18 - The Dynamics of Reality

Summary

IF HIS ARTS SUGGEST THAT ‘PRIMITIVE MAN’ WAS NEITHER ‘HELPLESS’ nor ‘incoherent’, let alone ‘dumbfounded’, the same view emerges from his ontology and metaphysics. A new understanding of African concepts of Being, of the immanent systematisation of the cosmos according to African ideas, looks back to the year 1946. Then it was that the Dogon elders of Ogol took an important decision about a visiting Frenchman.

Imagine the reversed situation of, say, the canons of Coventry Cathedral. They would surely have behaved no differently. Faced with an exotic but agreeable visitor who was pleasantly and yet persistently eager to understand the workings of the Divine dispensation, they too would in the end have wearied of uninformed questions and simple answers. Busy though they were, they would have recognised that there are moments when theology must be explained. They would have called in the dean, even possibly the bishop.

For think what kind of stuff this distant traveller might otherwise go away and tell his own world. The English pay little or no heed to religion; they have splendid churches, but seldom worship in them. They claim to have some notion of a High God, but you soon find out that this God is thought of as a man, a fact which no doubt says something about their intense individualism and aversion from community control. They will not, however, admit this. Although Coventry cathedral is decorated with the painting of an enormous male figure, the priests claim that this is really the picture of a god, a suprasensible being in some way an embodiment of ancestral wisdom. They deny that this is an image to be worshipped, although it is perfectly obvious that people do in fact kneel before this image and pray to it.

'With the same inconsequence they claim they have only one god. Yet it is just as clear that they have not one but three who are important, as well as many lesser gods. These last they call saints, perhaps because people here seldom like calling a thing by its real name. They are similarly reticent on the subject of one of their most solemn rites. This consists in eating the body and blood of their god. At the same time they are obviously sensitive to the old African belief that Europeans are, or at least were, habitual cannibals.