Preliminary Considerations
The Term and The Thing
 

Black Experience of Religion: What It Is Not

lack Experience of Religion must obviously consider the blackman within the context of the traditional religion of his African forefathers, the integrity, both of the blackman as well as of Africa being maintained. Most of us know only too well that such terms like "African Traditional Religion" are often used to identify an ersatz system assembled from the questionable findings of even more questionable authorities, and that a great show of seriously considering this perversion is made, while in fact it is being used as a foil to highlight the virtues of "Christianity" or "Islam" over all traditional beliefs of Africa.

The fact is, of course, that official Christianity has for centuries divested itself of all points of contact with the Life and teachings of its Founder. the Carpenter of Nazareth; to such an extent that the historian H. G. Wells records in his Outline of History, that by the eighth century when Charlemagne became Emperor of the West, official Christianity had for long ignored "those strange teachings of Jesus of Nazareth from which it had arisen." It had long abandoned the idea of achieving the Kingdom of Heaven, and was busily turning itself into a political body, "using the faith and needs of simple men to forward its schemes."

Middleton Murry is equally blunt in his "The Betrayal of Christ by the Churches" (Andrew Dakers: 1940), where he comments that in large-scale affairs, the Church offers no guidance, and would not dare to in any case, for it knows its place, which is "that of a good wife to the State." As a good wife, it never advises and never criticizes her husband, and will always stand up for him if there should be a row; only one thing does it insist, "as far as it may — that the husband shall keep out of the kitchen."

The twentieth century official Christianity is as related to the pagan Teacher of Nazareth as a malaria-carrying mosquito is to a royal eagle winging its way upward to the sun. TIME Magazine's "The Methodist Church: A Concern for Religious Relevance," (May 8 1964 issue); . . . the series of seven articles published by the London Times of Great Britain in mid-May 1966 on the Church of England under the general title "Christians Asleep"; . . . "The Vatican Empire" by Nino Lo Bello, (Trident Press: New York 1969), as an authoritative report that reveals the Vatican as a nerve center of high finance, and penetrates the secrecy of Papal wealth; . . . these, and other publications on the subject, supply chapter and verse for Leo's strictures in his "Passing into Aquarius" (Andrew Dakers: circa 1940), where. under the caption: "The Passing of the Churches", we find, "the Church which at present is the greatest single landowner and property owner, exploiting what it owns for profit, must either cease to exist, or reform itself out of all recognition . . ." The Religion Editor of The Cleveland Press of March 14 1970 estimated the churches' untaxed wealth at an annual income of $6.5 billion, and $105 billion in properties aud investments.

The foregoing helps to explain the changes in the attitude of official Christianity towards African Traditional Religion over the past century or so. At first the African was told that he had no religion, or anything remotely resembling one; he had to throw away his fetishes and superstitions, and be led, by the missionaries from the darkness of paganism, into the light of Christianity. At that time, the same missionaries were the greatest vandals Traditional Religion and Art in Africa had ever seen, or was ever likely to see.

Then came the unheralded but rapid growth of Independent African Countries, around the middle of this century, and with it a switch in attitude by official Christianity. Now the African was told that he had the makings of a true religion in his traditional beliefs; all that was necessary was that the missionaries rid these beliefs of flaws and weaknesses, restructure and refashion them to bring them in line with Christianity, and then together the traditional African and the missionary can worship God.

Today we are witnessing yet another change in attitude by the church. The Reverend Dr. John Mbiti, professor of Religious Studies and Philosophy at Makerere University College, Kampa
la, Uganda, told the Annual General Meeting of the Christian Churches' Educational Association in Nairobi on September 9 1969 that indeed Christianity can be claimed as one of the traditional religions of Africa, though different from tribal religions. "We must swallow the bitter truth," he also said, "that before missionaries set foot on the African soil whether in apostolic times or in the last century, Jesus Christ had preceded them here, preparing the heart of Africa, wooing the peoples of this continent to become the children of God. The same can be said about personal evangelism," and Dr. Mbiti points to the stories of the Ethiopian eunuch and Cornelius in the Acts of the Apostles.

