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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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The Unborn Traveller in Dagara Bagr Ritual Mythology and the hospitality of accommodating the stranger (colonial agent) and the different-cultural other (the missionary) in North-west Ghana
| Panel |
65. The politics of travelling in Africa - Translocal perspectives in African history
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| Paper ID | 82 |
| Author(s) |
Tengan, Alexis Bekyane
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | When one comes to reflect on African cosmological thoughts about the imaginary worlds in terms of trans-local and spatial movements of beings and elements, the feature of the dead as travellers to the ancestral world, predominates our scholarships much to the exclusion of the yet Unborn as a living agent in a separate world of its own. Yet, in most mythical narratives and other social and cultural discourses, including ritual practices, the notion of the Unborn as a travelling stranger, with its strange ways always expected to arrive at anytime and stay permanently or leave at the time of its choosing, has been commonly present and sometimes has served as the ideological theme that is shaping Africans perspectives of internal and external travelling processes and the way they receive and deal with the arriving stranger, visitor or the different-cultural other. One such mythical narrative and rite of initiation practice within which the character of the Unborn is very much active as a traveller is the bagr myth among the Dagara of Northern Ghana and Southern Burkina Faso. The feature of the unborn character is not only present in the mythical narrative content but is also embodied in the neophytes seeking to be re-born through the ritual drama. Hence, the neophytes are made to go through process of travelling through both imaginary worlds and trans-local vicinities in the physical world.
The paper I am proposing will first outline the social and cultural context of the Unborn traveller in Dagara society based on material from the bagr myth and rites of initiation in order to illustrate their thought perspectives on this issue. I will illustrate briefly the tradition of hospitality established in the society based on these mythical notions. The main point I will be making here is that the travelling stranger or visitor is dictating the terms of his or her hospitality and that the host is expected to respond according to these terms. In the second part, I will focus on the colonial and the missionary first encounter with Dagara population that succeeded one another in 1901 and 1930, how it was perceived and has continued to develop in social, political and cultural contexts and relationships. The use of the reference terms, nasaala (a rich smooth-skinned person) and faara (Reverend Father) respectively identifying the changing images of the colonial and the missionary agents are significant in the way I follow the development of the local discourses in songs, sayings and ordinary jokes. In the third and concluding part I will discuss how the Dagara people have come to accommodate the colonial stranger and the missionary as different-cultural others and as trans-local institutions within their contemporary socio-political and cultural systems.
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