“Constitutionally crucial? Not all ancestors were important, but only those who were recognized as standing in the line of succession back to ‘the power without beginning’. These were the appointed ancestors who channeled that power to living men, and who in so doing provided the means of protecting the present, guaranteeing the future, and generally assuaging the doubts and worries of pioneering groups in the wilderness where they wandered and settled. There is thus no true dividing line between founding ancestors and superior spirit guardians. Back beyond Mutota, the founder of their long dynasty of the Mwanamutapas, the Shona think of their great ancestral spirits, their mhondoro who, as founding heroes, first taught how to smelt iron from the rocks and how to grow millet and sorghum. ‘With this iron the people made hoes, and the mhondoro taught them in dreams to till and plant crops.’ In that dry country it has always been the rains, rare and irregular, which have made the difference between food and famine: above all, then, the mhondoro presided over the giving or withholding of rain, and logically so, for how could the ancestors, in preparing a land for their people, have failed to solve the problem of rain?” “It was in these senses that religious needs were seen as lying at the heart of social evolution. Social needs, that is, were conceived in religious terms. ‘After settling in an area’, kimambo has noted of the Pare, ‘each group established its sacred shrine at which they connected themselves with the ancestors who had founded their group’, as well as with any ‘local ancestors’ whose spiritual powers were important. They did this neither from blind superstition nor from want of a ‘sense of reality’, but because no group could feel itself secure, settled and at peace with the logic of events until, by setting up the necessary shrines, it had identified itself as a defined community with a ‘natural right’ to live where it had chosen. Nor did they set up these shrines, generally, in order to worship their ancestors as gods, but to ‘connect themselves’ with those ancestors to whom suprasensible power had revealed the land and how to prosper in it. The parallel, perhaps, is with saints in the Christian canon. They, too, are forerunners of living men and women. Yet despite their human origins it is through them that many Christians have sought to link themselves with the ‘power without beginning’, and in ways which have ranged from mere reverence among the sophisticated to outright idolatry among the simple. Just so with the Africans and their appointed—that is, canonized—ancestors.” Basil Davidson “The African Genius: An Introduction to African Social and Cultural History” Page 49
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 10:52:58 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015