Hans’s response to my paper was only brought to my attention this evening (28th February) while I was enjoying a glass of wine with Tony Chantry – a delayed celebration of my birthday of one week ago. I have since read what Hans has to say and feel it necessary to respond although I would wish to avoid any acrimony since I hold Hans in high regard and recall a thoroughly enjoyable evening debating missionary work with him in Sengera Parish in 1981. He was visiting Fons Geerts and I was a MEP student in Sengera.
However, it is difficult to enter into a constructive debate with Hans when he is reliant on memories from more than 50 years ago when he first arrived in East Africa. Also Hans fails to cite any Africanists who would support his somewhat idiosyncratic stance.
Although, there are a number of assertions proffered by Hans which I take issue with, I prefer to limit my response to the fundamentals of my argument advanced in my earlier piece:
- Hans dismisses my thumbnail sketch of pre-Colonial Africa as a theory that has popped up “intermittently in academic circles. But it does not sound convincing, it is contrived.”
However, mine is a version of events that has achieved wide acceptance both in and outside of academia. Martin Meredith’s celebrated The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence makes the same point as Reader (who I cited in my earlier article): “African societies of the pre-colonial era - a mosaic of lineage groups, clans, villages, chiefdoms, kingdoms and empires - were formed often with shifting and indeterminate frontiers and loose allegiances… At the outset of colonial rule, administrators and ethnographers endeavoured to classify the peoples of Africa, sorting them out into what they called tribes, producing a whole new ethnic map to show the frontiers of each one. Colonial administrators wanted recognisable units they could control.” (p.154). Meredith goes on to explore the role missionaries played in defining a tribe and spreading the notion of ethnic identity.
- Hans argues that “All East African tribes have fought their way to the places where they are now: Nilotes from the Sudan, Bantu from the Congo, Hamites from Egypt.”
The first thing to note is Hans’s ongoing use of the term ‘Hamites’ to define a cultural/linguistic category of African people. This term originally developed out of the belief that everything of any value in Africa had to be imported (The ‘Hamitic Hypothesis’). “The incoming Hamites were pastoral ‘Europeans’ – arriving wave after wave – better armed as well as quicker witted than their dark agricultural Negroes.” (C.G. Seligman, Races of Africa). However, the theory was abandoned in the mid-1960s and no recent anthropological or ethnographic literature would use it. By employing the term Hans is, unfortunately, showing just how out of date his information and thinking is. Further, and more worryingly, is the implication that Hans adheres to the ‘Hamitic Hypothesis’ and its conations of European racial superiority.
As for the militant migrations of discrete ‘tribal’ communities, I can but quote Daniel Stiles from my original paper:
…there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ tribe. Except for the most recent immigrants, it is safe to say that all tribes in Kenya contain a mixture of Bantu, Kalenjin, Eastern Nilotic and Eastern Cushitic elements, with a small amount of Southern Cushitic and Hadzan thrown in. Linguistics and comparative ethnography bear this out, as historical evidence of language and cultural borrowings from one group to another is unmistakable. This process is still going on today, and it is a normal one that happens everywhere in the world. (The Past and Present of Hunter-Gatherers in Kenya)
The old idea, that Hans advances, of fixed and clearly defined ethnic entities moving and migrating throughout East Africa is highly pervasive but inherently flawed. East African school children are taught, with the aid of colourful maps and accompanying arrows, that ‘the Maasai arrived from the north, and the Gikuyu from the coast’. However, Kesby (John D. Kesby, The Cultural Regions of East Africa) uncovers this myth for what it is, arguing that ‘neither the Maasai nor the Gikuyu seem to have arrived from anywhere, but rather to have come into being in the areas where they now live’ (Kesby, p. v). He goes on to conclude, ‘much of what is currently taught as history, or prehistory, in East African schools is ethnic myth. Myth may be true or false, and much of this is, I suggest, false’. African communities came to be as they are as a result of their encounter with other peoples. To suggest that the Maasai came from the Sudan is meaningless, the people that began that journey would not be recognisable as today’s Maasai who have borrowed, adapted and rejected cultural and religious features along the way to become who they now are.
