I’ve been overdue a commentary on Marcus Garvey’s Pan- African philosophy of Religion and after several drafts, and a rare bout of writer’s block, I’ve decided to take a detour into a related but separate matter I’ve been meaning to do for sometime on the Obeah Act of 1898… well it’s about more than that but I guess that’ll do for sensational captioning. Perhaps this is a round-about method of tricking my brain into tackling the sticky issue.
The premise
One of the very interesting things about AI, and before it the internet is that more than ever before, these new technologies have facilitated the accumulation of knowledge from several disparate knowledge fields. What were once discrete domains now beg for intersectionalities that could not before exist, for the purpose of the knowledge corroboration, knowledge compounding and knowledge comparison that fuel new knowledge creation. Those processes are complex, sometimes fruitful, other times deeply challenging as from a human perspective, it’s one thing to gather data, quite another to understand what the data means, especially when the data inferences go against established and hitherto unquestioned assumptions.
In a previous blog exploring the complexities of straddling between Eurocentric and Afrocentric epistemologies (it was not a scholarly excercise, almost none of my intellectual output ever is; it was a response to an article in the Gleaner by Dr Glenville Ashby which I thought unnecessarily hostile to fundamentalist Evangelicals) I pointed to the fact that the educational enterprise proceeds from the religious enterprise (historically and always – a controversial but considered statement of conviction) and there are ontological difficulties involved in attempted synthesis of epistemological systems with absolutely incongruent axiologies.
This was the existential dilemna the late Prof. Malidoma Somé faced, as the first of that early generation of the Dagara people of Burkino Faso to encounter the imposition of Western Civilization and master its education, in translating African tribal realities and ways of knowing to the West and vice versa, which was his life’s work. Before him, (he was the first) his tribal elders strictly forbade administering tribal initiation through adolescent rites of passage (African ‘primary education’) to the then few amongst the tribe who had been kidnapped by Catholic missionaries, taught to read, write and worship via forced introduction to western education and religion.* Their reason was that the two ways of knowing and being were believed to be fundamentally incompatible. Malidoma’s fate was to be captured by the missionaries as a boy, but then to escape and return to his village only to be lost between both worlds as the elders refused at first to initiate him (which is effectively worse than both excommunication and banishment compounded) because he had already been tainted, by no fault of his own, by Western ways.
- This was standard Catholic modus operandi in Christian ‘evangelization’ although it is hard to see the ‘good news’ in such barbarism besides being demon-possessed oneself. Somé’s account of the depravities that were integral part of his experience with Catholic mission are sickening.
- Malidoma Somé Of Water and the Spirit
Eventually the elders relented, their principles of justice superceding their instinct for self-preservation (which is remarkable in and of itself, as it demonstrates the value system of African village existence) and watched to see what would happen next. Malidoma’s attempt at describing the details of his initiation are too strange to be taken seriously by Western academia, whose literature relegates such accounts to fairy tales and science fiction. The fact however, that his fate led him to the eventual voluntary return to the West and its institutions, where he earned degrees from the Sorbonne Université in Paris and then from Brandeis University in Massachusetts, qualified his voice to be heard. It did not help either, that he credited his ability to master much of his earlier Western studies not to intellectual acumen, but to reading his professor’s minds during exams, a skill he acquired from his African initiation, not from his exposure to Western didactic logic.
The Predicament
In the history of Western Jurisprudence traditions, there is not a single instance I can think of where credulity has been ascribed to claims of extra-human agency in the committing of human crime. Perhaps possible exceptions can be successfully argued – the charade of the Boston Salem witch trials, the invocation of acts of God in indemnity clauses … I have tried to find others more plausible, perhaps the legal experts among my readership can help with this. But of the countless assorted cases ranging from claims of demonic possession, hypnosis induction to insanity, it appears to me that the law is quite settled upon human agency as the only recognized source of human crime. Whatever things there may be in heaven and earth unaccounted for by Western philosophy, they are presumed subject to the sovereignty of human will as far as the law is concerned, and of course this arguably is correctly informed by orthodox Judeo-Christian theology and the science that proceeded from its axiology.