The general public need only turn to Dr Geoffrey Parrinder's "Religion in Africa" (Praeger: 1969) to find, (a) in his Introduction, that "both Islam and Christianity are 'traditional religions' in Africa, in the sense that they have long traditions in the continent. . . ." and (b) at the beginning of his chapter 8, that "Christianity has the longest history of the great living religions of Africa. . . . Christianity entered Africa in the first century of our era and it has had a continuous history in Egypt and Ethiopia, so that it is truly a traditional religion of Africa." In other words, the African can now claim Christianity as one of his own traditional religions, and embrace it as his lawful heritage. Admirable materia1 for a charade, for never a mumbling word is said about installing a traditional African priest as the Archbishop of Canterbury in Britain or the Pope in Rome. But that which only yesterday official Christianity anathematized as heathenish, pagan, misguided unmitigated ignorance, horrible superstitions originating from Beelzebub, is now suddenly discovered to have come out of the same box as Christianity, then the age of miracles is not yet over, and almost anything can happen before the end of this century.

But in his Nairobi address, Mbiti recognized that Christian education came to African peoples who, in their ways, were notoriously religious; furthermore that "although this traditional African religiosity has been despised, condemned, and ridiculed, it has not disappeared from those converted to the Church. Instead, it forms a deep layer which waits to be penetrated by Christian education." Mbiti also warned his audience that if Christian education ignores, or resists the demands of that traditional religious perception and sensitivity of the blackrnan in Africa which "forms the most crucial background against which Christian education is disseminated," then Christian education can expect at the very least anti-Christian sentiments and even direct opposition to Christianity.

This is shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, and it is obvious that official Christianity is in reality trying to "zip-in" on traditional African religion. It will discover, sooner or later, that African re1igiosity can never be bridled or re-structured or re-shaped or re-directed, by christian education or theologians. As far back as September 2 1898, the Nigerian Astrologer Professor J. A, Abayomi Cole had warnod his London audience in the course of a lecture: "Cancer, the star of Africa, still, and will ever retain her cool changeable, spiritual and watery nature. Water will not burn, but it can put out the fire of Britain and France combined, if you think you can work against the law of God and nature by forcing water into fire. . . ."

At this point, we might profitably take a brief look at Erich Neumann's "Amor and Psyche" (Harper Torchbooks), in which he traced the psychic development of the Feminine in his commnentary on the tale, which came from The Golden Ass of Lucius Apuleius. 

In that commentary, Neumann made brief reference to Bachofen, whom he acknowledged as being the first to gain an insight into the hidden meanings and implications in the tale. But, Neumann commented, Bachofen forced the tale into his schema and dealt most arbitrarily with the text which, in the circumstances, he was bound to misuuderstand; "He failed to perceive the conflict between Psyche and Aphrodite or the independent feminine character of the myth, for the great discoverer and admircr of the matriarchate remained hampered by Platonic, Christian, patriarchal conceptions. He could apprehend the feminine psychic principle only as a stage subordinated to solar masculine spirituality."

What matters here is that the above criticism illustrates how christian missionaries and theologians, no matter their racial origin or religious denomination, become mentally conditioned by the 19th century climate of thought on the 'primitiveness' of the traditional religions of Africa; they were further hampered by a religio-centricity which had left them with the illusion of freedom to think, while in fact it had so subtly and yet so successfully trussed up their minds that they could no lonrer see things, except through what Professor Bastide so graphically termed "mirrors that deform" in his "The African Man by Way of his Religion" (Presence Africaine First Quarterly Literary Review: Vol 12 No. 40. 1962).

Very often it is the practice to use statistics to substantiate the effectiveness and productivity of Christian missions in Africa. But nothing could be more misleading, for it is an open secret that many Africans retain their membership in one Christian denomination or another purely as a status symbol, and that their first loyalty is to a traditional African religion. While it may be satisfying to official Christianity to imagine that somewhere, a deep layer in tile religiosity of the African waits to be penetrated by "Christian education," a more realistic view would be that that which we call "Christian education" today is neither Christian nor is it education, nor is it something to which the blacks of Africa and elsewhere can relate. 

A young Graduate student at Howard University began his January 1970 Termpaper with the terse statement: "To speak to young blacks living in America today about religion is to have a short conversation. For most, religion is synonymous with exoteric Christianity and all its attendant chicanery and hypocrisy. Young blacks want no part of it. They do without. . . ."
And on May 8 1964, the Nigerian Daily Times reported that members of the Anglican Church Niger Delta Diocese have expressed grave concern over the mass exodus of members from the orthodox church to new churches which claim to have faith healing powers. according to that Paper, the Angliean Youth Fellowship told Bishop Bara-Hart in their address of welcome, that if steps were not taken immediately, the orthodox church might one day find that most of its members had deserted. Bishop Bara-Hart is reported to havre told the Youth Fellowship that the Church had the problem well in hand. Also, on Febuary 23 1070, TIME Magazine published an article captioned: "The Catholic Exodus: Why Priests and Nuns are Quitting".

