Five Weird (Almost-Real) Books from Africa

 

Illustration for the EAPH combined reprint of Song of Lawino/Song of Ocol by Frank Horley

"The royal councillors were stunned at this answer, and stood in amazed silence, convinced she had known this by some supernatural power. For them, it was a miracle, and something to be taken seriously. Father Bernardo appeared less impressed and continued his questioning. 'Who are you?" he asked her. She replied gravely, as if every word were a serious matter, and slowly, as if carefully considering each remark, 'I am Saint Anthony, come from Heaven.'" - John K. Thornton's The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian movement, 1684-1706

BOOKPOSTING IS BACK!! I've always loved this style of blogpost and now I have a blog to participate with. Helps that it's kinda low-intensity on a day like Ashura. Pour (a non-alcoholic) one out for Husayn, y'all.

1. “To Awaken the Soul’s Water”: Shared Systems of Communal Recollection in the Upemba Depression

Unfinished monograph on Luba and Luba-adjacent use of the lukasa ("long claw") mnemonic device. First half is dominated by an interesting, if dated, ethnographic survey which details the local Bambudye Society’s apprentice training rites and fee collection networks. The second half opens with participant observation among the Tumandwa twa Maseba, hobbitlike "red hairy men" of Luba mythology who occupy termite mounds and caverns, and their own doctors of history. The oral records collected in this section largely revolve around alternative versions of familiar mythohistorical narratives - the author’s partners claim that the foundational ancestor Mbidi Kiluwe (hosted by the Tumandwa twa Maseba during his wanderings) was not a semidivine hunter but a powerful Society elder who used memory arts to generate his son Kalala Ilunga’s future conquests by unraveling and reknotting the semiotic ties of history, seizing on particular material signs and reassigning them within adjusted relationships. The Russet-Hair memorymen note that this reknotting appears to be breaking down, leading the author to hypothesize that the Eldest Spirit Maweja Nagila is slowly undoing the concept of Luba imperium. Authorship has been traced to a Makerere University professor who went missing during the Congo Crisis. Predates Mary N. and Allen F. Roberts’ celebrated article in African Arts suggesting that the Luba ‘core’ was more mythical than real, largely evoked by frontiersmen who claimed to have had a relationship with it as a means of supporting their own claims to power. 

2. TE OKONO OBUR BONG' LUPUTU

The missing section of Okot p'Bitek's epic poem Song of Lawino, known by the declarative statement which ends the chapter in Wer pa Lawino. The English Song of Lawino (also written by Okot) is not an attempt at producing a faithful translation of the original Acholi-language poem Wer pa Lawino, what with the hyperemphasis on topical, striking, and easily translatable elements for consumption by a new market of international readers. Compelled by a number of outside pressures, including changes in key sources of funding that privileged work in colonial languages after brief experiments with “regionalization,” Okot diluted or excised many of the darker and more intricately textured aspects of the poem which required the artistry of seasoned nanga players to reproduce. The altered chapter 14 in the printed version of Wer pa Lawino - published after Song - is a bizarre rebuke: it is literally untranslatable from Acholi, with Taban Lo Liyong’s 2001 Defense of Lawino largely considered a clever forgery. All of the indefinitely detained researchers on staff report that the passages “only make sense” in Acholi. Broad ideas can be communicated - dancing/blood, revolt-in-sorrow, Acholilandedness, the importance of pumpkins - but even these limited attempts at translation create a bleedover effect where would-be interpreters mimic Acholi conversational patterns or sentence structure when speaking other languages. 

3. The soft in character attains the ends–

An Antemoro sorabe ("great writing") manuscript produced in 1808, one of the many collected by Alfred Grandidier still languishing unread in the Musée du Quai Branly’s archival storage containers. Marginalia indicates that the manuscript was written by a student of legendary scribe, teacher, bureaucrat, and diviner Andriamahazonoro who accompanied the astrologer and his brother Ratsilikaina on their journey to serve at the court of Andrianampoinimerina, ascendant lord of Imerina. Unusual sequence where Andriamahazonoro and the other Antemoro scholars are called upon to support Merina forces in their war against the Andrantsay kingdom - a cluster of kin-related polities located in and around the Andrantsay River and its tributaries. The diviner tells his unnamed student that "the houses of the stars are like the houses of men" before performing strangely mirrored version of Arabico-Malagasy geomantic procedures intended to properly align homes. During the decisive battle itself, the Andrantsay leader Andriamanalina is vaporized by a pillar of light, putting the Betesilo armies to flight and earning the scholars a place of honor at the celebratory feast. The standing stone at Fandanana marking the victory makes cooing noises on moonless nights. 

