Public Healing Monotheism and Violence: The Religious Encounter in African History

a Mijikenda sacred grove in East Africa

The various teachers of precolonial African history I've had the privilege to learn from all emphasize that “public healing” is a useful descriptive to understand how a variety of people in Africa understood the connected realm that Western scholars separate into religion and politics. Public healing in Africa symbolized and symbolizes the collective aspiration for harmony, social reproduction and abundance. Public healing was about healing the political-social body. One of my mentors calls this dynamic discourse of public healing “a moral aspiration for community.” And it is very very old. For instance, if you go back and look at the identity of the earliest dynasty in Great Lakes history, the progenitor to all the subsequent kingdoms, that dynasty is not really a dynasty at all, but a coalition of healers, mystics and wisemen called the Cwezi.

Till today, the Cwezi continue to be venerated, as what some might label as gods, or perhaps more accurately, ancestors or spirits. In some places in the Great Lakes region, the place where this veneration happened was a territorial shrine. In 1996, the Ugandan journalist Geoffrey Kamali described a fleet of seven taxis filled with people who left Kampala in the middle of the night following an “ancestor guide”, someone who had the ability to communicate with these spirits. They sought a shrine on a hilltop outside Kampala, a place with many caves. They brought cash and coffee berries to give to the omusambwa of that place, the territorial spirit. During the fire, some people became possessed by the spirits and the ancestor guide moved through the fire without being burned. Afterwards she took the people to the shores of Lake Victoria, where she tattooed their right arms and asked them to confess their sins to her and swallow several of the coffee berries.

The Great Lakes experience is not unique. Similar kinds of shrines exist at the East African coast. The Giriama are one group among the Mijikenda, a people who have lived near the Swahili coast for many centuries. In the precolonial era, they most often lived in rural areas adjacent to the coastal towns. They had their own forms of sacred enclosures/shrines in the form of groves of trees, called kayas. In 1914, the British, in response to Giriama resistance to British colonial taxation and labor policies, demolished one of these sacred groves. The main trees and gates were blown up, all the dwellings and trees inside the kaya burned, and the entrance dynamited and barricaded. This prompted a rebellion by the Giriama, in which 5000 houses were burnt and 150 men killed. Harming religious-political space touched to the core of Giriama conceptions of the good and the sacred.

Nor where such sacred shrines confined to the continent of Africa. They were also found throughout "Arabia" both before and after the arrival of Islam, and constituted an important part of how people related to the divinity. When we think of the ka'aba, we usually think of a place in Mecca, but a ka'aba could potentially be any sacred place where people would gather to seek intercession. It was a plural religious space, where violence was forbidden. This is not to say that people always respected these boundaries, but there were rules elaborated about coexisting sacred spheres.

For monotheistic visions of divinity, public healing can look a lot like polytheism, paganism or shirk. Where it gets controversial for African and Islamic history is when the Prophet Muhammad is directly implicated in the destruction of such sacred places. Hisham Ibn al-Kalbi, the famous Kufan scholar, in his book Kitaab-ul-asnam, reports the following passage:

"When the Apostle of God captured Mecca and the Arabs embraced Islam, among the delegates who came to pay their homage was Jarir ibn-'Abdullah. He came to the Apostle and embraced Islam before him. Thereupon the Apostle addressed him saying, "O Jarir! Wilt thou not rid me of dhu-al-Khalasah?" Jarir replied, "Yea." So the Apostle dispatched him to destroy it. He set out until he got to the banu-Abmas of the Bajilah [tribe] and with them he proceeded to dhu-al-Khalasah. There he was met by the men… who resisted him and attempted to defend dhu-al-Khalasah. He, therefore, fought them and killed a hundred men of the Bahilah, its custodians, and many of the Khath'am; while of the banu-Qubafah ibn-'Amir ibn-Khath'am, he killed two hundred. Having defeated them and forced them into flight, he demolished the building which stood over dhu-al-Khalasah and set it on fire." 

