practice is mainly influenced by the capitalistic free market economy instead of the African communitarian ethical outlook. He writes, “In a market economy the practice of medicine has been profoundly influenced by the individualistic and materialist ethos of its liberal/capitalist setting and its commercial aims and methods. The huge omnicompetent hospital is its typical embodiment and most powerful symbol”. African traditional medicine prioritizes human wellbeing over monetary considerations. Disease is related to the moral predisposition of the individual. Immorality is the main causal factor for evil. It is integral to the profession of African traditional doctors to find out the cause of evil. The diagnosis which is given by African doctors is always related to moral behaviour. Violation of communal values is always considered as the main cause for physical and spiritual illness. It is for this reason that traditional doctors are usually expected to be paragons of moral uprightness within the

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community. Moral values of the community constitute a vital aspect of the training of African traditional doctors. A traditional doctor who flagrantly disregards the moral values of the community is regarded as possessed by an evil spirit. African indigenous healthcare can be regarded as a communal healthcare system. When an indigenous African consults a traditional doctor, she or he does not do so alone, rather they are accompanied by family members. The involvement of family members in the visitation to the traditional doctor is therapeutic as it actualizes the fact that the individual’s sickness is not a private affair. The individual’s sickness is a communal sickness and the healing of the individual can be equated to communal healing. For this reason, it is the practice of traditional doctors that for complete healing to take place, a ritual must be performed. Such a ritual unites the individual and the community with the ancestors in the realm of immortality. Ancestors play a central role as custodians of the moral traditions of the community. As has been mentioned previously, ancestors communicate with their progenitors concerning impending dangers and the moral wellbeing of the community. It is for this reason that “through the mediatory role of the traditional doctor, ancestors can impart knowledge of diagnosis and healing” and “the traditional doctor’s medical knowledge is not entirely personal, rather, it is given as a gift for the common good”. Payment or a token of appreciation that is given to the traditional doctor for his or her services by the individual is regarded as a gift for the ancestors (Murove 2009: 173). Since healing is a gift from the ancestors, it means that traditional doctors heal through the spirits of the ancestors. Traditional doctors do not commercialize healing. Patients pay them as a token of appreciation after they have been healed. Those who demand money upfront from patients are not real traditional doctors. Since healing is a spiritual gift, a traditional doctor is expected to attribute the healing of patients to ancestral spirits who have given him or her that gift of healing. During colonialism, the motive for the provision of healthcare was based on the need for healthy African labour force which was needed in the newly established industries. In rural areas, the provision of healthcare was left mainly to missionaries who apparently provided it for their own religious interests—demonstrating the healing power of Christ against that of the African traditional doctor. The health of an African within his or her traditional setting was interpreted by missionaries and colonialists as superstition and witchcraft. For example, Neil Macvicar, a medical

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superintendent at Lovedale, had this to say, “Among the South African Bantu the prevalent theory of disease is that it is due to some hostile personal influence, emanating either from the spirit of a dissatisfied ancestor or from a malevolent neighbour, or even from someone to whom no motive can reasonably be attributed” (Macvicar 1939: 2). It is in such colonial writings that one can easily deduce that the colonial healthcare system was based on the belief that the traditional African healthcare differed remarkably from the colonial settler healthcare. Such a belief is evidently an explanatory reason for the post-colonial African dual healthcare system based on rural and urban. However, the ironic part of it is that whilst colonial settlers had introduced many of the diseases such as cancer, tuberculosis, typhoid, syphilis and many others in Africa, they segregated Africans from accessing a healthcare system which was effective in curing those diseases. The African understanding of care as we shall see later is closely related to the classical meaning of care. In Cassell’s New Latin Dictionary, the word cura has the following meanings: “care, carefulness and concern”. This dictionary goes on to say that the word cura was also applied to medicine such that we have terms such as “medical care, healing, a cure”. Healing and cure can only be effected when there is care and concern for the patient. In most cases, when the word care is used, it implies the existence of an affectionate attitude towards that which is being cared for. An affectionate attitude implies concern for someone or something’s wellbeing emotionally. From a philological approach, Leonard Boff said that, “In its most ancient form, cura in Latin was written as coera and it was used within the context of relations of love and friendship. It expressed the attitude of care, of devotion, of concern and of worry for the loved one or for a favourite object” (Boff 2008: 58). In other words, someone who cares is presumed to be emotionally involved in such a way that her or his own being is transposed on the being of the other person. Boff went on to deduce that without cura or care, “the human being would not feel involved with the other person and would show negligence and carefulness for its own life and destiny. Ultimately, it would reveal indifference, which represents the death of love and of care” (Boff 2008: 59). Care or cura is the main reason human beings show concern for the wellbeing of other persons. A healthcare system without care is tantamount to an oxymoron. In African culture south of the Sahara, life is the basis for the ontological and cosmological ordering of all that exists. The life of one human

