CHAPTER 5:
The SHIFTING SENSORIUM and AFRICAN ORALITY (1)
[NB: This version (March 22, 2000) corrects errors in the representation
of Hebrew text found in the previous web posted version.]
One aspect of the social context in which African theologians write today, and upon which many have written, is the oral lifeworld of traditional Africa. This facet is so important that I shall devote an entire chapter to it, in order to develop further an understanding of African social context and the ways in which Africa's social construction of reality contrasts with that of the modern west.
This chapter deals with the apparent shift in modern western culture towards the eye as the locus and arbiter of all knowledge, at the expense of the non-visual senses, while African cultures have retained, generally, an earlier and more evenly distributed sensorium; and with the implications of this newly ocularcentric worldview.
There is a large body of evidence suggesting that the modern western world has lost a sensorial balance it once had (See Howes ed. 1991). In English dictionaries published before 1850 there is a greater variety of words related to ears and hearing, for example "earwitness". As languages evolve they do tend to drop out words that cease to have a meaningful function, but there is also a more pronounced tendency to invent new words as new circumstances emerge. There is no clear reason why a term such as "earwitness" should have been dropped from the language while its analogue in the visual field, "eyewitness", persists in everyday usage up to the present. In the context of this and a large body of evidence culled by other scholars (see Howes 1991 and Synnott 1991) one can only conclude that the oral-aural complex had entered a process of devaluation by mid-nineteenth century in the modern western world.
The shift towards the eye seems to have had great impact at approximately the mid-nineteenth century, a fact which has relevance for I study because the greater portion of Euro-American missionary effort in Africa happened after that time period. The resultant disjuncture of worldviews would thus have been heightened, and the mission churches left poorly equipped to cope with African thought structures and everyday realities. African Christian theologians have pointed to the inappropriate and inadequate nature of thought structures and cultural patterns inherited from the missionaries, and they are in the process of recovering the integrity and benefits of the traditional, balanced, African sensorium for the African church today.
Not all cultures divide the sensorium into the modern western division of five senses. In the Hausa language of Northern Nigeria, there are two general categories for the senses; gani which means to see, and ji which means to hear, smell, taste, touch and feel emotions. The latter is used far more frequently as a metaphor of knowing than the former. Kagamé (1956a, 186) confirms a similar division and categorization for the Bantu languages of central Africa.
We may say then, that the division and numeration of the senses is arbitrary, but in order to organize the vast amount of material in an orderly fashion I have five subsections corresponding to current western categories. Because African cultures have frequently been identified as "primary oral", I shall begin I survey with an examination of the oral lifeworld of Africa.
1: African Oral Lifeworld
(i): Orality In the AICs
Theological reflexion on African orality by Africans preceded the first academic theologians of the mainstream African churches by a century. African Independent Churches (AICs) were formed by African prophets such as Garrick Braide, in Nigeria, William Wadé Harris in Ivory Coast and Simon Kimbangu of Zaïre. They stressed the importance of bringing the gospel of Christ to Africans on their own, African terms. This meant in practice, the abandoning of long periods of literacy and catechetical training before baptism which had been normative in most mission churches up to that time. The Catholic church usually required three whole years of classes of instruction before baptising a new convert, while the Anglican church required a convert to be able to read and recite all the creeds before baptism, a process often requiring up to three years. In East Africa, Mbiti reports that the Africa Inland Church required one and a half years of instruction, but he says in practice it was usually longer (1971b, 23). The movement led by Garrick Sokari Idaketima Braide, an African convert who started a new movement in the Niger Delta, experienced great success during the First World War (Tasie 1978, 325-328). Braide himself became an inquirer in the 1890s, but it was not until 1910 that he was baptised. After baptism, he had to wait a further two years before being confirmed as a full member of the Anglican church, as was the custom at the time (Tasie 1982, 100).
His phenomenal success is largely attributed to his simple emphasis upon orality above literacy (Tasie 1978, 326). Braide abandoned the literacy requirement, and had more success in his preaching in six months than the Anglican church had had in the previous fifty years. Braide's movement did not deviate from Anglican doctrine. In fact, the remarkable thing about his movement was that it was in all other respects entirely orthodox from the point of view of Christian doctrine: Sokari Braide's only real "innovation" was the acceptance of African orality.
While sociologists often assert that Christian missions have little success where they directly clash with indigenous belief systems, it is clear that Braide actually heightened the conflict with ATR in a sense: his only prerequisite for baptism was that people must bring their "fetishes" to be burned, in order to show that they had transferred their allegiance from the idols to Jesus. But it is argued that in doing so he did not so much negate the traditional diviner as continue the diviner's role by stepping into his place. One can thus see in Braide an early example at the grassroots level of the reassertion of Africanness, and the revaluation of African orality. (On Braide see Tasie 1978, 1982, Sanneh 1983, 180-3 and Omoyajowo 1973). Peter Probst (1989) elaborates on literacy and religious authority amongst the Aladura churches of Yorubaland.
Omoyajowo tells us that it is common in the AICs to find members "who could quote accurately from practically all the books of the Bible." (Omoyajowo 1973, 87). This feat is the more remarkable because they are primarily non-literate. They have memorized the passages on the basis of hearing them only a very few times in sermons. The accurate memorization of Biblical passages is to them a continuation of the ancient tradition of memorization of the deeds of the ancestors and recitation of the ancient oral traditions. Note that research has indicated that general ability to memorize declines in a culture as literacy increases, for the written text provides a type of extended "memory" which obviates and thus devalues the older form of information storage.
Alternative explanations of the success of the AICs do exist: Max Weber's ideal type, the "charismatic leader" is usually cited in this regard. The "charismatic leader" is certainly appropriate and fits well the experience of the AICs, but their success is not to be explained simplistically or as monocausal. Indeed, the weakness of the major sociological paradigms developed by Durkheim, Marx and Weber or even Parsons' more eclectic model(s) is that reductionism can lead to the researcher missing an important factor such as orality versus literacy, a factor which goes a long way towards explaining the phenomenon under study, but which does not fit neatly under any of the major categorizing lenses of the greater paradigms. If and when orality is mentioned, it is merely subsumed under one of the other categories such as "cultural self-readjustment", and it is left at that, while the salience of the important factor is relativized and down-played to the point where it almost disappears.