This incident is also in Sahih al-Bukhari :

"During the Jahiliya, there was a house called Dhu-l-Khalasa or Al-Ka'ba Al-Yamaniya or Al-Ka'ba Ash-Shamiya. The Prophet said to me, "Won't you relieve me from Dhu-l-Khalasa?" So I set out with one-hundred-and-fifty riders, and we dismantled it and killed whoever was present there. Then I came to the Prophet and informed him, and he invoked good upon us and Al-Ahmas." 

Keep in mind here, we are talking about the destruction of a very similar type of shrine to that of the Cwezi shrines or the Giriama sacred groves. In fact, Dhu al-Khalasa was simply a carved piece of white quartz, resting in a place called the ka’aba by the local people who tended it. People used to come to this shrine when faced with difficult decisions and seek advice. It was sacred to those people, as showed by their determination to defend it.

The above incident raises several uncomfortable questions for the Islamic tradition and, beyond that for all monotheistic traditions. What is the difference between ancestor veneration and idolatry, and who gets to decide what that difference is? What are the limitations of the concept of toleration in dealing with the religious other? How does monotheism construct its other? I wonder if we regard the Prophet Muhammad’s need to destroy other people’s holy objects as a form of necessary evil on the way to monotheism. Were the tribes and the men a form of collateral damage in the march of the progress of the deen?

Forms of ancestor veneration and spirit possession have been a nearly universal part of all cultures and civilizations. The ancient Egyptians venerated ancestors, through a panoply of shrines, gods, idols, statues, figurines. One wonders however, if the ancient Egyptians worshipped their gods as a community in Mecca under the Prophet, would they have been regarded as rank idolators? I don't know the answer, but the above incident made me think about the likelihood that their buildings and shrines would have been burnt down and destroyed under those circumstances.

I would suggest that we need to interrogate the epistemological assumptions at the root of 1) the categorical move to create people whose beliefs place them beyond the sacred law, and thus in natural rebellion 2) the logic that makes it necessary to kill hundreds of men, simply to destroy an idol, and the moral calculus that makes figuring that possible. More is at work here than mere “Arab ethnocentrism” or “Arab racism” versus “African” religion. In fact what is at work is a profound devaluation of other forms of epistemology, cosmology and meaning making about the sacred in Africa.

For Muslims, the Prophet Muhammad is understandably the moral exemplar of a virtuous life. This is not an attack on the Prophet. As a human, he was truly great, a man who rose above the times he lived in. As a prophet, he was no doubt inspired. As a political leader he often dealt with difficult situations with the greatest sensitivity to human personality. But on the coexistence of monotheism with what we understand as “polytheism”, paganism, shirk, or iconoclasm, I believe the overwhelming historical evidence doesn’t support the way he linked polytheism to disobedience to the one God.

The great scholar of religion Talal Asad has done much work denaturalizing the secular, as something that the West created to help it imagine itself as civilized, and those still stuck in religious orthodoxy as barbarous. In fact, Asad and his many students have said and have demonstrated that secularism created religion, as a category with which to consign forms of non-rational belief. But Asad and his students have not gone far enough. Just as Euro-Americans have had difficulty recognizing that their experience of the Enlightenment was particular to their cultural and historical trajectory and its categories, so the Abrahamic traditions have had incredible difficulties recognizing the particularity of their own experience of universal religion. It would be interesting to get Asad's thoughts on how the Abrahamic faiths have created a category of shirk or polytheism,  filled it with a host of negative, immoral meanings which do not correspond to what we actually find in the historical record, and then constructed themselves in distinction to it. This process of meaning making has had profoundly tragic consequences for non-monotheistic aspirations for moral community and divinity.

