12 - Upside-Down People

Summary

LONG AGO WHEN GOD LIVED AMONG MEN BEFORE THE COMING OF Work and Death, things were not as they afterwards became. Evil may always have existed. Yet in the days before the Fall, the Akan of Ghana say, ‘its eyes were not yet open’ and there was nothing for it to do. The trouble began when God separated himself from men. As soon as Eve listened to the temptings of the serpent, and Adam in turn to Eve—most African versions of the Fall are variants on the same cautionary theme—Evil was awakened and made free to stalk the world, ‘seeking whom it may devour’ and finding many.

So for African religion, as for Christianity, Evil has appeared as an inherently necessary part of the world of men. If Evil has become a natural part of this world, the fault lies not with Good—with God— but with men's frailty and failure. This being so, there is always the millennial hope of paradise regained, of a world expunged of Evil, of progress unalloyed. It seems that every great culture has shared this hope in one way or another, and indeed, in the nature of human apprehension of reality, must share it: not least perhaps, though in secular terms, the consciously antireligious humanism which has inspired the social revolutions of the twentieth century.

Africans have also longed for a world without Evil, or, as they would put it, without witchcraft. Some of them have expressed strong ideas upon the subject. Mary Douglas tells us that the Lele of the Kasai region in the south-western Congo basin ‘can clearly visualise what reality would be like without sorcery’—meaning all forms of wizardry—'and they continually strive to achieve it by eliminating sorcerers'. Like Christian revivalists, they try ‘to push evil out of the world of reality’. Normally, it seems, their culture offers a balanced acceptance of reality, of things as they actually and irremediably are. But every now and then the Lele are consumed with a burning revivalism. This takes the form of anti-witchcraft movements that are 'nothing less than an attempt to introduce the millennium at once'.