Ritual Activism The Case For Fela Kuti and Black Africa

Give me control over he who shapes the music of a nation,
and I care not who makes the laws. Napoleon

Knowledge is power in a cosmic sense; its rhythm.
Once you start to have rhythm you start to have knowledge. Fela Kuti

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ritual
activism
the case for fela kuti
& black africa

curated by amma birago
for abigail frances olufunmi-layo kuti,
a womens' rights activist

the postcolonial country and person, the odds and their sanity;
on Kellers Madness and Colonization, Luceros The Politics of Ritual.
Ritual for psychic and social unanimity and wellness.

On the day people said goodbye to Fela Anikulapo-Kuti,
the sun shone and the heavens rained at the same time. When this happens,
a Nigerian might observe that a tiger has given birth to a child.
Knox Robinson, Fela; From West Africa to West Broadway



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"I came back home with the intent to change the whole system.
I didn't know I was going to have ... such horrors! I didn't know they gonna
give me such opposition because of my new Africanism. "
Laray Denzer in Fela This Bitch of a Life,
by Carlos Moore

Religious Movements and Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa
Terence O. Ranger

Kalilombe remarks that "history has demonstrated time and again that peasants' potential for bringing about
meaningful and lasting change is rarely activated from within themselves alone.... As a rule the decisive factor
comes from outside." But from whom? Not from local African prophets, living in their dream world; not from
leaders of mass nationalism, "who themselves belong to the powerful classes" and who now oppress the people in
their turn; not even from leaders of armed revolution who have all too often used "the masses to further their own
selfish aims [which] has led the people to become suspicious of any revolutionary firebrands claiming to join with
them for liberation."

In this concrete situation of contemporary Africa we are asking what the possibilitiesa re for the powerlessa nd
impoverished masses to participate in the kind of [liberation] theology we described... People at the grassroots react
in face of a growing sense of powerlessness and exploitation. The preponderant reaction is that of people
everywhere who... become convinced that indeed they are... powerless, ignorant, or out of touch with the
mainstream of history. They develop reflexes of inferiority... They try to insulate themselves in a little world of their
own.... [They] are likely to develop strategies of survival that in the long run prove self-defeating. Sometimes they
take refuge in... some type of religious cults, or other distracting hobbies.... People get used to living in a dream
world. It becomes difficult for them to analyse events and realities soberly.... And yet it is the people at the
grassroots that have the potential for meaningful change. Kalilombe remarks that "history has demonstrated time and
again that peasants' potential for bringing about meaningful and lasting change is rarely activated from within
themselves alone.... As a rule the decisive factor comes from outside." But from whom? Not from local African
prophets, living in their dream world; not from leaders of mass nationalism, "who themselves belong to the powerful
classes" and who now oppress the people in their turn; not even from leaders of armed revolution who have all too
often used "the masses to further their own selfish aims [which] has led the people to become suspicious of any
revolutionary firebrands claiming to join with them for liberation." What is needed is true religious liberation
(Kalilombe, 1984): capable of unleashing a power among those who have hitherto been powerless.... People
begin to think for themselves in a critical way....

... Peoples movements in Africa have always lacked their own, i.e. African ideology...[and they] have generally
taken the form of passive resistance, frequently lacked aggressive power. From that perspective it may well be
that nowhere is there more talk about change than in Africa. Yet, within Africa, few can really trigger change.
Herein lies the great agony of Africa's popular sentiments.... To describe people's movements in Africa it is
necessary to recognise their under-lying attitude, which is one of active waiting and active hope.... To outlive the
repression, in its various forms, is to gain victory.
Terence O. Ranger



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Graham Harrison The Death of Political Struggle
Bringing Political Struggle Back in: African Politics, Power & Resistance
The importance of political struggle as a key notion in the understanding of contemporary African politics. It does so
with an awareness that this notion has fallen out of academic favour. This article sketches an approach that gives a
key role to political struggle in processes of political change in sub-Saharan Africa. In doing so, African political
economies are seen as necessarily contested and therefore there is a need (to re-work the phrase of the new
statists/institutionalists) to consider bringing struggle back in to the analytical frame. Political struggle is used in this
article as a theoretical term; it is not supposed to allude to a specific institutional form or a certain political agenda.
Struggle is a process, a result of mobilisation provoked by some form of resistance.

The Import of a Postcolonial Masculinity
Derek Stanovsky, Fela and His Wives
However, if capturing an imagined, lost African purity is not the goal, then perhaps Fela is a very good choice as a
representative of African music. His music is a product of Africa's colonial and postcolonial history and as such
represents the present realities of Africa. What Fela lacks in purity of native authenticity, he more than makes up for
in richness of postcolonial fusion. For Fela, the identity of "African" has a use in his pan-African politics for
building solidarity across national boundaries and across linguistic and cultural barriers in an effort to build an
international political movement.

John Howe. Fela anikulapo kuti: An honest man
When Fela spoke - as he often did - in the name of Africa, he may have been projecting some of the attitudes of a
famous, eccentric, successful, Westernized, upper-class Yoruba anarchist and bohemian on a largely
uncomprehending continent; but people also understood that the Africa he referred to was a colonized Africa whose
private history had been disrupted by outside forces and needed to be relaunched. This knack of being wrong, but
right, endeared Fela to his constituents, but also puzzled everyone and enraged the powerful individuals implicitly
criticized, at the same time providing them with ammunition to use against him.

Yoruba women and the sanctity of abuse
Andrew Apter, Discourse and its disclosures.
It is not uncommon for those who live amongst primitive peoples to come across 'obscenity' in speech and action.
This 'obscenity' is often not an expression by an individual uttered under great stress and condemned as bad taste,
but is an expression by a group of persons and is permitted and even prescribed by society.
'Collective Expressions of Obscenity in Africa'.

Examining the Revolutionary Songs of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti and the Abeokuta Market Women's
Movement in 1940s Western Nigeria
The primary contention here is that he was heavily influenced both musically and politically by his mother. Leading
a group of embattled local women, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti (1900-1978) confronted deeply rooted traditional
patriarchy and the choking tentacles of colonialism in 1940s Abeokuta. Far from detracting from the existing
discourse on Fela, this paper seeks to add a vital dimension to our understanding of his genius by examining closely
the character of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti (FRK) and the songs that she and the market women created and sang
during their revolt in Abeokuta. The rare attention that a few of Fela's biographers have bestowed on his mother's



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activism has not closely examined the nature of her activism in relation to his music.
Fela's Foundation: Examining the Revolutionary Songs of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti and the Abeokuta
Market Women's Movement in 1940s Western Nigeria
Shonekan, Stephanie

Plays, Possession, and Rock-and-Roll Political Theatre in Africa,
Peter Ukpokodu
Fela has not offered many specifics about how a return to African
traditionalism would be squared with modern technology, which he distrusts.
The thin line between religion and drama, between rituala nd theatre, the "sacred," perhaps salvific nature of the two,
and particularlyth eir celebratorya nd transformativequ alities-of which Richard Schechnerh as writtenw ith
analyticalin sight (1976:I96-222; 1985; I987:5-33)-come to the fore in these experiments. Fela Music, especially as
practiced by the Nigerian musician, Fela Anikulapo- Kuti (formerly Fela Ransome-Kuti), has also become a parto f
the perform ing arts sociopolitical protests. While the lyrics of such recordings as "Zombie" (1976) and "Beasts of
No Nation" (1989) are annoying enough for the military regime of Nigeria-the pervading image is that of the intel-
lectually deficient and animalistic man-of-arms controlling the nation - it is Fela's live performances that drive the
regime insane. Fela's live show is both a musical and a verbal attack on the Nigerian government. He always has a
large following of student audiences all over the country. At Abeokuta in April 1989 the police forcibly prevented
Fela from performing for a student audience of 20,000. Twice (in 1978 and 1986) Fela Anikulapo-Kuti has been
beaten and jailed for his outspoken attacks on government corruption and police re-pression. In one savage attack by
soldiers in 1978, his house and "shrine"- the name of his theatre in Lagos-were razed (Grass I986:131-48). He has
become the rallying point for angry university students and disaffected masses. Not even the fact that his senior
brother is the Minister for Health has slowed down his verbal and musical attacks on the present government of
Nigeria. In an interview with Fela in London, Jane Bryce observes that songs such as "Beasts of No Nation," with its
refrain ridiculing the human rights charade of the military government, have not endeared Fela to Presi-dent
Babangida (1989:12-13).

Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions:
Catherine Bell
Catherine Bell

ritual as traditional, collective representation, implying that the notion of individual
or invented ritual was a contradiction in terms.

The tendency to think of ritual as essentially unchanging has gone hand in hand with the equally common
assumption that effective rituals cannot be invented. Until very recently, most peoples commonsense notion of
ritual meant that someone could not simply dream up a rite that would work the way traditional ritual has worked.
Such a phenomenon, if it could happen, would seem to undermine the important roles given to community, custom,
and consensus in our understanding of religion and ritual.

The fundamental efficacy of ritual activity
lies in its ability to have people embody assumptions about their place in a larger
order of things.
This new ritual paradigm has more subtle ramifications as well. Traditionally, for example, the legitimate authority
and efficacy of ritual were closely intertwined. For invented rites, which are not deeply rooted in any shared sense of



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tradition, however, legitimacy and authority tend to be construed more lightly and on quite different grounds. For
that reason, perhaps, much greater weight appears to fall on the dimension of efficacy.
The implicit dynamic and end of ritualization - that which it does not see itself doing - can be said to be the
production of a ritualized body. A ritualized body is a body invested with a sense of ritual. This sense of ritual
exists as an implicit variety of schemes whose deployment works to produce sociocultural situations that the
ritualized body can dominate in some way. This is a practical mastery, to use Bourdieus term, of strategic
schemes for ritualization, and it appears as a social instinct for creating and manipulating contrasts. This sense is
not a matter of self-conscious knowledge of any explicit rules of ritual but as an implicit cultivated disposition.
Ritualization produces this ritualized body through the interaction of the body with a structured and structuring
environment.

Free at Last - Now That the Nightmare is Over, Fela Has a Dream by
Roger Steffens, OPTION, Sep/Oct 1986.
Fela Anikulapo Kuti: He Who Carries Death in his Pouch. Black President. Band leader and revolutionary from
Lagos, Nigeria. Hes lost count of the times hes been imprisoned. His most recent bust put him behind bars for 18
months. The charges were blatantly false; eventually the judge who had sentenced him came to beg his forgiveness,
after which the magistrate was kicked off the bench and Fela released unconditionally, all the charges dropped.
.1986, from Los Angeles, he returned to Nigeria as a firebrand, inventing a new form of music called Afrobeat,
a red-hot mix of funk and West African riddims. His troubles started almost immediately. His lyrics named names
and demanded reforms in the post-civil war years of the Seventies.
One of the things that fascinated me in the Nigerian Newswatch article that appeared right after your release
was your talking about the New Age music and music for the Age of Aquarius. To us this seems like
something a California hippie might say, and to hear you, the head of the Movement of the People in Lagos,
Nigeria talking a desire to make New Age music absolutely fascinated me.
I was very spiritually aware, but subconsciously spiritually aware. But in 1981 I became consciously spiritually
aware.
Was that through Professor Hindu?
Yes, through a trance I had to go through. You see, I happen to know that some human beings have to go through a
kind of change of life at a particular time of their lives.
When the structure is ready for the transformation?
Exactly. When the experience of the structure is ready, the transformation has to take place whether one likes it or
not. I did not know about the transformation. My mother who knew about it had died. So there was nobody to help
me through the transformation. the purpose of the trance was to show me what life was all about, which I saw
very clearly. It was like a film, it was a whole two hour ritual I went through in which I saw a lot of things. It was
very spiritual and real.

Free at Last - Now That the Nightmare is Over, Fela Has a Dream by
Roger Steffens, OPTION, Sep/Oct 1986.
Via, Naija Music Blog, also The Shrine.



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a history of rituals is a history of reproduction, contestation, transformation ...
How can a new church, school, kingdom, colony, nation, party, "Common Market," or other "imagined community"
come into being except through its own characteristic rituals? Can a state be unmade by a carnival?
History, Structure, and Ritual, John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan

Victor Turner, The Ritual Process:
Structure and Anti-Structure.
Since societies are processes responsive to change, not fixed structures, new rituals are devised or borrowed, and old
ones decline and disappear. Nevertheless, forms survive through flux, and new ritual items, even new ritual
configurations, tend more often to be variants of old themes than radical novelties.

I remember seeing him for the first time just as if it was yesterday. Through the clouds of smoke and altered by the
"come hither" glow of red and blue bulbs that ordained the club, he stood with relative ease. an omnipotent
symbol of a bold and angry new Africa. I was instantly mesmerized and would be for life.
He was barechested and seemed oblivious to the thin film of sweat that defied the cool wind being dispersed by
huge ceiling fans above and that covered his sinewy ebony frame. One circle - in what must be some type of
traditional Yoruba chalk - encircled one eye making him look more like a winking raccoon than arguably Africa's
most vibrant singer slash activist. Ikeja, it is circa late 1970 "The Shrine"
Baba is Dead -- But Long Live Baba.
Iwedi Ojinmah
Anikulapo-Kuti was the only superstar African artist who was publically
engaging ritual practices while exploring African traditional music.

Chikukuango Cuxima-Zwa. Angolan Body Painting Performances:
Articulations of Diasporic Dislocation, Postcolonialism and Interculturalism in Britain.
Anikulapo-Kutis ritualistic ceremonies in his search for deeper African spirituality and modernity. I was fascinated
to find out that Anikulapo-Kuti performed live in his shine everyday at 2:00am in silence, paying respect to the
Yoruba spirits of Shango, Ifa, Eshu and Ogun; the same great spirits that are found in Afro-Cuban, Brazilian,
Haitian and Caribbean cults and in North America in voodoo. During these performances he sacrificed a chicken as
a form of blessing his music (Olorunyomy, 2003: 138). He sacrificed a chicken to represent the power and cross
connections between the visible mortal world and the invisible immortal world, the chicken was the means and
avenue between the two worlds (Veal, 2003: 39). The traffic of energy and forces between them is set-up during the
sacrifice of the chicken. What I found appealing was that, during Anikulapo-Kutis rituals ...the intent and
emphasis of sacrifice is not upon the death of the animal, it is upon the transfusion of its life... from the physical to
spiritual world (Deren, 2004: 216).In other words, flesh and blood became the essence of life and death a divine
energy with the gods in Yoruba mythological divinity (Olorunyomy, 2003: 135).