I do not think these anecodetes exhaust the possible entailments of Islam, Muslims or Islamic epistemologies. But they do highlight the degree to which force, conquest and a deliberate violence, both epistemological and literal are part of attempts to secure a particular tradition as sacrosanct. How do we avoid linking the sacred with a concept of governing exclusion? In reforming society a prophet has to participate in public life, in the affairs and concerns of the many, rather than in the cultivation of the one. The prophetic has to combine the ethical with the political. As the philosopher Muhammad Iqbal describes it, the Prophet returns: ‘to insert himself into the sweep of time with a view to control the forces of history, and thereby create a fresh world of ideals.’ To make a "fresh world of ideals" is a political act; the creation of a world is inherently political. But such a world cannot be sustained, if it continues to instantiate such a profound disregard for epistemologies that do not share in the logocentric assumptions of the dominant Abrahamic religions.

Finally, I want to suggest that we not be so quick to justify the Prophet’s actions above as necessary or divinely inspired. By apologizing for them, we create a direct connection to imagining and modeling the type of world we want to create, support and live in. If we as scholars of Islam want to challenge the rhetoric of ISIS and Salafism, if we want to imagine a world where we create enough room for “other ways of knowing”, for traditions which challenge the narrow technocratic ways of knowing of the modern world, and its attendant domination over nature, then we cannot afford to ignore some acts of profound violence and disrespect of other ways of knowing, at the root of ‘our’ tradition. In reckoning with these acts, I think we will be led into new definitions of tawhid, in which we are not so quick to think that we know the difference between tawhid and shirk. Inshallah, that will lead us into a profound humility and care in our encounter with the religious other.

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Consciousness, Motivation and Violence: Review of War of Words, War of Stones

Jonathon Glassman. War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.

PART 2: Glassman shows in detail how newspaper debates between the two rival parties over Zanzibar's history, slavery, marriage, and land rights became increasingly polarized and racialized. The outcome these polemical exchanges was that any conflict, especially those with a hint of violence, could become politicized. As each side ramped up their violent rhetoric, it drew readers and listeners into an everyday drama where everyone was encouraged and even coerced to choose among racialized political identities. The personal nature of the island's social relationships made these dramas all the more bitter—gradually almost every aspect of everyday life became infused with the tension of potential racial drama. Everything from bus rides and public dances to traffic accidents and crime became an opportunity for transforming the "overlapping discursive circuits" of newspaper discourse and racial rumor into "what many came to imagine as actual lived experience."
The book draws on a wealth of original sources—the enormous number of published newspapers circulating in Zanzibar during the 1950s and 1960s (and even earlier) as well as archival material. Glassman's choice not to draw on oral interviews is a conscious attempt to steer away from the minefield of counter-interpretation generated (and being generated) around the meaning of the 1964 Revolution. Instead Glassman revises and offers fresh interpretations on theories of violence and ethnic conflict.
