Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (57 page)

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Say “Africa,” and the immediate association might be “jungle” or “safari.” Or cartoonish images of missionaries in large stew pots. Or a man in a pith helmet, asking, “Dr. Livingston, I presume?” If you grew up in a certain era, your views of Africa were probably shaped by Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weissmuller surrounded by dutiful natives in loincloths saying things like “bwana.” Or old issues of
National Geographic
once eagerly perused for pictures of African women with bare breasts. A younger group might identify with the lovable Lion King immortalized in the idyllic animated Disney movie and Broadway musical.

Let’s face it. The generally woeful state of American knowledge about the rest of the world is at its nadir when sub-Saharan Africa
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is the subject. And the media doesn’t help matters. In recent years, Africa has only shown up on the American radar when some catastrophe strikes—an embassy bombing or a Black Hawk down. In the late 1960s, it took a civil war and starving Biafran refugees to make us aware of Nigeria. A rock-and-roll “feel-good” moment like “We Are the World” in 1985 briefly raised consciousness about the troubles confronting Africa. And, of course, when Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990, we were very much aware of the peaceful revolution he launched, which removed South Africa’s apartheid government.

But the typical and widespread American attitude toward Africa—even during the recent horrific episodes of butchery and genocide—is more like “out of sight, out of mind.”

This is historically misguided, because Africa is the place where humanity was born, as well as the fountainhead of a vast and rich tradition of myth, magic, and music. The second largest and second most-populous continent after Asia, Africa is where most evidence of the earliest human ancestors has been found, leaving little doubt that we are all “out of Africa.”
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From the many discoveries of bones, stones, and fossils at sites in eastern Africa, there is wide agreement that the earliest human beings lived more than 2 million years ago in eastern Africa, in an area spanning modern Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania. Evidence of emerging “modern” humans from the past 100,000 years, including improved stone tools, artwork on rocks, signs of body decoration, and burials, also appear first at various sites in Africa.

But a clear picture of what happened between the time of those fossilized remains from millions of years ago and last week’s headlines remains sketchy at best. By all accounts from the worlds of archaeology, anthropology, and history, a series of migrations took place over hundreds of thousands of years, eventually leading to pockets of very different people dotting the map of Africa. By the time of the Common Era, Africa was not the home of a few scattered tribes living in primitive isolation from the world and each other. Instead, it was a place of many people, hundreds of tribal groups (many of them nomadic, others in thousands of villages), sophisticated cities, and small kingdoms, all with different languages, beliefs, and rituals. These many people included the early Christian kingdoms of Kush and Axum, neighboring Egypt, which claimed to possess the biblical Ark of the Covenant that held the Ten Commandments; the great center of Islamic learning at Timbuktu in Mali; the diminutive Pygmies of the equatorial rain forests; the towering Masai herdsmen of Kenya and Tanzania; the San of the Kalahari Desert;
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the cattle-herding Khoi of southern Africa; and the proud Zulu, who challenged the might of the British Empire in nineteenth-century South Africa. This variety of people clearly underscores the fact that Africa is not one monolithic “dark continent,” but an extraordinary, rainbow-colored cloth woven through with the threads of many beliefs.

Africa’s diversity was both transformed and diminished by powerful outsiders—Islamic Arabs, starting in the seventh century, and European Christians in the fifteenth century. In the wake of their arrival, Africa’s rich array of native myths and beliefs was nearly eradicated by missionary zeal and then given short shrift by generations of academics and historians. When the African mythic legacy was finally recognized in the twentieth century,
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it was brought to life in a panoramic picture of all-seeing deities; mischievous tricksters; tales of death and mortality; powerful ancestors and spirits; the importance of family, friends, and community; and the dominating presence of the African healers, priests, and shamans, once derided as mere “witch doctors.”

Along with the revived interest in the role of traditional healers and shamans came the rediscovery of the rich oral history preserved by people like the griot—the musician-storytellers of western Africa who gained notoriety as the inspiration for Alex Haley’s
Roots
. Like the village shamans, the griot did not practice their art in a Parthenon, palace, or pyramid. Their sacred stories were expressed as a sort of performance art in song, drumming, and dance—a communal experience still alive today in African village life. Just as the songs of Homer and Hesiod were once sung in Greek villages, the musical tales of the griot captivated African villagers. Encompassing the themes of rain and drought, love and sex, morality and mortality—the same themes that course through all myths and legends—their tales were powerful accompaniments to the belief that all nature was sacred and that spirits inhabited every living thing.

