Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History

Syncretism and Religious ChangeAuthor(s): J. D. Y. PeelSource: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Jan., 1968), pp. 121-141Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/177725 .Accessed: 18/04/2011 12:08

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SYNCRETISM AND RELIGIOUS CHANGE

A superficial view of what happens when a large number of people forsake their former religion for a new one is that some of the old beliefs become mixed with the new. It is a commonplace to hear that folk Catholicism is mixed with pagan survivals, or that newly converted African Christians are "not real Christians" or "have a veneer of Christianity", because they have not totally abandoned all that they once believed. Such a judgment, however ethnocentric, would be pardonable in a European missionary who held a particular view of Christianity, which itself furnished a clear criterion of "real Christianity". But similar opinions are often expressed by sociologists and anthropologists who profess themselves neutral with respect to religious belief. They are usually interested in "acculturation" or "culture contact" and consider it of great moment to be able to say how far any particular belief or practice lies along a continuum whose poles are marked "tradi- tional" and "acculturated". Such assumptions underlay Malinowski's much- criticized scheme for the analysis of culture-contact in Africa and the great bulk of the work, by Linton, Wallace, Lanternari and others, on independent religious movements.' This tradition of interpretation is still very much alive.

It is the object of this paper to consider what happens when previously pagan peoples change their religion, and to suggest the serious limitations of any approach which centres on acculturation. The material is mainly drawn from the Yoruba of Western Nigeria (of whom over 90% profess to be Christian or Muslim, roughly half and half of each), and particularly the independent Aladura churches.

Yoruba Religious Attitudes

Many African independent churches - and the Aladura or "praying" churches I B. Malinowski, Dynamics of Culture Change (1943), Chap. III, criticized by M. Gluckman, "Malinowski's Functional Analysis of Social Change", Africa, XVII (1947), and by G. Balandier, Sociologie Actuelle de l'Afrique Noire (1955), Chap. I; on religious mnovements, R. Linton, "Nativistic Movements", Amer. Anthr., XLV (1943), A. F. C. Wallace, "Revitalization Movements", ibid., LVIII (1956), and V. Lanternari, The Religions of the Oppressed (1963), are typical.

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among them - present an odd paradox when viewed in this light. They can make the legitimate claim that they oppose the traditional religion and all its works with much more strenuous rigour than do the members of missionary churches, whose creeds, organizations and rituals were largely pre-made in Europe. Yet the European observer, whether missionary or acculturation anthropologist, can only see their difference from the missionary churches as residing in their being more nativist, syncretist or traditional.2 The Aladura outlook on religion and culture is distinctive among the various ways in which the Yoruba, themselves very divided among three religions and many sects, see these matters, and to understand it we must go back to the situation in which religious change first took place.

The first Yoruba Christians were freed slaves, converted in Sierra Leone, and the missions followed them back to Abeokuta in Yorubaland in the 1840's.3 The evidence for what the Yoruba initially thought of Christianity is slight, but a story handed down at Abeokuta exemplifies what must have been widespread assumptions.4 The C.M.S. missionaries brought as presents for the Alake and chiefs a Bible (from Queen Victoria) and a steel corn-mill (from the Prince Consort), and the leading chief wanted to sacrifice to the corn-mill when he had seen its marvellous operation. Christianity was asso- ciated with European culture (for which the Saro, or repatriated ex-slaves, were an ever-present advertisement); and a piece of novel and effective technology could be seen in terms of Yoruba religion. There is ample evi- dence of widespread respect for, and interest in, the positive aspects of Christianity, even where this interest did not go as far as conversion.

This response must be related to the character of traditional Yoruba religion. This comprised a discrete and variegated system of beliefs, very different from the closely-integrated religious systems of which we have accounts for most African peoples.5 A rather remote supreme God; a vast range of subordinate gods or orisa, some widespread and some localized, mostly specialized in function, whose devotees formed cult-groups; lineage ancestors of relatively minor importance; an important system of divination called Ifa, whose priests (babalawo) were consulted on most issues of public and private significance - these were its main elements. It is not really

2 Cf. E. G. S. Parrinder, Religion in an African City (1951) or K. Little, West African Urbanization (1966). Even Bishop Sundkler, in his memorable book, Bantu Prophets in South Africa (rev. ed., 1961) tends to make this assumption - "new wine in old wineskins". 3 For mission history in Nigeria cf. J. F. Ade Ajayi, Christian Missions in Nigeria 1841-1891 (1965), and E. A. Ayandele, Missionary Enterprise and the Evolution of Modern Nigeria 1875-1914 (1967). 4 This is told by A. K. Ajisafe, A History of Abeokuta (Abeokuta, 1924). 5 Cf. C. D. Forde, The Yoruba-speaking Peoples of South Western Nigeria (1951) for a bibliography of the vast literature on Yoruba religion and society; S. Johnson, The History of the Yorubas (1921), is of basic importance as an account of nineteenth- century practices among the Oyo Yoruba.

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properly called a "primitive" religion because that process of rationalization which results from one people realizing about other peoples' gods had already begun. Besides certain general similarities in religious concepts (such as ideas about the soul or the High God) within West Africa,6 we find very specific similarities between Yoruba deities and those worshipped by neighbouring peoples. The Igunnu cult was introduced from Nupe; the sea-god Olokun is shared with Benin; the smallpox-god Sopona is worshipped as an earth-god Sakpata in Dahomey and sometimes carries the epithet Oluwaiye (lord of the earth); Ifa divination, similar in principle if variable in precise form, is found over very wide areas of the Western Sudan and Guinea Coast.7 The process of borrowing, comparison and adaptation, often between religious systems which differ considerably in their totality, is a consequence of in- creased intercourse within an area, as a result of war and trade. A similar situation prevailed in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East for several centuries prior to the establishment of the dogmatic and prophetic world religions.

