PROPHECY: AFRICAN PROPHETISM

Studies of African religious leaders provide many descriptions of priests, diviners, healers, and witch finders, although relatively few have focused on the role of prophets within African religions. Although historians of religion debate about what constitutes a prophet, it is possible to distinguish two distinct visions: (1) the Greeks envisioned a prophet as a cultic figure who spoke on behalf of a god, and (2) ancient Israelite religion translated the term prophet from the Hebrew word navi, thereby defining prophets as spokespersons only for a supreme being. The role of these prophets was eventually narrowed to those leaders who played an oppositional role within the society in which they taught. It was this image of the prophet that captured the imaginations of scholars of religion.

Given Western commentators' assumptions that the supreme being played a relatively unimportant role in African religions, this category of prophets was rarely applied to African religions. Those who have used the term remain divided about its breadth. Some apply it to more institutionalized and hereditary forms of religious leadership, such as the office of the Mugwe among the Meru of Kenya. They served as religiously sanctioned chiefs, healers, and judges but did not necessarily receive privileged communication either from the supreme being or lesser spirits. Most commentators, however, insist on a more dramatic prophetic calling involving a direct experience of an extraordinary communication. Some apply it only to those who claim revelation from a supreme being (i.e., the Abrahamic model); others apply it to such communication from lesser deities or ancestors (i.e., the Greek model). Herein the usage of the term refers to the broader category and, as has been the practice in most studies of African prophets, includes people claiming revelation from lesser deities.

Mediums, Diviners, and Prophets

There are distinctions among mediums, diviners, and prophets. Spirit mediums are extremely common in African religious experience. These are individuals who receive messages from the supreme being or a lesser spirit, which are then interpreted by a priest to the community of adherents. It is the priest, rather than the medium, who controls community understanding of the revelation. Shona and Igbo religions, for example, have important mediums of the supreme being. In each case, a woman becomes possessed by and speaks in the voice of the supreme being, usually in a language other than her own. A male ritual specialist then interprets the message for those in attendance. Spirit mediums for lesser spirits are common to most African religions. In sharp contrast, however, prophets—whether they enter into an ecstatic state to receive communications—control the interpretation of their message and present it directly to the community. Both prophets and mediums, however, are considered to be speaking with the authority of the spiritual being who revealed the message to them. Prophets are more closely associated with specific periods of social stress and collective instability. Mediums are more closely associated with individual problems and disturbances. Both must be distinguished from diviners, who either examine signs or omens in nature or have developed mechanical techniques for ascertaining the will of deities or other spiritual forces. These religious specialists are extremely common in African religion but are understood as interpreters of signs rather than recipients of messages from spiritual beings.

Finally, distinctions must also be made between prophets within indigenous African religions and prophets within African independent churches, who situate themselves explicitly within a Judeo-Christian tradition of prophetic authority. Figures such as Simon Kimbangu (1889–1951) of Congo, John Maranke and Alice Lenshina (c. 1924–1978) of Zambia, and Isaiah Shembe (c. 1870–1935) of South Africa all claimed prophetic revelations, which led them to create independent African churches. Ecstatic visionaries associated with African Ṣūfī orders, such as Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba (1853–1927) of Senegal and Usuman dan Fodio (1754–1817) of Nigeria, are not considered prophets by African Muslims, but they share many characteristics with African Christian prophetic figures.

East African Traditions

Most of the religious leaders in East Africa identified as prophets tend to be individuals claiming privileged communication from lesser spirits rather than the supreme being. In some Nilotic religious traditions, however, lesser spirits are often seen as emanations of the supreme being. Through his field research on the Nuer people of southern Sudan, the British anthropologist Edward E. Evans-Pritchard was the first to describe an African prophetic tradition. The term guk, which earlier commentators had translated as witch doctors, Evans-Pritchard understood as prophet. He defined guk as a "man possessed by a spirit of some kind.… They are mouthpieces of the Gods" (cited in Anderson and Johnson, 1995, p. 2). He also emphasized their role in the development of oppositional politics in the wake of Mahdist and British intervention in the southern Sudan. These Nuer prophets claimed direct revelation from spirits of the above or sky deities, which Evans-Pritchard described as emanations of the supreme being Kwoth Nhial. These prophets, who also served as healers in the Nuer society, became prominent during the period of political instability and warfare as Egyptian forces penetrated the southern Sudan and began slaving in the area during the mid–nineteenth century.

