>> Edward Miner: On behalf
of the library's
African and Middle
Eastern Division,
I welcome you to
another in our series of
research presentations from our
Lilly Scholars-in-Residence.
I am Dr. Edward Miner,
Head of the African section.
For more than 60 years,
the African section has served
as the focal point for Africa
based research collections
and services at the library.
Within the division, it is one
of three, including the Hebraic
and Near East sections,
that provide access to research
collections of unmatched depth
and breadth, documenting the
literatures, cultures and
histories of regions extending
from the southern tip of Africa
to the Mediterranean coast
across the Middle East to
Central Asia and down to the
Indian Ocean Islands.
The library holds rich
collections in major African
languages such as Hausa,
Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya,
Somali, Kiswahili, Malagasy and
Zulu, as well as hundreds of
lesser known languages.
Today we are pleased to welcome
our Lilly Scholar-in-Residence,
Professor Robert M. Baum, Chair
of the Department of African and
African American Studies
at Dartmouth College.
His first book,
"Shrines of the Slave Trade:
Diola Religion and Society
in Precolonial Senegambia"
won the American
Academy of Religion Award
for first best book in the
history of religions in 2000.
He has written numerous
articles on the history of
Jola religion, field research,
religious constructions of
gender indigenous religions,
and in 2014 completed a book on
the history of Jola women's
prophetic movements entitled
"West Africa's Women of God:
Alinesitou and the
Diola Prophetic Tradition."
He has most recently written
a continent wide history on
African religions, beginning
with the earliest humans and
ending in the seventh century.
Professor Baum will now present
to us his residency research
project entitled
"Women, Rain and Religion, Jola
Prophets in post-War Senegal."
>> Robert M. Baum: Thank
you very much, Dr. Miner.
It's a pleasure to be here.
And I want to start by thanking
the Library of Congress and
the Lilly Foundation,
as well as Dr. Llaneza Kitchener
and you, Dr. Edward Miner,
for providing a wonderful
facility for me to
work for aiding me in all sorts
of search vehicles and finding
documents that I thought
I would have to travel
all over the world to find.
So it was a pleasure to spend
several weeks in residence
at the Library of Congress.
I'm going to be talking about
African women's prophetic
movements from the Second
World War to the present.
And I should point out
at the beginning that
this is not part of the image
of African religions.
The zairois philosopher
Valentin Mudimbe has pointed out
that the dominant image of
Africa has been as a place
without history and
without religion.
And he argues that this
was a major factor in the
justification of the Atlantic
slave trade that people without
history and people without
religion could be enslaved
following an Aristotelian
notion that African
religions-- that people
without history and religion
were brutish and could
be subject to enslavement.
I'm going to be talking about--
Hence the history of people who
were seen as without history and
without religions.
When people, Europeans realized
that Africans had rich religious
traditions, they tended to
portray them as non-theistic.
That is as not focused on gods
or spirits, but insisted that
Africans worshiped objects, or
that they had this pantheistic
notion that there were souls in
everything objects and people
and animals and things of that
sort without recognizing that
African religions are actually
theistic, they are monocentric.
That is, every religion in
Africa that I have encountered
has a supreme being who begins
the process of creation.
Though there are often lesser
spirits who are created by the
supreme being to aid
with specific types of issues.
So today I'm going to be
talking about prophets.
There have been over 75
different prophets claiming
direct revelation from the
Supreme being known as Amittai.
Who were commanded to teach and
share their revelations with
their community among
the Jola of Senegambia.
By prophet--
I'm translating a Jola
term an epithet that
[Speaks in foreign language]
which literally means
Amitai sent him or her.
So when you hear the word
the name of Aline Sitoe
often people will add
Aline Sitoe Amitai [Inaudible]
That is Aline Sitoe
whom Amitai has sent.
So this is a term that
corresponds to the English word
prophet or messenger of God.
It corresponds to the Arabic
term Rasulullah as someone who
is sent by the supreme being.
In Jola society before
the colonial conquest
in the 19th century,
there were at least 15 prophets,
all of whom were men.
And these I've recovered
oral traditions about,
there are no written documents
about them at all.
The European observers were
unaware of these prophetic
movements and so there
were 15 men involved in
teaching about amittai and
performing rituals that had
a lot to do with rain and also
with defense during the era of
the Atlantic slave trade.
