Healing the rupture: a Jungian perspective in African religion/mythology.

In a letter dated March 25, 1998 from the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, Vatican City, to the Presidents of the Episcopal Conferences of Africa and of Madagascar, the pastoral began by saying that, "[t]he secretariat for Non-Christians has become more and more convinced of the importance of giving greater pastoral attention to the traditional religion (incorrectly called animism) in Africa and Madagascar. This conviction is reinforced by the expressed wishes of many Bishops of Africa and Madagascar which our Secretariat receives, together with the experience gained by other heralds of Gospel in this continent" (Arinze 1998:1).

African religions/cultures have had a very difficult and particularly painful history of survival in the Diaspora, as well as in the African continent itself, due to the long trade of the carriers of these religions and to the oppression inflicted on them by outside cultures. Western culture caused indirect damage as African religions were misinterpreted or defined through European perspectives. This caused as much damage to the African psyche as did centuries of enslavement. Under subjection to other dominant religions, African religions were neglected and dismissed as lacking deep wisdom based in complex mythologies and symbols. Stigmatized by terms such as "barbarism," "savagery," "animism"--as mentioned in the Vatican letter--these religions have become incapable of communicating their deep knowledge. The misconceptions that have undermined African traditional religions have caused African peoples to become disconnected from their spiritual and cultural roots. The misconceptions have also alienated humanity as a whole, which could have benefited from the richness of the African myths, and through them gained insight into the human experience in its totality.

Beginning in the 16th century, many African cultures were dislocated from their indigenous context by the slave trade and relocated in diverse cultures. A great number of slaves were brought from diverse cultural backgrounds and dispersed in the New World in such a way that their individual cultural, linguistic, and religious similarities were lost. Thus, those that had shared the same cultural identity had their unity broken and their identity weakened. There was a deliberate attempt by part of the dominant society to dislocate a people's unity by weakening their system of beliefs. In the words of Gayraud S. Wilmore (1998: 22), "The most immediate and determinative reality in the life of most slaves was their bondage in this strange land, thousands of miles from the sacred earth in which were interred the bones of their ancestors and where the gods of their fathers walked and talked with men and women." With the institution of slavery, not only the cultural integrity of these people was broken, but their ability to maintain their mythological unity, creating, in this way, a psychological vulnerability and a deep disassociation from their beliefs.

The real process of slavery began with the breakdown of the slaves' own religions. The teaching of a new religion was a means to convince the slaves of the inferiority of their beliefs and to perpetuate the superiority of the masters' beliefs. The new religion--Christianity in different manifestations, being Catholicism in the South and Central America and orthodox Protestantism in North America--was inaccessible to the slaves since the sacred was cited in words, in a sacred book. The African peoples were accustomed to an oral tradition of cultural transmission.

Missionaries played the role of mediators in translating the `sacred' and they translated it from the perspective of a hierarchical, monotheistic power structure. E. Franklin Frazier states that, "The slaves were taught that the God with whom they became acquainted in the Bible was the ruler of the universe and superior to all other gods" (in Wilmore 1998:29). Missionaries served the purpose of the masters using the message of Christianity. The superiority of the Christian God over other gods, the choice of the Old Testament God for one race in favour of another, of even the example of Christ in submitting himself to suffering and self-sacrifice, were messages manipulated to keep the slaves in a state of powerless awe at the feet of this `superior God' and superior race. They learned to content themselves in sacrificing their lives to the purpose of that God.

Contact with this new religion and the ministrations of the missionaries diluted the spiritual base of African religions. Africans in the New World were taught completely new ways to conceive the sacred and to relate to nature. Due to their closeness with nature, African practices became easily associated with Christian conceptions of evil and devilish imagery depicted in European books. This process of associating African practices with evil created for the African people a state of dependence. Under the manipulation and pressure of dominant religions, African religions lost many of their primordial concepts. They were doomed to extinction or to undergo syncretism with Western religions, thereby muffling their expression.

It is very important to understand that West African religions and orthodox Western European Christianity religion(s) differ greatly from each other in their conceptions and their manifestation of the sacred. For Christian religions there is only one God and all things serve this God. It is a monotheistic religion that serves a hierarchical order (especially in Catholicism) in which, the sacred experience is normally conducted by a priest who offers the ritual and the interpretation of the scriptures. This hierarchical form would become fundamental to the support of slavery, where the masterholder, or "the Lord," dominated over the slaves.