Christianity and the Proliferation of Ancestors: Changes in Hierarchy and Mortuary Ritual in the Cameroon Grassfields
Michael Jindra bu.academia.edu
Christianity and the Proliferation of Ancestors: Changes in Hierarchy and Mortuary Ritual in the Cameroon Grassfields
In African spirituality, ancestor engagement with the community is always mediated through material objects. This article argues that materiality gives meaning and validity to the ancestral system. Ancestral objects are an embodiment of the ancestors or ancestral meaning-making, which links the visible community to the world of the spirits. However, ancestral objects also draw meaning and validation from those who inherit them, such as kings or titleholders who together with them connect the community to the spiritual source of well-being and vice versa. The article argues that such interplay is based on the material, religious and ritual conception of ancestral objects with their inheritors and the well-being of the community they represent. However, most studies on African religious art objects have focussed essentially on the symbolism behind ancestral objects and their motifs rather than on the interplay between ancestral objects and meaning-making in relation to community’s wel...

As in many other ethnic groups of Northern Ghana, Bulsa elders play a leading role in the traditional society. Their prominent position is based on their owning the shrine of the founding ancestor of their lineage and thus becoming the lineage-head. This status is acquired from their predecessors according to the rules of lateral succession which means that it is not the sons who succeed to their deceased father’s office, but the eldest of his younger brothers. This rule also applies to larger lineages. Among all the descendants of the deceased elder/ancestor, the oldest living man of the most senior generation will inherit and succeed. For many other ethnic groups in Northern Ghana, such a regulation only applies to 3-4 generations, but for the Bulsa it may refer to ten or more generations. As the members of such a lineage can live in more than 50 homesteads, the shrine of the founding ancestor and with it the office of the elder rotates through all these homesteads. All shrines and secular goods acquired by this founding ancestor, for example female ancestor shrines, shrines of bush spirits (ngandoksa) and important medicine shrines, rotate together with the male ancestor shrine. It is economically extremely important that also all land and livestock, and in earlier times also slaves of the ancestor, are subject to this rotation. An important task of the elder is offering sacrifices to the ancestral shrine. The sacrifices are not so much offered to the deceased personality or his soul (chiik), but to a divine element (wen), which the ancestor acquired in his childhood. In a particular ritual (wen-piirika) this wen descended from the sun (wen) into a small earth mound, and if the lineage does not die out it will receive sacrifices for centuries. Thus, in the so-called ancestor veneration a partial aspect of the God of Heaven (Wen or Naawen) is worshipped.