Christianity,fetishism,and the development of secular politics in Ghana: A Dumontian approach

Africa and modern ideas of politics

African chieftaincy has become a reviving topic of study in anthropology and related disciplines and chiefs have also been given an important role in grand theories about political processes in Africa (e.g. Bayart, 1993; Mamdani, 1996). What many of the recent studies have in common is the assumption of a separate political sphere of society, where institutions, agents, or groups compete, co-operate, or co-exist. These studies define, even if implicitly, politics as what is relative to power, and that is what both traditional chiefships and modern states are supposedly all about. Conversely, even a superficial glance at the classic ethnographies of African societies reveals that the kings and chiefs of the pre-colonial era were not ‘political leaders’ in the same sense as modern political theory suggests. They were characterized as diviners, healers, priests, magicians, rain-makers, or controllers of witchcraft, and the origins of their offices were traced to the spiritual realm (see e.g. Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, 1969 [1940]). The contemporary political theorists who write about chiefs rarely address this spiritual quality of the chiefly office and, in fact, the whole community that the chiefs ruled. What happened to the divine kingship(s) that the early anthropologists described does not seem to be an important question for political theory. In a Dumontian approach, however, the analysis of the development of the idea of modern politics starts from the ‘whole configuration’, where politics is not defined separately from religious or social relations (Dumont, 1971).

According to Dumont (1971: 32), in so-called traditional societies ‘the configuration of values has a hierarchical form where the all-embracing normative consideration which we usually call religion contains and limits whatever other social considerations are recognized’. Politics is therefore not an autonomous domain, but subordinate to religion. Here Dumont’s treatment of politics is similar to those of his predecessors, Marcel Mauss (1966 [1925]) and Karl Polanyi (1957 [1944]), who had discussed how the economic systems of traditional societies were merged within a unified social order. In such societies, states and rulers are intermediaries between God or a spirit world and society, which consists of collective elements, such as estates, orders, or clans. An Asante chiefdom of the pre-colonial era can be described in these terms. ² Such polity was composed of several matrilineages that were established on the basis of common descent from a known female ancestor. An Asante person was considered a whole person or a human being through his membership in the lineage. The matrilineage was understood to be comprised not only of its living members but also of the dead ancestors and the unborn. The greatest of all ancestors were those of the chiefly lineage, because they were considered the original ‘holders’ of the territory, where the chiefdom was located. The office of the chief held a nodal position, since it stood between the living, who were considered the existing guardians of the chiefdom, and the ancestral spirits, who had absolute power over the former. Generally, the ancestors were considered to use their powers to help the living in their worldly undertakings, but the bad deeds of the living also brought shame on the ancestors, who did not hesitate to punish them. Thus the prosperity and welfare of the living were believed to depend directly on good relations with the ancestors. Because of the fragility of this connection it was vital that the office vested in the chiefly lineage was occupied by a person who was a matrilineal descendant of the founding ancestor of the lineage and thus close enough to the ancestors to communicate with them. This communication took place through sacrifice. In addition to the ancestral spirits, the chief also made sacrifices to nature spirits, talismans, and medicines in order to guarantee the well-being and success of his people. The kingdom of Asante was a union of several chiefdoms, and the king, the Asantehene, performed similar ritual duties to his royal ancestors and gods on behalf of the kingdom.

It would, however, be incorrect to say that the Asante chiefs were only ritual rulers, ceremonial figure heads, or symbols. On the contrary, the chief had many functions that we could describe as political, legal, military, or economic. For instance, he presided over a decision-making council of elders and a judicial court, he commanded an army, and he also allocated farmland to his subjects. Nonetheless, what must be emphasized here is that all these functions were derived from the chief’s connection to the spirit world. To take an example, he did not distribute farmland because the land belonged to him, neither did the land belong to the community, who would then have vested the right of allocation in the chief. He did so because the land belonged to the ancestors and he was their representative, or better said, their reincarnation, among the living. Hence, all the other functions of the chief were hierarchically subordinate to the value of his religious functions.

