IN MEMORY OF AKUA DENTEH

[Kissi, Edward]

 

I acknowledge the first report in this forum on the public “immolation” of Akua Denteh by her own community, and the many rejoinders to that report that have since appeared here that have illuminated our reflections on a dangerous culture in Ghana, and Africa. I add here a tribute to a woman I never knew, but whose painful death reminds me of a lingering superstitious logic that I know too well as a Ghanaian, and to which I offer some solutions, for what they may be worth.

 

The lynching of Akua Denteh is, undoubtedly, a grotesque expression of a certain morbidity of mind in the perpetrator society. Any community that is invested in a cultural logic that leads to the public burning of a 90 year old woman is trapped in a dead culture and in need of a trans-community, counter-cultural redemption.

Condemnation of this dastard deed is deserved. But beyond that, a flight into causation, as warranted as it is, to chart some novel paths to a solution, can sometimes devolve into sophistry. But that is sometimes needed. Belief in witchcraft is terribly endemic in Ghanaian society. As the report indicates, it is not a cultural affliction of the uneducated. It paralyses the educated too. I did not cure my own mind of that superstitious thought until I began graduate studies in Canada in 1989. In that new Canadian campus environment, I never heard of any fellow student, or member of the University community, talk “religiously” about malevolent old women prancing in the dark and eating human beings turned into chicken in the canopy of trees as I heard throughout my youth in my Ghanaian village, and my undergraduate years at Legon. It did not take me long in Canada to realize that these are cultural stupidities that had long shaped my thoughts in my environment in Ghana about old wrinkled women who could potentially boil my brain for dinner, and make me a failure in life, without taking responsibility for the choices I make in my life. So environment seems to breed harmful mentalities.

Beliefs in witchcraft may have been worsened by the Pentecostal churches, today, as OAA aptly observes, but quack diviners and “witch-doctors” and “fetish-priests” have long dabbled in Ghana’s cultural conversation about malevolent forces. Just take a look at Ghana’s major roadways and you will see the many frightfully-dressed males and females on billboards festooned with white clay, with raffia palm skirts, and dyed whiskers, asking for consultation on witchcraft, and promising instant painful death of witches for the bewitched. That is a disturbing national story that bespeaks of a decadent community and national culture.

 

For many years the physical burdens of old age that scar the appearance of the elderly have often given room to harmful speculations about the supernatural abilities of the old and wrinkled.

What is disturbing in Akua Denteh’s murder is her community’s involvement in her lynching. There was no expression of gender solidarity as the perpetrators dispatched her. In fact women in her community took part in the lynching. And the male soothsayer instigator of her death, and the men in the community who made common cause with the maddening lynch-mob to burn her alive, speak of a community that is deeply invested in a belief system that may need a fundamental attack on its foundations to eradicate. Otherwise this may not be the last public lynching of a vulnerable old woman on the whims of the superstitious.

Educated people, priests, chiefs, politicians, and community leaders appear to be captives of this cultural thoughts about Witchcraft. Would these same people carry their beliefs in witchcraft with them, and the murders they commit to express them, beyond their communities when they migrate and become a diasporic group in an elsewhere community? If not, then might some carefully-organized inter-faith or inter-community cultural conversation help to make Akua Denteh’s death the last? Can local communities, and human rights organizations bring in people from other parts of the country, the region, the continent, the world to talk about how they cured themselves of their own witchcraft  superstitions and the benefits they secured?

Certainly, no state can legislate sane thoughts. But a community that suffers from the insane beliefs that got Akua Denteh murdered bears the bigger responsibility to rethink its moral values. Given previous outrages, it appears that incarceration of the murderers by the state may not be the needed response to deter future perpetrators of lynching. Might some form of public shaming in their own communities be the better deterrence? Could community leaders not tainted by their own witchcraft beliefs arrest the murderers, and that soothsayer, and make them stand at the public square, or community market, every day, for a month or more, with bells and large placards around their necks, with inscriptions in the local language broadcasting their murderous deeds to passers-by? There is nothing far more shameful in many Ghanaian cultures than such public  humiliation.

 

Can Art and Performance help since Ghanaian music, films and drama (including Nigerian) have also perpetuated beliefs in witchcraft and justified death for the accused? Can the musicians, film-makers, and dramatists who have contributed to this cultural malaise help cleanse it of its lingering and deadly debris? Otherwise, Akua Denteh’s death will not be the last in Ghana.

 

If I were not a poor college teacher, but had more legal tender to invest in one moral cause, I would establish a television station, as that has become a contemporary cultural artefact in Ghana, with all types of evangelical stations churning the type of cultural poison that killed Akua Denteh. Mine will be a counter-cultural television channel aimed at producing programs and drama attacking the foundations of our community and national beliefs in witchcraft, and comparing our society steeped in witchcraft to others that are not.

 

That, perhaps, may be the best cultural tribute to the memory of an old woman who perished in the name of a dangerous cultural thought.

 

Edward Kissi

 

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Toyin Falola
Sent: Sunday, August 2, 2020 9:51 AM
To: dialogue <USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Murder: Akua Denteh of Ghana

 

Akua Denteh: Last 'witch' to be murdered in Ghana?


https://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/features/Akua-Denteh-Last-witch-to-be-murdered-in-Ghana-1023577

 

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[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

I do not have time now to digest and properly reflect on the barbaric lynching of Akua Denteh and the commentaries on it on this forum, but let me drop a question. Does anyone think it is happenstance that most people accused of malevolent witchcraft in African societies--in both the secular and Pentecostal contexts--are the most vulnerable members of these societies: children, the elderly, and women? I have posed this question in Pentecostal circles and have yet to get a satisfactory answer. In my years of attending pentecostal events, I have not seen a man being identified as a carrier of evil spirits or a practitioner of witchcraft and being subjected to what pentecostal clerics call deliverance, which sometimes includes violent assault on the accused. It is almost always young women, children, and old women that are targeted.There is clearly a gender/patriarchy/power dimension here. I truly want answers because I don't believe that it is a coincidence that the anti-witchcraft people, in religious and secular spaces, target the most vulnerable demographics.

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

edward, thank you for your posting.

not too long ago i read an article dealing with the monthly payments people in accra made to their local spiritiual figure--a kind of protection payment. not much money, but a surprisingly large percentage did this.

reading geschiere on witchcraft and its growth in cameroon, it becomes really understandable why large numbers of people subscribe to this.

how many people tithe, in their churches? and why? to do some public good; but not also to buy some good vibes?

ghana is not unique; africa is not so different in this regard.

but where i applaud edward's posting is in the outrage over abuse of people, usually old, usually women, but sometimes girls, which shouldn't be tolerated.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

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Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - IN MEMORY OF AKUA DENTEH

 

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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Nothing surprising in the negative fixation on women in witchcraft beliefs observed by  Moses.

Witchcraft beliefs, in Africa, and in the pre-modern West,  often represent a form of demonisation of the vulnerable, making them sacrifices for the inadequacies suffered by others.

In the African context, however, exemplified by the Yoruba example, this demonisation may be part of a complex of beliefs about female spirituality, part of which are positive.

Such positive aspects should be refined away from the negative and developed into a freestanding spirituality, in my view.

Modern Western witcftaft, drawing on various sources, has claimed for itself the centralization of the feminine in pre-modern Western witchcraft beliefs, transforming the demonisation evident in the past into a contemporary valorisation. 

The diaspora practitioners of Yoruba origin Orisa spirituality are already hard at work on a similar transformative process, as I discuss in ''Womb Wisdom to Cosmic Wisdom : Women and African Spiritualities in Africa and the Diaspora, '',  ''Is it Possible to Become Iyami Aje, a Form of Witchcraft from Nigeria? T. Washington, M. Reyes andSpiritual Traditions, '' and the Facebook page Mercedes Morgana Reyes and the Womb of Witchcraft.
 

The Orisa feminists  have better access to the positive depictions of the feminine than even the Western tradition had to draw upon within its own cultural history.

thanks

toyin

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[Chielozona Eze]

Does anyone think it is happenstance that most people accused of malevolent witchcraft in African societies--in both the secular and Pentecostal contexts--are the most vulnerable members of these societies: children, the elderly, and women?” Moses Ebe Ochonu.