Since the colonial conquest in
the late 19th century, there
have been at least
another 60 prophets.
Most of them are women.
And so one of the things that
I've had to explain in my work
is why the transformation and
part of that has to do with
the erosion of confidence in
Jola institutions as a result of
conquest, and particularly of
male authority associated with
warriors and political
leadership that was conquered by
the French and the
Portuguese and the British
in southern Senegal and Gambia.
Another part of that had to
do with the male dominant--
The male leadership roles
in the incoming religions
associated with Christianity,
particularly in the Catholic
tradition and with Islam, where
public leadership was largely
focused on males.
So this created a space for
women to emerge as prophetic
leaders. And I'm going to be
talking about three of those
prophets today, all of whom
were active during the period of
the Second World War
or since that time.
The Jola number
about 650,000 people.
They are considered to be
the best wet rice farmers
in all of West Africa.
When the rains come,
they produce a surplus.
During the Sahelian drought of
the late 60s and early 70s,
there were people who had so
much rice in their granary that
they never ran out of rice
despite seven years of drought.
The Jola also are deeply
suspicious of centralized
authority. Anthropologists
usually classify them as
acephalous societies or
stateless societies in which
people who hoard wealth and
people who seek excessive power
are often accused
of being witches.
So there's a deep suspicion
of central authority, of
specialized politicians
and of any type of
social stratification. These
prophets emerge initially
in the pre-colonial period, but
I'm going to be talking about
them in the late colonial
and post-colonial period.
The first of these profits that
I'm going to talk about is also
the most famous. Her name
is Aline Sitoe Diatta.
She was born around 1921.
She worked as a maid in
the French capital of
French West Africa of Dakar.
And while working there as a
maid in 1940 or '41,
she began to have
visionary experiences.
She had her first vision.
Was working in the market.
The very busy market in
Dakar called Sundargarh Market.
She heard a voice that she
later came to identify with the
Supreme being who commanded
her to go down to the ocean,
a short couple of hundred yards,
walk from the market
and to dig in the
sand and water came up
and filled the hole
that she had dug.
And she heard Amitai say,
This is why I've summoned you.
You've been summoned to
bring rain to a people who are
being crushed by drought.
So it was during a period when
there was so little rain that
the rice withered away
in the rice paddies and
people were desperate for rain.
It was also a time shortly
after the colonial conquest and
the military defeat
of France in 1940.
So France was occupied by the
Germans, the northern part,
the government of Senegal
and French West Africa was
controlled by German
sympathizers associated with the
Vichy administration of that
part of France that was allowed
to nominally retain
its independence.
During that time, Africans lost
all civil liberty protections
within the colonial system of
French West Africa, and there
had been some protections of
civil liberties before that.
It was a very harsh time.
There was military
conscription. There was forced
requisitions of rice at a time
of drought and poor harvests.
There was forced requisitions
of cattle to feed the French
garrisons in the cities and
also to feed the urban
populations in Dakar
and Saint Louis.
It was a period of
unprecedented efforts by the
French to convert
Jola to Christianity.
There was a New Apostolic
diocese created in the Jola
areas of southern Senegal.
There were attempts by Muslims
also to try to convert the Jola.
And so there was a sense of
crisis and a sense of erosion of
the unity of the community
you could no longer count on
universal participation in
community rituals to ask the
supreme being for rain.
And this was particularly
distressing to the community.
It was in this context that
Eileen Sitwell had her first
really an auditory experience.
She didn't see any tie.
She didn't see God.
She heard its voice and she
goes down to the sea and
learns of her mission.
Initially, she's
resistant to this.
The idea of becoming a prophet
of God is an intimidating
prospect. And she resisted.
And finally, Amittai was said
to have told her that if she did
not return to her home village
and begin to teach that
she would die. So she goes home.
Initially, people in her
community of a township called
Chabrusa on the border with
Guinea-Bissau thought she was
crazy. She was running around
under the influence of these
auditory experiences and
revelations, and they weren't
sure what to make of her.
But eventually
she began to teach.
And by late in 1941,
she was teaching about
a ritual called Casilla.
And Casilla involved the
sacrifice of black bulls.