One of Dumont’s major contributions has been his detailed examination of how holistic, or traditional, societies become individualistic, or modern, as a result of an internal process of transformation. He has documented the successive differentiation of the political category and the expansion of the modern state from the dawn of the papal state to the English, American, and French revolutions. This has been done with reference to relevant developments in religious doctrine, philosophy, and law. The space here does not allow me to review these processes in any detail or length. So, I will only very briefly sum up the most important characteristics of the modern state as they help me to analyse the transformation of the Asante chieftaincy under the colonial rule. According to Dumont, modern society is separated from traditional societies by a displacement of the main value stress from the social whole to the individual taken as an embodiment of humanity at large. Power, rights and property are seen as attributes of the individual. The relationship between man and God is an individual matter and therefore religion has lost its all-embracing quality and has become one among other considerations. In this scheme of things, politics addresses the question of how these individuals, with similar needs, objectives and powers, organize themselves, how they associate with each other. States emerge through contracts made by individuals in their capacity as citizens and consequently rulers only represent the ruled, and the power of the state is nothing more than the powers of its members delegated to another level. Hence, the state does not ‘transcend itself’; it exists only for itself and not for any ‘higher cause’ like ancestral spirits or gods. This way it does not need any external reference point to explain its own existence (Dumont, 1971, 1992 [1986]: 60–103). In what follows, I will discuss how similar divisions and categories were introduced in colonial Ghana by European Christian missionaries and colonial administrators as they sought to redefine the relationship between the African ‘native’ and his/her ruler.

Missionary Christianity and political change

Christian missionary work among the Asante started when Wesleyan-Methodist Reverend T.B. Freeman visited Asantehene Kwaku Dua Panin twice in 1839 and 1841 and was granted permission to build a mission house in the capital city. Negotiations about opening a school were started at the same time (Freeman, 1968 [1844]). Yet, from the very outset, the missionaries gained very limited and closely supervised access to the kingdom. Their public insistence on the abolition of polygamy, slavery and human sacrifices, all of which were central to the royal cult of ancestors, aroused suspicions in the upper echelons of the Asante state, and the missionaries were only tolerated in the hope that they would help create contact with the European merchants on the coast (see McCaskie, 1995: 136–7).

In his writings on Christianity in Africa, John Peel has criticized the ways in which the missionary endeavour is too simplistically blended with ‘other grand narratives’. According to Peel, Christianity in Africa should not be treated as ‘a religion of the conqueror’, an inevitable result of European imperialism or colonialism. Equally, the adoption of capitalist ideology, scientific rationalism and other elements of modern European culture in Africa should not be seen as automatic by-products of the missionary project. Although evangelical Christianity was born in the intellectual atmosphere of the Enlightenment, and the modern idea of civilization had religious roots, the premises and aims of missionary work – the sinfulness of human nature and the salvation of souls – were markedly different from secular projects that put their trust in human reason and fortunes of this world (Peel, 2000: 2–7). In the pre-Enlightenment era, conquest and conversion had moved together: from the expansion of the Christian Roman Empire to the conquest of America by the Catholic kings of Spain and Portugal, the conversion of ‘pagan peoples’ to Christianity had been a part of a state policy. Later, however, the major colonial powers in Africa promoted Christianity only indirectly and sometimes even discouraged it (Peel, 1978: 445–6). By the 19 th century, religious denominations were regarded as forms of voluntary associations that were separate from states and the world of politics and power in general. Churches were expected to effect social change indirectly by furthering the moral education of individual citizens who, on their part, contributed to the welfare of the nation that they formed. Christian missions that aimed at the transformation of foreign societies were thus part of a larger social project (Van Rooden, 1996: 80–3). Many Christians had ‘become progressively estranged from the dominant culture’ of their own societies (Peel, 2000: 5) and thought that their own countrymen were badly in need of a reformation. The missionaries used expressions like ‘so-called Christian England’ and characterized their fellow citizens as ‘at least nominally, Christian men’ (see East, 1844: 244), when they wanted to emphasize that the civilization of the ‘Dark Continent’ could not be a secular process conducted by administrators, merchants, and educators.

