Thinking Black Circulations of Africana Religion in Imperial Comparative Religion

Abstract

Often invoked as providing the genealogy of the study of religion, British imperial comparative religion entailed a triple mediation in which imperial theorists derived indigenous data through colonial middlemen. Focusing on the circulation of Africana religions in this enterprise, I examine the work of three South African scholars—the Zulu philologist uNemo (1865–1953), the Tswana historian S. M. Molema (1891–1965), and the Zulu dramatist and student of anthropology H. I. E. Dhlomo (1903–1956)—who intervened in imperial comparative religion by reversing the flow in knowledge production. While uNemo unsettled F. Max Müller’s confidence in quoting colonial experts in South Africa, Molema and Dhlomo turned imperial theorists into informants for advancing their own intellectual projects in the historical and anthropological analysis of African religion in South Africa. For the study of Africana religions, this discussion highlights the dynamics of circulation in producing knowledge about religion and religions.

While studying at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, in February 1951, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote an essay, “The Origin of Religion in the Race.” Submitted for a course in the philosophy of religion, this essay outlined theories of the origin of religion not within any particular race, as the term race was generally used in 1950s America, but within the human race. The essay was a summary of theories of religion that had been developed primarily within British imperial comparative religion between 1870 and 1920. Although King omitted the putative founder of comparative religion, F. Max Müller, he reviewed the classic theories: the animism of E. B. Tylor; the ghost theory of Herbert Spencer; the totemism of William Robertson Smith, Emile Durkheim, and E. Sidney Hartland; and the preanimism or mana of R. R. Marett. Concluding with a discussion of the relation between religion and magic, King contrasted three positions: Andrew Lang’s proposal that religion, which was grounded in spiritual intuition and primitive monotheism, was prior to magic; James Frazer’s evolutionary scheme that placed magic as prior to religion on a trajectory toward science; and R. R. Marett’s contention, which King found “quite valid,” that magic and religion shared a common root in the human sense of the mystery of life. Receiving an A grade for his “thoughtful, critical analysis,” King showed that he could reproduce the standard narrative of theoretical development in imperial comparative religion.¹

One of the theorists discussed by King, E. Sidney Hartland (1848–1927), emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century as the leading imperial theorist of the indigenous African religion of South Africa, summarizing the state of the art in his presidential address to the Folklore Society in 1901, leading the anthropological delegation of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, along with A. C. Haddon, during the visit to South Africa in 1905, and writing the entry “Bantu and South Africa” in James Hastings’s Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics in 1909.² In his collection of essays published in 1914, Ritual and Belief, Hartland reviewed the history of the academic study of religion, from Max Müller to Emile Durkheim, as a prelude to what he proposed as its key, “Learning to ‘Think Black.’” Observing that E. B. Tylor had long ago dismissed the notion that there were tribes without religion, he repeated Tylor’s suspicion that savages were reluctant to reveal their religious beliefs and practices to ‘superior’ white people, disclosing “to the prying and contemptuous foreigner their worship of gods who seem to shrink, like their worshippers, before the white man and his mightier Deity.”³ Quickly, Hartland cited examples from South Africa: Peter Kolb had reported that the Hottentots were secretive; Charles John Andersson had reported that every time he asked the Damara about religion he was told, “Hush!” According to the South African author Dudley Kidd, the African “dislikes to find Europeans investigating his customs, and he usually hides all he can from them and takes a sportive pleasure in baffling and misleading them.”⁴ The solution to this problem of gaining knowledge about African religion in the unequal power relations of intercultural contact, Hartland proposed, was for Europeans to learn how to think black.

Acknowledging his source for this notion of thinking black, Hartland invoked the work of the explorer, journalist, and anthropologist Mary Kingsley (1862–1900), who had used this phrase in describing her research in West Africa. In her efforts to understand fetishism, Kingsley wrote, “It can only be thoroughly done by a white whose mind is not a highly civilized one, and who is able to think black.” Joking, perhaps, that as a woman her mentality might also register as primitive in imperial anthropology, she stressed the risk in thinking black. It required entering a field of relations but also entailed hardship and danger. “I beg you will not think from my claiming this power I am making an idle boast,” she noted, “for I have risked my life for months at a time on this one chance of my being able to know the way people were thinking round me, and of my being able to speak to them in a way that they would recognise as just, true and logical.”⁵ As Hartland translated this risk, thinking black required a “considerable apprenticeship,” whether in the field or in critically reflecting in the study, informed by anthropological theory, on the reports from the field. The relative comfort of the study, Hartland maintained, was “an advantage perhaps not un-accompanied by dangers of its own.”⁶

In thinking black, Hartland advocated sympathetic inquiry, without prejudice, in order to grasp the “protean ideas and half-formulated speculations of savage minds.” In order to think black the researcher would have to empathetically and imaginatively enter the mind of the savage but also to enter the mind of a child, because, as Hartland remarked, the savage “is a child, but a child familiar only with what we deem a topsy-turvy world, though it is the same world from which we ourselves emerged long ago.”⁷ By invoking this cliché, Hartland showed that he did not understand what Mary Kingsley had meant by thinking black. As Kingsley observed in 1897, “My capacity to think in black comes from my not regarding the native form of mind as ‘low,’ or ‘inferior,’ or ‘childlike,’ or anything like that, but as a form of mind of a different sort to white men’s—yet a very good form of mind too, in its way.”⁸ By self-description, Kingsley was an imperialist, “a hardened, unreformed, imperial expansionist,” but she argued against the denigration of blacks and women in imperial administration and scholarship.⁹ As Sidney Hartland reported in his presidential address to the Folklore Society in 1901, one of the great casualties of the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa was the loss of Mary Kingsley, who had gone to serve as a nurse to Boer prisoners and had died of typhoid, aged thirty-eight, in Cape Town, South Africa.¹⁰

Against the background of imperial comparative religion, I want to focus on South African producers of knowledge who were thinking black and writing back to empire. We will meet the Zulu philologist uNemo, the Tswana historian S. M. Molema, and the Zulu scholar of anthropology, ritual, magic, and drama H. I. E. Dhlomo. In different ways, sometimes destabilizing, sometimes enabling, and sometimes refashioning, they engaged in the production of knowledge about religion in imperial comparative religion. In this enterprise, Africana religions registered in two ways: as data for imperial theory and as a basis for reversing the flow of knowledge production in theorizing religion. By circulating through the networks of empire, imperial knowledge about Africana religions extended far, even as far as Crozer Theological Seminary in 1951. Without speculating about how Martin Luther King Jr. dealt with that circulation, I will focus here on three South African theorists who knew the imperial history of the academic study of religion and did something with it.