The arch-instrumentalists who view violence, especially "ethnic" violence, as an expression of class conflict or other material factors often stress that violence has to be "activated" by elites; violence is the outcome of planning and the hard work of social polarization. On the other hand, elites rarely control and direct the violence of crowds and mobs; the crowd's logic is not the product of external direction. Through a detailed examination of the character of mob violence in Zanzibar, Glassman argues that mob violence acts as an incentive for individuals to recast their experience along communal lines. In the context of a polarized political climate where people are encouraged to racialize their daily lives, transgressive violence can appear necessary. Violence in Zanzibar had to overcome the powerful affective bonds and neighborly relations; once it did (through the racialization of everyday experience in the "newspaper wars") criminality and rumor could work powerfully on people's everyday experience of themselves.
Rumor, argues Glassman, enables people to "replace the subjectivity of personal experience with false memories of victimhood." It "turns everyday patterns" and even sounds into "signs of impending violence." For those who actually experience acts of oppression, rumor further encourages them to think of these acts in the overall terms of a racialized narrative. For Zanzibar, Glassman documents how rival discourses of crime and criminality centered on both mainland immigrants from Mozambique and Tanzania and poor "Manga" Arabs from Oman; these discourses aided rival parties in giving concrete representation to their enemy.
Glassman rejects the distinction between acts that are expressions of the "real" consciousness of the crowd, and those they are "manipulated" into performing by elites. Working through the logic of writers like Robert Weinberg and Paul Brass, Glassman concludes that, based on their distinctions, one has to argue that violence in Zanzibar is a product of elite manipulation in the context of contests for political power.
Yet the nature of the violence itself, argues Glassman, contradicts this argument. The "stylized" and "expressive" nature of the killings in Zanzibar belies any notion that elite discourse sat as a form of false consciousness swaying the actions of an irrational mob. Propagandists in Zanzibar, notes Glassman, although they used inflammatory language, never called for violence. The violence instead was activated in the moment where racial discourse became "embodied" reality, often experienced as a fear of violence and domination from the "other." It was mostly a product of everyday experience and not directly shaped by elite direction.
Building on the work of Sudhir Kakar and Natalie Zemon Davis, Glassman argues that a mob focuses and sharpens a group's identity; participation is a kind of group ritual. Mobs are thus both spontaneous and premeditated. Participants' subjectivities and moral conscience are spontaneously re-shaped in the midst of the violent act itself, but their decision to "act spontaneously" is the product of a racialized discursive envirornment, which is then embodied and amplified through rumors and stories.
Glassman's evidence is vast and skillfully deployed, and his argument is subtle and well-stated. Yet while Glassman helpfully deconstructs the divide between spontaneous and induced violence, I wonder if he doesn't leave himself exposed to the criticism that his "false memories of victimhood" engendering "violent subjectivities" too closely resembles a form of false consciousness. In closing the gap between spontaneous and induced violence, I'm inclined to think that Glassman open up an unintended gap between "true" "personal" subjectivity (rational and moral), and "false" "collective" subjectivity. This may encourage readers to think of the "individual" as acting truly (as in heroic stories of individual rescue) as a counterpoint to the madness of the crowd. This thinking, if taken to its logical extreme, leads us back to our original problem, thus demonstrating that many crucial questions remain to be uncovered towards a better understanding of mob violence.