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being is ultimately entangled with the life of others. Based on this realization, the presence of a person is recognized by asking “how is life” (Injani impilo)—Zulu. In response, the other person responds by saying, siyaphila singezwa kuwe—we are well, if you are well too. Such exchange of greetings demonstrates a sense of care for the wellbeing of the other person. This type of greeting emphasizes the idea that the individual’s health is inseparable from the health of others. As human beings, our primary responsibility is to perpetuate life in all its manifestations without discrimination. The life of another person is intertwined with my own life to the extent that her or his health cannot be disentangled from the health of others in society. This implies a prior awareness of our original human bondedness. A concern for the health of another person does not arise out of mere curiosity on what is going on in their life, but transferring oneself in the other person’s existence through a natural process of assimilating the feelings of the other person in sickness and health. To feel the feelings of the other person in times of adversity is captured in the Zulu concept of Uzwelo—a concept that denotes the idea of feeling for the other person by actualizing the other person’s life predicament into actuality in one’s own existence. A person without Uzwelo cannot actualize the life experiences or sufferings of another person, and to that extent, such a person presents themselves as a cruel or heartless person who is in most cases described metaphorically as Umthakathi (witch or wizard). A person so characterized metaphorically as Umthakathi usually has no sense of care and concern for the health of others. Such a person exists as a destructive force to all life. The concept of Uzwelo has strong moral implications because one cannot be a moral being without Uzwelo for others. From Afro-centric bioethics, healing is effected through a process whereby a healer assimilates the pain of a patient in actuality instead of treating a patient as a distant object endowed with his/her intrinsic experiences of pain. African traditional healthcare providers see human sickness as an existential reality that cannot be disentangled from human moral behaviour. In African bioethics, diagnosis and treatment is done with an attitude that puts emphasis on the virtues of concern and care for the ultimate wellbeing of the patient. John Mbiti made a pertinent observation when he said that in African traditional healthcare practice “medicine men[sic] are expected to be trustworthy, upright morally, friendly, willing and ready to serve, able to discern people’s needs and not be exorbitant in their charges” (Mbiti 1970: 218–223). These virtues that are expected from African traditional doctors show that their professional moral orientation

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is aimed at nurturing an ethic of care in their provision of healthcare services. The virtues that are expected from African traditional doctors show that their professional moral orientation is aimed at nurturing an ethic of care in their provision of healthcare services. In the same vein, the famous South African traditional doctor was taught by his trainer that “a healer without compassion for all life in his heart is like a drum without its skin” (Mutwa 1996: 16). A traditional doctor who adheres fervently to the moral values of the community is known by the community to be more effective in his or her healing activities compared to the one who does not. The other feature of African bioethics can be characterized as the communalization of disease and the provision of healthcare. For this reason, disease and sickness are given a moral explanation which is usually based on how the individual relates to other people and his or her ancestors because the individual’s health is inseparable from the health of the whole community. The individual’s healing is integral to the healing of the whole community. This is the point which is made by Musa Dube when she said that in African traditional healthcare practice healing is a communal process. As she puts it, “The divination process includes examining all the relationships with family and neighbours as well as the living-dead – the spiritual realm” (Dube 2009: 203). Individual sickness is usually caused by discordant relationships in the life of the individual with reference to the relations which Dube mentioned above. Thus, one finds that a sick individual is usually accompanied by family members to see a doctor, be they a western trained or African traditional doctor. African traditional healthcare is not only about the socialization of sickness and disease, rather it fosters a sense of care and concern for the wellbeing of the other person. Peter Kasenene (2000: 350) observed that healthcare in African traditional societies operates on the paradigm of a holistic understanding of a human person. In this regard, he had this to say, “Health, in traditional African societies, is all-inclusive, taking into account a whole person and his or her environment. Briefly stated, health means personal integration, environmental equilibrium, and harmony between the integrated person and the environment”. For a holistic healing to take place, there must be harmony between the individual, the community and the natural environment. There cannot be holistic healing when the above dimensions of existence are missing. For this reason, Kasenene states that, “Personal integration is achieved when all the major aspects of a person, namely the physical, mental and social, are sound and operating normally and successfully” (Year: Page No?). The most critical aspect in the healing of the

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individual is the natural environment where medicines and the ancestors reside. Healthcare within the African traditional context is supposed to ensue in the promotion of harmony between the individual and all the dimensions of the individual’s life existence such as the physical, mental and the social or communal. The converse to this understanding of health is the modern capitalistic free market-driven healthcare system that excludes others on the grounds of their material standing in society. The African holistic understanding of healthcare implies that communal harmony presupposes the prior existence of a sense of care for all (Bujo 2001: 61; Boulaga 1984: 188). Our human relatedness to each other requires that there must be primal harmony and trust in each other as prerequisites to the provision of quality healthcare. It is the presumption of this chapter that an effective implementation of NHI in post-colonial Africa can only provide quality healthcare if it is premised on African traditional bioethics. A humane healthcare can only promote the common good when it is administered with a spirit of care and concern for all people regardless of their economic status. A traditional doctor who adheres fervently to the moral values of the community is known by the community to be more effective in his or her healing activities compared to the one who does not. The traditional doctor understands himself or herself as being at the service of the ancestors who gave her that gift of healing people. What makes traditional doctors more relevant in today’s modernized society is their ability to heal people spiritually and physically. For Africans, physical healing remains deficient when severed from spiritual healing. Post-­ colonial Southern African governments have made efforts to integrate African traditional healing practices with western ones.

The Capitalistic Disruption of the African Traditional Healthcare System However, the neo-liberal capitalistic belief in the promotion of welfare through the free market system and the idea that social inequalities were naturally inevitable has been critiqued by other scholars. These critics argue that the efficiency of the free market mechanism relies excessively on the exclusion of the majority of the poor from participating meaningfully in the economy. With reference to the main subject matter of this chapter, the exclusion of the poor in the medical aid schemes is a clear example of

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this inherent exclusionary nature of the capitalistic free market system. Our current experience has shown that those who have money do feel that they are entitled to benefit from the best of the best medical care which money can buy. Obviously, in this type of thinking, there is no concern for the healthcare of the majority of the poor who cannot afford to pay monthly premiums of medical aid insurance schemes. For this reason, it is submitted that the market-driven neo-liberal capitalistic economic system remains a stumbling block to an adequate provision of an authentic National Healthcare Insurance. Charl du Randt observed that medical aid schemes are basically driven by nefarious capitalistic motives. He writes, Economically, the medical aid derives fees based on turnover. Therefore, the higher fees and turnover becomes the higher the income of the medical aid schemes. The administrators therefore welcome skyrocketing costs. The senior officials are also rewarded for including certain treatments and medicines in their ‘approved schedules. (du Randt 1999: 185–186)

