tricks taught: risk, thought, and the Marxist (un)truth of myth in Sukumaland

 

a matched pair of mabindas (Sukuma articulated dance figures) on a performance cord

“For revolutionary consciousness is subjective consciousness, just as natural consciousness is, that is, it is a determination or re-presentation of substance, ethical life, actuality, in the form of an abstract consciousness. An abstract consciousness is one which knows that it is not united with ethical life. It is determined by abstract law to know itself as formally free, identical and empty. It is only such an abstract consciousness which can be potentially revolutionary, which can conceive the ambition to acquire a universal content or determination which is not that of the bourgeois property law which bestowed universality and subjectivity on it in the first place.” — Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology 

My medicine gourd

I should prepare-prepare

The snake hunters have not seen me yet

The huntsmen of snakes

I have a calabash of recklessness

O Madam, I have killed Shing’weng’we! 

— song of the Porcupine Hunter dance association, collected in Gunderson's 'We Never Sleep, We Dream of Farming': Sukuma Labor Songs from Western Tanzania

Hey, y'all! I hope life has been treating everyone gently. Would apologize for the silence here but I don't think this is a return to regular posting, just a break in the hiatus. It's only a temporary pause, though; still have ideas and plans for the blog n such. This post is both an extension and whittling down of a paper that was originally written for Ph.D applications, but it really grew out of the many psychotic conversations on Marxist religion and angelic materialism I've had with my beloved friend Marcia, who was kind enough to come see me muddle through a presentation of it at a conference. She recently brought it up in a discussion with Derek B. about his excellent post for the recent blogclave and there was some interest in seeing the actual thing, at least from matchless weirdos Lino and Sandro, so I thought it would be fun to rewrite the essay in a less constrained fashion. 

These little prefaces are usually about providing some insight into the animating spirit of a post, but the relationship between the original aims and the elements drawn out by substantial revision here is a fraught one. In terms of things that are different, I went on pilgrimage to Mecca and Madinah with my grandfather in the intervening time, and the experience worked me into a new shape on this specific question. I also discovered the work of Gillian Rose, which has been such a revelation for me - on Hegel and speculative / dialectical thought (Hegel Contra Sociology), on Adorno and the possibility of a critical theory (The Melancholy Science), on mortality and the examined life (Love's Work.) Her influence is all over the rewrite; really think I'll have to sort my life into pre- and post-Rosean eras. The last big change that hangs over this is my impending professionalization. I should say first that I am very happy to get the chance to study precolonial Congolese history with a prof I deeply respect, even if the bizarre German-American experiment that was the modern research university is melting down. That being said, if you know me or have read a lot of stuff here, you know I have problems with the discipline - particularly its craft guild mentality and the stillbirth of the philosophy of history as an integral aspect of historical inquiry. Precolonial Africanists are exceptionally adaptable and methodologically innovative for historians (Wyatt MacGaffey aptly called it the "decathlon of the social sciences") but that doesn't keep them (us?) from struggling with the same problems. There are positives to the process of disciplining yourself, to be sure, but the prospect alone has forced me to reassess what exactly it is that I find important or meaningful about this work - ig this is one attempt to do just that. 

I was reassured that this didn’t need to have a games point, God knows that’s never been a requirement for posts here at Majestic Fly Whisk, but I’ve been out long enough to feel like there should be some kind of value for the weary blogsman. While I was away, Rachel/Unfuturism sent me this article; lots of things that are interesting and worthy abt it, but the most relevant to the recent flurry of writing on religion is the idea of Gygaxian Materialism. The author explains what this looks like in practice:

“I design my adventures on the basis of my world-view, namely that of a cynical left-leaning anarchist and unrepentant degenerate. From my anarchism, I take the idea that all institutions are fundamentally illegitimate in so far as they exist solely to protect and enforce arbitrary social hierarchies. From my leftism, I take Marxist historical materialism, which is the idea that the underlying logic of civilisation is that societies rely upon their modes of production. It follows from this that every institution comprising a society is shaped by its modes of production and institutions either adapt to the mode of production or face extinction. In simpler terms, every institution is a gang and every gang follows the money. One of the defining characteristics of Historical Materialism is that there is no fixed path leading from poverty and horror to prosperity and enlightenment… there’s only the deafening sound of history as competing interests grind against each other.”

I’m aware that this is a rough and ready formulation intended to distill a position on preferred styles - that lends it a helpful clarity! There is something of this attitude in certain solutions to the Cleric Problem, the idea of returning to the “base” and drawing out religious interactions from there, but the funny thing about religion is that it reveals the difference between Marx’s own relationship to the material and the one we’ve inherited as “historical materialism” after a century of loss. To be clear, I think you can get great games out of the method above! If there is any advice for me to give, tho, it’s that there is more meaning in the untruth of abstraction (beyond ideology as simple misreading of material conditions) than this kind of materialism is typically willing to grant. Maybe we can have games that reflect a subtler relationship? I think Zedeck does this particularly well already, so maybe I'm just trying find out why his method works for me, why his spirits are so effective at representing social reality. My spiritual brother Semiurge once said of Bolaño that “because he was not enchanted by writing, he was able to understand it.” Rose says this also true of the dialectic, that only after we reject the spell of dialectical materialism do we give ourselves up to its logic in a way that revives its critical power:

“Adorno does not use the dialectic, but he does judge it; he cannot ‘give himself up to it’ – for then his thinking would become speculative. For reasons he gives himself, he is ‘under the spell’, which accounts for the remorselessly judgemental tone and style of his writing. Adorno kept the dialectic spellbound so that when later, post-modern generations insist again on revel without repose, their inevitable judgements may arrest their own inconsistency. If, even only abstractly and dialectically, this paper has begun to undo the spell – speculative beginnings may be released and coaxed to take up the labour of the concept. After the debilitations of the dance, the labour – which is equally repose – may refresh us.”