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Consciousness, Motivation and Violence: Review of War of Words, War of Stones

Jonathon Glassman. War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.

PART 1: Scholars of mass violence, ethnic cleansing and genocide frequently debate the precise nature of the links between popular violence and an elite propaganda. Mass violence, they increasingly argue, is not the product of primordial hatred activated in a Hobbesian environment of weak social inhibitions. Yet this thesis has come to have something of the air of a cliché; provoking an enormous literature that is essentially a reaction against the "uncontrollable passions" thesis. Such literature argues that such violence was really about "something else", such as control over resources or political power.
In his new ambitious new book on racial violence in colonial Zanzibar, Jonathon Glassman argues that neither approach adequately captures the complexity of violence in the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution and the events leading up to it. In 1964, a group of armed Africans overthrew the Sultan of Zanzibar and purged his supporters in the rival political party. They then embarked on the massacre and intimidation of Arabs; some figures cite as many as 5,000 Arabs were killed in the months following. As in other cases, reports of violence were immediately contested—revolutionaries naturally denied the massacres, while exiles painted a gruesome picture of anti-Arab (and anti-Indian) pogroms.
In Zanzibar, Glassman argues, violence was the product of dueling discourses of civilization and barbarism from groups of "Africans" and "Arabs." Each group shaped competing approaches to the island's history and identity. In his introduction, Glassman traces the development of these identities through the history of Zanzibar, beginning with the founding of the Zanzibar Sultanate in the mid-nineteenth century, when it fell under the rule of the Busaidi family from Muscat, Oman. The Busaidi sultans expanded Zanzibar's wealth through usage of Indian merchant credit and an intense plantation slavery system built around clove production. British-imposed abolition soon destroyed the productivity of this system, and slaves and masters had to re-negotiate relationships of labor through tenancy and squatting. British colonial administrators sought to control and rationalize these relations, and they steadily increased their influence in Zanzibar until the establishment of a formal protectorate in 1890. British administrators had seen Zanzibar as an "Arab state" before the protectorate, and afterwards they continued to rule with (and often for) the Arab sultan as if Arabs were the natural ruling elite of the island.
In the half-century leading up to Zanzibar's first common roll election in 1957, British administrators nurtured a secular intelligentsia of (mostly) elite Arabs, who they inculcated thoroughly with British notions of civilizational nationalism. These Arabs served important roles as middlemen in the colonial bureaucracy. Yet they were no parrots of their would-be teachers; these elites also drew on Islamic modernism and pan-Arabism to advocate (initially) for the Arabs as the natural rulers of Zanzibar, and to mobilize Arabs (and eventually all Zanzibari citizens) against colonialism. Their vision of Zanzibari nationalism was broad and inclusive, but rested on specific values (like allegiance to the sultan) and particular exclusions. All "true" citizens were welcome under the inclusive umbrella of ustaarabu, (a Kiswahili word meaning "civilization") but such logic often criminalized mainlanders and encouraged Arab cultural chauvinism. Politically, the National Party of the Sultan's Subjects (Hizbu or ZNP) represented this ideological position.
In N'gambo, the African neighborhood east of the elite streets of Zanzibar's Stone Town, a vibrant post-bellum African culture nurtured its own intellectual vision of Zanzibar's future. This nationalist vision relied heavily on metaphors of blood and race. Africans, it argued, had been victims of Arab imperialism, and it was only by uniting with each other on the basis of skin color and shared oppression that Africans could overcome Arab hegemony. This vision came to be represented by the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP), an outgrowth of a fusion of member of the town's African and Shirazi associations. The ASP was a complex mixture of former slaves, mainland migrants, and the indigenous Shirazi who resented Arab political dominance. Despite their links, those self-identified as Shirazi often faced criticism from the "Africans" that they were futilely trying to be "Asiatic." Instead of adopting an Arabocentric identity, the ASP argued, Africans ought to rediscover and reclaim their "tribal" ancestry. The Arabs were just as colonial as the British, the ASP claimed, but at least the British had abolished slavery. The ASP in effect, "racialized" the memory of slavery. Where the ZNP saw a shifting relationship between patron and client, the ASP saw evidence of pernicious racial oppression. This issue between the two proved to be one of the most contentious points dividing the two parties in the period known as the "Time of Politics", 1957-1963.

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Pambazuka - Wangari Maathai on the Kenyan TJRC

I've commented on this before in my book review of Odinga Odinga's Not Yet Uhuru. The fact is that those who fought most tenaciously for Kenya's freedom were shut out of negotiations for power in the newly independent state. Maathai connects the dots of power arrangements post-independence to the recent election crisis.
Pambazuka - Impunity is a way of life

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Kenya’s Bill for Bloodshed Nears Payment

Memo From Nairobi (New York Times)

NAIROBI, Kenya — The envelope, please — those are the words on many Kenyans’ lips.

Ever since last year’s eruption of post-election violence, which killed more than 1,000 people and threatened to drive this once promising country off a cliff, Kenyans have been waiting to hear who masterminded the bloodshed and who will pay the price.

A Kenyan commission investigated the violence in October and came up with a list of several top suspects, widely believed to include some of the nation’s most powerful men. The names were sealed in a square brown paper envelope (incongruously wrapped with a white ribbon) and handed over to Kofi Annan, the former secretary general of the United Nations who took on the role of peacemaker.

Kenyan politicians had promised Mr. Annan that they would form a special tribunal to try the suspects here, ending a longstanding culture of impunity that feeds the ethnic-political bloodshed that convulses Kenya nearly every election.

But so far, nothing. Kenya’s leaders, paralyzed by competing agendas and the prospect of prosecuting their own, have refused to set up a tribunal. So last week, Mr. Annan upped the ante. He sent the envelope with the names to the International Criminal Court at The Hague, which has now indicated that it will step in if Kenya fails to act.