Unlike his/her medieval Roman Catholic predecessors, the 19 th-century Protestant missionary was not interested in converting pagan kings and their kingdoms. Accordingly, the first missionaries in Asante merely asked the Asantehene to adopt a tolerant attitude towards missionary work. For instance, in 1862, Reverend William West pleaded with Asantehene Kwaku Dua Panin for permission to re-open the Wesleyan mission house in Asante by assuring that missionaries ‘had nothing whatever to do with politics, or the affairs of the Government, but were solely engaged in spreading the Christian religion’ (Wesleyan Missionary Notices, 25 August 1862: 157–8). Nonetheless, the idea that the religious conviction of an individual could provide a basis for major secular developments was at the core of the missionary project. The missionaries saw the human soul as the original source of all social ills and therefore the prerequisite of the civilizing of the African society was the reformation of the individual. Civilization could not be achieved by the implementation of any ‘human policy’. For instance, one could change the laws of a ‘heathen country’ so that they would be in agreement with the principles of Christianity, but in the long run society would not improve because laws could always be abused by the ‘wickedness’, ‘love of gain’, or ‘passions’ of humans. Similarly, economic progress brought on by the introduction of new technologies, improved trade relations or more effective extraction of natural resources could not take place before the people were liberated from their superstitions concerning nature, time, geography and such things. Therefore, a true Christian conviction was seen as the only way to civilization (see East, 1844: 238–43). Consequently, the missionaries did not have to overthrow or convert the African rulers; the Christian Africans themselves would build a new society.

Despite the great objectives set, several decades of missionary work in the 19 th century produced only a handful a converts in Asante. In addition to the negative stance of the rulers, the work was constantly hindered by illnesses and language problems and finally interrupted by wars between the Asante and the British (McCaskie, 1995: 136–40). Consequently, the missions were not able to consolidate their position before the full imposition of colonial rule in 1901. Before discussing the Christian conversion and its implications, it is important to take a closer look at what was understood by fetishism – a term used to describe and explain the Asante religion by Europeans.

All-embracing fetish

According to William Pietz (1987: 23–4), the idea of fetishism originated in a mercantile intercultural space between European traders and their West African counterparts from the 15 th century onwards. The Christian merchants saw the essential character of African culture to be the Africans’ way of personifying material objects and thus misconceiving natural causal relations. Consequently, they found it difficult to regard the Africans as ‘rational’ trading partners since the latter were ignorant of the ‘real’ nature and value of things. Later on, fetishism was also seen as a form of social and political organization, where the ‘irrational primitives’ were ruled by their immoral ‘fetish priests’, who used people’s fear of the ‘fetish gods’ to promote their self-interest. During the missionary era of the 19 th century fetishism became closely associated with human sacrifices to spirits (Pietz, 1995: 23–5). However, here I wish to draw attention to the all-embracing quality of fetishism, which not only puzzled the western observers but also proved highly problematic for the early African converts. For the Europeans, the fetish seemed to be omnipresent, pervading all categories of nature and society, and therefore it was hard to see what actually constituted the ‘African religion’. Henry Meredith (1812: 34), the governor of the British fort in Winneba, described the religious life of ‘the natives of the Gold-coast’ by pointing out that ‘[t]heir object of worship, no matter what it is, goes by the indefinite term, Fetish’. According to Meredith, it was impossible to say precisely what ‘the object of worship’ actually was, because:

Fetish is a word of great license, and applied in great variety of ways: it frequently means anything forbidden. One man refuses to eat a white fowl, another a black one; saying, ‘it is fetish!’ There are places into which they do not wish a White man to enter; enquire, Why? They are fetish! To kill an alligator, or a leopard, is fetish in some places. If a person be poisoned, or unwell, in a way they cannot account for; it is fetish! In lieu of an oath to prove truth of any assertion, they take fetish. (1812: 35; emphasis in the original)

