Magic, mediums and Mugabe
[ by Charles Cameron — religion and politics in Africa – “fire burn and cauldron bubble” ]
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Among the marvels delivered recently by Twitter:
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SAIS graduate Daniel Morris provided some context in this Globe and Mail article written a few years back about the 2008 elections, Mugabe plays the God card:
The story starts as far back as March of 1898, when Rhodesia’s British occupiers hanged a 36-year-old woman named Charwe for allegedly murdering a colonial officer. But Charwe was no ordinary woman. She was the spiritual medium for Nehanda, the first female ancestor of the Shona tribe.
In his study of Charwe’s life and death, historian D. N. Beach of the University of Zimbabwe has concluded that she may well have been innocent of the murder. But she had a reputation as an anti-colonial fighter and refused to co-operate with the British. Charwe herself knew that these offences, as much as any murder, would warrant execution under the colonial government’s conception of justice.
Nehanda had been believed to be the spiritual guardian of Shona lands ever since committing ritual incest with her brother centuries before. Aware of the powerful inspiration she provided, the British were happy to believe she died with Charwe.
They soon learned, however, that the Shona spirits do not expire so easily. Nehanda didn’t just survive the hanging – her memory became mixed up with that of Charwe, and she was soon remembered as a potent symbol of colonial resistance. In the past few decades, she has experienced a popular revival, commemorated in “statues, street names, a hospital, posters, songs, novels and poems, and … the subject of a full-length feature film,” according to Prof. Beach.
Four out of five Zimbabweans are Shona, including Robert Mugabe. Since his beginnings as a guerrilla fighter against colonial rule in the 1970s, he has incorporated Nehanda into his political rhetoric, praising her as a martyr and heroine. In Guns and Rain, a book on spirit mediums in Zimbabwe, historian David Lan quotes a news report from Oct. 10, 1983, saying that Mr. Mugabe, “swearing by the name of the legendary anti-British spirit medium Ambuya [Grandmother] Nehanda, vowed that his government would confiscate white-owned land for peasant resettlement if [prime minister Margaret] Thatcher suspends promised British compensation.”
And:
The world already knows Mr. Mugabe is cynical and dangerous. But to understand the enduring, if waning, support he has been able to maintain for decades, the story goes beyond modern politics. The current battle for the presidency of Zimbabwe is taking place in the spiritual world as well, where the soul of a religious ancestor continues to be used as a political weapon.
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It would be all too easy to ignore the influence of “the spiritual world” and “the soul of a religious ancestor” in the name of secular modernity — but which world is more vivid to many of the people of Zimbabwe?
Before we go overboard condemning African spiritual practices, it’s worth recalling that Prof. Ralph Kirsch of the Department of Medicine in the University of Cape Town Medical School was quoted in a 1995 British Medical Journal article as saying:
Traditional healers are a very caring people, and extraordinarily skilled in psychotherapy and counselling. Some of them do a damn good job. Of course there are certain horrible ones who poison their patients at every turn…
I’m sure that those more familiar with the literature could find more and more recent articles to the same effect.
Here as elsewhere, the “distinctions that make a difference” are in the details…
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Ironic ADDENDUM:
Meanwhile @Aynte tweets:
#Zimbabwe leader Rober #Mugabe critically ill at a #Singapore hospital