Another aspect of the oral-aural lifeworld is the importance of drums in African culture. Scholarly literature has drawn attention to the centrality of the drum not only as a cultural transmitter of culture, but also as a means of communication. Georges Niangoran-Bouah points out that the drum is the memory of African communities, and that the texts of a talking drum are as reliable as those of the written word (Niangoran-Bouah 1991, 87). This is in contrast to the view of traditional missionaries, who proscribed the drum. Missionaries in the colonial era had been instrumental in banning drumming in African communities (Niangoran-Bouah, 81). The current reappropriation of drumming in African Christian churches, which began in the 1970s, is another element of the cultural recovery pioneered by African theologians.
(ii): Oral literature and Négritude
Oral literature was a preoccupation of the négritude movement from its inception in the 1930s. Alexis Kagamé, an African theologian and student of African culture, modified Placide Tempels' theory of "vital force" as the central category of "Bantu Philosophy". He wrote on oral literature in Africa and was a pioneer in this field, publishing many major works on African "oral literature". Some of the more important works are Kagamé (1951, 1956b, 1959, 1969, 1972, 1974). African theology since its inception in the 1960s has had a special place for the world of orality, and this has grown into an interest in "oral theology" in the young churches. The phenomena of oral literature was expounded upon at length by the founders of the négritude movement Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire and Léon Damas, as well as by Alexis Kagamé, Tshibangu and Tshiamalenga. Senghor wrote poetry to try to revivify African oral modes of thought. Additionally the négritude scholars sought out the traditional elders of their own ethnic groups and transcribed into writing the ancient oral traditions which were in danger of disappearing from the world entirely. A notable example is found in the works of Camara Laye, whose book Guardian of the Word - Kouma Lafôlô Kouma recounts the traditional legends and oral history of the Malinke people of Mali.(2) This work had the effect of preserving and revaluing the ancient oral histories. In spite of the errors and distortions they may have been guilty of, this revaluing of the oral history is something of enduring value.
Parallel to the works of the négritude scholars was the more sympathetic strain of anthropology developing in the 1950s and '60s, which among other emphases understood African cultures as "primary oral" cultures. While it is often now said that their work ethnocentrically derogated the cultures they regarded as "preliterate", to be fair, there were many who regarded the oral world of Africa with great respect. Jan Vansina, a pioneer in the field of African oral tradition, held it in high regard. Marcel Griaule's transcription of Dogon tradition in Conversations With Ogotemmêli (1966) remains a classic. The unheard-of complexity in the Dogon cosmogony recorded there brought Griaule into disrepute when he first published it! He was accused of lying, for most Euroamericans could not believe that Africans possessed anything so complex and sophisticated.
(iii): Orality and the Anglophone Theologians
The anglophone theologians also stressed the importance of orality in Africa. One of Mbiti's first published works, Akamba Stories (1966) recorded the folk stories of his people. Idowu mentions the importance of orality in both his 1962 and 1973 (84-86) works. While the anglophones spoke of orality as an integral part of the ATR lifeworld, they did not produce as great a volume of monographs on "oral literature" as did the francophone African sector in this period. Anglophone development of this topic was to reach higher levels at a later time, in the period I have called the "third phase" of African theology.
Mbiti sought to revalue and to promote orality in such articles as "Cattle are Born with Ears, Their Horns Grow Later" (1978a). Here, he states that among his people, the Akamba of Kenya, the worst condition of a person is described by the saying "so and so has no ears"(Mbiti 1978a, 15). To say this is to say that the person has cut him or herself off from the normal world of social interaction, becoming antisocial. One may see a biblical parallel to this in the words of Jesus recorded in Mark's gospel, when he chided his hearers with the words: "Are your hearts hardened...having ears do you not hear?" (Mark 8:17b-18). To Mbiti, the responsiveness of orality is key. The same phenomenon is documented for the Akan of Ghana, who have a set of liturgical responses for the installation of a new ruler. The people chant together: "we do not allow deaf ears", to which the ruler elect must answer "mate" meaning "I have heard and understood" (Platvoet 1985, 185).
Gabriel Setiloane, begins his 1986 work African Theology: an Introduction with a section on the centrality of oral discourse in African society. He says:
...illiteracy does not necessarily spell dullness nor ignorance, nor even an inability to carry on with the arts. In fact, literacy has destroyed certain forms of art and dulled some very enviable and important human qualities. Two vital qualities are memory and story-telling. Many of us can witness in I own lifetimes to this downward trend (Setiloane 1986, 1).
Pobee goes even further to develop reflexion on the significance of orality in Africa in an article entitled "Oral Theology and Christian Oral Tradition: Challenge to Our Traditional Archival Concept" (Pobee 1989d). Here, he elaborates the importance of respecting the oral culture of the grassroots level of society.
In summary, I have noted the concern for oral literature which has been central in African exposition of ATR since the inception of these studies in the 1950s, particularly among the francophone African theologians. Additionally, there has been a new development of a consciously theological reflexion on African orality since 1978, particularly noticeable among the anglophone African theologians, a development which may be understood as one outgrowth of the "third phase" period of African theology.
2: Olfactory Language
(i) in African Tradition
There is also a less prominent but significant emphasis on the use of all the senses in ATR, and the Independent churches, e.g. the use of olfactory aids in healing rituals and exorcism, olfaction as a means of discernment, or the use of therapeutic touch by healers. The sensory world of traditional Africa may well be closer to that of the Hebrew bible, a fact which would help to explain the clear preference for the Old Testament which Africans almost universally express. The similarities in world view have implications for the biblical studies now being done by Africans. For to the extent that African exegetes have retained the traditional life-world, or can reenter it through their research, they can be expected to open up new paths of understanding for the rest of us.