Philology

In developing his science of religion, Friedrich Max Müller relied upon colonial middlemen, such as the missionary to the Zulu Henry Callaway, to provide data. Callaway’s account of Zulu religion was crucial to Max Müller’s theory of religion.¹¹ Callaway provided primary evidence for theorizing not only about savage religion but also about the origin of religion in the sense of the infinite displayed by the Zulu’s veneration of ancestors leading back to the first ancestor, uNkulunkulu, the “Great, Great One.”¹² Featured in Max Müller’s introduction to The Sacred Books of the East, uNkulunkulu played an important role in the study of religion. In 1897, however, Max Müller reported that he had recently received a disturbing account in a series of newspaper articles from Zululand, “from the hand, as it would seem, of a native,” which contradicted the version of uNkulunkulu given by Callaway. According to this native account, uNkulunkulu was not the primordial ancestor but the supreme being of the Zulu. Accusing Callaway of becoming “bogged in a philological mess,” the author of these articles, “our Zulu informant,” presented a threat to Max Müller’s entire theoretical enterprise, which was built on the “boggy foundations” of evidence from colonial experts such as Henry Callaway. “If we can no longer quote Callaway on Zulus,” Max Müller bemoaned, “whom shall we quote?”¹³

The articles that caused this crisis, “Zig Zag Notes for Zulu Scholars,” were published during 1895 in six issues of the newspaper Inkanyiso yase Natal, which ran articles in both Zulu and English. In a section of the paper called “Native Thoughts,” the author, uNemo, wrote in English about “our Zulu language,” invoking “our Zulu ancestors,” speaking on behalf of “we Zulus,” complaining about the “whiteman,” and celebrating the original, creative, and cognitive capacity of the Zulu language. As uNemo explained, “Each and every one of the noun-prefixes in Zulu had originally a certain ‘idea,’ or quality of thought, inherent in it.”¹⁴ Arguing for the originality of Zulu tradition, uNemo insisted that biblical narratives—Adam and Eve, the Tree of Life, and Noah’s Flood, which was prefigured by the Zulu uhlanga, the bed of reeds—were stories already familiar to the Zulu. Accordingly, he argued, “we might by a stretch succeed in proving that the ancient Hebrews plagiarized all they had from our own Kaffir ancestors.”¹⁵ With respect to uNkulunkulu, uNemo was “inclined to differ toto coelo from Dr. Callaway” because this term was “the exact Native counterpart of our Creator and God.”¹⁶

If Max Müller had read these articles carefully, he must have noticed the slippage between subject positions, the shift from “our Zulu language” to “our Creator and God.” In the latter position, uNemo observed, “The Natives, as we know, are a people not yet educated to reason penetratingly on any problem of life.”¹⁷ As a result, the Zulu could not think through the analogies between their bed of reeds and the biblical creation, their original ancestor, uNkulunkulu, and the Christian God. Neither, apparently, could Henry Callaway, who had coined the term uDio for his mission. While Methodists had imported the Xhosa term uTixo, derived from the Khoisan, into Zulu missions, Anglicans and Roman Catholics had appropriated uNkulunkulu. Against this background, the argument of the “Zulu informant,” uNemo, was not with Max Müller over philology or theory building in the academic study of religion but with Henry Callaway over the name that should be used for God in Christian missions to the Zulu.

Certainly, uNemo had no intention of destabilizing Max Müller’s theoretical project. As a Zulu philologist, recalling his pleasure in studying philological texts in the British Museum in London, uNemo laced his analysis of the Zulu language with examples not only from other African languages but also from German, Latin, and Sanskrit. Insisting on the originality of Zulu, uNemo was convinced that the study of African languages would lead to a revolution in knowledge similar to Oriental Studies. In his article in Inkanyisoyase Natal of April 5, 1895, uNemo quoted Max Müller quoting the philologist Wilhelm Bleek, who had coined the term Bantu while living and working in South Africa:

There are many reasons for believing that the South African dialects have preserved more of their primitive form than almost any other living languages in the world; for these nations have, less than any other, come into contact with foreign influence. Max Müller, in his Science of Language, quoting Bleek, says, “It is perhaps not too much to say that similar results may at present be expected from a deeper study of such primitive forms of language as the Kaffir and Hottentot exhibit, as followed at the beginning of the century, the discovery of Sanscrit and the comparative researches of Oriental scholars.”¹⁸

At this point, Max Müller certainly must have been suspicious of this “native,” uNemo, “our Zulu informant.” He must have wondered how this Zulu knew so much about him. How could this Zulu informant be quoting Max Müller quoting a local colonial expert, such as Wilhelm Bleek, when Max Müller built his theories of language, myth, and religion on quoting such colonial experts? Perhaps Max Müller was in on the joke, since no one reading these articles could mistake uNemo, “No One,” for an authentic Zulu informant.

Our Zulu author, in this case, was the Roman Catholic missionary Alfred T. Bryant (1865–1953). Born in England and relocating to South Africa in 1883, Bryant was ordained as a priest in Rome in 1887. He had used the pseudonym uNemo in a book published in the 1890s; he was temporarily stationed in the Eastern Cape, where uNemo located his submissions; and he was emerging as the leading philologist of the Zulu language, if not a Zulu philologist, by preparing his Zulu-English Dictionary, which would be published in 1905.¹⁹ In the introduction to the dictionary, Bryant repeated the same citation of Max Müller quoting Wilhelm Bleek to the effect that, in the future, African Studies would generate new knowledge about language, culture, and religion in the same way that Oriental Studies had in the past.²⁰ In the case of uNemo, the triple mediation—imperial, colonial, and indigenous—in the production of knowledge about religion and religions was strangely scrambled, as the local colonial expert assumed an indigenous Zulu disguise to reveal the “boggy foundations” of imperial knowledge.

