ISSN: 1570-0178 Volume 5, Issue 3 (16 May 2003) Teachings of the Jamaa movement: Texts and commentaries transcribed , translated, and commented by Johannes Fabian University of Amsterdam e-mail: fabian@pscw.uva.nl address: Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology University of Amsterdam Oudezijds Achterburgwal 185 1012 DK Amsterdam The Netherlands   Introduction Text 1: Of man (1)   Text 2: Of man (2) Context and setting Swahili text and English translation Commentary   Text 3: Of angels

Text 2: Of man (2)

Context and setting

The sirens call the end of the day shift and groups of workers emerge from repair shops and hangars; others come up from the open pit mines, blasts of flaming mineral colors carved by huge machinery into the dull arid savanna that surrounds them. Those from above and those from below meet on the red dust road that leads them to the workers' camp. Some walk, others ride bicycles; all look much alike in their soiled overalls and with their tired faces. A raised barrier admits them to the settlement. There they disperse in a geometrical maze of streets lined with small, identical-looking brick houses. They are greeted by women carrying babies astride their hips and balancing bundles of food or firewood on their heads. Bands of children are playing in a world they built for themselves, girls absorbed in rhymes and hand-clapping dances, boys pushing dream cars, elaborate, ethereal structures of bent wire and cardboard. Tulip trees, jacarandas, and rising smoke blend in the rays of a setting sun into a red, golden-green and bluish haze that hovers over corrugated iron roofs with deceptive serenity. The workers are immersed in the smells of charcoal, maniok, and sweat. They have come home.
A small group of sixty or seventy men and women, too small to be noticed among the thousands who live here, slowly gathers in front of the church in the center of the settlement. They welcome each other with a special greeting, call each other father and mother. Soon they will assemble for their weekly meeting. While they wait for others to arrive, they have time for a friendly talk. I have been waiting for them, and now I sit with a group of men in our favorite place, on the edge of a concrete-lined drainage ditch, our feet touching the dust and rubble left by the torrents of the rainy season. Tomorrow is payday, everyone is out of money, and so five or six of us share one strong, toasted smoke of a Belga Jaune. As the cigarette makes the rounds I do not dare to pull out my full pack. Our communion is too precious to be spoiled by such a display of the white man's inexhaustible resources. We are just getting into an intricate discussion of bridewealth and my ethnographer's mental notebook is ready, but we are called to the meeting. We walk over to the hall. Inside, we take our seats on low wooden benches, men and women facing each other. Babies cry and toddlers run in and out while the group waits in silence. Someone recites a prayer, we join, and return to silence. Then Baba Binga pronounces the greeting and embarks on his instruction.

Swahili text¹ and English translation

Commentary

Communicative Situation and Genre
The instruction represented in Text 2 was recorded before I arrived in Musonoi. Therefore, the introductory sketch of the ethnographic situation is in part fiction. It attempts to give a condensed impression of many occasions when I did participate in the mafundisho ya mukazi inne, the Thursday meeting of the group of Musonoi. It draws on actual observations and experiences and should, if successful, communicate the mood of a routine meeting. No special event, no crisis or cause for joy is needed to bring the group together for the weekly enactment of mawazo. In the course of many years, this had become part of their life, a break in the dull succession of working days. The gathering offers the opportunity to meet fellow members from other neighborhoods and to renew with them the "old thoughts" which brought the movement into being. Everybody participates, that means everybody who belongs to the Jamaa, or wants to belong to it, and who is not working the late shift, travelling, or otherwise unable to come. Thus, while never attaining attendance by all members, the weekly meeting is conceived as a gathering of the whole group, leaders, rank and file, and candidates. Without being formally regimented, these meetings follow more or less the same schema: Prayer, instruction, a hymn, perhaps another instruction, concluding prayer. Some groups emphasize singing more than others, but there is not much room for variation because the meetings should be over in about one hour, before it gets dark around 6 p.m. On cursory inspection it may seem that instructions are recited by whoever feels he has something to say. But speaking of mafundisho is not linked to any kind of special personal inspiration and longer observation shows that a small number of leading members are the recognized speakers of instruction.¹⁴
The speaker of Text 2 is one of these leaders. As one of the founders of the group at Musonoi, he has given birth through initiation to a large number of "children." He speaks with authority and his claim to teaching is uncontested. The size of the audience, the nature of the occasion, and the frame of the routine meeting make this text clearly a product of the genre mafundisho.¹⁵

Content and Style
The topic which the speaker of Text 2 chooses to discuss and through which he realizes his competence as a teacher of mawazo is the same as the one in Text 1: umuntu. But the exposition is not only much shorter, which may be a function of purely external limitations on time; it also reveals a significant shift in emphasis as far as the teaching content is concerned. This is illustrated in the following figure, in which we compare the content of Text 2 with our theoretical catalog.