Good question, Moses.

Many, many years ago, when I was a student of Catholic theology, I attended a seminar given by the French literary theorist René Girard. It was based on his theory of Scapegoat (Greek-pharmakós). He basically claims that every (primitive) society has the natural desire to deflect any impending danger by sacrificing one of their own. A victim. In every society, people are always at each other’s throats and when that competition reaches a boiling point to the degree that there is a palpable fear of the whole society being consumed in violence, the fever is usually calmed down by a ritual sacrifice, one that dramatizes the collective violence for everyone to see. The Hebrew have numerous examples in the book of Leviticus. In ancient Greece, a certain ugly person was usually chosen and sacrificed at the festival for Apollo. (The idea is that ugly, poor and powerless people are usually guilty!!!) The pharmakós, probably the origin of pharmacy, is a cleanser; he (usually a he, in ancient Greece) cleanses the sins of the community.

For Girard, the need to justify that violence, the pointless sacrifice of otherwise innocent people, is what gives birth to myth. In other words, myths are just human effort to justify violence or weakness, or a given ideology. The truth is that this is not restricted to primitive society. Or rather, humanity has never rid itself of that primitive instinct to blame the weaker ones for its own flaws.

Witchcraft is a universal phenomenon that manifests itself in different formats, depending on the people’s technologies of power. Victims do not have to be burned, lynched, or stoned. It is enough that society finds them guilty of its disorder. Society invents narratives that seek to permanently fix the victims in their condition.

Chielozona

Chielozona Eze

Bernard J. Brommel Distinguished Research Professor

Professor, Africana Studies, Northeastern Illinois University; Extraordinary Professor, Stellenbosch University, South Africa.Fellow - Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, South Africa
https://neiu.academia.edu/ChielozonaEze

My latest book: Race, Decolonization, and Global Citizenship in South Africa.

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

this reading of witchcraft doesn't conform to what geschiere has written about it. he studied people in south east  cameroon, but i think his conclusions are particularly valid for west africa. maybe for the other parts of the continent, too; i don't know.

there was one saying he reiterated, to the effect that the worst kind of witchcraft was that of the home. i .e., resentments from fellow clanspeople, fellow relatives, accounts for much. also, the shift in the govt's politics, where ., since the 1980s, they started to court local electorates. etc.

it's a complicated shift, but a compelling argument.

it takes away irrelevant arguments, one of which i would label girard's scapegoating. it wasn't at all scapegoating; it was getting the land or resources, or wealth, unduly denied the complainant. it was based on motives that were human, real, and reiterated by circumstances.

it gets transmogrified in lots of stories, but at heart, there is a rational reason at work, and attempts to deploy power denied to people without the political or police clout.

it becomes a familiar story in nollywood movies, and popular ideas get mushed in. but if you track it down, as geschiere and his collaborators have done (see WItchcraft, Intimacy and Trust), you might see how it is a human system working within the structures of life today, not a movie, nor a universal practice that is the same everywhere.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

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Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - IN MEMORY OF AKUA DENTEH

 

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[Chielozona Eze]

You are right, Ken.

Girard’s scapegoat theory does not explain the phenomenon of witchcraft per se. It helps us, though, to understand the power dynamics that underwrite it. It is true that Geschiere (1995), echoing Monica Hunter Wilson’s (1951), observed that witchcraft accusations are rife among relatives. Witch beliefs exist in small-scale societies, says Wilson. People usually accuse only those they know. Co-wives, in a (poor) polygamous marriage, are prone to accuse each other of witchcraft because of their obvious condition. None of them ever accuses their common husband who might not have provided enough comfort for their thriving. It’s all about competition and the mythologies it gives birth to. This is where Girard’s theory helps.

Anyway, Cameroonian scholar of religion David T. Ngong has vigorously challenged some of Geschiere’s observations. I wish I had time to also examine more critically Geschiere’s important contributions to witchcraft study in Africa.

Chielozona

Chielozona Eze

Bernard J. Brommel Distinguished Research Professor

Professor, Africana Studies, Northeastern Illinois University; Extraordinary Professor, Stellenbosch University, South Africa.Fellow - Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, South Africa
https://neiu.academia.edu/ChielozonaEze

My latest book: Race, Decolonization, and Global Citizenship in South Africa.

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[Farooq A. Kperogi]

Moses,

It's different among the Baatonu people of Borgu. The equivalent of a witch in my language is "dobo," but I'll use dobo here. A dobo can be male or female, middle-aged or old, powerful or powerless but rarely young. In fact, dobobu (plural of dobo) tend to be mostly middle-aged men. They are reputed to be inescapably malignant men (and occasionally women) with uncanny capacities to cause the deaths of people through supernatural means.

When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a Baatonu medicine man from the Benin Republic side of Borgu by the name of Daabo who used to perform magic tricks that purported to show dobobu in a magical mirror. People would identify them, fish them out from their homes, beat them up, and drive them out of town. They were never killed. This happened up until the late 1980s.

One day in a town not far from where I grew up, we were told, the medicine man (who visited communities only when he was invited at the cost of a lot money) identified a successful farmer as a dobo, shaved him clean (as he usually did), and told the farmer to publicly name the people he'd caused to die. As he was about to reel out the names, his son stopped him and beat the medicine man black and blue for slandering his father whom he said was innocent of the smears against him. 

Spectators wanted to retaliate on the medicine man's behalf, but he told them to leave the young man alone and then bragged that his assailant was a dead man walking. He said the young man would die in a matter of days. He didn't die. (I think he is still alive and should be in his late 50s now). That was what opened people's eyes to the medicine man's fraud.

People later learned that the medicine man often collectected money from the rivals of successful men (and a few women) and tagged them dobobu so that they would be disgraced out of town. The man was so successful at deception and at getting people to believe that he had supernatural powers that he acted as an occasional "spiritual consultant" for President Shehu Shagari in the 1980s--or so we were told.

The emir of my hometown hated the medicine man and the division and distrust he caused, so he forbade him from setting foot in his domain. In retaliation, he said our emir, an educated man who had been a junior minister in Northern Nigeria and a commissioner when Kwara State was created in 1966, was a dobo who feared being exposed! And several of his opponents believed it until he died.

Occasional dobo hunting has returned to my natal community again. But this time, the dobo hunters are self-proclaimed Islamic clerics. They disproportionately target successful middle-aged men. When I visited my hometown in 2016, I wanted to go and challenge one dobo hunter, a self-described Muslim cleric, who had destroyed people's lives by calling them dobobu, but my mother and my siblings begged not to.

Two years later, the dobo hunter's fraud was exposed. Like Daabo before him, people discovered that he collected money from people to declare people dobobu so that their wealth would be destroyed.

In other words, in the Borgu society, we have almost the inverse of what you described. 

Farooq

 

Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

School of Communication & Media

Social Science Building 

Room 5092 MD 2207

402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University

Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World

Nigeria's Digital Diaspora: Citizen Media, Democracy, and Participation

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

thanks chielonzona

geschiere's claims are pretty much fun to read; and they are specific to his region in cameroon. so, i suppose we should be cautious about reading them iinto other cultures. and i would be interested in ngong's critique...

but to be honest, it isn;t my field. that's why this listserv is so pleasurable, i suppose. we can read about a wide range of interests without having to be specialists to derive pleasure and understanding

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

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From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Chielozona Eze <chi...@gmail.com>

Sent: Tuesday, August 4, 2020 2:48 PM

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[Toyin Falola]

Ken:

Is capitalism not same as witchcraft?  To teach people about the dangers of credit cards, I do so via the medium of witchcraft!

Both belief systems, and as ideologies, suck blood!