We can infer from the above observation that private medical aid schemes operate under capitalistic business principles, and like any other capitalistic business, their main concern is to make profits and not to heal people per se, whether one is healed or not, they still charge you for ineffectual medical services rendered. Private healthcare providers do prefer to provide their services to those who are on medical aid schemes instead of those who do not have. Their services are given based on the prevailing market prices. The main focus is to make a profit from the member of a medical aid scheme. Skyrocketing medical costs are beneficial to the administrators of medical aid schemes. A transaction that accrues higher returns to medical aid schemes is mostly favoured, compared to the one that does not bring in higher profits. For this reason, medical aid schemes are a business just like any other business that operates within the capitalistic free market system. In medical aid schemes, the main product for business is human life. It is human sickness which is commodified. The more complicated the sickness, the more profitable such a sickness is to healthcare providers. The humane aspect of private healthcare is that it does not charge a person when s/he is healed. Even when a person is dead, private healthcare providers would still send bills of the medical expenses incurred by the dead person. What also makes the private healthcare practice more inhumane comes out clearly when you compare it with a car mechanical garage. When you send your car to the garage and they

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fail to fix it, they do not charge you. If they have done a bad job, they usually refund your money back or request that they be allowed to redo the job. Since the profit motive dominates the motives for the provision of healthcare in medical aid schemes, chronic diseases are deemed more profitable compared to those illnesses that are curable. In public hospitals, a patient is most likely to die from a curable disease than is the case in private clinics. The urge to make a huge profit from human suffering raises the issue of professional commitment to ethics within the realm of medical aid schemes and private healthcare providers. The former post-apartheid South African health minister, Aaron Motsoaledi, alluded to the problem of ethics in private healthcare providers when he said that private hospitals are the costliest healthcare providers in South Africa. As he put it, “There is no arguing that health care at private hospitals is too expensive. The members of the public communicate with us on what they’ve been subjected to when going to private hospitals. It costs between R600 and R15000 for a male circumcision procedure at a private hospital, while GPs were charging R600 and public hospitals charged R400” (Motsoaledi 2016: 2). Private hospitals that usually charge fees on medical aid insurance schemes are more expensive as compared to public hospitals. Because of medical aid insurance schemes, private hospitals operate within the paradigm of the capitalistic free market system where profit maximization is the goal for the provision of healthcare. It is partly for this reason that the idea of a National Healthcare Insurance that makes healthcare accessible to everybody remains an ethical obligation for any post-colonial African government that has a concern for the promotion of the common good in the provision of healthcare for all its citizens. In the following section I shall proffer the argument that the principles of NHI are based on the ethical principles of care which are based on justice and concern for the wellbeing of others.

National Healthcare Insurance and the Legacy of Colonialism The idea of a National Healthcare Insurance has a long history in many parts of the world. The main goal behind NHI was “to make healthcare affordable to all, in the spirit of Article 25 if the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/natitional_

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health_insurance. (Accessed 20 August, 2021)). For example, as far as during the Second World War, the South African government appointed a National Health Services Commission known as the Gluckman Commission. Whilst this commission was given the mandate to explore the possibilities of establishing a unified national healthcare service, but its deliberations did not see the light of the day (Marks and Anderson 1992: 132). The colonial and later on the apartheid healthcare system was based on a functionalistic philosophical paradigm. Within such a paradigm, the main thrust was to provide healthcare with the primary aim of having healthy African workers in the mines, factories, farms, gardens and kitchens. David Martin and Phyllis Johnson observed that, “The original [colonial] health service started as a network of hospitals serving European settlers, concentrated in urban areas. The early administration began to provide a rudimentary health service to Africans for two reasons – because of the danger of epidemics like smallpox spreading to European areas and because a healthy labour force was needed, particularly by the mining industry. This led to the establishment of fever hospitals and mine hospitals” (Martin and Johnson 1981: 62). During colonialism, the motive for the provision of healthcare was based on the need for healthy African labour force which was needed in the newly established industries. In the rural areas, the provision of healthcare was left mainly to missionaries who apparently provided it for their own religious interests—demonstrating the healing power of Christ against that of the African traditional doctor. The healthcare provision for an African within his or her traditional setting was interpreted by missionaries and colonialists as superstition and witchcraft. For example, Neil Macvicar, a medical superintendent at Lovedale, had this to say, “Among the South African Bantu the prevalent theory of disease is that it is due to some hostile personal influence, emanating either from the spirit of a dissatisfied ancestor or from a malevolent neighbour, or even from some one to whom no motive can reasonably be attributed” (Macvicar 1939: 2). It is in such colonial writings that one can easily deduce that the colonial healthcare system was based on the belief that the traditional African healthcare differed remarkably from the colonial settler healthcare. Such a belief is evidently an explanatory reason for the post-colonial African dual healthcare system based on rural and urban. However, the ironic part of it is that whilst colonial settlers had introduced many of the diseases such as cancer, tuberculosis, typhoid, syphilis and many others in Africa, they