Similar developments took place among the Yoruba peoples (who have never at any time enjoyed political unity, and who only came to call them- selves by a common name in the late nineteenth century). Some orisa, like Sango the thunder-god and Oduduwa the hero-ancestor of the Yoruba, spread with the influence of Old Oyo. Much of the disagreement about the nature of Yoruba religion can be traced to the difficulty of reconciling particularized local conceptions of orisa with an emergent central tradition, which early ethnographies presented as a kind of orthodoxy, which it was not. Likewise in classical Greece there was a steady tendency for all kinds of localized deities to be related to the major Olympians; the great gods were presented with local, and often bizarre, attributes.8 The process went on outside Greece. Herodotus, with a great respect for Egyptian antiquity, tried to harmonize Greek and Egyptian traditions about Heracles, if necessary modifying the Greek ones.9 Later the gods of the Olympian pantheon were paired off with Roman ones - in some cases rather bad matches. There are two important differences between the situations in West Africa and the Ancient World. In West Africa the forces which produced rationalization of local religion very soon produced world religions, Islam and Christianity, whereas these only emerged in the Ancient World after many centuries of highly sophisti- cated and rationalized "paganism"; while in the Ancient World the developing trade and communications which stimulated the rationalization also brought

6 Such as those cited by M. Fortes, Oedipus and Job in West African Religion (1959), pp. 19-25. 7 Cf. G. Maupoil, La Ge'omancie de l'Ancienne Cote des Esclaves (1943). 8 On Greece, cf. the great compilation of L. R. Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States (5 vols., 1896-1909); for a similar situation in India, cf. the essay by McKim Marriott in Village India: Studies in the Little Community (1955), pp. 195-200. 9 Herodotus, Histories, II. 42-45.

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literacy - a most important determinant of the character of religious thought, as we shall see.

A corollary of this modification of local religion was that religion was no longer "the cement of society" in the same way that it is where an all-impor- tant ancestor cult sustains a segmentary lineage system - for ancestors, unlike orisa, cannot be shared with unrelated groups, and in fact the orisa cult- groups cut across the lineages in membership.10 The individual was allowed to choose his cult-group; or at a crisis in his life he might be advised to join that of a particular orisa by the diviner, a priest of Ifa. Ifa divination helped articulate the various orisa cults, but it had no especial commitment to the traditional religion against Islam and Christianity, and has often been re- garded by Yoruba adherents of these religions as a source of esoteric tra- ditional wisdom which they are quite justified in consulting.11 Politico-religious coherence was and is provided by the Oba, the sacred King, who stands between his subjects and the ultimate powers - a function he can perform whether these powers are regarded as being orisa or the One God preached by the prophetic religions. There is a fortunate ambiguity in the position of a ruler like the Yoruba Oba or the divinized Roman Emperor (whose relation to the competing cults of his subjects was very similar); he can fulfil the same cohesive role under paganism and under Islam or Christianity because his sacredness is not exclusively identified with the traditional religion, and can be put on a new footing - he becomes a King by the Grace of God, or Christ's Vicar. Justinian was much more effectively a divine king than Diocletian.

So the differentiation of social and religious allegiance at the level of individual belief and ritual is balanced by a unity at a higher level. Such a "functional autonomy", as Gouldner has argued,12 facilitates change in the autonomous sphere. Religious tolerance is probably the greatest among peoples like the Romans or the Yoruba in the nineteenth century - who had left behind a localized primitive religion in which to be a member of the society at all meant to subscribe to a particular cultus, and who had not yet adopted a prophetic religion whose adherents regarded it as the sole way of truth and whose unique importance was such that it might be maintained by coercion. A further source of tolerance lies in the character of the religion for the individual - it tends to be concerned predominantly with easing the conditions of living in tllis world, and is seen by its adherents as having instrumental as well as expressive value. The more religion is regarded as a technique, whose effectiveness the individual may estimate for himself, the readier will the individual be to try out other techniques which seem prom-

10 Cf. WV. R. Bascom, The Sociological Role of the Yoruba Cult Group (1944). 11 On this aspect of Ifa, cf. Wande Abimbola, "Ifa", African Notes, II 1(1965). 12 A. W. Gouldner, "Reciprocity and Autonomy in Functional Theory", Chap. VIII of L. Gross (ed.), Symposium on Sociological Theory (1959).

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ising. He will not be inclined to rely exclusively on one technique just for the sake of simplicity, nor will he be intolerant towards other individuals who prefer other techniques. Chief Sagbua of Abeokuta appreciated the power of the corn-mill, and in so far as it was a Christian technique, was well-disposed to Christianity. The sources of "spiritual power" (i.e. ability to perform feats as a result of supernatural intervention or celestial knowl- edge) were mysterious, manifold and widely spread; illumination might come from remote quarters, and a dogmatic reliance on one source was foolish and pointless. In the same spirit the Emperor Alexander Severus (222-235), as Pontifex Maximus head of the old Roman state religion, and himself regarded as semi-divine throughout the Empire, had a private chapel in which there were statues of Orpheus, Abraham, Christ and Apollonius of Tyana, all mighty prophetai and benefactors of the human race.'3 Sagbua and many Yoruba were ready to accept Christianity and Islam in the same spirit as that in which the originally Nupe cult of Igunnu had been in- corporated; but they did not understand the unique claims made by these religions, and tried to soften their uncompromising outlines. They would have agreed with the Senator Symmachus when in the twilight of Roman paganism he pleaded that the pagan Altar of Victory might not be removed from the Senate House: "non uno itinere potest perveniri ad tam grande secretum".'4

Yoruba Christianity

We may now return to the situation of the early Yoruba Christians. At the beginning, when the contrast between them and their non-Christian com- patriots was sharpest, their life centred on the prominent two-storey mission houses, dominated by a missionary, symbols of Christianity and Civilization. Later when numbers had increased somewhat they were much less separated, and separate Christian villages (such as the Catholics established in the Congo) were few, and even then usually mixed Christian and pagan.'5 The Christians did form a distinctive group in society however, and were barred by religion from partaking of some aspects of public life - such as member- ship of the important politico-religious Ogboni Society.'6 Yet the Christians 13 Cf. E. R. Dodds, Christian and Pagan in an Age of Anxiety (1965), p. 107. The story is told in the Historia Augusta, written by pagan sympathizers in the late fourth century; even if, as Mr. T. D. Barnes of The Queen's College Oxford has suggested to me, the story is not true (Prof. Dodds accepts it), it illustrates the same attitude of mind in certain circles of the fourth century. 14 "There cannot be only one path to such a great secret": cited by A. D. Nock, Conversion (1933), p. 260. 15 On Christian villages, cf. Ajayi, op. cit., pp. 114-117; they appealed more to the Catholic than to the Protestant missions. 16 Cf. Ajayi, op. cit., pp. 189, 225, on Christian attitudes to Ogboni; some laymen did in fact join.

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did not withdraw from society - they fought as a separate corps in war, and eventually had chieftaincies reserved for them, as had the Muslims too. This was possible because the loose relationship between religion and society permitted the separateness of the new religion to be recognised within the political framework. This accommodation to the state was no doubt facilitated by the Lutheran background of many of the C.M.S. missionaries.

