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| Title: | Clash of cults: royal and territorial cults in central Africa |
| Author: | Flynn, Edwin |
| Year: | 2002 |
| Periodical: | Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere: Schriftenreihe des Kölner Instituts für Afrikanistik |
| Issue: | 69 |
| Pages: | 63-101 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic terms: | Tanzania Southern Africa |
| Subjects: | African religions cults |
| Abstract: | Looking back over the past fifty years, one can see a great surge in academic interest claiming to show how relevant religion is to the whole of Africa. All publications have made use of the 'ethnographic present' so when a writer said, 'people in Africa honour their ancestors', it seemed to imply that this practice existed in the past in just the same form as it does today. Thus the impression was given that these religions where somehow timeless and had no subject to the laws of change. However, in 1972 Terence Ranger and Isaria Kimambo threw down the gauntlet challenging scholars to ask 'historical questions about religious ideas and institutions' in order to open the doors to the past of African religion. A major challenge is to dicover trustworthy ways of tracing religious beliefs and practices back from the present to the distant past. The initial task is to narrow down the focus by concentrating on a particular cult and distinguishing it clearly from all others. The next step is to do a careful study to determine how that cult is integrated into each society in which it is found. A careful analysis would then identify similarities that indicate the more ancient elements, and isolate them from resemblances caused by local diffusion or differences that point to more recent changes. This paper focuses directly on encounters at the micro-level of specific cults, such as the clash between chief-led and territorial cults. It begins with a brief look at the concept of encounter at the level of cultures. It then draws on linguistic studies in order to identify a distinct branch of the Eastern Bantu family of languages, before applying this concept to examples of confrontation between chief-led (royal) and territorial cults. The paper then analyses three kinds of encounters and investigates the possibility of claiming that they belong to a single set. The encounters that are examined are those between: chief-led cults and the miao shrine cults (north-east Zambia and south-west Tanzania), chief-led cults and the cults of major shrine complexes (Malawi and Zimbabwe), the Botatwe and the cults of the previous inhabitants (southern Zambia). Bibliogr., notes, ref. |