To the Pan-African world, Fela was a towering figure who arguably combined elements of pure artistry, political
perseverance, and a mystic, spiritual consciousness in a way that no other individual ever has. Spiritually, less is
known about Fela, except that his spiritual vision grew from the African tradition and his belief in the sublime
power of musicians his death was noted in the Western press by newspapers and magazines ranging from The
New York Times andTime magazine to Rolling Stone and Spin.
Carter Van Pelt, The Beat, 1997



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They were certainly treated as such by the Nigerian government, which banned his music on government radio
stations and harassed, beat and imprisoned Fela on a number of occasions. The most brutal incident occurred in
1977 when hundreds of soldiers surrounded and overran his communal home, burned it to the ground, injured
dozens of supporters and residents, beat Fela himself to unconsciousness, broke his hands, and threw his seventy-
seven year old mother from a window, causing her injuries from which she later died.
It was this attack that cemented Fela's revolutionary political commitments. It was also after this attack that he
married the twenty-seven women, dancers in his band, in a traditional tribal ceremony, an act with nationalist
overtones in Nigeria and an affirmation of tribal culture, contexts which are difficult for Western audiences to
appreciate.

Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti
Exhibition curated by Trevor Schoonmaker for the New Museum
July 11 - September 28, 2003

Fela Anikulapo-Kuti (1938-97) was a musical revolutionary who achieved a level of stardom in his native Nigeria
barely imaginable. A charismatic and controversial bandleader with raw sex appeal, Fela was a powerful activist and
arguably Africa's most pioneering and influential musician. He invented a new musical genre called Afrobeat that
merged Nigerian highlife music, Yoruba percussion and American funk and jazz into one infectious groove.
Injecting politically charged lyrics on top of the multi-layered rhythms, his music became a call to arms against
tyranny and injustice.

A fearless champion of the oppressed, Fela was also a utopian visionary. He proclaimed his compound, where he
resided with his extended family, band mates and street toughs, an independent nation for the marginalized masses,
free from the laws and jurisdiction of the Nigerian government. He called this counterculture haven the Kalakuta
(Swahili for "rascal") Republic, named after a prison cell he once occupiedf Fela's face-offs with the government
turned violent on several occasions; military raids of Kalakuta in 1974 and 1977 destroyed the compound, brutalized
its inhabitants, and left Fela hospitalized and imprisoned. An alleged currency-smuggling violation while trying to
board a plane for his 1984 American tour led to his arrest and imprisonment for over eighteen months.

Despite such attacks, Fela remained undeterred in spreading his music and message. He recorded more than seventy
albums and delivered several electrifying performances a week at his nightclub in Lagos, the Afrika Shrine. It was
not only the hottest club with the funkiest music in Africa, but a place of political empowerment and spiritual uplift
where the Yoruba Orisha (gods) and heroes of the African diaspora such as Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, and
Fela's mother, Olufunmilayo Ransome-Kuti, the leader of the Nigerian national and feminist movements, were
venerated.

At the height of his popularity in the mid-1970s, Fela took to calling himself the "Black President," a moniker
worthy of his pan-African appeal and political ambitions. When he passed away at the age of fifty-eight following a
prolonged battle with AIDS, more than a million people attended his processional funeral through the streets of
Lagos. Fela has since achieved an iconic status that situates him alongside such counter-cultural figures as Bob
Marley and Che Guevara. His music has been sampled, covered, and paid tribute to by an unbelievable array of
artists and he is cherished by musicians from Paul McCartney to Mos Def. Despite the controversies surrounding
him, no one can deny his bravery in the face of government brutality or the fact that he created some of the best



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dance music ever recorded. Today Fela's legacy is both sobering and inspirational, but his life and struggles are as
relevant as ever.

Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti is a critical multimedia exploration of the life and
legacy of Fela, and the first museum exhibition of its kind. Along with largely new work from thirty-four
contemporary visual artists, it includes documentary photography and video, and an extensive exploration in sound
of Fela's musical history and legacy. The artists' personal investigations speak to the world in which Fela lived and
to the many sides of his personality-political dissident, nativist spiritualist, unabashed sex symbol, husband to
twenty-eight women, utopian visionary, and musical pioneer.

Thus, Fela must be continually recreated as the misogynist native precisely because he continually threatens to
exceed those boundaries. In his music, in his lyrics, in his public persona, in his life, and even in his death, the
iterations of the pre-existing scripts of race and sex are recombined and recirculated in ways that also work to
destabilize the boundaries and legitimacy of these representations. Perhaps in the not too distant future, one may find
a postcolonial masculinity being articulated in the service of a radical third-world feminism, complete with
polygyny, as a challenge to the implicit imperialism of many existing Western feminisms. This possibility seems no
more unlikely than the recent transformations "queer" identities have undergone. If such a thing happens, Fela will
deserve some of the credit for preparing and troubling the ground on which future iterations of postcolonial
masculinities will take place.

the replication and expansion of domestic rituals.
As habitual, ceremonial, and physical manifestations of a worldview,
rituals draw people together
(Leach 1966).

Through ritual,
beliefs about the universe come to be acquired, reinforced,
and eventually changed
(Kertzer 1988:9).

Rituals have been used by all governments to reinforce their legitimacy.
David I. Kertzers Ritual, Politics, and Power.
the case for studying political rituals and to explore their most important characteristics.

In 2010, seventeen African states celebrated their fiftieth independence anniversary, honouring the date when they
became independent from their former colonial masters. Most of them did so with much pomp and pageantry but
also amidst critical reflections of disappointed hopes and future challenges. Other countries, like Namibia and
Zimbabwe, commemorated twenty or thirty years of independence. Others awaited their symbolically charged
round birthdays and just marked their usual annual national days.
Carola Lentz The 2010 independence jubilees:

"I came back home with the intent to change the whole system.
I didn't know I was going to have ... such horrors! I didn't know they gonna
give me such opposition because of my new Africanism. "



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Laray Denzer in Fela This Bitch of a Life,
by Carlos Moore

Madness and Colonization, Richard Keller
Psychiatry in the British and French Empires, 1800-1962.
M. J. Field, Search for Security: an Ethno-psychiatric study of Rural Ghana (London 1960). Field notes an apparent
correlation between literacy and schizophrenia, but points out that, without reliable figures on the incidence of
literacy within age-group, no clear conclusions can be drawn: I would like to stress that this correlation is, for
several reasons, highly misleading and does not point to a conclusion that schizophrenia is caused by literacy
(p.318). Later in the book, when discussing chronic schizophrenia, she makes this point again, concluding that
'literate schizophrenics are more conspicuous than illiterate, but not necessarily more numerous' (p.453). A similar
conclusion was reached by G. Tooth, who also worked on Ghana. He draws attention to the fact that certain
circumstances in the lives of literates 'combine to make the literate lunatic both prominent and socially unacceptable
and, not unnaturally, suggest to the casual observer that literacy is itself a causal factor'. He concludes that 'this
survey provides no evidence in support of the hypothesis that psychosis is commoner in the Westernised group than
in the rest of the population'. G. Tooth, Studies in Mental Illness in the Gold Coast (London, 1950), cited in
Carothers, The African Mind. ...
Fela Anikulapo-Kuti was a Nigerian musical legend and human rights activist. His views and efforts on human
rights were admixture of personal principles and societal influence. A man of complex character, Fela exhibited
these through his songs; the conflict between tradition and modernism, indigenous and foreign cultures and the
resultant effect of identity crisis in African society. The tyranny of the masses by the ruling class and the affluent
were the major themes of his songs. As a courageous epitome, Fela used his songs to educate and encourage
oppressed African people to fight for their rights.
This article has discussed the life and human right activism of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti by adopting the critical socio-
biography theory as the conceptual framework. Hence, the background and the influence of individuals and groups
played major roles on Felas carrier and in charting ideological bearing with his image clearly displayed. The article
has also discussed the effects of colonial rule in Africa, economic and socio-political oppression in Nigeria and the
response of Felas songs to these.

Tejumola Olaniyans book examines the aesthetic and political dimensions of Fela Anikulapo-Kutis afro-beat, a
musical idiom that draws from multiple styles like highlife, jazz, and varieties of indigenous African music, and
through which Fela addressed many of the challenges that beset the African postcolonial environment.
Olaniyan argues that afro-beat, in its full maturity, constituted the denouement of Felas transformation from an
apolitical hustler to an ideologically committed artist.
Musical features like multilayered ostinato patterns, corroborative punctuations of brass instruments, solo-dominated
call-responsorial phrases, and the sheer force of a massive ensemble, though initially devoid of any strong political
meaning in Felas music, would later become bearers of a dissident political ideology.
In spite of the clarity of Felas political message, however, a seeming element of ambivalence pervades his music.
Take, for example, Felas persistent advocacy of an authentic African culture, and its negation of the quite
considerable impact of European elements on his music. Olaniyan employs the figure of antinomy to engage such
contradictions, and suggests that Felas music is both a symptom and a resister of a modernism that is at once
oppressive and enchanting. The resort to an illusionary African authenticity was strategic to Felas attempt to
configure a protected space within which he could reclaim an agency that he believed had been undermined by
colonization and modernity.
Tejumola Olaniyan, Arrest the Music! Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics
A review by Bode Omojola, Mount Holyoke.



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DIED. FELA ANIKUPALO-KUTI [sic], 58, confrontational father of Afro-Beat; after suffering from AIDS; in
Lagos. Flamboyant and unapologetic--he married 27 women in one mass ceremony--Fela liked to strut about the
stage clad only in briefs. He wielded his saxophone like a weapon, directing it against the Nigerian government in
songs like V.I.P. (Vagabonds in Power). His commitment involved more than just attitude: he was frequently
arrested and in 1984 was imprisoned.
"Milestones" obituary in Timemagazine:

ritual
activism
& black africa


John Howe. Fela anikulapo kuti: An honest man
characteristic of Fela. He had no interest in perfect philosophic correctness which has a very limited role in
showbiz. And, in any case, what with one thing and another, contradictions of a sometimes painful sort were
apparent in Felas own life and household. Some lyrics a string of anarchist slogans directed against a system,
and a series of regimes, that seemed to get steadily more venal and oppressive throughout his working life.
Felas political programme, to the extent that he had one, was perpetually under construction; his political
judgement was usually hasty, often flawed, sometimes almost perverse; but his political prejudices - pro-African,
pro-underdog, anti-pomp and anti-injustice - were generally sound. They are gut feelings shared by most Africans.
When Fela spoke - as he often did - in the name of Africa, he may have been projecting some of the attitudes of a
famous, eccentric, successful, Westernized, upper-class Yoruba anarchist and bohemian on a largely
uncomprehending continent; but people also understood that the Africa he referred to was a colonized Africa whose
private history had been disrupted by outside forces and needed to be relaunched. This knack of being wrong, but
right, endeared Fela to his constituents, but also puzzled everyone and enraged the powerful individuals implicitly
criticized, at the same time providing them with ammunition to use against him.

for the 'grandmothers' (yeye) of the Oroyeye festival recover repressed historical
memories and dynastic claims that, in times of crisis, can trigger social and political change.
the 'canalising' functions of sanctioned obscenity and abuse are far from harmless palliatives for those under
attack. Nor do they merely redress antisocial behaviour, for the 'grandmothers' (yeye) of the Oroyeye festival



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recover repressed historical memories and dynastic claims that, in times of crisis, can trigger social and political
change. True by definition, Oroyeye texts not only constitute an effective form of political criticism-in one famous
case rallying the public to depose an errant Oba (king) - but also establish a public archive of evidence for local
magistrates and historians in adducing testimony, citing precedents, and recalling critical moments in Ayede's
turbulent past.
...For central to Evans-Pritchard's argument was the insight that sanctioned obscenities made social sense by
channelling repressed desire and 'pent-up emotion' (ibid.: 95) into harmless 'palliatives' (ibid.: 100) and collective
activities that were generally (but not exclusively) sanctified by ceremonial.
these songs within a variety of shifting contexts, ranging from the specific social project of the festival itself-
which is to ostracise thieves and stigmatise 'evildoers'-to the sexual, socio-political and historical 'sub-texts' which,
when voiced, account for its deeper meanings and ritual power. In so doing, I hope to go beyond canonical accounts
of how ritualised ostracism upholds general norms of sociability

Michael E. Veal, Fela:
The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon
A review by Sazi Diamini
Nativism in postcolonial cultural production is not a rejection of the encounter with Europe or of modernity as such;
it does not fear openness, and hybridity is not alien to it. What it laments is the "forced necessity"10 of the native to
capitulate, appropriate, or borrow: a characteristic condi? tion of capitalist modernity that rules out equality in
advance. Fela's nativism is not an atavistic return to roots but a reclaiming of "authentic subjectivity": a subjectivity
that expresses, that is, subjects, itself "freely" without the element of a crudely obvious compulsion; the power and
autonomy of Africa to self-direct itself and its place in the world.

Arrest the Music! Tejumola Olaniyan
Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics
See also Lefebvre's useful study (168-238). 2. As in many other areas of contemporary African intellectual
production in which it appears, "nativism," supposedly the clamorous 'return-to-roots' reaffirmation of native,
indigenous traditions against a stifling encroachment by the foreign, has a very elastic character. Nativism here has
strangely refused to be bound by its conceptual "tribal" or ethnic delimitation, and has been unapologetically
transnational, continental. In other words, nativism in African discourses rarely speaks so much in the name of this
or that ethnic culture as of African cultures generally. Ordinarily, such transnationalism can hardly be described as
"nativist"; that is, it generally is now a testament to the power and ability of European racialism to cheapen and
simplify complexity in its own interest.
See, for instance, Howe's useful analysis: "When Fela spoke as he often did in the name of 'Africa', he may have
been projecting some of the attitudes of a famous, eccentric, successful, Westernized, upper-class Yoruba anarchist
and bohemian on a largely uncomprehending continent; but people understood that the Africa he referred to was a
colonized Africa whose private history had been disrupted by outside forces and needed to be relaunched. This
knack of being wrong, but right, endeared Fela to his constituents. . . ." (130; emphasis added). This is what Karl
Marx means in one of his eloquent characterizations of capitalist modernity: It compels all nations, on the pain of
extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into
their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image" (84).

Yet within this universality, the inherent multiplicity of ritual practices,
both between and within cultures, also reflects the full diversity of the human experience.



Page | 12
Ritual, Kevin Carrico
Online journal, Cultural Anthropology

Terence O. Ranger
From that perspective it may well be that nowhere is there more talk about change than in Africa. Yet, within Africa,
few can really trigger change. Herein lies the great agony of Africa's popular sentiments.... To describe people's
movements in Africa it is necessary to recognise their under-lying attitude, which is one of active waiting and active
hope.... To outlive the repression, in its various forms, is to gain victory.