One major problem in all this is, of course, that we use such terms as religion, education, philosophy, Christianity, etcetera, without bothering to indicate clearly in what sense they are to be understood in the particular context, the unexpressed implication being that everybody knows what these terms mean. But everybody does not know, and each of these and similar terms, has its own cluster of mutually exclusive definitions.

What is Religion? Certainly it is not an aborted amalgam of creeds and dogmas, forced into some semblance of cohesiveness and unity by an authority that is in itself more temporal than spiritual. Moreover, as Professor Ballou reminds us in his lntroduction to The Bible of the World, to Carlyle religion does not mean the church creed which a man professes, or the articles of faith which he will sign and assert in words or otherwise, for at this level we are in contact only with the mere argumentative region of the person, if in fact we have reached that far.

But "the thing a man does practically believe, (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others): the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious universe and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. That is his religion; or it may be, his mere scepticism and no-religion: the manner in which he feels himself to be spiritually related to the Unseen World or No-World. . . ."

I cannot immagine a definition more apt, particularly in this context, for the indispensable element in African religiosity is that which deals with the African's vital relations to the mysterious universe, and his duty and destiny there. That this is not a unique possession of the African is clearly shown by Mircea Eliade in his Cosmos and History. (Harper Torchbooks); the point here is that the blackman is no different to "traditional man" anywhere else. For him, that which is properly called "religion" necessarily has its indispensable aspect of "magic". Otherwise it will never secure his real loyalties and faith.

Donald Hogg's Paper on "Magic and Science in Jamaica," which he presented before the American Anthropological Association's Annual Meeting in Washington in 1958, and such publications as James Neal's "Juju in My Life" (Harrap & Co: 1966), show how deeply ingrained, how bred in the bone, this attitude is in the blackman. To most Western-European Africanists, (a Tower of Babel term if ever there was one!), the term 'magic' is like a red rag to a bull. There is no such thing as magic, because they know there is no such thing -- period. It is the old story of the blind men and the elephant all over again.

The fact remains that the brand of Christianity offered to the blackman in Africa lacked this magical element; it was a truncated Christianity which thereby and therefore became malignant. By making life extremely difficult for the traditional African priest, and by breaking down the structural unity of the traditional Way of Life in Africa, all the Christian missions succeeded in doing was that they opened the door wide for the 'trade-magician' who was free of all traditiona1 controls. 

The curious fact is that the religion founded by Jesus of Nazareth had its built-in magical element, one so profound that even the devils stood in awe of Him. But of course, European Africanists and Missionaries know better, although some of them will compromise for the term "dynamism," to replace 'magic.'This new term, however, is far too anemic, far too insipid, far too inadequate, much too lacking in guts to apply properly to that science which deals with man as the microcosm of the macrocosmic universe to which he relates most intimately at all points. The proper term is Magic, as signifying "the traditional science of the secrets of Nature which has been transmitted to us from the Magi," hence the word magic, and the particular relevance of that word above all others. The problem here is that for the typical European Africanist the Magi do not really exist; for the Missionary, the Magi exist but only within the pages of the New Testament; while for the traditional African, the Magi are real Spiritual Entities who, if anything, are more real than man himself. If purblind Africanists and theologians with their block-thinking and pigeon-hole mentality have brought this term into disrepute, the fault lies in them, not in the term.

The very idea that this truncated Christianity is one of the traditional religions of Africa is obviously ridiculous. It has been forced on the organized church, partly by the mass exodus of some of its members, partly by the inertia and apathy of those who yet remain within the fold, partly by the slow realization that there are serious limits to the advantages of being a good wife to the State. I for one suspect that if the times had allowed, another round of the Holy Inquisition might quite easily have taken the place of this inexplicable attempt to saddle the blackman with some responsibility for that Christianity-without-Christ which today we mis-call "religion."

It is significant that the sociologist Lewis Yablonski, in his The Hippie Trip (Pegasus: 1968) , compares the movement's high-priests to the early Christians in many respects; among which he lists their dress and hair styles, their fantastic visionsof a beautiful life in the future, their experience of legal and social persecution from society, their over-involvement with love, their involvement with the trials, search, and tribulations of Christ and the early christians, and with the New Testament.

