Zambezia (1983), XI (i).MEDIUMS, MARTYRS AND MORALS*A. HASTINGSDepartment of Religious Studies and Philosophy, University of ZimbabweEVERY UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT and every academic discipline needs itsjustification. For its own devotees a discipline may well justify itself simply interms of the pursuit of truth, but for those outside any particular magic circleand especially for university administrators and government piper-payersdividing up a limited cake among many bidders, the justification will have to becouched in some sort of social form. Even the richest university is not likely tomaintain indefinitely a discipline whose only point is the esoteric interest of itsexperts. This is as true of Religious Studies as of anything else and aninaugural lecture seems as suitable a moment as any for mapping out the roughlines of an appropriate apologia. Of course, the apologia that I offer will not bequite the same as that which my colleagues might provide. Nevertheless, Iwould hope that my own way of justifying the discipline and the Department ofReligious Studies is not merely subjective, but at least a fair appraisal from theviewpoint of today's Zimbabwe of some of the commanding heights of what is,on any standards, a vast and intriguing territory.I am not the first to attempt this exercise within this university. Mypredecessor, the first Professor of Theology, Robert Craig, gave his inaugurallecture here on 20 April 1964. In one way he was, to be precise, not mypredecessor because he was Professor of Theology, I of Religious Studies.Our department was renamed three years ago. Yet it is noticeable that Ms lecturewas entitled Religion, Its Reality and Its Relevance. We were, then, we mayclaim, in reality a Department of Religious Studies from the start, as we areexplicitly today. Equally, when we changed our name, we did not abandon aconcern for theology. We remain committed to the view that the University ofZimbabwe needs the study of Christian theology, but that Christian theologyhere, or anywhere, is almost bound to miss its own target if it avoids its propercontext, the study of religions.Where we part company with Professor Craig and also with hissuccessor. Professor T. A. Burkill, is not a recognition of religion beyond thebiblical and Christian tradition, but rather in the localization of that widerrecognition. Reading their inaugural lectures, the one delivered in 1964, theother in May 1971,1 was struck by the total absence from both of the slightestreference to the traditional religions of Africa. The Department had been*An inaugural lecture delivered before the University of Zimbabwe on 16 June 1983.located very clearly within a tradition of Anglo-Saxon theological thought. Itwas not located mentally in any significant way within the continent whereinit was placed physically. That was a weakness. The religious experience ofAfrica is not to be so easily dismissed. It is in fact a highly rewarding subject ofstudy and research, on any grounds; all the more if one is in fact at work in thecontext of today's Zimbabwe, endeavouring as it is to reappropriate in a livingway its innate cultural tradition, while not rejecting Š needless to say Š thevast positive acquisitions drawn from abroad over the last hundred years. Atthe heart of Zimbabwe's traditional culture lay the religious understanding ofits people. Equally, among the acquisitions of the last century nothing has beenmore taken to the heart of many Zimbabweans than Christian faith. Ourdepartment has to stand upon the knife edge where those two traditions meet.While theoretically the task of a Department of Religious Studiesembraces all religions, there has in practice to be a recognition of priorities;ours is to focus attention upon what is most significant for the society ofZimbabwe and its African neighbours: the three great streams of traditionalreligion, Christianity and Islam.These religions, their adherents, their beliefs, their interaction withsociety, actual or potential, are things of great public significance, for theunbeliever as well as for the believer. The social task of a university departmentis to concentrate its powers of scholarship, interpretation and pedagogy uponthat which manifestly bears upon man, here and now. It is our claim that todayas much as ever religion is immensely important for the understanding andenhancement of human experience. It is not something primarily 'primitive','medieval', or of antiquarian interest. It is essentially a modern reality, as it hasalways been, something culturally continuous with the contemporary world,and to be found present in both the latter's conservative and its radicaldimensions. The study of religion is an extremely complex, multi-faceted,exercise Š a process which cannot be short-circuited, and which is no moresafely dispensable than that of any other major aspect of human living. That isthe basic ground of our apologia Š a ground as sound for the believer in anyreligion or in none. We do not base our existence as a department in a modernuniversity on the ground of the existence of God or the objectivity of the objectof religious belief, but on the objectivity and influence of religion itself as an on-going human reality.One way in which the social importance of religion is demonstrated isthe number