Lisa J. Lucero, The Politics of Ritual:
The Emergence of Classic Maya Rulers.
Emerging leaders may replicate and expand traditional rituals to integrate increasingly larger numbers of people,
advance political agendas, and situate political change within known cultural constructs. Ritual events enable them
not only to promote surplus production but, more significant, to appropriate it and surplus funds an expanding
political economy as well as ceremonies and other public events.

A Critical Look at Indices Used in the Study of Social Change in Colonial Africa
Bernard Magubane
Writes Mphahlele (1967: 36-37): I have assimilated the education only the West had to offer me. I was brought up
on European history and literature and religion and made to identify with European heroes while African heroes
were being discredited, except those that became Christians or signed away their land and freedom; while African
gods were being smoked out. The style of analysis used in these studies has acted, politically as well as
sociologically, as a powerful mystification of the real social forces at work. It will be shown later in this paper that
the possibility of political action by Africans to change the status quo has been denied implicitly by the way in
which social change has been conceptualized. These studies are a bad example of what Mills (1961: 54) calls
abstracted empiricism: Insofar as studies of stratification have been done in the new style, no new conceptions have
arisen.

Mazi Okoro Ojiaku,
European tribalism and African nationalism
To the degree that he embodies both these varying norms, he works within two sets of symbols at the same
time, with resultant disharmony and inconsistency in his social personality. This also leads to frequent
conflict between persons; one's behaviour is quickly seen by others as deviant.
What is particularly unique about the society in general and the city in particular, is the fact that the individual bears
within himself two totally different and invariably incompatible values and beliefs : As a member of the traditional
society he bears with him the norms and values of his society; as one also exposed to the values of the West, he
carries the bureaucratic values emphasized by the coloniser. To the degree that he embodies both these varying
norms, he works within two sets of symbols at the same time, with resultant disharmony and inconsistency in his
social personality. This also leads to frequent conflict between persons; one's behaviour is quickly seen by others as
deviant. As with the individual so with the city, which because it contains both the traditional as well as western
standards of value and practice, also embodies conflict and disharmony. This conflict manifests itself today in
traditional nationalism, as reflected in the formation of the various kinds of organizations with a strong tinge of
traditionalism, in the new urban centers.



Page | 13

Bell's Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice
[R]itual has simultaneously become an object, a method, and even something of a style of scholarship on the
American academic scene. Some theorists have tried to build on and improve performance theory, but they
are still vulnerable to critiques, such as the fact that sometimes ritual isnt a performance but is intended to
cause change in the outside world (43)
Ritual gives shape and meaning to society and culture.
Dr. Bells contribution to the field of ritual studies forged a new framework for defining ritual as a situational and
strategic activity her fundamental re-imagining of the nature and function of ritualization- the term Bell
preferred when speaking of ritual as a form of privileged action - forever altered our conception of the simple
dichotomies of belief and behavior, the individual and the collective, the sacred and the profane.
Reza Aslan on Catherine Bells Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions.

The Sense of Ritual the primacy of the social act itself, how its strategies are lodged in the very doing of
the act, and how ritualization is a strategic way of acting in specific social situations. The framework of
ritualization casts a new light on the purpose of ritual activity, its social efficacy, and its embodiment in
complex traditions and systems.

Ritual knowledge became not something external to doing or being,
but rather 'a matter of participation in the ongoing drama of the world' (Jackson 1989, 15).
Richard C. Jankowsky, The Body in Performance,
Music, Spirit Possession and the In-Between

Catherine Bell


and consensus in our understanding of religion and ritual.

order of things.
that reason, perhaps, much greater weight appears to fall on the dimension of efficacy. There is increased pressure
for the invented rite to show that it works; this is what legitimates the rite since there is no tradition to do this.



Page | 14
Of course, the expectations of what it means to work are also not the same as for traditional rituals, for which no one
asked whether the rite worked, just whether it was done correctly. In some societies and cosmologies, correct
performance of a ritual made it effective whether you wanted it to be or not.

Ritual, anti-structure, and religion, Mathieu Deflem
A discussion of Victor Turner's processual symbolic analysis
All rituals, it seems, are in Turner's perspective religious; they all "celebrate or commemorate transcendent powers"
(V. Turner and E. Turner 1982:201). Still, Turner did view rituals in modern industrial society as having some
characteristics different from the tribal rituals he studied in Ndembu society. In tribal societies "all life is pervaded
by invisible influences" (Turner 1976a:507). In this way, tribal societies are wholly religious, and ritual actions
surrounding their religions are "nationwide"; they are oriented towards "all members of the widest effective
community" (Turner 1977b:45). In modern societies, on the other hand, religion is "regarded as something
apart from our economic, political, domestic and recreational life.
Ritual, anti-structure, and religion, Mathieu Deflem

Ritual by Kevin Carrico
Yet within this universality, the inherent multiplicity of ritual practices,
both between and within cultures, also reflects the full diversity of the human experience.

How does ritual frame our social experiences?
What are the relationships between ritual symbols
across social fields? Who exercises control in rituals;
or do rituals exercise control upon their actors?
Ritual is arguably a universal feature of human social existence: just as one cannot envision a society without
language or exchange, one would be equally hard-pressed to imagine a society without ritual. And while the word
ritual commonly brings to mind exoticized images of primitive others diligently engaged in mystical activities,
one can find rituals, both sacred and secular, throughout modern society: collective experiences, from the
Olympics to the commemoration of national tragedies; cyclical gatherings, from weekly congregations at the local
church to the annual turkey carving at Thanksgiving to the intoxication of Mardi Gras; and personal life-patterns,
from morning grooming routines to the ways in which we greet and interact with one another. Ritual is in fact an
inevitable component of culture, extending from the largest-scale social and political processes to the most intimate
aspects of our self-experience. Yet within this universality, the inherent multiplicity of ritual practices, both between
and within cultures, also reflects the full diversity of the human experience. It was then neither pure coincidence nor
primitivist exoticization that placed ritual at the center of the development of anthropological thought: it was instead
rituals rich potential insights as an object of sociocultural analysis.

Danny Kaplan The Songs of the Siren: Engineering National Time on Israeli Radio,
the role of music radio in shaping collective experience and national sentiment.
Particularly at times of national commemoration or emergency, Kaplan argues that Israeli disc jockeys draw upon a
common habitus to produce a unified musical atmosphere which engineers national mood shifts, at once playing a
central role in determining the importance of events within public consciousness, while also affirming national
identity through the construction of collective experience. Kaplans case not only draws attention to the expansion of
ritualistic collective experiences beyond local audiences through the development of modern mass media, but also
highlights the essential role of ritual in the production and reproduction of the modern nation-state.



Page | 15
Ritual knowledge became not something external to doing or being,
but rather 'a matter of participation in the ongoing drama of the world' (Jackson 1989, 15).

John Blacking engaged in a similar search for meaning rather than explanation
among the Venda, from whom he learned that music, when performed well, in the proper context and
for the right person, enables a dancer to 'come face to face with her/his other self,
the real self of the ancestor spirit' (1985, 67)

Ritual and Mythological Recuperation in the Drama of Esiaba Irobi
Isidore Diala
Recreating in terms of contemporary experience situations in which ritual had cogency, and treating myths as
malleable narratives capable of authorizing an ideological position, his attempts at the expansion of Igbo ritual into
contemporary (Nigerian) life are significantly marked by a deep belief in the religious efficacy of ritual. Irobi's
theater is still a house of faith in which the ceremony of drama does not only provide spectacle and entertainment
but is also aimed at resolving practical problems in society: an ideological resolution of the political impasse that has
characterized the post-colonial state.
In reality, he cultivates and harnesses the ancient potency ascribed to ritual to authenticate a new secular vision. His
expansion of ritual into life and giving of a secular base to that life is indeed marked by an iconoclastic projection of
traditional Igbo paradigms to facilitate secular projects. Irobi is obsessed by the possibility of the regeneration of a
society laboring under the burden of guilt.

In Power and Performance, Johannes Fabian calls attention to the value of attaining practical as opposed to merely
discursive knowledge through performing with others. This knowledge is embodied in movements, gestures and
interactions. Closely allied with the ethos of radical empiricism (and aptly presented in musical terms), he describes
this kind of engagement as a situation in which 'the ethnographer does not call the tune, but plays along' (1990, 18).
In the context of stambeli ritual, 'playing along,' in its literal sense, meant synchronizing my singing and shq?shiq
playing with the rest of the sunn?', following the often subtle cues of the yinna, directing our musical energies
towards the trance dancer and her possessing spirit, and entertaining an audience. These multiple and simultaneous
interactions, according to Thomas J. Csordas, are usefully construed as 'somatic modes of attention', which are
'culturally elaborated ways of attending to and with one's body in surroundings that include the embodied presence
of others' (2002, 244). In the heat of a stambeli performance, my bodily experience was multilayered. Ritual
knowledge became not something external to doing or being, but rather 'a matter of participation in the ongoing
drama of the world' (Jackson 1989, 15).

African Rituals of Conflict, Edward Norbeck
Gluckman's writings on customs of African peoples are among the earliest anthropological works that present
hypotheses concerning socially integrative effects of expressions of conflict. Gluckman's criticism (1949a: 10) of
Malinow-ski for his "refusal to see conflict as a mode of integrating groups and to recog-nize that hostility between
groups is a form of social balance" is perhaps the first explicit expression of this point of view by an anthroplogist.
Gluckman's interpretations are unusual in another respect.



Page | 16

However, if capturing an imagined, lost African purity is not the goal, then perhaps Fela is a very good choice as a
representative of African music. His music is a product of Africa's colonial and postcolonial history and as such
represents the present realities of Africa. What Fela lacks in purity of native authenticity, he more than makes up for
in richness of postcolonial fusion. For Fela, the identity of "African" has a use in his pan-African politics for
building solidarity across national boundaries and across linguistic and cultural barriers in an effort to build an
international political movement.
In Time magazine, the epithet of "African" serves more to homogenize and obscure the real differences among
Africans from the gaze of Western eyes, and creates an imagined, almost mythic, space called "Africa" which acts as
a repository for a host of Western fears and desires. In one case the goal is to overcome differences; in the other it is
to deny the existence of those differences.
The text of the brief "Milestones" obituary in Time magazine reads in its entirety:
DIED. FELA ANIKUPALO-KUTI [sic], 58, confrontational father of Afro-Beat; after suffering from AIDS; in
Lagos. Flamboyant and unapologetic--he married 27 women in one mass ceremony--Fela liked to strut about the
stage clad only in briefs. He wielded his saxophone like a weapon, directing it against the Nigerian government in
songs like V.I.P. (Vagabonds in Power). His commitment involved more than just attitude: he was frequently
arrested and in 1984 was imprisoned.
All of this implies that the subject named Fela Kuti could not have occupied his cultural niche in the West as a
radical, third-world cultural figure without occupying it through the iteration of scripts already bearing the marks of
Western racism and sexism. As was shown in the preceding section, there is no necessary connection between Fela's
African identity and his misogyny. However, when viewed from the vantage point of what might be necessary to
successfully import Fela for consumption in the West, then it begins to seem both necessary, and even predictable,
that events in his life be linked in ways that fit Western expectations. Thus, his masculinity, his politics and his
music are all cast in terms of repetitions of cultural norms that secure his sought-after native authenticity while
simultaneously rendering them safe for Western consumption. This safety is insured through the staging of his
masculinity in terms familiar to Western audiences, as politically radical and dangerously sexual, but fatally flawed
by backwards tribal views on the inferiority of women. His politics are radical, but no more so than the 1960s
Berkeley politics on which they are patterned.

but is an expression by a group of persons and is permitted and even prescribed by society. [Evans-Pritchard,1965:
76] Thus opens an early essay by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, excerpted from his Ph.D. thesis and first published in 1929,
on 'Collective Expressions of Obscenity in Africa'. Although lacking the polish of his more mature writings, the
essay represents the first systematic approach to ritually sanctioned licence and 'licentiousness' in Africa, bringing
together scattered texts in published accounts ... Several important ideas were foreshadowed in this essay,
anticipating Radcliffe-Brown's theory of 'permitted disrespect', Gluckman's work on rituals of rebellion, and even
Turner's studies of ritual liminality. For central to Evans-Pritchard's argument was the insight that sanctioned



Page | 17
obscenities made social sense by channelling repressed desire and 'pent-up emotion' (ibid.: 95) into harmless
'palliatives' (ibid.: 100) and collective activities that were generally (but not exclusively) sanctified by ceremonial.
of how ritualised ostracism upholds general norms of sociability (although such norms are clearly invoked), for, as
we shall see, the 'canalising' functions of sanctioned obscenity and abuse are far from harmless palliatives for those
under attack. Nor do they merely redress antisocial behaviour, for the 'grandmothers' (yeye) of the Oroyeye festival
turbulent past.

Gluckman states (1954b:21): "The acceptance of the estab-lished order as right and good, and even sacred, seems to
allow unbridled excess, very rituals of rebellion, for the order itself keeps this rebellion within bounds." ... "These
rituals contain the belief that if people perform certain actions they will influence the course of events so that their
group be made richer, more prosperous, more successful, and so forth. Some of us therefore call these actions
'ritual', and say that they contain 'mystical notions'-notions that their performance will in some mys-terious way
affect the course of events. This examina-tion of writings on Africa reveals an abundance of socially regalated
expressions of resentment on ritual and other special occasions. They are conducted at cer-tain times and are not
allowed to get out of hand. In some societies "regula-tion" is strengthened by limiting the expressions to a group
level so that more intense personal hostility is avoided. Interpersonal airing of grievances is also common, although
it seems rarely to apply to specific dyadic relationships.
. . . I suggest that much of what has been cited as evidence of rebellion in rituals elsewhere in Africa is in fact the
formal admission of anger, the prelude to reconciliation. The body politic is purged by the very act of 'speaking out'
.... " When rites seemingly hostile to rulers are conducted only in ceremonies of accession, it seems doubtful that
they are even expressions of anger. Since they are conducted at irregular and sometimes great intervals, their value
as safety valves for the expression of anger seems most doubtful.

Catherine Bell

The post-colonial, the odds and their insanity.
Of course, Sadowsky admits, it would be a mistake to conflate madness with anticolonial resistance.
But the "content" of madness "demands attention; without it the patient is decontextualized, and the social
dimension of affliction is obscured."