Many of the most prominent prophets, such as Ngundeng and his son Gwek, claimed to speak with the authority of a spirit known as Deng. Both would spend long periods in the bush, either in ecstatic states or in the quiet repose of meditation. Ngundeng created a massive mound of brush, earth, and ivory tusks, where he conducted sacrifices and disseminated his teachings. He ritually removed evil substances and powers from the community and buried them within the mound. He also led his Nuer followers to a military victory over a neighboring Dinka community of southern Sudan before eventually being challenged by the British. He died in 1906. In the 1920s his son Gwek claimed to be a prophet of Deng, but his career was short-lived. He was killed by the British, who also destroyed the ritual center established by his father. Since the 1950s other Nuer prophets have become involved in the Sudanese civil war. The most famous of these, Wutnyang Gatakek, who claimed his authority from Kwoth Nhial and Deng, became well known in the 1990s while working for an independent southern Sudan and peace between Nuer and their Dinka neighbors.

Similar to the Nuer, the neighboring Dinka had religious leaders inspired by clan and free divinities. They were known as ran nhialic (men of divinity). Like Nuer prophets, Dinka prophets served as peacemakers in disputes between clans but were also capable of cursing malcontents and leading war parties. Other Nilotic groups, like the Meban of Ethiopia, had prophets who claimed they had direct contact with a divinity and allegedly could control life and death through both word and thought. The Kalenjin of Kenya and the Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania also had prophets. Among the Maasai these prophets, known as laibon, were associated with rainmaking and were thought to be either of foreign or celestial origin. During the period of resistance to British and German occupations, the laibon played an important role in the preparation of war medicines to ensure the safety of Maasai warriors and to enhance the possibility of victory. These later roles earned them the enmity of colonial authorities and often led to their arrest and detention. In central Kenya in the early twentieth century missionaries described Embu and Kikuyu men who had dreams or visions of God and who taught what was revealed to them.

By far the most famous of the East African prophets was Kinjikitile of the Matumbi hills area of southeastern Tanganyika. Claiming that he was possessed by a divinatory spirit known as Lilungu and by a more widely worshipped spirit known as Hongo, he organized a movement that led to the unsuccessful Maji-Maji revolt of 1905–1907. His initial contact with Hongo came as a result of a shamanic journey in which he was said to have entered a river and to have emerged a considerable time later, wearing dry clothes and teaching about the imminent return of the ancestors and the departure of the Europeans. Word spread that he was planning to organize resistance and that people needed to wash with a sacred maji, Swahili and Arabic for water, which would protect them against European weapons. The actual revolt, however, began prematurely and was brutally suppressed. Warfare and famine brought on by German destruction of local farms and granaries led to the death of over seventy-five thousand people, including Kinjikitile himself. His multiethnic movement, however, was later hailed as a first war for independence and the beginning of a Tanganyikan national movement.

Xhosa Tradition

In southern Africa a prophetic tradition developed among the Xhosa in the wake of a series of military defeats and land losses in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century that led to the European occupation of the Western Cape Province. By 1816 Nxele began to teach of an African god he called Mdalidephu and of Thixo, the god of Europeans. Having lived on a settler farm for a number of years, Nxele became familiar with basic Christian teachings, which he placed within a Xhosa context. He claimed that Europeans murdered Thixo's son Tayi and were punished by being thrown in the sea. They emerged from the ocean on Xhosa lands, where they threatened Xhosa independence and control of their land. Nxele, who claimed to teach in the name of the "Chief of heaven and earth," proclaimed that they must abandon witchcraft to purify themselves and to rid the land of the whites. Then the ancestors would return from the dead. British officials arrested Nxele and imprisoned him at Robben Island; he died trying to swim to freedom.

In 1850 another Xhosa prophet, Mlanjeni, gathered a substantial following. He was a young man, about eighteen years old, when he began to teach. He fasted frequently, remained for long periods of purification in the wilderness, and kept celibate to preserve his powers from what he regarded as dangerous contact with women. Initially his teachings were not taken seriously, because he began to teach before he had been initiated in a circumcision school. He prayed to the supreme being whom he identified with the sun. Mlanjeni linked the drought of 1850 and the loss of cattle and land to a pervasive evil substance (ubuthi ), which was associated with witchcraft. He became a witch finder and purged the witchcraft from those he found had practiced it. He also ordered people to destroy all charms, amulets, and medicines. Furthermore Mlanjeni provided his followers with a root that he said would protect them against European guns. In 1850 his followers went to war but met a decisive defeat after several years. In 1855 five prophets claimed to be in touch with the Russians, a black nation across the sea that was also battling the British in the Crimean War, and taught the Xhosa that they should expect Russian assistance.