Roughly one-third (paragraphs 1-11) of Text 2 is devoted to "discovery," that is, to reflections on the idea of umuntu placed in the concrete context of experiences shared by every candidate to the movement. Then follows a brief section introducing the concept of mawazo, not through logical derivation from a root concept (as, for instance in Text 1) but in a mythical account of the origin of thought-man (paragraphs 13-14, and 17). The three great thoughts are introduced in the same general sequence as in Text 1 (paragraphs 18-22), though not differentiated along the lines of an ontological body-soul dualism. The latter is alluded to in paragraph 16, where the body is shown to be the source of divisiveness among men. Throughout Text 2, the two elements of human nature are expressed as mwili and mawazo (e.g., paragraph 14), but they are in no way systematically developed along the taxonomic distinctions of mwili versus roho which significantly determined the shape of Text 1. In paragraph 24, Text 2 seems to end in a concluding formula. Up to that point each of the three thoughts has briefly been treated and, except for some application, one would expect the speaker to terminate his instruction. Instead, he continues in what at first looks like a rambling summary of the discovery section. This text is not the most elegantly construed mafundisho. The speaker tends to return earlier points or examples (he does this in paragraphs 10, 16 and again in 28 and 30). But such unevenness of execution should not lead one to overlook that the transition between paragraphs 23 and 25, leaving out the interjected formula in paragraph 24, is in fact an important one. In paragraph 23, God still speaks to thought-man, to man before creation. In paragraph 25, the speaker invokes man's creation, his descent on earth, and his fall.
This leads us to consider the overall stylistic scheme of the text. The author was at the time when the recording was made probably the most influential leader in the Kolwezi area. He had synthesized his experience with and through the Jamaa in what we may call a mythical-historical style. Text 2 offers ample evidence for that interpretation, evidence which is all the more impressive since it is contained in an instruction which shares genre and topic with Text 1. Further and more extensive documentation for an almost pure form of that mythical-historical style will be given in Text 3, when we comment on the same speaker's instruction about the creation of the angels. But we may already assemble some of the lexical and structural indicators revealing a significant and systematic difference between the logical-moral and mythical historical styles.
We anticipate the results of that analysis and render the structural organization of Text 2 in the following schema (see Figure 5) which is again construed along a horizontal axis indicating narrative sequence and a vertical axis marking levels of discourse.