Page | 18
The most intriguing of these is the case of Isaac O., to which Sadowsky devotes an entire chapter. A nineteen-year-
old missionary student at the time of his first confinement in 1932, Isaac claimed "that he would kill all the
Europeans in Nigeria," posed as a colonial official in order to solicit help from villagers while he carried loads on a
highway, and claimed that he had "purchased a motor car for a million pounds." Isaac's delusions drew attention to
his position between cultures. His violent sentiments toward Europeans demonstrated his resentment at the hollow
promises of a colonial education, while his other claims "appropriated" symbols of British dominance: military
power, automotive technology, and capital.
50

Of course, Sadowsky admits, it would be a mistake to conflate madness with anticolonial resistance. But the
"content" of madness "demands attention; without it the patient is decontextualized, and the social dimension of
affliction is obscured." Even if we cannot interpret delusions and confinement as manifestations of resistance and
oppression, they "have significance as a gauge and representation of social pressures and contradictions" in a
moment when Nigerians increasingly realized just how limited their opportunities under colonialism were.
Sadowsky follows Fanon, concluding that "as inchoate articulations of the stresses of colonial society" the
"'symptoms' of Nigeria's lunatics and the psychiatric labels that were affixed" deepen our understanding of the
psychology of colonialism. And the psychiatric literature that medical theorists produced about indigenous madness
informs us about the psychological predicaments of colonialism for the colonizers as well as the colonized.
Practitioners in Nigeria "viewed Africans as representatives of a race, rather than as individual patients," with the
result that they described Africans' "innate character" without examining British policies that provoked trauma by
transforming the social landscape.
51

M. J. Field, Search for Security:
an Ethno-psychiatric study of Rural Ghana (London 1960).
that certain circumstances in the lives of literates 'combine to make the literate lunatic both prominent and
socially unacceptable and, not unnaturally, suggest to the casual observer that literacy is itself a causal factor'.
Field notes an apparent correlation between literacy and schizophrenia, but points out that, without reliable figures
on the incidence of literacy within age-group, no clear conclusions can be drawn: I would like to stress that this
correlation is, for several reasons, highly misleading and does not point to a conclusion that schizophrenia is caused
by literacy (p.318). Later in the book, when discussing chronic schizophrenia, she makes this point again,
concluding that 'literate schizophrenics are more conspicuous than illiterate, but not necessarily more numerous'
(p.453). A similar conclusion was reached by G. Tooth, who also worked on Ghana. He draws attention to the fact
that certain circumstances in the lives of literates 'combine to make the literate lunatic both prominent and socially
unacceptable and, not unnaturally, suggest to the casual observer that literacy is itself a causal factor'. He concludes
that 'this survey provides no evidence in support of the hypothesis that psychosis is commoner in the Westernised
group than in the rest of the population'. G. Tooth, Studies in Mental Illness in the Gold Coast (London, 1950), cited
in Carothers, The African Mind.

Fela Kuti During these performances he sacrificed a chicken as a form of blessing his music (Olorunyomy, 2003:
138). He sacrificed a chicken to represent the power and cross connections between the visible mortal world and the
invisible immortal world, the chicken was the means and avenue between the two worlds (Veal, 2003: 39). The
traffic of energy and forces between them is set-up during the sacrifice of the chicken. What I found appealing was
that, during Anikulapo-Kutis rituals ...the intent and emphasis of sacrifice is not upon the death of the animal, it is
upon the transfusion of its life... from the physical to spiritual world (Deren, 2004: 216).In other words, flesh and
blood became the essence of life and death a divine energy with the gods in Yoruba mythological divinity



Page | 19
(Olorunyomy, 2003: 135). In Anikulapo-Kutis ritual performances the chic en sacrifice is the beginning of a
deeper connection with spirits, the spirits arrive when the chic en dies, because upon the chic ens death he loses
control of his consciousness and speaks in a sign language and struggles to break off from an incomprehensible
experience (Olorunyomy, 2003: 136). What interested me in Anikulapo-Kutis chicken sacrifice is that, the chicken
represented death and the force that generates new life. Life and death become one and the same (Kuti, 1982).

it does not fear openness, and hybridity is not alien to it. What it laments is the "forced necessity" of the native to
capitulate, appropriate, or borrow: a characteristic condition of capitalist modernity that rules out equality in

Arrest the Music! Tejumola Olaniyan
Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics
See also Lefebvre's useful study (168-238). As in many other areas of contemporary African intellectual production
in which it appears, "nativism," supposedly the clamorous 'return-to-roots' reaffirmation of native, indigenous
traditions against a stifling encroachment by the foreign, has a very elastic character. Nativism here has strangely
refused to be bound by its conceptual "tribal" or ethnic delimitation, and has been unapologetically transnational,
continental. In other words, nativism in African discourses rarely speaks so much in the name of this or that ethnic
culture as of African cultures generally. Ordinarily, such transnationalism can hardly be described as "nativist"; that
is, it generally is now a testament to the power and ability of European racialism to cheapen and simplify complexity
in its own interest.
See, for instance, Howe's useful analysis: "When Fela spoke as he often did in the name of 'Africa', he may have
been projecting some of the attitudes of a famous, eccentric, successful, Westernized, upper-class Yoruba anarchist
and bohemian on a largely uncomprehending continent; but people understood that the Africa he referred to was a
colonized Africa whose private history had been disrupted by outside forces and needed to be relaunched. This
knack of being wrong, but right, endeared Fela to his constituents. . . ." (130; emphasis added). This is what Karl
Marx means in one of his eloquent characterizations of capitalist modernity: It compels all nations, on the pain of
extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into
their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image".

Fela Anikulapo-Kuti
The Art of an Afrobeat Rebel
Randall E Grass
Music can be a bridge to the animating forces of nature or to the spirit-world of the ancestors and the unborn, as well
as to deities who influence the material world. The highly sophisticated rhythms of African music evoke the
manifold rhythms of creation; this complexity frequently demands a large group of musicians creating communally.
But he also was shaped by an emerging urban, bourgeois culture that was greatly influenced by West-ern values.
Fela came of age during Nigeria's struggle with the twin spec-ters of colonial suffocation and impossibly romantic
notions of indepen-dence. Nigeria's fledgling steps as a newly independent nation in the '6os led it right into an
explosion of development accelerated by sudden wealth from massive oil discoveries.



Page | 20
Against the background of the flashy, sophisticated technology of the American society that awed him, he saw
people who were turning to Africa'sc ulturalt reasuresf or inspirationa nd wisdom. The Autobiography of MalcolmX
in particularc onvinced Fela to claim and exploreh is African identity, both personally and with his music.
The impact of these recordings on post-colonial Nigeria, which was foundering in waves of cor-ruption, sweeping
social change, and war, was immediate and profound. Suddenly the urban masses-as well as progressive intellectuals
and res-tive students-had a spokesperson, a catalyst for mounting challenges. Like traditional musicians, Fela was a
lightning rod for the concerns of society, but unlike them he adopted a confrontational posture. Where tra-ditional
musicians might admonish a chief or clan member with oblique satire, Fela would make naked accusations and blunt
calls to action.
The name of the club reflected Fela's intention that it be more than a night-club; it was meant to be a place of
communal celebration and worship, a rallying point of pan-African progressivism. Although many people at-tended
to enjoy the music and the loose ecstasy of the rebellious hemp-smoking crowd, just as many were there to partake
of Fela's vision of a new African society. Instead of ethnic or "tribal" communalism, as in traditional society, Fela's
new society was pan-ethnic and pan-generational. Afrika 70 performed on a stage at one end of a square, open-air
court-yard edged with the flags of all African nations.
In reality, Fela establisheda kind of traditional village in the middle of the city, with himself as chief, head of a
polygamous household. He exercised disciplinei n the authoritarianb ut benevolent manner of traditional rulers.
Pilgrims, whether curious pas-sersby, worshipful teenagers, or emissaries from progressive political movements,
came for audiences. Though Fela's lifestyle intentionally harkened back to tradition, his flouting of convention was
at odds with tradition. He openly disrespected the powers-that-be. This generated harassment by the police and
military which escalated into violent clashes between arrogant squads of "Fela's boys" and the authorities.
As the proposed beginning of civiliang overnmenta pproached, Fela associated himself with the Young African
Pioneers, a political group linked to vaguely socialist would-be politicians. He began to style himself as "The Black
President," mentioning aspirations toward political office to friends. All of this reflected Fela's feeling that art should
have political purposes. In a television the context of the historical, social and cultural milieu of post-independence
Nigeria and against the starkly contrasted landscapes of the city of Lagos, a crucial mix of thriving first-world and
an impoverished, haphazard Third- World urbanisation. The turbulent backdrop to his development is one of pre-
colonial Yoruba multi-ethnicity and competitively opposed intrusions of colonising Western sovereignties at a time
of the emergence of tense African cosmopolitan political economies and metropolises.
Kuti closely identified himself with musical forces which through musical composition and performance and by
utilising different stylistic and ideological approaches sought to graft a pan-ethnic, pan-African cul-tural pride and
consciousness onto existing popular styles such as highlife. However, initial attempts to set up a thriving ensemble
playing 'pure' African-American style jazz to Nigerian audiences already heavily groomed on local and international
commercial musical styles and dances encountered difficulties. Over and above his search for a sound in which
elements of jazz and highlife, as well as influences of Cuban salsa and rhythm-and-blues sat well together, Kuti was
also evolving a per-sonal ideology which sought to incorporate his growing engagement with the politi-cal economy
of African culture in general. A large part of this process involved a discursive engagement with the expressive
cultural consciousness of both African and diasporic identities in popular musical performance. his mature
afrobeat style emerged during this period, notably his creation of interlocking rhythmic instrumental patterns,
percussive horn riffs and a persuasively emotional declamatory vocal style, in a music imbued with unmistakable
popular dance elements. Other musical developments at this time included a gradual politicisation of his song texts,
in part due to recent mentorship in the United States of African-American 'black power' activists, ideologies and
'black is beauti-ful' discourses. As a result, alongside a consolidating style imbibed from a diverse diasporic
influential palette, was Kuti's growing assumption of a Nigerian, domestic and grassroots take on diverse issues of
social and political import. The rest of the fourth chapter discusses Kuti's musical and ideological devel-opment
including his assumption of what became characteristically contradictory positions with regard to issues in both his
public and private life. These included his neo-traditional stylistic approach which meant a circumvention of
indigenous Yoruba musical practice, rituals and core artifacts. Emanating from both a 'home-grown' African and



Page | 21
urban Lagosian worldview, this attracted global attention encouraged by his embrace of first-world modern
technological and performance production styles and methods. Originating a socially outspoken popular music style
in the midst of the equally emergent, disturbing diplomatic excesses of the post-oil-boom Nigerian state, presented
its own political challenges and practical economic choices. Kuti's establishment of the performance space known as
the 'Afrika Shrine' served both as an independent political space for maintaining a vehement opposition to Nigeria's
political and economic leadership, as well as nurturing a subversive material and moral economy with relative
autonomy.
contested legacies of a post-colonial African and post-independence Nigerian life experience. In chapter five,
Veal accounts for the tense relationships which developed between Kuti and the Nigerian state, particularly the
army, as a result of his biting criticism of the status quo. This was essentially effected through challenging songs and
perfomances aimed at focusing on and highlighting the abuses of the country's political leadership. As a result, Kuti
became a major living symbol of dissent to moral convention for a rebellious, youthful African urban subculture.
Through set-ting up his own 'Kalakuta Republic' headquarters and long-running advertisements in the press, he
established both physical and discursive domains in determined opposition to state corruption and its violently
censorial pattern of dealing with legitimate expressions of social grievances from the Nigerian people. Indeed, the
height of Kuti's creative career was fatefully overshadowed and its economic potential painfully truncated, by a
ruthless army attack on his Kalakuta residence in 1977.

ritual
activism
& black africa


Bernard Magubane
arisen.
In reality, of course, education and occupation, as well as a taste for conventional clothing and food, are instru-
mental in the struggle for power. The African cannot dispel the feeling of inferiority engendered by the system until
he is able to meet and deal with the "superior" classes on their own terms as regards education in the broadest
sense-and that includes styles of dress and diet. The social tendencies of a people, therefore, always arise from actual



Page | 22
needs within the people, and not through mere imitation of foreign models. It is possible, certainly, to learn from
other countries or other times; but people take from these sources only what they can use, what corresponds to a
need. Naturally one does not go to the trouble of inventing a new item when an existing one is handy. The fact that a
new item comes from abroad does not answer the question of why it finds use; that can only be explained by actual
needs of the people themselves (Kaustky 1953:265). The role of modern industrial development in the social and
spiritual crisis of the colonies was indeed great. The "acculturation" which took place while Africans were under
colonial rule was much more than aspiring to "goals of a European character." Van den Berghe (I1964: 64) has said:
"Detribalization" is, thus, not simply the product of selective borrowing, with or without reinterpretation, from
Western culture. It is also a process of cultural dislocation and dis- organization initiated by the impact of external
forces (such as industrialization and political subjection), and a process of readaptation of the traditional institutions
to the new condition.
What I found appealing was that, during Anikulapo-Kutis rituals
... the intent and emphasis of sacrifice is not upon the death of the animal, it is upon
the transfusion of its life... from the physical to spiritual world (Deren, 2004: 216). from the physical to
spiritual world (Deren, 2004: 216). In other words, flesh and blood became the essence of life and death a
divine energy with the gods in Yoruba mythological divinity (Olorunyomy, 2003: 135).

How did Classic Maya rulers (ca. a.d. 250850) acquire and maintain political power - the ability to exact tribute
in the form of surplus goods and labor from subjects? I argue that it was through the replication and expansion
of domestic rituals. As habitual, ceremonial, and physical manifestations of a worldview, rituals draw people
together (Leach 1966). Through ritual, beliefs about the universe come to be acquired, reinforced, and eventually
changed (Kertzer 1988:9). Emerging Maya rulers expanded family-scale rites, especially dedication, termination,
and ancestor veneration rituals, into larger communal ceremonies as part of the process that drew seasonal labor
from farmsteads to civic-ceremonial centers.

Incrementally the musical and political trials and tribulations of Kuti's career against the background of an
increasingly intolerant succession of regimes and the increasing gap between Nigeria's rich and poor classes. The
author details the complication of Kuti's relationships with both his supporters and detractors in an era which saw a
simultaneous increase in global appreciation of his music and a soaring public political profile which spurred Kuti
onto even more daring and precipitous challenges against the brutal Nigerian authorities. The chapter covers the
years between 1978 and 1992, a period which not only represents the profound depth of Kuti's musical and political
commitment but during which sig-nificant events, coupled with his own volatility, contributed to a narrative which
documents both the triumphant and the tragic aspects of his turbulent existence. Veal closely details Kuti's
ideological zig-zag, his re-invention of himself, his constant collisions with and revisions of his own earlier



Page | 23
convictions through a diversity of themes. In themselves, they reflect a material and discursive engage-ment with
issues within and without his musical involvement with both his native Nigeria and Africa in general, as well as his
personal involvement with shamanism.