As an interested party in the colonial mission, Bryant defined uNkulunkulu in his dictionary by both what the term had meant and what the term had become in the hands of Anglican and Roman Catholic missionaries. In the relevant entry, he defined uNkulunkulu as “the Great-great-ancestor or ancestral-spirit (of mankind), the first man who is supposed to have made most of the things round about; hence, adopted by missionaries to express God, Creator.”²¹ As uNemo had argued, the analogy between original ancestor and Supreme Being, both creators, made uNkulunkulu an appropriate term to be appropriated by Christian missionaries. However, as uNemo was well aware, this strategy of translation had not been adopted by the Wesleyan Methodists or the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. It was vigorously opposed by Henry Callaway. Translation, therefore, was entangled in conflicts within the colonial mission in Natal and Zululand.²² Turning to the entry iDhlozi, “ancestral spirit,” in his dictionary, Bryant indulged in a long digression on Zulu indigenous religion. Ancestors were the heart of Zulu religion. Yet Christian missionaries were justified in using the term for the first ancestor, uNkulunkulu, as the proper name of their Christian God.²³ While his definitions were situated in the colonial context, Bryant also aspired to knowledge that could only be acquired by the comparative philology practiced by metropolitan theorists such as Max Müller. “It would be interesting to know,” Bryant observed, “whether there is really no relationship traceable between the Zulu word i-dhlozi and the Skr. dyaus, sky (Z = i-zulu); Gr. theos, god; and L. deus, god.”²⁴ In this interest, Bryant suggested that Zulu could be inserted into the imperial study of Indo-European languages. Zulu ancestral spirits, therefore, played multiple roles in Bryant’s Zulu-English Dictionary. They were the center of an indigenous religion retained under colonial conditions; they provided a key term, uNkulunkulu, used by the colonial mission; and they could be drawn into the Indo-European philology of imperial comparative religion.

In 1917, A. T. Bryant published two articles in British academic journals. His article “The Zulu Cult of the Dead,” in the journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Man, outlined his understanding of the role of ancestral spirits in Zulu religion.²⁵ By contrast, his article in The Eugenic Review, “Mental Development of the South African Native,” reduced indigenous religion, culture, and personality to a relatively undeveloped primitive mentality. Echoing uNemo’s criticism of the native’s reasoning, Bryant asserted, “The African intellect, as exemplified in its manhood, is simply incapable of reaching the brilliance or of attaining the range of that of the European.” Although African intellect was incapable of rational conceptions, comprehensions, or judgments, it did display certain primitive capacities, such as memory and intuition, which had supposedly atrophied among Europeans in the course of their advanced mental development. Intuition, in particular, was strong in the African mentality, which was “endowed with some peculiar sense of sympathy or telepathy,” which explained the existence of “witch-doctors or sorcerers” who do not understand “clairvoyance” but “attribute their powers to the inspiration of ancestral spirits.”²⁶

Eventually, A. T. Bryant emerged as the leading historian of the Zulu. His Olden Times in Zululand and Natal, published in 1929, set the model for recounting Zulu history.²⁷ In recent years, that model has been generally rejected by historians. Although he claimed to draw on oral traditions, Bryant’s version of tribal history reproduced the colonial accounts of Zulu-speaking tribes distilled by the British colonial administrator Theophilus Shepstone for his administrative system of indirect rule. In his last book, Zulu People as They Were Before the Whiteman Came, which was completed in 1935, Bryant used philology and the study of religion to trace the prehistory of the Zulu back to the Uganda-Kenya region of East Africa. Affinities of language, pointing to an ur-Bantu language, suggested for Bryant that the Zulu shared the same mother tongue as people of East Africa. A common language suggested a shared religion. Comparing the Zulu to the Kavirondo of Uganda, Bryant found that “just as the Zulus have their uNkulunkulu (or Great-great-One, the creator of mankind), the Kavirondos likewise have their Nyasi (or Supreme One).” Establishing what he concluded was “the practical identity of Kavirondo and Zulu life customs and beliefs,” Bryant found that the Zulu had originated in the north, in East Africa, before migrating three thousand miles over half a millennium to end up in the south, around 1600, when their migration was “blocked by the Whiteman” who was arriving at roughly the same time.²⁸ By this account, the precolonial history of Africans was a saga of migrations, with Bantu groups moving from the north into the “empty land” of South Africa.²⁹ As the historian Norman Etherington has observed, such accounts of Bantu migrations “drew inspiration from the language-based theories of Aryan migrations developed in the mid-Victorian period by Max Müller and other Sanskritic scholars,” indicating that Max Müller and his Indo-European philology had an unexpected afterlife in the development of the study of African history in South Africa.³⁰

In addition to his interest in philology, Bryant read widely in the imperial anthropology of religion. Entering the debate about totemism, he found that the scholarship of leaders in the field such as Andrew Lang, James Frazer, and E. Sidney Hartland was incoherent. For Bryant, the problem of totemism was simple. The term was being used in imperial scholarship to refer to a commonplace mix of personal clan names, religious ancestor worship, and social taboo in indigenous life. European scholars were mystifying this commonplace. Responding to Andrew Lang’s account of Zulu totemism, Bryant complained, “Now, if a writer of Lang’s repute can write such ignorant twaddle, what confidence can we place in the statements of less celebrated ‘arm-chair’ ethnological authorities.” Turning to James Frazer, he remarked, “One feels it almost profanity to criticize anything great Frazer wrote. Yet even a Jove could nod.” As for E. Sidney Hartland, he found it amusing to watch the anthropologist grope in the dark searching for an imaginary “totem” only to catch an ancestor.³¹ Claiming to be standing in the light because he was on the ground with the Zulu, Bryant dismissed the speculations of these imperial scholars. Like the Zulu philologist uNemo, who had destabilised the theoretical project of F. Max Müller, the philologist A. T. Bryant sought to unsettle the entire theoretical industry of definition, interpretation, explanation, and analysis in the imperial study of religion.