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segregated Africans from accessing a healthcare system which was effective in curing those diseases. Post-colonial efforts from African governments that are aimed at implementing National Healthcare Insurance are aimed at correcting the healthcare imbalances of the past. For example, the green paper of the “National Health Insurance in South Africa” motivated the need for NHI in post-apartheid South Africa on the grounds that in pre-democratic South Africa, healthcare was provided on racial lines whereby “One system was highly resourced and benefited the white minority. The other was systematically under-resourced and was for the black majority. The Constitution has outlawed any form of racial discrimination and guarantees the principles of socioeconomic rights including the right to health” (NHI Policy Paper, 2011: 5). The Green Paper went on to state that after the post 1994 democratic dispensation attempts to transform could not succeed because the current healthcare system was “based on socioeconomic status” which continues to perpetuate disparities in the post-­ apartheid healthcare system (NHI Policy Paper 2011: 5–6). Economic inequalities in the national healthcare system implies that those without money are excluded from accessing quality healthcare service as compared to those who have money. The exclusion of the poor from accessing quality healthcare poses an ethical problem because this type of exclusion creates an existential state of vulnerability in terms of health. The NHI Policy Paper observed that the private medical schemes were responsible for the perpetuation of inequality because many people who use these medical aid schemes are increasingly abandoning them because medical aid schemes tend to overcommercialize health, a practice that gives rise to exorbitant costs. Because of the problem of inequality in the provision of health, the NHI Policy Paper proffered seven principles that will guide its implementation: (a) The Right to Access, (b) Social Solidarity, (c) Effectiveness, (d) Appropriateness, (e) Equality, (f) Affordability and (d) Efficiency (NHI Policy Paper 2011: 17–18). The principles enshrined in the NHI document are undoubtedly noble ethical principles that are based on the ethic of the common good in the provision of healthcare, especially when one takes into account the disparities that have existed in the past as a result of exclusionary laws of colonialism and apartheid. However, whilst everybody would agree that NHI remains a noble national healthcare vision for the making of a humane society, the problem that hinders its implementation is in the domain of political will. For

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example, in Zimbabwe the idea of NHI has been discussed for the past three decades without coming up with a solution for its implementation. Shamu, Loewenson, Machemedze and Mabika carried out a survey on public awareness of NHI and found out that 56% were ignorant about the existence of NHI whilst others “were concerned about governance and transparency issues in government run organizations” (Shamu et al. 2010: 26). This implies that the problem in the implementation of public policies lies in those who are responsible for the governance of the country. The lack of political will is related to the fact that politicians and public servants do not use national public healthcare facilities. Their healthcare institutions of choice are private hospitals within their countries and, in most cases, overseas private hospitals. The Zimbabwean columnist wrote an online article in which he questioned the commitment of African politicians towards the improvement of their public healthcare systems. Mbofana asked a provocative question as follows: “How many nationalist leaders, who bravely fought European colonialism and avidly preached against so-­ called Western imperialism, actually took their last breath on the African continent, in African healthcare institutions?”. He went on to name all those African politicians who passed on in western hospitals and private clinics. Angolan President, Eduardo dos Santos, died in a private hospital in Barcelona (Spain), Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe died in a private medical hospital in Singapore, Michael Sata of Zambia died in a private healthcare facility in London (UK), Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia passed on in Brussels (Belgium), just to mention a few. Mbofana went on to say that, “In all this, our former liberation leaders have absolutely no qualms flying abroad to some of the most opulent medical facilities – and, can never be bothered improving, upgrading and even maintaining local institutions, which ironically, were largely constructed by our erstwhile colonial masters. …Do our ruling elite, surely, not feel ashamed of such levels of disgusting incompetence, and indifference towards the welfare and well-being of the ordinary citizenry – whom they vowed were fighting for during the armed independence struggle?” (https://bulawayo24.com/columnist/ Tendai+Ruben+Mbofana). In the light of Mbofana’s observation, African politicians do prefer high-quality medical services that are provided in western countries instead of the healthcare services of the countries they rule. The ideal is that African politicians are morally obliged to use public healthcare hospitals for their medical needs. Being in charge of an institution whose services you do not use is analogous to being a cook who does not eat his or her

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own food. In post-colonial Africa, the neglect of public healthcare institutions is a common phenomenon. This political culture has led to the decay of public healthcare institutions in post-colonial Africa. Such a political culture reflects an utter lack of commitment to the common good in the provision of national healthcare. If public officials and politicians are constitutionally obliged to use public hospitals for their medical needs, then such a constitutional obligation will serve as a professional duty for the diligent upkeep of public hospitals. The issue of equal access to healthcare remains a thorny ethical issue in post-colonial Southern Africa. There are disparities in accessing modern healthcare. Quality modern healthcare is only accessed by those who are economically well off. The majority of the people who rely on public modern healthcare have no access to privatized healthcare. Those who are economically fortunate travel abroad for the best healthcare treatment and checkup. Gbadegesin is more nuanced on this point when he observed that, “There is inequality of access depending on which step of the ladder of wealth a person happens to occupy. At least two-thirds of the country’s population relies on public health care system. They are unable to afford the luxury of occasional visits to private clinics. Yet there are those few who are able to travel abroad for regular check-ups in the best clinics around the world” (Gbadegesin 1993: 261). Gbadegesin’s observation brings into light what should be the main focus when one talks of bioethics within the post-colonial African context that is dominantly characterized by unprecedented inequalities in the provision of quality healthcare. As I have shown in the preceding discussion, those who are rich are the beneficiaries of quality healthcare services that are provided in private clinics through medical aid schemes. The majority of the citizens who are poor get their medical services from public hospitals which are poorly managed. The healthcare that is offered in post-­ colonial African public hospitals is usually of very low quality. Within these public hospitals, many poor people who suffer from curable diseases end up dying due to substandard medical interventions. The implication is that the economically affluent members of post-colonial African societies live longer whilst the poor are destined for extinction. In the following section, I shall proffer the argument that the principles of NHI are based on the ethical principles of ethical are based on the ethic of justice and concern.