critique of political anthropology

Anthropological understandings of witchcraft and magic have undergone a surprising transformation since the 1990s - while previous generations of anthropologists from Marcel Mauss through E. E. Evans-Pritchard to Mary Douglas and Victor Turner viewed witchcraft's persistence as a mode of thought through the lens of structural adaptation or cognitive flexibility, contemporary scholars have increasingly positioned modernity itself as the primary force driving magical thinking and practice. This theoretical reorientation has been particularly influential in African contexts, where scholars have drawn direct connections between neoliberal economic transformations and the proliferation of witchcraft discourses. Jean and John Comaroff's influential work in South Africa attempted to demonstrate how occult narratives emerged as responses to post-apartheid economic liberalization, while Francis Nyamnjoh's research in Cameroon revealed that accusations of sorcery often arose when market forces created unexpected winners and losers, disrupting traditional social hierarchies and protection systems that once governed community relations. The value of magic as cosmology, however, is conspicuously absent in the new literature; the scholarly focus on economic precarity and the political dimensions of witchcraft has overshadowed the intimate contexts in which magical beliefs are most viscerally enacted and reproduced. The emphasis on colonial modernity's role in generating magical thinking has drawn attention away from the healer's compound and the home - the spaces where sorcery manifests most powerfully in daily life - towards increasingly narrow views of the political. As Koen Stroeken, anthropologist of East-Central Africa and source of many of the observations on Sukuma life that feature in this post, caustically noted in his book Moral Power: The Magic of Witchcraft: "[c]ontemporary anthropologists of magic overlook the epistemology in its own right, which explains why they are the first generation thinking they could write about magic without having studied traditional healing." This is perhaps unsurprising, considering that the foundational works produced by anthropologists interested in ‘occult modernity’ were written during a period when the particularism of cultural and area studies mounted significant challenges to Marxism's historical concern with totality. Ironically, the value of a totalizing perspective becomes particularly evident when examining the kind of consumer societies that the new anthropology of magic prefers to take as its subjects. Defending a Lukacsian image of totality, Beverly Best writes that “[t]he presently dominant convention of perceiving and representing….different geographical locations, moments in history, institutions and fields of activity, and experience as fragmented and atomized is an obstacle to understanding how the social world actually works in capitalist societies, that is, in a more complex, holistic and interconnected way.” Even this problem would be mitigated, though, if anthropologists of magic took the Latourian impetus behind their reassessment of modernity seriously. In a trenchant critique tucked away inside his comprehensive introduction to witchcraft and magic, Bruce Kapferer argues that in their eagerness to diagnose the postcolonial predicament, authors like the Comaroffs and Nyamnjoh inadvertently pathologized magic, returning its former association with irrationality. Positioning witchcraft primarily as an internal response to the neoliberal postcolony, Africanists psychologized magical practice into a mere coping mechanism for managing uncertainty, casting it as a primitive risk management strategy that parallels modern financial instruments in aim. The homology drawn between magical practices and Western responses to insecurity is superficially affirming but ultimately reinforces long-standing hierarchies of knowledge; modernity only reveals its plural nature when ‘provincial’ experiences of the modern are in sync with those of the metropole. 

Where I think we'll diverge from Stroeken and Kapferer's very useful criticisms is that their polemics against the anthropology of occult modernity are not really an attempt to undermine the validity of the subfield’s guiding questions. Stroeken says as much in Moral Power:

"The observation that witchcraft beliefs are not vanishing under the influence of modernity could have been interpreted as a revealing one for our modern epistemology. It could have paved the way for a debate on the ways in which humans make meaning and assess the social situation they are in. It could have led us to unpack both ‘modernity’ and ‘witchcraft’ to the point where one concerned the other. However, something else happened. Globalist studies chose to attribute the ongoing relevance of witchcraft beliefs to the detrimental effect of modernity and the contemporary manifestation of the capitalist economy. As a result, witchcraft lost nothing of the alterity moderns had always attributed to it. A set of traditional beliefs and practices that date from before colonization were treated as a symptom of postcolonial disorder. Might this not be the last thing that we as anthropologists intended?"

While I'm deeply sympathetic to Stroeken's point here, we could and should ask if this is indeed about a failure somewhere with these foundational questions. We have a model for this in Marx's relationship to political economy. Classical political economy - the work of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, etc. - was primarily concerned with uncovering the origins of wealth and analyzing its distribution among social classes. Contemporary Marxist economics (Backhaus would call that an oxymoron!) regularly positions Marx within this framework. There’s a certain slippage here between political economy and its critique; classical political economists conceptualized society as resting upon the economy as its natural foundation, and the hope was that if you could grasp the underlying laws of motion of that system, you could then instrumentalize that knowledge to do all kinds of neat things. Much of the desire from a certain kind of leftist guy to, like, work out the correct mixture of policies and laws that would maximize the generation of wealth and optimize its distribution seems to me a Smithian-Ricardian inheritance that bypasses Marx entirely. It’s not that Marx doesn’t think they’re useful, he’s quite sympathetic to them himself in much the same way, but he isn't a member of their intellectual tradition. Adorno summarizes this hilariously in Marx and the Basic Concepts of Sociological Theory when he says that "[t]he genius of Marx consisted precisely in the fact that, filled with disgust, he tackled exactly that which he found disgusting: the economy." The central problem for Marx is that the classical political economists take a lot for granted, not least the assumption that their categories are natural or universal instead of historically specific constructs particular to capitalist society. While political economists presented concepts like value, labor, and capital as transhistorical, Marx revealed their contingency and their embeddedness in specific social relations. Capital is not just an advancement upon or a refinement of political economy because the political economists are not just getting the answers wrong; they're also asking the wrong questions. This is also true about the anthropologists; the Africanist Hylton White, himself a heterodox anthropologist who remains something of an outsider figure in the subfield for (among other things) insisting on the dialectical tension of the Marxist critical impulse in a way that resists easy assignment into professional camps, begins this work in his excellent essay What is anthropology that decolonising scholarship should be mindful of it?  It's worth quoting at some length here:

"In the strand of critical Marxism Adorno represents, non-identity is the limit point of totalising inclusion. In the face of this, critical analysis confronts at least two tasks. One is to explore the logic of totalisation itself. How do forms of social domination work at the largest scale? What kinds of social dynamics underpin them and perpetuate them? But another, equally urgent task is to show how totalisation also fails to fully include its objects within itself. How do objects exceed their totalisation, and what dynamics of trauma, tragedy, play and possibility result? Combining these agendas makes critical Marxism a much more revealing lens by which to comprehend complexity than we find in the varieties of post-structuralism. By totalising difference itself, in a flat space of play, post-structuralist thought collapses the space between energies that should be kept in tense relations of distance as well as proximity, if we want make our thought respect the qualities of the real. But recognising complexity this way also requires we nurture a very wide range of intellectual work, conducted at different scales and with different objects. In its insistence on attending to the non-Western — in this case, its attention to the African or the indigenous — one of the possible gifts of decolonising thought is to hold in view the force of non-identity in the postcolonial world. Even more compelling is the way decolonising thought makes its regard for non-identical objects into a principled standpoint for critique. It thus opens out into acts of recuperation and respect that are potentially transformative, not just in intellectual work but also in how we govern our relations with each other much more broadly, in a world shaped deeply by injuries of estrangement and domination. Seen this way, it is hard to sustain the charge that decolonising thought is a one-dimensional practice that inflates separate human identities into segregated worlds...What if we took non-identity as a starting point for considering a mode of ethnographic estrangement that actually does very innovative work in decolonising thought? That estrangement lies in the tension between the claims made through cultural forms and the forms of social life in which they are handled heteronomously. By cultural form I mean not its static existence but what kind of work it could do if it were brought into a different kind of relationship with the social dynamics surrounding it. What could these forms reveal to us in thought as well as in politics if we placed them in a different kind of relation to the postcolonial whole? How does this help us see what kinds of constraints on innovation and change exist in our society? By attending to African cultural forms as non-Western ones, decolonising thought should not be construed as drawing a line that deepens and reiterates divisions already familiar from colonial thought. Instead it should be construed as a work of revealing modes of estrangement. By doing so it does not leave the larger world around it either untouched or unexamined. Instead it forces a difficult confrontation with the constraints estranging us all from alternative futures."

The rest of the blogpost is an argument in favor of White's modes of estrangement as an answer to the problem of aims and ends that sunk the anthropology of magic, an answer that requires us to look, as Marx says, "behind our backs" at the process of abstraction. I suppose the questions I want to pursue go something like this: what does Sukuma religion (used here in the Hegelian sense as an institutionalized attempt at social freedom, including myth and magico-medicinal operations) tell us? Why might we want to study that disclosure? What forms of thought does that study require of us?

the mechanical dancer

Before getting into the critical skeleton of this paper, I would like to talk about Sukuma dance figures; in part because it may clarify another point about the value of untruth, but also because it would be funny to bookend this section with stories about puppets.

Sukuma competitive association music was/is the exact sort of thing that Adorno would have been a freak about. It's a product of the arrival of capitalism (which precedes colonial relationships on the Central Tanzanian Plateau - we'll talk about this period in the next section) and it is particularly telling that the great dance moieties - the bagiika and the bagaalu - emerge in tandem with something like a concept of the public in the modern sense just as the tensions between medicating rulers and magico-medicinal associations spiraled into open conflict. Frank Gunderson’s ‘We Never Sleep, We Dream of Farming’: Sukuma Labor Songs from Western Tanzania notes that “baliingi [dancer-poets] began to disassociate from batemi [chiefly] patronage, and realign not with the colonial powers, but with the emerging powerful voluntary medicinal and labor associations, where powerful alliances and affinities developed through the sharing of labor, medicinal knowledge, new political ideas, and song.” Sukuma dance associations took on a number of powers which were once the province of kings and semi-secret cults, absorbing and redeploying them as all that was once solid quickly began melting into air (Marcia reminds us to pay attention to the end of that Marx quote as well!) Initiations that belonged to nobility were undermined by the new power of the dance associations and their merchant-porter supporters but the rhythms of social reproduction didn't go untouched either; the extent to which dance associations became ‘alternative’ educative institutions is evident in the aphorism, shikome sha malika or, ‘the hearth teaching of the dance society’; it refers to the ways in which the instruction that was organized under the aegis of the malika (an older term for dance associations) was similar to - and, crucially, came to replace - the traditional evening fires of Sukuma homesteads (shikome) where young people were once taught. This is a validating result, and again very telling, but the facet of the dance associations Adorno would probably be most interested in is the performers' use of puppetlike figurines called mabinda to simulate / satirize / promote the performances in a kind of introductory stage before the main performances. As an aside, these puppet shows are insane, alternately super horny (articulated genitalia is a common feature) or reflective or surreal but almost always with an ironic undercurrent; Aimée Bessire's paper Sukuma Figures, Boundaries, and the Arousal of Spectacle focuses on the transgressiveness of the mabinda performance + its relationship to the separation between audience and performance, but it's the ironizing structure of mabinda that we're after. What I suspect would captivate Adorno here is the way these figurines function as a dialectical negation within the performance itself - a built-in...perhaps even immanent...critique that reveals the dance's own contradiction. People often flip out about the A-dog's takes on jazz without even starting from the point he was trying to make in his work on aesthetics: that artistic quality properly considered refers to the capacity of the work to reveal the falsity of the experience and ultimately the necessity of its own aesthetic dissolution if justice is to be done to the work’s promise, the mirror of the communist's commitment to doing justice to the promise of progress immanent to the exchange principle and bourgeois revolutionary freedom by abolishing them. It's enough for now to say that a successful work (thinking of Adorno's mixed praise of Schoenberg) is one that truthfully discloses its own lie. The articulated figures would then represent the 'truth content' of dance association performance, externalizing the reflexive moment where the art acknowledges (confesses!) its own entanglement in the social transformations it documents - “torn halves of an integral whole, to which however they do not add up.”

