The Heartbeat of Indigenous Africa

A Study of the Chagga Educational System

R. Sambuli Mosha

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781135577308
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Empowered by findings and insights from the wit and wisdom of the indigenous Chaga educational system, Dr. Mosha contends that an authentic educational program in Tanzania and elsewhere should be holistic in its unrelenting quest to educate the entire person: body, mind, and spirit. He provides a comprehensive description of the indigenous schooling process and its underlying fundamental virtues and then proposes that modern education should give equal emphasis to both the spiritual development of students as well as to their intellectual growth in knowledge, science, and technology. Dr. Mosha argues that for its own advantage and survival, education has to prioritize moral consciousness and responsibility in its students in order to attain academic excellence. Without a consistent moral living and moral action by all who teach and learn, education eventually plunges into hopeless mediocrity, It becomes the proverbial salt which loses its saltiness. This book provides several unique contributions to the academy. First, it illustrates how the Chaga people of N. Tanzania cherish everyday experience and every here-and-now situation as teachable moments, teaching moments, and learning moments. It is also uniquely rich in its description of stories, riddles, proverbs, and rituals as powerful tools of holistic education. Thirdly, the book breaks ground by comprehensively articulating specific indigenous virtues such as reverence, self-control, silence and thoughtfulness, courage, diligence in work, and communality. This book therefor makes a unique contribution in the areas of Indigenous Knowledge, Spirituality, Education, African American Studies, African Studies, Religious Studies, Anthropology, et cetera. The author's stories, personal experiences, and thick descriptions are so fundamental that every reader will rediscover, in this book, similar experiences in his/her own life.

CHAPTER 1
Indigenous African Worldview
on Life and World

Many years of personal experience, study, research and teaching on indigenous African culture in general and on indigenous Chagga culture in particular, have disclosed that, like all peoples everywhere, indigenous Africans have a fundamental worldview, a unified trend of thought on life and world, which inspires their thoughts, words, and actions. It is their window to the world within and without. Their worldview is a powerful compass that guides their everyday interactions in life and world. For analytical purposes, four aspects of this worldview will be identified, although there is essentially one and therefore uncompartmentalized in real life. The following is a brief description of each of the four aspects that, when seen together as one worldview, are crucial in order to understand the major thrust of this book: fundamental African virtues and the educational system that makes them possible.

A FIRM BELIEF AND PROFOUND REVERENCE IN THE ETERNAL DIVINE MYSTERY

Indigenous Africans always believe that the universe, humans, and everything that is are the handwork of an Infinite and Eternal Divine Mystery. This Mystery gives birth to the universe and continues to create, recreate, and sustain it. The most common descriptive names given to the Supreme Being are Great Parent, Great Ancestor, Creator, Great Spirit, Sustainer, and Benefactor. African peoples have always strongly believed in the existence of such a Supreme Mystery. They have absolute trust and confidence that their Great Parent makes human life, and all life and being, profoundly valuable and meaningful.

The Great Ancestor is, in the mind and heart of indigenous Africa, incomprehensible, indescribable, indeed a Mystery of Mysteries. My grandfather told me several times that the Chagga people have no images of the Divine simply because the Divine is so indescribable that any image would fall far short. Nevertheless, Africans have always felt free to give God anthropomorphic attributes such as: Father, Mother, Elder, Ancestor, Friend, Chief of Chiefs, Wise One, and Mother Chicken.¹ None of these and numerous other attributes, however, is a proper name for God. The Bambuti people of the Congo say that God’s real name is unknown because God’s real being or personality is unknown or unknowable. Mbiti describes God as “the Mystery of mysteries, the Marvel of Marvels, the very Mysterium Tremendum par excellence.”²

Indigenous Africans, therefore, have profound reverence and adoration for this incomprehensible, yet real, Mystery. They are awed by the greatness of the Great Ancestor. Their very being is gripped by the almighty power of the Supreme Creator. Their hearts and minds experience the highest form of admiration and adoration of this Divinity. In awe-evoking life situations, Chagga elders burst out saying: Naacho cha Ruwa; that is, “Who is like God!”³ When someone is gravely ill, they sacrifice a bull at noon on a market day and recite this prayer, facing Mount Kilimanjaro:

We know you, Ruwa, Chief, Preserver.
One who united the bush and the plain.
You, Ruwa, Chief, the elephant indeed.
You who burst forth people that they lived.
We praise you, and pray to you,
and fall before you…
Chief, receive this bull of your name.
Heal him to whom you gave it and his children.
Sow the seed of offspring with us that we
may beget like bees. May our clan
hold together that it be not cleft in the land.
Now, Chief, Preserver, bless all that is ours.⁴

This reverence-filled prayer reminds us of Rudolf Otto’s statement that religious dread or awe may be so overwhelmingly great that it seems to penetrate to the very marrow, making one’s hair bristle and limbs quake. It makes one speechless in a feeling of personal nothingness and submergence before the awe-inspiring Sacred.⁵ According to Otto, the Sacred Mystery (or Mysterium Tremendum) is here experienced as absolute overpoweringness, as Tremenda Majestas, that is, aweful majesty, and as Mysterium Fascinans, fascinating mystery.⁶ This is, indeed, how indigenous Africans experience the Great Ancestor. Otto has excellently articulated this experience that gradually creates in indigenous peoples core dispositions of reverence, awe, wonder, appreciation, gratitude, and humility. Believing in God is like standing at the foot of a towering mountain, or at the shore of an expansive ocean. One is moved to reverence and awe, and feels humble before such majesty and greatness. Reverence and humility thus experienced do not belittle a person. On the contrary, one becomes more aware, more grateful, more appreciative, and therefore a better person, more fully present, more fully human. (Chapter 3 will describe in detail the connection between reverence for the Supreme Mystery and reverence for life and world.)

A number of formative dispositions that are intimately connected with the indigenous values discussed in this book emerge from the peoples’ belief and trust in the Eternal Mystery: an ongoing trust and confidence in self and world; a sense that life is meaningful; a feeling of at-homeness not only with the Great Ancestor, but also in the world; an experience of inner peace and quietude; a keen sense of awe and appreciation; a growing readiness for positive abandonment and letting go. These spiritual dispositions are offsprings of the Indigenous African’s worldview that there is an Eternal Divine Mystery that is the Ground of All That Is.

ONGOING HUMAN FORMATION, REFORMATION, AND TRANSFORMATION

The second aspect of the indigenous African worldview is an awareness that from birth to death a person must go through a rigorous process of spiritual and moral formation, reformation, and transformation. Indigenous Africans realize through time-tested wisdom handed on from previous generations, and through their own experience, that the forming and reforming of a person’s moral core is fundamental in the emergence of genuine humanity and essential for harmonious living with all that is. My maternal grandfather, Nderumaki, used to tell me, “The well-being of the visible cosmic world and that of the invisible transcosmic one depends to a great extent on the level of individual and communal moral living.” Often he would direct me in the acquisition of sound moral dispositions by saying, “My grandson, grow up and become human.” The translation in Kichagga is: mchuku, ng’ana uwe mndu. In this trend of thought one does not become automatically ‘human’ by virtue of birth, rather one becomes human and reclaims one’s humanity by gradually becoming a moral and spiritual person.⁷

Thus, the number one priority of African indigenous culture is to hand on to the younger generation knowledge and wisdom that continually forms, reforms, and transforms the individual and the community. Indigenous Africans, like all indigenous people, know that a person’s interiority or spirit is the home of inspiration, intuition, motivation, dreams, and all spiritual inclinations. A lot of transforming work has to be done in this home, in this innermost core of a person. Zahan states that in Africa the inner person is esteemed more highly than the outer person, thought has a greater value than act; intention prevails over action.⁸ This is the same as saying that interiority, thought, and intention are the foundations of exteriority and action. Zahan further articulates this worldview:

It is through the valorization of the interior [man] that the human being raises [himself] beyond [his] natural limits and accedes to the dimensions of the gods. [He] becomes something other than [himself] by refusing to valorize appearances, by instead deeply mining [his] secret being. This does not happen without the acquisition of a veritable “sense of what is within,” of a science of the soul. Neither does it happen without a total transformation of the personality…by the death of the “old [man]” and the resurrection of a new being.⁹

In the indigenous African milieu where moral formation is understood as so essential, the importance of initiation rites and other formational methods cannot be overemphasized. The next sections and chapters will discuss in detail the indigenous educational systems and the moral values that are at the heart of these formational endeavors. Suffice it to say at this point that the entire educational or formational system of indigenous Africa is inspired by this single paradigm: human and cosmic harmony hinges upon human moral living because all facets of the universe are interconnected and interdependent.