An interesting facet of this argumentation grounded in axioms of human causality will be how the law handles AI as it continues its ascent to AGI and simulated consciousness (and how would that fundamentally differ from our own?) If crimes are intelligently committed, will the law let *creator, programmer and hacker off the hook as is the case with human intelligence? Up to this point, the LLM versions popularly available are all programmed to be benefiscent, considerate and supportive. If this continues, my vote is for the robots to take over as the human race could certainly use their mentorship, but back to another kind of Obeah – The African variety.
- parallel cognates to God, hypnotist and devil
The popular narrative that has been largely embraced by modern Christian evangelists, like their imperial predecessors, is that all African religious phenomena, i.e. African ancestral religion in its totality is demonic, devious and obessessed with the capture and control rather than the cultivation and guidance of the human will … Without attempting to discredit the very valid observations and encounters of those for whom this narrative appears evidentiary, (there is no denying that the Satanic has infiltrated both African and European mainstream political and religious systems, especially on the level of leadership in particular circles) two things in particular, which never seem to even occur to Western religious practitioners and theorists alike, stand out to me as indicative that these impressions have been funneled through a filter designed to selectively notice some things and ignore or totally discredit others.
- the documented wickedness and hypocrisy perpetrated by Western orthodoxy, not just in deviation from its standards but constituent in its codified, canonized and continuing practices. In other words, it is difficult to tell when the selective whitewashing propaganda of Western Apologia is stripped away, both from the historic record and from unbiased current evaluation, which is the more demonic : The Christian religion or African indigenous practices. Which is more guilty of barbarous genocide? Which more controlling and morally corrosive? Taken as a whole, which more secretive and seductive?
- the fact that the tremendous contribution that Africa has made to the formation and development of the Judeo-Christian *mythoplex and axiology, from ancient through recent to modern times is still hardly known and widely suppressed. Why is that? Who and what is behind that? And if one’s ‘truth’ depends on the suppression of fact to exist, can it be truth at all?
- a coined word indicative of the collective body of narrative informing the scaffolding of a belief system as broad and complex as is what is commonly referred to as the ‘Judeo-Christian world-view’.
After due consideration of these matters, to return to the concrete matter of the legitmacy or illegitimacy of the Obeah Laws, it is already consensus amongst scholars that the laws themselves are logically inconsistent with legal precedent in giving credence to intangible ‘spiritual’ phenomena. If the Old Testament prophet Elisha or the New Testament apostle Peter were tried in any modern court for murders claimed to be committed by the spiritual forces both were accredited with and voluntarily acknowledged commanding, (the murders of innocent children as well as the slaughter of a couple in of all places a religious sanctuary would be considered serious crimes except that no court would admit into evidence spiritual curses and invoked spirits, whether one wants to ascribe religious labels to them such as ‘the anointing’, or the ‘water spirits’ the case would be thrown out of court as ridiculous, as would murder by hypnotic suggestion, or rape / assault by demonic invocation. If no trigger was pulled, no bloody knife recovered, if the murder weapon was something as legally flimsy as a spirit or a suggestion, the court has no opinion on such matters. Every case of the Devil-made-me-do-it in modern times has been denied credulity in court.
Why the furore then over the Obeah laws? Is this an attempt at protecting persons and property from harmful spirits … really? And yet said courts are still unable to opine on much more substantive matters … such as the worth of Black life and labor and the just claims of reparation for documented devastation on a scale of consequential evil far beyond the collective capacity of all combined accused obeahmen throughout Jamaica’s history? Yet none of this faintly bothers the conscience and stirs the conviction of tongue-talking saints? And why is that?
As to distinguishing between ‘acts of God’ and ‘acts of the devil’, granted either exists, (which is untestable in a modern court) these matters are for a Higher Court to decide. Perhaps AI will do a better job than humans have thus far in making the distinction evident.
And perhaps not!
