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The Anthropology of Anger: Civil Society and Democracy in Africa, by Célestin Monga, translated by Linda L. Fleck and Célestin Monga
5. Democracy and the Politics of the Sacred
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Etre intelligent, c’est savoir être con chaque fois que cela est nécessaire. |
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| Being intelligent means knowing to act stupid whenever necessary. |
| —Robert Monga, Cameroon |
And God in all of this? 1 No one undertaking to analyze political transformations in Africa today can fail to ask this question. The resurgence of God—’L’enjeu de Dieu,” as Eboussi Boulaga (1991) puts it, or, more generally, the proliferation of the sacred (Mbembe 1992)—has been one of the principal determinants of the present ferment. Its impact on society may well decide the future of fledgling democracies and economies in sub-Saharan Africa.
My purpose is not to detail the various beliefs held by the populations of Africa at the end of this millennium. Rather, I want to explore various aspects of what might be termed the explosion of the sacred throughout the continent. Some regard this as a positive phenomenon (religion energizes and unites people), others as a negative one (it may have pernicious effects during this period of political change), but no one denies its existence and importance. Whether Christians, Muslims, or animists, young or old, men or women, rich or poor, the religious now constitute the largest sector of society in Africa. Prayers, rites, and acts of atonement are the most regular activities of a significant fraction of the population.
The first section of this chapter outlines the various manifestations of the quest for meaning, which is always part of everyday life in Africa. The second section explores the main determinants of the recent explosion of the sacred in Africa. The third section highlights some of the dangers of fatalism and nihilism behind such a phenomenon. The fourth section analyzes the various ways in which African political entrepreneurs are politicizing God and the devil.
The Ever-Present Quest for Meaning
How is one to interpret the religious boom in Africa? The first problem one encounters is the scope of definition. Where does religion begin and where does it end? Is it possible to establish a line of demarcation between the political dimension and spiritual activity? And when one is dealing with Africa, where more social activity is hidden from view (the “invisible”) than seen (the “visible”) (Bahoken 1967; Wiredu 1980), should one analyze all the various dimensions of religious activity—what is said, done, and demanded—or confine oneself to what the naked eye observes and might eventually measure?
Some writers have rightly underscored the “puzzle” of religion’s vitality in the world today (Wald 1992:2). But with respect to Africa, one may discount from the outset the rhetoric of secularization, which takes the decline of religious influence as a given and has long influenced thinking on the interplay between religion and politics in industrialized countries (Glasner 1977:chap. 2). The same goes for any “culture of disbelief” of the kind described by Carter (1993) with reference to the United States.
The idea of a religious decline in Africa is even more implausible if one considers the fact that there has been no uniform process of secularization on the continent. The notion of differentiation, implying the withdrawal of religion from such areas of public policy as law, education, and health, varies greatly from one country to the next. Indeed, in the largely Islamic nations of North Africa, the Sahel, or even the Horn of Africa, some politicians have promoted the idea of an identical religious and social order. The civil war in the Sudan is the most striking and painful example of this type of futile effort to use faith as a vehicle for forcibly homogenizing a recalcitrant social mix. The Djiboutian penal law code (the Xeer of the Issas), as well as education standards in Senegal, Guinea, Mali, or Niger, is based on leaders’ interpretations of the Koran (Magassouba 1985).
Religion, moreover, is not thought of as a strictly personal matter. The religious diversity found in most countries explains why even the most cynical leaders have had difficulty imposing a state religion. The most skillful (Morocco’s Hassan II, for example) have managed to elevate themselves to the legal status of “Commander of the Faithful” in order to ward off subversive interpretations of the Koran by Islamic fundamentalists. This is possible in a country where more than 95 percent of the population is Muslim. In countries where the three major monotheistic religions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) compete with animism and other belief systems, things prove more difficult. Politicians in such places attempt to control or seduce religious leaders, alternating between the carrot and the stick. Religious leaders are either courted by those in power—as well as by those who hope to replace them—or are fiercely attacked when they publicly express divergent opinions (Haynes 1994).
