Oprah’s Book Club: A New Earth

As Jamaica approaches fifty years of independence in 2012, the greatest concern of the nation is crime. In a society where a large number of its young people are becoming desensitised and traumatised by the crime around them, it seems to me that something is not working. It is, therefore, time for us as a nation to do a serious analytical investigation into the social systems that colonialism has left us, and find new alternatives. People of African descent in the Caribbean have survived great atrocities in chattel slavery, while others perished and were even wiped out. We need to identify the characteristics and values that we carried with us from Africa that enabled us to withstand and overcome that dark period in our history. 

I would like to look at one area of African Philosophy, which I think, if understood and utilised, could be an effective contribution in reinstating good values into our society and particularly among our young people. Before I go further, I must state that this might be a controversial topic for some of us who treat the topic of African traditions as a taboo. Most Jamaicans stay well clear of anything to do with Traditional African Philosophy, because of the negative stigma that surrounds it. A Jamaican just has to say “obeah” and the response will either be fear, ridicule or indifference – and rightly so. Traditional African Philosophy is closely associated with indigenous African religion and indigenous African religion is associated with obeah. Obeah is the use of spirits (ghosts) to do evil – witchcraft. I believe that obeah is effective to those that believe in it. The important word here is “believe”. All original cultures of the world believe in the supernatural. Most Jamaicans are Christians and what would Christianity be without belief in the supernatural? Christianity is also the largest religion in the world by far.   Belief is the second strongest element of the human mind - the first is knowledge. Believing in the supernatural is the foundation of the indigenous African society. The Akan religion in Ghana and the Ivory Coast, believe in an all-powerful God who was out of the reach of mortal man. Man therefore needed intermediaries to reach God. These intermediaries are the spirits. The ancestors are the good relatives, who have died and gone on to join the spirits. Not everyone that dies becomes an ancestor. Ancestors were citizens of high moral standing who in death become intermediaries and act on their descendants’ behalf. Ghosts are evil spirits while the ancestors are good spirits. The ancestors are believed to be still with the community and are still active in the life of the community. This becomes a belief, as over time, there will be no one alive who personally knew the ancestors (when they were alive). For example, no one alive today has physically met or knew Paul Bogle, but we believe and know from written records that he existed. Africans taught about their ancestors from childhood education straight through to adulthood. They celebrate them through initiation rites, ceremonies, stories, songs, dances, at work, at play and through all aspects of life. Through all these forms, the ancestors stay alive and continue to teach, inspire, lead, guide and protect their descendants. When we cease to acknowledge and celebrate our ancestors they are eventually forgotten and that is when they die. 

We hear the proverb – belief kill an’ belief cure. This was and still is a fact in many African cultures that are not over-run by Western thought. In these communities, their belief is their reality. They believe in good and evil and they believe that evil will be punished. This belief/reality is tied up intrinsically with the ancestors and the spirits. Friends from Ghana conveyed to me what their elders told them. Before modern Christianity went to Africa, if someone stole your property, the elders would call the community together and ask for the property to be returned within a given period, or there would be serious consequences. The property would be returned because every individual in the community believed in the power of the ancestors to punish evil. Being the opposite of the evil spirits in obeah the ancestors contribute to the development of order among their families and their communities – they are role models. 

With the replacement of indigenous religions with the European brand of Christianity in Africa, it was taught that if you have done something wrong, ask Jesus for forgiveness, and then believe or have faith that you are forgiven and the wrong you did would be wiped away. Now people steal and do all manner of evil and escape punishment. Within this process, the African ancestors have lost their power. It becomes too easy for the wrongdoer to escape punishment and the order within the African universe is turned on its head, so now there exist confusion and lawlessness. The strength of the African belief system is destroyed. 

In the work of Kwasi Wiredu, a Ghanaian philosopher, entitled “Toward Decolonising African Philosophy and Religion”, he says the following: ‘Where two religions are in question, in this case, the indigenous African religion and Christianity, the suggestion that religion is a matter of faith is clearly incapable of explaining a preference of one over the other. Moreover, ordinary common sense dictates that one should not jettison what is one’s own in favour of what has come from abroad for no reason at all. It is, accordingly, difficult to see the faith defence as anything other than the rationalisation of an intellectual inertia born of an early subjection to evangelism, that is to say, a colonised condition of the mind.’