The blackness of the bulls was
symbolic of the dark rain clouds
that would end the drought.
And this ritual involved
six days and six nights of
shared participation in ritual
in which people slept outside
in the public square.
They ate all their
meals in common.
They feasted on
the sacrificed cattle.
They feasted on sacrificed
pigs and chickens.
All meals were eaten in common.
There were no distinctions
of rank or class.
And the priesthood of this
shrine, in contrast to many of
the other Jewish shrines, was
open to men and women,
young and old, rich and
poor, regardless of status.
Priests were chosen
by divination.
A chicken had its
throat cut in front
of whom it died was the new
priest, and that was seen as
Amitai choosing its priest
rather than a selection based on
social status, economic
status, or gender.
So during the six days and six
nights, there was an emphasis on
community. Songs were sung
about the ancestors,
and there was a celebration
of the unity of the community.
Christians and Muslims were
welcome as long as they
participated
in the shrine.
Aline Sitoe had no problem
with people being
Christian or Muslim as long as
they recognized that they were
also Jola and had obligations
to the community as Jola.
Part of a civil religion.
An idea that you had certain
obligations regardless of your
formal religious identity.
You had obligations to your
community, and that obligation
included rituals imploring
the supreme being for rain.
But she also taught
about other issues.
And it's probably these issues
that got her in trouble with the
French. She was very critical
of French agricultural policies,
which she saw as fostering
economic dependence on a
colonial system that did not
work to the jola's advantage and
would erode their autonomy
within the French colonial
state. She was particularly
concerned about the
French insistence on
Jola growing peanuts.
Peanuts were a cash crop.
They grew in upland areas.
This is a very low lying area.
Theslight rises or
plateau areas were suitable for
growing of peanuts.
The problem was, was twofold.
One is that historically, Jola
farmed rice as a family unit.
Men did the heavy plowing.
Men maintained the dykes and
men helped out with work that
was normally
associated with women.
Women planted the seed
harvested, transplanted the rice
from rice nurseries into
the deep water paddies.
They weeded the rice
paddies and they harvested and
men were available to help out,
particularly with the harvest,
which had to be done
as quickly as possible.
With the introduction of
peanuts, however, men abandoned
the rice farming
entirely to women.
Because they thought the money
that peanut crops could provide.
And so you have a disruption,
particularly in the
predominantly Muslim
areas of the northern cosmos
and northern part
of the Jola domains.
You had a...
A transfer in which men stopped
farming rice, which doubled the
women's work and also led to
a decline in rice production.
A lack there was suddenly a
lack of labor focused on rice
production. That worked okay as
long as the French could import
rice from Vietnam
and Cambodia.
French colonies
in Southeast Asia.
But once World War II began,
that was disrupted.
The Japanese conquered
French Indochina.
The British controlled many of
the trade routes in the
Indian Ocean and the South
Atlantic, and suddenly there was
no rice to be purchased.
And the French turned to the
Jola to produce the rice that
was necessary to feed
the colony of Senegal.
Before this disruption, the
French made profits from both
the peanut crop and the
Indo-Chinese rice crop.
And that whole system of
extraction of economic
surplus was disrupted
by the Second World War.
Eileen Sitwell taught that the
Jola had a covenant.
They had an obligation to grow
rice and that under no
circumstances should
they plant peanuts.
The second problem with
planting peanuts is you had to
cut down the forest areas to
plant the peanuts, and that
meant that you had to cut down
the palm trees that provided
palm oil an important nutrient
in the Jola diet that provided
palm wine an essential beverage
for Jola ritual that provided
building materials in terms of
wood that provided areas of
tall grass that could be used
to thatch roofs that provided
habitat for game animals that
could be hunted and provide us
an important source of protein
for the Jola diet that provided
herbal medicines that could be
used to combat disease.
All of these factors were
disrupted by the spread of
peanuts. So Aline Sitoe taught
that under no
circumstances should
they grow peanuts. And the
French were determined that the
Jola grow peanuts as the cash
crop from which they could
extract an economic benefit.
So that put the French and
Jola on a collision course.
The second area where
she taught, which was also
a critique of French
agricultural policies, was that
she argued that it was okay
to plant rice that was
introduced by the French.