It charts how even as he shelved a strategically sustained political campaign and ambition towards a Nigerian
presidency, his compositions took an increasingly radical view offering blatant criticism of the country's leadership,
its ideological and religious legacies, corruption and more than its fair share of dire economic crises. Despite failing
personal health, Kuti's achievements in the decade preceeding his AIDS-related death in 1997, can be evaluated
though his highly incisive and energetic musical output testimony to his unrelenting commitment to exposing the
plight of the underclasses in the face of a grossly abusive and corrupt Nigerian elite and military leadership.
In his concluding eighth chapter, Veal posits various interesting scenarios and in doing so theorises a holistic
function for popular cultural art forms on both sides of the Atlantic, all serving to conflate the often disjunctive and
non-coeval African, and diasporic 'revolutionary' streams of consciousness. This is a valid speculative position in the
light of Kuti's immersion in a broad range of aesthetic, pan-African ideological and black-affirmative political
issues, never mind the sheer phenomenality of his presence and the power of his ideological and popular cultural
synth-eses. In a series of pertinent arguments, the author analyses the relationships that exist between Kuti's
evolving consciousness and the post-colonial political and social theories of Frantz Fanon and Frederic Jameson.
Kuti's romanticisation of tradition and the essentialist approach he assumed in his prescription of counter-hegemonic
social and political alternatives based on indigenous African cultural legacies.
In his compelling book, Veal has produced a distinctive and thoroughly engaging analysis of afrobeat and its
historical, ideological and material under-pinnings. He is to be congratulated for providing a welcome and frank
appraisal of Fela Kuti's significant contributions to twentieth-century post-colonial African popular musical
performance and expressivity.

Felas music, which developed themes relating to Blackism and Africanism, and encouraged a return to traditional
African religions. Later he was to become outspoken in his criticism of those in power, bravely condemning
military and civilian Nigerian regimes for their mismanagement, incompetence, theft, corruption and marginalisation
of the underprivileged.

In 1974, pursuing his dream of an alternative society, Fela built a fence around his house and declared it to be an
independent state: Kalakuta Republic. To the dismay of bourgeois Nigerian society, this spirit of defiance was soon
to spread throughout the neighbourhood, as more and more people were inspired by Felas stance. The authorities
remained vigilant, fearing the potential power of Felas state within a state. Until the end of his life, on uncounted
dozens of occasions, Fela was to suffer the consequences of his scathing denunciations with arrests, jailings and
beatings at the hands of the authorities.
.. The population of Kalakuta grew amid mounting criticism from the authorities, who professed to be concerned
about the young people, many still in their teens, who left their families to live there.
Homeless and without a Shrine, which had also been destroyed in the February attack, Fela and his group moved to
the Crossroads Hotel. A year later, Fela went to Accra to arrange a tour of Ghana. On his return, to mark the first
anniversary of the destruction of Kalakuta, Fela married twenty seven women in a collective ceremony - many of
them dancers and singers in Afrika 70 (as he had recently rebranded Africa 70) After the wedding, the group set off
for Accra, where concerts had been planned. In a packed stadium, as Fela played Zombie, riots broke out. The
entire group was arrested and held in custody for two days before being put on a plane for Lagos, banned from
returning to Ghana.

From there, Fela, more political than ever, went on to form his own party, Movement of the People. He presented
himself as a presidential candidate in the 1979 elections that would return the country to civilian rule. His
candidature was refused. Four years later, at the next election, Fela again stood for president, but was prevented



Page | 24
from campaigning by the police, who once more rampaged through his house, imprisoning and beating Fela and
many of his followers. Any further presidential aspirations were crushed when a coup brought Nigeria back to
military rule.

Considering himself to be the spiritual son of Kwame Nkrumah, the renowned Pan Africanist, Fela was a scathing
critic of colonialism and neo-colonialism. He became famous as a spokesman for the great mass of people, in
Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa and the African diaspora, who were disenchanted with post-independence Africa.
Felas death in August 1997 was mourned by practically the entire Nigerian nation; even those who did not agree
with some of his ideas respected him for his courage and for his attacks on government corruption and violence.
Over a million people attended his funeral, and his family even received many unexpected letters of condolence
from state officials expressing their admiration for Fela.

Anikulapo-Kuti was the only superstar African artist who was publically engaging ritual practices while exploring
African traditional music. What had a particular impact on my own performances were Anikulapo-Kutis
ritualistic ceremonies and his dialogue with the spiritual world. I was absorbed by Anikulapo-Kutis ritualistic
ceremonies in his search for deeper African spirituality and modernity. I was fascinated to find out that Anikulapo-
Kuti performed live in his shine everyday at 2:00am in silence, paying respect to the Yoruba spirits of Shango, Ifa,
Eshu and Ogun; the same great spirits that are found in Afro-Cuban, Brazilian, Haitian and Caribbean cults and in
North America in voodoo. During these performances he sacrificed a chicken as a form of blessing his music
(Olorunyomy, 2003: 138). He sacrificed a chicken to represent the power and cross connections between the visible
mortal world and the invisible immortal world, the chicken was the means and avenue between the two worlds
(Veal, 2003: 39). The traffic of energy and forces between them is set-up during the sacrifice of the chicken. What I
found appealing was that, during Anikulapo-Kutis rituals ...the intent and emphasis of sacrifice is not upon the
death of the animal, it is upon the transfusion of its life... from the physical to spiritual world (Deren, 2004: 216).In
other words, flesh and blood became the essence of life and death a divine energy with the gods in Yoruba
mythological divinity (Olorunyomy, 2003: 135).
In Anikulapo-Kutis ritual performances the chicken sacrifice is the beginning of a deeper connection with spirits,
the spirits arrive when the chicken dies, because upon the chickens death he loses control of his consciousness and
speaks in a sign language and struggles to break off from an incomprehensible experience (Olorunyomy, 2003: 136).
What interested me in Anikulapo-Kutis chicken sacrifice is that, the chicken represented death and the force that
generates new life. Life and death become one and the same (Kuti, 1982).

The primary contention here is that he was heavily influenced both musically and politically by his mother. Leading
a group of embattled local women, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti (1900-1978) confronted deeply rooted traditional
patriarchy and the choking tentacles of colonialism in 1940s Abeokuta. Far from detracting from the existing
discourse on Fela, this paper seeks to add a vital dimension to our understanding of his genius by examining closely
the character of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti (FRK) and the songs that she and the market women created and sang
during their revolt in Abeokuta. The rare attention that a few of Fela's biographers have bestowed on his mother's
activism has not closely examined the nature of her activism in relation to his music.
Fela's Foundation: Examining the Revolutionary Songs of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti and the Abeokuta
Market Women's Movement in 1940s Western Nigeria
Shonekan, Stephanie



Page | 25

but is an expression by a group of persons and is permitted and even prescribed by society. [Evans-Pritchard,1965:
76] Thus opens an early essay by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, excerpted from his Ph.D. thesis and first published in 1929,
on 'Collective Expressions of Obscenity in Africa'. Although lacking the polish of his more mature writings, the
essay represents the first systematic approach to ritually sanctioned licence and 'licentiousness' in Africa, bringing
together scattered texts in published accounts ... Several important ideas were foreshadowed in this essay,
anticipating Radcliffe-Brown's theory of 'permitted disrespect', Gluckman's work on rituals of rebellion, and even
Turner's studies of ritual liminality. For central to Evans-Pritchard's argument was the insight that sanctioned
obscenities made social sense by channelling repressed desire and 'pent-up emotion' (ibid.: 95) into harmless
'palliatives' (ibid.: 100) and collective activities that were generally (but not exclusively) sanctified by ceremonial.
of how ritualised ostracism upholds general norms of sociability (although such norms are clearly invoked), for, as
we shall see, the 'canalising' functions of sanctioned obscenity and abuse are far from harmless palliatives for those
under attack. Nor do they merely redress antisocial behaviour, for the 'grandmothers' (yeye) of the Oroyeye festival
turbulent past.
Perhaps in the not too distant future, one may find a postcolonial masculinity being articulated
in the service of a radical third-world feminism, complete with polygyny, as a challenge to the implicit
imperialism of many existing Western feminisms. Fela will deserve some of the credit for preparing and
troubling the ground on which future iterations of postcolonial masculinities will take place.
it does not fear openness, and hybridity is not alien to it. What it laments is the "forced necessity"10 of the native to
capitulate, appropriate, or borrow: a characteristic condi? tion of capitalist modernity that rules out equality in



Page | 26
Ritual, by Denis Fleurdorge
Finally, in general throughout my research, I consider it important to identify a system, namely political ritual, in
which the various elements or components can be considered as recurring ritual structures, and can thus underpin a
functional and permanent frame for understanding the ritual phenomenon. By reaching an understanding of the
different modes of expression and representation of presidential practices, it is not only possible to establish an
inventory of the composite elements of this system, but also to develop an interpretation of the relationships
between these different elements, as well as their relationship to other social systems.

(Leach 1966).

Through ritual,
(Kertzer 1988:9).


a history of rituals is a history of reproduction, contestation, transformation ...
How can a new church, school, kingdom, colony, nation, party, "Common Market," or other "imagined community"
come into being except through its own characteristic rituals? Can a state be unmade by a carnival?
History, Structure, and Ritual, John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan


not only to promote surplus production but, more significant, to appropriate it and surplus funds an expanding
political economy as well as ceremonies and other public events.

My approach is not intended to present the political field as an autonomous and closed social domain, but to retain
the idea that political practices, in this case ritual, participate to a great extent in a larger whole, as one of the
dimensions of a given society (cultural labeling/ marking). Rituals are not situated alongside but rather within
society, along with a number of other social dimensions: religion, beliefs, institutions, social practices, economy, art,
etc.
not only to promote surplus production but, more significant, to appropriate it, and surplus funds an expanding
political economy as well as ceremonies and other public events. Consequently, the relationship between resources,



Page | 27
settlement, and surplus is critical. For the ancient Maya, the variable distribution of resources and people presented a
challenge to those with aspirations to political power. Emerging rulers used domestic dedication, termination, and
ancestor veneration rites for political integration.

How did Classic Maya rulers (ca. a.d. 250850) acquire and maintain political power - I argue that it was through
the replication and expansion of domestic rituals. . Emerging Maya rulers expanded family-scale rites, especially
dedication, termination, and ancestor veneration rituals, into larger communal ceremonies as part of the process that
drew seasonal labor from farmsteads to civic-ceremonial centers. Incrementally

Bernard Magubane
arisen.

Carothers, The African Mind.

Richard C. Jankowsky, Music, Spirit Possession and the In-between:
Ethnomusicological Inquiry and the Challenge of Trance
The music, in the context of stambeli, serves as a catalyst for healing by attracting the spirits. It preserves cultural
memory and re-creates and reconfigures the spirit pantheon. It narrates multiple crossings of the Sahara and their
resultant encounters. This rich world of stambeli opened up to me only when I changed my research priorities,
putting aside my preoccupations with belief, my preconceptions of trance, and fully taking part in the shared
experience of music making. The healing of humans and the narration of an alternative historiography both rely on



Page | 28
the actions of the unseen characters of the stambeli pantheon, characters whose presence is invoked systematically
through music. It is precisely the invisibility, ambiguity and ineffability that lend such potency to the music and to
the spirits. We would do well to embrace, rather than resist, these in-between spaces.
It is the spirit, and only the spirit, that has the power to heal the afflicted. My own interpretive dilemma regarding
the patient at Dar Barnu, instinctively framed in terms of belief, was undoubtedly shaped by my indoctrination in an
academic world that treats empirical data as the most valuable form of evidence, as well as the likely subconscious
tension between my self-identification as a secular humanist and my early upbringing in the Roman Catholic
Church, with its demonization of possession and its own unseen world of saints, angels and other divinities. It also
stemmed from my assumptions about the probable causal relationship between music and trance, as well as my
initial ignorance of the complexity of the stambeli system of healing. Stambeli healing, like other ritual healing
practices around the world, is not about the simple elimination of a specific ailment. Rather than restoring a patient
to her former, 'healthy' Self, it is more concerned with transitioning the patient into a new mode of being, with a new
social identity. Furthermore, as Arthur Kleinman (1980) demonstrates, the implications and relevance of ritual
healing often reach far beyond an individual illness. He argues, 'suffering must be understood in the context of both
larger political realities and local moral worlds' (Csordas 2002, 161). Afflicted persons seeking help in the stambeli
system of healing initiate a relationship with a healing tradition associated with sub Saharan traditions cultivated by
black Tunisians as well as a relationship with a pantheon of individualized, named Saints and Spirits that embodies
the complex historical relationship between North and sub-Saharan Africas.
Richard C. Jankowsky, Music, Spirit Possession and the In-between:
Ethnomusicological Inquiry and the Challenge of Trance

Rituals, defined as "symbolic behavior that issocially standardized and repetitive," include secular as well as
religious action; political rituals are an important means ofproviding large-scale nation-states and other social groups
with a clear symbolic identity.

taken the form of passive resistance, frequently lacked aggressive power. At present, Africa is home to a great many
people's movements. Very many Africans want change: change in culturally oppressive systems, change in
economically unjust situtations, and change in politically divisive structures. From that perspective it may well be
Terence O. Ranger

What I found appealing was that, during Anikulapo-Kutis rituals
... the intent and emphasis of sacrifice is not upon the death of the animal, it is upon
the transfusion of its life... from the physical to spiritual world (Deren, 2004: 216). from the physical to
spiritual world (Deren, 2004: 216). In other words, flesh and blood became the essence of life and death a divine
energy with the gods in Yoruba mythological divinity (Olorunyomy, 2003: 135).




Page | 29

Carola Lentz, The 2010 independence jubilees:
The politics and aesthetics of national commemoration in Africa
In 2010, as many as seventeen African states celebrated their independence jubilees. The debates surrounding the
organisation of these celebrations, and the imagery and performances they employed, reflect the fault lines with
which African nation-building has to contend, such as competing political orientations as well as religious, regional
and ethnic diversity. The celebrations represented constitutive and cathartic moments of nation-building, aiming to
enhance citizens emotional attachments to the country and inviting to remember, re-enact and re-redefine national
history. They became a forum of debate about what should constitute the norms and values that make-up national
identity and, in the interstices of official ceremonies, provided space for the articulation of new demands for public
recognition. A study of the independence celebrations thus allows us to explore contested processes of
nationbuilding and images of nationhood and to study the role of ritual and performance in the (re)production of
nations.

