Cowrie shells, African Spirituality and Authentic African-Christianity

You know how you feel when you have made a great decision? It is how I feel about my closest friends, my hair style (dreadlocks), my relationship with God, and cowrie shells as a hair accessory.

So you can imagine how I felt when, out of the blue, someone came to me and told me that cowrie shells are “evil” objects of witchcraft. I have worn cowries for the longest time, and it is only when I came to Gulu that it seemed to be a problem. That has not tainted even for a dust-sized moment, my love for this city. Instead, it has given me the much needed moment to speak about something I have had on my heart for a very long time. The shouldn’t be, but forced paradox of the African-Christian.

One of the things that regular Christians who simply want to live their Christian lives are never prepared for are the unchristian elite. You know, secularly brilliant and intelligent young men and women who can speak English and make you wonder if you went to school at all. They are usually lawyers, economists, and the elite cream of the arts and literature spaces. And I’m being really generous here because, spend a bit of time with these people and the featherweight of these externalities really begin to underwhelm.

It is in interactions with one such person that I was first confronted with the re-branded version of what is essentially witchcraft, but that is now being called “African Spirituality.” From my experience, of all the people I have encountered who speak of “African Spirituality” and express desire to “embrace it”, only one has been authentic and I am not sure if I was glad to meet an authentic practitioner or shocked at what that actually meant in practice. Essentially, I had met a person who looked just like me in terms of age group and academic achievement; and who was far more advanced in their career field than I was, but who was basically a living practitioner of witchcraft.

So, you know, I am a believer of, “If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is probably a duck.” My friend, even while he spoke of “African Spirituality” as if it were an extension of Pan Africanism, a distancing from Colonialism, and an embracing of an African identity, the quacking of the duck in the form of how he was an avid, devoted and convinced seeker of mediums for knowledge regarding his future was simply too loud. He moved places all over the country seeking the services of mediums and really putting to heart the things they told him.

One time, in a moment of being pushed too far against the wall when I pressed in on him forcing him to articulate his beliefs, he declared, “I visit mediums and I will never stop visiting them!” Suddenly, it was not a matter of academics as he had always fronted. It was a matter of faith.

But this is a story about cowrie shells. Let us go back.

This background is important for navigating the thin line between practising an authentic African-Christianity without appearing as witchcraft. Both the African that seeks to divorce himself from Christianity and the Christian seeking to divorce himself from his Africanness err by standing on two extremes. Sadly, the Christian seeking to be authentically African may not be clearly visible to either one of the two extreme personalities. It is perhaps why I really connected with my friend described earlier. We shared common views regarding the value of our local languages and the unnecessity to bear Anglicised names because we are not English.

In support of my views regarding having our tribal names, I referred to Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, who, like so many Nigerians and Kenyans, had no problem bearing full non-English African names and being Christian. Herself, a Nigerian Igbo and Catholic, had expressed rather aptly in a speech about Blackness and Africanness about how for the religious African, their identity was not a function of their race/skin colour, but first their tribe and then their religion next. While the speech was about race and black identity, the Tribe-Religion identity was worth further unfurling.

In other words, in holding these very African beliefs, especially the preference for bearing African names only, and not perceiving of Christian names as by default English names, my friend concluded that I was being true to Africanness and therefore by default not Christian, or at the very least not like that. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Not to mention that for a lot of people, their rejection of Christianity as “a white man’s religion” is really only high-sounding nonsense delivered in too much English, but that betrays every time that sneaky fella called dishonesty which underlies the truth beneath the rejection of not just Christianity but any religion for that matter, which is the desire to do as one wishes without the burden of a convicting conscience. This can be wrapped up in too much English (now it’s starting to look like I have something personal with people who speak English). I do not. Really. 🥹

Anyway, as I was saying, It is this sneaky fella that undergirds a lot of the opposition of our very seemingly wise friends. One thing that chrisitianity does is that it is a soul searcher and a personal convictor that restrains the believer a lot. While I would really love to point out the specific struggles that my friend had as a means to challenge the value system anchoring his beliefs, I am awake to my own shortcomings. All I can say is that a belief system that does not challenge expression of our lesser version, and that not only does not confront things one has become slaves to but also continues to bury one in the throes of addiction, is a highly questionable one.

We reject Christianity because it places demands on who we are. It is not because Christianity is stupid, illogical or nonsensical. It is because Christianity is hard.

But this was supposed to be about cowrie shells. Okay, let me get to them.

The point I have laboured so much to get to is this: There is no difference between the man who rejects cowrie shells as a genuine article of beauty while embracing gold, silver and copper jewellery; and the man who rejects Christianity on grounds of it being “unAfrican“. The former is as earthly as the latter is spiritual, and therefore, none contradicts the other. Moreover, it is very difficult to claim the practice of “African Spirituality” without sliding down the slope of legitimate witchcraft. On this, we can argue all day and all night, in all manner of English and (inevitable) French.

What we should not do is attempt to paint herbalists and custodians of meaningful cultural norms and traditions with the dark brush of authentic harmful cultural spiritual practices, otherwise known as witchcraft. You know, as human beings, we always want to push boundaries wherever they are defined. This really is the function at work when it comes to defining this thing called African Spirituality. If we were honest, we would admit that we want everything that God has to offer, without the conditions that he puts on us to get those things.

That is where this whole, “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual comes from.” Someone said it like this: “We want God’s Spirituality but without his morality.” No wonder we seek spirituality everywhere else, even when it constitutes cognitive dissonance. Imagine with all of one’s academic degrees, career pursuits, and achievements; instead of seeking an eternal answer to the void in your heart, you hope on buses and bodabodas- you, the intelligentsia, the crème de la crème of artistic and literary pursuit- you crouch beneath the hut of some old woman and smoke a pipe just because you want to know what your future holds.

Maybe it’s just me, but that, to me, does not look awfully intelligent. Yet listen to what God says about humanity: Ecclesiastes 3:11″…He has also set eternity in the human heart…” These are the facts
1. Everyone is seeking God. whether they know it or not.
2. If you are not after God, you are after something. We can argue about this the whole day and night, but like I tell every person I meet who wants to argue with me about God, “You know where you stand with God and you need no convincing”

In summary, cowries shells are not a problem. Authentic African-Christianity is not a paradox. And if we are talking African Spirituality, and I mean the real thing- such as my friend practices- there is no and cannot be any compatibility with Chrisitianity.