of its full-time practitioners and their wider influence. It is one taskof a university to service the major public professions and to enable theirmembers to maintain and improve their specific expertise. A Department ofReligious Studies has the responsibility not only of helping society understandreligion, but also of helping religion and its leaders understand themselves.Where this does not happen, not only may the churches themselves be gravelyhampered in their work, not only will they be diminished in their self-understanding and intellectual flexibility, but society as a whole is left withchurches which may be no less influential for being less critically self-aware,less enlightened in their approach to the relationship between religion andsociety. It is, then, greatly in the interests of society to have a well educatedclergy rather than a poorly educated one. A university Department ofReligious Studies is one way in which society not only recognizes religion butalso influences it, thus to some extent ensuring against the dominance ofreactionary religion Š a danger to which the modern world remains very muchexposed as we may observe, for example, in the Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran.A department such as ours should, then, be the point not only at whichdifferent religious traditions meet but also where a constant dialogue is inprogress between religion and society. Such a dialogue is to be conductedwithout reductionism. Religion is not here to be explained away in terms ofpsychology, sociology, politics or economics by any full surrender to thedogmas of Freud, Marx or Durkheim. It is accepted as a reality in its ownterms, though its understanding does require the constant intervention ofpsychology, sociology, politics and economics, as abrasive tools of analysis, forreligion does not constitute a segregated area of reality but one aspect of man'sfinally single experience.Much of our subject can, doubtless, be studied in other departmentsand, of course, it is. We have no complaint that Sociology or History prey upona great deal of religious material. They have the right to take as much as is ofuse for their own discipline. It is, indeed, a homage to the importance of oursubject that they take a great deal. Here, as throughout the academic world,there is bound to be some overlapping, especially at the more humdrum andquantitative level. Yet for the study of religion in itself the quantitative must, Ibelieve, remain of rather secondary significance. We are certainly interested inChristians and Buddhists, but we are basically a great deal more interested inthe Christ and the Buddha. If we wish to grasp the specificity of religion and itspeculiar power, we need to focus our attention above all upon its high andformative points, upon the people, moments, ways of behaviour which throughsome sort of special spiritual intensity escape the regular, more predictablepatterns of human living (including more conventional religious behaviour) toforge anew a compelling communicable vision. It is this that millions of lessintense people subsequently accept as normative in the understanding ofthemselves and the world.It is in an attempt to find some sort of structure for the commanding heightsof religious experience that I wish now to turn your attention to mediums,martyrs, morals and also memories, and I intend to illustrate this synthesisabove all in African terms.The unpredictable Christ is certainly not to be dissociated from thepredictable Christian. One of our primary concerns, indeed, is just how to linkthem. The sociology of religion suggests a link in the routinization of charisma.3However charismatic the prophet, the charisma to survive must needs beroutinized through the establishment of predictable structure including, veryespecially, ritual structure. Ritual, while not necessarily or specifically areligious phenomenon, is the great common carrier and communicator ofreligious reality. It is, nevertheless, not self-justifying. Doubtless in establishedchurches ritual can and does, to some extent, become an end in itself (thougheven then one would probably always be able to find a further hidden agenda,aesthetic or social), but healthy ritual always points, and pretty clearly points,to things outside itself: there is a 'foundation charter' behind it and there is amessage of moral and social purpose before it.Take the 'foundation charter'. It is the nature of ritual to be performedon account of some past authority which it recalls more or less explicitly. At itsmost explicit this becomes a formal memoriale: do this in memory of me. Itrecalls some unforgettable moment in history, a theophany, the death of amartyr, and the authoritative message of a medium or prophet interpreting thatmoment. This is, of course, particularly clear in that ritual which, I wouldsuggest, is the most symbolically comprehensive of all Š the Christian mass,an explicit memorial meal of the death of Jesus of Nazareth, performed at hisown command. But good ritual looks forward still more than it looks back: itrenews in fact the essentially non-ritual concerns of the originating moment,concerns of moral and social order, of claiming the future, of symbolicallyasserting the primacy of the spiritual within the material, of weaving an imageof healing and the