THE INTRINSIC UNITY BETWEEN INDIVIDUALS AND COMMUNITIES

According to the third aspect of the indigenous African worldview, there is an intrinsic unity between the individual and the community. In their everyday lives, indigenous Africans try to strike a balance between one’s collective identity as a member of a society and one’s personal identity as a unique individual. This consciousness helps indigenous people to continually struggle against rugged individualism on the one hand and communism (loss of individual identity and rights) on the other. To avoid these two dangers African societies strive to understand and define a person in the context of community that in turn is understood and definable through its unique members. Mbiti aptly puts it: “I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am.”¹⁰

Indigenous thought recognizes that each person is unique, endowed with a personal identity and special talents and gifts, and motivated by particular ambitions, needs, inspirations, and aspirations. This recognition is in part shown by elaborate naming ceremonies for each newborn, and for each initiate in subsequent initiation rites such as marriage and funeral rites. My people have a saying: “The children of the same mother are not similar” (wana wa mka wekehiana pvo). The implication is that each child, each person, is unique, one who fills a special niche in a given community.

In his book of Kiswahili prose and poetry (published 1949), the Tanzanian author Shaaban Robert writes one hundred verses of admonishment to his daughter and one hundred verses to his son. He does not write the same verses to both. He recognizes their unique individualities, and yet never ceases to remind them throughout the two hundred verses that they keep community life alive and well.¹¹ It is evident, therefore, that indigenous African peoples, are, on the one hand, profoundly conscious of the importance and indispensability of community interconnectedness and interdependence; and on the other, deeply respectful of the sacred uniqueness of each one.

According to this aspect of the African worldview, one’s deepest human identity emerges in and through communion with other people in particular, one’s family, clan, neighbors, friends, peers, and so on. In and through significant others, the African, like all humans, finds herself or himself. The Chagga people have a saying: “Not to have brethren is to die” (lura monowomoo nyiipva). Mbiti states: “Whatever happens to the individual happens to the whole group, and whatever happens to the whole group happens to the individual.”¹² One finds here a keen consciousness of interconnectedness and interdependence among people, a consciousness slowly being lost in contemporary African cities, towns, and in many industrialized nations.

With whom is the indigenous African in constant communion? Vertically she or he communicates with the Supreme Parent (God), spirits, ancestors, the departed, and those still to be born. Horizontally one continually relates with one’s family, neighbors, clan, villagers, one’s ethnic group, peers, workmates (for example travelers, farmers, hunters), and with the entire cosmos. In this context one can define a community as any group of people, whether few or many, related by blood or marriage, by geographical proximity (neighbors for instance), by age (peer groups), by interest or occupations, or by any short-term or long-term events such as celebrations, journeys, and so on. In such small or large communities, people quickly form strong and intimate bonds in which each one feels at home, receives and gives support, and journeys through life shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand. This, in short, is the indigenous African’s view of human life. As will be discussed, this aspect of their general worldview, like every other aspect, influences the entire life ex...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• SERIES EDITORS' FOREWORD
• FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• LIST OF MAPS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1: INDIGENOUS AFRICAN WORLDVIEW ON LIFE AND WORLD
• CHAPTER 2: FORMATORS AND PEDAGOGICAL TOOLS IN INDIGENOUS EDUCATION
• CHAPTER 3: REVERENCE, SELF-CONTROL, AND SILENCE
• CHAPTER 4: COURAGE, DILIGENCE IN WORK, AND COMMUNALITY
• CHAPTER 5: A REFLECTION ON INDIGENOUS EDUCATION AND ON AFRICAN EUROPOCENTRIC EDUCATION
• CHAPTER 6: RECLAIMING THE FOUNDATIONS OF A HUMANIZING AND CIVILIZING EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM
• EPILOGUE
• GLOSSARY
• BIBLIOGRAPHY