History

While A. T. Bryant was emerging as a historian of the Zulu, Africans were also writing history. They were also informed by the Christian mission. The earliest history of the Zulu written by a Zulu author was Magema Fuze’s Abantu Abamnyama Lapa Bavela Ngakona (The Black People and Whence They Came), published in 1922. As an early convert of the Anglican missionary John Colenso, Fuze had absorbed the promise of the mission. With regard to religion, he adopted the genealogy of Zulu religion from ancient Israel. Introducing his history, Fuze stated, “I feel strongly that our people should know that we did not originate here in Southern Africa.” In contrast to Bryant’s philological and historical accounts of Bantu migrations from the north, which also suggested that the Zulu came from elsewhere, Fuze turned to the Bible as a template for inserting the Zulu into a universal history. Familiar with the colonial analogies between Zulu practices and the rituals of ancient Israel, Fuze agreed with the conjecture that “we black people came from the people of Israel.”³² Likewise, the historian Petros Lamula, who once described himself as “The Professor of the Hidden Sciences,” saw Zulu history through “the great ‘telescope’—the Bible.” In UZulukaMalandela: A Most Practical and Concise Compendium of African History, published in 1924, Lamula used the Bible to establish the common origin of all nations but also to locate the Zulu at the beginning of human history. According to Lamula, Zulu traditions echoed biblical stories. God’s creation of Adam and Eve was like the folktale told by old people about uMvelinqangi creating people in the original bed of reeds. God telling Adam and Eve about death was like the traditional tale about uNkulunkulu sending a chameleon to tell people that they would die. “The folk tales agree with the Bible,” Lamula concluded, proving that the religion of ancient Israel had been preserved in Zulu tradition.³³ This theme of African origin in ancient Israel was also implicit in the historical work of the Xhosa historian John Henderson Soga, who framed his account of Xhosa religion by establishing similarities between Jewish and Xhosa sacrifice “purely in the interests of truth and scientific research.”³⁴ For these African historians, African history flowed from the Bible and could be interpreted in the light of the Bible.

Silas Modiri Molema (1891–1965) was the first African South African to write a general history of Africans in South Africa. Published in 1920, The Bantu, Past and Present, was a comprehensive history. From a Tswana background with a missionary education, Molema left South Africa in 1914 to study medicine in Glasgow. Remaining in Scotland during World War I, Molema researched and wrote his account of the past, present, and future of Africans.³⁵ While touching on religion in his profiles of the various African “ethnical groupings,” he demonstrated a remarkable innovation by proposing a generic definition of religion that was situated not only in Africa but also in conversation with the academic study of religion. Molema’s bibliography included many of the major authors of imperial comparative religion—F. Max Müller, John Lubbock, Herbert Spencer, Andrew Lang, and James Frazer—in the section on “books referring indirectly to Africa.” Curiously, E. B. Tylor was missing, but Molema had clearly engaged key texts in the history of imperial theorizing about religion. He had also seriously reflected on W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, quoting from Du Bois, especially when looking to the future of Africa. In a chapter on the future of religion in Africa, “Religious Outlook,” Molema introduced another innovation by including Islam as an African religion and anticipating the expansion of Islam in Africa. For the study of religion in South Africa, therefore, S. M. Molema can be regarded as an indigenous innovator in defining religion as a generic term and in engaging religious diversity.

Introducing the “ethnical groupings” of Bushmen, Hottentots, and Bantu, Molema referred to the work of Max Müller and Wilhelm Bleek in classifying languages, but his accounts of the religions of these groupings preserved colonial stereotypes. “The religion of the Bushmen was the fear of ghosts and evil spirits,” he recounted. “They had a strong faith in charms and witchcraft.”³⁶ The religion of the Hottentots, who “were given to merry-making, singing and dancing,” especially at the new moon, was some form of “Lunar worship.” Although they venerated the mantis, the “Hottentot god,” their Supreme Being was Gounza Ticquva, “an undefined sort of deity, who left the immediate care of the Hottentots in the hands of the spirits and insects.”³⁷ Arriving at the religion of the Bantu, Molema deferred to the authority of the Scottish evangelist Henry Drummond, author of Tropical Africa. “What was their religion?” Molema asked. “The question is answered accurately by Mr. Drummond: ‘They had a national religion—the fear of evil spirits.’”³⁸ Accordingly, Molema found that Bantu religion could be characterized as Spiritism, Spiritualism, or Animism, concluding that “the religion, if religion it is, of the Bantu, was Animism.”³⁹ Colonial stereotypes of Africans worshiping evil spirits, therefore, could be reproduced; but they also could be translated into E. B. Tylor’s imperial theory of religion as animism, “belief in spiritual beings.”⁴⁰

Molema’s transactions with imperial theory led him to reflect on the definition of religion. Although he repeated colonial stereotypes about the religious beliefs of “ethnical groupings,” he pushed his analysis forward by asking, “How far do they agree with the usual definitions of religion?” Observing that scholars had produced many definitions, all different, Molema concluded from a review of the literature that three terms—the supernatural, the human, and the adjustment of the relationship between the supernatural and the human— were the essential ingredients in any generic definition of religion.