Many works have commented upon the use of olfaction in rites of passage. The African theologian K. Enang, for example, notes in his 1979 work Salvation in an African Background the use of olfaction in transition rites in the traditions of his people. Enang cites favourably the use of incense and perfume smell in combatting witches in an African Independent Church (Enang 1979, 218). Sometimes olfaction merely marks transition states, other times it seems actually to invoke them. Amongst the Azande of Sudan, for example, a newborn child is fumigated with the aromatic smoke from various plants in order to usher it into the world, thus marking a transition into the new state of being. Other ethnic groups also fumigate newborn children and in some cases the process goes on for several weeks.
Omoyajowo points out that the African traditional worshipper who comes to an AIC is made to feel conceptually at home:
As with the diviner, he is even given concrete objects to aid his prayers and restore his confidence - holy water, candles, incense, consecrated oil, psalms to rehearse, Bible passages to recite (Omoyajowo 1973, 90).
Here, all the senses are brought into play, not merely sight. This type of worship experience is understood to be part and parcel of the African oral-lifeworld, in which visuality does not dominate in the same manner which one finds in the modern west.
This is no mere matter of idle speculation: in fact it is usually cited by African theologians as a key to understanding why the AICs have gripped the imagination of Africans at the grassroots in a way the mission churches never have. The AICs stressed the importance of bringing the gospel of Christ to Africans on their own terms, African terms. This meant in practice, that concrete aids to worship that engaged all of the senses were employed; that long periods of literacy training before baptism were abandoned; and that African priorities such as healing were appropriated.
Anthropologist Michael Kirwen alerted me to the existence in ATR of "chief sniffers" who sniff every participant at the entrance door of the worship area, in order to discern whether the person's intentions are good or evil. Many diviners claim to have this power, up to the present day. I have interviewed two such diviners in Kenya, Kakwini Muva of the Akamba people of central Kenya, and Maria Atieno of the Luo people of western Kenya. Both diviners attributed the ability to discern through sniffing to an ancestral spirit, who calls upon the individual to follow the life of a diviner. This, Maria Atieno observed, can and does happen even to Christians. Her own background is Roman Catholic.
"Chief sniffers" are found as well in some African Independent Churches, such as the Legio Maria of Kenya. Members of this church call the sniffers "juchekos" or "ng'wechos", and they claim that these persons are specially gifted or empowered to sniff out evil "through the power of St. Joseph". My interview with a Luo diviner, however, (Maria Atieno, 1996) suggested that the Legio Maria's practice of sniffing is actually derived from the divination practices of Luo traditional religion. My interviews with a number of church members have so far failed to reveal any known connection between this practice and any biblical precedent or reference. For this reason it would seem that the diviner's explanation of its origin amongst the Legio Maria seems more likely, though more investigation is certainly called for.
Michael Kirwen participated in an experimental Roman Catholic liturgy which incorporated chief sniffers, but he reports that this liturgy was not approved by the Vatican (Kirwen, personal communication 1992). The presence of chief sniffers in ATR, the AICs and elsewhere suggests that olfaction in many African religions is considered a means of discernment in many respects superior to any other sense, for it can reveal important things not accessible through any other sense.
(ii) Parallels in the Hebrew Bible
The use of incense and perfume to combat witchcraft or evil spirits may be understood as similar to the use of the smell from burning a certain fish, which drove away the evil demon Asmodeus in the Book of Tobit (8:3) in the Old Testament Apocrypha.
The phenomenon of a specially gifted olfactory discernment might well remind us of Isaiah 11:3, which says of the coming messiah "He shall smell [jyr] in the fear of YHWH, he shall not judge by what his eyes see or by what his ears hear but he shall judge the poor of the earth with equity." The verbal root jyr in the hiphil stem means, in all lexicons, "to smell, perceive odour".(3) Ancient Jewish commentators such as Rava and Ibn Ezra had no trouble understanding the passage in precisely that manner, (see Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 93b, and Ibn Ezra on Isaiah). So also, the Protestant reformer John Calvin understood it to mean that the Messiah would smell in the fear of the Lord (see Calvin's Isaiah Commentary). But modern biblical translators have refused to translate it that way, preferring rather to render it "His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord" (R.S.V.) or even, as in the case of the New English Bible, leaving the verse out of the translation altogether! Often the modern exegetes have referred to this verse as "dittography" from the previous verse (cf. BDB Lexicon, 926), even though the words of the previous verse are quite different. Note that while many techniques of the "higher criticism" came into common use in the second half of the nineteenth century, the fact that textual transmission errors could be caused by "dittography" had been known by biblical commentators for centuries. Yet the ancient commentators did not conclude that Isaiah 11:3 was a dittography, probably because in their context there was no reason to seek an "explanation" for a problem which was not a problem in their lifeworld's conceptualization of the senses.(4)
An approach favoured by many western commentators since 1850 has been to assume that Is. 11:3 could never have made sense with the word "smell" in it, and so to conclude that the text must have become corrupted in the transmission process. Then these exegetes attempt to reconstruct the steps of the process through which the text became corrupt. Typical of this type of approach is that of Jeremiah Unterman, in his article entitled: "The (Non)Sense of Smell In Is. 11:3" published in Hebrew Studies 33 (1992) 17-23.
We may partially explain the attribution of fine discernment powers to olfaction in terms of its unique properties: (i) it is of all the senses the only one which can travel around corners without diminution; (ii) it is of all the senses the only one which can determine whether something is rotten inside while the outside still appears sound; (iii) it can determine changes in the chemical make up of the atmosphere; (iv) amongst the senses, smell is the most evocative of memory. With these unique properties, it should not surprise us that many cultures have understood a strong link between smell and special discernment powers: the ability to discern things which cannot be known through any other means.
(iii): An Olfaction Avoidance Syndrome?
