West Africa's Women of God: Alinesitoué and the Diola Prophetic Tradition
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West Africa's Women of God: Alinesitoué and the Diola Prophetic Tradition
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253017888 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/09/2015 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 306 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
West Africa's Women of God
Alinesitoué and the Diola Prophetic Tradition
By Robert M. Baum
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2016 Robert M. BaumAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01788-8
CHAPTER 1
Prophets, Gender, and Religious Change among the Diola of Senegambia
After finishing my doctoral dissertation on religious and social change in a pre-colonial Diola community in 1986, I returned to Esulalu, my research site and home base, in southwestern Senegal. I had planned to write a second book on Esulalu focusing on religious and social change in the colonial era, including the growth of Diola Christianity and the prophet Alinesitoué Diatta. When I arrived, however, people insisted on talking about a new group of women who claimed that Emitai (the supreme being) had sent them to teach about rain rituals and the reform of Diola community life. These women said that their dreams, visions, and auditory experiences came directly from Emitai. They claimed their experiences were part of a tradition extending back to Alinesitoué Diatta, a woman who had taught during the Second World War and been celebrated in Diola and Senegalese culture since her arrest and exile in 1943. These women came to revive local rain rituals directed toward Emitai so that It would end the recurrent droughts that plagued the region. I was already aware of male prophets who had been active before the French conquest, and Alinesitoué Diatta, but had been unaware of other women prophets who preceded her or followed her, and the importance of this tradition for Diola communities.
In the mid-1980s, a woman named Todjai Diatta, from the Department of Oussouye, gained a substantial following in many Diola townships. She revived a ritual, known as Kasila, in which people gathered in a public ritual to ask Emitai for rain. Other people, mostly women but some men, claimed messenger status, insisting that they were sent by Emitai, just as Alinesitoué Diatta had been in the midst of the Second World War. Southern Diola gathered together to renew the Kasila ritual, which they performed in each sub-quarter of each township. They sacrificed a black bull, some pigs, and chickens, which the entire community consumed together for several days, accompanied by the singing of songs honoring the ancestors. Nothing of European origin could be used or worn at the ritual, as Diola asked Emitai to send rain to break the increasing frequency of drought and restore them to a position of self-sufficiency in the cultivation of rice. These prophets emphasized the importance of renewing the rituals of Alinesitoué and claimed to be her spiritual successors. By the 1990s, prophetic movements had spread to many northern Diola communities, particularly in the area known as Buluf, which had experienced massive conversion to Islam in the period after the First World War.
My realization that Alinesitoué was not an isolated individual but part of a longstanding tradition of prophets, labeled with the epithet Emitai dabognol (whom Emitai had sent), demanded to be studied. I knew of no other African religious tradition that had so many claimants to privileged communication from the supreme being. This long tradition of prophets fundamentally challenged the scholarly received wisdom on the nature of African religions, the role of the supreme being within them, and the nature of "traditional" societies. Furthermore, I had begun some collaborative work with the late Marilyn R. Waldman, comparing the prophetic careers of Muhammad and Alinesitoué, which I wanted to develop in terms of this exceptionally rich tradition of direct revelation from a supreme being among the Diola. Just as Waldman hoped to incorporate Islamic traditions into the comparative study of prophecy, I wanted to expand the canon still further to incorporate Diola prophets within the discussion of prophetic leaders. As I finished my book on religious and social change during the era of the Atlantic slave trade, I began to gather information on these "messengers of God," not only Alinesitoué but also lesser known prophets who came before and after her brief career during the Second World War.
As I expanded my work outside Esulalu and pursued this more-focused work within Esulalu, I found an increasing number of oral traditions and personal testimonies concerning people who claimed to be messengers of Emitai. Alinesitoué represented the best known example of a longstanding prophetic religious tradition, rather than the isolated figure emphasized in celebrations of her as a Senegalese or Diola Joan of Arc. Initially, this tradition consisted entirely of men whom Emitai had sent. Following the colonial conquest, it was transformed into a predominantly female prophetic tradition of people who taught in the name of Emitai. The colonial and postcolonial eras also witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of prophets claiming divine revelation. Each time I returned, I learned either about a new prophet or one who had been active in the past.
For twenty-five years now, I have been engaged in the study of this tradition of direct revelation from the supreme being among the Diola of southern Senegal, Gambia, and northwestern Guinea-Bissau. This work is a history of a tradition that stretches back to the earliest creation narratives and continues to the present day. I collected oral traditions describing fifteen men before the colonial conquest who claimed that Emitai had summoned them to the heavens or that they had originated with Emitai Itself. Emitai commanded them to teach about new spirit shrines (ukine) and what Emitai desired for the Diola to understand about their basic obligations on the awasena or Diola religious path. Since the colonial occupation by the French in Senegal, the British in Gambia, and the Portuguese in Guinea, at least forty-two other people have claimed such revelations, two-thirds of whom are women. French-speaking Senegalese described these peoples as prophets (prophètes). The Diola epithet used to describe them, however, means literally "whom Emitai has sent," that is, a messenger of God.