In 2010, seventeen African states celebrated their fiftieth independence anniversary, honouring the date when they
became independent from their former colonial masters. Most of them did so with much pomp and pageantry but
also amidst critical reflections of disappointed hopes and future challenges. Other countries, like Namibia and
Zimbabwe, commemorated twenty or thirty years of independence. Others awaited their symbolically charged
round birthdays and just marked their usual annual national days.
Carola Lentz The 2010 independence jubilees:

On 1st of October 2010 the giant of Africa celebrated its 50th Birthday. Celebrating Greatness was the official
motto the Nigerian government had chosen for this event in order to highlight the achievements and the importance
of the country. The motto should demonstrate Nigerias size and power. With a population of over 150 million,
Nigeria actually is the most populous country in Africa and also technically, the oil exporting country plays a
leading role in West African politics and economics.
In order to demonstrate this, the government organised great celebrations in the capital. But given the fact that in
spite of Nigerias oil wealth, two thirds of the population live below the poverty line and infrastructure, electricity,
education and security are in deficit, the Nigerian press discussed the question of how the holiday should be
celebrated appropriately and whether there was any reason for Nigeria to celebrate its 50th Independence Day at all.
Carola Lentz The 2010 independence jubilees: ???

ritual
activism
& black africa



Page | 30


Richard Keller, Madness and Colonization:
Psychiatry in the British and French Empires, 1800-1962

the unsuitability of the African temperament for political leadership.
...[and] predisposition to mental illness."
41

And recent studies of British imperialism in sub-Saharan Africa have applied psychoanalytic concepts of fetishism
and displacement to colonial rule. Colonialists displaced onto Africans "the contradictions that [they could not]
resolve at a personal level." Colonial administrators therefore discredited local rituals as "fetishistic," but only as
they ignored their own fetishistic investment in the power of commodities as critical tools for "civilizing" Africans.

From Algiers to Lagos, from Mombasa to Cape Town, psychiatrists, colonial administrators, and settlers focused
their concerns about madness on indigenous rather than European populations. Officials fretted about how to define
insanity in an alien culture, and psychiatrists from both British and French schools published widely on "indigenous
psychopathology" and the political and social implications of "the African mind." These doctors also cared for
European patients, but their preoccupation was the identification and classification of madness in Africans. .
Increasingly voluble independence movements that called attention to inconsistencies in colonial rule provoked
investigations into indigenous psychology. Studies of African colonial psychiatry therefore open a window on the
psychology of colonialism by pointing to incongruities between the realities of colonialism and medical imperatives.

Most theorists about African madness felt that civilization itself brought psychic disturbances to "deculturated"
Africans who were unprepared for rapid progress. The highest proportion of psychiatric patients belonged to the
intelligentsia (who had the closest contact with Europeans), and sexual dysfunction followed the introduction of
clothing to certain tribes. In contrast, those who remained in traditional situations showed a low incidence of
insanity, according to physicians like J. C. Carothers, who founded an East African psychiatric "School" in the
1930s. Carothers found that traditional cultures "relieved individuals of responsibility," but that depressive patients
tended to be wracked by guilt: clear evidence that civilization facilitated madness.
But the majority of patients treated in asylums were Africans who found the psychological transition from a rural
agricultural tradition to urban wage labor insurmountable. McCulloch argues that the British ethnopsychiatrists (who
were themselves largely drawn from settler society) "were watching a world being born," where uprooted (or
"deculturated") subjects were set loose from a grounding tradition into an advancing civilization. Although doctors
like Carothers and Robert Cunynham Brown noted in their surveys of Nigerian institutions that proximity to the
colonial administration--more than any natural predisposition to insanity--accounted for the social makeup of
asylum populations, this awareness did not hinder these same individuals from developing theories about African
insanity based on this limited population sample.

the unsuitability of the African temperament for political leadership. (Expensive) education was harmful for
Africans, psychiatrists argued, and democratic institutions would be impossible given the African "inability to
accept responsibility...[and] predisposition to mental illness."
41



Page | 31
. Nigerian psychiatrist T. A. Lambo's reform programs in the 1950s draw surprising parallels between
postcolonial theories of liberation and psychiatric developments. For Sadowsky, Lambo's rapprochement of
psychiatry and local traditions brought to mental patients a liberation concomitant with Nigeria's independence. The
British-trained Lambo rejected notions of European superiority by hiring regional traditional healers at the Aro
hospital to assist in treatment and interpretation of mental illness. Lambo also established a community outreach
program that installed recuperable patients with local families on a work exchange program. This innovative service
reduced the hospital's heavy case load, helped patients adapt to extra-institutional environments, and gave villagers
access to hospital financing for housing and infrastructure. The programs were so successful that the UN produced a
film about Aro, and the hospital served as a model for other African mental health systems. But ignoring the
political origins of individual cases of progress is also a grave mistake: the "Nigerianization of psychiatric
institutions provides an example of the creative energy for which independence provided greater scope [I]t provided
more opportunity for Nigerian physicians to use their expertise publicly [and] represented...a collapse in the basic
logic of colonialism itself."
52

the unsuitability of the African temperament for political leadership.
...[and] predisposition to mental illness."
41

By the end of the nineteenth century, the British colonial press lamented the problem of mad Nigerians roaming the
streets of Lagos, and called upon authorities simultaneously to preserve public order and to take pity on deranged
Africans. A lunatic ward at the Lagos prison became quickly overcrowded, and as public madness became more
visible by the early twentieth century (with an increasing British presence in the colony), officials passed a lunacy
ordinance in 1906 stipulating the construction of specialized institutions for confining the insane. As Sadowsky
argues, however, these institutions that were "[c]reated in response to the scandal of untreated lunatics on the
streets...themselves became enduring scandals of the colonial period."
47
Until the 1950s, Nigeria's colonial prisons
and asylums were "functionally equivalent." Sadowsky focuses on the Yaba asylum in Lagos, where psychiatric
patients received no treatment and lived in dank cells with only rudimentary facilities for hygiene and medical care--
indeed, in worse conditions than convicts. Rampant overcrowding and restricted public health budgets limited
institutional efficacy, and for most of the colonial period there was no psychiatrist on the state payroll.
Sadowsky ascribes these poor conditions to a paradox of Britain's "Indirect Rule" in Nigeria, which promised the
exploitation of economic resources by the British, and the civilizing of Nigerians with minimal intervention in local
traditions. Like other scholars, Sadowsky notes that despite egregious conditions asylums symbolized the civilizing
mission. But just as "[t]he expense of a truly modern asylum...was incompatible with the economic goals of
colonialism," a policy of "financial restraint was justified by the goal of preserving the African way of life."
Although administrators admitted that they could recognize madness--and therefore social danger--in Africans,
they felt that racial and cultural difference made it impossible for them to cure these patients, so they urged cost-
effective confinement over expensive treatment. By the 1930s, when colonial officials realized the necessity of
improving conditions at Yaba, such reforms had become fiscally impossible.
48

Sadowsky's concern with the content of colonial madness marks another new direction for the historiography of
colonial psychiatry. He notes that the British appear to have confined patients not because their behavior was
"anomalous or deviant" but instead "because they drew attention to structures of power in ways which denaturalized
those structures." These patients' disorders allowed them to speak what other Nigerians only thought. Many patients
confined at Yaba, for example, suffered from what psychiatrists called "persecutory delusions," a diagnosis that
Sadowsky notes "was overdetermined by the persecutory nature of colonialism itself."
The most intriguing of these is the case of Isaac O., to which Sadowsky devotes an entire chapter. A nineteen-year-
old missionary student at the time of his first confinement in 1932, Isaac claimed "that he would kill all the
Europeans in Nigeria," posed as a colonial official in order to solicit help from villagers while he carried loads on a
highway, and claimed that he had "purchased a motor car for a million pounds." Isaac's delusions drew attention to
his position between cultures. His violent sentiments toward Europeans demonstrated his resentment at the hollow



Page | 32
promises of a colonial education, while his other claims "appropriated" symbols of British dominance: military
power, automotive technology, and capital.
50

Of course, Sadowsky admits, it would be a mistake to conflate madness with anticolonial resistance. But the
"content" of madness "demands attention; without it the patient is decontextualized, and the social dimension of
affliction is obscured." Even if we cannot interpret delusions and confinement as manifestations of resistance and
oppression, they "have significance as a gauge and representation of social pressures and contradictions" in a
moment when Nigerians increasingly realized just how limited their opportunities under colonialism were.
Sadowsky follows Fanon, concluding that "as inchoate articulations of the stresses of colonial society" the
"'symptoms' of Nigeria's lunatics and the psychiatric labels that were affixed" deepen our understanding of the
psychology of colonialism. And the psychiatric literature that medical theorists produced about indigenous madness
informs us about the psychological predicaments of colonialism for the colonizers as well as the colonized.
Practitioners in Nigeria "viewed Africans as representatives of a race, rather than as individual patients," with the
result that they described Africans' "innate character" without examining British policies that provoked trauma by
transforming the social landscape.
51

. the usefulness of psychiatric history for understanding colonialism's hold over emotional as well as material
domains, and his examination of the Nigerian psychiatrist T. A. Lambo's reform programs in the 1950s draw
surprising parallels between postcolonial theories of liberation and psychiatric developments. For Sadowsky,
Lambo's rapprochement of psychiatry and local traditions brought to mental patients a liberation concomitant with
Nigeria's independence. The British-trained Lambo rejected notions of European superiority by hiring regional
traditional healers at the Aro hospital to assist in treatment and interpretation of mental illness. Lambo also
established a community outreach program that installed recuperable patients with local families on a work
exchange program. This innovative service reduced the hospital's heavy case load, helped patients adapt to extra-
institutional environments, and gave villagers access to hospital financing for housing and infrastructure. The
programs were so successful that the UN produced a film about Aro, and the hospital served as a model for other
African mental health systems. But ignoring the political origins of individual cases of progress is also a grave
mistake: the "Nigerianization of psychiatric institutions provides an example of the creative energy for which
independence provided greater scope [I]t provided more opportunity for Nigerian physicians to use their expertise
publicly [and] represented...a collapse in the basic logic of colonialism itself."
52

Certainly the colonial environment, where "civilizing" rhetoric raised expectations that realities failed to meet, and
where individuals seeking opportunity found themselves alienated from both local and British communities,
provoked significant trauma.

debates over deculturation in Nyasaland, East Africa, Rhodesia, and Nigeria encouraged colonizers and
colonized alike to question the merits of a civilizing mission that appeared to produce pathology, a central notion for
Fanon.
Bgu Theorists in the first period included travelers, military physicians, and alienists who examined Algerian
lunatics and collectively found them less prone to madness than civilized Europeans The Oriental mentality was
the obverse of the Occidental mentality: a lack of ambition and initiative among natives protected them from
civilization's threats of madness. ... Women's seclusion from education and intoxicants, psychiatrists argued,
sheltered them from the psychological burdens of civilization.

Megan Vaughan, Idioms of Madness:
Zomba Lunatic Asylum, Nyasaland, in the Colonial Period
'I am King Thius and my bicycle is at the frontier. Later I want to go across the frontier to fight the Germans. My
father is a king. I am the son of King Makwira and I have cut down wire at the frontier. I have two bicycles. The



Page | 33
name of one bicycle is Tereneus. I have a silver-mine in South Africa. I am an Englishman. I was head of the British
army. At that time I was Queen of the Unit'. 'Alleged Native Lunatic', Blantyre, 1929
The real problem lay with those Africans whose 'brains had been turned by a little schooling', 7 the idioms of whose
madness were motor cars, bicycles, kings of England and silver mines; who flung back at the conquerors their own
images of superiority in disturbingly distorted forms. This is not to say that there was a clearly thought-out policy
towards in-sanity on the part of the colonialists, nor that the establishment of the asylum was a deliberate attempt to
segregate the dangerous, decultured African (though this may have been the case elsewhere).
the causation of mental illness amongst Africans. The Problem - European theories of African Mental Illness In the
course of the 1930s, the conception of insanity amongst Africans as an illness with definite causes seems to have
grown in the minds of some officials in the Protectorate. In 1935 H. M. Shelley, the Government Pathologist, and
W. H. Watson, a Medical Officer, who later took charge of the Mental Hospital, were commissioned to write a
report on the Lunatic Asylum and on the 'nature of mental disorder in Nyasaland natives'.37 The 'problem', as it
emerges in their report, was the apparent increase in the incidence of insanity amongst Africans, particularly
amongst the educated. I will argue that the report reflects a more general concern amongst Europeans about the
effects of their rule on African societies.
European theories on the working of the 'normal' African mind,
in order to understand how the 'abnormal' was defined.