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Justice and the Ethic of Concern in the Provision of Healthcare A healthcare system that provides its services to the citizens on the basis of their ability to pay exorbitant medical bills violates the ethic of the common good. The ethic of the common good implies that everybody should have access to quality healthcare regardless of their financial status. Norman Daniels argued from the perspective of social justice in which he advanced the idea that healthcare should be accessible to everybody in society. As he puts it, A just health-care system will protect the fair equality of opportunity of the members of society. One implication of this view is that there is a social obligation to guarantee equitable access to a broad array of medical and other health-care services. Specifically, this means that various kinds of primary and other acute care must be available to people who need it, regardless of geographical location or ability to pay. (Daniels 1995: 114)

Daniels described the above scenario as a theory of a just healthcare system which tends to overlook the fact that providers of healthcare “have certain vested interests”, and seeking just healthcare institutions may well threaten some of those interests. In other words, those who are beneficiaries of the private healthcare system will be unsupportive of an egalitarian healthcare system. For this reason, beneficiaries of a private healthcare system will regard an NHI system as a threat to their privileges which they enjoyed under private healthcare insurance companies. According to Daniels, this threat is usually resisted as an infringement of rights, “an undue restriction on professional autonomy, and a threat to the quality of care” (Daniels 1995: 114). In the light of the above observation, it is important to note that the idea of a threat to quality through common access is usually related to the usual neo-liberal capitalistic claim that government public institutions are usually in pathetic conditions and that the services that are offered to the public are always found wanting. This claim is also seen as a justification of the fact that good standards can only be maintained and sustained through private and individual ownership. This argument is further stretched to say that when something is owned by the public, it means that there is no one who owns it; hence the practice of gross negligence in public institutions is compelling evidence for the sanctity of private ownership.

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African traditional healthcare has been always orientated towards the common good. African traditional doctors are endowed with the power to heal from their ancestors. Their healing powers are at the disposal for everybody in the community regardless of the patient’s financial status. Healthcare within the African traditional context is supposed to ensue in the promotion of harmony between the individual and all the dimensions of the individual’s life existence such as the physical, mental and the social or communal. The converse to this understanding of health is the modern capitalistic free market-driven healthcare system that excludes others on the grounds of their material standing in society. The African holistic understanding of healthcare implies that communal harmony presupposes the prior existence of a sense of care for all (Bujo 2001: 61; Boulaga 1984: 188). Our human relatedness to each other requires that there must be primal harmony and trust in each other are prerequisites to the provision of quality healthcare. It is the presumption of this chapter that an effective implementation of NHI in post-colonial Africa can only provide quality healthcare if it is premised on African traditional bioethics. A humane healthcare system can only promote the common good when it is administered with a spirit of care and concern for all people regardless of their economic status.

References Boff, L. 2008 Essential Care: An Ethics of Human Nature, Texas: Baylor University Press. Bujo, B. 2001. Foundations of an African Ethic: Beyond the Claims of Western Morality. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company. Boulaga, E. F. 1984. Christianity without Fetishes: An African Critique and Recapture of Christianity. New York: Orbis Books.. Bulawayo 24 News. “Prophetess uses Spirit Medium”, 5 May 2022 at 20:32hrs. Daniels, N. 1995. Just Health Care. New York: Cambridge University Press. Dube, M. 2009. ‘I Am Because We Are’: Giving Primacy to African Indigenous Values in HIV&AIDS Prevention. In F. M. Murove, Ed. African Ethics: An Anthology of Comparative and Applied Ethics. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. du Randt, C. 1999. Demonised Doctoring: Exposing the Occultic Mission of the Medical Industry. Somerset West: Rapture Publications (Pty) Ltd. Gbadegesin, S. 1993 “Bioethics and Culture: An African Perspective”, in Bioethics, Vol. 7, Issue 2-3, April, 1993, pp.557-262.

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Kasenene, P. 2000 “African Ethical Theory and the Four Principles”, in Veatch, R.  M. (ed.), Cross-Cultural Perspectives in Medical Ethics, (Second Edition), Boston: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, pp.347-357. Kirwen, 1987. The Missionary and the Diviner: Contenting Theologies of Christian and African Religions. New York: Orbis Boooks. Maier, K. 1998. Into the House of the Ancestors: Inside the New Africa. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Makinde, A. M. 1988. African Philosophy, Culture, and Traditional Medicine. African Series 53. Ohio: Ohio University Press. Martin, D. and Johnson, P. 1981 The Struggle for Zimbabwe: The Chimurenga War, London and Boston: Faber and Faber. Macvicar, N. 1939: Side-Lights Upon Superstition, Lovedale: The Lovedale Press. Marks, S.  Anderson, N. 1992 “Industrialisation, Rural Health, and the 1994 National Health Services Commission in South Africa” in Feierman, S. and Janzen, J. M. (eds.), The Social Basis of Health & Healing in Africa, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 131-161. Mbiti, J. 1970. African Religions and Philosophy. London; Heinemann. Motsoaledi, A. 2016, “Private Healthcae is too Costly. Businesslive. co.za. Accessed 31 August, 2016. Mutwa, V. C. 1996. Songs of the Stars: The Lore of a Zulu Shaman. New York: Barrytown. Murove, M. F. 2009. “African Bioethics: An Exploratory Discourse”. In Murove, M. F, (ed.). African Ethics: An Anthology of Comparative and Applied Ethics. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu Natal Press, pp. 157-177. Ramose, M.B. 2005. African Philosophy through Ubuntu. Harare: Mondi Publishers. Ranger, T. 1992. “Godly Medicine: The Ambiguities of Medical Mission in Southeastern Tanzania, 1900-1945”. The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa, (eds.). S. Feierman and J. Janzen. Berkeley: University of Berkeley Press. Shamu, S, Loewenson, R. Machemedze, R. Mabika, A. 2010 “Capital flows through Medical Aid Societies in Zimbabwe’s Health Sector”, EQUINET DISCUSSION PAPER 82, pp. 1-32. Shutte, A. 2018. “Reflection in Practice as Source of Values: The Cross-Culturral Creation of a Health-Care Ethic in Post-Apartheid South Africa, Journal for the Study of Religion. pp. 177-206.