Judging on first appearances, Texts 1 and 2 seem to follow roughly the same scheme. Both consist of a sizeable introductory section, followed by a systematic treatment of umuntu; both show an interdigitation of segments or of clusters of segments, which we interpret as changes between levels of discourse. However, these resemblances turn out to be largely formal as soon as one examines the content of the relationships we distinguished as sequences and levels. This is what we try to indicate by choosing new and different labels in Figure 5 to identify the dimensions of Text 2.
Along the horizontal axis the segments of Text 2 are linked by sequential (narrative), not taxonomic, principles. In the first major section, "discovery" (paragraphs 1-8), the speaker evokes a series of mifano, exemplary situations, which have the purpose of illustrating practical, concrete experiences of what it means to be human.
The second major section, labelled "account" (paragraphs 15-28) is organized along a sequence of successive origins: of thought-man and unity (paragraph 15), of the body and diversity (paragraph 16), of man's nature (paragraph 18), of each of the three thoughts (paragraphs 19-23), and of visible man on earth and the loss of umuntu (paragraph 25). Relationships between source and results are not conceived as logical derivations, as in Text 1, but as successive actions and interactions: God and thought-man, God and man. Paragraph 25 is separated from the preceding parts of that section by yet another temporal notion; the cut marks the history of the three thoughts before and after creation. There remains some uncertainty whether this account of beginnings should be located on the theological or the mythological levels of Jamaa doctrine,¹⁶ or perhaps on both, but it is clear that it exhibits the concern and ways of arguing that are characteristic of the mythical-historical style.
The concluding section of Text 2 resumes the pattern of discovery and in fact refers to one of the examples used at the beginning (see paragraphs 28 and 4). It thus appears simply as a resumption of the initial theme. More of a problem is posed by a short passage (paragraph 12-14) which we separated from the two main sections. There the speaker recalls questions regarding the nature of man. Grammatically it would be possible that with the first person plural in the phrase "we answered" (paragraph 13) he simply refers to his own person. But the content of the dialogue combined with external evidence suggests that the passage recalls formulae used in the ritual interrogation of candidates about to be introduced to the first degree of Jamaa initiation. If our interpretation is correct, these segments would not at all disturb the transition between the two major portions of Text 2. On the contrary, they would accurately reflect Jamaa ideas of the acquisition of doctrinal knowledge as a process of realizing mawazo through common search, initiation, and shared knowledge.
Two levels can be distinguished along the horizontal axis. We choose the label "recall" for the first one to emphasize that the speaker's evocations of Jamaa experience and doctrine are distinctly temporal. By this we mean that the situations and doctrinal tenets which serve as point of departure in creating the rhetoric appeal of this instruction are all located in some time, in a proximity to origins whose nature remains to be determined. This, by the way, is true also of the exemplary stories in the first section. Not only are these mifano introduced in the past tense (e.g., tuliona, we saw, in paragraphs 4 and 6), but the speaker locates them in the social past of his audience: they happened "back home in our village" (paragraph 4).
The second level of discourse was called "realization." It groups the segments in which the speaker relates paradigmatic situations or events, all of them situated in the past, to the present state of man and of the world in which he lives. The point is that this is done not as moral application of norms to action but as a realization of models. These may be depicted simply as examples, other times as ultimate causes, and then again as paradigmatic mythical events. This observation will be confirmed and clarified when we now examine some of the semantic indicators for the mythical-historical style.
One of the most prominent features we expect to find in the mythical-historical scheme are terms connoting cosmological concepts: origins, heaven and earth, and the metaphor of the road, the believer's travels through time. Text 2 identifies the time in which God lives as eternity (milele; see paragraphs 15, 19), the time of thought-man as "the days of old" (tangu zamani; paragraph 14), and the lost origins of man as the place from whence he came (kule alitoka; see paragraphs 11 and 31). Heaven and earth are viewed in a spatial relationship; when God creates he "lowers" man unto earth (paragraph 25). Because everything that constitutes man has its origin in the past, his present failures and limitations are explained not as infractions of a code of morals (or at least not primarily so), but as a loss, often a loss of memory, a failure to recall or to note. These notions pervade Text 2 in such terms or their derivatives as kupotea, to lose (paragraphs 1, 25, 26, 27, 30, 31), kusahau, to forget (paragraphs 1, 11, 16, 22), and kukosa or kushindwa kujua, fail to know (paragraphs 5, 9, 11, 28).
Characteristically, those exhortations and phrases expressing, or appealing to, moral obligation which we found to be prominent in Text 1 are absent in this instruction. Transitions between the levels of recall and of realization are usually expressed in statements of fact, e.g., "therefore we know . . ." (kumbe tunajua, paragraph 16), "therefore we have . . ." (kumbe twiko, paragraph 20), "this is because . . ." (sababu, maneno, paragraphs 17, 28), or simply "this is how it is" (ni vile, paragraphs 24, 27, 29, 319). The same "aura of factuality," to borrow a term from Clifford Geertz, surrounds an expression which appears almost as frequently as in Text 1: kutafuta, to search. Nowhere in Text 2 is it made an existential/ontological attribute of man's nature. Man is not the seeker "as such"; he searches for what was lost, for umuntu, for the way (e.g., paragraph 26), and for Christianity (e.g., paragraph 27). In any case, kutafuta always occurs with an object, it always is directed towards a goal or thing (e.g., paragraph 7).
In this context, the notion of "the way" (njia) deserves special attention. With one exception, to be discussed below, the term occurs in this instruction in two contexts or connotations, both of which point to Jamaa concepts of initiation. In paragraphs 3 and 26, "the way" is identified with the knowledge of umuntu, that is, with Jamaa doctrine and its gradual acquisition symbolized in the "three ways" of the ritual of initiation. In paragraph 39, njia evokes a notion of progress and growth that is attained in the Jamaa, which may be lost, though, if it is not pursued in unity. In that case, it may throw the followers back "to where we came from," a phrase expressed in a subtle combination of temporal and local markers in which the speaker artfully rejoins the conclusions of his mafundisho to its point of departure, to experiences "back home in our village" (see paragraph 4).
Regarding the use of rhetoric devices, the speaker employs greeting and sentence and/or word completion much in the same way as the author of Text 1. We should note, however, a tendency to intensify or extend contacts with the audience. Frequently, Baba Binga repeats the responses of his listeners (e.g., in paragraphs 5, 7, 14). More significant are differences in the use of mifano. In Text 1 their functions remained somewhat unclear; at times they appeared as plans or projects, rather than examples (in fact, this led us to distinguish "organization" as a level of discourse). In Text 2 they are undoubtedly construed and used as concrete exemplifications. Not only their content (situations in village life) but also their form definitely point back to the traditional context. In paragraph 8, for instance, we see the influence of the traditional device of confronting one's audience with a riddle: "How many people passed on the road?" Then follow the wrong and the correct answers, and the segment ends with a condensed allegory in which njia serves as a metaphor of the common toils of married life: "Husband and wife, they pass on the road from morning to evening."