“Kenya Cornered,” and “Annan Ambushed Us” blared the Daily Nation, Kenya’s biggest newspaper.

On Tuesday, the bloated Kenyan cabinet (which has more than 60 ministers and assistant ministers) called an emergency meeting to decide what to do, but once again, deadlock. The Kenyan government has essentially three options: coax a rebellious Parliament into approving a special tribunal; refer the case to the International Criminal Court, which has already been criticized for picking on Africa; or do an end run around Parliament and set up a special branch of Kenya’s judiciary, whose credibility is “below sea level,” according to one human rights official.

Human rights advocates are urging their government to do something, fast.

“If we don’t deal with the impunity from this last election, the next one will be horrible,” said Maina Kiai, a former government human rights official.

Mr. Kiai says that ethnic gangs are rearming themselves across the country, this time with guns, not machetes. He contends that unless the culprits are punished for the killings last year, which included hacking up old men and burning toddlers to death, the next time there is a disputed election, which he thinks there surely will be, people will be emboldened to wreak havoc again.

“It’s not peace,” he said, of the semblance of normality that has returned to Kenya since the election. “It’s a cease-fire.”

Kenya is still wrangling with problems that go back decades, and the tribunal crisis is wrapped up in a call for sweeping change, including land reform, electoral reform and constitutional reform. The so-called grand coalition government, cobbled together after the disputed election, was supposed to tackle these issues. So far, none of those boxes have been checked either.

Nothing, though, appears more sensitive than the tribunal. In February, Parliament shot down a bill to set up a special Kenyan court for perpetrators of the post-election violence, and in recent days, lawmakers have indicated that the votes are still not there. Human rights officials are not surprised.

“If we leave it to Parliament, and I say this as an individual and not on behalf of my organization, Parliament will not pass a tribunal unless they are sure the tribunal will be dysfunctional,” said Victor Kamau, a lawyer at the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights.

Why?

“Because many of the murderers are in the government,” he said.

The names in the envelope have not been made public. But Kenyans have their suspicions. Several Western diplomats and human rights officials have said that Finance Minister Uhuru Kenyatta, the son of Kenya’s founding president, and Agriculture Minister William Ruto are on the list, suspected of organizing death squads. The two men are from different ethnic groups and opposite political camps, with Mr. Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, in the president’s party, and Mr. Ruto, a Kalenjin who quickly scaled the rungs of the leading opposition movement. One reason for the paralysis over the tribunal may be that both sides, for once, have the same vested interest: continuing the impunity.

But all the talk of organizers, masterminds and planners of the post-election violence raises a big question: how organized was it?

In the days following the election, in December 2007, in which the incumbent president, Mwai Kibaki, was declared the winner over Raila Odinga, the opposition leader who is now prime minister, rival gangs rampaged across Kenya’s slums, in the hillsides and throughout many towns. Initially, a lot of violence appeared to be spontaneous outrage, vented along ethnic lines, though upon closer inspection, some of it seemed to have been organized, at least by local leaders and village elders. But what remains murky, many political analysts here say, is the extent to which top politicians were directly involved.

“I think a very large part of the violence was spontaneous,” said Abdalla Bujra, a Kenyan sociologist. “When it started, it was spontaneous. Later, there was some level of organization.”

But, Mr. Bujra argued, “none of the top leaders expected this to have erupted on a massive scale.”

Further bloodshed is another serious fear. Some people worry that if Kenya’s big men are hauled off to court, they will tell their followers to kill again.

“We have a history of politicians mobilizing their ethnic constituencies when they feel threatened personally,” said George Wachira, a peace advocate in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital.

“But that’s a risk we have to take,” he said. “At some point, we have to take a stand, and re-establish the rule of law.”

Or, as many other Kenyans might say, establish the rule of law in the first place.

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