Invisible Agents. David M. Gordon
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or simply ignore the invisible worlds of others. This book considers various moments of social and political upheaval influenced by conflicting beliefs in invisible agents, including a precolonial ancestral government that claimed to control the spirits responsible for fertility, a prophet’s efforts to cleanse the colonial order of witchcraft and evil, and the overthrow of a postcolonial socialist regime thought to be influenced
by Satan.
A recent survey, a form of knowledge preferred by secular society, indicates that nearly nine out of ten sub-Saharan Africans consider “religion” to be very important in their lives. But what is meant by “religion”? And in what sense is this set of beliefs and practices termed religion “important”? In this survey, religion and its measure of importance are the spirits that flourish in Africa. For example, the survey indicates that roughly half of the 470 million Christians in sub-Saharan Africa (Christians, we are told, make up 57 percent of the total population) believe that Jesus will return to the visible world within their lifetimes. Slightly more African Christians claim that God will grant prosperity to those with faith.1 But these beliefs are not part of a removed and detached otherworldliness that many secularists associate with “religion.” Even if implausible to some, the spirits of the invisible world—including ancestors, nature spirits, God, the Holy Spirit, Jesus, and Satan—hold implications for realms of human agency. Rather than a history of institutionalized religion, this book is a history of the spirits believed to have influenced this world.
Religious and secular authorities often claim that beliefs in spirits are “superstitions,” false beliefs. Spirits have been marginalized by a post-Enlightenment Christianity that guides human actions in this world by focusing attention on the symbolic meanings of religion and on its moral implications. Spirits are distant, appearing only in an afterlife, in heaven and hell, instead of having a direct influence over happenings in the material world and the health and wealth of living beings. Clearly, this is not the position of all Christian believers in the West—now or in the past. Yet this nonspiritual type of religion is found among the mainstream Protestant and Catholic clergy and lay leadership, and has influenced scholarship. Drawing on such post-Enlightenment theological and scholarly abstractions, much scholarship focuses on the distinctions between the otherworldly qualities of sacred spirits and the this-worldly qualities of profane agents.2 Instead, the history of the entwined visible and invisible worlds that I propose here locates its arguments around the conceptions and sensory perceptions of historical agents who have thought that invisible spirits have exerted power in this world.
Africanist scholarship characterizes such belief in invisible spirits as part of an “African traditional religion” that continues to influence modern life. For philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, “most Africans, whether converted to Islam or Christianity or not, still share the beliefs of their ancestors in an ontology of invisible beings” (my emphasis).3 Such accounts draw on a long tradition of anthropological scholarship that describes ancestors as “shades” with a presence in the physical world.4 Theologians, historians, and other scholars of religion have joined in describing these ancestral religions as such.5 There is much of value in these accounts. For many people, ancestral and nature spirits have wielded power in this world. And yet the notion of African traditional religion implies a primordial set of beliefs that are static, closed to outside influences, and unengaged with historical changes. If they still exist in modern life, it is because Africans hold on to such beliefs with remarkable tenacity, or so it is argued. However, modernity, in Africa and elsewhere, is neither what it seems nor what it promotes itself to be. Religion is not the past of modernity, but integral to its present logic, the regulation of its rationality, and its modality of power.6 In this vein, recent scholarship on the African spirit world has shown that it is entwined with modernity rather than being only a residual traditional religion. Stephen Ellis and Gerrie ter Haar identify an invisible world that permeates postcolonial politics across much of Africa; anthropologists have found “witchcraft” and “magic” to be part of the quotidian experience of modernity.7 And even at the Western European heart of the supposed secular revolution, the triumph of secularism now appears to have been a mirage, the Enlightenment’s publicity stunt.8
Invisible Agents develops this line of inquiry. The invisible world discussed here is not a remnant of tradition, but an outcome of and engagement with a particular experience of modernity. My point is not to present Africans steeped in irrational, exotic, or traditional beliefs, but to describe how these rich products of the human imagination inform identities and actions; in other words, to offer an account of historical agency in a world populated with spirits.
the historiography of an invisible world
Implausible African beliefs have constituted one of the oldest—even foundational—problems for secular Africanist scholars. Nearly four decades ago, Terence O. Ranger published an article that considered connections between millenarian religion and anticolonial nationalism.9 This approach inspired an effervescence of historical scholarship. Historians found a rich source base in the writings of paranoid colonial administrators who referred incessantly to such connections. Movements that combined ancestral and Christian beliefs in millenarian efforts to rid the visible world of invisible forms of evil were thought pregnant with possibilities for nationalist movements in terms of their forms of organization and their anticolonial ideologies.10 Ancestral religious ideas, such as rainmaking, could also serve the anticolonial struggle.11 The recognition that spirits inspired anticolonial agency was a helpful and productive insight, albeit an incomplete and a very particular aspect of spiritual agency. In the emphasis on connections between modern politics and primary acts of rebellion, the spiritual beliefs of those who constituted these movements were subordinated to the formal—meaning African nationalist and anticolonial—political role that these movements played. If agency was primarily political and nationalist, spiritual beliefs were but an accident, a colorful detail of human agency.
Scholars have subsequently questioned the supposed evolution of forms of resistance, complicated arguments that religion was simply a cultural component of nationalist struggle, reconsidered the ties between religious organization and civil society, and taken the autonomous claims of faith more seriously. Ranger himself revised his original position in several regards. In a critical survey of the literature, he finds the notion that religious movements constitute “a stage in the evolution of anti-colonial protest” excessively teleological and often inaccurate. Such an approach invariably treats religion as a sort of false consciousness, awaiting an accurate historical consciousness in the form of working-class or nationalist ideas. The explicitly spiritual nature of these movements is ignored by focusing on anticolonial politics.12In a more recent literature survey, however, Ranger still seems uneasy with a focus on spirits, especially occult forces, which, he thinks, presents Africans as steeped in strange superstitions.13
That spirits are thought to hold power should point to the political importance of religious ideas, not suggest that they are false superstitions. Political scientist Michael Schatzberg has demonstrated the rich analyses that may follow from extending the “parameters of the political,” especially to spirits that are thought to exert power in this world.14 Not only do religious movements appear political in new ways, but conventional political movements engage in often unrecognized forms of spiritual politics.15 Yet much scholarship on religious movements remains embedded in a secular view of politics. For example, there have been many fruitful inquiries into the public role of Christianity, exploring whether churches are autonomous and promote opposition to the state or are captured by the state and become instruments of patronage politics.16 Other recent Africanist scholarship focuses on elements of civil society, for example the engagement of women with Christianity.17 Human agency is still viewed in terms of secular political claims and identities, however. The spiritual component of religion is not what is important; even if religious movements constitute civil society, spiritual beliefs remain a form of false consciousness, sometimes explicitly critiqued, sometimes ignored as irrelevant detail.
A linguistic turn in humanities and social science has helped to point out that the fields of meaning designated by “religion” and “politics” differ across time, societies, and languages. Imposing such labels often reflects interpretative translations of unfamiliar realms of human agency. Scholars sensitive to this problem have shunned “religion” to characterize certain African beliefs and practices.