The powerful influence of the irrational (l’enflure de l’irrationnel) against which Etounga-Manguelle rails (1990), is not, of course, confined to Africa. As numerous writers have noted, the religious impulse is a constant of the human spirit, “a defensive reaction of nature against the dissolvant power of intelligence” (Bergson 1932). “In order that man (the individual) might not concern himself first with the burdens society imposes upon him, and might not allow the idea of death to slow down the movement of life within him, it was at once necessary for religion to impose upon him taboos and gods and to promise him life after death.” 2 Humankind’s desire for an intimate relationship with the gods remains one of our oldest instincts, something philosophers and anthropologists of religion have yet to “explain.” If Max Weber’s work (1920/1921) distinguished between ritual, salvational, and soteriological religions, it also underscored the extreme complexity and diversity of the religious phenomenon—and thus the impossibility of comprehending the multiplicity of its dimensions. Generally speaking, the difficulty of capturing the essence of the sacred and determining its root causes is consubstantial with thought on the subject. As Sarrazin has remarked, “We hesitate to utilize this worn-out concept [the sacred], which has fallen into disuse among ethnologists because, in religious phenomenology and positivist sociology, it was intimately linked to the religious, a means for the one to regard as sacred an imaginary psyche, for the other to dump into the ‘rubbish bin of the irrational’ everything in man that was not reducible to positivist reason—the sacred was good for the savages” (1991:11).
Even if one defines the sacred as the sum total of the social practices and actions that are tied to the range of belief systems in current practice, one is still faced with the difficulty of conceptualizing a configuration that would allow one to comprehend its various aspects. 3 To begin with, there is the problem of the age-old quest for the sacred, common to all men. As Boyer has observed, “Worship, prayer, offerings, sacrifices, thanksgiving, and commemorations may be expressed in a variety of ways in different eras and places.... It is the customs, the mentalities, and the modes of conceptualization that differ. Not their object” (1992:17).
Though they did not possess modern technical knowledge, primitive human beings also had a set of values and a need for transcendence. Africa is not the only place where veneration and sublimation are among the deepest human instincts, but their present intensity on the continent is tied to a series of crises. The traditional quest for meaning (the desire to go beyond everyday banality, to struggle against the absurd, to give purpose to life) was upset by the implosion of social structures brought on by the economic crisis. Caught in a whirlwind of structural adjustments and a chaotic process of democratization, people have turned to a pantheon of old and new gods to give meaning to their lives.
The Explosion of the Sacred: Root Causes
To explain the religious boom, leaders of religious movements generally point to the disintegration of social bonds, most notably the erosion of the family as spiritual anchor. Weakened by a tremendous loss in purchasing power and an unprecedented rate of unemployment, the African family has grown more inflexible even as it decomposes (Ngandu Nkashama 1990). Though it lacks the financial means that once made it possible to endorse and maintain a certain social order—in sum, to legitimate its existence—the family nevertheless remains totalitarian, assigning roles and responsibilities to each of its members. The collective misery and suffering have not clarified and facilitated relationships among family members; rather, they have exacerbated the overweening presence of the family clan.
Every family member seeks to escape the pressure cooker, to revolt, to find his or her own way. But insofar as freedom is always difficult to manage, the individual who cuts family ties painfully attempts to establish new relationships with others by becoming involved in social organizations. In the absence of professional associations, which might stimulate and channel the sense of belonging to the same socioprofessional group, these organizations have generally revolved around politics or religion. Part of their tremendous success may be attributed to the breakdown of lines of transmission between generations, a consequence of the crisis of the family. Having received nothing in the way of political, economic, cultural, or even symbolic capital from their parents, the young have at their disposal only vague beliefs, common mores. The fragility of their value systems allows them to fall prey easily to the allure and illusory power of religious dogma—reinforced by a well-developed marketing strategy for rallying the faithful—which helps them define themselves and put their subjectivity into some sort of perspective. 4
At a more general level, the weakness of the individual’s relationship with other members of the community has augmented the thirst for the sacred, causing more and more Africans to take the plunge into the abyss of new utopias. The crisis of the family has been further aggravated by the obsolescence of traditional forms of knowledge. The world is evolving at such a frantic pace that parents are no longer able to contribute significantly to their children’s upbringing. The basics of elementary education, love, contraception, and disease appear to escape adults, who are often stuck in their ways and resistant to change.
In this environment of perpetual conceptual change, the young are not the only ones in a state of confusion. Because of their social condition and the myths that justify their marginalization, women, too, have been painfully affected by the current transformations. Forced to contend with the simultaneous omnipresence and instability of the African family, they desperately attempt to fit innumerable obligations into their schedule. They take care of the home and the housework, earn an income, deal with the budget, savings, and investments, negotiate tensions among family members, and ensure the multiple connections between city and village. They have little time for dreams and are often deprived of that minimal amount of solitude that every human being requires.