The missionary view of fetishism differed from that of the merchants, soldiers, administrators, and the like. On the one hand, they could agree that fetishism was just an illusion inside the heads of the Africans and hence the spirits that the Asante gave sacrifices to did not exist. Therefore, a missionary only needed to convince the convert that the traditional ideas were false and thus liberate his mind. On the other hand, fetishism was seen to represent evil and therefore it should be fought against and avoided (see e.g. Freeman, 1968 [1844]: 22–9). As a result, the fundamental problem of an Asante convert was that since fetishism was all-embracing, how could one possibly avoid it? Here one can see a link to the situation described by Dumont (1992 [1986]: 23–59) in his treatment of the process of an ‘outworldly individual’ becoming an ‘inworldly individual’. As the spiritual salvation is considered an ‘outworldly’ matter and this world is not only seen as meaningless in that respect but also dangerous and diabolical, the relationship between the Christian and the world has to be thoroughly reassessed. The first requirement for a Christian to live in a world filled with fetishes was the disenchantment of nature. Sacralizing or personifying plants, animals, bodies of water, rocks, and so on became perceived as a misunderstanding (see Kyei, 2001: 46). Consequently, sacred animals could be hunted, sacred rivers fished, and the catch eaten. The devil was not in nature. Of course, the introduction of the idea of a ‘physical nature’ differentiated from the spiritual and social world is an enormous question and would certainly need a treatment of its own. Here I have only briefly pointed to it as a prerequisite for the second stage, (re-)entering the society of pagans as a Christian individual. The rest of the paper focuses on that question.

Conversion

After 1901, when Asante was permanently placed under British occupation, both the Wesleyan-Methodist and Basel (later Presbyterian) missions were able to secure a footing in Asante and they were also joined by the Roman Catholic mission. The early missions made slow and steady progress, though most of their churches and schools were primarily attended by non-Asantes. For instance, in 1912, after a good 10 years of missionary work, only 2 per cent of the total population had converted (Colonial Report No. 771, 1912).

The missionaries understood their work in terms of calling the converts from pagan associations and surroundings to a Christian way of life by all means possible. They insisted that the converts had to be, at least spiritually, separated from their old allegiances and live apart as individual men and women (Williamson, 1965: 56–7). However, in a social setting where the spirit world was all pervasive an attempt to separate oneself from it spiritually could mean ultimately that one had to abandon it completely. Every aspect of Asante society could be brought under suspicion and condemned. For instance, such fundamental and at first sight commonplace matters as village living arrangements could become an insurmountable problem. Customarily, every Asante village or town was divided into quarters, where the members of a single lineage were supposed to live in several households. The lineages also had their own burial grounds in the same locality. Each of these quarters stood under the protection of its own ancestors and gods and was directed by the elders responsible for the ritual veneration of these spirits as well as the chief. Consequently, for the Christians, even everyday activities in the domestic circle with relatives could put them in contact with fetishes. Sometimes this was avoided by moving the Christians from their ‘ancestral quarters’ to detached settlements around the missions (Debrunner, 1967: 198). These new communities were called Salems, Jerusalems, or ‘White man’s towns’. Hence, the idea of ‘religious separation’ led to an actual physical separation (Williamson, 1965: 56–7). Although it has to be remembered that these changes touched only a very small minority of the Asante people, it is clear that such radical renunciation of society – and indeed of personhood – as it had been previously understood must have had a widespread shock effect.

In the early decades of colonial rule the government received an enormous number of complaints from chiefs, whose converted subjects refused to heed their summons or to provide services on the grounds that service to the chief was ‘fetish worship’. In some localities, these differences had led to violence between the Christians and ‘traditionalists’ (Tordoff, 1965: 197–8). Furthermore, there was evidence that some people had first turned to Christianity in order to avoid their traditional obligations. Some were said to be Christians in name only and to have converted for ‘worldly gain’, so as to avoid paying taxes collected by the chiefs, for example. It was also understood that the introduction of cocoa, a cash crop that demanded a low labour input, was making people selfish and greedy and conversion to Christianity provided a way for some of the newly rich cocoa farmers ‘to protect their money’ from the claims of their kinsmen and chiefs (Allman and Tashijan, 2000: 28–39). In some places it was reported that opposition to a particular chief had taken the form of conversion and subsequently a wholesale rejection of chiefly rule (Tordoff, 1965: 197–8). In 1905 the Governor of the Gold Coast wrote:

The tendency of Christian converts to alienate themselves from the communities to which they belong is very marked, and is naturally resented by the chiefs, who claim their hereditary right, in which they are supported by Government, to make the converts in common with their fellow tribesmen obey such laws and orders as are in accordance with native custom, not being repugnant to natural justice, equity and good conscience. (quoted in Busia, 1968 [1951]: 133–4)

Separating religion and politics

The colonial authorities tried to come up with a solution for the conflict in 1912, when the Governor of the Gold Coast visited Asante. He met a committee consisting of the chief commissioner, three other government officials, and representatives of the Christian missions – Wesleyan, Basel, and Roman Catholic missionaries. This committee, made up of only European members, drew up rules for the chiefs and the churches. The two rules regulating chief-subject relations were: ‘1) no Christian shall be called upon to perform any fetish rites or service, but shall be bound to render customary service to his chief on ceremonial occasions when no element of fetish practice is involved’; and ‘2) an effort should be made to draw a distinction between fetish and purely ceremonial service’ (quoted in Busia, 1968 [1951]: 134).

When a Christian convert refused to perform a service required of him on the ground that it was ‘fetish’, the district commissioners were to decide whether it involved a ‘fetish’ or not (Busia, 1968 [1951]). Furthermore, it was stated that all Christians belonged to the jurisdiction of their chiefs’ courts and they had to attend court when summoned (Allman and Tashijan, 2000: 31). It would be impossible to list all the things that finally became included in the category of ‘fetishism’ and thus not mandatory for the Christians, but what is important is that a real attempt was made to separate in detail the religious from the political and thus secularize the Asante chieftaincy. However, the separation remained vague, to say the least.

Through this distinction, a ‘right-bearing individual’ was also placed at the centre of the political society. From now on, a person’s ‘free choice’ of religion determined the nature of his/her relationship to his/her chief and consequently the previously dominant traditional view of the ‘constitution’ of the Asante polity was challenged. To put it another way, the Christian Asante of the early colonial period were depicted increasingly as ‘citizens’ of their natal chiefdoms.

The committee’s ruling managed to clarify the relationship between chiefs and their Christian subjects to some extent. The following year, 1913, the Chief Commissioner of Ashanti wrote that the new rules ‘have so far had the effect of lessening the breach between the factions’ and the relations now showed a ‘decided improvement’ (Colonial Report No. 771, 1912). Nonetheless, enough ambiguity remained and disputes about the borderline between religion and politics did continue. One of the most significant incidents took place in 1942, when Christian clergy, both European and local, submitted a petition to the Asantehene, in which they requested that Christians should not be forced to treat Thursdays as days of rest. Previously, the Asantehene and his council had decreed that farm work on Thursdays, a sacred weekday for the Asante ‘earth-goddess’ Asase Yaa, was an offence (Busia, 1968 [1951]: 135). The petition was titled ‘Memorandum on the relation between Christians and the State’ and it argued that the converts were loyal to their chiefs but could not rest on Thursdays because Sunday was already their holy day. The petition was eventually turned down by the king, but it showed how a group of people that had been constantly growing in numbers was thinking about their relationship to their rulers. The three quotes that follow are from the memorandum and they reveal some notable changes in the ways the state was conceptualized:

On the part of the chiefs we would ask that they accept as a fact the existence of Christians as members of their State and lay down ways by which they can show their allegiance to their chiefs without at the same time offending their Christian conscience (e.g. if a chief orders community work, say on roads, to take place on a Sunday as being the day most suitable to the majority of his subjects, he might at the same time state that Christians may do their share of the work on the preceding Saturday … )

 … We believe that the Christian Community is large enough for the State to be the loser if Christians are cut off from a share in the country’s political life. If no recognized place exists in Native Customary Law for those who do not believe in ‘fetish’, has not the time come in view of many changing circumstances for the adaptation of Native Customary Law in order that it may include in its provisions all loyal citizens?