In Amos 5:21 the verb jyr was translated as "smell" by the Geneva Bible of 1560 and also by the King James Version of 1611: "I will not smell in your solemn assemblies." Thus it is apparent that in sixteenth and seventeenth century England the sensorium had not yet shifted significantly from its relatively balanced state wherein any of the senses could equally as well be used as metaphors of knowledge. Also, John Calvin's understanding of Is. 11:3 indicates that in sixteenth century France the sensorium had not yet shifted significantly. But by the twentieth century the intuitive avoidance of olfactory language had become so strong that the R.S.V. translators render the term smell as "delight." The history of the exegesis of Is. 11:3 has shown that a tendency to avoid the mention of smell in connection with the messiah, or with God, is a feature of the worldview of the modern translator and not of the ancient: another indication that the sensorium has shifted (Ritchie 2000).
There are several other instances of avoidance of olfactory language in modern English translations, worthy of brief mention here. In the R.S.V. translation of I Sam 26:19 David says to Saul: "If it is the Lord who has stirred you up against me, may he accept an offering...". The Hebrew text reads "may he smell an offering...". Here again, the original and correct meaning becomes obscured by a modern translator, even though the connection between the Lord's smelling an offering and acceptance/ reconciliation has already been established where the same verb is used in the Genesis 8 and Leviticus 26 passages.
In Judges 16:9 (R.S.V.) we read: "he [Samson] snapped the bowstrings, as a string of tow snaps when it touches the fire." The Hebrew text reads "when it smells fire". In Job 39:25 we read: "when the trumpet sounds he [the war horse] says 'Aha!' He smells the battle from afar, the thunder of the captains and the shouting."
In Genesis 3:19, the passage in which God curses humanity, the Hebrew (BHS) reads: mjl lkat iypa tuzb . The word aph is usually translated "nose", but also can refer to the entire face, and sometimes to "anger", derived from the nose. Most English translations render this passage as "In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread" (RSV, NRSV). No English translations render the term aph as nose here. But the Nigerian biblical studies scholar, Modupe Oduyoye does chose this alternative. In his Genesis commentary he renders: "With the sweat of your nose you will eat food..." (Oduyoye 1984, 14). Regardless of whether Oduyoye's choice is a "correct" one or not (however one might choose to determine correctness) is of less importance than the fact that he chose to render it this way. For while there is a choice open to exegetes here because of the semantic range of aph, it is significant that Oduyoye, as an African scholar, is not affected by the "olfaction avoidance syndrome" which I have identified in the works of modern western exegetes, and he is thus free to employ the traditional African sensorial balance in his translations.
In European speech, there is evidence to indicate that much olfactory language dropped out of the language, or was suppressed, in the middle of the nineteenth century. The term "nosegay" disappeared from English dictionaries at this time, as well as the term "to nose" used as a verb with the meaning of "to discern". English olfactory language has thus become impoverished in the modern era, while most other domains of the language, particularly those having to do with science and technology, have greatly increased in volume and complexity.
I conclude that it is the unconscious bias against olfaction which prevents modern western translators from translating it.(5) This bias stems from the sensorial paradigm gap between the modern western "worldview" and the lifeworld of the ancient Hebrews. The modern western paradigm, as Edward Said has so ably indicated in his work entitled Orientalism, is profoundly visualist and textualist. This paradigm assumes the priority of the visual mode of knowledge and equates seeing, especially the seeing of texts, with knowing. Modern discourse so profoundly embeds this priority that the use of the non-visual senses in connection with modes of knowing are made to appear "nonsensical". Thus the avoidance in 20th century scholarship of any association between olfaction and "knowing" in any real sense.
The above analysis would explain the various convolutions modern exegetes have involved themselves in while explaining, expurgating and reconstructing Is. 11:3. For the same reason, I would expect an African sensitized to African traditional life to be relatively free of the visualist and textualist paradigm and therefore enabled to approach the verse in a manner similar to that of the ancient Hebrews, if we can determine that the African sensorium more closely resembles the Hebrew balance than either one resembles the modern western sensorium. Clearly, one cannot simply assume that because a phenomenon happens in one culture that therefore it also happens in another. But here we have sufficient evidence to conclude that Africans and the Hebrews had in common a more evenly distributed sensorium, as opposed to the modern western sensorium which is heavily weighted towards the visual.
From the above it is evident that a sensorial anthropology will give translators and hermeneuts a wider range of options to choose from. For when moderns are confronted with and take seriously the implications of a shifted sensorium then we may realize that many so-called "problems" of exegesis are not problems of the ancient world, but problems we have imposed on ourselves as a result of our ocularcentric worldview. In the process of challenging the sensory hierarchies of modernity this knowledge bursts existing artificial notions of what is "possible" according to current canons of "rationality" and presents us with new solutions. In this work the contributions of African theologians such as Enang, Omoyajowo and Modupe Oduyoye have already proved invaluable, and there is promise of much more in the future because of the orientation of African theology towards the exploration of African religions. It is of interest that most of the works I have cited in this section on olfaction were published since 1979, in the period I have called the "third phase" of African theology.
3: Gustation and Transition
(i): In African Culture:
I have written elsewhere (Ritchie 1990) that the Hausa people of Northern Nigeria exhibit in their folktales and proverbs a stronger propensity for gustatory metaphors of knowledge than is apparent in modern western thought. The Hausa have a folktale in which five tastes are the principal actors. The tastes, Salt, Pepper, Nari (a savory peanut sauce), Onion Leaves, and Daudawar Batso (a special sauce with a pungent smell) transform themselves into young women and go out into the world to find a certain young man whom they know little about except that he is "beautiful". In the end it is Daudawar Batso who gains the right to marry the man. What is striking about the story is that its principal actors are tastes, an idea which seems strange to modern western people, though not to the Hausa, who have retained the story in their oral repertoire because it remains meaningful to them.
My research in Hausa folktales showed a frequently recurring phenomenon: not only do the vast majority of them centre on eating something, but most also reach a point where category change is invoked by eating something (Ritchie 1990, 1991). After the object is eaten, the story goes off in an entirely new and unpredictable direction. Anthropologists (cf. Darrah 1985) have indicated that in Hausa the verb ci "to eat" is a "root metaphor" - a metaphor which serves as an uncommonly fertile root for other metaphors and constitutes a major contribution to the social construction of reality within a culture.