salvation of man. Ritual, then, while being the commonlanguage and tool of religion, is in no way its source or its raison d'etre. Itpoints to non-ritual. It is striking that the most religiously decisive figures areseldom themselves ritual specialists. Here again the Christian example isenlightening: if the mass is ntua\,par excellence, it recalls Jesus who was in noway whatsoever, so far as is recorded, a ritualist. Religion is carried on andapplied by ritual, it is not begun by it. It is begun, just as it is revitalized, by themedium or prophet, and the martyr.Raymond Firth, in his magnificent sociological study Rank and Religionin Tikopia,l establishes a. contrast between the medium and the prophet: themedium does not need to be personally identified with the supernaturalmessage received through him as does the prophet. He is, indeed, more or lessunconscious and in a trance, while the spirit speaks directly, not to him butthrough him, oratio recta. The medium has not, as a consequence, to bearpersonal responsibility for its interpretation as had Elijah, Isaiah or Jeremiah.Once the message is given, the state of spirit possession terminated, themedium's role is over. The prophet, on the contrary, passes on the message hehas received through his own deliberate words and actions, oratio obliqua. Heremains morally one with the word that he proclaims and, if that word isunpopular, he will have to suffer for it. In formal terms Firth's distinction is a'R. Firth, Rank and Religion in Tikopia (London, Allen & Unwin, 1970), 33-4.4genuine one, and it is certainly possible in practice to separate the twophenomena to a considerable extent. Nevertheless, it would be mistaken toargue for a systematic separation of the two. A prophet must obtain hismessage and mission from some sort of very special personal experience, andthat experience is often mediumistic. In a society where mediums are animportant part of the culture, a prophet is most likely to be a medium, just as invery priest-ridden churches a prophet is very likely to be a priest.To illustrate this one cannot do better than to refer to Shona mediums and,very particularly, the part they played in the first Chimurenga of 1896-7.Mediums are crucial to Shona culture and they cannot well be restricted, likeTikopian mediums, within Filth's rather narrow typology. Indeed it is widelytrue in Africa that the strictly mediumistic activities of the n 'anga are a fairlysmall part of a wider pastoral or priestly ministry though not, normally, aparticularly prophetic ministry. Through them the ancestral spirits regulate themorals of family and clan. But the mediums of the great Mhoedoro havefrequently had a wider role. That of Chaminuka in the wars against theNdebele, that of Nehanda and Kagubi in the first Chimurenga became farmore that of a prophet than Š in Firth's typology Š that of a mere medium.2In 1967 Professor Terence Ranger in his classic Revolt in SouthernRhodesia 1896-7 went so far as to claim Š in this representing much earlieropinion Š that the religious personalities of the revolt, like Mkwati, Kagubiand Nehanda, were in fact its true political leaders, combining propheticfervour with an amazingly wide-ranging political skill. Kagubi, in particular, hemaintained, played' a very important role in co-ordinating the rising at a supra-tribal level'.3 More recently other historians, especially Julian Cobbing andDavid Beach,4 have sharply challenged this thesis and demonstrated, on thewhole fairly convincingly, that the leadership of the rising, both among theNdebele and among the Shona, was far more firmly in lay and chiefly handsthan Ranger had argued. In terms of power, of the effective initiation and co-ordination of the movements of rebellion, this is doubtless the case.5 Ourconclusion, nevertheless, should not be that Kagubi and Nehanda did notmatter, that the popular mythology which has remembered them soemphatically is somehow groundless. It means rather that their truly religiousand prophetic function should not, in interpretation, be over-politicized. Theirswas not so much one of straight political leadership. It is in fact unlikely to be a:For example, cf. the role of Nuer prophets like Ngundeng, E.E. Evans-Pritchard. NuerReligion (Oxford. Clarendon Press, 1956). 303-10, or that of Dinka prophets, G.Lienhardt,Divinity and Experience, The Religion of the Dinka (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1961).T.O. Ranger, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896-7 (London, Heinemann. 1967). 224.4J.R.D. Cobbing. 'The absent priesthood: Another look at the Rhodesian Risings of 1896-7'.The Journal of African History (1977). XVIII. 