Art and Oracle: A Scholarly Resource of African and Rituals of Divination | Explore & Learn

Divination in Sub-Saharan Africa
Conclusion

ll systems of divination are modes of communication developed to bridge realms that are intimately related yet distinguishable—the realm of ordinary or "visible" experience and the realm of unseen powers. Through words, gestures, sounds, and artifacts, divination rites arrest the conventional sense of time and place, providing for a moment another realm of experience, a world dense with meaning, perhaps more real than that in which one has been pursuing his or her daily life. Because they are one form of expression of a larger system of religious thought and practice, divination rites must be understood within a more encompassing cultural context and not as a prescientific mode of inquiry.58 Pluralistic visions of the world coexist in sub-Saharan African cultures. The problems they find themselves confronted with are morally complex, and resolving them requires a combination of faith and skepticism. Life entails multiple possibilities, choices, and decisions, and there is no single answer to the question of how to live. In contrast to Christian and Islamic worldviews, in sub-Saharan African cultures there are no definitive solutions to specific individual problems, only temporary expedients based on the unique circumstances of each situation and a high degree of responsiveness to the particular needs and demands of various individuals and peoples. Hence, divination is concerned with the immediate experience of people and attempts to place it in a context of cultural meaning.

Similarly, an exhibition of artifacts that were created for use in divination rituals must place the objects in a context of cultural meaning. It is obvious that, as with all ritual artifacts, those employed in African systems of divination are instruments, utensils. They have their meaning in the context of ritual performance, used in executing prescribed gestures, prayers, chants, and dances. They are analogous to a crucifix, which is not simply an ornament or a religious symbol, but has its essential meaning in the context of the Catholic Mass. The object is informed by the words of the liturgy and, in this instance, by an elaborate narrative known to those participating in the rite. The same may be said about the sixteen sacred palm nuts (ikin Ifa) and the sculpted caryatid bowls (agere Ifa), which are the central implements in Yoruba Ifa divination rites. The diviner and the suppliant know the story of Orunmila giving the palm nuts to his children to enable them to receive the wisdom of his counsel after he departed for the world of the gods; and the sculpted figures on the bowls represent people whose lives have been empowered by Orunmila's wisdom. Likewise, the sculpture of a kneeling female figure holding a bowl, which is placed next to a Luba diviner when he or she is using an mboko, is recognized by the suppliant as evoking the spiritual power of the diviner, who, like women, is a container of hidden resources.

A ritual artifact is an instrument used to invoke spiritual powers and to signal to the participants transitional moments in the ritual sequence. Through gesture, it is also an extension of the powers of the priest into the surrounding space, enlarging that space and making it sacred, and thus linking priest and suppliant. Furthermore, in the fabrication and consecration of a ritual artifact, a person is imaginatively re-creating the self in terms of a spiritual entity (an ancestor or a deity) that is not otherwise observable apart from the ritual. A Christian crucifix, a Russian Orthodox icon, or a Yaka slitdrum, in its ritual context—whether public or private—is an expression of the inner life of each individual who participates in that ritual. Such artifacts may be said, therefore, to link the self and the transcendent (the "not self"), acting as instruments through which a person becomes in some measure the embodiment of the transcendent, as in the case of a Catholic reliquary or a Kongo nkisi.

Art critic Roberta Smith, in her review of the exhibition "Baule: African Art/Western Eyes," observed that "the intended use and meaning of an African object is central to understanding its form, no matter how beautiful and self-sustaining the form may be."59 Rowland Abiodun's analysis of the long, graceful, conical form of a Yoruba divination tapper (iroke Ifa) in terms of the Yoruba concept of prenatal destiny (ori inu, literally "inner head") and the central importance of this concept in Ifa divination rites confirms Smith's observation.60 In African art, form and meaning are inextricably related, and meaning entails a knowledge of an object's use.61