And in Africa, quite a handful of the Yoruba traditional priests I have met, and who recently began to read the New Testament in the vernacular, have said to me of Jesus: he is one of us! The great miracles of the Master excites their unbounded admiration and commands their unqualified respect. These miracles, which we who are Christians can only accept figuratively, are accepted by these pagan priests as being factual and accurate records of actual historical events. They find close parallels in their own personal experiences, either during or after training.

All that is needed now is for their admiration and respect to blossom into love for the Master, and we Christians — theologians and all — may yet find that if indeed there is a Day of Judgement and we manage to get into the same queue as the hippie high-priests of America and the pagan priests of Africa, we shall be bringing up the rear, provided of course that by that time we are not already busy stoking fires some place else.

Even to think of Christian education penetrating African religiosity is arrant impertinence; and in general, assessments and evaluations of Black Experience of Religion by missionary writers (clergy or laity, black or white) should more wisely be regarded as documenting precisely what that experience is not.

Preliminary Considerations

In his article referred to above, Professor Bastide properly asked whether there is one or several African cultures; he drew attention to the extreme diversity and the luxuriant richness of African civilizations, and wondered what the so-called Palaeo-Nigritic civilizations could have in common with the civilizations of the Mali Eunpires or thc Yoruba kingdoms or with Sudanese and Bantu civilizations or with those people who are cattle-growers and those peasants who eat the tropical forest. As he commented: "Familiar systems, religious mythologies, political forms, all change."

These questions arise at all and have relevance, because our schooling has seriously interfered with our education. What is education? "Not to kill out idealism, but to make the world safe for ideals is the true purpose of education, . . . True education is learning how to build an adequate foundation under the ideals of the race. . . . Education means the release of ideals and the determination of spiritual values. To the degree it falls short of this legitimate end, education fails to educate." Thus Manly Palmer Hall defined education in his Man: The Grand Symbol of The Mysteries (Manly Hall Publications: Los Angeles, 1932).

Our contemporary educational system will have no truck with such weird ideas as "the mysteries," but this attitude has an interesting history, which we can pick up from the Renaissance. While he was Overseas Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, London, in 1967, Allen. G. Debus, — then Associate Professor of the History of Science at the University of Chicago, — delivered a lecture under the title "The Chemical Dream of the Renaissance," Here we find that by 1600, the educational system was already faced with endorsing or rejecting the idea that man was the microcosmic replica of the macrocosmic universe, with which he was connected in every imaginable way. The idea was ultimately rejected. As a result, Robert Fludd, who had been educated at Oxford, was a man of substance, and had spent years touring the centres of education on the continent, registered the view, in his Fama Fraternitatis of 1614, that nowhere was more useless knowledge being spewed forth than at the universities, and urged that the universities be reformed, "so that the divine light of Christian teachings could flourish."

Three centuries later, Jung was to remark: "I know that the universities have ceased to act as dissemnators of light. People have beecome weary of scientific specialization and rationalistic intellectualism, They want to hear truths which broaden rather than restrict them, which do not obscure but enlighten, which do not run off them like water, but penetrate theem to the marrow" (Vide: The Secret of the Golden Flower. Harcourt, Brace and World).

Ancona's views as expressed in his The Substance of Adam (Rider) was that the Renaissance was no more than a revival of profane sciences "which do not consider the content oi life existing in every phenomenon but study only the corpses of the universe and of its parts." By the end of the nineteenth century, humanity had rejected the old gods and replaced them with the new ones of efficiency' determination, shrewdness, selfishness, enterprise, greed, hurry. Men seriously called themselves children of monkeys, and their professors taught that only what the senses can feel or the instinct can eat is certain.

I must make one more reference here, this time to Albert Schweitzer's The Philosophy of Civilization which dates back to the years 1914 to 1917, but was published in 1949 by Macmillan. Schweitzer's view was that civilization requires that both the spiritual-ethical as well as the material forces of progress should be at work; at the Renaissance, however, man's ethical energy faded out, while his material achievement increased by leaps and bounds.For a time he lived on capital in the spiritual-ethical field; but today we have come to believe that civilization consists primarily of scientific, technical and artistic achievements, and that there is no real need or place for ethics. We have not taken the trouble to think the thing through, but this is because our "authorities" assure us that this point of view is valid and correct. Thus it was that from the renaissance to the middle of the nineteenth century, those who carried on the work of civilization firmly believed that as they succeeded in transforming this or that aspect of public life, so they were automatically transforming the spiritual life; but this was a mirage, for "all the institutions they created were spiritually bankrupt."