- Hans asserts: “’Shared social and religious practices’ between the tribes seems to me a figment of the imagination”
This statement is not born out by the facts. Just limiting ourselves to Kenya we see how Spencer (Nomads in Alliance) has demonstrated, in his study of the Samburu, that members of this community have no problem, in certain situations, ‘crossing over’ and becoming Rendille. Similarly Gunter Schlee (Identities on the Move) has demonstrated the importance of inter-ethnic clan relationships amongst a number of communities in northern Kenya. My own work amongst the Boni has clearly identified religious and cultural borrowing from their Orma, Somali and Swahili neighbours. John Janzen, in his study of Ngoma cults across sub-Saharan Africa (Ngoma: Discourses of Healing in Central and Southern Africa), expunges the myth of intransigent cultural boundaries and Brenner concurs when he writes that ‘“religious” ideas, practices and institutions moved through various regions of the African continent, traversing political and ethnic boundaries….ethnicity was not at issue, and new religious ideas and practices were borrowed and incorporated with apparent ease among different groups’. (“Religious” Discourses in and about Africa). Janzen coins the term ‘Tradition of Renewal’ to suggest that the only thing traditional about African societies is their ongoing ability to change and adjust to new and evolving circumstances, drawing on the wealth of religious and other knowledge that travelled along the paths that crisscrossed Africa long before the arrival of Europeans.
- Hans argues that those who suggest that the colonial authorities imposed new identities in Africa “must have a low esteem of Africans if they think that one can so easily manipulate their minds and attitudes.”
Yet isn’t that what we, as Mill Hill Missionaries, have been doing for the last one hundred years? Isn’t Catholic Christianity a “manipulation of minds and attitudes”? An African writer whom I esteem, V.Y Mudimbe, writes that “African conversion, rather than being a positive outcome of a dialogue - unthinkable per se - came to be the sole position the African could take in order to survive as a human being.” (V.Y.Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa p.48). Writers such as Jon Kirby (“Cultural Change and Religious Conversion in West Africa” in Thomas Blakely, Walter van Beek and Denis Thomson Religion in Africa: Experience and Expression p. 56-71) would posit that Christianity merely adds to the existing body of religious knowledge that people hold. If Hans is consistent and argues that African communities cannot have their minds and attitudes easily manipulated then this has consequences for his assessment of the conversion process in western Kenya. How ‘Christian/Catholic’ are the communities that fill his church on Sundays?
Finally, I was sorry that Hans chose, in his closing paragraph, to reduce the discourse to a personal rebuke for my having the audacity to challenge his benign perception of the colonial and missionary narrative. I do not subscribe to what Hans, rather patronisingly, identifies as “one of the most pernicious features of East African cultures [which] is the scape goat (sic) mechanism: blame others as much as you can, never yourself.” At no point was I seeking to facilitate the operation of this “scapegoat mechanism” but, at the same time, British occupation was far from being an unmitigated success. From the massacre of Kisii warriors around Nyabururu in 1916 (I might have got the date of wrong) until independence in 1963, colonialism was marked by racism and increasing brutality. Caroline Elkins (Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya) paints a very different picture to the rosy glow that appears to infuse Hans’s recollection of that time. Elkins also details, with reference to missionary sources, the involvement of church personnel in the concentration camps of Kenya suggesting that “The Catholics seemed to epitomise Christian hypocrisy” (page 174). Rather than I doing “Kenya a real disservice”, as Hans would have it, I am seeking to establish a version of events that makes sense of the evidence and does not avoid inconvenient truths or perpetuate a ‘feel good’ version of history. Far be it from me to suggest that Kenyans “have been victims of the wickedness of the British” - I'm sure that documented instances of European administrators forcing bottles full of pepper into the vaginas of interned African women (Elkins p. 258) was consensual and done just for a laugh. But perhaps I am letting the (White) side down by not kowtowing to a colonial version of Africa, an Africa rent by inter-ethnic clashes, calling out to the young men on the playing fields of Eton to assume the “White Man’s Burden” and bring civilisation and ‘pacification’ (Hans’s term) to the unruly natives of the Empire.
Mark Faulkner
mf34@soas.ac.uk
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