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African History, Anthropology, and the Rationality of Natives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Wyatt MacGaffey
Wyatt MacGaffey*
Affiliation:
Haverford College
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Extract

The following exploration of social scientific thought as applied to Africa is an exercise in ethnography, not in debunking. At one level the argument, referring mainly to social change in western Zaire in the last hundred years, offers a descriptive interpretation which I assert is better than others. At another level I seek to establish what kind of phenomenon, in an ethnographic sense, historiography really is. At this level, I apply the methods of social science to a body of work in “social science” which is, in fact, myth, and which itself deals, in part, with a body of “myth” which is, in fact, social science.

In “African Traditional Thought and Western Science,” Robin Horton first shows the ways in which the first is like the second in producing model-building explanatory schemes, and then argues that the difference between the two is essentially that “in traditional cultures there is no developed awareness of alternatives to the established body of theoretical tenets; whereas in scientifically oriented cultures, such an awareness is highly developed ” He elaborates this difference between “the open and closed predicaments” in terms of such factors as unreflective versus reflective thinking, mixed versus segregated motives, absence versus presence of experimental method; these factors he finds superior in explanatory power to “most of the well-worn dichotomies used to conceptualize the difference between scientific and tradition religious thought. Intellectual versus emotional; rational versus mystical; reality-oriented versus fantasy-oriented …”

Only occasionally does Horton refer to social science, however; he seems to assimilate it to natural science.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 5 , 1978 , pp. 101 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1978

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References

1. I am grateful to my colleagues Richard Bernstein, Linda Gerstein, Mark Gould, and Asoka Gangadean for comments which helped me to improve this paper.

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3. Ibid., p. 63.

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16. Cosmological elements considered in this paper are limited to space, time, death, and race.

17. Merriam, Alan, An African World (Bloomington, 1974), p. 116Google Scholar; MacGaffey, W., “The West in Congolese Experience” in Curtin, Philip D., ed., Africa and the West (Madison, 1972), pp. 49–74.Google Scholar

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19. “The same events,” in a philosophically naive sense: events in which both participated.

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27. Andersson, Efraim, Messianic Popular Movements in the Lower Congo (Uppsala, 1958).Google Scholar

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29. Edict No. 28/1963, Bulletin Officiel, xi, Province du Kongo Central.

30. Kongo Dieto (Leopoldville), n.d. [1959].Google Scholar

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37. Janzen, and MacGaffey, , Anthology, p. 88.Google Scholar The BaKongo are not inarticulate, and the problem is not how to write “the history of the inarticulate,” as Ranger suggests (“Introduction,” Emerging Themes), but how to bridge the discontinuity between their institutions and ours.