TF

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

for nollywood they are the same; i used comaroffs on neoliberal capitalism to talk about living in bondage, with container, cargo capitalism having the same magic, in their analysis, for the pacific islands. but the bloodsucking is metaphorical.

k

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

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[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Farooq,

Thanks for this enlightening excursion into the Baatonu conception of witchcraft. I found the stories both perversely entertaining and insightful. This is an outlier in my admittedly limited familiarity with Pentacostal and traditional engagements with witchcraft in several African societies. My sample is quite small, so the Baatonu conception may not actually be an outlier. Clearly, there are many kinds of witchcraft beliefs on the continent. If one is looking for a commonality in the complexity and diversity, it may be the idea of inflicting violence or banishment on the suspected witch/wizard. What seems to connect these disparate stories is the impulse to banish, punish, and force a confession of evil doing that satisfies and corroborates the accusers' externalization of their misfortunes and/or their belief in death being the result of malevolent spiritual acts.

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[Femi Kolapo]

 

An unequal power dynamic, be it ritual, political, or economic, was almost always involved in witch finding and in the murders of innocent victims that many times accompanied it. The following are two examples and explanations of politically motivated use of local belief in witchcraft to eliminate those who threatened a nobility’s political interest in a mid-19^th century Niger-Benue confluence community. The victims were both male and female persons of high status. 

 

.           .           .           the power of life and death is not the exclusive prerogative of the Atta; any subordinate chief can exercise it at pleasure, on whom their rage is directed. The cause of any disadvantageous circumstance which might befall Akaia, was sure to be laid on someone, as having bewitched him. Last year, a respectable elderly woman, of very tender feelings and kindly disposition, the sister of the late chief of Gbebe, really a mother-like  to Akaia, having nursed him up in his childhood, was accused by this wicked man as having bewitched him, upon which suspicion, Akaia ordered the poison draught, the water of ordeal to be given her to drink to prove her innocence, which proved fatal to her life: every right minded persons shuddered at this cold blooded murder. A few weeks ago, an elderly man of influence, called Okoro Shigiala, met the same fate from Akaia. Attributing the cause of the trouble he got into at Idda to witchcraft, poor Okoro was accused as having bewitched him upon which, Akaia ordered the like poisonous draught to be administered to him; but as that did not put an end to his life Akaia ordered him to be beaten with club, beheaded, and his head to be brought to him, and the body to be burnt; but out of respect for the old man by the elders, the body was not burnt, but Akaia triumphed at the sight of Okoro’s head as if he conquered an emperor. 

I was very much shocked at hearing this cruel and barbarous murder on my return from Bida to Lokoja: for these reasons: 

Though Okoro was slave to Akaia’s grandfather, the old Abokko of the Landers’, Laird’s and Oldfields’ time, yet he was as father to Akaia from his childhood; Okoro was ever regarded as a member of the family, himself having many grown up children in the house, and prospered well in trade, by which he gained much influence and commanded due respect.         .           .  

[“Bp. Samuel A. Crowther.” Notices of the Atta of Idda in the Igara Country.” [1873] Niger Mission. CA3/O4   Journals & Reports. 1860-79] 

 

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[Kissi, Edward]

In Akan society there is no age limit for witchcraft although older women are presumed to be the majority in the guild.

The Akan of Ghana believe that there are male witches or wizards too. They are presumed to be far more dangerous than their female counterparts. Thus there is a gender component in Akan witchcraft beliefs, and the degree of malevolence ascribed to the male wizard appears to reflect recent Akan concepts of patriarchy and power. What is ironic is how this emerged in the cultural thought of a matrilineal Akan society. What made a matrilineal society ascribe to male wizards the ultimate in power expression, and at what point in time?

There are witches of every age too in Akan cultural thought---babies as young as a few weeks old, pre-teens, teenagers, adults, mid-age, and very old. Child witches and wizards, and their male counterparts, are believed to be more diabolical than the women. So the gender and age spread, as well as the power ascriptions in Akan witchcraft beliefs, deserve their own separate study about the aspects of the group’s social thoughts that these beliefs reflect, and the changes that have occurred through time and contact with other groups.

What confounds me, as I look back to my years in my village, are the people who claimed to be witches and wizards without any pressure on them from anyone. I remember a young teenage girl who claimed to have pushed a young man, who drowned and died in the village stream, to his death,  in “spirit” weeks before his actual death. Are these types of “unprompted confessions” manifestations of some early stages of mental or psychiatric ailment? But equally confounding are those who claim equal, but “good” supernatural ability to find witches, kill them in spirit, or cause them to confess voluntarily, or expose them in public.

While I do not have answers to these questions, my own interest in addressing this disturbing belief in Ghana encounters some hydra-headed realities. Who are these soothsayers who claim supernatural ability to know who is a witch and who isn’t, and where did they get their power? Are they practitioners of a deceitful trade whose aim is to frighten society and extract economic benefits from it? I remember a soothsayer and witch-doctor who had a large poultry farm and who became the major supplier of eggs in the village as a result of his craft as a finder of witches. He received lots of chicken and eggs for his ‘spiritual services.” But did he take all of us in the village for idiots? Are these types of people doing society enormous good by becoming its protectors in the dark of night, or are they merchants of some dark art of deceit?

Whatever the realities that witchcraft and witch-finders reflect, in the inner thinking of any society, the two phenomena have existed long enough to merit reflection on their longevity. Even in societies that have eradicated them, there are similar versions that have replaced them.

Is the witch-finder a society’s medicine or the extension of its lingering disease?

 

 

Edward Kissi

 

 

 

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Sent: Tuesday, August 4, 2020 6:09 PM
To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - IN MEMORY OF AKUA DENTEH

 

Farooq,

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAAHJfPpSdiUoqQ%3Df-X8Jn7K%2BmLLSJffBdqWukWjW99z1wHp9aw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Harrow, Kenneth]

one way to get rid of the unfortunate conflation of continent wide practices of witches is to look for other words. we are approaching old colonial patterns when we use just the one word in english, or sorciere, or any other, that avoids words like babalowa or dibia or many others, that are in fact specific and denote differences within cultures, and are mistranslated at best. priest; healer; etc

it was very much on the mind of europeans to apply such labels at the time they came, for reasons we all know.

but when i say europeans, i mean christians. not muslims.

the marabout might have assimilated the cultic practices of many spiritual figures, like blessing with one's saliva, placing hands on the supplicant's head, etc.

but the bori were attacked by muslim sects in hausaland. was that different?

my question is, did muslim cultures developed the same degree of hostility toward such religious/spiritual figures, say throughout the sahel, or in east africa? were the christians more enthusiastic in their denigration of "witches"?

also, because of that, is it within the christian dominated lands that "witches" are killed more frequently--places like ghana, tanzania or malawi or botswana or elsewhere in southern africa, which is predominantly christian?

has this issue became exacerbated with the rise of pentacostalism, in contrast to muslim communities, where i have not heard of such prosecutions.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>

Sent: Tuesday, August 4, 2020 6:09 PM
To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - IN MEMORY OF AKUA DENTEH

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAAHJfPpSdiUoqQ%3Df-X8Jn7K%2BmLLSJffBdqWukWjW99z1wHp9aw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Spiritualities of all kinds are best taken with a huge dose of scepticism, even if one identifies with any of them.

A lot of it is nonsense. Of the part that has value, much is speculative, the rest subjective. 

Witch finders, traditional, Christians, Muslim or whatever,  are better regarded as a cancer.

Any method of knowing that is not open to mutual verification by the average person and yet is used to determine the life or death of others is evil, a means of dehumanisation and a danger to society.

Also, people may be free to claim to be witches,  but until they  can demonstrate objectively how it works and everyone can examine the validity of their claims, those claims are their  private business that have no place  being used a framework to shape any other person's life.

England did well by passing an Act that made it punishable to call anyone a witch or for anyone to call themselves a witch.

Sanity having been achieved after generations, the Act was repealed. The witchcraft beliefs that followed are self regulating and regulated by modernity. These beliefs constitute private religion and no more. They might generate imaginative appeal for non-practitioners but that's where it ends. They are not used to define how non-witches  should live, they do not affect the larger running of society  nor who lives or  dies.

I don't think the witch finder persona exists in the West any more. It would make no sense in that context.