One recurring and important theme, which colours many writings on the African mind, was the search on the part of
the European for some kind of 'lost innocence' of his own. This is vividly expressed in Carl Jung's memoirs. Jung, as
a member of the 'Bugishu Psychological Expedition' in 1925, caught his first glimpse of Africa from the window of
the Mombasa to Nairobi train, at dawn: The train, swathed in a red cloud of dust, was just making a turn around a
steep red cliff. On a jaggedr ock aboveu s a slim, brownish-blackfi gures tood motionless,l eaning on a long spear,
looking down at the train. Besides him towered a giant candelabrum cactus. I was enchanted by this sight - it was a
picture of something utterly alien and outside my experience, but on the other hand a most intense sentiment du
deja-vu. I had the feeling that I had alreadye xperiencedt his momenta nd had alreadyk nown this world which was
separated from me only by distance in time. It was as if I were this moment returningt o the land of my youth, and as
if I knew that dark-skinnedm an who had been waiting for me over 5,000 years.38 Here, in the 'divine peace of a
still primeval country', Jung explored the psychology of 'archaic man', but, more importantly, explored his own
psyche: 'The demons could not reach me here - there were no telegrams, no telephone calls, no letters, no visitors.
My liberated psychic forces poured blissfully back to the primeval expanses'. 39 In The Relation of the Ego to the
Unconscious, Jung goes beyond this nostalgia for the primeval to say that '(Europe) had projected upon peoples still
sound in their instincts an unconscious "mental derangement"', and here we have the beginning of a theme which
was to be repeated by many European psychologists and psychiatrists. According to Jung, the 'normal' 'primitive
man' (and his examples are based on the Bugishu research) is 'unpsychologi-cal', because in the primitive world
everything has psychic qualities, and 'psychic happenings' take place outside him in an objective way. This means
that the African is much given to 'projection', so that the Elgonyi porters he questioned maintained that they did not
have dreams - only the sorcerer, while the sorcerer in turn claimed that he had stopped having dreams since the
British had come; 'God now speaks in dreams to the British, and not to the medicine man of the Elgonyi'.

taken the form of passive resistance, frequently lacked aggressive power. From that perspective it may well be



Page | 34
Terence O. Ranger

Graham Harrison The Death of Political Struggle
Bringing Political Struggle Back in: African Politics, Power & Resistance.
The importance of political struggle as a key notion in the understanding of contemporary African politics. It does so
with an awareness that this notion has fallen out of academic favour. This article sketches an approach that gives a
key role to political struggle in processes of political change in sub-Saharan Africa. In doing so, African political
economies are seen as necessarily contested and therefore there is a need (to re-work the phrase of the new
statists/institutionalists) to consider bringing struggle back in to the analytical frame. Political struggle is used in this
article as a theoretical term; it is not supposed to allude to a specific institutional form or a certain political agenda.
Struggle is a process, a result of mobilisation provoked by some form of resistance. Nevertheless, using terms such
as resistance and struggle clearly requires some normative judgement. In this article, the notion of struggle is based
in a sympathy for mass politics rather than elite politics, widening political participation, and the promotion of
socio-economic equality. Consequently, struggle alludes to political mobilisation and organisation to express and
promote demands which are in keeping with these sympathies. Struggle is not used to refer to processes associated
with the struggle for spoils (Szeftel, 1983; 2000), or the violence and struggle associated with complex emergencies
(Duffield, 1993; Keen, 1994). Struggle also involves a particular understanding of political economy more broadly,
based in a critique of capitalism. This draws our attention to the relationship between structure and struggle, but at
this point it is important just to note that struggle relates to social tensions and contradictions which go beyond the
liberal-pluralist framework of 'checks and balances', multi-party contest, and a basically positive sum approach to
socio-political intercourse in which - under certain conditions - dialogue and negotiation will produce marginal
benefits for all involved.
The Death of Political Struggle.
It is easy to understand how and why political struggle has not enjoyed great prominence recently. The end of the
Cold War (or at least the way the 'victory' of the West has been represented) and the neo-liberal 'revolution'
entrenched in many societies in the 1980s has yielded (and been promoted by) an intellectual climate which is
increasingly hostile to the idea - and certainly the ideal - of political struggle. The key features of this intellectual
climate are the more nihilistic strains of post-structuralism, the triumphalism of a schematic liberalism (articulated
with increasing power as the World Bank consolidates a greater intellectual presence), a tendency towards
eschatology (with telling cross-overs into the media and the intelligentsia), and a revived interest in the
epistemology of cultural relativism. Each of these approaches has written into it a hostility towards a serious
consideration of the role of political struggle in African political economy as outlined above.


How did Classic Maya rulers (ca. a.d. 250850) acquire and maintain political powerthe ability to exact tribute
in the form of surplus goods and labor from subjects? I argue that it was through the replication and expansion
of domestic rituals. As habitual, ceremonial, and physical manifestations of a worldview, rituals draw people
together (Leach 1966). Through ritual, beliefs about the universe come to be acquired, reinforced, and eventually



Page | 35
changed (Kertzer 1988:9). Emerging Maya rulers expanded family-scale rites, especially dedication, termination,
and ancestor veneration rituals, into larger communal ceremonies as part of the process that drew seasonal labor
from farmsteads to civic-ceremonial centers. Incrementally, they conducted structurally and functionally similar
domestic rites in progressively larger-scale settings (e.g., from houses to elite compounds to temples), incorporating
ever larger groups of people (Cohen 1974, Vogt 1970:101). This pattern became noticeable during the Late
Preclassic (ca. 250 b.c.a.d. 250) and culminated in large-scale royal rites in the Early Classic (ca. a.d. 250550). By
the Late Classic (ca. a.d. 550850) a direct association had been established between royal families and the divine.

Leach (1966) has argued that ritual pervades all aspects of human existence, and this is a claim that anthropologists
generally accept. This being the case, it is not surprising that ambitious people transform ritual action into political
fortune. Ritual can integrate religious, social, economic, and political life, for example, creating and maintaining
alliances through marriage and longdistance trade (e.g., Friedman and Rowlands 1978), warfare (e.g., Carneiro
1970), and such integrative events asthe construction of public works (e.g., Service 1975:96), religious ceremonies,
political rallies (e.g., Kertzer 1988), and feasts (e.g., Hayden 1995, Hayden and Gargett 1990).
Through ritual, political actors can incorporate people as active participants in political change. Leaders - lineage
elders and heads of military societies, kinship groups, and religious sodalities - often promote political change
because through ritual they can claim that their actions benefit all members of society (Godelier 1977:11119;
Kertzer 1988:30). They organize the building and maintenance of religious structures, subsistence technology
including irrigation systems, and canoes or roads for trade and craft production facilities and lead raiding parties - all
activities that typically involve ritual.

Their actions presuppose their ability to lead and offer the potential for expanding their influence outside
their particular groups. Each group has special ties to an aspect of the supernatural world that can be appropriated by
aspiring political agents (Bloch 1986). Emerging political elites claim closer ties to the supernatural world,
particularly ancestors, and as descendants of founding ancestors they can reach out to more people (Bloch 1986:86;
Friedman 1975). As intermediaries they receive offerings that once were made directly to ancestors (see, e.g.,
Friedman and Rowlands 1978, Helms 1998, McAnany 1995) and other supernatural forces (Friedman 1998:129):
This development is an internally determined evolution, the outgrowth of the operation of the political economy
within a pre-structured kinship system.

ritual
activism
& black africa


The Politics of Ritual: The Emergence of Classic Maya Rulers.
Lisa J. Lucero



Page | 36

(Leach 1966).

Through ritual,
(Kertzer 1988:9).


The music, in the context of stambeli, serves as a catalyst for healing by attracting the spirits. It preserves cultural
memory and re-creates and reconfigures the spirit pantheon. It narrates multiple crossings of the Sahara and their
resultant encounters. This rich world of stambeli opened up to me only when I changed my research priorities,
putting aside my preoccupations with belief, my preconceptions of trance, and fully taking part in the shared
experience of music making. The healing of humans and the narration of an alternative historiography both rely on
the actions of the unseen characters of the stambeli pantheon, characters whose presence is invoked systematically
through music. It is precisely the invisibility, ambiguity and ineffability that lend such potency to the music and to
the spirits. We would do well to embrace, rather than resist, these in-between spaces.
It is the spirit, and only the spirit, that has the power to heal the afflicted. My own interpretive dilemma regarding
the patient at Dar Barnu, instinctively framed in terms of belief, was undoubtedly shaped by my indoctrination in an
academic world that treats empirical data as the most valuable form of evidence, as well as the likely subconscious
tension between my self-identification as a secular humanist and my early upbringing in the Roman Catholic
Church, with its demonization of possession and its own unseen world of saints, angels and other divinities. It also
stemmed from my assumptions about the probable causal relationship between music and trance, as well as my
initial ignorance of the complexity of the stambeli system of healing. Stambeli healing, like other ritual healing
practices around the world, is not about the simple elimination of a specific ailment. Rather than restoring a patient
to her former, 'healthy' Self, it is more concerned with transitioning the patient into a new mode of being, with a new
social identity. Furthermore, as Arthur Kleinman (1980) demonstrates, the implications and relevance of ritual
healing often reach far beyond an individual illness. He argues, 'suffering must be understood in the context of both
larger political realities and local moral worlds' (Csordas 2002, 161). Afflicted persons seeking help in the stambeli
system of healing initiate a relationship with a healing tradition associated with sub Saharan traditions cultivated by
black Tunisians as well as a relationship with a pantheon of individualized, named Saints and Spirits that embodies
the complex historical relationship between North and sub-Saharan ?fricas.

Bernard Magubane



Page | 37
arisen.

European theories on the working of the 'normal' African mind,
in order to understand how the 'abnormal' was defined.

In her study of 'ethno-psychiatry' in Ghana, Margaret Field is adamant about the need for this caution, especially as
'literate schizophrenics are more conspicuous than illiterate', though it must be added that Meyer Fortes and Doris
Mayer came to a completely different conclusion in their work on Northern Ghana. There is some highly dubious
reasoning behind Shelley and Watson's argument, and they show little caution in the application of their theory that
the main cause of insanity was education. In this theory they echo remarkably closely nineteenth century
explanations of the apparent increase of insanity amongst women, and a train of eighteenth century European
thought as described by Foucault: Civilisation, in a general way, constitutes a milieu favourable to the development
of madness. If the progress of knowledge dissipates error, it also has the effect of propa-gating a taste and even a
mania for study. . . the more abstract or complex knowledge becomes, the greater the risk of madness.
Carothers, The African Mind.
To the horror of the Chief Secretary, who drew his red pen through large parts of this report, Shelley and Watson
went on to ascribe much of the blame to missionaries, who had destroyed the 'primitive innocence' of so many
Africans. Missionaries encouraged 'the natives to clothe themselves and at the same time stimulate the sex
consciousness by causing to be hidden the natural functions of the body'. Furthermore, 'Christian natives' informed
the two doctors that 'detumescence is more rapid in them than in their uneducated village brothers, so much so, that
women dislike their attentions'. The doctors concluded that 'Education appears to have an obscure influence on the
powers of copulation. Not surprisingly, the Chief Secretary ordered the whole of this section to be omitted from
the report. Though Shelley and Watson's thesis was expressed too strongly for general consumption, in essence their
ideas were familiar to and shared by a large number of colonial administrators. Education was an essential
component of the 'benefits' of European rule, and yet it continued to cause problems. It broke the silence between



Page | 38
the ruler and the ruled, it introduced the 'irrational' to reason, it brought about a stammering dialogue which
sometimes had dangerous consequences. From the beginning of colonial rule administrators expressed alarm at the
'disintegration of tribal authority' brought about by European contact, and the dangers of incipient class formation
amongst Africans. Whilst not all educated Africans were considered likely to fall insane, they could be driven to acts
of insubordination and violence. The Chilembwe Rising of 1915, led by a group of mission-educated Africans,
epitomised this danger and seemed to prove correct the warnings of those who had felt unease at the increasing
number of literate amongst the population. Africans in European dress constituted a kind of psychological threat, the
appearance of a parody of European culture being particularly disturbing and insulting. Those African groups which
remained aloof from European culture were appreciated and encouraged. The problem continued, however, up to the
end of colonial rule, though when Shelley and Watson wrote in the 1930s, an attempt was being made to control it
with the introduction of Indirect Rule. The dangers of acculturation were known to most Europeans, not only those
who suffered from 'cheeky' educated African subordinates. The dire consequences of Europeans 'going native' were
also indicative of the problems which arose when an unstructured dialogue was created between the two groups. In
the 1890s, the physical and mental health of Europeans had been particularly precarious. Frequently the victims of
malarial fever, dysentery and other diseases, many also became morphine addicts, causing great concern amongst
their superiors.
A report on mental health in the Federation, published in 1959, attempted to account for the apparent increase in
mental illness amongst Africans. Whilst it was acknowledged in this report that malnutrition and parasitic infection
might account for some cases of mental disturbance, it was felt that the social changes accompanying colonial rule
had a larger part to play: ... .whether it is the stress and strain of modern life, or arises out of feelings of guilt, or
whetheri t is a mattero f economicso r improvede ducationc annot be determinedw ith accuracy - but undoubtedly
the emergent African is paying a penalty in neuroses and anxiety states quite unknown in years gone by.70 Clearly
any assessment of the acculturation thesis is difficult without more studies on the nature of mental illness in Africa
and reliable figures on its incidence. It is also apparent that we need to investigate how the European conception of
mental illness interacted with 'indigenous' definitions and institutions for coping with mental disturbance; how and
why the European legislation was sometimes put into force, and how some individuals came to find themselves the
recipients of European treatment. The Mad, the Possessed and the Bewitched Anti-psychiatrists argue that insanity
does not exist in any objective sense, that it is an imprecise, all-encompassing concept, culturally defined. 7' Others
argue that, whilst cultural definitions of madness do, indeed, vary, this does not prove the non-existence of mental
illness; and some go further to argue that there are clear categories of mental illness which can be relatively easily
identified cross-culturally.
In Nyasaland, the diviner and healer often played an important part in chanelling mental disturbance into culturally
acceptable modes, and thus in 'healing' the afflicted. 75 The healers and diviners were the psychotherapists, and this
partly explains the emphasis placed by Europeans on the apparent prevalence of schizophrenia in African societies,
as chronic schizophrenia would appear to be less amenable to in-digenous forms of treatment. The only indigenous
treatment available for Witchcraft Ordinance, No. 67 of 191 1. Szasz, The Manufacture of Madness, p.xix. 7 This is
obviously a large question, which I am unable to explore in detail here. However, there are a number of case studies
of 'spirit possession' in Malawi, which emphasise the role played by diviners and healers in alleviating, if not curing,
certain forms of mental disturbance. One crucial fact about these healing systems is that they do not isolate the
'patient', but rather put him or her into contact with those who have suffered similar afflictions and have been cured.
The healing is usually public, and often conducted by someone who is a 'former patient'.
Despite this evidence the Magistrate issued a detention order on the man for a month, and he was sent to Blantyre
prison. After the month, however, the case was re-opened and his brother came to give evidence: I have never
considered my brother to be insane. I do not know anything bad about him. He had trouble some time ago, but I do
not think that this was caused by madness. I want my brother to come and live with me in my village in Cholo. My
mother will come with him and so all the family will be together. Conclusion I have sought to describe some aspects
of colonial lunacy legislation in Nyasaland, not through any belief that it was a highly influential or coherent aspect
of European rule, but because it illuminates many other aspects of the colonial situation. In an admittedly rather
curious way, a study of European ideas on African psychology and insanity demonstrates the insecurity and
psychological vulnerability of the Europeans themselves, in a situation where the segregation of cultures seemed



Page | 39
necessary for the maintenance of their own sanity and the precarious myth of their superiority. African institutions
for dealing with mental disturbance were little affected by the legislation or by the setting up of the asylum, where a
few unfortunate individuals found themselves the victims of a 'humanitarian' regime of 'gainful employment',
Christian worship and leg-irons. As with much other colonial legislation, however, the lunacy legislation could
occasionally be used by African com-munities to rid themselves of 'undesirables', or by the politically powerful to
eliminate their rivals. In order to do this, however, the Africans concerned had to have a clear insight into the
workings of the European mind and the Euro-pean concepts of insanity. There are, presumably, not a few Africans
who could write a 'psychological interpretation of colonialism'.