So that was actually Asian rice,
oryza sativa, but was identified
as European rice.
It had a higher yield, but it
was subject to-- it was more
susceptible to drought, more
susceptible to animal pests and
more susceptible to
local plant diseases.
Then a form of rice called
Oryza Glaberrima, which was
first domesticated in the
Casamance Gambia and
Niger River valleys
and had been grown
in the area for nearly
2000 years.
So she argued that it was okay
to grow the new rice, but
it couldn't be used
in ritual contexts.
You had to grow the rice.
You had to use the rice that
was spiritually situated in
relationship to the land
and to the supreme being
for ritual purposes. French
were not happy about this
because the Oryza Glaberrima
had a lower yield.
It was more resistant to
drought, more resistant to
animal pests and more
resistant to disease.
But at the same time
it offered lower yields.
James Scott has demonstrated
in a very important book
"The Moral Economy
of the Peasantry"
that peasant producers are
often willing to forego maximum
profits, maximum yields of
crops in order to ensure
the maximum possibility of
survival against drought
or pandemics or
animal infestations.
And I think she was
working in that area.
The French also tried to block
upland rice or mountain rice
that was also more drought
resistant and grew in
the same areas that the French
had hoped that the Jola
would plant peanuts.
So she was on a collision
course with the French
agricultural policies.
She, in a sense, was offering a
critique of the Green Revolution
before there was
a green revolution.
She was concerned
about seed diversity.
She was concerned about
the preservation of locally
manufactured fertilizer.
She was concerned about
local farmers preserving their
autonomy and their ability to
provide for their own needs
without dependence on
a world economic system.
She was arrested by the French,
who felt quite vulnerable during
the Second World War.
The French in Senegal had
very poor contact
with the motherland in France,
occupied by Germany, with the
Atlantic coast patrolled
by British and later
American navies, they felt--
They were worried
that Aline Sitoe would lead
a revolution against
their authority.
And so they arrested
her in January of 1943
after record harvest, after
abundant harvest, because people
were seen as following her
rituals that ensured adequate
rainfall for a
bountiful harvest.
She was arrested
in January of 1943.
She was tried under the local
or native law code called
The Indigena for the heinous
crimes of obstructing colonial
administrative policies
and causing humiliation
to the colonial administration.
She was exiled
to Timbuktu.
Young woman.
22 years old,
was exiled from a
coastal forested area
along the Atlantic coast of
southern Senegal to the
borderlands of the
desert in northern Mali,
in Timbuktu.
She was the only woman
in a detention camp filled with
Islamic leaders who had resisted
French colonialism in Senegal
and present day Mali and Niger.
She had trouble adjusting to
the diet, which was quite
different than what
she was used to.
And she died of scurvy within
a year after her arrival
in this camp. That was
kept secret until 1983.
When I interviewed her husband
in 1978, he had no idea what had
happened to his wife.
He had no idea whether he was
a widow or still married to
a woman who had simply not
returned home from exile.
Aline Sitoe was arrested,
exiled, and eventually died,
immediately in her wake,
two other women prophets
came forward, one who had
been active during World War I
and during the
influenza pandemic,
and she began to teach in 1944.
And another woman named Kawita
Jatta, who carried the a similar
message to predominantly
Muslim Jola areas among the
Northern Jola on the north
shore of the Casamance River.
Aline Sitoe created a tradition
of prophetic revelation.
She wasn't the first woman
prophet, nor was she the first
Jola prophet in general,
but after her arrest,
and her initially disappearance,
but we now know she died.
After that,
people referred to themselves as
part of the tradition
of Aline Sitoe.
In the late 1960s,
a young man created a play.
He wrote a play about
Aline Sitoe in her life and the
tragic arrest of Aline Sitoe
and the way that this rain
ritual was disrupted
by the French.
And a young woman played
the part of Aline Sitoe.
The French financed the play
initially, but when they saw how
it was anti-French, they
withdrew the funds and the
theatre piece was closed down.
This woman named Bertha Jutta
had played Aline Sitoe in
the 1960s, in the early 1980s,
as a married woman, a mother
married to a catechist,
a Roman Catholic catechist,
she began to have
visions that of Amittai.