Not surprisingly, women more than men feel as if their lives are passing them by. They frequently suffer from depression and, in an effort to escape the ordeals of daily life, have enrolled in massive numbers in the fledgling sports and arts programs the leisure industry has begun to organize in large cities. More than the loneliness of the elderly in rural areas, the confusion of women, and its corollaries (emotional bankruptcy, sexual frustration), is the principal threat to the stability of social structures in sub-Saharan Africa today.
No sooner had women escaped arranged marriages and obligatory procreation than they were forced into the preestablished role of wife, mother, maid-of-all-work. Condemned to a state of economic dependency, a result of unemployment and especially of the limits society has assigned to their physical and intellectual capacities, women have had to adopt a role that does not suit them and resign themselves to their fate. They are expected to conform to a certain image and to confine themselves to the space the present sociocultural order has carved out for them. Inequitable and repressive, the African family has thus driven its principal constituents (the young, women) to seek peace and solitude elsewhere. At this moment of structural transition, the manner in which the family operates fans the flames of the collective desire for the sacred.
The need for the irrational is also fed in school and in the workplace, where the myth-making function of the sacred, which Bergson so brilliantly analyzed, blossoms. Here secret ambition, jealousy, and passion unfold. Individual energy, thought to be insufficient to achieve one’s goals, is supplemented by a moral stimulant—religious fervor. In certain cases, its infinite powers break down ordinary social, ethnic, and economic barriers. Thus, every Sunday, Cameroonians are amused to find the most notorious white-collar criminals in their country seated in the front pews of churches in Douala and Yaoundé. Some of them even join the church choir, making sure their voices are heard above the rest, especially if there is a camera around, as if they feel the need to absolve themselves of their sins.
Touré and Konaté related with humor and delight how Ivoirian president Félix Houphouët-Boigny’s announcement of a plan to restructure the ministries set off a serious crisis of legitimacy within the governing class, accompanied by a noticeable increase in the practice of paganism and an exponential increase in offerings: “Thursday, September 28, 1989, The Presidential Palace. After having patiently listened to twenty-three orators rooting out one by one all the evils the Ivory Coast has been made to suffer, the President proclaimed: ‘On October 15, I will restructure the ministries!’ The room was jubilant, the applause was thunderous, the rest of the speech was barely heard. They were looking for scape goats, they had found them. They wanted sacrifices, they were going to get them” (1990:13).
Sacrifice, an essential dimension of religion and the ultimate step in the quest for the sacred, takes on much importance here. It serves both as the foundation of a somewhat baroque system for the transfer of wealth and as the guarantor of a social order whose three functions (psychoreligious, political, and economic) have been conflated. “Between September 28 and October 15, calculations, worries, insomnia.... Even the most important state officials can’t get a good night’s sleep. Secret meetings, a sacrificial war: on the one side, there’s the big boss who is looking for sacrificial victims; on the other, there are the little bosses who refuse to be sacrificed. Upsurge in the activities of the divinities, more than ever implored. In the intersections of Abidjan and elsewhere, the number of sacrifices offered up to them!” (1990:13).
The size of the sacrifice being directly proportional to the intensity of the entreaties and supplications, thirteen ministers were eventually let go, in spite of all their sacrifices. But in the meantime, thanks to all their offerings (animals, cereals, money, etc.), the poor would have had a feast and become accustomed to their lot. The principles that have contributed to the success of paganism and other religious syncretisms in black Africa are found here: the anchoring in the here and now and the absence of perspectives on the afterlife; the limited desire for transcendence; and the rejection of the usual dichotomies between the spirit and the body, knowledge and faith, etc. The imperative of effectiveness is the only guideline. Thus, some of the “faithful” go from one prayer group or spiritual movement to another, until they feel they have satisfied their immediate need for serenity.
Faith and the Dictatorship of Destiny
Throughout Africa, the failure of the state—once thought of as omnipotent and now incapable of offering its citizens even a minimal level of comfort—along with the general shipwreck of society, has given rise to new networks for the management of the sacred. The business of these unregulated authorities is the production of myths, symbols, and rituals packed with meaning and designed to ease the tensions of everyday life, to reduce anxiety about an uncertain future, to exorcise fears, and to chase away pain. It is a faith industry in which the dictatorship of the idea of destiny occasionally holds sway.