Last but not least, ancient Africa was a preliterate place that produced few texts by which their myths can be studied. There is no ancient
Odyssey
or
Ramayana
written in African tongues. Neither is there a guide to the afterlife or a native encyclopedia of the gods to help us grasp what the ancient Africans thought.

Fortunately, an extraordinary oral tradition has been maintained throughout Africa to this day. And recent scholarship and a dedication to restoring some of the “lost” African past has cast a bright new light on the dazzling mythology of what was once considered the “Dark Continent.”

Is there an “African” mythology?

Good question! But when you stop to ponder it, it’s a bit like asking, “Is there a ‘European’ mythology?” A Greek and an Irishman are both called “Europeans,” but share little in the way of ancient myth or national history—or appearance. Similarly, Africa is filled with people who fall under the collective nametag “African,” but who look very different and also have an expansive range of traditions and myths.

The wide variety of mythologies that developed among the people living south of the Sahara was a result of constant movement by nomadic populations across enormous geographic barriers in a vast and varied landscape. Occupying a fifth of the world’s land—an area three times the size of the continental United States—Africa is a staggering 11,657,000 square miles of territory, divided by deserts, mountains, rain forests, winding rivers, and a massive savannah. Sheer size alone kept myth-mingling to a minimum. As mythologist Arthur Cotterel notes, “Mythologies abound in Africa. Tribes possess their own traditions, and even where they share a language with their neighbors…it is the diversity of local belief that surprises rather than the evidence of a common heritage.” While Islam and Christianity are widespread today among the more than 850 million Africans, more than 100 million people still practice forms of traditional ethnic religions, according to the
Encyclopedia Britannica Book of the Year
(2004); other estimates of the number of traditional believers in Africa are twice that.

This rich range of ancient beliefs makes it difficult to draw simple conclusions, but some broad parallels can be found in Africa’s many traditions. “Central to these,” author Chris Romann notes about African religions in
A World of Ideas
, “is a strong sense of the oneness of creation, in which the interconnection between the natural and the supernatural, the physical and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible, the living and the dead are far more important than the differences between them.” Traditionally, the majority of African people believe that gods exist everywhere in nature, and that such natural presences as mountains, rivers, and the sun contain a deity or spirit. African religions also tend to be more “here and now,” focusing on earthly life instead of an afterlife.

So, put the “oneness of creation” and nature worship at the top of a list of similarities in Africa’s many mythic traditions. And bear in mind these other important common characteristics:

A Supreme God
. The existence of a supreme being who is omniscient and omnipresent but often disappears from the scene out of annoyance with mankind is a very common theme. For instance, Wulbari, the creator god of the Krachi of Togo in West Africa, gets tired of people asking him for favors and is annoyed by the cook-smoke constantly getting in his eyes, so he leaves the village of people and sets up a heavenly court composed entirely of animals. Another god, We, is irritated because an old woman cuts a piece of him each day to make a good soup. Nyame of the Ashanti (or Asante) of modern Ghana is constantly disturbed by a woman pounding yams who keeps banging on the overhanging floor of heaven. In a move that any New York apartment-dweller with a noisy neighbor can appreciate, Nyame retreats to the sky, and when the people try to build a ladder of calabash gourds to reach him, they tumble down—another common African narrative which mirrors the Tower of Babel story.


 


A Pantheon of Gods
. In many African traditions, the supreme creator may withdraw, but there is still a pantheon of more active and available gods who can be called upon through prayer, sacrifice, or the offering of gifts to gain favors. One of the best examples of this pantheon is the 1,700 divinities—known as orishas—of modern Nigeria’s Yoruba, who are part of one of the world’s oldest practiced religions, sometimes called Orisha after its gods. Orisha is headed by the supreme god, Olorun (or Olodumare), who couples with Olokun, goddess of the sea, and has two sons, Obatala and Oduduwa. Olorun sends his sons, along with a great palm tree, to create the world, but one of them makes wine from the palm sap, gets drunk, and falls asleep. (The biblical Noah, first man after the Flood, did exactly the same thing.) The other son, Oduduwa, creates earth and separates the land from the seas by having his hen scratch the ground. Oduduwa calls the place he creates Ile-Ife (“wide house”). In time it becomes a great city of the Yoruba, and it is still a major university center in modern Nigeria.
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Also in the Yoruban pantheon is the god of storms and thunder, Shango. According to legend, Shango is a ruler on earth who flees to the forest to escape his enemies but winds up committing suicide and then later being deified. Shango and another orisha, the trickster Eshu, are among the most important gods carried to the Americas by Africans taken as slaves, and are prominent in the African-based fusion religions, such as Santeria, which emerged in the Caribbean, and the voodoo of Brazil, Haiti, and Cuba.