And she had one vision where
her soul left her body and
traveled to the home
village of Aline Sitoe,
to the village of Kabrousse,
where Aline Sitoe's
husband and family
told her that she was supposed
to carry on the tradition of
Aline Sitoe Diatta, and she
took the name Aline Sitoe
and became known as
Bert Aline Sitoe Diatta.
When I interviewed her in
the early 1990s, she was still
teaching, but she did not have
a very substantial following.
She was trying to revive the
Casilla ritual that had been so
important to Aline Sitoe.
She was overshadowed by
another woman named Toje Diatta
who began to have visions
in the 1980s as well.
Toji, who I knew before she
became a prophet
had a problem that was
diagnosed as epilepsy
since she was a little girl.
During those seizures, she
would hear voices that were
associated with
the supreme being.
Her mother, however, made her
promise not to teach, not to
claim to be a prophet, because
these some of the claimants
who were said to
be prophets were
described as crazy rather
than as prophetic.
And the boundaries between
the two are not always
starkly clear. She
married and had children.
And her husband was deeply
disturbed by these epileptic
seizures. And he was a
high school professor.
Taught at the Catholic high
school in the state capital of
Ziguinchor. Decided to bring
his wife initially to medical
missionaries and
then to a hospital,
a medical hospital in
Ziguinchor with no results.
No effective results.
His wife continued
to have seizures.
Then he took her to a mental
hospital in a ziguinchor suburb
called Kenya that had pioneered
an effort at African forms of
psychotherapy, where the
entire family moved to
this village, lived in a village
where there was counseling, but
counseling not only for the
individual but for their
immediate family.
And so there was an attempt to
incorporate African community
ideas into the
therapeutic treatments.
That, too, did not work.
So her Roman Catholic husband
took her to an Islamic healer.
What's called a Marabu?
Who divine that the reason she
was having these seizures was
that she was neglecting
her obligations in her village.
So the two of them went home
and by then her mother had died.
She began to teach
in the name of Aline Sitoe.
And in the name of Amittai.
And she taught
a revival of kasilof of
Aline Sitoe Kossila ritual.
But she also insisted that
nothing of European manufacture
could be brought to the ritual
that even to talk with her, one
could not wear European
clothes, one could not wear
shoes or sandals
that during the ritual you had
to wear indigenous forms of
clothing. Or at least those
forms of clothing associated
with African cultures as
opposed to European ones.
You could not bring European
manufactured utensils or bowls
or even knives.
Everything had to be
of local production.
She also recognizing
that the drought was quite
persistent in the 1970s and 80s
began to talk about reviving old
root crops that the Jola no
longer farmed but had been an
important sources of nutrition.
For decades before
the 20th century.
In some cases, people had to go
south into Guinea-Bissau to find
seeds that they could use
to plant these crops.
And so she was reviving a
more diversified agricultural
production that would be useful
in a period of diminished
rainfall. She also was involved
in healing rituals, particularly
associated with the
women's fertility shrine.
She was also involved in the
detection of witches, of people
whose souls travel in the night
and attack other people's souls.
Her influence began to ebb
because the rains didn't
come back.
So Tojo eventually began to
limit her work primarily to
healing of disease and the
detection of witches.
She is still active
as a prophet today.
She's relaxed some of her...
Some of her prohibitions on
Western technology that was
facilitated by a year that she
spent in the United States
taking care of her daughter,
who was a new mother.
She helped her daughter with
a newborn child and lived
for a year in Silver Spring,
Maryland, about ten miles away
from the Library of Congress.
So when I last saw her, she was
talking on a cell phone.
She was still teaching about
healing, still teaching about
the disruptive and selfish and
egocentric activities of
witches, but less so
about rain rituals.
But she continues
to be active today.
So we're looking at a
tradition that's ongoing.
There are a dozen prophets
alive today actively teaching
who have followers.
These prophetic leaders, I
think, are part of the reason
why the Jola constitute the
largest single group of
traditionalists in religion
within the Senegambia region.
Senegal itself is
about 85 to 90% Muslim.
It has a significant and
influential Christian minority,
mostly Roman Catholic, but the
Jola include those groups but
also include a vital
traditional religion,
particularly among
the Southern Jola.
