Reclaiming the Lost Voice of Black African Religion

Black Heroes and the Spiritual Onyame – An insight into the cosmological worlds of peoples of African descent, by Norman Barnett, Cryodon: Filament Publishing

Reviewed by Mike King, January 2005

In 2002 Channel 4 screened a visit of Mel B – ‘Scary’ Spice of the Spice Girls – to Benin in Africa. Mel arrived with the hard attitude of a black woman who has made a success in a white man’s world, but also with the inherited white man’s prejudice against African religion, only to be quite transformed by a Voodoo ritual. She was obviously moved and softened, not just by the ritual but by the community which practiced it. The significance is twofold: firstly that any genuine religious experience has a transforming quality, and secondly that the prejudice against African religion is unfounded. Norman Barnett’s book is for anyone who has transcended or needs go beyond such a prejudice, though it is specifically aimed at black people of African descent.

Black Heroes and the Spiritual Onyame is divided into four sections, the first three providing a historical, psychological and spiritual background to the discussion of selected black heroes in the fourth. These heroes are: Toussaint L’Overture, Paul Bogle, Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Nelson Mandela. The real contribution of Barnett’s book is the recognition that a reclaiming for black people of what is uniquely theirs – and not what was imposed by European colonialists – must include the spiritual. Barnett’s heroes operated in a context that was either secular or Christian (he understandably omits those who have taken up Islam), but who did not oppose the characterisation by whites of African religions as ‘primitive.’ Indeed Barnett seems to struggle with this himself, desiring on the one hand to explore and praise the uniquely black African religious impulse, while on the other hand often falling into clichés of Christian prejudice, using phrases like ‘descending into polytheism.’

In the early chapters Barnett introduces us to the Onyame as both the highest ‘God,’ and the name of a system which he compares in detail to the Tree of Life of the Kabbalah, laying diagrams of the two systems over each other to highlight the similarities. The Onyame Tree is a system of the Akan people of Ghana, which Barnett suggests to be historically continuous with black Egyptians or Ethiopians of early antiquity. He goes into some detail on the issue of the false and possibly racist assumptions of 19th century scholars who denied the black African origin of Greek culture, and later deals with Casaubon’s denial in the 17th century of the great antiquity of the Hermetic texts. I found this fascinating as I have always found the Hermetica to pose this conundrum: it has a monotheistic core, yet one that has an utterly different ‘feel’ to the Hebraic one. Barnett suggests that the Hermetic texts arise from an ancient black African culture, which has a high ‘God’ though does not exclude lesser deities. I find this plausible, and also agree with him that Greek culture, however wonderful, is over-elevated in European thought. Plato himself tells us in the Timaeus that the Egyptians regarded the Greeks as undeveloped children in comparison to their own tradition, and in Libellus XVI of the Hermetica, Hermes pleads that his wisdom be not translated into the “Greek mode of speech with its arrogance and feebleness.”

Barnett, like all those within a Eurocentric cultural inheritance who are arguing for the lost voices silenced by that dominant culture, both argues against that dominance and asks for recognition within its own terms. His context, according to his own admission, is still Christian (unlike the post-Christian and even postsecular context of the SMN), and hence he occasionally falls into the trap of using Christian concepts to seek legitimacy for aspects of the Onyame. These include an appeal to monotheism and the Trinity, and one could argue that the parallels drawn with the Kabbalah are also part of an attempted alignment with the Abrahamic traditions. He talks about a tradition that is ‘still’ animistic – as if animism was a lesser tradition – yet elsewhere makes the useful point that ‘paganism’ should be understood as the religion of villages. In my own delineation of the postsecular I argue that monotheism should take its place at the table as an equal of polytheism and the cluster of early spiritual practices that we can call animism and shamanism, and should never be used as the touchstone of ‘proper’ religion. Hence I would both support Barnett’s wonderful efforts here to portray the authentic black African religion, and ask him to go further in showing its grandeur and uniqueness independent from white man’s religion and its false aura of legitimacy.

However, Barnett is using more than white man’s religion as a tool: he also draws extensively on Jung’s ideas, creating a set of Onyame archetypes with which to consider and characterise his black heroes. By creating this synthesis he is providing a genuine middle ground and a language for black and white alike to engage with his material. This allows for an analysis of the previous failures of black peoples to assert themselves, and provides a spiritual psychology for future change and success.

This really is a remarkable book. It is a sourcebook for thoughtful people who believe that the spirituality is central to what we are, and are interested to see how spirituality relates to the issues of self-determination in a historically oppressed group. It has opened up a lot of new questions for me, some which I have already partially stumbled into, like the question of the Hermetica, and others which parallel for example the question of Tamil and Dalit spiritual identity in India. However, as an academic I did rather miss a more consistent method of referencing, the lack of which means that I cannot easily trace the source of many of Barnett’s statements. No matter: I know that I will use the book for many years to come as a springboard for a host of key questions relating to the global history and articulation of the spiritual life. These include for example the question: was black Africa the original source of monotheism?