Bernard Magubane
arisen.

Catherine Bell
and efficacy of ritual were closely intertwined. For invented rites, which are not deeply rooted in a any shared sense
of tradition, however, legitimacy and authority tend to be construed more lightly and on quite different grounds. For

Terence O. Ranger

ritual
activism



Page | 40
& black africa


What, then, are the indices of social change? In my opinion, they vary according to time and place and to particular
environments. In any colonial country the effects of colonial relations are pervasive, so that even the people of
traditionally rural areas, whose supposed non-market subsistence economy is often said to isolate its inhabitants
from towns and mines of colonial exploitation, find themselves fully integrated into the same colonial structure,
albeit as super-exploited victims. Thus the villager, the farm worker, the miner, and the clerk represent not only
different strata, but also different stages in a continuum. It is legitimate for the sociologist to concentrate on one or
another stratum or type of community, but he should never lose sight of the true scale or of the uneven nature of
development. The peasant who continued to practise subsistence farming in a remote area was also liable to pay tax,
to be visited by the district officer in his capacity of administrator and judiciary, or to experience a restriction on his
own culture such as that imposed by "witchcraft" ordinances, the suppression of the old military organization, and
the subordination of his chief. Some Africans were more directly involved in the colonial order, as were those who
worked for a settler or in the mines, who were recruited to the towns, or who received formal education or joined a
Christian church. Living in an urban setting, for instance, an African was unavoidably involved in a money
economy. He had to buy his clothing, food, furniture, utensils; and the goods that he was offered in the shops came
from the factories that catered to an industrialized society. The acquisition of "European" goods was not, therefore,
in any sense "imitative" or indicative of status, but a necessary consequence of being absorbed in a milieu dominated
by factory-made goods. A similar compulsion dictated the acquisition of cultural values, such as Christianity. To
obtain a school education, Africans were obliged to embrace Christianity, since education was in the hands of the
missionaries. The adoption of Christianity had many consequences, such as the acceptance of monogamous
marriage, the wearing of European-style clothing, and the abandonment of characteristic traditional pursuits such as
beer-drinking, circumcision schools, and traditional forms of worship. Why then, the question might be legitimately
asked, did Africans use their meagre earnings to invest in clothing and "European" furnishings? I think it is true that
Africans did attach some importance to clothing, furniture, food, education, and occupation-but not as mere
"indices" of status. To dismiss the drives behind these things as mere status-seeking is a mark of' con- descension, of
the arrogance typical of middle-class social scientists who, having been accustomed to "good Vol. 12 No. 4-5
October-December 1971 425 standards" since infancy, profess to see in working-class ambitions a conscious
imitation of upper-class attributes. In reality, of course, education and occupation, as well as a taste for conventional
clothing and food, are instrumental in the struggle for power. The African cannot dispel the feeling of inferiority
engendered by the system until he is able to meet and deal with the "superior" classes on their own terms as regards
education in the broadest sense-and that includes styles of dress and diet. The social tendencies of a people,
therefore, always arise from actual needs within the people, and not through mere imitation of foreign models. It is
possible, certainly, to learn from other countries or other times; but people take from these sources only what they
can use, what corresponds to a need. Naturally one does not go to the trouble of inventing a new item when an
existing one is handy. The fact that a new item comes from abroad does not answer the question of why it finds use;
that can only be explained by actual needs of the people themselves (Kaustky 1953:265). The role of modern
industrial development in the social and spiritual crisis of the colonies was indeed great. The "acculturation" which
took place while Africans were under colonial rule was much more than aspiring to "goals of a European character."
Van den Berghe (I1964: 64) has said: "Detribalization" is, thus, not simply the product of selective borrowing, with
or without reinterpretation, from Western culture. It is also a process of cultural dislocation and dis- organization
initiated by the impact of external forces (such as industrialization and political subjection), and a process of
readaptation of the traditional institutions to the new condition. Much of what is sometimes interpreted as culture
borrowing is in fact the result of internal readaptation to change. For example, the increasing predominance of
nuclear as opposed to extended families among urban Africans is not so much an "imitation" of the European type of



Page | 41
family as an adaptation imposed by the urban conditions, restrictions on internal migration, etc. Similarly, the
donning of "European" clothes can be attributed to a variety of pressures. One of these was compulsion, the result of
governmental decree-at least in South Africa, where Africans wearing their traditional garments ran the risk of being
prosecuted as "vagrants" or for "public indecency." Secondly, as already indicated, conversion to Christianity
inevitably meant a change in clothing habits. Thirdly, I think it can be argued that the clothing had a utilitarian
purpose, at least in some situations. A miner could not work efficiently or in safety if he did not wear protective
clothing: boots, trousers, and a helmet.

Wealth, occupation, education, and power seem to be constant factors in both stages, but they find expression in
different forms. No African in the colonial period could match the positions occupied by a president and his
ministers today. If in colonial days, education was geared to conversion to Christianity, the two are not necessarily
linked now, and this suggests that Africans can and will receive education without being Christianized. Africans no
longer attach importance to the conventional clothing of an office worker; instead, there is a strong impulse to find
an alternate form of dress, often called "traditional" and quite different in design from the "European." We can
therefore group indices of status into two categories: those which are "functional" in terms of urban industrial
society and occur in both pre- and post- independence periods, and those which stem more particularly from the
colonial order and have diminished in importance with independence. Mitchell and Epstein and others failed to
make a correct assessment because they accepted the colonial system as "eternal," as a condition in which Africans
would try to achieve equilibrium, instead of a system which they were anxious to overthrow. If one looks at what are
called African aspirations without specifying the context in which these aspirations are manifested, one may miss
the fact that the colonized may "present themselves in the guise we desire just because we desire it," and we may
"insist that this guise reflect the way they truly want to feel about themselves

Another angle to "Westernization" hardly touched by those who study urban African social life refers to an added
dimension in the African personality. In the positive sense, the absorption of the intellectual aspect of colonization
was thought of merely as a weapon that helped the black man to penetrate the white man's mind, which was
represented in the external world the African needed to grasp. The African could also exploit this external world for
cultural reasons that, paradoxi- cally, unified disparate nationalities and ethnic groups. In this sense the African's
receptiveness enriched his personality and made him spiritually superior to the whites, who have never, as a group,
tried to live the black man's culture. At the other level, the African merely thinks of the layer of what was called
"Western- ization" as something that was not itself uplifting, but only served to make him more aware of his
Africanness and to accentuate this "native" dimension. The negritude-minded peoples of French-speaking Africa
explain their attachment to "Western values" in terms of the need to adapt Western technology to the African context
in order to fashion what Senghor calls "la civilization universelle." In the same way, black Americans repudiate the
white man's assumption that he is the rightful custodian of civilized standards. The American blacks, it should be
remembered, share what is called the "Western way of life" fully because of historical circumstances. Like all once-
colonized people, the African has this second dimension which provides more channels of expression, but this
second dimension is not, as white interpreters of the African scene have believed, a badge of "civilization" and
therefore ele- vating.
The question which is crucial for my purpose is: at what level of social-psychological experience is it that "Euro-
peanization" stratifies the African urban population? Colonial prejudice limited the African's participation to his
work situation. It restricted his entry not only into the human cultural scheme but also into the market- place. His
labour might be purchased in the market- place, but his social existence was supposed to remain outside the
industrial culture. Consequently, urban 11 Fanon (1967b: 17) has expressed the black man's dilemma due to colonial
subjection in these words: "The black man has two dimensions, one with his fellows, the other with the white man.
A Negro behaves differently with a white man than with another Negro. That this self-division is a direct result of
colonialist subjugation is beyond question



Page | 42
they were merely uprooted and divorced from the enrich- ment of their own culture, without receiving any
substitute other than objects; they were sounding brass and tinkling cymbals, being without love, being true to
nothing (cf. Lewis 1959: ix).13 Admission to a money economy should not be dismissed, but its limitations under
colonialism should be understood. Indigenous crafts and "industry" could not hold their own against powerful
foreign competition. The acquisition of so-called European clothes and other gadgets was the most visible sign of
contact with and involvement in a money economy. These new acquisitions, however, were not rewarding because
they, as items of class distribution, could not have any significance in the lives of the Africans. Thus
"Europeanization" is confined to the outermost layer of African social-psychological reality.
The studies we have looked at are infused with the ethnocentricism characteristic of the view of the privileged
strata. Here we see not so much an analysis of culture contact and change as a pragmatic propagandiza- tion of
certain ideals in the guise of sociological analysis. To portray culture contact the way Mitchell, Epstein, and others
have done is to interpret ideas in terms of their actual service rather than in terms of their face value (Gerth and
Mills 1954:189). Such interpretations of data became both weapon and excuse in the struggle of groups. Mitchell
portrays the Europeans as agents of civilization; he views the pathological alienation of the African from his culture
as a prestigious mark of civilization. If such interpretations could take hold in the minds of the Africans, they could
become a material force justifying white oppression and economic exploitation.
The point is well worth making, though I am not sure that British social anthropology should be blamed for not
having considered this aspect, more properly a matter for psychological research. The anthrc pologists properly and
accurately note the existence of such values in the socic cultural system. It was not for them t judge whether these
were indications of "mass insanity" (p. 428). Neither, course, was the documentation of the value patterns adequate
for explainini the system, as Magubane is well aware Values inevitably develop to support th status quo, and it is not
surprising tha Africans under colonial rule began to think like their oppressors, who were after all, firmly in control
of the systen of rewards.

Gluckman states (1954b:21): "The acceptance of the estab-lished order as right and good, and even sacred, seems to
allow unbridled excess, very rituals of rebellion, for the order itself keeps this rebellion within bounds." ... "These
rituals contain the belief that if people perform certain actions they will influence the course of events so that their
group be made richer, more prosperous, more successful, and so forth. Some of us therefore call these actions
'ritual', and say that they contain 'mystical notions'-notions that their performance will in some mys-terious way
affect the course of events. This examina-tion of writings on Africa reveals an abundance of socially regalated
expressions of resentment on ritual and other special occasions. They are conducted at cer-tain times and are not
allowed to get out of hand. In some societies "regula-tion" is strengthened by limiting the expressions to a group
level so that more intense personal hostility is avoided. Interpersonal airing of grievances is also common, although
it seems rarely to apply to specific dyadic relationships.

Ritual, Anti-Structure, and Religion:
A Discussion of Victor Turner's Processual Symbolic Analysis (Mathieu Deflem)

Rituals as Symbolic Action
Turner (1967:19) defined ritual as "prescribed formal behavior for occasions not given over to technological routine,
having reference to beliefs in mystical beings and powers." Likewise, a symbol is the smallest unit of ritual which



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still retains the specific properties of ritual behavior; it is a "storage unit" filled with a vast amount of information
(Turner 1968a:1-2). Symbols can be objects, activities, words, relationships, events, gestures, or spatial units (Turner
1967:19). Ritual, religious beliefs, and symbols are in Turner's perspective essentially related. He expressed this
well in another definition: Ritual is "a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects,
performed in a sequestered place, and designed to influence preternatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors'
goals and interests" (Turner 1977a:183). Rituals are storehouses of meaningful symbols by which information is
revealed and regarded as authoritative, as dealing with the crucial values of the community (Turner 1968a:2). Not
only do symbols reveal crucial social and religious values; they are also (precisely because of their reference to the
supernatural) transformative for human attitudes and behavior. The handling of symbols in ritual exposes
their powers to act upon and change the persons involved in ritual performance. In sum, Turner's definition of ritual
refers to ritual performances involving manipulation of symbols that refer to religious beliefs.

Catherine Bell


and consensus in our understanding of religion and ritual. As Ronald Grimes notes, Psychologists have treated
private ritual as synonymous with neurosis. Theologians have regarded self-generated rites as lacking in moral
character because they minimize social responsibility. And anthropologists have thought of ritual as traditional,
collective representation, implying that the notion of individual or invented ritual was a contradiction in terms.

For invented rites, which are not deeply rooted in a any shared sense of tradition, however, legitimacy and authority
tend to be construed more lightly and on quite different grounds. For that reason, perhaps, much greater weight
appears to fall on the dimension of efficacy. There is increased pressure for the invented rite to show that it works;
this is what legitimates the rite since there is no tradition to do this.

Ritual, Commentary by Danny Kaplan
why and in what ways they sustain and nourish national sentiments,
particularly as social rituals could offer myriad alternative forms of collective identification.
My main research interest is in how rituals provide a sense of social belonging, which transforms into a sense of
national identification. My engagement with ritual as a mechanism of national solidarity came from a practical
question. My approach to ritual follows the elementary Durkheimian view of ritual as a cyclic, recurrent activity that
provides symbolic confirmation of collective values and emotions shared by members of the community and
reinforces their sense of stability, security, and belonging.

it is interesting to follow rituals of sociability and to ask why and in what ways they sustain and nourish
national sentiments, particularly as social rituals could offer myriad alternative forms of collective
identification.



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Catherine Bell

order of things.
and efficacy of ritual were closely intertwined. For invented rites, which are not deeply rooted in a any shared sense
of tradition, however, legitimacy and authority tend to be construed more lightly and on quite different grounds. For

The ritualized body produced in ritualization brings what it has come to possess during ritual into social life. Bell
introduces the term ritual mastery, based on Bourdieus practical mastery (schemes for ordering the world used
by social agents that come to be embodied during practice), to refer to practical mastery in the context of
ritualization. Bell writes, I use the term ritual mastery to designate a practical mastery of the schemes of
ritualization as an embodied knowing, as the sense of ritual seen in its exercise (107). With the term, Bell
emphasizes that ritual is not a static, existing object but something embodied in specific contexts through work.
Ritual mastery involves a circularity, where a ritualized person uses ritualization schemes to affect non-ritualized
parts of life and to make them more coherent with the ritualized. Along with circularity, ritualization also relies on
constant deferral of meaning and purpose.
Part of this circularity is misrecognition, seeing and not seeing. Bell explains what ritualization sees: ritualization
sees itself as the correct way of acting to respond to a particular context or situation. It does not see the extent to
which it redefines or generates the circumstances to which it is responding (109).
environment.
Catherine Bell




Page | 45
environment.


ritual
activism
& black africa

for abigail frances olufunmi-layo kuti,
a womens' rights activist


Ritual Activism The Case For Fela Kuti and Black Africa

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Give me control over he who shapes the music of a nation,

and I care not who makes the laws. Napoleon

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