Socio-Cultural Context
No communicative event and hence no text exists in a vacuum. Yet there may be differences in the degrees to which a speaker addresses himself to problems, situations, and tasks the Jamaa faces in relating to its socio-cultural environment. On that score, Text 2 is undoubtedly in sharp contrast to the first document. It expresses the kind of closedness, self-centered otherworldliness, of which the Jamaa in the Kolwezi area was often accused. The author of Text 1 repeats ad nauseam his moral appeal to the audience: tunapashwa, we must, we are obliged. In his obsession with kutafuta he depicts man individually, and the Jamaa as a group, collectively, as permanently self-transcending, full of projects for social practice. Baba Binga, the author of the second text, calmly states mythical and historical facts. At one point he succinctly expresses the purpose of his instruction: kukumbushana, to make each other think, remember (paragraph 29; the expression, by the way, has its negative counterpart in kujisahauna, a complex reflexive and at the same time reciprocal derivation, roughly "to make each other forget one's self," see paragraph 16). The image is that of a group sharing in a common possession (perhaps lost, but to be found again), and it implies a definition of Jamaa as "those who guard mawazo." Allusions to the ritual of initiation (paragraphs 12-14) further contribute to the inward, group-centred character of Text 2.
Not only is Baba Binga looking inward, he also appears to be fixed on the past, not just the mythical past but also a social past he shares with most of his listeners. In his examples he recalls the life of Christians in rural Kasai: small groups in populous villages and towns often led by laymen in charge of communal devotions that had to substitute for the liturgy whenever the missionaries could not make it to the village (see paragraph 4). In these exemplary stories, Christians are contrasted to pagans as those who "recognize" human beings beyond the limits of their kingroup or village. A similar notion is expressed in the only other passage directly addressed to a social problem. There the speaker traces tribalism and racism to the divisive nature of the human body (paragraph 16). But notice that this is stated with a good deal of resignation, as a matter of fact rather than as a challenge. One is tempted, by the way, to seek a similar passive and fatalistic attitude behind the descriptions of man's fall. The expression used is "mawazo . . . ilitupoteza, umuntu . . . ilitupoteza" (paragraph 25), literally "mawazo and umuntu lost us." This curious inversion of subject and object is idiomatic Swahili, not a "typical" feature of "Bantu thought" (mis)interpreted by colonials as inability or unwillingness to assume personal responsibility.¹⁷
Finally, there is a distinct contrast in the way the two leaders introduce Christianity into their teachings. Where the first speaker invokes the founder of the church, his apostles, and the present clerical hierarchy and where he outlines ways in which the Jamaa should integrate into that institution, the author of Text 2 speaks only of bakristiani, Christians, and bukristiani, the abstract noun signifying Christianity as an idea, which he then identifies with the three thoughts and therefore with umuntu (paragraph 27). Thus the circle closes, and encloses, the followers of the Jamaa in their own thoughts. The threat of an internal schism (alluded to in paragraph 26) becomes more important than the challenge of a hostile outside world.