61-84; D.N. Beach, '"Chimurenga": The ShonaRisings of 1896-7'. ibid. (1979), XX, 395 420; D.N. Beach, "Revolt in Southern Rhodesia*. TheInternational Journal of African Historical Studies (1980), XIII. 103-8."Note, nevertheless that, in reply to Cobbing* s 'Absent priesthood'. Ranger has promised usa further article to be entitled "The priests and prophets return'.prophetic stance for a priest to become prime minister even in a state ofemergency. His influence is not thereby enhanced. The prophetic role is ratherone of the instilling of enthusiasm and a more than rational conviction, of moralinterpretation, of the construction and enhancement of an on-going tradition ofmeaning, of the symbolization of a cause in a single person.The achievement of Kagubi and Nehanda should, I suspect, be seen onsuch lines. It had, furthermore, not a little to do with their dying, executed in acolonial prison in 1898, though it is true that Kagubi's Christian baptismimmediately before execution adds a further touch of ambiguity Š yet a veryauthentic one Š to his message. He had proclaimed national salvation throughthe killing of the White invaders. It had not worked. Now by becoming one ofthe first of his people to be baptized a Catholic Christian, while surely notceasing to be a Shona nationalist, he did in fact point prophetically enough tothe future. Nor should the deaths of Nehanda and Kagubi be entirely separatedin our view from that of the Anglican catechist, Bernard Mizeki, upon the otherside. The scope of prophetic martyrdom at that point can encompass both.When in April 1977, in the second Chimurenga, Basil Nyabadza, priest of thelittle church of St Francis, Makoni, was shot at night by security forces besidehis church, these two martyr traditions Š that of Nehanda upon the one side,Mizeki upon the other Š somehow coalesced. Each prophet, each martyr-witness, has his limitation; yet each from a brief localized set of eventsgenerates a myth, an on-going memoriale, a story with its own in-built moralimperative for people to come.Eighty years earlier than Kagubi and Nehanda there lived two, perhapsstill more remarkable, African prophets Š Nxele and Ntsikana. These twoXhosa mediums, one of whom died in 1820, the other in 1821, present in anextraordinary way the intellectual and moral alternatives that Africans hadthen, and have had many times since, to face. As a recent writer, J. B. Peires,has remarked, 'The contrast between the two would surely be taken for a mythif it were not known to be a reality'.6 At the time they lived, British colonialismwas pressing upon the Xhosa and driving them eastward from their homes witha rathlessness that they had previously never experienced. Both Nxele andNtsikana were mediums who had come into some contact with Christianity.Nxele reacted to become the prophet of violent resistance, a true predecessorto Kagubi. He died attempting to escape from Robben Island. Ntsikana wasthe pacifist, the preacher of submission, but of much more than submission. Hewas the author of some of the most powerful oral literature of Southern AfricaŠ his Great Hymn above all.7 Like Jeremiah he taught by symbols. As he laydying, he asked his family to bury Mm in the ground in the Christian way.\J.B. Peires. 'Nxele. Ntsikana and the orisins of the Xhosa relisious reaction". The Journalof African History (1979). XX. 51-61.J. Hodgson. Ntsikana's 'Great Hymn' (Cape Town, Univ. of Cape Town. Centre forAfrican Studies. 1 980).When they appeared to hesitate he grasped a wooden spade and turned the firstsods. Ten thousand men marched behind Nxele in his attack upon Grahams-town, hardly a handful of people were convinced by Ntsikana, yet manymillions have since sung his hymns. If prophecy is largely concerned with eviland the proper response to it, it is likely to oscillate between the two poles ofmilitant resistance and pacifism. This has seldom been better shown than in thecontrast between Nxele and Ntsikana.Twenty-five years after Kagubi, in 1921, Simon Kimbangu began one ofthe most striking of prophetic movements in modern Africa in the country ofthe Bakongo. He had many of the characteristics of a traditional medium, anngunza; he had also a Christian, Baptist, background and the conviction thatGod had called him personally to a mission of preaching and healing. Hisattitude to authority appears consistently pacifist, his teaching both theisticand moralistic. Crowds flocked to hear him. Simon was quickly judged a threatto colonial order; he was arrested, flogged during his trial, and sentenced todeath on the flimsiest of charges. The sentence was commuted by the King ofthe Belgians to one of life imprisonment and for thirty years Kimbanguremained in prison, never once permitted a visit by either a member of hisfamily or a Protestant pastor. He died on a Friday afternoon in October 1951.Out of that long silence grew the Kimbanguist Eglise.Twentieth-century Africa has been replete with prophets and a vastliterature has arisen concerning them since Bengt Sundkler wrote in 1948 hisseminal Bantu Prophets in South Africa,* Between them and mediums thereare obvious links of similarity or Š at times Š near identity. Their individualsignificance varies. Only a few are truly prophetic. As a whole they represent awrestling between the tradition of the medium and the tradition of the Bible asrural society as a whole passes through the pangs of altering its prime religiousidentity. If I have selected Kimbangu from among them, it is because he seemsto me to express what this is all about at its most decisive but also mostenigmatic. There is an apparently unbridgeable gap in causality between thosefew months of almost incoherent mission in 1921 and the great Kimbanguistchurch of today. Despite the many books and scores of articles devoted to him,he remains a figure of mystery which we can hardly dissect in cool secularterms. Perhaps more than anyone else in modern African history he is a Christ-figure Š medium and prophet, suffering servant, the giver of a foundationcharter for what is today a large and thriving community.The controversy over the role of mediums in the Chimurenga is notentirely unlike that provoked at much the same time concerning the politicalcharacter of Jesus of Nazareth. What sort of a prophet was he? Just one yearafter Ranger's Revolt Professor S. G. F. Brandon published his remarkablestudy, The Trial of Jesus of Nazareth, in which he claimed that Jesus had beenfar more of a political figure than the gospels suggest and that it was precisely8B. Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa (London, Lutterworth Press, 1948).7as a dangerous rebel leader that he was executed by "the Romans, The gospelsdepict Jesus ie frequent conflict with the 'collaborationist' Sadducees andPharisees, they are quite silent about his opinion of the Jewish nationalistresistance movement, the Zealots. They do, however, consistently portray himas someone who had rejected a pursuit of'the kingdoms of the world' (Matt.4:8) as his greatest temptation, who taught his followers in the Sermon on theMount to shun violent resistance and who, when directly challenged over themorality of paying the imperial taxes, replied 'Give to Caesar what is Caesar's'.Yet Brandon, and he was by no means the first scholar so to argue, maintainedthat this sort of picture of Jesus was a highly misleading one. It was a pictureinfluenced more by the preoccupations of second generation Roman Christiansthan by the historical facts. For him Jesus' plan during his last free days inJerusalem had beee no less than a 'Messianic coup d'etat' against the existingorder.. It was 'dynamic political action of a revolutionary kind', 'a directchallenge to the Roman government of Judaea'. Jesus' action ie the Templewas, Brandon even suggests, part of a wider 'concerted attack' in which themain force of the Zealots led by Barabbas assaulted the Romans themselves inthe fortress of the Aetonia.9Jesus, the Freedom Fighter, the Kagubi, the Nxele, organizer of amessianic coup d'etat, is a beguiling figure, especially in an age of liberationtheology. Alas, while we cannot here explore the ins and outs of thisexceedingly learned controversy, we have, I think, to accept that Brandon'sarguments have been refuted.10 Jesus was far too consistently unZealotlike.While he was not by any means an 'other-worldly' prophet uninterested in thethings of here and now, justice and oppression, he did quite deliberatelytranscend the exceedingly narrow, nationalist and essentially reactionaryoutlook of Ms Zealot contemporaries. Far from sharing with Barabbas a seaton the revolutionary central committee, he was a good deal nearer to Jeremiah,Ntsikana, and Kimbangu.Brandon dealt with Jesus a little too much in the way in which Ranger dealtwith Kagubi: both tried to force their religious heroes into overly politicalcategories. It is worth noting in passing how well these two books of 1967-8reflect the religious mood of those years with its rather optimistic rechannellingof religious fervour in political directions Š the age of the conference of theLatin American bishops at Medellin, of the World Council at Uppsala. Ofcourse some prophets are, and need to be, a good deal more overtly politicalthan others. On the whole, however, their raison d'etre is not to organize thecoming kingdom on the model of some immediate revolutionary programme.The prophet's task is rather to insinuate and symbolize his vision in a moreimmediately impractical, a more ultimately undefeatable way.As we see again and again, he or she may well do this most decisively by"S.G.F. Brandon, The Trial of Jesus of Nazareth (London. Batsford, 1968). 146-8.'"See for example. D.R. Catchpole, The Trial of Jesus (Leiden, Brill, 1971).martyrdom, as Socrates did. 'Unless the seed going into the earth die .. .'There is a strange, almost perverse, consistency in this odd world of oursbetween prophecy and martyrdom. It is, first of all, a biblical and Christiantheme as Professor Geoffrey Lampe has recently stressed in a beautiful littleposthumous study 'Martyrdom and Inspiration'.n Jesus' own scathingdenunciation of Scribes and Pharisees as 'sons of those who murdered theprophets . . . Jerusalem, Jerusalem, still killing the Prophets' (Matt. 23:31)doubtless helped to ensure that he himself went the same way. When Stephen,the Christian protomartyr, is stoned to death he is depicted by the author of Actsas continuing the tradition. But this is not just a biblical and Christian motif; it israther a central pattern of religion itself.In the letter to the Romans Paul commented on the meaning of Jesus'death in oft-quoted words: 'While we were yet helpless, at the right time Christdied for the ungodly. Why, one will hardly die for a righteous man Š though,perhaps, for a good man one will dare even to die. But God shows his love for usin that while we are yet sinners Christ died for us5 (Rom. 6: 6-8). If Christianshave used these verses to suggest the unique moral character of what Jesus did,they could perhaps still better be taken as referring to a peak of creative self-sacrifice which is to be found on rare occasion in many of man's noblesttraditions. When Maximilian Kolbe in the Nazi concentration camp ofAuschwitz volunteered to replace another prisoner in the starvation chamber,and died