The problem was more acute at the level of individual belief. Where did the old religion stand in the light of the new? It was dismembered. The old Supreme Being, Olodumare, was regarded as the same being as the Christian God, now more perfectly revealed.'7 This was easy since Olodumare's cultus had been non-existent or minimal, and so could not be seen as fetishism or idolatry. By the end of the century the splendid and evocative epithets tra- ditionally used to describe Olodumare had in many cases been annexed to the Christian God, and these, or epithets like them (oriki Eleda ni ede wa, "the praise-names of the Creator in our tongue", a leading member of an Aladura church called them) are used in churches today.'8 The word "Olodumare" (which is of uncertain etymology) was used in the Yoruba Bible to translate "Almighty".

This tactic was not possible with the orisa, whose worship was clear idolatry. The alternatives were to regard them as non-existent, simple delu- sions, or as dangerous and seductive devils. The former is only possible where converts are so removed from the social situations in which orisa are worshipped, and from the occurrences and evidences which are explained by their activity, that they no longer constitute a problem to be overcome and can just be forgotten. These conditions were hardly achieved at all until well into the twentieth century, when young men could say in 1931 "that the heathens are only deceiving the people by putting on rags, voicing ho ho ho, and saying there is Egungun inside".19 The early converts certainly regarded them as diabolical - a viewpoint which was undoubtedly strength- ened by the choice of the name of one of the orisa, Eshu, to translate "Devil" in the Bible. Just the same form of accommodation was found in the later Roman Empire, when Christians were quite prepared to concede the exist- ence and the malign activity of the pagan gods, which they called daimones - Socrates' good daimon became a demon.20 There were similar alternatives with witches. Did one deny their existence with robust rationalism, or

17 E. B. Idowu, Olodumare: God in Yoruba Belief (1962), argues that Olodumare was not as remote as other African High Gods, and shows that in places there is a cultus to him. 18 Cf. A. A. Abiola, Isipaya Asiri Adura (Revelation of the Secret of Prayer) (Ibadan, n.d.), by an Apostle in the Seraphim; or the Anglican Rev. S. M. Abiodun's, Akojo Oruko Olorun (Collection of the Names of God) (Lagos, 1919). 19 Quoted in "Complaint against Cherubim and Seraphim Society by the Bales of Agodo, Alatare and other village people, 4th June 1931", before the Alake of Abeokuta, typescript proceedings, Sosan Papers (University of Ibadan Library). 20 On daimones cf. Dodds, op. cit., pp. 37, 124-125.

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emphasize the effectiveness of Christianity against them? Ajayi notes the confusion caused by C.M.S. ambiguity on this score; 21 but most Christians, now as then, certainly believe in their existence (which is less tied down to a particular social order than is that of the orisa), and may trust in Chris- tianity as a protection from their malice.

The orisa, however, though personalized gods, are not clearly separated from ogun - charms and medicines colloquially called "juju". Some orisa are barely more than what works in a particular field, while some ogun must be invoked in order to work, or require incantations to be said. The category ogun includes all the extensive pharmacopoeia of the Yoruba, whose purpose was obviously good, and which was seen as a simple parallel to European medicines. A line had to be drawn somewhere between devils and medicine. The line was drawn generously and what fell on its permissible side was defined as not religious. Many Yoruba Anglican clergymen were renowned for their knowledge of native medicine, and in some cases published pam- phlets about it; 22 Christian prayer could, if need be, replace incantation. Ifa divination was more difficult; it was a salvationist element in a somewhat fatalist religion and, though associated with an orisa Orunmila, stood apart from the rest of Yoruba paganism. Its predictive efficacity was still almost universally accepted, and few laymen either ignored it or declined to consult it occasionally. Yoruba clergymen were the first to collect the Odu (versified responses) of Ifa, and they defined it as "Yoruba philosophy", a valuable part of Yoruba traditional culture which was not religion and so was per- missible.23 This attitude was not universal among the clergy, most of whom did define Ifa as pagan.

It is a pity we do not have more collected material on just how missionaries present a new religion. Two broad approaches may be discerned. The first emphasizes the discontinuity involved in adopting a new religion, and seems to predominate among those Protestants who draw on the evangelical ideal of total regeneration. This stemmed from a situation where men were being invited to change from atheism, irreligion or non-religion to a particular kind of religion - thus Wesley saw the nature of his conversions. This atti- tude was always present among evangelicals in Nigeria, but especially after the impact of the vigorous Keswick revivalism of the 1880's, when some

21 Ajayi, op. cit., p. 264. H. R. Trevor-Roper, "The Witch Craze", Encounter, XXVIII (1967), shows changes in the attitude of the Church in Europe to the existence of witches. 22 For example, Rev. J. S. Adejumo, Anglican pioneer at Ife, Dr. N. D. Oyerinde, leading founder of the Baptist Seminary at Ogbomosho, and A. K. Ajisafe, a prominent layman in the African Church, all of whom exchanged recipes with the father of an acquaintance of mine, the late Mr. E. M. P. Dada, of Ibadan. 23 Such as Adejumo, described as "The Yoruba Philosopher of Ife", in the West African Nationhood, 21 Aug. 1931; cf. Archdeacon T. A. J. Ogunbiyi's booklet Iwe Itan Ifa etc. (Story of Ifa) (Lagos, n.d.) or Rev. D. 0. Epega's The Mystery of Yoruba Gods (1932).

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misionaries regarded Africans as being either without religion, or with such a degraded religion that it was worse than atheism. Such men are not likely to be very good missionaries.

The other attitude emphasizes the continuity between the old and the new, and, in the absence of a social cataclysm which will make men want to reject the past utterly, is likely to be a better approach in practice. We see it in the writings of Pere Tempels on Baluba beliefs,24 and in Pater Schmidt's thesis that the most primitive religion was a pure monotheism,25 but it is not confined to Roman Catholics. The early Danish missionaries in the Gold Coast adopted it,26 and it has been the dominant strain of the C.M.S. in Yorubaland, especially as preached by Yoruba clergy. Thus Arch- deacon Ogunbiyi compared sacrifices (ebo) in Yoruba paganism with the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ on behaff of Christians, to emphasize the superior effectiveness of Christianity.27 Other Christians have drawn a parallel between sacrifice as the way the pagan approaches his god, and prayer as the Christian's way;28 or have compared Ifa as the ancestral guide of the Yorubas with Christ as the guide of the Yoruba Christian.29 Those who adopt this approach tend to see the two religions as bodies of belief and practice with similar boundaries, purposes and objects - it is just that the content of their assertions is different and that one is more effective than the other. Yet by making what seemed to them to be descriptive comparisons between the religions, these Yoruba theologians (for such they were), were actually delimiting the boundaries of Yoruba "religion" in a new way, and were putting forward a particular conception of the nature of Christianity.