Index

A Abstraction, 42, 106, 107 African belief, 25, 34, 54, 69, 106 African bioethics, 14, 122, 123 African cosmology, 26, 42, 57–60, 65, 72, 73, 77, 79, 106 African culture, 6, 19, 25, 40, 115, 121 African ethics, 6–8, 10, 11, 40, 55, 83, 87, 89, 92, 93, 103, 104, 108 African scholars, 8, 66 African spirituality, 9–15, 19, 20, 25, 26, 39, 41, 55, 59, 87, 115, 116 African traditional religion, 35 African universe, 40, 65 Afrikaner peoples, 32–34 Afro-centric, 12, 66, 67, 70, 72, 73, 75, 77–79, 89, 92 Amadlozi, 46, 50 Analogical similarity, 25 Ancestors, 96, 106, 109, 113–115, 120, 123, 124, 132 Animism, 6, 39

Anthropologists, 5, 34, 41, 42, 53, 68, 115 Apartheid, 127, 128 Apodictic, 26 Ascendency, 23, 34, 95 Autocracy, 36 B Balimo, 43 Bantu, 53, 54, 57 Bantu religion, 54 Barbarism, 6, 25 Basotho, 43, 44 Bastardization, 6, 115 Bauman, G. 31 Beneficence, 6 Bergson, H., 60, 61 Bertalanffy, L., 64 Bible, 93 Bioethics, 122–124, 130, 132 Botho, 43

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. F. Murove, African Spirituality and Ethics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45590-2

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136 

INDEX

C Calvinistic, 33 Catholicism, 48 Caucasian, 33 Chaminuka, 47 Civilization, 55 Communal harmony, 46, 124, 132 Communicability, 11 Communicative relationship, 105–108, 114, 115, 117, 120, 123, 124, 132 Communion, 19, 26, 45, 56, 74, 114 Community, 2, 7, 14, 15, 25, 35, 45–48, 57, 66, 74, 78, 85–89, 92, 93, 96, 103, 104 Cosmogony, 40, 58, 60, 65, 66, 72, 79, 83 Cosmology, 9, 26, 42, 49, 57–60, 65, 66, 72, 75, 77, 79, 106 Christ, 1–3, 5–8, 10, 12, 14, 18, 30, 53, 54, 110, 118, 120, 127 Christian faith, 7, 27, 55, 113 Christianised, 35 Christianity, 2, 3, 7, 8, 18–21, 26–29, 35, 36, 54, 55, 94 Christian villages, 35, 36 Church, 1, 22, 23, 28–30, 34–36, 48, 49, 51, 52, 55, 94, 95, 110, 113, 114, 118 Colonialists, 3–5, 11, 23–25, 27, 35, 67, 117, 118, 120, 127 Cultural conditioning, 25 Culture, 3, 5–7, 12, 18–20, 22, 25, 28, 29, 34, 36, 54–56, 70, 84, 96, 99, 101, 119, 121, 170 D Darwin, C., 13, 42 Death, 4, 8, 11, 13, 44, 56, 57, 61, 67–69, 71, 72, 75–77, 79, 87, 106, 109, 110

Deduction, 21, 28 Dehumanization, 33 Demons, 3, 19, 52, 53 Dependency, 27, 30, 58 Descendants, 9, 10, 19, 43, 45–47, 49, 56, 67, 73, 85 Destiny, 21, 22, 26, 33, 51 Destruction, 12, 13, 94, 99, 102 Dichotomy, 9, 17, 42, 69, 101 Differentiated, 42, 87 Discounting, 71 Discrimination, 83, 122, 128 Discriminative rationalization, 18 Disentangled, 14, 40, 46, 68, 85, 104, 122 Disequilibrium, 14, 114 Disharmony, 18, 41, 46, 88 Divergence, 61 Divested, 62 Divination, 41, 47, 50, 123 Divine, 7, 19, 22, 28, 31, 34, 40, 55, 57, 58 Doctors, 73, 74, 114, 116–120, 122–124, 132 Doctrines, 30, 32 Dogmatic, 7, 30, 35, 71, 75, 78, 101 Dominated, 31, 48, 60, 99 Domination, 26, 27, 31, 34, 55, 95 E Ecosystems, 12, 13, 103 Edwards, D., 54 Embedded, 11, 87, 92, 104 Emergence, 160 Environment, 7, 9, 11–13, 17, 24, 41–44, 46, 83, 89, 99, 100, 102, 103, 123, 124 Environmental crisis, 42, 103 Equilibrium, 45, 46, 123 Essence, 6, 7 Essentials, 7, 103

 INDEX 

Ethical, 7–11, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23–25, 36, 43–45, 55, 65–67, 89, 105, 108, 119, 126, 128, 130 Euro-centric, 48 Evil, 1, 3, 26, 31, 32, 41, 44, 48, 51, 53, 54, 88, 94, 95, 116, 119, 120 Evil spirits, 1, 3, 48, 53, 54 Evolution, 6, 42, 61, 100, 101 Evolutionary backwardness, 25 Exceptionalism, 7, 25 Existence, 3, 6, 9–13, 18, 23, 25, 26, 40–43, 45, 47, 53, 56, 57, 59, 61–68, 70–74, 88, 89, 92, 94, 96, 101, 106, 109, 116, 121, 124 Existential, 3, 18, 20, 25, 36, 47, 57, 66, 69, 79, 84, 85, 87, 96, 100, 104, 117, 122, 128 Exogenous religions, 18 Experience, 6–8, 25, 32, 35, 39, 51, 54, 56, 62, 70, 72–74, 76–78, 103, 105, 110, 125 Expropriation, 33 Extinction, 39, 102 Extrapolate, 96 Extremists, 32 Exudes, 11 F Flourishing, 26, 87, 88, 98, 103 Forgiveness, 66, 110 Forsaken, 4 Frail, 48 Functionalistic approach, 115 Fundamentalism, 32 Fundamentalists, 32 G Gabriel, S. 23 Gelfand, M. 108