there encouraging his fellow victims to the last, he became, perhaps,the most perfect such figure of our age: in that very hell he incarnated amorality of love against one of hate. His memory lives on. But his veryachievement of being in the mid-twentieth century a priest-prophet turnedmartyr authenticates the possibility of many such a person in the more easilymyth-derided past. You cannot very easily demythologize Maximilian Kolbe,any more than you can really very successfully demythologize Nxele andNtsikana or Basil Nyabadza. Nor, for that matter, Nelson Mandela, enduringtwenty years of imprisonment on Robben Island for the freedom of Ms people.These people really do exist. They do accept suffering and death for the sake ofthe message that they proclaim, and their combination of witness and sufferingreally does forge an on-going moral tradition, the living memorial or acommitted community.Let us turn now to a seemingly far more mythical figure Š the 'priest-king'destined never to die in Ms bed of old age, who dominated the vast tapestry ofSir James Frazer's stupendous survey of religious phenomena, The GoldenBough,12 For Frazer the key for the interpretation of religion was the King-Priest in the grove of Diana at Nemi in classical times, awaiting night by nightthe murderer who would inherit his crown and continue his function. The king"G.W.H. Lampe. 'Martyrdom and inspiration*, in W. Horbury and B. McNeil (eds),Suffering and Martyrdom in the New Testament (Cambridge, Univ. Press. 1981). 118-35.i:J.G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (London. Macmillan,2 vols, 1890).9must so die as not to die. The king never dies. Long live the king. Upon hisdeath and life depends the life of nature and society. Frazer seemed to imaginethat if some such mystical formula can be found at the heart of all religion,Christianity included, then they must all be equally invalid.Frazer did stand in need of some hard contemporary evidence that suchthings were not just part of the classical imagination, and he found his bestevidence in reports which anthropologists like the Seligmans brought back toEurope early this century from the Sudan about the customs of the Shilluk andDinka. They indeed, it seemed, really did possess divine kings who, generationafter generation, were never allowed to die naturally but either arranged theirown deaths or were deliberately killed by their subjects, on the principle ofCaiphas that 'one man should die for the people so that the whole nation shouldnot perish' (John 11:50). As the author of the fourth gospel commented, 'He,being high priest that year, prophesied'. Here among Shilluk and Dinka themyth at the heart of all religion was, apparently, still being factually realized.Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard disagreed. Probably the most distinguishedsocial anthropologist of this century, he had ceased to share Frazer's agnos-ticism and perhaps in some unformulated way he felt that, if the Shilluk king'sritual murder really never took place, this somehow weakened the groundbeneath Frazer's vast debunking of religion. Anyway, when in 1948 hedelivered the Frazer lecture, Evans-Pritchard devoted himself to de-my thologizing Shilluk regicide. He greatly doubted whether Shilluk kings hadever really been killed in the traditional way when they became sick or old. Themyth of regicide, he argued, was really simply a cloak for a socio-politicalorder in which the royal power was weak and rebellions frequently occured.13I greatly admire Evans-Pritchard, but here one has to disagree. It reallywill not do. The Shilluk evidence in recent times may be inconclusive but thatfor their closely related Dinka neighbours is not. No-one, I think, can readGodfrey Lienhardt's Divinity and Experience and be left with any doubt that,well into the twentieth century, aged Masters of the Fishing Spear really havedied at the hands of their friends and followers. If this is true for the DinkaSpear Master, it seems unlikely that mystical regicide never had a factual basisin the case of the Shilluk Reth. For the British colonial authority murdering anaged chief, with or without his consent, was Š quite understandably Š adisgraceful and primitive custom, to be stamped out. I would suggest that, fromboth the Dinka perspective and that of world religions, it could also be seen asproviding a peak of spiritual and moral experience, to be put beside creativemartyr deaths in so many other traditions. The identification, world-wide, ofhints of Frazer's central myth, far from destroying its inner objectivecredibility witnesses rather to a sort of trans-cultural spiritual need. The heroic13E.E. Evans-Pritchard, 'The divine kingship of the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan', in hisEssays in Social Anthropology (London, Faber and Faber, 1962), 66-86,X10meeting of such need seems to me already a kind of truth, rather than a kind offalsehood.The Masters of the Fishing Spear, we are told, 'carry the life' of theirpeople, they are 'the lamps of the Dinka'.14 Mediums, they and they alone arepossessed by the divinity Ring (flesh) which, Lienhardt explains, is 'theprincipal inspiration of masters of the fishing-spear, the grounds of their abilityideally to "light the way", to pronounce and define truth, to prevail in prayers,and to