This fascinating volume renders visible the public and political roles of the polymorphous invisible agents that transcend African states and religious affiliations. Some of these spirits are remnants of once-visible bodies, as in John M. Combey's chapter on the changing political roles of ancestors manifested in Poro societies through Sierra Leonean history, and in Victor Igreja and Limore Racin's chapter on the post-war social agency of dead Mozambican soldiers. Other spirits, never having been bodies, possess the living, such as those whom Barbara Meier identifies as being incarnated in Acholi prophets in Uganda; similarly, under Pentecostal influences, the Holy Spirit guides prophets to eradicate competing deities, ‘juju’ and ‘witchcraft’, as recounted by Thomas G. Kirsch in southern Zambia and Johannes Harnischfeger in eastern Nigeria. Manipulated by malicious beings, spirits are also thought to harm people, as in Kjersti Larsen's sad tale of a Zanzibari woman's recourse to explanations of invisible powers after a real-estate swindle. Isak Niehaus describes how evil afflicts South Africans to such an extent that vigilantes hunt for witches. According to Arne S. Steinforth, rumours of the spirits that support political big men such as Malawi's former President Hastings Banda have encouraged ambitious politicians to make use of specialists who claim that they can manipulate these invisible beings. These diverse cases pose a daunting task to the editors of this collection, but Barbara Meier and Arne S. Steinforth (along with Victor Igreja) admirably introduce the volume with a coherent analytical framework that explores the public and political roles of spirits.
Guided by the trail blazed by Stephen Ellis and Gerrie ter Haar's bold arguments regarding the agency of an invisible world in modern Africa, the volume is concerned with the role of spirits in the sometimes fragile and often uncertain realm of African governance. Claims for a distinctive spiritual politics might make African politics appear excessively exotic. Even while pure political secularism is elusive globally, it remains a goal for many, believers or not, in Africa and elsewhere. To take one example from the volume: Isak Niehaus tells us that South Africans feel that witchcraft should remain in the private sphere and ‘does not belong in the public realm of governance’ (p. 124). The claims of these South Africans demonstrate that political secularism has a particular history. In this case, it probably reflects the history of a state unconcerned with the afflictions of the people. The ethnographies presented here point to the legacies of a political secularism imposed on diverse societies as a colonial project.
The volume's analysis is driven by cultural differences between diverse African societies and the West. In part due to the commitment to revealing emic perspectives, there is little about changing social formations that might transcend cultural differences, for example the expansion of scale through urbanization and globalization or the development of relations of production. The focus here is on a plurality of culturally determined modernities, with an almost Malinowski-era ‘culture contact’ as a determinant of change. In combatting a modernist teleology led by a Western experience and a deterministic materialism, the scholars of this volume no longer offer arguments that reach beyond cultural explanations to explore broader patterns of continuity and change in lived, felt and imagined realities.
By using spirits as a unit of analysis, the authors avoid pejorative terms to refer to African invisible worlds (such as magic, fetish or witchcraft). Spirits also do not imply the unity of belief that some scholarship claims is characteristic of established religions. Whether internal or external to ‘religion’, spirits are not limited to denominational or political units (unfortunately, there is little here on mainline Christianity and Islam). By basing analysis around emic perceptions of spirits, rather than on an exegesis of religious ideas, the authors present belief as a lived reality. Collectively, they promise to correct scholarship that, to date, does not ‘have a very strong record at taking cosmological ideas for ontological fact’ (p. 30).
Spiritual ontologies, the editors argue, are bound up with healing practices. The titles of the four parts of the book correspond to different elements of healing: ‘assessing uncertainties’, ‘curing’, ‘mending’ and ‘reconciling’. Perhaps, but to this reader healing does not emerge organically from the individual cases, not even from the ‘wide, polysemous notion of healing’ (p. 27) proposed by the editors. The chapters show that spirits engage with emotions related to death, disappointment, inequality, misfortune, and moral and political uncertainty. In this sense, spirits affectively ‘heal’. However, reducing spirits to healing ignores the other roles and forms of spirits: for example, spirits promote violence, as the editors acknowledge (pp. 24–5). Moreover, a healing idiom might become yet another interpretive strategy that refutes the ontological relevance of spirits by offering a secular terminology.
The editors and most chapter authors take issue with a Western, normative view of secularism, in particular when it is treated as a measure of modernity. Yet therein lies the conundrum at the heart of this volume. On the one hand, Florence Bernault's chapter argues that representations of an African ‘failure’ to achieve secularization are reverberations of colonial ethnocentrism, even racism. On the other hand, there is the claim to depart from a Western secularization narrative, treat spirits as a lived reality, and recognize their public roles. But if secularism is a measure of Western modernity, for Western scholars and their audiences it appears prejudiced to present Africans as anything but secular. The struggle to align political intuition with ethnographic observation still appears in this volume. Fortunately, these essays allow the spirits to flourish.