A common practice in many African ethnic groups is that of spitting out water to represent the expulsion of a curse, or of witchcraft. This practice is shown in the anthropological documentary film "Witchcraft Among the Azande"(1982). Here, a woman who has been accused of employing witchcraft against her rival is made to drink water from a calabash and then spit it out, saying that she harbours no evil against her rival. Clearly, the words are not enough on their own, even though all students of African culture agree that words have dynamic power in African thought. There must be a physical gesture that marks the expulsion of witchcraft, and the expulsion of water ingested in the ceremony is considered adequate in this context.
(ii): In Biblical Culture:
Parallels to the phenomenon of category change or transition states invoked by eating something may be seen in the Hebrew bible. Moses, Aaron and seventy elders of Israel share a meal with God on Mt. Sinai to mark their covenant with the deity with whom their relationship has fundamentally changed (Ex 24:11). Jeremiah says: "Thy words were found, and I ate them, and thy words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart..."(15:16). Ezekiel is told to swallow a scroll as part of equipment for service (Ezek. 3:3). Here the transformation is most dramatic. After Ezekiel swallows the scroll, he is equipped for a new life of service. That the prophetic tradition continued to understand scroll swallowing as a strong expression of ingestion of the word of God and of inner transformation is evidenced in the New Testament book of Revelation, where the author is also told to swallow a scroll containing the word of God, in a manner reminiscent of that found in Ezekiel (Rev. 10:2-11). In both cases the scroll is found sweet in the mouth but bitter in the stomach, for while the words would seem right and good at their first reception, the task of carrying them to a hardened and stubborn people would bring bitterness.
Also in the New Testament there are the words of Jesus at the Last Supper: "take, eat, this is my body." (Matt. 26:26). The importance of fellowship meals has been noted in the Near East in particular, as well as in several religions and in a number of African cultures.
Parallels to the conception of category change marked by the spitting out of something ingested might be found in the words to the angel of the church in Laodicea in the book of Revelation (3:16): "So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth." In a sense, the Laodicean Christians have become a kind of curse to the Lord, and therefore they are to be "spewed out" or expelled because of their lukewarmness.
In the Hebrew bible and in some Orthodox Jewish communities up to the present day the custom of conferring blessing on persons by spitting on them is reported, at weddings in particular. Some traditional African cultures have the same custom, thus indicating that spitting does not universally signify curse or expulsion of curse. This particular custom is not clearly evident in the New Testament or in most subsequent Christian traditions. This then, is another example of African tradition bearing closer resemblance to Hebrew tradition than either does to the modern western or Christian traditions. The symbolism is that of conferring the water of life to another, a particularly poignant symbolic gesture in countries where water is in short supply and is thus a highly valued commodity.
These brief examples serve to show that gustatory metaphors are found apt for marking transition states in African cultures and in biblical culture, even if this is not witnessed in modern western culture. Today we witness the trivialization of potentially rich custom through the promotion of fast foods, which you can eat while driving your car or rushing around. On plastic or styrofoam plates with plastic knives, forks and spoons we eat food in individually wrapped plastic packets. This is the antithesis of transformation. From here, we could move into an analysis of modern television culture, where no event, thing or person is considered "real" until it has been trivialized on television for thirty seconds, but such analysis lies outside of the scope of the present work.
4: Tactility
(i): African Culture:
Areas in which the importance of touch has been explored are the areas of African medicine, special rites, and in African sexuality. The power of touching with or pressing with the hand is considered an integral part of the healing phenomenon in many African societies. Akama tells us (1985, 37) that in the healing rituals he studied, the sound of a drum is employed, and as it is sounding "the particular part of the body believed to be affected by the sickness (which the Igbe interpret as evil) may be pressed by the votary with his or her hand rubbing the sacred kaolin powder on the spot." While Akama's example comes from the Igbe cult of the Isoko people in Southern Nigeria, similar examples are cited from all over sub-Saharan Africa.
Belief in the restorative power of touch in ritual is also widespread in the AICs. Wyllie tells us that in the Ghanaian "Spiritist" (AIC) churches he investigated, healers "slap the afflicted part of the patient's body as they command the sickness to depart in the name of Jesus"(Wyllie 1985, 157). This practice may be a somewhat more aggressive version of the biblical practice of the "laying on of hands," as much as it is a continuation of African traditional practice.
Many African ethnic groups traditionally restricted male-female touch, as it is considered to be highly charged or "loaded". Fernandez, writing on the Bwiti religion of Gabon, has shown how the whole body is represented in the shrine of the cult, and he relates the symbolism to the human body. But in Bwiti, he says, though the symbolism is intensely intimate and sexual, no actual physical contact takes place between participants, and the cult is rather "puritanical" (Fernandez 1990). African scholars had criticised Fernandez's previous work for sensationalizing a phenomenon which is extremely rare in Africa (the Bwiti cult involves the use of drugs). In his 1990 article, Fernandez attempts to counter some of the sensationalization of African sexuality which western observers have been guilty of, by emphasizing the puritanical aspect of the cult. The area remains controversial.
In summary, the communication both of contagion and curse on the one hand, and on the other, of blessing and healing through the hands of spiritually gifted persons and of ordinary persons is very familiar to Africans.
(ii): Biblical Culture:
In the Hebrew bible we find that touch is important enough to be regulated heavily, in regard to sexual matters, and in regard to the various items considered to be unclean in Hebrew culture. Of the 613 mitzvot (commands) of the Torah a large per- centage have to do with not touching things, such as carrion, unclean animals and foods, etc. It is emphasized that contagion is most dangerously communicated through touch, hence the prohibitions.