reconcile conflicting groups and interests'.15In much of this the Spear Master is not very different from many othersacred chiefly figures. What is special to him, as to the Shilluk Reth and thedivine queen of the Lovedu, is that he is also exprofesso a martyr-to-be. Hedoes not kill himself. In some cases he may indeed be killed by his peopleagainst his will, but typically and also in many cases in historical fact, an agedMaster has invited his people to bury him alive Š not for his sake but for theirs.Lying in his grave, he will give his people his last advice. When he ceases tospeak, they will cover him with dung and out of death, freely accepted, life willbe renewed. In a typical Dinka text we read how 'He will not be afraid of death;he will be put into the earth while singing his songs. Nobody among his peoplewill wail or cry because their man is dead. They will be joyful because theirmaster of the fishing spear will give them life.'16Strange and horrifying as such a rite may seem to the outsider, is it so muchmore strange than the sacrificial willingness of many a soldier to die for hiscountry, or, again, the confidence of Jesus when going to his death: 'He beganto teach them that the Son of Man must. . .be killed, and after three days riseagain' (Mark 8:31)? In the Spear Master, as in Jesus, we have a bondingtogether of the bearer of absolute truth, sacrificial death and the ordered ethicallife of man, the new covenant Š medium, martyr, morality.The death of a Master of the Fishing Spear is not merely exemplary,indeed it is hardly exemplary at all; it is, rather, vicarious and expiatory. It is infact redemptive. It seems silly for Christian theologians to want to whittledown the sense of Christ's death into a matter of mere exemplarity, when themartyr deaths of historic figures across the world are clearly so much more.Martyrdom is the sealing through suffering and death of commitment to acause held absolutely with love of one's fellow men, in a way so powerfully tocommend the martyr's message as to require its remembrance: its handing on,its traditio. It originates a memorial ritual and around it a moral community.The further martyrdom of disciples reinforces the strength of both. Each dyingSpear Master renews the meaning of the rituals. The death of each freedomfighter, we may well remember this 16 June, Soweto Day, enhances the sacredsignificance of their cause. The early Christians triumphed especially throughtheir uncompromising commitment to the acceptance of martyrdom: Sanguis14Lienhardt. Divinitv and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka 316 14115Ibid.. 146. lflIbid.. 300.martyrum. It is through the constancy of the martyr and the near-martyrconfessor in prison Š whether it be the prisons of ancient Rome, of Auschwitz,of Robben Island, of the Gulag Archipelago, that prophecy is proved, thatcertain principles of living are witnessed to compellingly as having anabsolutely absolute claim, come fair weather, come foul weather, upon man.Within the material order it seems impossible to find an absolute morality.It is neither morally good nor bad that a volcano erupts to destroy the townsand kill the people in the vicinity. It is not wicked for a lion to devour a lamb,nor for a crocodile to snatch to her death the woman washing clothes in theriver. If man is but the development of the lion or the ape with an enlargedcranial capacity, he may grow more shrewd in his lifestyle, more calculating inhis treatment of others, but a principle of material utility cannot turn itself intoa quite different one of moral obligation. In material terms there is no evidentreason why we should not wipe out a backward tribe and give their land to themore technically advanced. The survival of the fittest is a sensible enoughnorm in terms of the overall advantage of the race.If man is perennially conscious that the order of power, of efficiency, evenof the greatest benefit of the greatest number, is not an adequately exactingnorm for the conduct of human affairs, it is because we cannot escape the senseof there being an absolute morality. Man is not, obviously enough, compelledto be good, but Š unlike the crocodile Š he consciously belongs to an ethicalworld in which action is always judgeable in ultimately moral terms. Like KantI find it hard to make sense of such a predicament except by positing anultimate, objective and divine principle of ethical value which, as ThomasAquinas would say, is what we call God. Nothing less can leap the hurdle fromthe pragmatic and the utilitarian to the absolute.The moral sense exists, I am suggesting, in away that is, at least implicitly,theistic, but its objective referent and its power to command are never wellsecured by reason alone. In practice it needs to be channelled and goaded on bythe authority of specific revelation. That is where the medium, the prophet, themartyr is so decisively important Š- together with his memorial, even thecentenary celebration of his death and burial in Highgate Cemetery.At the first of this university's new series of public lectures the PrimeMinister, Robert Mugabe, while outlining the sort of university he wanted,appealed for both socialist philosophers and socialist theologians. We were, ofcourse, in our department pleased at this explicit recognition of the need forboth its sections, but there was at that point some laughter and the PrimeMinister twice repeated 'socialist theologians'.171 wonder why exactly peoplelaughed. It is not a particularly new idea. Professor Craig may not himself havebeen a socialist, but undoubtedly the subject which was most his own and onwhich he wrote his principal book was Social Concern in the Thought of William"R.G. Mugabe, The Role of the University in the Process of Social Transformation(Harare, Univ. of Zimbabwe, Public Lecture Series 1, 1983). 