Following David Freedberg's critique of an art theory of "formalism" with reference to the visual arts of Western culture,62 Wyatt MacGaffey points out that "art objects are more than just objects"; in our society, artworks have a "quasi-religious status . . . as embodiments of spiritual power," making the museum the "successor to the municipal temple."63 Even so, MacGaffey, who has written extensively on the peoples and ritual art of the Congo, goes on to say that "once an object has been appropriated as art . . . its original context and visual effect cannot be recovered and may be irrelevant." Indeed, MacGaffey holds that "culture is untranslatable."64 To be sure, when a ritual artifact, whether a medieval altar painting or an African shrine sculpture, "has been appropriated as art," the very act of appropriation serves to distance it and perhaps deny its religious and cultural context and meaning, and thus to impose a somewhat alien aesthetic upon it. I say "somewhat," since it is evident that an artist's interest in aesthetic considerations plays a significant part in the creation of such objects and remains, if not always transparent, at least perceptible to the viewer. Abiodun has made it abundantly clear that Yoruba artists are concerned with matters of composition, with the formal properties of a sculpture, and that a sculpture or beaded vestment reveals the artist's "eye for design" (oju-ona), as well as "insight" (oju-inu) into the work's subject.65

Because cultures are not easily translatable, a foreigner cannot readily know what a Yoruba or Luba or Yaka person experiences in the presence of a ritual artifact. And yet, a work of creative imagination seems able to transcend cultural and historical distances. At the very least, it requires us to take it seriously as a visual presence possessing an informative power. It has the capacity to evoke in us wonder, perhaps even awe or anxiety, which requires us to look again and again and, as far as possible, seek to understand the culture that engendered it.

Freedberg has observed, "Images work [i.e., have the power to signify] because they are consecrated, but at the same time they work before they are consecrated."66 In the creation of a Yoruba divination bowl or a Luba kneeling female figure with its bowl or a Baule mouse-oracle vessel or a Kongo nkisi figure, it is the skill of the artist who makes it—before its preparation and use by a diviner—that gives the ritual artifact its conceptual significance. In these Yoruba, Luba, Baule, and Kongo carvings, the concept of the self as a container—an embodiment—of power is the underlying subject. In every instance, the object's effectiveness in conveying that idea is the ultimate criterion of its aesthetic quality and provides the basis of its meaningful use within a ritual.

The nkisi figure is perhaps an exception, for it is an assemblage of various materials added to the sculpted form by the diviner and other people over the course of time. It is the creation of many hands, each contributing to its awesome visual and ritual power. Other works of art in Africa have a similar history, evolving over many years and shaped by the experiences of many people. In a review of an exhibition of Buddhist art from Tibet, art critic Holland Cotter observed that "when it comes to religious art, the value of an object often derives less from its physical form than from its history: where it has resided, what ceremonies it has been involved in, who has seen it or handled it. In many cases, though, it would be difficult to separate spiritual content from esthetic form."67

The challenge that African sculptural art presents to a Western art museum is to arrest the viewer's attention. Exhibitions must make the viewer feel somewhat discomfited with the recontextualization of African art in a museum environment that has been shaped by Western aesthetic notions and, to some extent, by the colonialist mission of collecting artifacts of "exotic" cultures. At the same time, exhibitions of Africa's art must induce a sense of visual engagement in order to draw the viewer into a new awareness of the skill, imagination, and conceptual sophistication of Africa's artists and the cultural traditions in which they lived and worked. As the "Art and Oracle" exhibition clearly reveals, artistry has an informative power in the ritual life of Africa's people and, if one observes with a sensitive eye, the power to inform others as well.

58. Peek 1991, pp. 193–208.

59. Roberta Smith, "Objects of Wonder That Are too Potent for Mere Display," New York Times, September 11, 1998, p. B37.

60. Rowland Abiodun, "Ifa Art Objects: An Interpretation Based on Oral Tradition,Ó in Abimbola 1975; Abiodun 1981.

61. To speak of African ritual artifacts as art is either to recontextualize them within a culturally legitimated post-Kantian aesthetic of formal properties, as a class of objects set aside in a museum or personal collection, or to be mindful of the extent to which the ritual artifacts of sub-Saharan Africa call into question such an aesthetic perception.

62. David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

63. MacGaffey 1998, pp. 229–30.

64. Ibid., p. 230.

65. Abiodun 1983, pp. 13–30; Abiodun 1987, pp. 252–70; Yoruba Art and Aesthetics 1991, pp. 20–26.

66. Freedberg, Power of Images, p. 98.

67. Holland Cotter, "Remnants of Tibetan Splendor, Divine and Intimate," New York Times, October 29, 1999, p. E38.