137

Genealogy, 17, 27, 53, 85, 95 Generality, 9, 10, 41, 43, 45, 73, 107, 108 Generations, 1, 45, 85–87, 109 Generously, 44 Genesis, 109 Genetic, 102 Gift, 47, 48, 55, 113, 115, 120, 124 Global warming, 12, 13, 42, 99, 100, 102 Glory, 3 Gospel, 24 Grandeur, 3, 4 Great Zimbabwe, 47 Greco, M. 64 Greedy, 100 Greenhouse, 102 Griffin, D. R. 62, 71, 72, 78 Grounded, 95 Guardians, 9 Guilds, 103 H Harmonious existence, 9, 43 Harmony, 114, 123, 124, 132 Healers, 26, 48, 50, 113, 116 Healing, 113–118, 120–124, 127, 132 Healing spirits, 50 Healthcare, 114, 115, 117–132 Heathenism, 35, 51, 54, 116, 118 Historical, 33 Holistic, 14, 89, 101, 117, 118, 123, 124 Holland, H., 25 Holy Spirit, 19, 114 Hospitals, 115, 116, 118, 126, 127, 129, 130 Hove, 87 Humanistic, 93

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INDEX

Humanity, 3, 9–13, 18, 21, 23, 24, 30, 31, 40, 42, 43, 63, 71, 73, 76, 84–86, 92, 93, 95, 96, 100, 105, 106, 109, 110 Hungwe, 43 Hypothesis, 96 I Identity, 11, 13, 32, 33, 58, 70 Immersed, 40 Immortality, 8–10, 14, 26, 45–47, 50, 56, 59, 62, 66–70, 73, 74, 77, 120 Immutable, 93 Impassible, 30 Imperialism, 7, 23, 64, 129 Impulses, 96 Incommunicability, 104 Incompatible, 17, 119 Independence, 27, 88, 100 Indigenous, 2, 4, 6–8, 12, 13, 18, 25, 32–34, 40, 42, 44, 51, 52, 54, 55, 59, 77, 79, 91, 92, 95, 101, 104, 106, 109, 115, 118, 120 Indigenous Africans, 2, 6, 32–34, 42, 54, 55 Indigenous Churches, 52, 54 Indispensable, 9, 19, 27, 45, 66, 67, 79, 92, 106 Individual, 8, 9, 12–14, 23, 25, 40, 41, 47, 48, 56, 59, 65, 66, 68, 69, 74, 76, 79, 83, 86–89, 91, 92 Individualism, 86–88, 101, 102, 104, 107 Individualistic, 50, 101–103, 119 Indoda, 46 Inhumane, 29, 41, 125 Injustice, 39 Inseparable, 7, 22, 41, 43, 66, 70, 72, 122, 123 Institutionalization, 6, 33, 113

Institutions, 95, 96, 129–131 Intelligibility, 18 Intelligible, 18 Interdependence, 40 Internal relations, 11 Intervention, 110 Intolerance, 5, 7, 28, 29, 55 Invisible world, 46 Isithunzi, 107 Israelites, 20, 22, 32, 33 J Janheiz, J. 69 Judaism, 109 Judeo-Christian, 12, 17, 18, 22, 24, 27, 93, 109 Junod, P. 77 Justice, 27, 39, 43, 130, 131 Justification, 6, 19, 23, 24 K Kalabari, 49, 50 Kalanga, 43, 44 Kantian-Christian, 97 Karanga people, 40, 44 Kaunda, K., 87 Kazipa, N., 64 King, 24, 27, 28, 43, 47, 93, 95 Kingdom, 22, 33, 47, 48 Kinship, 56, 85, 86 Kinyaruwanda, 69 Knowledge, 2, 9, 23, 24. 29, 42, 63, 64, 71–73, 76, 79, 88, 101, 116 Kuita Chikaranga, 44 Kuremekedza, 107 L Land spirits, 50 Langa, 44

 INDEX 

Leadership, 43 Leopold II, King, 24 Life, 2, 3, 7, 8, 11, 17, 18, 26, 28, 31, 35, 41, 46, 55, 57, 60, 61, 64, 66, 68, 69, 75, 76, 79, 87, 99, 105, 122 Lifeless, 9, 41 Lineage, 49, 56, 85 Luxuriousness, 98 M Mabwe aDziva, 40 Madzibaba, 51 Madzimai, 51 Magnanimity, 66, 95 Mai, 84 Makoti, 84 Manifestation, 25, 35, 52, 54, 75, 77, 79, 98, 107, 115 Marginalization, 6, 39, 55 Mashavi, 48 Mashonaland, 4 Materialistic, 70, 71, 75, 119 Materiality, 8, 17, 47, 57, 69, 77 Matopo Hills, 4 Mazrui, A. A., 45, 67, 104 Mbiti, J., 85, 104, 122 Mechanistic theory, 60 Mhondoro, 9 Midzimu, 48, 74 Miles, J., 3, 21 Milingo, E., 48 Missionaries, 2–6, 19–21, 23–25, 34, 53– 55, 115, 117, 118, 120, 127 Monotheism, 5, 12, 20, 32 Monotheistic religions, 8, 17, 27 Moshoeshoe, 43 Moya, 8, 77 Mudzimu, 48 Multiplicity, 104 Musikavanhu, 9