To illustrate the variety of definitions, Molema invoked three authorities—F. Max Müller, James Frazer, and William James. Beginning with the founder of the academic study of religion, Molema observed: “Professor Max Müller thus vigorously defines it: ‘Religion is the outcome of desire to explain all things—physical, metaphysical, and moral—by analogies drawn from human society, imaginatively and symbolically considered. In short, it is a universal sociological hypothesis, mythical in form.’” Unfortunately, this definition was not actually provided by Max Müller but by the French philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau, whose Irréligion de l’avenir (1886), which was translated into English in 1897 as The Non-religion of the Future, advanced a sociology of religion around this definition.⁴¹ This text was mistakenly attributed by Molema in his bibliography to F. Max Müller. Certainly, Guyau’s sociological definition was inconsistent with Max Müller’s definition of religion as a sense of the infinite. How did Molema confuse Guyau with Max Müller? In A Psychological Study of Religion, published in 1912, James H. Leuba collected forty-eight definitions of religion, classifying them into three categories—intellectualistic, affectivistic, and voluntaristic—on the basis of their primary emphasis on thought, emotion, or will. In a section of the book in which he criticized definitions based on emotion, Leuba observed, “A similar criticism is applicable to Max Müller and to Guyau.”⁴² Proceeding to analyze the latter’s definition of religion, Leuba provided the definition and reference to The Non-religion of the Future exactly as it was cited by Molema in Bantu, Past and Present. Although Leuba does not appear in his bibliography, Molema must have read him. Besides accounting for the confusion about Max Müller, Leuba provided all three of the definitions of religion cited by Molema. If he had read James H. Leuba, then S. M. Molema was familiar with a text that has been used as a reference point in the academic study of religion to argue for both the futility and the possibility of defining religion.⁴³

While the definition Molema cited from Max Müller (or Guyau) illustrated the human side of religion, as religion was “drawn from human society,” the definition by James Frazer emphasized the supernatural side. As Molema noted, “In The Golden Bough, p. 63, Frazer thus defines religion: ‘It is a propitiation or conciliation of powers supreme to man, which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and human life.’”⁴⁴ Again, this definition appears in Leuba’s catalog, although Molema might also have consulted The Golden Bough. As we will see in a moment, a contemporary South African scholar, H. I. E. Dhlomo, was familiar with the work of James Frazer, relying on him for his understanding of indigenous ritual and sympathetic magic. For Molema, however, Frazer’s definition captured the supernatural dimension of religion that had to be placed in relationship with the human.

Situated between the human and the supernatural, the third definition, by William James, focused on the adjustment of relationship between the two that was crucial to Molema’s understanding of religion. As Molema quoted James, “Religious life consists in the beliefs that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. The belief and the adjustment are the religious attitude of the soul.”⁴⁵ Mediating between the supernatural and the human, adjustment was the pivot around which Molema’s generic definition of religion turned. Distilling his definition of religion from a review of imperial comparative religion, he deployed that definition to refute a colonial legacy of denying African religion. “If then the three elements—supernatural, man, and the adjustment of relationship between the two by the latter—constitute religion,” Molema concluded, “it seems that the Bantu had a religion, primitive and unevolved certainly, but none the less a religion.”⁴⁶

At this juncture in his work, Molema achieved something remarkable. As an African scholar, he altered the terms, reversing the flow, in the triple mediation in which knowledge about religion had been produced in imperial comparative religion. Instead of acting as an indigenous informant in the colonial exchange with metropolitan theorists, he transformed imperial theorists into “informants” about defining religion in order to solve a colonial problem, the recognition of African indigenous religion as religion.

Having established that the Bantu had an indigenous religion, Molema countered the colonial stereotype that Africans were subject to a savage religion. For understanding the religion of savages, he suggested, we would have to look not to the religion of Africans but to the religion of the Germanic savages of pre-Christian Europe. In an extended quotation from Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Molema profiled the religion of German savages:

The religious system of the Germans (if the wild opinions of savages can deserve that name) was dictated by their wants, their fears, and their ignorance. They adored the great visible objects and agents of Nature—the sun and the moon, the fire and the earth—together with those imaginary deities who were supposed to preside over the most important occupations of human life. They were persuaded that, by some ridiculous arts of divination, they could discover the will of the superior beings—such was the situation, and such were the manners, of the ancient Germans.⁴⁷

He provided a similar profile of the savage religion of the English in pre-Christian Britain. While identifying the enduring template that had been used by Europeans in representing African religion as savage religion, Molema’s invocation of Gibbon effectively put Europeans in the “savage slot,” rendering their ancestors as wild savages with a religion driven by ignorance, fear, and desire, enveloped in imaginary delusions, and displayed in ridiculous rituals.⁴⁸ However, Molema rejected the notion that savagery and civilization were fixed terms of reference, a permanent opposition, by quoting W. E. B. Du Bois to the effect that such an assumption “would have made it difficult for the Teuton to prove his right to life.” As Molema quoted Du Bois from Souls of Black Folks:

The silently growing assumption of the age is that the probation of races is past, and that the backward races of to-day are of proven inefficiency and are not worth saving. Such an assumption is the arrogance of peoples irreverent towards time, and ignorant of the deeds of men.⁴⁹

Writing about the African past and present, Molema was also looking to the future, inspired by Du Bois to imagine a pan-African future in which the categories of savagery and civilization would be transcended. In his analysis of religion, Molema engaged in a complex dialectic—repeating the colonial stereotypes about the religions of “ethnical groupings,” engaging the imperial study of religion for a generic definition of religion, and then challenging the imperial assumption of a fixed racial hierarchy of religions. As Molema observed, “we are told from all sides that ‘man is a religious being.’”⁵⁰ Quite possibly, Molema was quoting Henry Callaway, who had made that assertion in 1876 in a widely distributed pamphlet, Religious Sentiments Amongst the Tribes of South Africa.⁵¹ But Molema was not merely reproducing but strategically intervening in the study of religion by challenging both colonial and imperial assumptions about African religion. His sustained attention to the problem of religion distinguished S. M. Molema as a significant scholar of religion in South Africa.