The hand was used metonymically as referent for "power" or "control", as in Joshua 10:32: "and the Lord gave Lachish into the hand of Israel, and he took it on the second day...", and as in hundreds of other verses. In fact, concordances generally contain five pages of fine print listings of verses containing the word "hand", of which a larger fraction uses it in this metonymic fashion than in any other way. This is, perhaps, not surprising; but in modern English the word is seldom used that way, unless one is trying to speak archaically in order to produce a special effect.
Laying on of hands was employed as a sign at times of commissioning a person for a new role, as is indicated in Num. 8:10; 27:18; Deut. 34:9; Acts 6:6 and 13:3; I Tim. 4:14; and 5:22. In these instances touch marks and possibly invokes a transition. In the Acts of the Apostles, in particular, laying on of hands is frequently associated with new believers receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit: 8:17,18; 19:6. Laying hands upon a person was the accepted means for the transmission of blessing. This is found in Matt. 19:13-15. An alternate form, the lifting up of hands in a sign of blessing is found in Luke 24:50 and Acts 1:12.
We find that healing power is positively communicated through touch, more than through any other means, exceeding even that of words of blessing, and certainly more than beneficent gaze. For examples see Matt. 8:3,15; 9:18,25; Mark 1:41; 5:23; 6:5; 8:25; 16:18; Luke 4:40; 5:13; 13:13; Acts 4:30; 5:12; 9:12,17; 9:41; 28:8. In addition to healings "signs and wonders" were said to have been done by the hands of Jesus (Mark 6:2) and by the Apostles in Acts 14:3 and 19:11. Many of the cures effected by prophets and priests only became effective at the moment of the touch of the healer's hands. This demonstrates that while the other senses may prepare the person for the action of YHWH, touch was understood as the most intimate of the sensory modalities, making the experience real for the believer in a dynamic way.
The power also of curse was transferred through the hands of priests and prophets. The curse of the sins of the nation were transferred through the hands of the high priest to the head of the "scapegoat" on Yom Kippur (Lev 16:21).(6)
The biblical word yadah meaning "to know" is the idiom for sexual intercourse, the penultimate experience of tactility. Here there is evidence of a culture that understands touch as an equivalent of "knowledge", of understanding, one more example of the ways in which Israel's understanding of consciousness is distributed throughout the body more evenly than in modern western thinking. However, sexual behaviour was heavily regulated and male-female touch outside of marriage was restricted.
5: Sight
Most African cultures had a colour scheme consisting primarily of black, white and red. Pauline Ryan's (1976) work on Hausa colour terms indicates that among the Hausa it is black and white which are used most frequently, with far less attention to red. Other colours are known and referred to only by those employed in specialized occupations which require finer distinctions, such as the dyeing industry at Kano. I have demonstrated elsewhere (Ritchie 1990) that the inattention to red and other colours indicate a relatively less elaborated concern for colour distinctions and for the visual dimension as a whole.
Other evidence is found in proverbs, such as the following: "Ganin Dala ba shiga birni ba ne. = Seeing Dala [a suburb of Kano] is not entering the city [Kano], i.e. seeing your goal is not the same as reaching it." (Whitting 1940, 60). Even more decisive is: "gani ba ci ba" which means "seeing is not eating", (Whitting 1940, 52) a proverb which indicates that eating is preferred over sight as the proof of a thing's integrity.
John Mbiti tells us that to Africans the universe is alive and dynamic: "The invisible world presses hard upon the visible: one speaks to the other, and Africans 'see' that invisible universe when they look at, hear or feel the visible and tangible world" (Mbiti 1969, 56-57). This means that the universe that one sees is only a small fraction of what is really there; thus the invisible universe is to be understood as just as real as the visible one. A thing is not made valuable by its being visible, and the value of a thing is not to be found in its visibility. So to Africans, the proof of a thing is not in the seeing.
The foregoing evidence should not be taken to mean that sight is unimportant to Africans. Some individual Africans today might tell you that sight is the most important of the senses (though this may be due in large part to modern influences). The literature on the Hausa indicates that traditionally it was considered important to make sure that one's physical appearance was one of glowing health, as this was a sign of one's vitality. The point I are making is that in traditional African culture visuality did not usually have the elaboration, and certainly not the controlling function, or the empirical finality which it exerts in modern western culture. Once again, I am not talking about innate mental capacities at all, but about actual expressed preferences.
6: Implications of the African Sensorium
for World Theology and Anthropology
We have written in chapter 2 of the development of a new literate class in Africa. In this section I shall explore some of the implications of literacy for human thought itself.
The oral mode of communication and its uniqueness have been explored by Walter Ong, Jack Goody and others. They have outlined several phenomena unleashed in a culture when literacy becomes prominent and when the eye becomes the primary adjudicator of truth and knowledge. Of great importance is the dynamic of story-telling, an art which seems largely lost in modern western culture.
We may also point out the damage done when the communicative "Rubicon" of transmitting oral narrative into written text is crossed. When oral tradition is rendered into writing it inevitably decontextualizes and makes static that which was once fluid and contextual. The rabbis knew about this problem and openly worried about it at length at the time the Talmud was committed to writing in the sixth century C.E.. Much has been written about the impact of this decontextualization. It can turn that which was once story into an unchangeable commandment written in stone.
Scholars have identified many other changes resulting from the transition from orality to literacy. With the invention of writing new forms of information packaging made communication more efficient and portable. Goody (1977) and Yoffee (1979) note that writing brought us also the list, the table (that is paired lists forming rows as well as columns), the matrix (a more complex table) together with the development of more precise notions of "logic" (in the specialized sense), including the syllogism and other types of argument and of proof (Goody 1986 xiii). The literacy hypothesis holds that concepts of "rationality" itself are bound up in this, along with the western definition of "the other".(7) While recent studies of the impact of literacy (e.g. Denny 1991) demonstrate that Walter Ong and Jack Goody had somewhat exaggerated the importance of literacy, particularly in their claim that it makes abstraction possible, the central thrust of their claims still stand: that literacy brings decontextualization. In fact, Denny (1991) holds that most of the claims they made for literacy amount to one type of decontextualization or another.