The African Churches

The cultural debate about the place of Christianity in Yoruba society was conducted most energetically within the African churches, of which several were founded between 1888 and 1901.30 These churches, created by, for the most part, laymen who broke away from the Anglicans, Methodists and Baptists, were stimulated by disgust at the wave of restricting paternalism which passed through the missions in the 1890's. But the real motive of the founders was the conviction that the churches were still exotic institutions, 14 R. P. Tempels, Bantu Philosophy (1959). 25 W. Schmidt, Die Ursprung der Gottesidee, 12 vols. (1912-55). 26 Cf. D. W. Bro-kensha, Social Change at Larteh, Ghana (1966), chap. II. 27 Ogunbiyi, op. cit., p. 40. 28 Cf. editorial of the Lagos newspaper Akede Eko for 30 May 1931 on the Aladura revival - "Adura l'ebo" (prayer is the sacrifice). 29 Thus Epega in an article "Ifa Amona Baba wa, Jesu Kristi Amona wa" (Ifa Guide of our Fathers, Jesus Christ our guide), in Akede Eko, 3 Dec. 1932. 30 This account is based very largely on J. B. Webster, The African Churches among the Yoruba, 1888-1922 (1964).

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and would remain so until, led by Africans, they purged themselves of their adventitious and inessential European cultural trappings. Theologically their formal innovations were few; but in organization, in evangelistic and pastoral methods, in the use of Yoruba music and, to a lesser extent, in liturgical forms, in their readiness to accept without cavil such customs as polygamy, they changed the aspect of Christianity considerably. For twenty years or so their founders' initial enthusiasm carried them forward vigorously, but by 1920 their desire to compete with the smart mission churches in Lagos in social respectability had caused their pace to slacken.

Can these churches be called syncretist? Not if we mean by that a desire to unite in one system what they saw as valuable in Christianity with what they identified as traditional Yoruba religion. Rather the opposite, for they justified their innovations on the grounds that the non-religious aspects of Christianity, which were owed to European culture, were being replaced by Yoruba non-religious elements. When Chief J. K. Coker, the Saro leader of the African Church, spoke about African Christianity, he meant the same Christianity in African form. He was accused of making concessions to paganism, especially in the matter of polygamy, but although he was no doubt more tolerant of Yoruba pagan practices than the English Bishop of Lagos, it was because he had to live with them and wished to change them. The demarcation of essential Christianity and African or European customs was necessary to this project. In the case of polygamy, Coker tried to show that it was practised in the Old Testament, not forbidden in the New, and that European monogamy was due to "simply the universal customs and laws of the pagan Greeks and Roman".3'

A syncretist is a man who sees some good, as many Yorubas have done, in his traditional religious practices and beliefs, identified as such, and attempts to synthesize them with new beliefs in a harmonious religious system. If their own nature had permitted it, Christianity and Islam would have been syncretized into Yoruba paganism just as Alexander Severus tried to romanize Christianity in the third century. To do this with a prophetic religion means explaining away its uncompromising claim of uniqueness, and this most Yoruba Christians and Muslims have not been prepared to do in a formal and explicit way. Rather they have followed a pattern of behaviour which is inconsistent on the cultural plane, however reasonable and understandable - they have been pluralists, going to church or mosque and also, when they wanted, to a babalawo.32 This is reasonable behaviour, for they want clear and well-defined this-worldly goals, and they pursue whatever means they have any reason to suppose effective; the sources of spiritual power are manifold and none need be rejected. It is only where logical coherence, rather than

31 J. K. Coker, A Review of the Problem of Polygamy (Lagos, 1934). 32 Cf. M. J. Field, Search for Security (1960), p. 52, about the clientele of shrines in southern Ghana.

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practical efficacity, is the prime end of action, that an attempt will be made to create a new system of behaviour; but this has only been attempted by a minority of Yoruba Christians. For the ordinary man "cognitive dissonance" is the least of the troubles which a man might seek to avoid. A most prominent feature of the beliefs and actions of the explicit syncretists and of the Aladuras (who are often misleadingly called syncretists) is their marked logical coherence, which sets them both apart, in different ways, from other Yoruba Christians.

The Aladura Churches33

During the very rapid expansion of Christianity which occurred from the time of the British occupation in the 1890's there emerged a group of part- time evangelists, less well-educated than the native clergy, some of whom had experienced a distinct spiritual experience akin to the prophet's call. They were often itinerant, tramping about the country, preaching the Gospel. They saw however vaguely that the future would be radically different from the past, and that Christianity was the religion of the future. It was more powerful than any pagan cult, and differed from them in that it demanded exclusive adherence; idols must be utterly rejected and the Christian should rely on prayer (adura) to his omnipotent God. The superior truth of Chris- tianity was to be evidenced by the effects of prayer; it was assumed that similar things were to be prayed for.

These preachers contributed to the emergence of the first two Aladura (i.e., praying) churches, The Precious Stone Church or Faith Tabernacle (now called the Christ Apostolic Church) founded in 1918, and the Cherubim and Seraphim in 1925. The former arose at the time of a terrible influenza epi- demic, and of several other disasters: bubonic plague in 1925-26, the depression beginning in late 1930 and continuinlg till the late 1930's, famine in 1932, all at a time of widespread and rapid social change. During the 'twenties their membership was strongest among young men in the newer quarters of the towns - clerks, traders, tailors, etc., in many cases the children of the con- verts of the 1890's, and keen lay members of the churches themselves. The religion of such men involved much rationalistic Bible reading and doctrinal argument and until 1930 was of very restricted popular appeal. After 1930, prophets, notab]y Joseph Babalola, initiated a series of massive popular revivals, which caused wholesale conversion among large numbers of pagan farmers. From these origins has grown the thriving but fragmented Aladura movement of today, whose main beliefs must now be summarized. 33 In this section I draw on material from J. D. Y. Peel, "A Sociological Study of Two Independent Churches among the Yoruba" (unpublished London Ph.D. thesis, 1966); Dr. H. W. Turner and Mr. R. C. Mitchell have also done research on the Aladuras.

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Their central claim is that God is powerful, and when prayed to with trust answers all prayers. A professed belief in the efficacy of prayer was no new thing among Yoruba Christians if we may believe Chief Awolowo.34 Healing and prosperity were the goods most prayed for. Besides asserting the potency of prayer, the Aladuras have specified conditions for successful prayer. One must pray with faith; one's prayers will be better heard in the Cherubim and Seraphim because it is a special recipient of divine favour as is shown in its services, or in the Christ Apostolic Church because it has the right doctrines; one is helped by such spiritual techniques as fasting or using specially effec- tive psalms or names of God, as in the following: Psalm 108. Pray this Psalm at the Entrance of your door for 7 days when going to business; you will prosper in all your ways. Holy names are VI-JEHOVAH, JADI, SARENI, NAKONI. Use prayer under Psalm 16.35 Here the process of successful prayer is seen as partly like working a recipe and partly like asking someone to do something - someone who, being God, can give, but on moral conditions. In this respect the 'theory' of prayer is ambiguous, part technology and part theology, and recalls to mind the in- distinctness of the boundary in traditional society between invoking orisa and using ogun.