I look forward to the time  in Africa and other regions suffering this problem when the idea of witchcraft accusations would have no value and anyone claiming to be a witch is related to with healthy scepticism.

thanks

toyin

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/BN8PR08MB5779FB839B3CF871D07FF360CE4B0%40BN8PR08MB5779.namprd08.prod.outlook.com.

[Harrow, Kenneth]

toyin, i wouldn't be surprised to learn that movies about the occult are the most popular, nowadays. and of coure nollywood got its real start with the occult.

it is in the popular imaginary, if not in real life.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 5, 2020 8:55 AM
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CALUsqTRNYoZdO8LPShA4b2LRci6WLvqWxAATEd%2B%2BLHMdRz4yEQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Toyin Falola]

Ken:

Witchcraft exists in real life! Remember Nwolise, and the provocative arguments I had with Moses.

I think scholars continue to make the mistake they are addicted to: the centralization of rationality! And scholars continue to think that when they disagree with something—ethnicity, religion, witchcraft—those become “irrational.” Not so.

Refer to the careless statement on spirituality by Adepoju that:

 

“A lot of it is nonsense. Of the part that has value, much is speculative, the rest subjective.”

 

This is like saying billions of people, over two-thirds of the world, have no brains!

TF 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/DM5PR12MB24564F2D5EA129E18A5B5179DA4B0%40DM5PR12MB2456.namprd12.prod.outlook.com.

[Harrow, Kenneth]

hi toyin

your response makes me think, again, of how things are framed. call it the context, though i prefer "horizon of expectations" or "world" or in french "sensible." the way we put the world together to make sense.

there are many worlds, in that regard. WHen you are in one world, the sensibility, the reasonableness, of another world does not apply.

what is rational in a world governed by scientific rationality, and which offers the only acceptable explanations for how things are, work, function, doesn't apply in other worlds.

so, in a world of belief, rationality comes second, as aquinas put it in the middle ages. faith first, reason second.

that was the dominant world view until the enlightenment, and by 1900 faith had to yield to science.

you know i subscribe to many worlds, and the only values i dismiss are those that harm other people.

in literature and cinema, we don't privilege the rational. just the opposite: we say, enter into the diegesis, take it for what it is, and go along for the ride, in order to appreciate it.

there are limits to this. when the movie is over, i enter into another world where a more rational/scientific set of values prevails, and instead of relying on faith to keep me safe from covid--like magufuli--i put on a mask. and i strongly strongly disapprove of his claims about faith having kept tanzania safe, not to mention his authoritarianism. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/world/africa/tanzanias-coronavirus-president.html

as for ethnicity, or identities, essentializing, of course they exist, but through history and stories we construct about ourselves--this is stuart hall's argument, to which i subscribe completely.

we wear many hats; we have multiple subject positions. that's how i see it.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, August 5, 2020 10:24 AM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/D7739DBB-73E0-4D52-9451-1C12DCFF714C%40austin.utexas.edu.

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Thanks, prof. Falola.

Experience and Responsibility in Relating With Spirituality 

My statement is far from careless.

It is based on my immersion in study and practice of various spiritualities and philosophies, from Africa, Asia and the West, and experiencing  their creative outcomes, not simply remaining at the level of faith.

Yet, as a person committed to the development of forms of spirituality, including a modern African witchcraft, I have a duty to make clear the parameters of my approach to these subjects.

The Need for Critical Consistency in Relating with  Spirituality

How critically consistent is this perspective described by Edward, exemplifying much of the contemporary African situation, a view that often leads to the dehumanization of so many, including children-

'There are witches of every age too in Akan cultural thought---babies as young as a few weeks old, pre-teens, teenagers, adults, mid-age, and very old.'' 

Yet, the Akan, like other African peoples, have also developed a great philosophy and spirituality, perennially inspiring to philosophers and artists, represented particularly powerfully for me by the artistic/philosophical complex that is Adinkra, on which I have created blogs and written an entry for the Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought, 2011, along with an essay in the book Microcron-Kosum  on the Ghanaian  artist Owusu-Ankomah and  discussed Adinkra and Ankomah in my essay on African arts in  The Palgrave Handbook on African Philosophy, Ankomah in his art and thought being a supreme exponent of Akan philosophy and its imaginative possibilities,as is Ayi Kwei Armah in the sublime dialogue between Densu and the healer Damfo in The Healers. 

Forms of Nonsense in Spirituality

Yes, amidst such sublimities, a lot of spirituality is nonsense.

This nonsense  extends to-

my spirituality is the best in the world

  

if you dont believe in my spirituality you are less than human

share my faith or die

God's views and my views are identical

my views about the nature and direction of the universe are the last word on the subject

God has chosen us as his special children

God says we should destroy everyone on the land and take it for ourselves bcs all land belongs to God

among other ridiculousnesses. 

Between Positive and Negative Rationality 

Certain beliefs are so irrational, or negatively rational  and dangerously so, that every effort has to be made to critically examine them and demonstrate their irrationality, or if one  chooses to appreciate their own endogenous form of rationality, their negative rationality. 

The spectrum of human rationality is multi-cognitive, embracing  the senses, the emotions, the imagination, the intellect, intuition, and in my experience and that of others, extra-sensory perception and revelation.

Even within this expansive scope, however, a carefully cultivated, empathetic, imaginatively responsive reason has to play a central role or open the world further to horrors of all kinds in the name of respecting epistemic relativism.

Spirituality as Action in the Dark

Even when spirituality is not nonsense, its often equivalent to moving about in the dark.

It is often speculative, an effort to project the mind into regions it does not know how to enter, thus uncritical imaginative creation takes control.

Spirituality may be described as  the effort of a partially sighted person to explore a world they can hardly see. 

It is also akin to moving about in a deeply unfamiliar landscape, significantly different from the human spatio-temporal cosmos.

How does one interpret what one sees, hears or feels there and present whatever is understood?

It is also akin to a landscape glimpsed briefly through flashes of lightning, to adapt S.T. Coleridge on waking the actor Edmund Keane play Shakespeare  and Susanne Wenger on Yoruba Orisa ritual  in Ulli Beier's The Return of the Gods.

How does understand and represent these glimpses?

Speculation, uncritical imagination, exaggeration, run riot.

Images of Aspiration and Limitation in the Spiritual and Philosophical Quest 

My favorite images  on this- 

Thomas of Aquinas, one of the greatest of Western theologians and philosophers, is saying Mass, at which point he has a vision of the reality beyond this world, the universe as it is as different from how it is described, a vision that makes his immense library of writings look like grass in comparison, after which vision he stops writing, leaving his magnificent Summa Theologica unfinished, as the story goes.

''I do not know how I may seem to others, but to myself, I am as a child playing on the sea shore and finding pebbles, some brighter than others, while the great ocean of truth lies undiscovered before me''- Isaac Newton, one of the greatest thinkers in history.

The distance between cosmic reality and human perception is like a decrepit old man, wandering about dressed in lice infested rags, who is yet a ray of light from the hearth of Gueno, creator of the universe. 

The rags and the lice infested clothes are akin to our awareness of reality. 

Who will be attentive enough to the potential beyond the exterior to look within and perceive the glorious interior?

-my interpretation of the image of Kaidara as described by Ahmadou Hampate Ba in various essays and particularly in his Kaidara: A Fulani Cosmological Epic from Mali.

Augustine of Hippo, foundational theologian and thinker in the Western Christian and philosophical tradition, was one day at the sea shore, at which point he saw a child  repeatedly filling with water from the sea a hole he had dug in the sand. 

''What are you doing,''  he asked the child. ''Trying to empty the ocean into the hole,'' the little one responded. 

''That is impossible,'' he told the child.

''Just like it's impossible for you to understand the Trinity with your mind,'' the child responded.

Augustine understood the message being conveyed by the mysterious messenger, as the story goes. De Trinitate, On the Trinity, is however, regarded as one of Augustine's greatest works, its discussion of the Christian concept of the triune yet unified identity of God in relation to the human mind being enduringly insightful across theology and philosophy.