This insistence that Marxist criticism does not really involve oppositional stances in the conventional sense, whether towards capitalism, religion, racism, or w/e, is one of the major inheritances of the Frankfurt School's (pre-Habermas) theoretical tradition. That kind of oppositionality doesn't really require Marxism anyways, right? Lots of people hated capitalism before Marx and Engels, as they'll tell you. Hell, Catholic social teaching opposes capitalism and racism. There's certainly a pious normativity to what Moishe Postone called the 'standpoint of labor,' the desire to fix what is broken in the world from a place of morality, that isn't very Marxian at all. After all, Engels recalled that whenever someone tried to talk to Marx about morality, he "roared with laughter!" I don't think this anecdote implies the kind of vulgar materialism about our moral intuitions it's typically reduced to by Marxists, but something more along the lines of Adorno's observation in Minima Moralia that "[a]nti-morality, in rejecting what is immoral in morality, ... inherits morality's deepest concern." It's a bit tricky, but Werner Bonefeld deftly summarized the thrust of the point in an interview with Emancipations (emphasis mine:)

"The truth of the ‘standpoint critique of capitalism’, that is, critique from the standpoint of labour, articulates the misery of capitalist society, focusing on the poverty of the human condition, the struggles to make ends meet, etc. It articulates the conditions of misery, and it does so with an eye for setting things right; to achieve justice, equality, freedom, opportunity, full employment, and humane labour processes. Who objects to that? What it means in practice is not clear inasmuch as poverty belongs to the concept of a capitalist society that is founded on free labour, free from direct access to the means of subsistence, and thus free to seek wage-based employment to secure social reproduction. In the words of Marx, the freedom of labor manifests itself in the form of the needy individual. In the words of Adorno, it entails the freedom to ‘dodge starvation’ by working for the enrichment of another class of Man. The freedom of contract manifests the historically acquired freedom in capitalist society. It is founded on the rights of private property of the means of social reproduction. Its normative values of freedom and equality, and justice too, connect with the exploitation of labour. If one were to summarize the difference between critiques of capitalism from the standpoint of labour and my critique of labour economy, it would be that the former analyses the world of real (economic) abstractions to comprehend their political, economic, cultural, psychological, social, and historical truth from the standpoint of the interest of the worker in higher wage and better conditions, welfare entitlements, etc. But the [Marxist] critique of labour economy scrutinises their untruth. It asks about the social constitution of the (economic) abstractions, and it asks about the historically specific character of the social relations that assume the form of a relationship between seemingly natural economic things."

There is, unsurprisingly, a dialectical relationship here; if (a particular strain of) Marxist critique scrutinizes the untruth of social reality, it is similarly interested in the truth of social fantasy. Returning to religion, this is why François Châtelet claimed that the question of Marx's relationship to religious thinking is at its root about the overcoming of atheism, which cannot ever be understood as doctrine for him. The young Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts says so quite plainly (emphasis is all Marx:)

"Since the real existence of man and nature has become evident in practice, through sense experience, because man has thus become evident for man as the being of nature, and nature for man as the being of man, the question about an alien being, about a being above nature and man – a question which implies the admission of the unreality of nature and of man – has become impossible in practice. Atheism, as the denial of this unreality, has no longer any meaning, for atheism is a negation of God, and postulates the existence of man through this negation; but socialism as socialism no longer stands in any need of such a mediation. It proceeds from the theoretically and practically sensuous consciousness of man and of nature as the essence. Socialism is man’s positive self-consciousness, no longer mediated through the abolition of religion, just as real life is man’s positive reality, no longer mediated through the abolition of private property, through communism. Communism is the position as the negation of the negation, and is hence the actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and rehabilitation."

The mature Marx, inasmuch as the difference between the Marxes is more than just Althusserian cope, goes even further than the Manuscripts in a way that Walter Benjamin's reading of the theological in the political was the first to fully appreciate. In a footnote in Capital, Marx writes (the ellipsis is his too lmao:)

"Even a history of religion that abstracts from this material basis is . . . uncritical. In truth, it is much easier to discover the foggy creations of religion by analyzing the earthly kernel than it is to proceed the other way around: i.e., to begin with the actual, existing relations of life and, proceeding from them, explicate their heavenly forms. The latter approach is the only materialist and therefore truly systematic method."

This is another possibly tricky point, which is why I'm relying on so much, but I think Hamacher's passage in his paper On the Right to Have Rights: Human Rights; Marx and Arendt attempting to explain Marx's somewhat cryptic pronouncements that "political economy is Christian"  or that the atheistic, democratic state reveals itself to be "the consumated Christian state"  is maybe the most concise reading I've found of the turn that takes place here:

"For Marx, the Christian distinction that Tertullian declared in his Apology still dominates even where the res publica is no more a res aliena but instead has become the res publica christiana that, in the form of political democracy, has become the universal trend. This distinction and, as Marx writes more concisely, the 'diremption' between a political and a thoroughly social society, are the means by which the religion 'democracy' will be transformed into an institution for the disruption of each and every one of the relations that constitute the humanity of the human. Democracy - which is structurally Christian - only knows the human alienated from the human, the human as social-being separated from itself and for whom each other human is an opposed human. Even in its universality, democracy knows only the human as a human-against-human."