While prayer is a means of counteracting present distress, visions, sought by prayer and fasting, and dreams, are a means of knowing the future as God reveals it. Asceticism directed to the seeing of visions is very widespread among ardent members of the churches, and several leading prophets have issued books of asotele (prophecies of the future). These asotele predict dangers which express God's anger at mankind's wickedness; Aladura mem- bers can pray to be delivered from them. The distress and upheavals of the formative years were interpreted in two ways, which may either be seen as alternatives, appealing to people with different assumptions about the world, or as explanations of greater and lesser generality. The more radical response was to see them as an expression of God's anger at mankind's wickedness, demanding repentance; and the more traditional response was to see them as the work of Satan, or witches, calling for positive prayer to enlist God's help in frustrating them. The former view tended to be adopted by the major prophets and the young literate members who were already ardent Chris- tians, while the latter had a greater appeal to the mass of the population, to whom an interpretation in terms of God's just anger was meaningless.

Agbara (power), Iye (life), Isegun (victory over material and spiritual adversity) are the dominant themes in Aladura Christianity. They are not, however, to be secured at any price, but are the reward of total reliance on God to the exclusion of native medicines of any kind, and in some cases

34 Awo: the Autobiography of Chief Obafemi Awolowo (1960), pp. 9-11, on the early Christians of Ijebu Remo. 35 Thus J. M. Akindele, The Use and Efficacy of the Psalms (Lagos, n.d.).

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European medicine also, let alone occasional or additional use of Ifa divina- tion or sacrifice to orisa. Early constitutions of Aladura churches sometimes list in meticulous detail the various ogun which the members must renounce. They attack the ordinary Christian for actual half-reliance on a God in whom he professes complete reliance: Our God never changes position but (is) the same for ever. Howbeit for the pride of knowledge we Christians of today go about the worshipping of idols, keeping other gods besides the Almighty and Everlasting God by associating with secret societies in the disguise of perpetuating our art and culture, namely: the Ifa oracle, orunmila adulawo, ogboni fraternity, lodges of all kinds, secret societies, Sango and Oya (the gods and goddesses of stones, iron, fire, lightning and water), igunu, eyo, adamuorisa, gelede, egungun, nmawun (masqueraders) etc. etc. Any person still interested in the above is worshipping other gods contrary to the first and second commandments. A live Christian must steer clear of all these practices - Evil communication corrupts good manners.:36

Thus the founder of the Cherubim and Seraphim. But the ban of the Aladuras on medicines is the most singular repudiation of the traditional, adaptive, tolerant Yoruba attitude to beneficent techniques, whatever their origin. How did this come about?

In time of tribulation the reasonable man would be inclined to use more of whatever medicines, prayers or other techniques he had reason to suppose effective, whatever their source or rationale. We must assume as a given that the average Yoruba had some reason for supposing a great variety of means had some efficacity. But if, as was the case in 1918, nothing seemed to work, a widespread response was to assume that the usual techniques were useless, since God had removed their power. "He withholds the efficacy of leaves, barks and roots" . . . "He will send a different kind of disease which has no medicine", said the prophets.37 The Christians were able to interpret the disaster in terms of a theodicy - God was punishing his people for their sins, chief among which were idol-worship and half-hearted faith - and to proffer a new remedy, exclusive reliance on prayer; they were also able to explain failure of prayer - lack of faith or unconfessed sin. This opposition to all medicine, a spontaneous rationalization of the epidemic at Ijebu Ode, was given doctrinal expression in the teachings of Faith Tabernacle of Philadelphia, U.S.A., whose tracts the members received. The general attrac- tiveness of this rationalization passed when the epidemic was over; but while the majority rebounded to their old ways, a significant minority held out, and made exclusive divine healing the main reason for their break with the

36 Eternal Sacred Order of Cherubim and Seraphim, The Order (Lagos, n.d.), p. 52, ostensibly quoting a sermon by Moses Orimolade, their founder, in 1925; I suspect, from internal evidence, that these sentiments were not uttered until some years later, but they still represent the authentic attitude. 37 Thus Prophet Adeleke of Abeokuta in 1932 (ms. account of his vision in Sosan Papers), and Timothy Adeniji (Iran ti Brother Timothy, pamphlet of his vision, Abeo- kuta, 1932).

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C.M.S. The Aladura leaders, unlike the founders of the African churches, did not criticize the Anglicans for not being African enough but for not being Christian enough!

Such was the highly untraditional reasoning of the clerks who were the Aladura leaders. During the revivals of the 1930's when prophets preached salvation, from sickness and from witchcraft as well as from sin, more tra- ditional attitudes prevailed. The single-minded devotion to the Omi Iye, the "water of life" as the prophet sanctified it, effective to heal and to protect, can be seen as a mass predilection for the most powerful medicine of the day. Effectively, one was being healed by a "man of spiritual power", the prophet, rather than by God as a result of His power and one's own faith and moral worth. Yet in the end the view of the rationalistic, Bible-reading clerks won out - divine healing was to be done not only because it was effective (an argument which appeals most during an epidemic), but because it was right, a principle to be followed however difficult it seemed. After the revivals began the Yoruba Faith Tabernacle had joined with a British pente- costal church, the Apostolic Church, and in 1939 they broke away again to form the Christ Apostolic Church. Their main reason was that the Apostolic missionaries did not rely solely on prayer, but used quinine. So far had they travelled from the undogmatic, all-inclusive attitudes of their fathers.

There is a sense in which this aspect of Aladura Christianity is owed to their traditional modes of thought, though the outcome is best not called syncretism. The categories of traditional Yoruba thought are highly integrated (though not so much as witlh many 'primitive' peoples) - cosmological, reli- gious, medical and moral beliefs are thought to imply one another. Sickness may be caused by spiritual beings who control segments of the cosmos, so that healing is a matter of religious concern. A scientific culture asserts that the evidence of sickness is traceable to natural causes and that its cure is simply a matter of technique; it is not a sign of divine displeasure or the occasion for the re-emphasis of moral principles. Nor is religion in such a culture seen as a technique for achieving such ends as health and prosperity. Liberal and modernist theologians would be embarrassed by the assertive this-worldliness of the Christianity which the Aladuras preach, and lay Christians have only a residual belief that one's prayers really will be an- swered. If religion can change things, it is because it makes men change their minds and characters, not because it alters brute circumstances. Excep- tions to this are the consequence of folk traditions within Christianity, where the integrated outlook is partially reconstituted among peasants.