Schweitzer held that World War I, which had left Europe completely disorganized spiritually and physically, was not responsible for that obvious decay, but that the War itself was a manifestation of the decay. . . .

But as Schweitzer, pointed out when you cut down a forest of magnificently tall trees, that which grows in their place is mere brushwood. The great ideas which linked man with the universe and the universe man, and which had kept the ship of humanity afloat and in reasonable security on the turbulent waters of evolution. had been cut down by the Renaissance, and in its place we find mere brushwood ideas, which sought to understand and explain life in rational terms, and succeeded in turning it into a struggle for existence with the survival of the fittest; man, once the grand symbol of the mysteries, now knew himself to be but an animal on two legs, by the end of the nineteenth century.

Four to five centuries earlier, the Princes had taken care to grab the material possessions of the Roman Church with one hand, and her educational system with the other. As H. G. Wells records, the Princes knew that it was the poor scholar and the priest class that had made the Reformation possible, and they were not disposed to take chances. Education had to mean "capturing young clever people for the service of their betters," otherwise it was a dangerous thing. Thus the universities and the public schools of the eighteenth century were the preserves of the rich. The university became "part of the recognized machinery of aristocracy" and in England, "education was the nursery, not of a society but of an order; not of a State, but of a race of owner-rulers; . . . the community was like a pithed animal in the hands of the governing class" (0utline of History).

Only so was it possible to find, as Lewis Mumford reminds us in The City in Hstory (Harcourt Brace and World), that "a whole country was run for the benefit of a few dozen families, or a few hundred, who owned a good share of the land — almost half in France in the eighteenth century — and who battened on the unearned increments from industry, trade, and urban rents."

But we are far from being out of the woods; for it was not without good reason that Jung tersely commented on the professor whose whole individuality is exhausted by his professorial role, a mask, behind which you find nothing but peevishness and infantilism. 

The background for a meaningful and profitable examination of Black Experience of Religion must therefore be sought not within the field of Academicia but within that of the oral traditions of Africa on the one hand, and Western European esoteric philosophy on the other. Both speak the same language, and in each man -- far from being an animal — is a god-in-the-making. "My child," — the high Instructor told Mutwa at his initiation, — "God is more in You, and is more part of you than you are in and part of yourself. You were not created by God as the aliens tell you, but you exist as part of God. Your soul is immortal, because God is immortal, and your sou1 and mine are as much part of God as the grain of sandstone is part of the boulder that is part of the mountain." This kind of religiosity lies, (in Jungian phraseology), "in a field which begins beyond academic boundary posts." Here alone can our inquiry be profitable, meaningful, enlightening, and spiritually vivifying.  

The Term and The Thing

     Oral Traditions as Source-References

Too often we lose sight of the fact that the thing came before the term. So we start off with the term as a necessary prelude to consulting the dictionary or some other authority, in order to determine what the term must stand for, thus putting the cart before the horse. But terms have a habit of behaving like the chameleon, with the result that communication is sometimes needlessly prejudiced, and the possibility of understanding reduced to near zero. 

For example, apocrypha, which originally meant 'too sacred to be left within the reach of unconsecrated hands' has come to mean 'spurious,' a vast change in meaning. Philosophy defined as 'thinking with God and thinking with Nature' can hardly be regarded as synonymous with the same term defined as 'thinking of God and of Nature,' parent to that pedantic Philosophy of degenerates about which Schweitzer spoke. The root meaning of which was 'to be wise in the sacred lore,' and the term witchcraft signified the powers accruing to the person who had gained that wisdom. Today the same term means anything but that, especially when applied to traditional Africa. John and James, may well be in for a heated argument leading to a fight, if to John the term animist refers to a person who ignorantly attributes imagined life to inanimate objects, while to James the same term distinguishes the person who wisely recognizes existing life in so-called inanimate objects. What we should aim to unearth in this inquiry is, therefore. those ideas which subsequently came to to be identified by such terms as religion, philosophy, etcetera, rather than making our own definitions of these terms our point of departure. We are much more likely to succeed by operating in that field of humanity which begins beyond the boundary posts of Academicia.