And I think this has a lot to
do with these prophets who claim
direct revelation from the
supreme being and who introduced
innovations within their
tradition that enable them to
deal with the challenges of
initially of colonial rule and
now of the problems of
post-colonial Senegal and the
problems of being integrated
into a world economic system.
I benefited greatly from my work
at the Library of Congress
because I was able to
rely on their extensive
collections of
recent sources in
French and Portuguese.
I was able to access
British colonial archives
from the library itself.
And it's it's an extraordinary
experience to have the African
bibliographer of the Library of
Congress showing you how to find
works that are directly
relevant to your research.
Most of what I found was that
studies of the context of these
prophetic movements less about
the prophets themselves, because
for the most part, the authors
of written texts were unaware of
these activities.
The the exceptions are those
prophets who were arrested by
the French or by the Senegalese
government, and those left a
written trail of documents.
I would recommend in order to
expand and augment the
collection of the Library of
Congress focused on
African religions is to seek...
to seek out researchers
who conducted oral histories,
who've have extensive
field notes to deposit
copies of these works at the
Library of Congress so that they
would be widely accessible.
The other thing is that I would
urge people to seek out more of
the ephemera of pamphlets and
documents and objects that would
be useful for such studies.
But this is an extraordinary
resource, the Library of
Congress. And I was privileged
to spend several weeks there
doing research.
I thank you. And we'll take any
questions you might have.
>> Edward Miner: Professor
Baum, thank you so much
for that most
insightful presentation.
It seems like there
are historical and
cultural traditions and
discourses that inform and
influence contemporary African
governmental responses to
climate change and the
narrowing of biodiversity
views upon GMO crops.
And really all of
these kinds of solutions
to perceive solutions to
poverty that have emanated
primarily from the Western
based economic systems.
I wonder if you see a way
in which African societies have
actually taken
opportunistically ideas
and technologies from their
interaction with Western
cultures to actually leapfrog
over Western approaches to
mitigating climate change and
and the negative social effects
of environmental injustice.
>> Robert M. Baum: Okay.
Thank you for that question.
There are a number of areas
where that's taken place.
One is in the area of seed
diversity of maintaining this
full range of Asian rices and
African varieties of rice such
that Jola women who control
what seed is selected have
a working knowledge
of something like 100 different
varieties of rice and a typical
woman farmer would be
working with something like
30 different varieties.
And depending on how the rains
come in and how the climate
is affected,
would be using those
different techniques.
They've insisted, by the way,
in using locally manufactured
fertilizer made from cow manure
and ashes from hearths
and ashes from burning the
fields so that rather than be
dependent on chemical
fertilizers, which also cause
various kinds of pollution.
In terms of technology
leapfrogging, what we're seeing
is solar energy providing
electricity before there's
any kind of power plant.
So we have solar panels
operating heat water pumps
and providing electricity
at schools and local
infirmaries and youth centers
before there's hard
wiring. So you're
moving to solar energy
before you have power plant
generated energies.
That's one example.
That would be
perhaps the primary
example of that leapfrogging.
You're also have, of course,
the diffusion of cell phones
before you have hard
wire phones or landlines
I guess is, as we call them.
So those are examples of
that that are helping to
deal with climate change.
There's also been efforts
toward reforestation,
which is also important.
Those would be the primary
examples I could think of.
>> Edward Miner:
And related to that,
I wonder if like in
Uganda you see
NGO activity
focused specifically
on cultural reclamation
as a kind of holistic program to
bring indigenous knowledge about
biodiversity, about the effects
of climate change, say,
on sacred spaces.
And of course, you know,
maintaining the natural
pharmacy of indigenous
medicine, as well as the
knowledge that is
necessary for the use
of those resources
in healing.
Are you seeing any kind of that
kind of grassroots and or NGO
activity along those lines.
>> Robert M. Baum:
You did in the 1970s,
particularly Dutch researchers
coming in and studying
Jola Agricultural techniques.
Dutch were fascinated by the
Jola because like the Dutch
Jola build Dykes to keep salt
water out of the fields.
There were studies of Jola
pharmacology in the 70s.
Since the early 80s,
however, NGOs have not been
very active in this area because
of the Casamance
secessionist movement.
The Casamance predominantly
Jola movement, but Casamance
wide has sought the
independence of that region
since about 1983.