A similar attitude towards the nature of religion is to be found in other circumstances where Christianity is preached to pagan or peasant people. Prophecy and miracles were much used by Roman apologists as partial evidence for the truth of Christianity, but they had to be careful since the

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same were reported for paganism, and it was difficult to disbelieve them entirely.38 Similarly the Aladuras argue from the effectiveness of prayer against other means, but they are careful not to base their case entirely on technical efficacity. The Anglo-Saxons, whose notions about sickness and healing resemble those of the Yoruba closely,39 regarded Christianity in a similar light. The pages of Bede are embarrassingly full of miracles of healing and the effects of epidemic on religious belief, and one distinguished convert, in a celebrated passage, attributed his conversion to the new teachings being "better and more effectual" than the old ones.40

So the debt of the Aladuras to the traditional beliefs of the Yoruba is more complex than the simple copying and mixing which the stock notion of syncretism implies. Where there are parallels between Aladura and pagan rituals, this is sometimes due to the fact that both stem from an initial as- sumption about the nature of religion, but they are often quite fortuitous. For example, the services of some Aladuras are marked by pentecostalism - possession by the Holy Ghost and glossolalia - and the priests of some orisa cults, such as Sango, also become possessed, and it is often implied that here is a piece of nativism, a cultural hangover. In fact pentecostalism was not a part of the Aladura movement till 1931-32 when it was introduced by the British missionaries of the Apostolic Church, who taught it to the Yoruba members, who were at first highly sceptical of its validity, since they had been taught by Faith Tabernacle that it was a "diabolical delusion". The functions of religious dissociation are no doubt similar for the Aladura and the devotee of Sango, but Aladura pentecostalism is not a syncretism.

Ethiopianism and Syncretism

There are some Yoruba syncretists, however, whose beliefs present an illuminating contrast; they spring, appropriately, from the African churches. The first was the Ethiopian Church, founded in 1918 by S. A. Oke, whose family was prominent in the United Native African Church.4' It is probable that the disasters of that year stimulated him, and he walked about Lagos clad in a white robe with a bell, like the Aladura prophets after him, but calling himself "Messenger to Ethiopians" and preaching a very different 38 Cf. Dodds, op. cit., pp. 123-127. 39 Cf. J. H. G. Grattan and C. Singer (eds.), Anglo-Saxon Magic and Medicine, 2 vols. (1952), an edition and commentary on the semi-pagan text called Lacnunga. 40 Bede, A History of the English Church and People, Penguin ed., trans. by L. Sherley-Price (1955), especially I. 7, III. 9, IV. 3 (miracles of healing), III. 30 (where a plague causes the East Saxons to lapse into idolatry), with which cf. B. Colgrave, 'Bede's Miracle Stories", in A. H. Thompson (ed.), Bede: his Life, Times and Writings (1935), chap. VIII; the convert is a pagan priest, addressing King Edwin and Arch- bishop Paulinus of York (Bede, II. 13). 41 On the Oke family, cf. Webster, op. cit., pp. 93, 137, 154.

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message. In a widely distributed pamphlet he began by speaking of Universal Religion and how at Pentecost everyone heard the Gospel in their own tongue.42 "Christianity" is merely one form of the Heavenly Kingdom and that is subdivided into various national forms - Jewish, Romish, British (Anglican) and so forth. Islam was merely the Arabian form of the King- dom; he quotes the Koran (Sura XV 5-6) to the effect that Mohammed was not a prophet for non-Arabians. He then quotes Mary Kingsley and Dr. Blyden to prove that Africans cannot progress unless they have their own version of the Kingdom. "Let every creature rise and bring Peculiar honours to our King"; Africa must have her own religion and it will not do for the Devil always to be painted black and Christ white. (Aladuras represent Christ as being white; when I asked why, they said it was because he was a Jew, which was like a European.) The African religion must found schools and colleges "to free us from the galling yoke of our present spiritual masters and from Spiritual Slavery."

These sentiments are clearly close to the proto-nationalism which is one root of the African church movement, though Oke sharply castigates it for "working upon the principle of Europeanizing the Ethiopians". He did not specify in the pamphlet what "Ethiopianizing the Kingdom" meant in practical terms, though the pastor of the Ethiopian Church in Ibadan (there are still two or three small branches of the church) denies that any Ifa or "idol-worship" is involved.43 The services of the church look like those of an Aladura church, the Cherubim and Seraphim, whose founder was ac- quainted with Oke in Lagos in the 1920's, and who may have been influenced in some ways by him - in the wearing of white prayer-gowns for instance, or in the idea that the Cherubim and Seraphim Society is a spiritual gift intended, in the first instance, for Africans.

A certain affinity between Ethiopianism (in this sense) and the ideas of the Seraphim is also suggested by the writings of Gbadebo Dosumu, owner of a small press in Ibadan, who had been a leader of the Seraphim there but left in dissatisfaction to found his own ljo ti Afrika (Church of Africa), now defunct. He dedicates a justificatory pamphlet to Adeniran Oke the Ethiopian, the Anglican bishops Crowther and James Johnson, and to an- other noted Anglican cleric, Rev. E. M. Lijadu.44 In it he begins by em- phasizing on the one hand the universality of the one true God, and on the other the need for each people to worship Him appropriately. He says of the Seraphim Society: It was bestowed with the spiritual charge that they must worship Him as Africans and that they must not imitate any foreign organization or form of worship. Its 42 S. A. Oke (Adeniran), The Ethiopian National Church: a Necessity (Lagos, 1932). 43 In a personal interview, June 1965, at Ibadan. 44 G. Dosumu, African Religion (Ibadan, 1959); another pamphlet of his is devoted to showing that the Queen of Sheba was a native of a village near Ijebu Ode, in West- em Nigeria.

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partisans were bestowed with spiritual powers in immensity but the message was carelessly handled and woefully misinterpreted. This unique opportunity should have been seized to improve all aspects of our national religion, hand in hand with the resurrected few, for it was influenced with many tremendous and unpre- cedented revelations which if guarded should have contributed towards developing our race spiritually.