Anthropology

While James Frazer was disappearing from theory and method in anthropology, his influence diffused through a variety of creative arts, most notably in the work of the poets T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats and the novelists James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence.⁵² In South Africa, the primary artist to embrace the legacy of Frazer was the journalist, poet, and dramatist Herbert Isaac Ernest Dhlomo (1903–1956). During the 1930s, hoping to advance a new African national dramatic movement, Dhlomo traced the origin of African dramatic art back to indigenous religion. “The origin of African drama,” he explained, “was a combination of religious or magical ritual [with] rhythmic dances and the song.”⁵³ Picking up themes from Frazer, such as the notion of sympathetic magic, a pragmatic theory of religious ritual, and the need to relate magic, religion, and science, Dhlomo created his own synthesis. Although he annotated his copy of The Golden Bough, his primary textual source for reflecting on these Frazerian themes was provided by the feminist, classicist, and student of comparative religion Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928), whose Ancient Art and Ritual, published in 1913, gave Dhlomo key terms for tracing the religious origin of African drama. Harrison had revealed ancient Greek religion as savage, just as Robertson Smith had unearthed the savage in the religion of ancient Israel.⁵⁴ As Harrison observed in the bibliography to Ancient Art and Ritual, her understanding of the religious origins of ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman drama had been derived from the study of primitive religion advanced by William Robertson Smith and James Frazer. She singled out the importance of Robertson’s Smith’s Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, “an epoch-making book,” for clarifying “fundamental ritual notions,” while she identified Frazer’s Golden Bough as the best general reference for the study of ancient and primitive ritual, especially the section devoted to Adonis, Attis, and Osiris, “from which most of the instances in the present manual are taken.”⁵⁵

In a series of articles on African drama in the 1930s, Dhlomo showed that he had undertaken a careful reading of Jane Harrison’s Ancient Art and Ritual. He invoked her authority to support not only the ritual origin of drama but also the dramatic character of ritual. In his article, “Nature and Variety of Tribal Drama,” published in 1939 in Bantu Studies, the journal of the South African Inter- University Committee for African Studies, Dhlomo quoted Harrison on ancient Egyptian rituals of Osiris to reinforce the relationship between religion and drama:

In Egypt, then, we have clearly an instance—only one of many— where art and ritual go hand in hand. Ancient art and ritual are not only closely connected, not only do they mutually explain and illustrate each other, but . . . they actually arise out of a common human impulse.⁵⁶

If Harrison’s research proved the link between religious ritual and art, Dhlomo argued that indigenous Zulu rituals could be seen “to contain the germs of a great art such as drama.”⁵⁷ However, by developing his own theoretical synthesis, he was not merely applying imperial theory. Like S. M. Molema, Dhlomo reversed the flow in the production of knowledge in imperial comparative religion, turning theorists such as Robertson Smith, Frazer, and Harrison into “informants” about ancient religion in order to pursue his own project, in this case the advancement of African drama under colonial conditions in South Africa.

In Dhlomo’s analysis, the religious rituals that gave rise to drama were “based on what anthropologists call Sympathetic Magic.”⁵⁸ Invoking this classic Frazerian category, which was based on the belief that “like always and everywhere produced like,” he found that sympathetic magic in both ritual and drama was not only imitation but also anticipation. Observing that imitation was central to indigenous African ritual, he argued that this mimetic acting did not represent the past. It anticipated the future. “There are also what one may call anticipatory dances or ceremonies based on the principle of sympathetic magic,” he noted. “In these ceremonies the people ‘Acted’, not what had happened, but what they wished to happen.”⁵⁹ In this respect, he focused on what Jane Harrison had called the ritual “fore-done for magical purposes,” the “dance that anticipates by pre-presenting.”⁶⁰ Harrison outlined the anticipatory character of imitation in savage ritual:

If we consider the occasions when a savage dances, it will soon appear that it is not only after a battle or a hunt that he dances in order to commemorate it, but before. Once the commemorative dance has got abstracted or generalized it becomes material for the magical dance, the dance pre-done. A tribe about to go to war will work itself up by a war dance; about to start out hunting they will catch their game in pantomime. Here clearly the main emphasis is on the practical, the active, doing-element in the cycle. The dance is, as it were, a sort of precipitated desire, a discharge of pent-up emotion into action.⁶¹

As Dhlomo adopted Harrison’s profile of anticipatory ritual, he agreed that it should be understood as acting out desires. Instead of adapting to the conditions of life, tribal Africans acted through ritual to bend its course to their desires, which “gave birth to what anthropologists call Sympathetic Magic.”⁶² However, by contrast to Harrison’s reduction of this anticipatory performance to an emotional discharge, Dhlomo regarded indigenous ritual drama as revelatory, insisting that “anticipatory ceremonies were psychological and imaginative, revealing the thoughts, the feelings and the desires of the people, and giving full play to the faculty to imagine and conceive.”⁶³ In Dhlomo’s understanding of indigenous ritual, imitation and anticipation held a wider range of intellectual and emotional significance.

Nevertheless, like James Frazer, H. I. E. Dhlomo developed a pragmatic theory of ritual. The purpose of most rituals, he suggested, is “a utilitarian, a practical one.”⁶⁴ While rituals served such practical ends as cleansing, protection, and appeasement of ancestors, they primarily addressed human desires for food, children, and success. “Many of these tribal, magical dramatic representations,” he observed, “sprang from the desire to have much food, many children, and to conquer in battle.”⁶⁵ Here Dhlomo was certainly referring to the pragmatic theory of ritual advanced by Frazer. As Jane Harrison summarized,

The two great interests of primitive man are food and children. As Dr. Frazer has well said, if man the individual is to live he must have food; if his race is to persist he must have children. “To live and to cause to live, to eat food and to beget children, these were the primary wants of man in the past, and they will be the primary wants of men in the future so long as the world lasts.”⁶⁶

Although he added conquering in battle as a practical objective, Dhlomo shared this pragmatic theory of ritual. However, he blurred Frazer’s distinctions among magic, religion, and science. For the tribal African, religion was magic, ritual was “magico-religious representation,” and “Magic was his science.”⁶⁷ Modern science could also be based on magico-religious representation. “Many European historians worship at the shrine of Colour and ‘Science,’” he observed, “and succeed only to produce colourful and pseudo-scientific race doctrines.”⁶⁸ As a kind of sympathetic magic, the enactment of these race doctrines also sought control over resources, reproduction, and power.