It's the longest running
armed conflict in Africa.
And it's a very low level
of violence, but it's kept many
NGOs from operating in the area.
There have been studies
of local healing techniques,
local pharmacology.
But the NGOs have not been
very active in that.
You do have northern Senegalese
coming to the south seeking
healing techniques that
are known to the Jola.
Even though the
northerners are mostly Muslim
and seeking traditional
healers in those contexts.
>> Edward Miner:
And I'd like to turn now to a
methodological question.
You've said much about the
value of increasing access to
basic materials
like field notes.
The use of field
notes in research
is an interesting topic.
The survival of this data
of course is precarious because
they're in private hands and
they might be deposited with
institutions that may or may
not, you know, do the basic
work of making them discoverable
and available.
One of the premier institutions
of that is a repository for
indigenous knowledge, for
example, is the archives of
traditional music at
Indiana University.
It has thousands of recordings
made by PhD students in African
studies across Africa
documenting oral histories and
interviews with traditional
healers, musicians, priests
and so forth.
As someone who's taught
field methods courses or
has researched about,
the use of field notes
as an additional source of data,
can you talk a little bit about
the challenges of using that
kind of data in constructing
new analyses?
>> Robert M. Baum: Well, I
work in what are called
free flowing oral
traditions, so.
Something like the Sunjata
Epic, which is recorded in many
different versions at Indiana.
Charles Byrd was a folklorist
who made many recordings of
these performances.
Those are fixed traditions,
very public traditions, very
performative traditions.
The oral traditions that I've
gathered tend to come out of
long, free
flowing conversations.
And so I've tended not
to actually use tapes.
Some of the materials
are restricted.
Before I made a deposit of
my field notes, I would have to
edit them because there are
certain knowledge in there
that is for my eyes only.
In that there are details,
particularly of details of
ritual, that people would be
uncomfortable becoming part of
the public domain.
The elders want me to know
more than what I'm willing to
write about, because I've been
going to the same community
since 1974.
So I'm seen as part of the
community now, and there are
things that I can know about
that can't be shared generally.
So I would have to go through
and edit those, particularly
about male initiation.
That's one of the more
closely guarded areas.
The other part is that
you're dealing often with
disparate. You're not getting
one set narrative.
You're getting little pieces
here, little pieces there.
Sometimes the information is
contradictory and you have to
use a kind of critical source
analysis to find out
what is most accurate.
Who has a vested interest in
advancing a particular
interpretation of the history?
Who is relating a narrative hat
he or she is not invested in?
Often it tends to be the
most reliable sources.
If you're not advancing your
family's claims to leadership
roles, you can rely on that
much more heavily perhaps than
one that's more
obviously self-serving.
So there's a critical analysis
that has to go on, and that's
true of fixed oral
traditions as well.
So the field notes would
provide a challenge to people
who didn't actually create them.
But they are sources that--
Unfortunately, because elders
are passing away, there's a
saying that when an elder dies,
it's like a library is lost.
And when an elder dies, it's
those field notes that may be
the only sources that we can
use to reconstruct, however
partially their knowledge.
And local people are eager to
have access to this, too.
And so in my case, I'm hoping
to have repositories in Senegal
as well as in the U.S.
>> Edward Miner: So your
most recent comments here
draw my attention
to an aspect of
contemporary African lived
experience, which I think
is relatively misunderstood.
And that is that...
This idea that when
sub-Saharan Africans in the
21st century identify
as publicly as
Christians or Muslims,
that somehow they
have completely--
they no longer live in the world
in which taking account
and having responsibility for
taking guidance from
ancestors no longer exists,
as if it is no longer a
part of the African world.
My personal experience tells
me that really this
entire side of indigenous
African life is alive and well
in the lives of Africans,
of all paths, including
urban, rural, you know,
Western educated, illiterate.
And that it's a fundamental
experience and fact
of simply growing up
in on African soil.
What are your perspectives on
how these worlds fit into
the lives of 21st century
Jola people?
Maybe who are exposed
to a lot of French
culture, have professional
identities and so forth.
>> Robert M. Baum:
Okay. Well, thank you.
There's a number
of-- The idea that
when someone converts to
Christianity or Islam,
they cease to be
who they were before
I think is extreme rarity
in the history of religion.