What was the Seraphim's error? To have rejected utterly Yoruba traditional medicine and religion. HIe goes on to quote many of the odu of Ifa, to show their eternal value and their concordance with the best in other religions. He identifies the orisa Sango with the thunder-gods of other peoples; James the son of Zebedee and his brother, called sons of thunder, Boanerges, are rendered awon omo Sango; St. Paul called God "a consuming fire" (Heb. XII 29) - and so on in this vein. Other peoples have syncretized the uni- versal religion with their own: the Kaaba at Mecca, the Teutonic festival of Easter and the English days of the week named after pagan gods are cited to support the thesis that Africans should do so too.

Yet this syncretism is still a new creation, and not the confused ideas of a recent convert, since Dosumu says that the Africans want the real Kingdom of God, which "does not preach Christianity nor propagate Islam nor sponsor Heathenism". It is true that Orunmila, the god of divination, is seen as the special prophet of the Almighty to Africa; but he is described in epithets which emphasize general salvation - Okiribiti Apojo-iku da ("the immense Orbit that averts the day of death"), and Oluwa mi Ato-ba-jaiye, Oro Ab'iku j'igbe ("my Lord Almightly to save, mysterious spirit that fought Death").45 Above all "the God of Africa is also the Universal God". This kind of philosophical syncretism - God appears in many forms - is widely prevalent among educated and religious men in West Africa, for it is in part a worked- out rationale of the undogmatic attitudes we see in the early Yoruba reaction to Christianity. A newspaper review in 1917 celebrated the recent appear- ance of Garrick Braide, Elijah II, in the Niger Delta, as a sign that the "Great Architect" had revealed himself to Africa as to other nations; and went on to assert that the kernel of all religion was one - "Orunmila, Ain Soph, the Metaphysical Zero of the Kabbalists".46 The writer here draws on some European arcana - freemasonry, theosophy, and suchlike - which have found ready recipients in the West African bourgeoisie. It is in this context that we can understand the reported beliefs of Colonel Juxon-Smith, head of state in Sierra Leone:

45 On this aspect of Orunmila, see E. G. Parrinder, "An African Saviour God", in The Saviour God: Essays presented to E. 0. James (1963). The emergence, within a pre-world religion, of the concept of personal salvation of some kind, is a token of a decisive step in religious evolution; cf. Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion (1965), Chs. IX-XII, and R. N. Bellah, "Religious Evolution", Amer. Soc. Rev., XXIX (1964). 46 Lagos Weekly Record, 14 Apr. 1917, in a review of S. A. Coker's pamphlet Rights of Africans to organize Independent Churches.

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he claims to be both Muslim and Christian, was married in both faiths, and attends the Mosque on Fridays and Church on Sundays. He insists he has no difficulty in reconciling his two sets and beliefs because the concept of "a Most High God", for him all-important, is found in the two religions.47

The same theme of basic unity amid local diversity of manifestation, linked with a reluctance to go to specific doctrinal expression, is frequently found in the last centuries of classical paganism when philosophical pagans like Symmachus were prepared to see in Christianity the same essence as in other religions. We find it too in the celebrated passage of Apuleius where Lucius is converted to the worship of Isis, and invokes her as myrionyma, in what is virtually a catalogue of all the local great goddesses of the Ancient World.48

This syncretism has two motives which tend to coalesce in practice but which may be distinguished. One may see some good in one's people's tra- ditional religious practices on expressive grounds: the practices should be continued and synthesized with Christianity because they are African, so that in denying them one would be denying one's social identity. Here the syn- cretist ideal grew out of the stated principles of the African churches, as was the case with Adeniran Oke. Yet the Ethiopianism of Oke and Dosumu is not a simple atavism, for their consciousness of themselves as Africans (not as Yoruba, Ijebu, or the members of a particular village or lineage) was a response to a colonial situation, and was quite untraditional. Because it implied a parallelism between social identity and religious allegiance it departed from the traditional Yoruba practice, where cult-group membership and lineage membership had not coincided. Since this aspect of Ethiopianism is very widespread in other parts of Africa besides Yorubaland, one must in general reject the hypothesis that the expression of the political grievances of the colonial situation in a religious idiom is simply a consequence of the close integration of the religious and political spheres in traditional African society, as Banton has suggested.49

Syncretism also has instrumental motives, which are perhaps more im- portant in Yorubaland, where the yoke of Empire was relatively light. Here one continues to respect one's traditional religion, especially where it is con- cerned with healing and divining, because one really does believe its practices work. This is the actual position of most people, and these syncretists want to be consistent about it. At a philosophical level they may use the arguments of Oke and Dosumu that Orunmila is God's prophet for Africans, but at a practical level they are concerned with systematizing native medicines and applying the odu of Ifa. These interests are barely to be found in Oke's writing, and are more to the fore in Dosumu; but are dominant in two other syncretist churches, which again have a very small total membership.

47 Report in West Africa, 22 Apr. 1967, p. 531. 48 Apuleius, Metamorphoses XI, discussed at length in Nock, op. cit., pp. 138-155. 49 "African Prophets", Race, V (1963).

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The Editor of the Nigerian Daily Telegraph in the 1920's and 1930's was a Lagosian of Saro descent, H. Antus Williams (later changed to A. Fag- benro-Beyioku), who had initially welcomed the Aladuras, both the Seraphim and later Babalola, as having made a contribution to "African practical religion"; but his favour turned to hostility and scorn when he saw that their attitude to traditional medicine and religion was one of forthright and un- equivocal condemnation. In 1934 he was a leading founder of the Ijo Orun- mila, whose name reveals one major doctrine - Orunmila is God's prophet to Africa, as Jesus was to Europeans and Mohammed to Arabians.50 "One Shrine, One God, One People" was the motto of this church. There was also an ajo isegun ("meeting for victory") whose aim was "the improvement of African Science and Therapeutics", for which it planned to make awards to meritorious practitioners. Other aims, as expressed in an editorial in 1937, included the "the revision of the Bible to introduce African theosophical terminologies" and the establishment of a "healing-house" in suburban Lagos for "metaphysical treatment of maladies beyond the confines of foreign therapeutics".51 The "metaphysical healing" of the Aladura prophet Joseph Babalola was derided as a "wash-out".52 Traditional Yoruba "metaphysics" had been applied to all complaints, mental and physical, and the Bible was not opposed to it. Fagbenro-Beyioku accused Babalola's followers of a restricted ignorance; he wanted European occultism synthesized with Yoruba traditions, of whose effective power he had no doubt.