As Augé has aptly remarked, “Man never approaches the gods with free hands and a clear head” (1982:50). To date, the role played by religious and spiritual organizations in Africa’s sociopolitical transformations has varied greatly and has sometimes proved marginal. In the future, however, their role is almost certain to grow. The interminable economic crisis and the implosion of social structures feed psychological insecurity and increase the membership of religious and parareligious organizations. Savvy politicians attempt if not to control this collective need for the irrational, then at least to exploit it to their advantage.
In the past few years, the media have called attention to the increased presence of religious leaders on the political stage—Islamic leaders in north Africa and the Sahel countries, Catholic priests in west and central Africa, and leaders of traditional religious communities in the south. The intervention of leaders of parareligious and religious communities into political life has occasionally puzzled researchers and has been interpreted in a number of ways. But Berque’s analysis of the emergence of ayatollahs in Iranian politics provides a straightforward explanation of what is happening in sub-Saharan Africa today:
Should one impute, as some have done, the fall of the Shah of Iran to the “return of the sacred” into politics? No, but to the use of religious language for the expression of demands, the same there as elsewhere, though more intense and compressed. But why such a use, one might ask, rather than a reliance on the apparently tested procedures of political parties? That is the real question. The answer to it hinges, on the one hand, upon the brutal perfection with which the classical forces of opposition had been crushed in this country. But, on the other hand, it surely hinges upon the long misunderstood or distorted possibilities of Islam (1980:61).
Berque’s reading of the religious origins of the Iranian revolution is similar to Simone’s analysis of political Islam in Sudan (1994). It makes two important points that may be applied to black Africa: First, it suggests that the flourishing of paganism on the continent may be attributed to authoritarianism. Second, it indicates the need for a careful analysis of the workings of belief systems in current practice.
In undertaking such an analysis, one must not be too quick to celebrate the political virtues of the rise of the sacred. The thirst for the sacred can lead not only to trivialized forms of spirituality but also to the emergence of immoral and perverted gods able to exploit a feeling of tragic fatalism. Already in Senegal, which incarnates the pseudomodel of good government that France invented for its former colonies, the mullahs of the Mourid and Tidjan sects have essentially co-opted the people’s desire for freedom (Magassouba 1985). This may be explained by the fact that the quest for meaning in each citizen takes expression in a contradictory form, one in which the need for transcendence is conflated with the imperative of well-being in the here and now. As a result, religious leaders have little difficulty promoting the idea of household gods and the existence of a relationship between the lives of the faithful and the workings of the celestial powers. Credulity and suffering become a breeding ground for a populist version of spirituality.
This view of the world can have terrible consequences insofar as it risks disrupting the lines and channels of communication within society. If religious North African fundamentalism seems far away, the threat of a deliberate use of the spiritual for political purposes is present in some countries. Cameroon is the most notable example, as Fisiy (1990) and Fisiy and Geschiere (1990) have amply demonstrated. The reduction of all events to the workings of divine powers leads to fatalism. In the hands of a few religious leaders, who conflate the temporal and the spiritual and act either in their own material interest or on behalf of the urban or political elite, with whom they have formed an alliance, fear and ingenuousness become useful tools for the management of society.
Will Africans end up calling upon the power of marabouts, inspired prophets, or sorcerers to organize democratization and the education of the masses? Will the validity of public policy adopted in sub-Saharan Africa soon come to depend on the degree of spirituality it exhibits? This is the paradoxical situation in which African societies find themselves at the end of this millennium. But African politicians did not stop to answer any of these questions before taking the plunge into the religious field and making it a part of politics.
The Politics of God and the Devil
Even if every major social player has desperately tried to gain politically from the explosion of the religious and the parareligious, the grand prize for originality of goals and methods goes to the politicians in power. Their strategy is twofold. They attempt to co-opt religion itself, occupy its turf, confiscate the idea of God, and thus take over the space in which the people’s quest for absolution finds expression. This is the politics of God. When this method does not produce the desired results, they call upon the forces of evil, the powers of darkness, deeply rooted in the African imagination. This is the politics of the devil.