In order to occupy himself while in prison, an Aztec priest  imprisoned by the Spanish invaders of South America spends his time watching a tiger in a cage near his cell, and reflecting on the belief that the creator of the universe had achieved this feat  using a word, a word he then confined to an aspect of creation, so it would survive in the material realm, subsisting within the vicissitudes of history.

One day, watching the tiger, he sees that  word as emerging into his awareness through the composition of the  patterns on the skin of the tiger, the tiger being a totem of the ultimate creator.

Access to the awesome power of this word implies he can reconstruct reality, obliterate the prison he is locked in, flush away the Spanish conquerors and rule mightier than the greatest kings.

''But, having seen the fiery designs of the universe, the wheel of being and becoming across time and infinity, what is the significance of the fate of one man?'' he asks himself. ''Thus I lie here and let the days obliterate me'' as Jorge Lois Borges' story, ''The Tiger'' concludes.

A tiger paces a cage, frustrated by his  desire to do things he has never done nor seen done.   Having been bred in captivity, he does not realize his  dissatisfaction with the food he  is fed by his  keepers is because he  desires to race across the savanna in hunt of prey and tear into hot flesh, as his  wild nature hungers for.  Yet he has to remain locked in that tightly confined space, daily  gaped at by his two legged spectators.

One day the tiger has a dream, in which God explains to the tiger  the reason for his predicament. '' You are held captive'' the divine one states, ''so that a certain man will see you a certain number of times, and be thereby inspired to place your image in a word of a poem that has a precise place in the structure of the universe. You suffer, but you would have contributed a word to that poem.  

The tiger accepts his fate but on waking he forgets the dream, because the designs of the universe are too complex for the mind of a tiger.

Dante, in exile in Ravenna, reflects on the bitterness of his life, driven away by a coup from his native Florence.

One night, God appears to him in a dream, revealing to him the logic of  his tortuous life. 

He accepts his fate, understanding its significance in the dynamism of being, but, on waking, he forgets the dream, because the design of the universe is too complex for the mind of a human being, yet, Dante's composition of an attempt to dramatize the nature of the universe through the words of his Divine Comedy remains one of the greatest achievements of humanity in the centuries since it was written, the   chapter in that poem with the image of the tiger  being the title of the story told by Borges as I have tried to relate here. 

A rabbit farmer from time to time takes away one of the rabbits for his supper.

The rabbits, in the security they have developed on account of the long stretches between the disappearances of one of them, are puzzled as to this negative pattern in their lives, since they never see the farmer and have no idea of any mode of existence beyond that of  the space where they live.

There arise among them poets and philosophers who create imaginative and intellectual constructs to help them adapt to this painful reality about which they can do nothing, so runs Richard Adams' metaphorical exploration in Watership Down of the human effort to adjust itself to the reality of death, an effort central to the arts, philosophy and spirituality in trying to make meaning of a puzzling universe. 

We exist on a small island represented by what we know. Our understanding is akin to crude echoes from an infinite intelligence- Catholic theologian Karl Rahner and physicist Albert Einstein.

You can measure the height of a wall, but can you do this in an absolute sense? Can you measure the height of a wall from the perspective of an ant, for example?, asks the mathematician Ramanujan. 

The ant was asked, ''what is God to you? A big ant,'' of course, the ant responded. 

''What do you understand of the essence of my teaching?'', the Buddha asks his disciples after many years of teaching.

Each of the disciples responds with rich verbal explanations, representing their understanding of the  complexity and depth of the teaching, and to each of them, he responds ''to you I give my my bowl , my cloak, my skin, my bones,'' etc, moving progressively from the symbolic relationship of each of his  possessions, meagre but vital to sustaining his life even in his ascetic lifestyle,  to his clothes, vital for warmth and social decency,  to his body, represented by his skin and even more intimately, his bones, thereby suggesting the level of penetration of each of the answers to the heart of his teaching.

The last disciple to respond, however, says nothing.

He bows, but remains ''thunderously silent'' as this story is put in Paul Reps collection of Buddhist stories, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones.

The Buddha responds, ''to you, I give my marrow.''

Representations of this silent disciple run in Buddhist art across the centuries, Reps states, recognizing a central vision of a strand of various philosophies and spiritualities, which may be summed up in the question-having had your eyes opened to see in a world of blind people, how can you describe what you see to your still blind fellows?

Having experienced something beyond words, beyond thought, beyond images and senses, how do you describe it?

No one, no matter how wise, can hold water in the folds of their pocket, a line from the Yoruba origin Ifa literature states, as quoted in Wande Abimbola's Ifa Divination Poetry.

thus summing up my view for epistemic humility, critical scepticism, in dealing with spirituality.

The Human Race as Epistemic Children 

The human race, in my view, is best understood, not as fools, as brainless people, as Falola indicates my stance suggests, but as children,  people whose cognitive capacities are not sufficiently mature to adequately grasp what their nature compels them to explore, the cosmos in its totality, physical and non-physical,  material and spiritual, physical and metaphysical.

 

a writer glimpses the volumes of his many works as he lies dying. As he slips away, he realises, that the complex worl;ds he had constructed to mirror the universe aree nothing mpore than another object added to the world.

  Jorge Louis Borges, a great writer on the intersection of spirituality, philosophy and the imagination-  

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/D7739DBB-73E0-4D52-9451-1C12DCFF714C%40austin.utexas.edu.

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Edited

Thanks, prof. Falola.

Experience and Responsibility in Relating With Spirituality 

My statement is far from careless.

It is based on my immersion in study and practice of various spiritualities and philosophies, from Africa, Asia and the West, and experiencing  their creative outcomes, not simply remaining at the level of faith.

Yet, as a person committed to the development of forms of spirituality, including a modern African witchcraft, I have a duty to make clear the parameters of my approach to these subjects.

The Need for Critical Consistency in Relating with  Spirituality

How critically consistent is this perspective described by Edward, exemplifying much of the contemporary African situation, a view that often leads to the dehumanization of so many, including children-

'There are witches of every age too in Akan cultural thought---babies as young as a few weeks old, pre-teens, teenagers, adults, mid-age, and very old.'' 

Yet, the Akan, like other African peoples, have also developed a great philosophy and spirituality, perennially inspiring to philosophers and artists, represented particularly powerfully for me in Akan thought by the artistic/philosophical complex that is Adinkra, on which I have created blogs and written an entry for the Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought, 2011, along with an essay in the book Microcron-Kosum  on the Ghanaian  artist Owusu-Ankomah and  discussed Adinkra and Ankomah in my essay on African arts in  The Palgrave Handbook on African Philosophy, Ankomah in his art and thought being a supreme exponent of Akan philosophy and its imaginative possibilities,as is Ayi Kwei Armah in the sublime dialogue between Densu and the healer Damfo in The Healers. 

Forms of Nonsense in Spirituality

Yes, amidst such sublimities, mirroring the grand vistas of much of human thought, a lot of spirituality is nonsense.

This nonsense  extends to-

my spirituality is the best in the world

  

if you dont believe in my spirituality you are less than human

share my faith or die

God's views and my views are identical

our  views about the nature and direction of the universe are the last word on the subject

God has chosen us as his special children

God says we should destroy everyone on the land and take it for ourselves bcs all land belongs to God

among other ridiculousnesses. 

Between Positive and Negative Rationality 

Certain beliefs are so irrational, or negatively rational  and dangerously so, that every effort has to be made to critically examine them and demonstrate their irrationality, or if one  chooses to appreciate their own endogenous form of rationality, their negative rationality. 

The spectrum of human rationality is multi-cognitive, embracing  the senses, the emotions, the imagination, the intellect, intuition, and in my experience and that of others, extra-sensory perception and revelation.

Even within this expansive scope, however, a carefully cultivated, empathetic, imaginatively responsive reason has to play a central role or open the world further to horrors of all kinds in the name of respecting epistemic relativism.

Spirituality as Action in the Dark

Even when spirituality is not nonsense, its often equivalent to moving about in the dark.

It is often speculative, an effort to project the mind into regions it does not know how to enter, thus uncritical imaginative creation takes control.

Spirituality may be described as  the effort of a partially sighted person to explore a world they can hardly see. 