We have noted the loss of ability to understand Biblical texts the way they were meant to be understood, and the consequent rendering nonsensical of things which ought easily to be understood. This comes partially out of the decontextualization process, but even apart from contextual elements, once worldview has shifted in such a manner as we find today, even the restoration of contextual elements within the scope of biblical studies as it has been practised in the past one hundred and fifty years cannot recover much of the original meaning because the shift in the sensorium has pushed many concepts out of the realm of "possibility" according to the current paradigm of knowledge.
This means that the historical-critical method along with all of the other methods developed since Wellhausen, cannot go far enough to uncover the lost meanings. In biblical scholarship since 1970 anthropology has increasingly been used to enhance our understanding of the biblical text. Pioneering works were those by Norman Gottwald (The Tribes of Yahweh, 1979), B. Malina, Rogerson and many others. While these studies have gone a long way to open up new avenues for understanding the biblical text, it would be unreasonable to expect them to explain the textual conundrums mentioned above because the existing paradigm in anthropology itself is too closely identified with the textualist and visualist paradigm of modern western culture.
Anthropologist David Howes asserts that anthropology was on the verge of a rediscovery of the senses in the 1960s, but since the ascendancy of Clifford Geertz in the 1970s (see Islam Observed, 1968) a new and more profoundly visualist, textualist mode of inquiry has arisen, a mode which the current postmodernist discourse has done little to ameliorate.(8) Apart from the exposés of Valentin Mudimbe (1988) and Edward Said (1978, 1983), the visualist/textualist paradigm in anthropology has been criticized by anthropologist James Clifford's 1986 work Writing Culture.
An additional problem with current anthropology has been expressed by the Ghanaian anthropologist M. Owusu, (1978) who tells us that western anthropologists have paid inadequate attention to learning the language of the people they are studying. He points out that even Margaret Mead, who was one of the first anthropologists to insist that her students must do field work, actually advised against becoming a "virtuoso" in the native language. She feared that if she insisted upon a high level of language fluency it would scare potential students away from anthropology altogether. She asked them only to learn how to ask twenty basic questions. One of the consequences of this policy has been the serious errors, mistakes and distortions made by anthropologists about indigenous cultures, not the least of which are those made by Margaret Mead herself in her famous work Coming of Age in Samoa, which has now been entirely discredited with the confession by her major informant that she had lied to her (Freeman 1989).
Owusu and Mudimbe have pointed out that anthropologists seldom spent longer than one year in the field studying an ethnic group, and many studies, such as Coming of Age in Samoa were based upon less than three months of field work! So discourse on Africa by African scholars now rejects the foreign-manufactured discourse which pretended to define African reality without even bothering to learn the language in which that reality is expressed by Africans. The devastating critiques of Africanist discourse put forward by Mudimbe and Owusu assert that discourse upon Africa ought to be done by Africans themselves, and call into serious question all discourse about Africans by non-Africans.
7: To Restore the Balance?
Michel Foucault has been a leader in demonstrating the distortions brought about by our increasingly ocularcentric worldview. His pioneering works on punishment (Foucault 1979), on modern medicine (1973), and other topics, have exposed the role of the gaze in the exercise of power. He shows (1979) how Bentham's model prison, the "Panopticon", which had a central point from which the guard could observe all the inmates but not be seen himself, reveals the preoccupation with sight as the medium of control par excellence. Recent feminist critique has also begun to elaborate on the role the male gaze has played in the oppression and control of women (see Ramazanoglu 1992 and Charles Davis "The Male Gaze and the Eye of Power", personal copy from the author).
Attention to sensorial "democracy" may help us to restore the lost sensorial balance and regain a more incorporative approach, but it will mean a long process of "resensorialization" going beyond the methods of traditional anthropology as well. For the "dead-ends" encountered by Biblical exegetes in their exploration of new methodologies in order to explain "problem" texts cannot be helped much by an anthropology which is enclosed by the same "hermeneutical seal" that encloses biblical exegetes: that of the modern western worldview with its sensorially distorted ratio.
David Howes has issued an appeal for a "return to our senses" which would enable anthropology to understand the lifeworld of societies under study in a new way (Howes 1990). There is an error at the very base of a discipline which defines itself at the start as the study of "nonliterate" societies. The very definition of anthropology creates a stumbling block at the outset. For it is primarily the contextuality, fluidity, the humanity fostered by orality that is missed because virtually all objects of study in the field exhibit the same characteristic: otherwise they would never have been chosen as an object of study in the first place. But as an "other" they exhibit "difference" only in relation to the dominant white paradigm of modern western culture.
Returning, briefly, to the historical-critical method, Sr. Teresa Okure of the Catholic Institute of West Africa opined at the 1992 EATWOT workshop on biblical hermeneutics that the critical methods developed in the past one hundred and fifty years have had the effect of cutting the people off from the life-giving power of the text; it is not real to them. The power of text as story needs to be reappropriated. She was echoed in her concern by most other participants in the workshop, from Africa and other parts of the third world. She was countermanded, however, by George Soares, an Indian Jesuit, who asserted that the historical-critical method had liberated him from being a very conservative clergy man, and therefore he would not want to give it up completely. The discussion then turned to ways the bible can be used in a liberative manner, in a manner which does not shut out the common people, but rather brings them life in their concrete everyday experience.
Teresa Okure has also observed that there is a dearth of biblical scholars amongst African theologians; the major emphasis has been upon systematic theology. This, she says, remains a serious handicap. The problem of the disjuncture of worldview between Africa and Europe remains acute, and S.O. Abogunrin, one of Africa's best New Testament scholars, claims that the historical critical method can provide Africans at last with the tools they need to pierce through the hermeneutical barriers caused by the cultural baggage of the European missionaries and biblical exegetes. Through gaining a knowledge of the biblical languages and of the biblical lifeworld, Africans scholars are now gaining a more direct access to the ancient text, without the intervening mediation of European cultural assumptions, which, no matter how well intentioned they may be, can only have a distancing and distorting effect. There is ample evidence that not only Africans but also Europeans and Americans feel cut off from the biblical story by excessive intellectualizing. It lies beyond the scope of this work to determine whether the historical-critical method in itself cuts the masses off from the biblical text. But there is a significant body of literature in the field of narrative studies which suggests that critical method ceases to serve people well when the exegete's research pushes him or her into fragmenting any sense of a story. In this discussion, then, the conscious programme of the African theologians towards the retention of orality in Africa becomes crucial. For the sense of a narrative whole is maintained through a conscious striving to retain it, and this is precisely the work which African Christian theologians have set for themselves.