5.12Temple.18 Temple was, of course, the most influential figure in English churchlife in the first half of this century. He began as a philosopher don at Oxford,and he died as Archbishop of Canterbury. Now it was Temple who declared aslong ago as 1908: 'The alternatives stand before us Š Socialism or Heresy; weare involved in one or the other'.19That was surely a word of prophecy, even if it could also be judged theseemingly simplistic words of an enthusiastic young man. He himself mighthave wished to qualify it later but he would not, I think, ever have repudiated it.Temple was not a medium Š the socio-cultural pattern of twentieth-centuryBritain takes other forms Š but he was in the eyes of many a great prophet. So,if Craig was the disciple of Temple but also the founder of our department andone of the most influential figures in the development of this university, ofwhich he was Vice-Chancellor for many years, we are entitled to claim that ourown foundation charter includes within it a commitment to theologicalsocialism. We do not need to invent this prophet's mantle today but only to wearit appropriately for our time.I do not want to explore here the issues of what socialism should reallymean for us except to say that it does, I believe, consist less in a particularsystem of economics or politics or even a theory of history, and very muchmore in a passionate ethical commitment to seeking, through the adjustment ofsocial structures, the good of all, the poor and the weak first of all. ProbablyTemple never really worked out what he meant by it; in that he would not beunusual. To understand its relationship to religion today, I would turn rather tomartyrs like Camilo Torres and Oscar Romero, or even to that present labourerin the shipyard at Gdansk, Lech Walesa. What all these people would agreeabout is that religion, especially the religion of prophets and martyrs, andChristianity very much in particular, is all about morality Š a relevant, liberating,contemporary morality, personal and social. Christianity has often beenexceedingly spiritualized but, like most African religions, it does basicallyrelate morality very deeply to the material and the communal Š to breadand wine, to flesh and blood, to bodies. Temple, to quote him once more,was not mistaken when he called Christianity the most materialist ofreligions. It is, indeed, all about 'flesh'. Certainly religion cannot escapefrom morality. It may be confirmatory or it may be challenging to existingsociety, to the mores of our world. It may, of course, like the SpearMaster's death, be both at once, I would hold that the contemporary moralchallenge of prophetic religion should be at once socialistic andpersonalistic in a ceaseless urging of justice for all, and by all I mean all.To what conclusion have we come? I have sought to provide, in asomewhat rambling manner, a basic model for religion as a working primaryISR. Craig. Social Concern in the Thought of William Temple (London, Gollancz. 1963).'"'The Church and the Labour Party*. The Economic Review (1908) quoted in J. Fletcher,William Temple: Twentieth Century Christian (New York, Seabury Press, 1963), 180.13reality, recognizable world-wide across human experience but illustrated hereby a Christian African dialogue. Is it true? The religion of the Dinka can hardlybe valid for the non-Dinka, but it worked pretty well for the Dinka. Is the spiritualachievement of the dying Spear Master invalidated, or is it not rather enhancedby that other figure of the young carpenter, all blooded with beating and acrown of thorns, going yet eagerly to his death 'for many' on the hill ofGolgotha? Are both just myths? As Peires has said of Nxele and Ntsikana,each must 'surely be taken for a myth if it were not known to be a reality'.Where does the one begin, the other end?The study of religion remains rooted in the study of history. The people wehave spoken of are real people; their deaths, real deaths. Are their dreams,their convictions, their inner willingness to suffer and die for truth andgoodness and the freedom of their brethren, as they see them, just myths, orreality too? That the religious leaders and systems of the past were limitedenough and in part self-deceiving is not hard to believe. But if they were whollydeceived, then our world is surely a drearier place, the arena only of materialpressures, of the survival of the fittest, of sophisticated up-graded crocodiles,of some accidental concourse of atoms. Mediums, martyrs, morality, thesethings stand together to assert absolute ultimacy of meaning over non-meaning, and it is to the human sense that ultimate meaning is perenniallyworth searching for that, within this university, our department, bothPhilosophy and Religious Studies, is committed. That is our apologia. Ibelieve it to be a sufficient one.14