It is also akin to moving about in a deeply unfamiliar landscape, significantly different from the human spatio-temporal cosmos.

How does one interpret what one sees, hears or feels there and present whatever is understood?

It is also akin to a landscape glimpsed briefly through flashes of lightning, to adapt S.T. Coleridge on watching the actor Edmund Keane play Shakespeare  and Susanne Wenger on Yoruba Orisa ritual  in Ulli Beier's The Return of the Gods.

How does understand and represent these glimpses?

Speculation, uncritical imagination, exaggeration, often run riot.

Images of Aspiration and Limitation in the Spiritual and Philosophical Quest 

My favorite images  on this- 

Thomas of Aquinas, one of the greatest of Western theologians and philosophers, is saying Mass, an effort at unifying spirit and matter through symbolic action, at which point he has a vision of the reality beyond this world, the universe as it is as different from how it is described, a vision that makes his immense library of writings look like grass in comparison, after which vision he stops writing, leaving his magnificent Summa Theologica unfinished, as the story goes.

''I do not know how I may seem to others, but to myself, I am as a child playing on the sea shore and finding pebbles, some brighter than others, while the great ocean of truth lies undiscovered before me''- Isaac Newton, one of the greatest thinkers in history.

The distance between cosmic reality and human perception is like a decrepit old man, wandering about dressed in lice infested rags, who is yet a ray of light from the hearth of Gueno, creator of the universe. 

The rags and the lice infested clothes are akin to our awareness of reality. 

Who will be attentive enough to the potential beyond the exterior to look within and perceive the glorious interior?

-my interpretation of the image of Kaidara as described by Ahmadou Hampate Ba in various essays and particularly in his Kaidara: A Fulani Cosmological Epic from Mali.

Augustine of Hippo, foundational theologian and thinker in the Western Christian and philosophical tradition, was one day at the sea shore, at which point he saw a child  repeatedly filling with water from the sea a hole he had dug in the sand. 

''What are you doing,''  he asked the child. ''Trying to empty the ocean into the hole,'' the little one responded. 

''That is impossible,'' he told the child.

''Just like it's impossible for you to understand the Trinity with your mind,'' the child responded.

Augustine understood the message being conveyed by the mysterious messenger, as the story goes. De Trinitate, On the Trinity, is however, regarded as one of Augustine's greatest works, its discussion of the Christian concept of the triune yet unified identity of God in relation to the human mind being enduringly insightful across theology and philosophy.

In order to occupy himself while in prison, an Aztec priest  imprisoned by the Spanish invaders of South America spends his time watching a tiger in a cage near his cell, and reflecting on the belief that the creator of the universe had achieved this cosmic feat by  using a word, a word he then confined to an aspect of creation, so it would survive in the material realm, subsisting within the vicissitudes of history.

One day, watching the tiger, he sees that  word as emerging into his awareness through the composition of the  patterns on the skin of the tiger, the tiger being a totem of the ultimate creator.

Access to the awesome power of this word implies he can reconstruct reality, obliterate the prison he is locked in, flush away the Spanish conquerors and rule mightier than the greatest kings.

''But, having seen the fiery designs of the universe, the wheel of being and becoming across time and infinity, what is the significance of the fate of one man?'' he asks himself. ''Thus I lie here and let the days obliterate me'' as Jorge Lois Borges' story, ''The Tiger'' concludes.

A tiger paces a cage, frustrated by his  desire to do things he has never done nor seen done.   Having been bred in captivity, he does not realize his  dissatisfaction with the food he  is fed by his  keepers is because he  desires to race across the savanna in hunt of prey and tear into hot flesh, as his  wild nature hungers for.  Yet he has to remain locked in that tightly confined space, daily gaped at by his two legged spectators.

One day the tiger has a dream, in which God explains to the tiger  the reason for his predicament. '' You are held captive'' the divine one states, ''so that a certain man will see you a certain number of times, and be thereby inspired to place your image in a word of a poem that has a precise place in the structure of the universe. You suffer, but you would have contributed a word to that poem.  

The tiger accepts his fate but on waking he forgets the dream, because the designs of the universe are too complex for the mind of a tiger.

Dante, in exile in Ravenna, reflects on the bitterness of his life, driven away by a coup from his native Florence.

One night, God appears to him in a dream, revealing to him the logic of  his tortuous life. 

He accepts his fate, understanding its significance in the dynamism of being, but, on waking, he forgets the dream, because the design of the universe is too complex for the mind of a human being, yet, Dante's composition of an attempt to dramatize the nature of the universe through the words of his Divine Comedy remains one of the greatest achievements of humanity in the centuries since it was written, the   chapter in that poem with the image of the tiger  being the title of the story told by Borges I have tried to relate here. 

A rabbit farmer from time to time takes away one of the rabbits for his supper.

The rabbits, in the security they have developed on account of the long stretches between the disappearances of one of them, are puzzled as to this negative pattern in their lives, since they never see the farmer or any human being and have and have no idea of any mode of existence beyond that of  the space where they live.

There arise among them poets and philosophers who create imaginative and intellectual constructs to help them adapt to this painful reality about which they can do nothing, so runs Richard Adams' metaphorical exploration in Watership Down of the human effort to adjust itself to the reality of death, an effort central to the arts, philosophy and spirituality in trying to make meaning of a puzzling universe. 

We exist on a small island represented by what we know. Our understanding is akin to crude echoes from an infinite intelligence- Catholic theologian Karl Rahner and physicist Albert Einstein.

''You can measure the height of a wall, but can you do this in an absolute sense? Can you measure the height of a wall from the perspective of an ant, for example?'', asks the mathematician Ramanujan. 

The ant was asked, ''What is God to you? A big ant,'' of course, the ant responded. 

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Thanks, Ken.

I identify with your views on multiple rationalities, and find your references enriching.

You seem to suggest, however, that these rationalities are largely mutually exclusive, like putting off one hat to wear another.

Is it not more realistic to see them as complementary, in other words, representing putting on various hats at the same time?

In watching afilm, we self consciously enter into a carefully circumscribed state of belief in which we allow the imaginative truth of the fictive rendition to prevail over its fictional vehicle, as Aristotle so delicately describes in the Poetics and Biodun Jeyifo sums up in the book title The Truthful Lie. 

In recognizing what we are doing as a deliberate imaginative act of a kind, can we not be described as still operating within the same context of rationality, in which the rational is clearly understood in terms of varied, interlocking expressions?

When people assume, as is at times done with myth, that that they are relating with literal reality, and as has been done with people believing a fictional film is recording or depicting a real life occurrence, what kind of rationality would that be?

What should be one's response to such rationality?

thanks

toyin

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

hi toyin, good questions. we are at a difficult point for email. i don't generally do long long responses, and when i do, i feel guilty, as if i'm imposing on people.

your use of the term rational or rationality would have to be parsed, and it sounds like what i mean by "world" as heidegger says, or the equivalent. we put together an understanding (rationality) that makes sense of what we experience.

it is "rational" only in that it is how we make sense of the world, of how things work. if we can't do that, we can't survive. and if our rationality differs too much from that of others, we get locked up....

anyway, there has to be overlap, as you say, because to understand, say, a science fiction film we need to understand the basis for its structure and motivations.

anyway, i said i don't want to pursue it too much.

i see it in terms of genres: there are dozens of different genres of films, of fiction, etc. we understand how they work (more or less), we see them change, we go along with them as long as we enjoy the film. it overlaps with our understanding of how things work in our lives, or else we'd be too confused by the film. if the genre is a variant of realism (say historical realism, or political realism, or even poetic realism), we adjust our expectations and make judgments of its success.

that's where your "overlap" is strongest. people even come out of the movie and say, it was great, it was just like real life!

so, witches and witchcraft, etc., make some degree of sense to people, in varying degrees. the most important case i know of is Living in Bondage. Also it is wildly imaginative and occult, people will patiently tell you how real it is. and for the comaroffs with cargo cults, its "realism" is really a metaphor for neoliberal "magic," the way we make money multiply magically. for some, it is their faith that enriches them. for others, it is satan, and so on.

lots of overlaps.

and lots of differences of opinion on what is "real" what is not

sorry for the length

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

i had one more thought! on this.

as i said earlier, i am reading up on physics quite a bit.

there are two major branches to physics: classical physics, of which Newton and his laws are the basis; and quantum, which dates from the 1920s on, and which applies to micro-particles, like electrons and photons.

guess what. "reality" is not the same for them. the laws that hold for macrophysics, for classical physics, do not work at the micro level, and vice versa.

what is "real"? both!!

weird, but true

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Thanks, Ken.