 


A Guardian Spirit
. Many Africans—like the Chinese and other ancestor-worshipping cultures—believe that the souls of their deceased forebears serve as guardians and sources of wisdom for the living. Some believe that ancestors are reborn in living things or in objects. The Zulus, for example, traditionally refuse to kill certain kinds of snakes, because they believe the souls of their ancestors live in these reptiles. In the modern Kwanzaa celebration, ancestor worship plays a part in a ritual that includes pouring a glass of clear water and lighting a candle while praying to the departed ancestor for help and guidance.


 


The Trickster
. One of the most widespread and popular African mythic characters, the trickster often appears in many stories as an animal. The clever, clownish trickster is both a troublemaking hero and a schemer who shows little concern for the consequences of his mischief and fantastic adventures. A typical trickster in African traditions is Turé, the spiderman of the Pygmies, whose loincloth catches on fire from a spark at a blacksmith’s shop. Madly dashing through the forest, Turé asks the fire to enter the trees. This explains how humans got fire and why rubbing wooden sticks together produces it. Another famed animal trickster is Anansi the Spider, who was once a Creator god but who now lives by his wits, fooling other animals and mankind. And then there is Hare, whose ability to outwit other animals—and humans—made him the model for Br’er Rabbit, the mischievous rabbit who constantly outwits Br’er Bear and Br’er Fox in the stories told by plantation slaves in the American South and recorded by Joel Chandler Harris in his Uncle Remus stories (see below).
Eshu, another important African trickster, is not an animal but a god—like the Norse Loki, in many respects—who brings chaos. In one story, Eshu steals vegetables from the Creator god and covers up his theft by making footprints in the garden with the god’s own sandals. When the Creator realizes what has happened, he is so angry that he withdraws from earth.


 


Explanations for Death
. In many African traditions, a “mixed message” brings death into the world, usually when an animal courier fails to deliver some important information from the gods to mankind. This is the case in the story of a bird sent by the Creator to tell people that when they get old they should just peel off their skins. On the way to deliver this message, the bird sees a snake eating a dead animal. In return for some of the meat, the bird tells the snake that it can obtain a new life by shedding its skin. While snakes gain the secret of immortality, the message is never delivered to humans—which is why people are mortal. For its failure, the bird is afflicted with a terrible disease. That’s why its painful cry is often heard in the tops of trees.
In a Zulu tale of the origin of death, a lizard carrying the news of death outraces a chameleon who has the message of eternal life. The chameleon arrives only to find that people have accepted the lizard’s words as the truth.


 


People with Special Spiritual Abilities
. Magic played a major role in many traditional African religions in which the only way an average person could approach the divine was thought to be through priests or medicine men. As the historian of religion Huston Smith writes, “We can think of shamans as spiritual savants…exceptional to the point of belonging to a different order of magnitude. Subject to severe physical and emotional trauma in their early years, shamans are able to heal themselves and reintegrate their lives in ways that place psychic if not cosmic powers at their disposal. Those powers enable them to engage with spirits, both good and evil.”
These healers and shamans were usually elders and other individuals singled out for some remarkable ability, and typically were responsible for healing, divination, exorcisms, and escorting the dead to the underworld. As true of shamans in many traditions, the tribal priests of Africa usually performed in an ecstatic trance induced by dancing, drumming, chanting, or with the use of a drug or alcohol. Since there was no established church or clergy in ancient Africa, the appointment of these priests was often hereditary. Among the Masai of eastern Africa, for example, the medicine men all came from one clan.
According to Paul Devereux, an authority on ancient mysteries, “The shaman
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was the person who acted as the intermediary between the tribe and the otherworlds of spirits. A shaman would heal the sick tribal members by locating their lost souls, perhaps entering the spirit world to reclaim them, or by deflecting bad spirits and invisible influences. There were also a variety of other reasons for entering the spirit realms, such as accompanying the souls of dying people or seeking information from the spirits or ancestors.”


 


Fetishes
. Bones, carved statues, or unusual stones were thought to be inhabited by spirits and contain magical powers, but they were more closely associated with dead ancestors and seen as an integral aspect of ancestor worship in many African traditions. The word “fetish” was coined by Portuguese sailors, some of the first Europeans to encounter these figures among the Yoruba and the Dogon of western Africa. But the use of fetishes was widespread throughout Africa, and in the Congo, for instance, included elaborate, nail-studded statues called
nkisi nkondi
(“power figures”).
Don’t snicker if you happen to be one of those people with a “lucky coin” or a rabbit’s foot in your pocket. They are “fetishes,” too.