In April 1856 a teenage girl named Nongqawuse heard her name called by a couple of strangers standing in the scrubland near the gardens she was watching over. They told her to tell her uncle Mhlakaza that all the ancestors would rise from the dead and that the Europeans would be expelled if the Xhosa slaughtered all their cattle and destroyed their grain, both of which had been contaminated by witchcraft. Her uncle, a major chief, decided that the strangers included his brother, Nongqawuse's father, who had died many years before. With Mhlakaza's support, what became known as the Xhosa Cattle Killing spread rapidly, leading to the destruction of thousands of cattle and granaries. Yet the prophecy did not come true. Some attributed this to the refusal of some Xhosa to make the sacrifice; others questioned the prophetic teaching itself. In either case, however, the severe famine that resulted from the sacrifice forced many Xhosa to accept British authority, and it effectively ended Xhosa resistance in South Africa.

Diola Tradition

The Diola of Senegal, Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau have a continuous tradition of prophetic revelation from their supreme being, Emitai, dating back to the founding of major Diola communities, described by their oldest oral traditions. The epithet Emitai dabognol (God had sent him or her) was applied to those individuals who claimed a prophetic calling. Most of these prophets focused their attention on the procurement of rain from Emitai. Emitai ehlahl is the word for rain and indicates that rain is something that falls from the supreme being. Oral traditions concerning the precolonial era describe eleven men who claimed that Emitai communicated with them. Many of the traditions concerning the earliest prophets resemble accounts of cultural heroes, who establish communities and introduce a variety of spirit shrines (ukine ) for prayers to Emitai to obtain rain. Since the effective establishment of colonial rule in the late nineteenth century, more than forty people have claimed prophetic revelation, two-thirds of whom are women. Sixteen of these prophets were active in the closing years of the twentieth century. Thus colonization seemed to play a causal role in the intensification and transformation of this prophetic tradition into one in which women played a central role.

Alinesitoué Diatta was the most famous of these prophets. In 1942 she introduced a major new spirit shrine (boekine ) that she claimed Emitai gave her in an auditory revelation. Her rituals stressed the importance of neighborhoodwide celebrations that focused on the sacrifice of a black bull and six days and nights of feasting and celebrations in the public square. She insisted that women and children as well as men could be priests of her shrine and that the ritual knowledge should be shared publicly. She also taught that Emitai looked with disapproval on those who violated a Diola Sabbath for the land by working in the rice paddies, on those who neglected to plant African varieties of rice in favor of Asiatic forms introduced by Europeans, and on those men who abandoned rice farming for the cultivation of peanuts as a cash crop.

As a result of these actions and the neglect of ritual obligations by converts to Christianity and Islam, Emitai withheld life-giving rain. Her ritual of Kasila reaffirmed the community of indigenous Diola religion and stressed the importance of local crops as well as the role of Emitai in protecting Diola communities. In 1943 Vichy French officials arrested her, tried her under a native law code for obstructing colonial initiatives, and exiled her to Tombouctou in French Soudan. She died a year later, but news of her death was kept as a state secret until 1987. Since her death, others have come forward, claiming that Emitai had sent them in the tradition of Alinesitoué Diatta.

See Also

African Religions, overview article; Alinesitoué; East African Religions, overview article; God, article on African Supreme Beings; Politics and Religion, article on Politics and African Religious Traditions.

Bibliography

Anderson, David M., and Douglas H. Johnson, ed. Revealing Prophets: Prophecy in East African History. London, 1995.

Baum, Robert M. Shrines of the Slave Trade: Diola Religion and Society in Precolonial Senegambia. New York, 1999.

Baum, Robert M. "Alinesitoué: A West African Woman Prophet." In Unspoken Worlds: Women's Religious Lives, edited by Nancy A. Falk and Rita M. Gross. Belmont, Calif., 2001.

Bernardi, Bernardo. The Mugwe: A Failing Prophet. London, 1959.

Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. Nuer Religion. New York, 1956; reprint, 1974.

Johnson, Douglas H. Nuer Prophets: A History of Prophecy from the Upper Nile in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Oxford, 1994.

Lienhardt, Godfrey. Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka. Oxford, 1961; reprint, 1978.

Peires, Jeffrey B. The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856–7. Johannesburg, 1989.

Ray, Benjamin. African Religions: Symbol, Ritual, and Community. Upper Saddle River, N.J., 2000.

Robert M. Baum (2005)