Fine examples from film. 

Forms of Reality Depiction in Nigerian Film 

Living in Bondage is a superb  film, in all elements of visual storytelling.

In terms of its relationship with reality, its general depictions of occult rituals in which people sacrifice other human beings for money is factual because that is actually done in Nigeria.

From what I remember of it, it does not go into anything not readily verifiable.

There are other Nollywood films that do that, such as The Last Believer, if I recall the title correctly, in which the supernatural is manifest while it does not manifest in Bondage. 

A  Nigerian film culture in which the spiritual universe is consistently depicted as a reality co-extensive with the material universe is Yoruba films. Responsive to classical Yoruba cosmology, this film culture depicts the spiritual universe as containing both good and evil entities or  entities who may engage in both good and evil, in relationships with human collaborators  who are similarly complex, developing these ideas in ways that may be seen as ''wildly imaginative'', depicting occult practices which are likely to be imaginative expansions of reality.

Distinctive but Complementary Perceptions of Reality in Scientific Cosmology

I get the impression, though, that the physics example you gave could be made more robust by asking, ''in what sense are both aspects of the cosmos real''?

Are reality at the macro and micro levels different or complementary?

     Epistemology

The cognitive community engaging in classical and quantum physics is the same community, in terms of their underlying epistemic parameters.

    Metaphysics

Is it not more realistic to reference complementary laws of macro and micro-physics, in which what operates at one level complements and enables what operates at another level?

 Without the processes and laws that enable the physical constitution of the cosmos in the first place, subatomic particles would not exist.

Yet, without the existence of the subatomic level, the particles that constitute the material foundations of the universe, would any large scale structures exist?

Without the cosmological constants represented by such numerical relationships as described by Martin Rees in Just Six Numbers, in which he presents six numerical harmonies that enable the constitution of the cosmos as a stable and yet dynamic system, numbers imprinted in the origin of the universe in the  "big bang'', numbers demonstrating  ''deep connections between stars and atoms, between the cosmos and the microworld [determining] the essential features of our entire physical world''there would be  either utter chaos, or no universe in the first place.

It has taken centuries to arrive at the understanding of the distinctive but complementary levels of material reality represented by the macro and micro universes, but these aspects of the material cosmos  existed as a unified whole right from the emergence of matter, I expect.

     Perception of Difference Made Possible by Underlying Unity

Even if its possible to discover parallel universes in which the laws of physics are different, they would still be  part of the complex harmony that constitutes the material cosmos, along with our own universe,  constituted of the entire physical world  that shares fundamentally similar operational principles or laws.

Such universes operating in terms of laws different from ours would be perceivable by humans in terms of their difference from the material environment in which we currently live. 

Difference is itself a form of unity, because it implies a basis for comparison. 

The scientific view of the cosmos is better understood in terms of  complex, interlocking harmonies rather than a disjointed harmony, in which one segment of reality is fundamentally different from the other, if not would we be describing the same reality? 

Would these realities be able to exist together?

Distinctive but Complementary Metaphysical and Epistemic Unities in Western Magical Cosmology

The Western magical tradition develops a similar idea, particularly in its adaptation of  the  image of the cosmos as a tree, each branch representing an aspect of reality different from but complementary to the others, an image represented particularly strongly by the  Jewish origin Kabbalistic Tree of Life.

In this view, the entire material cosmos, apprehensible by the senses, composed of  any number of universes, constitutes one aspect of reality. The various means of apprehension of various aspects of the cosmos, imagination, emotion, intellect and extra-sensory perception, etc constitute other aspects.Each of these aspects contains entities native to those dimensions.

Beyond these aspects of existence are those which are beyond such means of apprehension.

These levels are transcendent, yet apprehensible.

Beyond these transcendent, yet apprehensible levels are those which are not apprehensible partly because they are in constant  process of emergence.

I take this image as a heuristic map, as a guide to exploration, not dogma.

This world view is an aspect of a unifying current in Western magic since the 19th century.

That is the idea of magic as a method of exploring the constitution of the cosmos in terms of the use of contrastive but complementary rationalities, corresponding to its various complementary dimensions.

A Critical Approach to Spiritual Knowledge Claims within a Heuristic Framework

I admire this approach because it encourages trying to find out in what way/s a particular picture of reality constitutes  a subjective reality for the person that holds it, an inter-subjective reality for the group that identifies with it and how these subjectivities intersect with an objective universe that subsists in spite of whatever views people hold, whatever subjective universes they inhabit, an objective cosmos that provides the enablement for those subjectivities  and even contributes to shaping them.

Within such a context, therefore I am better positioned to examine claims of reality from any context.

I can explore the relationship between the various kinds of reality represented by witchcraft beliefs and evaluate the relative validity of those beliefs.

I can believe in the existence of the spiritual and argue that many concepts of the spiritual are delusional because they have no reality outside the beliefs of those who hold them or even if they do, they are identifications with unhelpful or dangerous approaches to reality. 

I can also hold that belief can be a means of understanding aspects of reality that go beyond human beings.

All in all, such a stance protects me from surrendering to the varieties of belief in the effort to grant everyone the right to manufacture their own subjective worlds.

toyin

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

hi toyin,

i don't quite share your visionof Living in Bondage being factual or verifiable, etc. not sure when you saw it last: the blood sacrificing, the mocked up ritual, the cult of rich people, the ghost of the dead wife... nah. factual and verifiable is not really how i'd describe it. it was real movie stuff, not realism in cinematic mimetic terms at all.

i am not denying that bad practices based on spiritual beliefs don't occur; but this was hollywood mushed into a nigerian imaginary, creating a new phenomenon, nollywood. it was so extravagantly bizarre, over the top, that our greatest director at that time (1992-3?) tunde kelani disavowed the label for his films.

times have certainly changed in the shift from the quick-dirty-overthetop-unprofessionallooking first efforts to the neo-nollywood extravaganzas of today. a mere 25 years to see this phenomenon called nollywood of today. even tunde now can accept something closer to the label. and why not? wonderful movies are being made by very very talented people.

quickly, to respond to your points concerning physics. first, you put it well when you claim the epistemology of both micro and macrophysics is basically the same. that is correct. but the findings of the two are more at odds with each other than you seem to recognize. that is, the forces at play on the macro level seem not to be at the micro. the word "seem" is for the wiggle room. if special relativity says time dilates when we move relative to a stationary platform, that is not really visible/perceptible to us except at speeds that are too high for us to perceive or generate. it happens, it can be measure with clocks today; but the difference, say, between the time of someone staying home and someone flying is miniscule; the difference between someone on top of a mountain vs at the bottom exists, but is very small. but if you were a photon, then the difference is enormous.

the differences of what happens on the quantum scale vs the macro are all like that. we can figure out and learn the mathematical laws that describe those events, but they don't describe our daily lives and experiences. i've noticed in recent publications more and more attempts to bridge those realms are occurring, just as the relationship between the events dealing with subatomic particles are of interest to cosmological scientists who study the universe.

my own interest lies in the question, what does any of this have to do with those of us who specialize in cinema or literature, or the arts. i believe the real answer is, a lot. i love the idea that we can rethink such basic concepts as time and space, which we take for granted, and open questions about how they are being rethought in the sciences--ever since the beginning of the 20th century.

your concerns over spiritual questions are not directly my own. but the questions per se--what is time, how do we conceive of it, how does it change depending on our circumstances and location and speed; how do different frames of reference change our experiences of reality. the arts are not asking different questions from the sciences in all these areas, and i want to see these two domains more in discussion with each other.