Looking back to sympathetic magic, Dhlomo also looked forward to modern drama in his analysis of ritual. In his vision for African drama, Dhlomo was not a primitivist, calling for a return to pure tradition. “The development of African drama cannot purely be from African roots,” he proposed. “It must borrow from, be inspired by, shoot from European dramatic art forms, and be tainted by exotic influences.”⁶⁹ Dhlomo mediated between traditional and modern. If Africans were totemists, feeling kinship with animals, Darwinism might show they were not wrong in understanding humans as animals.⁷⁰ If Africans were spiritualists, psychoanalysis might show they were not wrong in exploring the subconscious mind.⁷¹ Likewise, in the study of ritual, he used a modern European dramatic structure, the five-act play, to analyze the indigenous Zulu ritual of death. “In this great ceremony,” he observed, “there are five divisions or five ‘acts’: Death, Burial, Mourning, Ihlambo (Cleansing), and Ukubuyisa (the bringing back of the spirit of the deceased).”⁷² Proceeding to outline the “great, tragic performance,” he identified the crucial elements in each of the five acts of this ritual drama. By developing a performance theory of ritual, Dhlomo showed how indigenous Zulu religion employed basic patterns and processes that were also evident in modern dramatic art. While drama originated in religion, religion was already drama.

As a scholar of drama, but also as a scholar of religion, Dhlomo announced a research program. He called for historical and anthropological research on the “dramatic elements in Bantu ritual ceremony,” while urging the “comparative study of African life and literature, and Greek, Hebrew and Egyptian life and literature.”⁷³ Here, again, we must detect the influence of the comparative research of Jane Harrison. But Dhlomo’s research program in the history and anthropology of religion was addressed specifically to African scholars. “The European historian was handicapped by preconceived ideas and existing prejudices,” Dhlomo observed. “He could not enter into the mind and the aspirations and the feelings of the black people of whom he wrote.”⁷⁴ Trusting that African scholars would not suffer from such a handicap in studying indigenous religion, Dhlomo imagined that they would also have greater insight into ancient religion, since they would be able, as the rhetorician Giambattista Vico had advised, to look “at the world with primitive eyes” in order “to recapture the ancient point of view.”⁷⁵ Since he was primarily interested in the revitalization of African drama in South Africa, Dhlomo’s research goals also included collecting indigenous praise poetry and traditions of African kings and heroes, translating Shakespeare into African languages, and studying new developments in African American theater in the United States. His sustained attention to the religious roots of drama, however, distinguished H. I. E. Dhlomo as a significant scholar of religion in South Africa.

Circulating Knowledge

In his skepticism about the ability of European scholars to enter the minds of black people, H. I. E. Dhlomo implicitly challenged E. Sidney Hartland’s proposal that the key to the study of religion was to “think black.” Hartland made thinking black sound too easy, as if it were a kind of telepathy. This easy empathy was an imperial conceit. As the British imperialist and novelist John Buchan claimed, the British were “the only race on earth that can produce men capable of getting inside the skin of remote people.”⁷⁶ While Mary Kingsley earned this skill in the field, Hartland claimed that he had learned to think black in the study by reviewing reports from observers such as Kingsley. As an example of what Dhlomo called handicapping prejudice, Hartland explained that thinking black was thinking like a child in two senses—as the opposite of an adult and as the childhood of humanity. Countering this assumption that Africans were permanent children and primitive survivals, S. M. Molema invoked W. E. B. Du Bois: “Such an assumption is the arrogance of peoples irreverent towards time, and ignorant of the deeds of men.”⁷⁷

This same passage from Du Bois was cited by Dudley Kidd, the South African missionary author of The Essential Kafir (1904), Savage Childhood (1906), and Kafir Socialism and the Dawn of Individualism (1908), an author who was consulted by E. Sidney Hartland in the quiet space of his study, calling attention to “what an American negro has to say on the latent capacity of the black races to rise in the scale of civilization.” Revealing that an old friend of Du Bois had told him that this American Negro was more white than black, Kidd wondered why Du Bois identified with his African ancestry rather than with his European heritage. More white than black, according to Kidd, Du Bois was not a good model for what Africans in South Africa might achieve. According to “colonists in South Africa,” Kidd explained, Africans came from bad stock, inheriting no civilized traits, and thereby suffered a “hopeless handicap.”⁷⁸

How was knowledge produced in the imperial study of religion? For imperial theorists from Max Müller to Hartland, knowledge was produced by quotation. The quotation of indigenous voices, made available by colonial mediators, was the primary source of knowledge production for any theory of religion. As an engine for producing knowledge, quotation was central to the triple mediation—imperial, colonial, and indigenous—in the production of knowledge about religion and religions in the British empire. When F. Max Müller quoted Wilhelm Bleek quoting Max Müller, this production of knowledge was circular, feeding back into itself, reinforcing the imperial theorist. However, when uNemo quoted Max Müller and Wilhelm Bleek, the effect was destabilizing, suggesting an alternative basis for generating knowledge about religion and religions.

Combining telepathy and ventriloquism, A. T. Bryant, thinking black and talking black as uNemo, would seem to represent the perfect middleman in the exchange between indigenous Africans and imperial theorists. However, while his indigenous voice unsettled the theorizing of Max Müller, his attacks on imperial theorists completely dismissed the knowledge they had produced in the quiet of the study. Nevertheless, although he claimed to be gaining knowledge on the ground, Bryant’s knowledge about the mentality of the native was infused with the racial theories of empire.

As theorists in their own right, the historian S. M. Molema and the dramatist H. I. E. Dhlomo reversed the flow in the triple mediation of knowledge production in the study of religion. Instead of providing evidence like the testimonies collected by Henry Callaway, where indigenous voices served as raw material for theory building, they interrogated the theorists of imperial comparative religion. In that inquiry, they found resources they could use in refashioning knowledge about African religion. While Molema cited imperial theorists in distilling his own generic definition of religion, which demonstrated that the Bantu actually had a religion, Dhlomo invoked imperial theory to reveal the religious roots of African drama. In both cases, they were not serving imperial theory. Imperial theory was serving them in their thinking about religion.

Still, the question of race remained, looming over the entire history of imperial comparative religion. Living, working, and thinking within a racist regime, theorists such as Molema and Dhlomo made knowledge, but not under conditions of their own making.