In this work, I am describing both the transformation of an exclusively male prophetic tradition and its intensification in response to the distinct challenges of conquest, colonial rule, and the postcolonial era. The astounding number of such prophets, rivaling the number of actually named prophets in any of the Abrahamic religious traditions, questions the legitimacy of fundamental assumptions about the nature of African Traditional Religions and their ability to respond to and shape the challenges that their communities have encountered. Furthermore, it challenges the persistent claim that African supreme beings are deus otiotus, remote and seldom supplicated deities who began the act of creation and then left the world to the far more active lesser spirits and deities that inhabit African cosmos. Although this tradition is very local in scope, it is fully comparable to those of other religions that emphasize the importance of a supreme being who chooses messengers to communicate Its requirements and plans for their communities.
Recently published work by Waldman sets out to analyze the category of "prophet" in a critical and comparative way, seeking to create a new language for leaders who based their authority on privileged communications from a spiritual being or transcendent force not accessible to most human beings. Although the book became more limited in scope as her final illness took its toll, she and I wrote an essay comparing the most important of the Muslim Rasul Allah with the most famous of the Diola messengers of God, Alinesitoué Diatta, a young woman from Kabrousse, a Diola township on the Senegalese/GuineaBissau border. Our essay joins a growing body of literature that sees prophetic traditions not just as reaffirming the importance of tradition but of introducing religious innovation in the guise of restoration. What she began to do was to utilize the terms applied to people we wished to compare — Alinesitoué and Muhammad, for example — both to discern the similarities of these figures to their contemporaries and to determine what was unique or innovative about them. Finally, she created a catchment for such people cross-culturally to create a language for comparison that did not privilege any tradition but that sought to shed light on a range of phenomena existing in many traditions over many centuries, as heuristic devices that may help us to ask better questions about the people we consider too quickly to fall into the category of "prophet." Most comparative accounts of prophets privilege Jewish, Christian, and/or Muslim ideas of a prophetic role.
In their comparative work on prophecy, G. T. Sheppard and W. E. Herbrechtsmeier insisted that the category of prophet is limited to "divinely chosen messengers to humankind," a daunting threshold that was difficult to achieve. It remains unclear whether all of the Abrahamic prophets were speaking beyond their own ethnic communities to humanity as a whole, and it is equally unclear in reference to Diola prophets. At least among the Diola, there does not appear to be a categorical distinction between those prophets who spoke only to the Diola and those who incorporated neighboring ethnic groups to hear their message. Furthermore, ethnic boundaries kept shifting throughout the period of this study. Sheppard and Herbrechtsmeier also share with many other commentators a focus on prophets in oppositional roles towards institutional authority. Although this is often the case, too little is known about some of the precolonial prophets to assert that with any degree of certainty.
What has become a normative focus on the Abrahamic traditions in the study of prophetism is reflected in the writings of John Mbiti, who claimed that he knew of no African tradition that incorporates what he would consider the strict definition of a prophet:
In the strict biblical sense of prophet and prophetic movements, there are no prophets in African traditional societies, as far as I know. I attribute this primarily to the lack of a long dimension of the future in African concepts of time, though there might be other contributing factors. ... Some anthropologists talk about "prophets" and describe them in some African societies. These "prophets" belong to the category of diviners, seers, and mediums, and may have other religious or political functions in their societies. ... I do not know of "prophets" in traditional societies who claim to be the prophetic mouthpiece of God in the manner similar to biblical or koranic prophets.
The concept of a "long dimension of the future" is problematic in many African societies that emphasize a cyclical view of time, reincarnation, and, in the case of the Diola, repeated destructions of the inhabitants of the world and their restoration. The distant future (denied as a category in African traditions, according to Mbiti) and the distant past are linked within an ongoing cyclical view of history.
It is true, however, that diviners, seers, and mediums shared some characteristics with prophets, including biblical and qur'anic prophets. For scholars working primarily with Abrahamic traditions, a prophet was a person "who speaks in place of or on behalf of the god." Like seers and spirit mediums, prophets received privileged communications from a being or force, but it was not always initially clear what the origins of the revelatory experience were. For example, on the Night of Power, the prophet Muhammad feared that his visionary experiences came from djinn (genies) rather than Allah. This possession by djinn would mean that he was being summoned to become a seer or medium rather than a messenger of God. Communications from the supreme being were considered to be marks of a prophet in Islam, as well as Judaism and Christianity. Communications from lesser spirits were not. I claim that there were similar distinctions in the nature of privileged communication within African religions. In Diola, for example, spirits are said to seize people (cadiouke) while Emitai selects individuals whom It sends as messengers (Emitai dabognol).