Most people regard oral traditions as unreliable evidence, by its very nature. Madame Blavatsky pointed out in The Secret Doctrine however, that oral tradition may have been preserved through countless aeons "with more truth and accuracy than . . . inside any written document or record." Schweitzer has already drawn our attention to that manufactured history which turned school history books into "regu1ar culture beds of historical lies"; and we all know that the fact that we read something in a book or journal or newspaper does not automatically guarantee that it is true.

We tend to imagine that oral traditions are transmitted as we would, for example, send a newspaper clipping to a friend with a polite note asking him to be sure not to forget the information contained in the clipping. But this is far from being the pattern in traditional Africa.

First, the person to whom something is to be transmitted is carefully selected. Then, Mutwa documented, "a particular story was put across to him in such a way as to imprint, a vivid picture into his mind that could never fade. But to make assurance doubly sure, he was required to retell the story a hundred times on a hundred different occasions while subjected to the vilest torture, to ensure that nothing at all can divert his attention. For example, a High Brother would, from time to time, apply a red-hot knife to his body, and if he lost the thread of the story he must start again. Much was also done to create an eerie, sombre, or impressive atmosphere -- the other High Brothers would, for example, dance in a circle all round chanting the one word 'remember' a thousand times." Oral traditions are far from being the unreliable evidence some of us take them to be. Madam Blavatsky confirms (idem) that in India, in China, and in Japan, material without which the sacred books could not be properly understood were kept out of reach of the general public in inaccessible places, the very existence of these hidden libraries being unsuspected outside.

We err greatly if we imagine that material which cannot be found in our libraries have either been lost, or never existed. But of course Western European Academicia has consistently discredited the esoteric philosophers, no matter their origin, not excluding Western Europe. Reference to such sources as the articles in Sociology on Trial (Stein & Vidich: Prentice Hall 1963) shows conclusively that within its own ranks, Academicia demands conformity and will brook no argument. I am thinking particularly of The Bureacratic Ethos by C. Wright Mills.

The traditional philosophy of the Ibos of Eastern Nigeria holds that every soul incarnates seven times on this planet. The human beings at the beginning of this cycle are the "young souls" who do things that are wrong, not because they are wicked, but because they have to learned not to do those things. Those at the end of the cycle are the "old souls" who have acquired wisdom through experience. But there are also those souls who are not young souls. but who deliberately do wicked things, for one reason or another. These are the "perverse souls." We have therefore three types of human beings here, the young, the old, and the perverse souls. 

This classification can with profit be applied to almost any human social group. The terms 'young' and 'old' do not refer to physical age, but to the degree of spiritual maturity; the extent to which the person has aligned himself, of own accord, what Schweitzer termed 'the spiritual- ethical forces of progress.' This is the only measuring-rod; not social status, or physical age, or birth, or anything else, but the degree of spiritual awareness . We shall find these three types in every human organization. For example, even when the Roman Church was [careening] madly towards her eventual dismemberment, there were dedicated priests within the Church who sought a reformation of the Church from inside the Church, but they made no impression. 

The same is true in the field of academic studies today; the sociologist can point to the collection of essays in Sociology on Trial for evidence; I am thinking particularly at this point of C. Wright Mills who deplores the university turning itself into a set of "research bureaucracies" with its "intellectual technicians," breeding the next generation of social scientists in whom one finds deadly limitation of mind." Or of Alvin Gouldner who sees the danger of ushering in "an era of spiritless technicians who will be no less lacking in understanding than they are in passion, and who will be useful only because they can be used."

But the real culprit is the system of so-called education to which we are in bondage, and which has warped the mind, not only of the social scientist, but of the theologian, the historian, the political scientist, etcetera; not excluding the artist, who no longer sees Art as the life-line for man between this imperfect world and the ideal world of the spirit, but has in fact patterned himself after the hack newspaperman, one of the scavenger[s] of news for a yellow rag. 

It is for this reason that it is wiser not to look to Academicia for guidance and enlightenment in this kind of inquiry. least of all with reference to the Way of Life of the Peoples of African descent, inside or outside Africa. We have to look elsewhere. For Africa, my source-references will be (a) my understanding of my own Yoruba oral traditions, and (b) INDABA, MY CHILDREN by Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa, published by Blue Crane Books, Johannesburg. The London edition of this book by Kay and Averil does not have precisely the most important sections in the original Johannesburg edition, for reasons which I am at a loss to fathom. My Western European source-references will be given later on; the selection is dictated by the reasons which I have just given above.