 … Our members, if they observe the day, cannot do so for the ancient Ashanti reason. The question arises should they be asked to observe the day out of respect for the beliefs of others in the community. We feel that we cannot ask this of our members, in that to refrain from work on Thursday would be to them a confession of faith in Asase Yaa and her relation to harvest and famine and therefore a denial of the Fatherhood and providential care of God. A like difficulty of conscience holds in relation to other special days and observances which have a similar significance to Asase Yaa. If, however, the chief reason behind this observance is not so much the association with Asase Yaa as a desire for some communal act to express the unity of the nation, we would ask whether there is not some other act of allegiance in which the Christians could take part; an act which would not place the working life of farmers under the disadvantage of refraining from work on two days in the week. (quoted in Busia, 1968 [1951]: 220–22; emphasis added)

Here one is able to see how the Christians had developed their own individualistic understanding of chieftaincy, which on the surface could look very much like the traditional ‘holistic’ chieftaincy, but which ultimately rested on an entirely different foundation. ‘The external continuity hides a revolution’, as Dumont (1971: 31) himself succinctly put it.

Decades later, as Ghana gained its status as an independent nation-state and chieftaincy became at odds with the administration of the post-colonial state, the legitimacy of chieftaincy has been both questioned and supported by arguments on how the chiefs ‘represent’ people. Nowadays, when traditional institutions are being evaluated by the standards of western democracy, good governance, and human rights, not only by governments but also by NGOs and international development aid donors, it is important to consider when, how, and why chieftaincy became identified as a ‘political institution’.

Concluding remarks

As Jonathan Parry (1998: 153) has pointed out, Dumont inherited from Mauss the interest in studying ‘the progressive fragmentation of an originally unified conceptual order’. Accordingly, in his work secularization, whether it concerned the differentiation between kingly and priestly orders in India (Dumont, 1980 [1966]: 287–313) or church and state in Europe (Dumont, 1992 [1986]: 60–103), was a historical development – an evolution of a sort (Parry, 1998: 151–3). Similar genealogical accounts on the development of secularism have ensued more recently (e.g. Taylor, 2007). The case of Asante chiefship is clearly different. The Christian conversion and the demarcation of a ‘political sphere’ by an administrative order that followed should be perceived as a rupture or a crisis rather than an endpoint of a long-term process. One is witnessing a unified order getting hacked into pieces instead of its gradual fragmentation. And yet, Dumont’s notion of structure proves very helpful in analysing these revolutionary changes. By adopting his idea of religion as the ‘all-embracing normative consideration’, one is much better equipped to understand the vast problems posed by fetishism to the converts and the radical denial of society that was their response.

Finally, returning to the breach between the political and religious discourses on chieftaincy in contemporary Ghana, it is evident that the tension between Christianity and chieftaincy has not been resolved. Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity has been characterized as a ‘cult of discontinuity’, because the converts are expected to make a complete break with their pre-conversion lives, after which they are to distance themselves from the social world and its demonic influences. The interesting point is that pre-conversion cosmologies are not abandoned completely as lies or delusions, but they are preserved and regularly engaged with. Consequently, Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity accepts the ontological claims of traditional religion concerning the existence of gods, ancestral spirits and their powers, but it does not agree on the moral values attached to them. It demonizes the indigenous spirit world and leads the followers of true Christianity to combat the spirits as representatives of the devil (Robbins, 2004b: 127–9). In this sense the present-day born-again Christians resemble the first Asante converts. However, where they differ drastically is in their attitude towards politics. If the early converts seemed to be content to have become recognized as individual ‘citizens’ with a Christian conscience, the present-day Pentecostals are now openly questioning the idea of a modern secular political order encompassing the religious (see e.g. Gifford, 2004: 161–90). Not only is chieftaincy rejected as a pagan institution, but also representative government without a born-again Christian leader and God’s guidance is seen as a threat to the nation. Thus the separation between religion and politics has not resulted in a wholesale secularization of society according to any existing or imagined western model and this, I think, is what Dumont himself would have also wanted to highlight since he considered the development in the West something very peculiar.