The Politics of God
Even in the turbulent atmosphere of the ongoing democratization process, African politicians are adept at inventing methods to maintain power. Here follow some of the ways in which they have exploited religion to this end:
In Africa, the politics of God is above all a vehicle for reconstructing reality, a means of legitimating power that stems from brute force rather than the ballot box, a way of polishing up the tarnished image of the most brutal regimes. In short, the cult of the gods allows those in power to regenerate themselves and to restore their image in the eyes of populations generally ready to forgive them—for forgiveness is the goal of African society. Thus, dictators are quick to use religion to their advantage and to mingle with the most prominent religious leaders. This frenetic quest for sanctification sometimes borders on the grotesque. Hence, whenever Pope John Paul II visits the continent, the heads of state who receive him thoroughly exploit the event for political gain. Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko had photos of the Holy Father blessing his family distributed worldwide in an effort to show his people that the pope approved of his regime. Deliberately dressed in the traditional formal costume of his native region, Togo’s Gnassingbe Eyadema appeared everywhere with the pope and even insisted that he be “initiated” into local ritual ceremonies. Cameroon’s Paul Biya carefully positioned family members around the pope, then presented him with a newborn infant from Biya’s second marriage. The ceremony was broadcast on national television and received wide coverage in the press. The idea, once again, was to show to the world the Vatican’s recognition of his authority, widely contested after the rigged elections of 1992. In Kenya, Daniel arap Moi did much the same thing.
The nourishment of fatalism: Nothing is more useful to a head of state than to divert attention from the government’s incompetence and the true causes of the nation’s economic and political difficulties. Studies have shown that wars are occasionally used as a means of reducing internal tensions (de Mesquita et al. 1992; Rummel 1979). But like their counterparts elsewhere, African heads of state rarely have convenient outside enemies who might serve as sparring partners in a premeditated war and provide them with the opportunity for a heroic battle for the fatherland—a battle that is worth fighting only if one is sure to win, and if it makes citizens focus on something other than the mediocre performance of their leaders. The cult of the diverse forms in which the quest for spirituality takes expression is a life buoy: Convincing the population that the world is controlled by divine powers beyond the scope of the human mind becomes an effective political strategy. In countries where public revenues come primarily from the sale of raw materials, the people are often called upon to pray to God not only to make it rain but to make the price of cocoa beans and coffee go up in international markets. In churches in Yaoundé, Abidjan, or Nairobi, the explicit aim of some sermons is to ward off the global economic crisis, the “enemy of the nation” that politicians in power never cease to rail against. By invoking supernatural forces to end the economic crisis, leaders exploit the faith of their fellow citizens and nourish a subtle form of fatalism. The responsibility for their failures is transferred to “the sinister logic of world markets,” and citizens put up with their misery, return to their prayers, and wait for things to get better. In a word, this is an emotional holdup.
Faith as a strategy for absolution: The sacred may also serve to “rejuvenate” African politicians. Given that forgiveness is the goal of African society, a good way to obtain it is to identify oneself with God in the collective imagination. Beyond the moral authority such a position affords, there is the implicit benefit of forgiveness itself. For example, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, Côte d’Ivoire’s former president, saw the construction of the world’s largest basilica in his native village as the most effective means of restoring his image. His reasoning was that even if his political opponents managed to convince the population of his failures and political and economic crimes, no one could really remain angry at him, because the construction of a cathedral guaranteed him a place in heaven. What African could hold a grudge against a man who, however sinful, spent a large part of his fortune, and the rest of his life, building churches? Numerous leaders throughout the continent reason in the same way. To secure the people’s forgiveness, high state officials make it a point to participate in spiritual activities. During the day, they go about their brutal business, doing whatever it takes—force, coercion, bribery—to stay in power. But at night they head for churches, mosques, and other places of prayer, stationing themselves in the front rows where they can be seen by the cameras and the people. Who could really despise the head of the secret police, responsible for the deaths of thousands of fellow citizens but regularly in attendance at all sorts of public prayer meetings? Who could be angry at the former finance minister and banker, a notorious embezzler of public funds but always at mass on Sundays? Or at the CEO of state-run television who transforms himself into an exuberant and humorous choir director after bombarding the audience with official propaganda?
The construction and renewal of social networks: African politicians are likewise interested in the resurgence of religion insofar as it provides them with an invaluable means of access to the souls of their constituents. In light of the ineffectiveness of such traditional organizations as political parties, unions, and socioprofessional associations, politicians have difficulty keeping abreast of the dreams, anxieties, and demands of the “electorate.” Their information cannot come from major political gatherings, which celebrate the virtues of unanimity and the status quo and make hypocritical “motions of support” for the dictator in place. Not duped by their constituents’ public show of admiration, politicians use the secret police and religious and parareligious organizations to stay informed of public opinion. The cult of the sacred is one of the few reliable networks in which the bottom can communicate with the top and vice versa. As such, it is an amazing source of power, a large communication network to be controlled. Priests, imams, and leaders of various sects pass on to the people the gospel from on high (not from the heavens but from the presidential palace) and bring back to the leaders the public’s primary concerns.