Why Marx arrives at this relationship to religion has everything to do with his Hegelian roots. For Hegel, religion offers a narrative mode of apprehending fundamentally speculative and conceptual content, a mechanism through which we approach a comprehension of our purposed nature - aka the TRVE meaning of teleology, read your Pippin kids!!! Gillian Rose's Hegel Contra Sociology argues that, for Hegel, "[p]hilosophy establishes its ‘idea’ of freedom by a speculative reading of the history of religion...misrepresentation has occurred in the form of religion, and religious representation is a form of ordinary thinking. Philosophy thus transcribes a terminology which is already understood." The Marxist inversion that puts Hegel 'on his head', then, already contains the counterturn of falsity that would set theology aright again . Benjamin captures this relationship really elegantly with a famously weird little allegory in the Theses on the Philosophy of History:

"There was once, we know, an automaton constructed in such a way that it could respond to every move by a chess player with a countermove that would ensure the winning of the game. A puppet wearing Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent on all sides. Actually, a hunchbacked dwarf—a master at chess—sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophic counterpart to this apparatus. The puppet, called 'historical materialism,' is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is small and ugly and has to keep out of sight."

Puppets on both ends! With all this in mind, I'd like us to look at a particular Sukuma story - the death of the world-swallowing monster Shing’weng’we at the hands of Masala Kulangwa - and try to approach it with an eye for its (un)truth.

hunting the world-monster

The development of new long-distance trade networks in East Africa during the 19th century is one of the most significant events in the region's precolonial history. At the heart of this commercial system were the Sukuma and Nyamwezi peoples of the Central Tanzanian Plateau who established and dominated the caravan routes connecting the East African interior with coastal trading ports. While Zanzibar served as the great clearinghouse of the regional commercial system, the Nyamwezi-Sukuma caravan “was its basic institution,”  in Stephen Rockel's words. The sheer scale of participation in this trade was remarkable - Rockel's Carriers of Culture: Labor on the Road in Nineteenth-Century East Africa estimates that during peak periods, approximately one-third of the adult male population in Unyamwezi engaged in annual coastal trading expeditions. The massive scale of caravan trade in the mid-19th century necessitated increasingly sophisticated organizational structures, gave rise to specialized roles within the caravans; the caravan's social organization drew heavily from ‘Greater Unyamwezi’ cultural traditions while developing its own distinct characteristics. A vital specialist in the caravan hierarchy, and the figure of most importance for this discussion, was the mganga who “acted as advisor and provided ritual protection against the dangers of the road.” Given the numerous hazards faced during these extended journeys, such spiritual safeguards were considered essential components of successful trade expeditions. Just as the caravan's overall organizational structure and specific internal roles both drew from Nyamwezi-Sukuma traditions, the role of the mganga likely emerged from the magico-medicinal practices of Greater Unyamwezi cultures; Sukuma traditional healers in particular had long been recognized for their expertise, playing critical roles in community health, sacrifices, ritual protection, and spiritual propitiation across the Plateau. Existing scholarship has wholly focused on economic and political strategies of risk mitigation, particularly those documented in coastal mercantile networks, with the interior dimensions (both in terms of ritual technology and geographic orientation) of risk - especially the role of waganga in caravan operations - remaining unexplored. 

Fahad Ahmad Bishara's A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780– 1950, frex. describes how Indian Ocean merchants developed finely-tuned financial and legal instruments to manage trade risks, including those associated with inland caravan ventures. Their primary strategy involved creating extensive networks of debt and obligation that transformed how trade risks were managed. These mercantile leaders, operating from coastal entrepôts, created bonds of credit and obligation that extended deep into the interior beyond formal Zanzibari control through their interactions with Nyamwezi-Sukuma caravans. The loan structures prefigured modern debt management tools in their flexibility; by extending loans to caravan leaders and agricultural producers, they could effectively shift the commercial risks onto their debtors while maintaining a degree of financial insulation for themselves. When a moneylender provided capital to an aspiring caravan leader or a plantation owner, the loan agreement was structured so that repayment was directly tied to the future sale of commodities. This meant that the debtor absorbed the primary risks of trade fluctuations, environmental challenges, and market volatility. The lender would receive a predetermined commission, with the remaining proceeds applied to the debt. This system created what Bishara describes as a "ocean-wide geography of obligation" - a complex web of financial relationships that bound together diverse economic actors. This dynamic system ensured that moneylenders maintained a consistent stake in the trade, regardless of immediate market conditions, transforming what financiers saw to be an intolerably risky economic environment into a calculable, and thus manageable, system of trade. This was more than mere adaptation to the unpredictable nature of long-distance, multi-stage commercial ventures, but a quest to totally eliminate the shadow of risk from trading endeavors - the ultimate goal of most coastal merchants with ties to the inland caravan trade was to exit the business entirely and invest in ‘safe’ spice plantations. If, as seems probable, the ritualists accompanying trade caravans were instead drawing from Sukuma conceptions of magical practice, their role was, by contrast, one concerned with an ecosystem of intentions, using shingila (the unstable "access" ingredient in Sukuma magico-medicinal compounds) to establish links between desire and result. Whether for healing, initiation, protection, or commercial ventures, shingila represents an acknowledgment that “[i]n magic one can never be sure of the outcome; that is to say, whether ‘access’ will be attained. While shingila is what makes magic work, it means accepting a fundamental instability as a part of life.” It’s hard not to hear Judith Butler’s description of precariousness as a generalized condition of human life in those words, but it is important to note that the Sukuma totally dissolve the line Butler draws between precariousness and precarity in their work. By embedding their alternative to coastal ‘risk management’ in a magical framework that explicitly incorporated contingency, these traders and their ritualists were developing a sophisticated epistemology of uncertainty; the ritualist was not trying to guarantee success by increments, but to establish a relational field where successful outcomes became more likely through mediation. As Stroeken describes in an extended discussion of ownership and risk in Moral Power, the Sukuma understanding of possession and relationship differs in important ways from the meanings activated by the Indian Ocean mercantile networks studied by Bishara:

"The philosophy of life…boils down to a relation between self and world that is best captured by the Sukuma verb ‘being with’ (-li na). A Bantu language like the Sukuma language, Kisukuma, has no word for ‘to have’. The meaning is composed by adding the preposition ‘with’ to the primary verb ‘to be’...This idea of having someone, something or a feeling by ‘being with’ them or it rather than by possessing or ingesting them is suggestive of a self tied (umbilically) to its environment without coinciding with that environment. This relational experience, whereby the self never fully owns the things (or experiences) it ‘has’ but is accompanied by them, surfaces in [Sukuma] practices of marriage and alliance, status promotion and initiatory membership, which operate on the principle that there can be no gift without sacrifice. We ‘are with’ the world in that we give to the world and will get something in return, yet – here comes the sacrifice – without knowing what the return will be. Figures of the unknown such as spirits immanent in daily life evoke this fundamental uncertainty, this umbilical tie between self and world, the latter comprising the group."

Those of y'all who are familiar with Heidegger might've perked up at the mention of "being with," a core concept in Being and Time as Mitsein. The importance of being-with for Heidegger requires a brief explanation of what he means by care (assuming some familiarity with Dasein, tho it's not needed for the ultimate point) in BT first; very loosely speaking, the sense in which Heidegger uses the word care is the same sense in which I might say you care about something or another, but applied to the whole of my existence, such that it becomes more about the necessity of dealing with our thrownness into the world, the facticity of our relationship to existence. This, more or less, is what Heidegger means when he says that Dasein's Being is that care and its capacity for it. The resulting relationship between Heideggerian care and Mitsein, being-with, is beautifully explicated by Charles Bambach in his paper Who is Heidegger’s Hölderlin?:

"If our existence is marked above all by “care,” then it is equiprimordially a care for others in that Dasein comes to existence in Mitsein, “Being-with.” As Heidegger puts it, “being-with others belongs to the being of Dasein, with which it is concerned in its very being. Thus as being-with, Dasein ‘is’ essentially for the sake of others” (BT: 120/SZ: 123). In responding to others, in exposing ourselves to their alterity, we come to be responsible for the very emergence of being in its temporally particular situatedness. Such otherness resists our attempts at appropriation; more properly, in the event of being that is the world, we are appropriated by what is other, summoned to respond to the call that comes, unbidden, from an alterity that never lets itself be appropriated. This sense of responsibility is not limited to other human beings; in Heidegger’s work this responsibility extends to all beings, or rather, to being’s way of be-ing, its happening as the play/πόλεμος of concealment and revelation."

The Catholic phenomenologist (you have Catholic phenomenology to thank for basically all of your French theory faves) Gabriel Marcel's distinction between ‘being’ and ‘having’ extends the Heideggerian insight far enough to provide an illustrative parallel from the Western tradition. Having emerges in those situations where we exercise a power over a thing which, up to the time of our exercising the power, maintains a certain independence of us. This distinction, Marcel suggests, reveals itself most profoundly in experiences that transcend simple possession, with the body as the limit case par excellence. Bodies are both something that we have and we are; when viewed purely instrumentally, the body becomes depersonalized and loses its fundamental connection to personal identity, but recognizing the body as "my" body transcends mere possession. The body, then, occupies a zone much like the Sukuma -li na for Marcel. In a study of Marcel’s philosophy of alterity, Brian Treanor argues that attitudes of risk mitigation (what he calls “the administrative conservation of our lives”) emerge from a fundamental misreading of this relationship. Marcel's critique centers on the destructive nature of an "objective view of life" that transforms human experience into a enterprise ruled by the calculative thought that both Heidegger and Adorno found so problematic; Treanor writes that we do not possess life "as if these years were safely stored in some metaphysical bank account. We do not 'have’ any life at all.”  This administrative approach to being "does nothing but cut us off from communion with others and renders us deaf to the cry of the other in hopes of storing up more and more life against the threat of disaster." Unlike Marcel, however, who only finds these moments of suspension in exceptional cases of category confusion, the Sukuma account of ‘being with’ reads all relationships (with people, nonhuman others, objects, emotions, etc) from within the Rosean broken middle between ‘being’ and ‘having’ — our relationship to risk included.