4. Notes Taken Abroad

The 1943 travel diary of pathbreaking newspaper editor and littérateur Alhaji Abubakar Imam, later edited into the serialized travelogue Tafiya Mabudin Ilimi. The folksy easygoing charm that characterizes Tafiya's tour guide narration is replaced by the laconic wit typical of Imam's articles for Gaskiya ta fi Kwabo. In these private records, his wartime patriotism and general admiration for British achievements are tempered by a nascent nationalism that was judiciously left out of the published version. Includes descriptions of lengthy forays into the British occult scene nestled between more conventional discussions of Gothic Revival architecture, gossip concerning former Northern Nigerian colonial officers, and updates on the imperial war effort. Imam frequently leveraged his own 'exotic mystique' in metropole settings and knowledge of West African Qadiriyya mysticism to obtain exclusive invitations, including one to a reading of Aleister Crowley's recently released The City of God, a Rhapsody - he found the man "impossibly self-important" and delighted in flustering England's Great Beast by innocently questioning his self-professed "thorough knowledge" of Arabian esoterica. The Katsinan aristocrat was more pleased by his encounter with Dion Fortune, despite her "lamentably pedestrian" obsession with racial categories. Imam enjoyed Fortune's mystic novel The Winged Bull, sharing both her interest in 'white magic' and her overall prudishness. The writer gave his British Council and N. Nigerian Colonial Service handlers the slip to visit Highcliffe-on-Sea in the company of a new acquaintance, where he met members of the proto-Wiccan grouping that would later be called the New Forest Coven by Gerald Gardner. Disappointed to learn that the secretive witch-cultists he'd heard about were just middle-aged teachers and housewives interested in past lives and nudism, he left Dorset convinced that the truly dangerous British sorcerers were instead stalking the halls of Westminster. 

5. Vatican Library Urb.Lat 1076, f. 5v - 6. Avissi di Roma. 5.I.1702

Account penned by a former schoolmaster and aide to the Capuchin monk Father Lorenzo da Lucca on the teachings of Santa Luzia Maria Kinza. Maria Kinza was one of the “Little Anthonys” ordained by the “Great Anthony” Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and possessed by allied saints, in her case Saint Lucy. Saint Lucy was a leader in the Antonian ministry of the south, traveling across the seaside Duchy of Mbamba performing miracles and proclaiming the Advent before the execution of Dona Beatriz. She was most famous for dying and being resurrected dozens of times, a feat that Father Lorenzo attributed to infernal aid in his annual letters to the Capuchin province of Tuscany. Recounting his secret meetings with Saint Lucy to a fellow graduate of the shuttered Kongolese Jesuit college, the aide describes her lengthy explanations of key Beatrizian prayers and millenarian visions. The saint prophesies the second coming of Jesus, accurately predicting several aspects of the life of 20th century prophet and martyr Simon Kimbangu. Saint Lucy focuses on the "New Passion" in particular, with the Dialogue of Prophet and Slaver paralleling written records of Kimbangu's torture at the hands of Commander De Rossi in Thysville, and lists the patrilineages of several early Kimbanguist disciples imprisoned alongside him. Several of the silver shoot hymns, revealed to Kimbangu by God in response to challenges made by Catholic and Baptist authorities, are presented in full. Even the spiritual titles of the Three Sons of Kimbangu - Papa Kulutu (“elder father”) for Kisolokele; Papa Mfumu a Mbanza (“the father at the head of the city of Nkamba”) for Dialungana; and Papa Mfumu a Longo (“the father who is the spiritual leader”) for Diangienda - appear in Saint Lucy's catechistic discussion of the Trinity. The Last Little Anthony also foretells a third and final coming of Jesus, this time alongside his beloved Saint Anthony and the vast army of fire-eyed miniature soldiers (the soldat ya mokusse) who served Diangienda, before the aide watches her walk into the waves beyond Soyo Port. Paleographic, physical and computer-based techniques all date the manuscript to the early 1700s, including the pages with writing in the Kimbanguist sacred script Mandombe.