These Diola prophets are quite distinct from seers, mediums, and diviners. Diola messengers claimed that Emitai spoke to them and commanded them to share what they learned with the people of their communities and, by the colonial era, with neighboring peoples as well. They did not become possessed, nor did they simply relay the message, which characterized spirit mediumship. One Diola elder, for example, used the French term prophète for anyone to whom God spoke. Like the Abrahamic prophets, they were teachers as well as visionaries. They focused on the immediate needs of their communities to restore a proper relationship with the supreme being through ethical behavior and effective ritual, to end devastating periods of drought and other environmental dislocation, and to defend their communities against raids by neighboring groups. Diola prophets refrained from the use of mechanical means of prophesying, such as the tossing of palm kernels or cowry shells, or the reading of the entrails of sacrificed animals, which were typical of diviners. Such techniques could be taught and passed down, and were subject to interpretation by the practitioner. Diola prophets did not lose consciousness in their revelatory experiences like mediums did, only to have another person interpret the meaning and communicate the message.
The thrust of my research on Diola religious history has been to interrogate the idea of change-resistant societies and to explore the innovative qualities of "traditional" societies. I argue that these messengers of Emitai were partially responsible for the innovative qualities within a Diola religious tradition that have enabled it to adapt successfully to the challenges of the Atlantic slave trade, conquest and colonization, and the uncertainties of the postcolonial world. My present work expands the category of prophetic figures to include African women and men who claimed direct revelation from an African supreme being without major influences from the Abrahamic traditions and without being seen exclusively as prophetic movements in response to imperialism. While working beyond the strictures of a single prophetic tradition, I hope to provide a deeper understanding of the importance of a group of individuals who claimed that Emitai spoke to them and commanded them to teach what they learned, and who became a major source of religious innovation in a Diola religious tradition that continues to be a powerful force in the lives of the peoples of coastal Gambia, Senegal, and Guinea-Bissau. I contend that this innovative capacity, embodied in people "whom Emitai has sent," is a primary factor in the ability of Diola religion, the awasena path, to continue to serve the largest community of indigenous practitioners in the Senegambian region.
In an East African context, David M. Anderson and Douglas Johnson have engaged similar concerns about establishing a useful catchment of people and their experiences as prophets, despite the multiplicity of ways in which this term is applied:
In the corpus of anthropological and historical writings on eastern African societies, it is often difficult to appreciate the distinctions that exist from one community to another, between characters who are variously termed "prophets," "diviners," "ritual experts," "oracles," "spirit mediums" or even "witch doctors." This indiscriminate use of terms has created a number of obstacles in the way of any comparative study of prophets, for we find that in many cases the only common element uniting a variety of persons or officiants is the title "prophet" imposed upon them in different ethnographies or histories.
Anderson and Johnson built on E. E. Evans-Pritchard's use of the term, which drew on the Greek prophetes, that is, to speak for a god or spirit, and the Nuer guk that had been mistranslated as "witch doctor" but that actually referred to "a man possessed by a spirit of something. ... They are the messengers of the Gods." The anthropologist Dominique Zahan would agree with this emphasis on spirit possession rather than direct contact with a remote supreme being:
As strange as it may seem, the Supreme Divinity is not generally the pole toward which the innumerable threads of African spirituality converge. It does, however, constitute the ultimate stage of recuperating the vital human elements released at the moment of death. Altars are sometimes dedicated to him and offerings are made, but sometimes his name, if not his very existence, is unknown. As for mystic phenomena, especially those concerning possession, there is rarely any connection with the Supreme Divinity, more often than not it is the secondary divinities who have the monopoly on the piety and fervor of the believers.
This book examines precisely what Zahan sees as rare: direct communication between a Supreme Divinity and a long line of human beings, from the Casamance/Senegambian region. I focus exclusively on those prophets or messengers who claimed the role of a mouthpiece or spokesperson for a singular deity known as Emitai. Those who spoke on behalf of lesser divinities are not included.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from West Africa's Women of God by Robert M. Baum. Copyright © 2016 Robert M. Baum. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments 1. Prophets, Gender, and Religious Change among the Diola of Senegambia 2. The Diola: An Ethnographic Introduction 3. Koonjaen, Felupe, and Diola Prophets in Precolonial Senegambia 4. Women Prophets, Colonization, and the Creation of Community Shrines of Emitai, 1890–1913 5. Prophetism at the Peak of Colonial Rule, 1914–1939 6. Alinesitoué Diatta and the Crisis of the War Years, 1939–1944 7. The Prophetic Teachings of Alinesitoué, Her Successors, and a Contested Diola Prophetic Tradition Conclusion Glossary Notes Bibliography IndexWhat People are Saying About This
A masterful book that explores a little known part of Africa and makes it the showcase for transformative changes involving colonial agents, local subjects, religious narratives, and unpredictable outcomes.
"A masterful book that explores a little known part of Africa and makes it the showcase for transformative changes involving colonial agents, local subjects, religious narratives, and unpredictable outcomes."
A masterful book that explores a little known part of Africa and makes it the showcase for transformative changes involving colonial agents, local subjects, religious narratives, and unpredictable outcomes.