As the passage from Stroeken indicates, at the heart of this system lies shitambo - sacrifice - which literally means hunt in Kisukuma, evoking the hunter's risk of returning empty handed from the forest. The Sukuma philosophy of life operates through two distinct but interrelated codes of exchange. Sacrifice functions through a logic of honoring and imploring, where the material value of what is offered matters less than the personal attention and intention behind the offering. Like a hunter entering the forest, one who makes a sacrifice cannot guarantee a return; the ancestral spirits may or may not respond, may or may not be satiated by the offering. This inherent uncertainty stands in marked contrast to ordinary gift-giving, which operates under clear social laws of reciprocity and expected return-gifts. What makes the Sukuma approach particularly striking is how these two systems serve as each other's ‘secret meaning’ or ‘medium.’ While sacrifice explicitly operates through uncertainty and personal attention, it implicitly carries the social law of reciprocity that explicitly governs gift-giving. Conversely, while gift-giving explicitly operates through social reciprocity, its success implicitly depends on the same kind of personal attention that characterizes sacrifice. As Stroeken notes, "the group's goodwill in the end decides whether one's gift counts." This creates a circuit where risk and certainty, personal attention and social obligation, material exchange and spiritual connection all flow into and reinforce each other. Sukuma interlocutors insist that a system based purely on gift exchange would lead to runaway accumulation through calculated reciprocity, while a system based purely on sacrifice could trigger social breakdown through uncertainty. By making each form of exchange the implicit meaning of the other, this vision of sociality creates an indeterminate relationship where risk is neither eliminated nor allowed to dominate. It is very important to note here that the claim isn't that this is an 'accurate' picture of the social world so much as it is a real abstraction formed by and out of the relations that make up Sukuma totality, one that discloses truth even (or especially) at its moments of failure.

The relationship between risk, gift, and sacrifice is easiest to read through a myth, one of Sukumaland’s oldest. The story begins with apocalyptic stakes; the monster Shing’weng’we “devours all living beings,” save one pregnant woman. Her son, when born, swears to kill the monster:

"…[The boy] ventures into the forest where he initiates himself into magic. There, the monster, who addresses him in a fatherly manner, challenges him to a game. Each will have eight stones to throw at each other. The boy is named Masala Kulangwa, literally ‘tricks to be taught’, because of the turning point in the myth. He wins the duel because he dares to negotiate the rule imposed by the monster on who should throw the first stone. The monster gives in and throws first, but both the monster and the boy miss seven times. As the monster tries to renegotiate the throwing order for the last stone, the boy strikes his opponent. He cuts open his belly like one would slaughter a bull, and out come all the people the monster has devoured as well as the cattle which permit Sukuma to marry."

Just as shitambo conjures up the hunter's uncertain venture into the forest, Masala Kulangwa's journey begins with a similar movement into uncertainty; he must enter the forest to initiate himself into magic before confronting the all-devouring monster Shing’weng’we. This parallel alerts the canny listener to the fact that the journey follows the logic of sacrifice rather than gift-giving, operating in a realm where returns cannot be guaranteed. The story's opening scenario, where Shing’weng’we has eaten all living things save one woman, presents an extreme version of what can happen when the negotiated balance between gift and sacrifice breaks down: pure consumption without reciprocity or attention to social bonds. The woman’s status as a slave in some tellings, one who escapes notice by hiding in chaff or refuse, sharpens the point. The explicit code governing the game appears to be one of reciprocity as each player throws the same number of stones, suggesting the balanced exchange of gift-giving. However, the victory comes through understanding the implicit medium of attention and timing that characterizes sacrifice. When the fatal kairós does arrive, which here retains its ancient link to keírō as cutting motion, it bursts open the swallowed world within the monster in catastrophic fashion. What began as a sacrificial wandering has shifted, all at once, into a gift that renews order right at the moment of shitambo’s hunt-cum-slaughter - out come both the devoured people and the cattle that enable marriage (and thus the reproduction of the social world.) Yet it remains that the renewal is mediated not through direct gift exchange but the uncertain path of sacrifice; Masala Kulangwa must risk everything, wager the continuation of all life on earth, to make this restoration possible. He wins, just as the Sukuma participants who related the tale to Stroeken emphasized, because he dares. Very Maoist!

an age of insurance?

Historian Emily Nacol observes in An Age of Risk: Politics and Economy in Early Modern Britain that there was a time before the modern concept of risk existed. She admits that "the ubiquity and permanence of risk in our contemporary relations with each other and with nature make it hard to imagine that anyone has ever lived without it. But human beings once did, and thus the modern idea of risk has an origin and a history."  Nacol locates this origin in 18th-century Britain, home to the entangled development of an increasingly mature capitalist outlook and the architectonic of probability that structured it. The early modern self, as Nacol describes it, was a closer thing to the Sukuma ideal; defined as it was by close awareness of future indeterminacy and attempts to grapple with that uncertainty – whether through efforts to control risk or to profit from it. She argues that indeterminacy and our ambivalence toward it are still with us, remarking that the potential payoffs and pitfalls of risk, and how they should be managed, consistently raise questions about whether we should adopt an “authoritarian stance informed by an endless search for security in the face of risk or instead endorse a system that harnesses experience, intuition, flexibility, and a wider distribution of risk management.” While supporting Nacol’s provocation, we may be forced to counter that the ambivalence towards risk present in Locke and Hume has already collapsed into full-throated support of the ‘authoritarian’ response in early modern capitalism’s daughter systems. It's not too much to say, after Anne Dufourmantelle, that if the early moderns lived in an Age of Risk, late modernity is instead an Age of Insurance:

"In a society where insurance is imposed on us in every domain, because no one is allowed to decline coverage anymore or simply make do without it, it has become useless to promote zero risk; it is a matter of course. Zero risk has become the obligatory horizon of our collective and individual decisions."