For African leaders, putting the idea of God to good political use has a number of advantages: it allows one to sanctify one’s actions, to reduce the possibility of faith being used as a vehicle for protest, and to elevate oneself to the level of director of social conscience, the best remedy against the emergence of uncontrollable forms of religious extremism.
The Politics of the Devil
African politics also allows for more violent, destructive, and perverse uses of the sacred—those that stem from politicians’ cynical manipulation of the prevalent, indigenous belief in the powers of darkness. One has only to read the African press to see that the integration of the invisible realm into politics is widespread. On the one hand, illegitimate leaders attempt to appropriate the sacred not only to distinguish themselves positively but also to distinguish themselves negatively in the eyes of their constituents. On the other hand, the public, increasingly credulous as a result of the economic crisis, buys into the myths concerning the existence of supernatural forces in the political arena and, more generally, the idea that evil forces control the continent.
The current situation can be summed up in a pithy phrase: The devil is back in African politics. This pleases African leaders, for the public’s belief in the devil, able to manipulate at will the powers of evil, gives them a relative advantage in the confrontation that the very act of governing implies. They are delighted to claim that they have the protection of the gods and the backing of the devil. The effectiveness of this double strategy can be measured by the extent to which the occult has penetrated the African imagination (World Values Surveys 1990–1991).
Of course, a sociopolitical analysis of the idea of the devil and, more generally, of the role played by forces of darkness in social life is a serious affair and warrants a few preliminary remarks. As Parrinder has written, “Belief in witchcraft is one of the great fears from which mankind has suffered.... In modern Africa, [it] is a great tyranny spreading panic and death” (1958:9).
It is necessary to clearly define one’s terms to avoid falling into the trap of words with multiple meanings—semantic quarrels abound in studies on faith and superstition. Insofar as I am concerned with the authorities who produce and manage the idea of evil in African political life, I will adopt Evans-Pritchard’s distinction between the techniques of witchcraft, which fulfills an essentially positive social function along the lines of psychiatry, and the bad magic of sorcerers per se, who engage in black magic and generally intend to do harm.
There is much loose discussion about witchcraft. We must distinguish between bad magic (or sorcery) and witchcraft. Many African peoples distinguish clearly between the two and for ethnological purposes we must do the same (1935:22).
A witch performs no rite, utters no spell, and possesses no medicine. An act of witchcraft is a psychic act. The sorcerer, on the other hand, may make magic to kill his neighbours. The magic will not kill them but he can, and no doubt often does, make it with that intention (1937:21).
Prudence is also in order because human history is filled with its share of witch-hunts. Works devoted to the genealogy of the idea of evil have recounted the often bloody consequences of intolerance and accusations of sorcery and black magic that people have leveled at one another since the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance, a phenomenon that was exacerbated by Pope Innocent VIII’s publication in 1484 of the encyclical Summis Desirantes, declaring war on sorcerers (Notestein 1911; Davies 1947).
Things are different in the African political scene today. The intervention of the devil and his avatars in political life (the use of occult techniques to conceptualize evil, to combat either one’s ideological adversaries or one’s rivals in the same camp, and to achieve political objectives) is a constant, at once desired and exploited by political players. For a number of years, one of the most influential men in west and central Africa was a marabout known as M. Cissé, who benefited from the favors of numerous high officials and was the unofficial adviser of the presidents of Benin, Mali, and Gabon. Because he had served in this capacity, he was arrested and sentenced by the new Malian government that came to power after the democratic revolution in March 1991.
The story of Nicéphore Soglo, the first democratically elected president of Benin, provides another noteworthy example of the devil’s “intervention” politics. Shortly before he was to take his oath of office, Soglo was stricken with an illness his doctors were unable to diagnose. He eventually fell into a coma and was transferred to a hospital in Paris. In the meantime, his family and political allies organized a campaign against the malevolent use of sorcery in politics and accused those whom Soglo had defeated at the polls of using black magic against him. Radio programs denounced the relentlessness with which evil spirits had attacked the new head of state. “Nationalist” sorcerers were called upon to rescue democracy in Benin. If they did not save the president’s life, it was implied, then the democratic process, which finally brought down former president Mathieu Kérékou, would fall by the wayside and everyone would suffer when the pendulum swung back to the other side. Group prayer meetings were organized throughout the country. And while the sick president remained under heavy guard in the hospital in an effort to ward off evil spirits, African marabouts were asked to devise a magic potion that would act as an antidote. Finally, after several months of medical care and a period of convalescence, Soglo was able to take office. When a major radio station in France questioned him about the source of his mysterious illness and asked him to comment on the political use of sorcery in his country, Nicéphore Soglo gave a cautious reply, refraining from any commentary that might strike his enemies as pompous: “I think I was poisoned, but I don’t really know what happened to me.” 5
Political life in many African countries is studded with similar—if less dramatic—scenarios. Bayart related juicy anecdotes about the important role sorcerers played at the convention of Congo’s former Marxist-Leninist single party, the PCT (Congolese Workers Party). According to reliable eyewitness accounts, each of the regime’s principal dignitaries—Communists, mind you—arrived at the convention (the party’s highest authority and the event at which the most important political decisions were made) accompanied not by his closest advisers but by the sorcerer whom he most trusted (Bayart 1989).