Looking to the future of religion in Africa in his chapter “Religious Outlook,” Molema reflected on the three faiths—Paganism, Christianity, and Islam—on the continent. Taking Islam seriously, he quoted from the Qur’an and referred to an academic history of the tradition. As Molema noted, in The Conflict of Colour the British journalist B. L. Putnam Weale had argued that in Africa “the black man will be superficially civilized and either Christianised or Islamized.”⁷⁹ Weale had proposed that Africans would be attracted to Islam because the religion was better suited to their militant nature than Christianity. But Molema focused on the nonracial character of Islam, its “practical spirit of equality and fraternity.” As Molema observed, “The strength and vigour of Mohammedanism is in its ‘assimilation,’ racial barriers and distinctions being swept off between co-believers.” Since the link between race and social class in South Africa had been thoroughly entrenched, Molema called attention to the fraternity in Islam between rich and poor, citing G. W. Leitner’s chapter, “Muhammadanism,” in Religious Systems of the World: “The rich man is considered to be the natural protector of the poor, and the poor man takes his place at the table of the rich.”⁸⁰ In looking to the future of religion in Africa, therefore, Molema was interested in the nonracial character of Islam. Although he concluded that the European presence in South Africa, which would not go away, strengthened the prospects of Christianity, Molema was clearly thinking black about Islam.

Thinking about religion under the same racial regime, H. I. E. Dhlomo turned to imperial theorists of religion James Frazer and Jane Harrison to recover tradition and invigorate his own projects. Like Molema, he was using them instead of being used by them. He found in their theoretical vocabulary key terms for rethinking black religion, culture, and art. However, under the shadow of a thoroughly racialized imperial theory, with its presupposition that Africans were incapable of thinking, of engaging “matters of abstract thought and metaphysics,” of performing “intellectual work,” Dhlomo had to deal with race. Although the imperial theorists had helped his thinking, he also had to think otherwise about the denigration of Africans in imperial theory. Shifting from the academic study of religion to religious invocation, Dhlomo asserted that in imaginative art, “the Universal Mind can and does express itself actively through primitive men and humble.”⁸¹ Insisting that African art, like any great art, was not racial or national, he proposed that the Universal Mind, the All-Creative Being, transcended race. “Great art or thought (art is thought-feeling) is more than racial and national,” Dhlomo insisted. “It is universal, reflecting the image, the spirit, of the All-Creative Being who knows neither East nor West, Black nor White, Jew nor Gentile, time nor space, life nor death. The tragedy of a Job, an Oedipus, a Hamlet, a Joan, a Shaka, a Nongqawuse, is the tragedy of all countries, all times, all races.”⁸² Thinking black, for Dhlomo, was thinking beyond race, while thinking strategically within the racialized categories advanced in imperial theory and entrenched in South Africa.

In recovering the centrality of Africana religions in the history of the academic study of religion, the work of A. T. Bryant is emblematic of racist scholarship, not only in his reduction of African religion to a primitive mentality, but also in his erasure of Africans from the land in which their religion might be recognized as indigenous in South Africa. As painful as it might be to rehearse this racial legacy in scholarship, Bryant’s work, whether as uNemo or under his own name, can be recovered as providing alternative points of engagement with the centralizing and universalizing aspirations of imperial scholarship. As we have seen, Bryant vigorously challenged the pretentions of imperial scholars of religion on the grounds that they were not on the ground with the Zulu. This warrant for authentic knowledge, of course, would come to underwrite the entire enterprise of ethnography, which was based on the opposition between the armchair theorizing of the study, which Sidney Hartland thought entailed its own dangers, and the dangers of the field. Studying religion, in either case, was a dangerous business. But it was also a circulating enterprise, circulating throughout an expanding empire of relations, contacts and exchanges in which religion registered as an index to persons and places, identities and geographies, essential or enduring stabilities and shifting or transient migrations in the world. In these circulations of knowledge about religion, A. T. Bryant drew upon the latest research in Indo-European linguistic, cultural, and religious migrations without realizing that those theories were based upon ideas of racial segregation that had been developed and enforced in South Africa and the American South. “In this fantastic back-projection of systems of racial segregation in the American South and in South Africa onto early Indian history,” as the historian Thomas R. Trautmann has observed, “the relations of the British ‘new invader from Europe’ with the peoples of India is prefigured thousands of years before by the invading Aryans.”⁸³ Circulating and circling back on itself, racialist theorizing of religion in South Africa lies exposed in the work of Bryant as a fraud, as a carnival sideshow of telepathy and ventriloquism, which was nevertheless engaged with the global circulation of imperial comparative religion. Whatever his failings, Bryant highlights the dynamics of the imperial circulation of knowledge in the study of Africana religions and in the general study of religions.

For S. M. Molema and H. I. E. Dhlomo, the circulation of knowledge about Africana religions entailed simultaneously working within and struggling against racist scholarship. In solidarity with W. E. B. Du Bois, they worked toward a pan-African study of Africana religions. Refusing to be data, they theorized religion in relation to imperial scholarship. But they also theorized religion within their own situations. As a result, Molema found that African indigenous religion in South Africa actually was religion. Given recent criticisms of the term, religion, as an illegitimate Western, Christian, and imperial imposition of on the world, we might wonder why he would want to do that.⁸⁴ Despite its imperial pedigree, of which he was well aware, religion provided Molema an opening, a range of possibilities, to negotiate a space for Africans in South Africa. Accordingly, he made strategic use of the term. Although he deferred to colonial constructions of the religions of “ethnic groupings,” he focused on distilling a generic definition of religion, which effectively obliterated those stereotypes, and tried to imagine a nonracial future for religion in Africa. For his part, H. I. E. Dhlomo found that African indigenous religion was a basis for dramatic creativity. Although he drew upon theories of religion advanced by James Frazer and Jane Harrison, Dhlomo turned those theorists into informants, quoting them as any imperial theorist might have done, for evidence in support of his own project, which in his case was the project of revitalizing African drama in South Africa. Subsequently, Dhlomo developed other projects, such as the emergence of the “New African,” but his activist assertions of political independence resonated with his refusal to be merely data in any imperial theory of religion. In the work of both Molema and Dhlomo, imperial theorists of religion, from F. Max Müller through James Frazer, were engaged not as monuments to thinking about the origin of religion in the race but as openings in a field of strategic possibilities for another kind of study of religion.