2008 made us all familiar with financial instruments that serve to reduce risk for private lenders whilst relocating the social dimensions of risk onto debtors; as Albena Azmanova argues in Capitalism on Edge, even investment risk – once cautiously celebrated by early modern political writers as exemplifying the possible benefits of risk-taking – has become thoroughly entangled in the logic of insurance. With tools like credit default swaps, "risk thus becomes a profit-generating entity itself, one explicitly produced for market exchange." Risk is no longer simply an aspect of economic activity to be managed, but itself a site of risk mitigation: “[i]n contrast to standard insurance…CDS allows us to insure what we do not own—namely the risk of someone else’s defaulting on a loan.” Isabell Lorey’s State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious eloquently describes the means by which our internal attempts at self-governance increasingly revolve around eliminating risk, tracking the emergence of "biopolitical self-sovereignizing" out of the liberal individual’s need to believe they can control their own precarious conditions, attempts to overcome life's inherent contingency that are invariably shaped by governmental structures. Those structures have, of course, already been remade by risk mitigation; Wendy Brown’s Walled States, Waning Sovereignty explains the global rush to wall and enclose as the nation-state’s bid to project strength in the face of its increasing powerlessness against the swings of neoliberal economies, while Bernard Harcourt’s Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age is a look into the justice system’s efforts to predict and thus control criminal behavior through an array of ‘risk factor assessments’ borrowed from insurance firms. 

All that being said, the material truth in Sukuma speculative thought would also lead us towards a wariness of the untruth in the materiality of programs limited to the “wider distribution of risk management” that Nacol mentioned as an alternative. Living wages, stricter workplace safety standards, or a universal basic income - the calculative portioning-out of waged life! - necessarily affirm exploitative and unfree social conditions even as they mitigate them. Perhaps it's not unfair to say that many analyses of neoliberal or financialized capitalism are insufficiently risky in their emancipatory ambition; Marx’s major critique of this socialist tendency in his letters on the Gotha Program was that it “took the appearance for the essence of the matter."  The rump American left's focus on universal insurance programs or renewals of the welfare state might be read as a symptom of our broader inability to imagine solutions beyond the apotropaic magic of insurance; it's no coincidence that the world-monster of Sukuma myth addressed the hero in a paternal fashion. Even Lorey and Azmanova seem to shrink from the challenge; Lorey (speaking in familiar post-Focauldian tones) suggests that the end of the new capitalism would come from “the small sabotages and resistances of precarious everyday life” instead of “the radical foundation of a new order,” while Azmanova sets aside the promise of revolution as “a utopian goal.”  The wariness in both stems from a sense that the age of great political projects, with their attendant risks of failure, has passed with the collapse of the Soviet Union (and, I might add, the long death of the Pan-African dream on the Continent.) This is where the kind of degraded Marxist tradition we've inherited, the histories of near-misses, setbacks, and losses that weigh like a nightmare on our living brains, would have us stop with risk. Revive our ambitions, take the risk of revolution, the Sukuma message of the daring cut and the world reconstituted as it is remade. That, I think, is the 'sublime moment of failure' for the story; a place where it recognizes and transmutes the limitation of its own goals. This is also true of our communist Trauerspiel, though we're often less courageous than the Sukuma grandmothers and dancer-poets in acknowledging the fact. Adorno gestured toward this inability in his confrontations with the West German student left - another infamous moment in his personal legend that deserves more serious consideration than it typically gets. This isn't like a moral failure or anything, but it is the breakdown that shows us where courage and risk are actually needed. There's no better signpost than Rose’s passage on the Angelus Dubiosus from Judaism and Modernity:

"The discovery of the difficult, dangerous and irrational impulses and actualities of individual and social life can only be the work of faceted and facetious reason, which – like Socratic irony equally beyond irony – is at the same time beyond its facetiousness. Paul Klee’s Angelus Dubiosus provides an image and name for reason, full of surprises. The ‘dubious angel’, doubtful and doubting, is distinguished from Benjamin’s choice of Klee’s angel, Angelus Novus, the new angel, his emblem for the traumatized Angel of History; and, equally, from the angry angels which I discern in Weil and in Levinas when they propose a new ethics defined against an idealized rationalism; and the facetiousness of the dubious angel is contrary to the ethos of so-called ‘ironic liberalism’, with its cynical display of indifference towards ‘the plurality’ of the Other. 

The dubious angel, bathetic angel, suits reason: for the angel continues to try to do good, to run the risk of idealization, of abstract intentions, to stake itself for ideas and for others. Experience will only accrue if the angel discovers the violence in its initial idea, when that idea comes up against the actuality of others and the unanticipated meanings between them. Now angels, of course, are not meant to gain experience – in the angelic hierarchies, idea and act at once define the angel, who is the unique instant of its species, without generation or gender. But here is the dubious angel – hybrid of hubris and humility – who makes mistakes, for whom things go wrong, who constantly discovers its own faults and failings, yet who still persists in the pain of staking itself, with the courage to initiate action and the commitment to go on and on, learning from those mistakes and risking new ventures. The dubious angel constantly changes its self-identity and its relation to others. Yet it appears commonplace, pedestrian, bulky and grounded – even though, mirabile dictu, there are no grounds and no ground. 

The dubious angel as the emblem of the work of facetious reason spoils the opposition between Athens and Jerusalem which new ethics has re-invented. It takes issue with the claim that Judaism provides the refuge for thought which has finished with the jaded rationalism of the philosophical tradition. Judaism, deprived of this counter-cultural cachet, ‘beyond reason’, shares with modernity the same crisis of self-comprehension, the same trauma and actuality of reason."

Rose’s dubious angel has largely been read in terms of personal vulnerability or the necessary riskiness of political action, but as Andrew Brower Latz points out, her self-dissolving awareness of dialectical reason's untruths produced a Hegelianism that “lacking the guarantee of method…knows [that] it must start its judgments in the middle, in an already contested space, in a mixture of error and truth.” The historical Sukuma vision of risk, when taken as an entryway to a renewed thought instead of a museum piece or derangement of modernity, can prepare us to understand the nature of such an endeavor.

Angelus Dubiosus, Paul Klee