The democratization process begun in the early 1990s has changed nothing in this regard. Although the myth of Satan and his representatives on earth is, as a number of anthropologists have pointed out (Cohn 1970), only relatively ancient, the devil appears to have taken over the imagination of African populations and leaders these past few years. Of course, one cannot remember a time when sorcery and politics were not connected on the continent (Douglas 1963; Nadel 1952). What appears to have changed is the use to which the belief in forces of evil is now put. Twenty-six years ago, Douglas wrote: “Witchcraft beliefs are essentially a means of clarifying and affirming social definitions.... People are trying to control one another, albeit with small success. The idea of the witch is used to whip their own consciences or those of their friends. The witch-image is as effective as the community is strong” (1970:XXV).
Similarly, Willis affirmed that “in most African societies, witchcraft (here used as synonymous with sorcery) is a putative cause of what is seen by the sufferer as unmerited misfortune” (1970:129). Though they make some interesting and valid points, such analyses do not enable us to pinpoint the reasons for the irruption of sorcery in African politics today. The most remarkable aspect of the current social transformations is the implosion of communities as they have traditionally been defined. Across the board, African communities appear weaker, and individualism stronger, than ever before. Reversing Douglas’s claim, one might say that in Africa today the witch image is as effective as the community is weak. Satanic cults and rituals, black masses, the celebration of the invisible, the belief in the omnipresence of the most powerful politicians, rumors of sacrifices, organ trafficking, cannibalism, and orgies, all of this is now part of the everyday landscape. The idea of being possessed traverses all social classes, all “tribes.” Exorcism, as a result, is a booming business.
Is the resurgence of the occult the necessary outcome of a certain economic determinism, as Willis predicted? Are the economic crisis and the trauma of structural change the principal causes of the economic and political success of the devil in Africa? Nothing is less sure. Ardener (1970) pointed out that the Bakwéris in Cameroon retained their belief in the forces of evil despite a marked improvement in their standard of living. In other words, economic factors did not affect their cosmology. The absence of a correlation between the two has been confirmed by Horton (1967, 1982), who stresses that the religious and parareligious beliefs of Africans, based on the real and immutable power of the invisible, go much further than purely symbolic, superficial rituals.
If African politicians have been able to exploit the public’s credulity—that is, manipulate, at a subconscious level, the belief in the forces of evil for the purpose of gaining and maintaining power—it is because this belief exhibits its own rationality. The irrational here has a coherence and internal logic that allow for the harmonious integration of phenomena that might strike an observer as bizarre, horrible, and unjustifiable. However obvious it might seem that the success of sorcery, for example, is related to subjectivity, political analysts must attempt to define the objective functions of such practices. That is what Appiah invites us to do when he writes: “Concentrating on the noncognitive features of traditional religions not only misrepresents them but also leads to an underestimation of the role of reason in the life of traditional cultures” (1992:134).
Indeed, one has only to interview political actors to see how they exploit belief in the supernatural. First, it allows them to introduce the elements of fear and respect into the construction of their image. The collective imagination easily accepts the idea that power needs a little black magic to solidify itself and affirm its superiority over its opponents, and that leaders need to shield themselves against the hatred, jealousy, and violence of evil spirits. The conversations between political activists are often studded with remarks such as: “The leader of our party is very strong. He is shielded by all the sorcerers” or “Your president is off to a bad start! Even the spirits of our ancestors are against his policies, which is why they haven’t had good results.” Various cults are involved in political campaigns. Discussions at political meetings often revolve around magico-religious themes: legendary tales of famous opposition leaders who escaped numerous assassination attempts thanks to the powerful force of their gris-gris; epics of the supernatural powers of beloved leaders, who made banana trees grow overnight, were untouched by gunshots fired at point-blank range, and transformed themselves into winged creatures to escape the wrath of their enemies. In fact, one essential criterion of political popularity seems to be mastery over the occult. No one wants a naive leader who could be blown away like a leaf by the most insignificant sorcerer working for the opposition. To receive the confidence of the public, a leader must be solid, powerful, able to vanquish the forces of evil on their own satanic turf.