139

Muslims, 18 Mutwa, C., 70, 72, 74, 75 Mwari, 4, 5, 12, 40, 41 Mweya, 8, 40, 41, 61, 68, 77 N Narcissus, 28 Nationalism, 6 National spirit, 47, 50 Natural environment, 23, 85, 89, 99, 101, 103, 123, 124 Ndebele, 44, 48 Ngonyama, 9 Ngozi, 67, 68 Nguni, 44 Njuzu, 49, 50 Nolan, A., 101 O Old Testament, 17, 20–22, 28, 31, 32, 93 Omega, 57 Oneness, 106, 108 Ontological/ontologically, 8, 10, 57–59, 66, 79, 83, 86, 88, 89, 104, 106, 121 Ontology, 59, 66, 72, 79 Organic, 43, 60 Organism, 56 Organization/organizational, 22, 29, 40 Origination, 9, 12, 49 Orthodox Catholicism, 113 P Pagans, 95 Pantheism, 11, 12 Pantheistic spirituality, 11, 12 Parenthesis, 8

140 

INDEX

Pentecostal churches, 51, 53 Politicization, 6 Politics, 17, 26, 27, 32, 34, 94 Post-apartheid, 116, 126, 128 Post-colonial, 8, 51, 115, 118, 121, 126–128, 130, 132 Power, 5, 15, 17, 20, 26–32, 34, 47, 48, 54, 59, 88, 94, 99, 118 Precipitated, 2, 6 Pre-colonial, 5 Primitive, 5, 6, 54, 100 Primitiveness, 6, 39, 42 Primordial spirit, 9, 11, 12, 40, 41, 43–45, 49, 59, 61, 77, 85, 92, 96, 115 Progenitors, 8, 9, 46, 52, 56, 59, 66, 73, 79, 94, 120 Prophesying, 51, 52 Prophet Mohammed, 18 Prototype, 3 Prozesky, M., 19, 43, 100, 107 Psychiatric, 51 Psychological, 51 Q Qur’an, 18 R Rationality, 19, 25, 97, 116 Reciprocal, 58, 104 Recognition, 44, 104, 105 Reductionism, 71, 79 Reductionist, 71 Reductive, 71 Reflectively, 41 Reformed Puritans, 23 Remembrance, 109 Relatedness, 10, 62, 65, 105, 107, 108, 124

Relationality, 7, 11, 58, 66, 84–86, 101, 104, 105, 107, 108 Relationships, 9–11, 13, 28, 43, 45, 46, 57, 86, 93, 104, 105, 107, 108, 123 Relatives, 1, 9, 10, 26, 45, 51, 68, 83–85, 88, 104 Religion, 2, 5, 7–9, 17–27, 31, 32, 35, 40, 42, 54. 55, 101 Religious, 2, 6, 7, 9, 12, 17–22, 24, 25, 27, 29–31, 36, 40, 54, 57, 77, 92, 94, 98, 99, 118, 120, 127 Righteousness, 20, 47 Rituals, 9, 10, 20, 40, 44, 45, 47, 56, 69 Rodes, C. J., 4 S Sabi river, 49 Sacredness, 11, 12, 26, 35 Salvation, 2, 3, 5, 24, 30, 34–36 Savage, 6, 24, 42 Self-interest, 26 Shaman, 70 Shavi, 48 Shona, 4, 8, 9, 12, 26, 40, 41, 44, 48–50, 61, 67, 68, 73, 77, 83–85, 87, 89, 107 Shumba, 87 Sickness, 114, 115, 119, 120, 122, 123, 125 Society, 5, 7, 9, 17, 25–27, 29, 34, 35, 41, 43, 46, 49, 86, 87, 94–96, 99–101, 106, 107, 109, 122, 124, 128, 131 South Africa, 4, 7, 19, 22, 32–34, 91, 113, 116, 128 Southern Africa, 2–9, 12–14, 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 33, 40, 41, 43, 44, 48, 50, 56, 66, 77, 79, 84, 114–116, 118, 130

 INDEX 

Spirit, 1, 3, 9, 25, 26, 43–54, 57, 70, 73, 78, 89, 114, 117, 120 Spirit medium, 114 Spiritual harmony, 14 Spirituality, 2, 3, 5–15, 17–20, 24, 26, 33, 39, 40, 47, 48, 51, 54, 55, 57, 59, 69, 77, 87, 89, 93, 102, 103, 115, 116 Supernatural, 87 Superstition, 116, 117, 120, 127 Svikiro, 74 Symbiotic relationship, 56 Synonymous, 4, 7, 10, 13, 28, 101 Systems, 11–13, 17, 19–21, 59, 63, 64, 71, 76, 106, 141 T Tabula rasa, 25 Taylor, J., 54–56 Teleology, 41 Telos, 65, 66 Tempels, P., 65, 79 Traditional healers, 114–117, 119, 120, 122–124, 132 U Ubuntu, 89, 93, 104–109 Ukama, 83–85, 87, 89, 93, 107 Umoya, 39, 40 Universal, 18, 19, 27 Universalizability, 25 Uzukwu, E., 104

141

V Violence, 40 Virtues, 92, 95, 98, 122, 123 Vital force, 57, 58, 60 Vitalism, 60, 62–64 W Western, 78, 83, 85, 87, 88, 91, 92, 94, 98–102, 104, 106, 115–119, 123, 124, 129 Western individualism, 12, 88, 102 Whitehead, A N., 28. 61, 62, 73 Witchcraft, 19, 25, 26, 115–117, 120, 127 X Xhosa, 44 Y Yahweh, 17, 24, 27 Z Zambia, 48 Zimbabwe, 61, 67, 68, 73, 107, 114, 129 Zimbabweans, 6 Zulu, 8, 9, 26, 27, 32, 39, 40, 46, 66, 72, 77, 83, 84, 89