The Ijo Orunmila later fragmented and one of its successors, Idapo Adulawo ("Association of Blacks, or Ethiopians"), influenced the Ijo Meje Aiyeraiye ("Seven Churches of Eternity"), established by a prosperous trader at Ile Ife in the interior, J. 0. Fawole, who had already established the Cherubim and Seraphim there. "I have found what we (the Seraphim) were looking for", he says,53 but when he put his heretical ideas to them, they repudiated them and ordered his pamphlet to be burnt.54 His church actually synthesizes Aladura prophecy (minus its fundamentalist and rigorous ex- clusiveness against paganism) with traditional techniques - a paradoxical combination. "What we were looking for" is the secret of effective spiritual power. That this is a legitimate goal of religion is what links the Aladuras and the syncretists; the Aladuras are distinguished by the remarkable way in which they seek spiritual power, submitting themselves to conditions which show 50 There is a file on the Ijo Orunmila in the Nigerian National Archives, Ibadan, Oyo Prov. 1565; it cited such distinguished patrons as Herbert Macaulay and the Alake of Abeokuta. Idowu, Olodumare, pp. 212-215, attacks this church and its branches, F. Sowande, Ifa, defends them; both seem to me to exaggerate their popular appeal. 51 Editorial, "An Indigenous Organization", Nigerian Daily Telegraph, 14 Oct. 1937. 52 Editorial, "Joseph Babalola again?", Ibid., 10 Sept. 1937. 53 In a personal interview, Aug. 1965, at Ile Ife. 54 Minutes of Western Conference of Cherubim and Seraphim, 10 Apr. 1940, when a leading Apostle successfully attacked Fawole on the grounds that Idapo Adulawo was for Africans only, whereas the Seraphim Society was for all men.

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that its acquisition is not their only goal. The Aladuras and the syncretists are together different from other Yoruba Christians in that they have rationalized the common experience of all men who bring together a primi- tive religion in whose efficacy they still have some faith and a world religion which demands exclusive adherence. In this search for cognitive and moral consistency they stand apart from their fellows, who go to church and on occasion to the babalawo, and have felt no pressing need to work out what the relationship between them should be.

The Effects of Literacy

Syncretism, whether the explicit kind of the Ethiopians or the implicit kind of the typical Yoruba Christian, would seem to be an obvious reaction of previously pagan people to new religions. The whole framework of classical Roman or Yoruba paganism was syncretistic, and the dogmatic exclusiveness of prophetic religion presented a severe challenge to it. In view of the wide- spread accommodation shown by men whose doctrines seem uncompromising, the stand of the Aladuras is most remarkable. Their concern for "spiritual power" is understandable, as is their exclusive reliance on prayer at a time of crisis; less so their fierce hostility to paganism, even to medicines whose use can be justified fairly easily and from which abstention is often difficult and painful. The evangelists of Christianity in Anglo-Saxon England or in Latin America, literate men of an alien culture, have been readier to accom- modate pagan practices to Christian ones, dedicating churches on the sites of pagan temples and so forth, than have Yoruba Aladuras.55 If the African churches rebelled against the impatient contempt for native culture so often shown by Victorian evangelicals, the Aladuras have often seemed to echo their strictures on morally-backsliding Christians and secret idol-worshippers.

The answer lies in the Protestantism of the Aladuras, which was partly inherited from the evangelical missions from which the Aladura founders came, but which was also in large measure a spontaneous reaction to similar conditions which produced Protestantism in England - rapid social change leading to industrialization, and, associated with this, the spread of literacy. Literacy changes decisively the way in which religious beliefs are held.56 In non-literate societies (and to some extent in the illiterate peasant strata of more complex societies) the past is perceived as entirely the servant of the needs of the present, things are forgotten and myth is constructed to justify contemporary arrangements; there are no dictionary definitions of words, but as Goody and Watt put it "the meaning of each word is ratified in a

55 Cf. Pope Gregory's advice to Abbot Mellitus (601 A.D.), Bede, I. 30. 56 Cf. the valuable discussion by J. Goody and I. Watt, "The Consequences of Liter- acy", CSSH, V (1963-64).

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succession of concrete situations". In religion there is no sense of impersonal or universal orthodoxy of doctrine; legitimate belief is as a particular priest or elder expounds it. But where the essence of religion is the Word of God, where all arguments are resolved by an appeal to an unchangeable written authority, where those who formulate new beliefs at a time of crisis commit themselves by writing and publishing pamphlets, as the Aladura leaders have done in plenty, religion acquires a rigid base. "Structural amnesia" is hardly possible; what was thought in the past commits men to particular courses of action in the present; religion comes to be thought of as a system of rules, emanating from an absolute and universal God, which are quite external to the thinker, and to which he must conform and bend himself, if he would be saved. The literate clerks, tailors and traders who founded the Aladura churches, eager heirs of an evangelical tradition, proud of their literacy, and both agents and creatures of modernization, reacted in 1918 in the same way as many of their fellows, but because of their literacy they committed themselves for the future. Literacy means that for the Aladuras, as for Puritans, morality is thought of as conforming to rules, which is the only kind of morality possible (the alternative is anomie) in a situation where the customary morality of traditional society has broken down.57

The reactions of people to radical social change marked by the availability of totally new cultural systems are not best approached by theories of acculturation which aim to trace each item of behaviour to its cultural source, to add them up, and to pronounce the reaction more or less "acculturated" or "traditional", along a single continuum.58 The various ways in which the new syntheses relate to traditional culture vary not so much in degree or quantity of indebtedness as in kind or quality. This concern with the cultural origins of items of behaviour only makes sense if we wish to show the diffusion of ideas from a particular source, not if we want to explain why men act in a particular way. The mechanical assignation of cultural traits is no aid to understanding, for it is a purely external way of classifying be- haviour. West Africans seem to be much less interested in the cultural origins of items of behaviour than some anthropologists are. Cultural traits are so mixed up that tradition is just what people do.59 Some of them, the Ethiopian syncretists for example, do profess to regard the African or European cultural origin of a practice as the most important fact about it; but this cultural

17 Cf. the discussion by E. A. Gellner, Thought and Change (1965), pp. 86, 90-92, and also M. Walzer's analysis of Puritanism in The Revolution of the Saints (1966). 58 As is explicitly done by J. W. Fernandez, "African Religious Movements: Types and Dynamics", Journ. Mod. Afr. Stud., II (1964); the Aladuras can no more be as- signed a definite place along this continuum than they can along his other one, ex- pressive/instrumental. 59 This is well said by D. W. Brokensha, Social Change at Larteh, pp. 264-269; it is perhaps more true of West Africa than of other places in Africa.

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self-consciousness is always ambivalent - often it conceals instrumental interests. Most people simply ask of a practice whether it is right or wrong, good or bad, wise or foolish, beneficial or harmful. Their choices can only be explained by situational analysis - asking why men of a particular kind interpret their situation in a particular way.

J. D. Y. PEEL University of Nottingham