The public acceptance of the use of the occult in politics has various implications. Many politicians now believe that it is necessary to use sorcery to advance their political ideas. Their logic is simple: To win the support of the electorate, it is best to monopolize its imagination. Any means may be used to achieve this end: seduction, fear, or threats. That is why a number of sects and religions have sprung up within political networks in almost every country in Africa.
As long as this frenzy is limited to mind games involving the idea of the devil, these rituals are harmless. Rituals, in themselves, are not the problem: all powers throughout the world validate themselves through the institution of networks of legitimation (ideological, religious) in which they have faith. Within the machinery of the state, Gabon’s president, Omar Bongo, informally established a sect—the bwiti—dedicated to his worship. Anyone hoping to move up the ladder in his administration knows that it is advisable to be a member of this sect, for competence alone or even “ethnic representation,” used not so long ago to achieve “regional balance,” is not enough. The president of Cameroon, Paul Biya, has turned membership in the Rose-Croix, of which he is a member, into a litmus test for legitimacy and a pledge of loyalty for high government officials. Most other heads of state have acted in like manner, vesting various religious and parareligious sects with full rights over the management of the political sector.
The real problem lies in the degree to which the use of occult forces is limited: A total absence of control opens the way to various abuses. For example, the violence of the state, which, as Foucault (1979) has demonstrated, often provokes the irreparable, is increasingly transferred to private groups outside the administrative hierarchy. These groups answer only to the heads of state, who, for the most part, no longer trust the military. This perverse “privatization” of violence has occurred in Mobutu’s Zaire, where “uncontrolled soldiers,” who are nevertheless loyal to the Zairean dictator, terrorize poor areas of Kinshasa. It is likewise found in Somalia, where the state has ceased to exist in any form whatsoever, and where the international community has rehearsed one of the main diplomatic principles of the post–Cold War era: silent abdication of responsibility.
In his well-known preface to the English edition of Weber’s Sociology of Religion, Parsons suggested we take seriously the belief in the supernatural:
Every society possesses some conceptions of a supernatural order, of spirits, gods or impersonal forces which are different from and in some sense superior to those forces conceived as governing ordinary “natural” events, and whose nature and activities somehow give meaning to the unusual, the frustrating and the rationally impenetrable aspects of existence. The existence of the supernatural order is taken seriously, in that many concrete events of experience are attributed, in part at least, to its agency, and men devote an important part of their time and resources to regulating their relations with this order as they conceive it (1963:xxvii–xxviii).
I have attempted to follow his advice, without, however, giving in to the temptation of adapting Weber’s evolutionist models. Beyond the fact that such an approach allows access to the hidden dimension of certain myths, it opens up new perspectives on the manner in which the “religious” segment of African civil society is organized and operated today. A serious analysis of the quest for the sacred among Africans likewise helps one understand better the misadventures and complexities of current sociopolitical transformations. It sheds light on the unwritten rules of African politics.
Endnotes
Note 1: This simple question is a well-known phrase used by French journalist Jacques Chancel for several years to revive his famous interviews on Radio France Internationale. Back.
Note 2: That is how Augé (1982:49) explains Bergson’s justification of the origins of religion. Back.
Note 3: Besides the “classical” religions, such a definition includes all kinds of new sects, which, in some African cities, are the main technostructure through which the relationship between people and the sacred takes place. Thus, my definition is broader than the one suggested by Durkheim: “Système de croyances et de pratiques relatives à des choses sacrées, c’est-à-dire séparées, interdites, croyances et pratiques qui unissent en une même communauté morale, appelée Eglise, tous ceux qui y adhèrent [A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices that unite into one single moral community, called a church, all those who adhere to them.] (1979:65). Back.
Note 4: There seems to be no distinction related to social class, gender, or socioprofessional status. Rich and poor people, literate and illiterate, all are potential customers for marabouts, sorcerers, and other agents of spiritual racketeering. Back.
Note 5: I personally spoke with President Soglo about these matters during an interview in August 1995. Back.
The Anthropology of Anger: Civil Society and Democracy in Africa
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