Tempels’s transformative encounter with Bantu ritual challenged his civilizing mission.
Evidence
A better way to read Tempels’s book would be to understand the context in which he wrote it and how his encounter with the Bantu shaped his own life. While Tempels was attempting to “civilize,” he found his moment of truth in an encounter with the people he came to teach. He thus became their student, and he tried to understand their version of the truth. During this encounter he came to know many things about the Bantu, which radically called into question his own convictions as the civilizer. He explored these conscious experiences without making any metaphysical assumptions. This intercultural encounter had a profound transformational effect in the life of Tempels. His active participation in the symbols and rituals of those he was supposed to teach led him to understand and internalize their indigenous beliefs better, rather than just limiting himself with prejudices. He knew where he was coming from but found ways of negotiating his own identity with the Bantu and making meaning out of the tension of the various contradictions in his own life (Mosima, 2016). … In the first proposition of Tempels’s philosophy sketched above, he claims that Africans are incapable of articulating the way they perceive and understand the world. This opinion stems from the derogatory, Eurocentric conception that Africans live in a world that is essentially symbolized and ritualized in character. This implies that indigenous African peoples predominantly articulate their beliefs and values through rites, rituals, and masquerades, rather than using discursive verbal statements, such as proverbs and myths. Such an argument calls for the intercultural fieldworker, who is professionally trained, to be active in trying to decode (interpolate the meanings of) such behaviour (symbolic and ritual), proverbs, and myths in a comprehensive and discursive manner, as seen in the works of Marcel Griaule (1965) and Alexis Kagame (1956). Marcel Griaule, the French anthropologist known for his studies of the Dogon of West Africa, suggests a certain affinity between so-called Bantu ontology, as pioneered in Father Tempels’s amateur ethnography, and the worldview of the Dogon in present-day Mali. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 533
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the ADDENDUM article on ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ in that both concern the civilizer-encounter dynamic and reconsidering one’s own cultural presuppositions through contact.