Ancestral figures in carved basalt, the larger one about 108 cms. high, from Ekoi country in south-eastern Nigeria. Drawn in the bush before its removal to the Jos Museum, the larger is from the lands of the Nnam people. Many such shaped and engraved stones exist in this country, but little is known of their origin.
This constant shaping of new identities and separate systems was a worldwide phenomenon, so that early societies in different continents must often have resembled each other in their underlying concepts. This indeed is what modern research affirms for later societies. Every group has needed to define itself in order to believe in itself. So as to enter a firm claim upon the future, every group has had to give itself a name and heritage. But this has supposed agreement on a common group-origin, even if fictional or deliberately contrived. The children of the United States of America derive from many ancestral origins; but they sit in school beneath the daily sign and symbol of the Stars and Stripes, ever visible and reassuring demonstration of their joint identity and common heritage, and hence their common future. The children of Africa have gone through educational academies of a different kind. Yet the ‘initiation’ courses and ceremonies, seminars and examinations through which they have passed were no less aimed at ensuring joint identity and common heritage as well as common future; and the shrines of the appointed ancestors—the constitutionally crucial ancestors—were there to confirm it.
Constitutionally crucial? Not all ancestors were important, but only those who were recognised as standing in the line of succession back to ‘the power without beginning’. These were the appointed ancestors who channelled 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, canonised—ancestors.
This bare model may be an abstraction, but it can still convey the essence of the truth. In thinking about it one needs continually to envisage the acute and actual problems of small communities at grips with strange and often hostile circumstances. There are many Biblical parallels. A Kenya historian of the Luo has compared their reactions with those of the wandering tribes of Israel. For the Israelites it was Moses who, as founding hero, brought them out of the sorrows of Egypt to the borders of a land flowing with milk and honey, who spoke with God and knew the ways and wishes of the ‘power without beginning’, and who defined the laws by which alone the Israelites could prosper. The God they named, however, had not been their own, for he was Jahweh of the Canaanites and lived on Mount Sinai; but they took over God in this Canaanite garb because it was he who had given them a home. Around AD 1500 the Padhola Luo came into eastern Uganda from the north-west. They too had wandered far and wide before finding their home. Once installed there they stopped calling God by the name they had used before, Jok, and began calling him Were. For it was God in his local garb as Were who had given them their Canaan, and so deserved their worship.
An interweaving of ideological traditions was obviously a continual process. Many of their early elements have survived in recognisable form. The Yoruba of southern Nigeria show this very well. Few peoples have so elaborate a cosmogony. The Yoruba think of divinity as a family of gods and goddesses who prefigure the social life of man but combine what appear to have been two quite separate traditions: those of the incoming ancestors, arriving in Yorubaland at some time before AD 1000, and those of other peoples who were already in the land.
In the Beginning there was Olodumare, God the archetypal Spirit. Having decided to create the world, Olodumare engendered Orishanla and sent him down to do the work. This he rapidly completed with the aid of other ‘archangels’. Orishanla then brought mankind out of the sky. They settled at Ife; and from Ife they spread across the Earth and made it fruitful.
But that is only half the story. In another large facet of Yoruba belief, it is not Orishanla who created the world at the bidding of Olodumare, but Oduduwa. Coming from somewhere far away in the east—from Arabia according to a later tradition doubtless inspired by Islam—Oduduwa then brought the Yoruba into their land, ruled them from Ife, and begat the men and women who were to rule or provide rulers for other Yoruba communities. ‘His eldest daughter, it is said, was the mother of the Olowu of Owu; another was the mother of the Alaketu of Ketu. One son became the Oba of Benin, another the Alake of Ake, another the Onisabe of Sabe, another the Alafin of Oyo.’
How reconcile Oduduwa with Orishanla? In Yoruba traditions as we have them today, there seems to have been conflation of two initially separate social charters. According to this conflation, ‘it was indeed Orishanla who got the commission from Olodumare but, through an accident, he forfeited the privilege to Oduduwa who thus became the actual creator of the solid earth’. The incoming Oduduwa tradition, in short, became woven with another, lying behind the Orishanla tradition, which presumably belonged to the population whom the incomers found and mingled with.
The ‘accident’ whereby Oduduwa supplanted Orishanla was the fruit of movements made long centuries ago. Yet its enduring sense of spiritual clash and redistribution of power has been so deep as to keep it vigorously alive. Even today, ‘the priests of Orishanla find it necessary to make a compensatory claim that even though Oduduwa once supplanted Orishanla in the honour of creating the solid earth, and therefore in seniority over all the other divinities, he could not maintain the machinery of the world, and therefore Olodumare had to send Orishanla to go and set things right and maintain order.’
The point here lies not in the picturesque details of a legendary compromise between incomers and aboriginals, but in the care that was taken, that had to be taken, to legitimise a new arrival and a new synthesis. What right could any people have to come from somewhere else and settle in a new land? The title to any piece of land lay with the Spirit of the Earth. To seal their right to occupy and settle, incomers must make their peace with this Spirit. They could do this only through a process of spiritual reconciliation sanctioned by appropriate rites. Otherwise the Spirit of the Earth would not recognise their legitimate existence in the land. Failing this act of connexion, even the appointed ancestors of the incomers would lose their spiritual