Christians have a model of
conversion that comes from a man
named Saul riding his donkey
toward Damascus and being
knocked off his donkey by a
bolt of lightning and moving
from being a persecutor
of the Christian
movement to one of its most
effective apostles.
And changing his name
from Saul to Paul.
That's the model of conversion
that many Christians have.
But that's a relatively
rare phenomenon.
It's difficult to understand,
historically.
In most cases,
conversion involves
not so much that dramatic.
Turning around 180 degrees
and more of an opening to a
new source of
religious teachings.
Even in the case of Paul, we
can still find Jewish ideas
influencing his Christianity.
He doesn't cease to be
who he was in the past.
He was a highly hellenized Jew.
In the case of Jola
Christians or Jolan Muslims,
they're people who convert
are recognizing a new source of
authority of religious teachings
and authority. So they're
opening up to an additional
source rather than
necessarily a replacement.
And the new teachings are
assimilated and incorporated
through categories
of experience that are
pre-existing.
That is not seen as a problem.
In some cases that Jola
influence actually enriches
their new religious tradition.
And let me give you
an example of that.
There was an elder who I
interviewed who was one of the
early Christian converts.
His brother was
a Catholic priest.
All his children were married
in the Catholic Church.
He himself did not go to any
traditional rituals, as far as
I know. And we were talking one
day and I asked him about
what happens when you die.
He said, Well, you go to
heaven or you go to hell.
And I said, Well, do you stay
there knowing that Jola would
believe in reincarnation?
He said, Well, we learned in
catechism that you stay there
forever. But, you know,
Catholic priests,
they're white men.
They can't see the spirits
of the dead coming back.
And we believe that God gives
everyone a second chance.
God cannot hate its creation so
much as to condemn anyone
to eternal damnation.
God gives everyone
another chance.
Now, that's not your standard
interpretation of Christian
ideas, of judgment after death,
but I would argue that it's
actually closer to the
teachings of the founder of
Christianity Jesus than some of
the interpretations that have
become orthodoxy in
many of the churches.
The idea that God loves humans
so much that God never condemns
them to eternal damnation but
gives them another chance, seems
to fit with the teachings of
"Judge not, and ye
shall not be judged."
There is a tendency to
assume that African religious
influences mean that they're
less Christian or less Muslim.
I don't think that's the case.
I think it's a much more an
enriching of the religious
tradition, and it ignores the
fact that Europeans introduced
a lot of European culture
into their understandings of
Christianity and Arabs and
Iranians and South Asians and
Southeast Asians and Africans
introduced a lot of African
culture, a lot of their own
cultures into their embracing of
Islam. This kind of
cultural conduct is
normal in most contexts.
So Jola Christians and
Jola Muslims continue to be
influenced by their
indigenous religion.
And there are certain spiritual
needs and spiritual questions
for which Christianity
and Islam are silent.
How do you deal with the
problem of rain, which is seen
as originating with
the supreme being?
How do you procure rain?
What are the ritual
techniques for doing that?
How do you ensure the
likelihood that you'll have
enough rain that you can
have a crop and survive?
These are not central questions
to Christian or Muslim
experience, but they are
central to Jola religious
experience. And so there's a
need for certain community based
rituals and community based
concerns that don't come from
the new religions, but come
from deeply rooted traditions
that are closely tied to the
environment and the economic
production forces
within local communities
and those persist.
>> Edward Miner: It's
interesting that we are looking
at discourses of African
resistance that seek to protect
diversity and an enriching the
cultural landscape in specific,
both the diversity of the
basic resources of feeding
people, seeds, plants, healing
plants, trees, and the
natural materials that are used
for housing and clothing
and tools and all of those
kinds of things together with
a sort of a prizing or a
recognition or
a high value placed on the
enrichment of the spiritual
landscape as opposed
to its impoverishment.
We see that, I think,
across the continent.
Professor Baum,
thank you so much for
this very engaging conversation.
We will bring this presentation
to a close now.
And we thank you for your
speaking to us today.
For any further questions on
this topic and related ones
pertaining to Africa, you can
send a query to Ask a Librarian
at the link you see at the slide
before you, ask.loc.gov.
Thank you very much.