Notes

¹ Recorded, probably in 1965, by Fr. Bertien Peeraer at the parish hall in Musonoi.
² This is what I hear on the tape; the translation assumes that the verb is -nyima, to withhold (see Lenselaer 1983:148).
³ In this translation we use bumuntu although the speaker is not consistent and at times chooses the alternative form umuntu. In Shaba/Katanga Swahili th u- and bu- prefixes may be used interchangeably.
⁴ It is not quite clear who is meant by "he". The context points to a passerby.
⁵ Our translation is abbreviated. In the original the speaker goes into a rapid flow of permutations, changing prefixes and infixes, thus giving a vivid rhetoric expression to the hurried and confused reactions of people who do not want to get involved.
⁶ The term bababa is here simply translated as "men." The context indicates that the speaker is using the polite form current in Shaba/Katanga Swahili, not the obligatory term of address in Jamaa language.
⁷ This translation assumes that the -sima in the orginal is a variant of -zima, to put out or away.
⁸ This is a short translation of two awkward phrases (one in the plural, the other in the singular) introducing a question in the form of a riddle.
⁹ The meaning of anakutola is not quite clear; possibly it is the conversive form of anakuta. In that case it would imply the opposite of meeting or greeting someone, perhaps "he does not stop to look carefully."
¹⁰ In the form tshi-ka-lunda, two prefixes are compounded; tshi- ( = ki- ) as the the common prefix for languages, and ka-, singular of the ka-/tu- class used in several Bantu languages of the region (e.g., Luba, Tshokwe), but not in Standard Swahili. Hence kabila, "tribe", may have a plural form, tu-bila. The same occurs in several other curiosities of Shaba/Katanga Swahili, especially with loanwords in which a syllable ka is interpreted as a prefix. Thus, tu-piteni is a plural of ka-piteni, "foremen" (from Portuguese capita, or English captain); ka-mat is the singular of tu-mat, "tomatoes", and so forth.
¹¹ This is one of the contexts in which the concepts of umuntu, "human nature", and umungu, "divine nature", seem to shade into each other. This occurs frequently as a "mistake" based, probably, on the phonological similarity of the two terms. But it also invites speculation about a structural semantic similarity revealing in effect an equivalence of the doctrines of God and Man in Jamaa teaching.
¹² Imva equals mvi in East Coast Swahili.
¹³ The current word in Shaba/Katanga Swahili for milk and for breast is maziba (see East Coast ziwa, plural ma-ziwa). The prefix ma- is interpreted as the plural form of the di-/ma- class (cf. van Avermaet and Mbuya 1954:105), hence diziba, one breast.
¹⁴ For a more detailed description, see Fabian 1971:83-84.
¹⁵ On genres of Jamaa discourse see Fabian 1974, reprinted in 1991: chap. 3.
¹⁶ See on this Fabian 1971:161).
¹⁷ Another often cited example would be phrase a cook might use when he dropped a plate: "sahani ilinipasuka," literally "the plate broke on me."

References

Fabian, Johannes. (1969). An African Gnosis: For a Reconsideration of an Authoritative Definition. History of Religions 9: 42-58.
Fabian, Johannes. (1971). Jamaa: A Charismatic Movement in Katanga. Evanston: Northwestern University press. (234 pp.)
Fabian, Johannes. (1973). Kazi: Conceptualizations of Labor in a Charismatic Movement among Swahili-speaking Workers. Cahiers d`études africaines 13: 293-325.
Fabian, Johannes. (1974). Genres in an emerging tradition: An approach to religious communication. In: A.W. Eister (ed.), Changing perspectives in the scientific study of religion. New York: Wiley Interscience. 249-272.
Fabian, Johannes. (1975). Taxonomy and ideology: On the boundaries of concept classification. In: M. Dale Kinkade, Kenneth L. Hale and Oswald Werner (eds.), Linguistics and anthropology: In honor of C.F. Vögelin. Lisse: Peter de Ridder Press. 183-197.
Fabian, Johannes. (1977). Lore and doctrine: Some observations on story-telling in the Jamaa movement. Cahiers d`études africaines 17: 307-329.
Fabian, Johannes. (1991). Time and the Work of Anthropology: Critical Essays 1971-1991. Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers.
Fabian, Johannes. (1994). Jamaa: A Charismatic Movement Revisited. In Thomas D. Blakely, Walter E. A. van Beek and Dennis L. Thomson (eds.), Religion in Africa. Experience and Expression. London: James Currey/ Portsmout, N.H.: Heineman. 257-74.
Lenselaer, Alphonse. (1983). Dictionnaire Swahili-Français. Paris: Karthala.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1967). Structural Anthropology. Garden City, N. J.: Doubleday.
Van Avermaet, E. and B. Mbuya. (1954). Dictionnaire Kiluba-Français. Tervuren: Musée Royal du Congo Belge.

[Introduction]

[Text 1: Of man (1)]

[Text 2: Of man (2)]

[Text 3: Of angels ] - to appear

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