Ultimately, we may learn more about the nature of language and of meaning itself as a result of this programme. For when we understand that olfactory metaphors were chosen by many cultures as the best way of describing the special discernment powers of a messiah or of God, then we may also understand that it is most appropriate because this means of discernment pierces beyond mere appearances or mere words, below the surface into what a person really is. For smell is notoriously uncontrollable, despite the best efforts of modern technology to sanitize, deodourize, and control it; a humbling indication of human finitude. Although all human language ultimately falls short in describing this experience, perhaps olfactory language is, in most ways, the best suited to it as a metaphor for this reason. In this context, it is interesting to recall what it was that "the messiah" of Isaiah 11:3 would do with his extraordinary olfactory discernment. Vs. 4 tells us that "with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth." The connection with liberative models of theology is obvious, and this has been an increasing concern of African theologians in the "third phase", as my other chapters have suggested.
One may ask if it really is practical or possible for us in the modern world to return to an imagined state of pristine preliteracy, when the advantages of literacy are so obvious and so immense. I am not arguing that we should, for it is impossible to turn back the hands of the clock. But we can sensitize ourselves to the issues, become more aware of what we are losing as a result of the shifted sensorium and try to reintegrate the insights of a more balanced sensorium into our lives. Some are enthusiastic about the possibility of new technology restoring the balance. Marshall McLuhan spoke of the "global village" created by T.V.. McLuhan's understanding of the nature of T.V. was wrong in several respects. But more recent advocates point to the inception of "virtual reality suits" which will be able to reproduce not just two sense modalities but all five. This is one possibility, but I am sceptical about the possibility of this very expensive technology bringing about great cultural shifts significant enough to undo the damage done by ocularcentrism. Literacy brought about cultural shifts precisely when technology made it more cheaply and easily available to the masses via the printing press. We will need a more determined effort, a conscious effort on our part to reintegrate sensory balance, and apart from this, I doubt that any technology will provide the necessary impetus on its own.
The discussion of biblical hermeneutics done by the poor raises some serious challenges for the field of hermeneutics in general. This approach seeks to value and respect the poor, those without writing, by making their oral discourse traditions carry just as much weight as those of the mighty and powerful. In order to do this, John Pobee says we must cast off the "Christendom mentality" wherein history is what the powerful ones do:
Even here the rediscovery of the biblical insight of the preferential option for the poor must inform our archival work. This conversion experience means a move away from the establishment mentality to search for the events of the grassroots (Pobee 1989d, 92).
The "preferential option for the poor" here is a category to be applied in ways which have not only economic implications, but also epistemological implications, which reach to the heart of our "ways of knowing" and our ways of being in the world. These challenges go to the very core of what it means to be human. Therefore, in their attempts to recover the orality of African traditional life in order to address a serious lacuna in current Protestant and Catholic church life, the African theologians are contributing a much needed dynamic to the wider world as well.
* * * * * * *
1. In 1988-89 I was involved in a research group funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the purpose of which was to investigate the relative weight given to each of the five senses in various cultures around the world. The ultimate goal was to create a sensory map of the world. We paid special attention to the metaphors of knowledge in each language, for the metaphors of "knowing" come the closest to telling us how a given culture understands and/or locates knowledge, whether it is thought to be located in the eye, as the modern English phrase "seeing is believing" would have it, or whether it is in the taste buds, as in the proverb "seeing is not eating", a saying of the Hausa people of northern Nigeria.
2. See also Laye's 1971 work Radiance of the King.
3. Brown Driver and Briggs. 1907/1978. Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament Oxford: Clarendon. p. 926. ]] jyr occurs as a verb eleven times in the Hebrew bible: Gen 8:21, 27:27; Ex 30:38; Lev. 26:31; Deut 4:28; Judges 16:9; I Sam 26:19; Job 39:25; Psalm 115:6; Isaiah 11:3; Amos 5:21.
4. I elaborate more fully on the scholarly treatment of these texts in: "The Nose Knows: Bodily Knowing in Isaiah 11:3" in Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 87, March 2000, pp. 59-71.
5. Similarly, Classen notes Peter Gay's comment in The Education of the Senses, 415, that when Thomas Carlyle's Journey to Germany, Autumn 1858 was edited by his nephew, the word "see" was substituted for the word "smell" in a phrase concerning the eagerness of a waiting crowd to "smell the Prince of Prussia." (Classen 1991, 60).
6. Note also the use of incense in this passage during the atonement ritual, vs. 12.
7. Goody (1986 xvii) goes further, to say: "Here, as I think with law, the written book leads us to different ideas of what religion is, ideas that also relate to substantial matters of form and content. Form, because of the fixing of a boundary to 'belief' as well as to practice, which brings out questions to do with the nature of belief, truth and of conversion. Content, because of the tendency of writing to over-generalize norms. In both ways religion acquires an increased measure of autonomy in relation to other aspects of the social system. But the emergence of religion as one of the 'great organizations' (not simply as a partially differentiated aspect of, say, intra-familial interaction) implies autonomy at another level: the autonomy of the church as an organization... The 'great organizations' with their literate tradition acquire a certain independence of their own, promoted by their custodianship of the books as well as their interest in earthly continuity and other-worldly salvation."
8. Foucault's works have been helpful in the critique of the textualist-visualist paradigm, but there are some questions about whether Foucault is a true "postmodernist."