for instance, where do we come from? where does matter or existence come from? when was it created? where are we headed? hard to disregard these questions in literature/movies/the arts or in cosmological science where hawkings more or less co-created the study of black holes, and where lemaitre and many since have studied the big bang. we all ask very similar questions.

i don't feel the discussion is enhanced by claiming the spiritual realms are real, nor is anything enhanced if we were to say the only epistemologies of worth are scientific or rational. that gets us nowhere--or gets me nowhere. i'd take the different "worlds" we create, understand, study, and even love as being of worth on their own; but then i want to say, what more can we get if we put them in dialogue with each other.

for instance, when i read the comaroffs' evocation of cargo cults in the pacific, and their tie to trade and capitalist value, it opened my eyes, actually, to Living in Bondage where the container cult lay at the heart of the magic multiplication of wealth of the rich people in the film. i doubt kenneth nnuebe was reading the comaroffs--their writing actually came after he made the movie. but the worlds of the anthropologists, economists, moviemakers, and my and my students all met when their analyses seemed pertinent to the nollywood values.

similarly, the wonders of ifa, the masquerades of gelede, the worlds which they figured reach out to the art of bruce onobrakpeya as you wonderfully demonstrate, with creative imaginary futurist visions. the afrofuturist visions of black panther or pumzi come from somewhere. what are the richest ways we have to approach them? for me it isn't those that settle the questions with absolutist cultural origins, but rather that see the artists as being inspired by what came before, and freely creating a new vision. stuart call spoke of being and becoming.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

a footnote and a correction

the footnote is that the equations for quantum do not work for general relativity. two worlds that are each described mathematically by key equations, for quite some time. the former for the micro world, the latter for the macro world (with gravity)

attempts to put them together, using string theory and its 11 dimensions, so far haven't worked.

and for us, in this "real" world, 11 dimensions are not real in any way that corresponds to our experience of existence.

the correction, i meant to write stuart hall, at the end, as he sees identity being a combination of the past--being--and the future we create, becoming. and most intriguingly, that it is the stories we tell about ourselves, our narration of our past, that functions to create our identities. not our genes.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

superb short pieces, Ken.

it would seem i might need to watch Living in Bondage again since i remember it in a very different way from your description but its been very long since i watched it. 

i really enjoyed the poetic beauty of your insights. will chew on them to see if i have anything i would like to add and will keep myself tuned for more engagement with these cosmological and epistemic qs intersecting the sciences and the arts.

i wonder if you ever taught any course correlating these two, particularly as you are doing here.

how do you follow scientific research, particularly new publications?

thanks

toyin

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

i am retired, toyin.

on retirement i developed an interest in these questions of science since reading hawking's Brief History of Time, and then thought, why are we not finding ways to bridge the questions about time and space raised by physicists with african cinema. well, all cinema, but my models and examples are mostly african as that's what i know best. i've now been reading for 2 years, roughly, and gave a number of conference papers on these topics, mostly at african studies and african lit conferences. i have written enough that now i am working on putting it together into book form.

my only sense is that no one in our field has paid much attention to these great questions that enable us to bridge science and the humanities, or specifically, cinema. and not to african cinemas either.

i really believe there are areas we have to explore, to ask, why did the scientists think about these issues, and why did we think, in our domain, about them. and why silo all this knowledge. it's beyond me to come up with strong answers, but i can ask the question.

living in bondage was groundbreaking, but if i were to teach a film with the occult, that i prefer, it'd be afolayan's The Figurine.

he is a really good director. if you've seen that film, i'd mention the ending where afolayan leaves us with a question, not an answer. he's pretty good at opening up the question, what is there beyond what we can see and hear with our senses, what other magical realm might there be, and, of course, is this figurine the device that opens up the corridors to that other realm?

ken

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

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[Toyin Falola]

Ken:

Living in Bondage 2, released this year, which is on Netflix, may even be better suited to your argument. Rather than the main character disappearing by magic, he does so in his private jet, and Afrofuturism project that fuses magic with capitalism.

My own interest is actually different: why are the African anecdotes and the ever-present reality of witchcraft and magic not converted into science? Fantastic imaginations are products of fantastic thinking!

Or why do we frame the wrong questions—is lottery not similar to a desire to use rituals for money?

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

the fantasy world of physics is unbelievable. really. they don't know what to do with the idea of a world with more than 3 dimensions, but their equations indicate that the answer to their questions involves more than 3, or with string theory, up to 11. they posit that we might be 2 dimensional creatures, projected onto 3 dimensions. feynman posits that positrons are electrons that move backward in time. i kid you not. backward in time when then crash into electrons. how can that be?

the questions about what is real, in physics, dwarf our wildest imaginations. my god, all that speculation on black holes, with the possibility of worms of time in space enabling time travel. our wildest occultist films are way tamer than the work physicists are doing, and they are not in agreement on much of it. so it is not, like, established science.

i think we should not look to science so much for answers, but simply for ways of thinking and asking questions. african speculations, over the millenia, are the most fabulous imaginable, and i wouldnot want to measure it in terms commensurable with other cultures. every aspect of witchcraft, or of sufi mysticism, or of polytheistic god stories, has a potential richness in and of itself. for me, science is not an answer, nor does it offer ameliorations to these non-scientific ways of thinking. but they are all human, and when human ideas "talk" to each other, we are enriched.

when one takes over and says, i am the way...we are in trouble.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

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Sent: Thursday, August 6, 2020 6:24 PM

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[Assensoh, Akwasi B.]

Dear Farooq and  Edward:

Due to my hectic ongoing Remote (Zoom) university summer teaching at my ripe age (of course, by popular demand), I have overlooked many past-times and hobbies in order to do a good job for the bright group of  young honor college students assigned to my class.  Therefore, pardon me for a belated intrusion into the witchcraft discourse.

By the way, in our Ghana Akan witchcraft parlance, Edward, what do we call witchcraft? Is it the same as "bayie" or "obayifo"/"bayifo" in our various linguistic expressions? In fact, as I recall the facts, when I lived in Europe,

a middle-aged Ghanaian woman had a mental breakdown, and she was admitted to a local mental hospital (in Europe); when some of us -- as fellow Ghanaians -- visited her, she confessed that she felt "having been caught right-handed" by a god (or "suman") back in Ghana due to her witchcraft activities of the past. She confessed to many past atrocities. She, in fact, insisted on being allowed to sit nude as part of the punishment for her cruel witchcraft past, etc. The hospital, of course, did not allow that; instead, the attending Psychiatrists insisted that their Ghanaian female patient suffered from nothing but psychosis. Therefore, her confessions --including adulterous behavior -- were simply couched in mental health terms and disregarded by the mental health experts; in fact, an underlying factor was that the woman's late father (a staunch Methodist preacher/catechist)  also suffered from a similar mental health condition, from which he was classified back in his Ghanaian locality as being crazy (or "obodamfo") before he eventually died.

I also remember that due to my hectic graduate (or postgraduate) studies, for the three years I was earning my M.A. & Ph.D. (in record time at New York University, I never had the time to take a break to visit Ghana to see my aged mother in our village. Sadly, my mother was told that I was staying away from our village's witchcrafts ("abayifo"/"​bayifoo" in our village, including my mother). When my mother reached me by phone, she seemed sad and agitated.  Therefore, she asked me to "clear my ears" to listen to what she wanted to tell me: that if she had witchcraft {or "bayie" in Akan) to kill and "eat" me, she would have done so when I was much, much younger, maybe in my teenage years, when my bones were much softer  ("un-ossified") for her aged teeth!.  Indeed, that taught me a lesson because what my mother (currently aged 98 years) said at the time did make sense.  I also rationalized: "Why kill me after I had acquired higher academic credentials to be able to get a higher-paying job to support her (my mother)?"

So, my quick query is this, Farooq and Edward: Does witchcraft exist? If so, what do we (Akans) of Ghana correctly call it?

A.B. Assensoh.                                                 

 

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Subject: [External] RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - IN MEMORY OF AKUA DENTEH

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