26 Principles of the Great Belief of the Balanta Ancient Ancestors

According to the DNA marker E3a*-M2 (also called E1b1a) found in the Mandinka and Balanta people, our Balanta ancestors shared a common origin with all Bantu people at the end of the Pleistocene around 9,500 BC.

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Excerpt from the book Bantu Philosophy by Placide Tempels as quoted in Balanta B’urassa, My Sons: Those Who Resist Remain Volume I

1.       “It is today generally admitted that, among Bantu peoples, it is the oldest of all who have maintained the most pure form of the concept of the Supreme Being, Creator, and Disposer of the Universe. The faith of Bantu people in the Supreme Being lies at the root of all the religious conceptions current among them: animism, dynamism, fetishism and magic.”

 

2.       “Bantu behavior is centered in a single value: vital force. The Bantu say, in respect of a number of strange practices in which we see neither rhyme nor reason, that their purpose is to acquire life, strength or vital force, to live strongly, that they are to make life stronger, or to assure that force shall remain perpetually in one’s posterity.”

 

3.       “Force, the potent life, vital energy are the object of prayers and invocations to God, to the spirits and to the dead, as well as of all that is usually called magic, sorcery or magical remedies. The Bantu will tell you that they go to a diviner to learn the words of life, so that he can teach them the way of making life stronger.”

 

4.       “The spirits of the first ancestors, highly exalted in the superhuman world, possess extraordinary force inasmuch as they are the founders of the human race and propagators of the divine inheritance of vital human strength. The other dead are esteemed only to the extent to which they increase and perpetuate their vital force in their progeny.”

 

5.       “In the minds of Bantu, all beings in the universe possess vital force of their own: human, animal, vegetable, or inanimate. Each being has been endowed by God with a certain force, capable of strengthening the vital energy of the strongest being of all creation: man.”

 

6.       “Supreme happiness, the only kind of blessing, is, to the Bantu, to possess the greatest vital force: the worst misfortune and, in very truth, the only misfortune, is, he thinks, the diminution of this power.”

 

7.       “Every illness, wound or disappointment, all suffering, depression or fatigue, every injustice and every failure: all these are held to be, and are spoken of by the Bantu, as a diminution of vital force.”

 

8.       “Illness and death do not have their source in our own vital power, but result from some external agent who weakens us through his greater force. It is only by fortifying our vital energy, through the use of magical recipes, that we acquire resistance to malevolent external forces.”

 

9.       “Those who think that, according to the Bantu, one being can entirely annihilate another, to the point that he ceases to exist, conceive a false idea. Doubtless one force that is greater than another can paralyze it, diminish it, or even cause its operation totally to cease, but for all that the force does not cease to exist. Existence which comes from God cannot be taken from a creature by any created force.”

 

10.   “This concept of separate beings, of substance (to use the Scholastic term again) which find themselves side by side, entirely independent one of another, is foreign to Bantu thought. Bantu hold that created beings preserve a bond one with another, an intimate ontological relationship, comparable with the causal tie which binds creature and Creator. For the Bantu there is interaction of being with being, that is to say, of force with force. Transcending the mechanical, chemical and psychological interactions, they see a relationship of forces which we should call ontological.”

 

11.   “One force will reinforce or weaken another. This causality is in no way supernatural in the sense of going beyond the proper attributes of created nature. It is, on the contrary, a metaphysical causal action which flows out of the very nature of a created being. General knowledge of these activities belongs to the realm of natural knowledge and constitutes philosophy properly so called. The observation of the action of these forces in their specific and concrete applications would constitute Bantu natural science.”

 

12.   “In what Europeans call ‘primitive’ magic there is, to Bantu eyes, no operation of supernatural, indeterminate forces, but simply the interaction between natural forces, as they were created by God and as they were put by him at the disposal of men.”

 

13.   “Above all force is God, Spirit and Creator, the mwine bukomo bwandi. It is he who has force, power, in himself. He gives existence, power of survival and of increase, to other forces. In relation to other forces, he is “He who increases force”. After him come the first fathers of men, founders of the different clans. These archipatriarchs were the first to whom God communicated his vital force, with the power of exercising their influences on all posterity. They constitute the most important chain binding men to God. They occupy so exalted a rank in Bantu thought that they are not regarded merely as ordinary dead. They are no longer named among the manes: and by the Baluba they are called bavidye, spiritualized beings, beings belonging to a higher hierarchy, participating to a certain degree in the divine Force.”

 

14.   “After these first parents come the dead of the tribe, following their order of primogeniture. They form a chain, through the links of which the forces of the elders exercise their vitalizing influence on the living generation. Those living on earth rank, in fact, after the dead. The living belong in turn to a hierarchy, not simply following legal status, but as ordered by their own being in accordance with primogeniture and their vital rank: that is to say, according to their vital power.”

 

15.   “But man is not suspended in thin air. He lives on his land, where he finds himself to be the sovereign vital force, ruling the land and all that lives on it: man, animal or plant. The eldest of a group or of a clan is, for Bantu, by Divine law the sustaining link of life, binding ancestors and their descendants. It is he who ‘reinforces’ the life of his people and of all inferior forces, animal, vegetable and inorganic, that exist, grow, or live on the foundation which he provides for the welfare of his people. The true chief, then, following the original conception and political set up of clan peoples, is the father, the master, the king; he is the source of all zestful living; he is as God himself. This explains what the Bantu mean when they protest against the nomination of a chief, by government intervention, who is not able, by reason of his vital rank or vital force, to be the link binding dead and living. ‘Such a one cannot be chief. It is impossible. Nothing would grow in our soil; our women would bear no children and everything would be struck sterile.’”

 

16.   “The quality of ‘mfumu’ (chief) is added to the commonality of an individual neither by external nomination, nor by singling him out. He becomes and is ’mfumu’ by endowment therewith; he is a new higher vital force capable of strengthening and maintaining everything which falls ontologically within his cure. A man does not become chief of the clan and patriarch by natural succession through the deaths of other elders who had precedence and because he has become the oldest surviving member of the clan, but because primogeniture inherently supposes an inner secretion of vital power, raising the ‘muntu’ of the elder to the rank of intermediary and channel of forces between the clan ancestors on the one hand and posterity with all its clan patrimony on the other hand. It never takes one long to observe the transformation on becoming chief of a man whom one has formerly known as an ordinary member of the community. The qualitative change is made evident by an awakening of his being, by an immanent inspiration or even, sometimes, by a kind of ‘possession’. The ‘muntu’, in fact, becomes aware of, and is informed by, his whole conception of the world around, through all his modes of knowledge, that he is now a true ‘muntu’, endowed with a new power which did not belong to his former human status. He is no longer what he was. He has been changed in his very quality of being.”

 

17.   “Can one, then, be surprised that each accession of essential life is indicated by the gift of a new name? Such is required to indicate that the ‘muntu’ has been renewed and strengthened.”

 

18.   “The name expresses the individual character of the being. The name is not a simple external courtesy, it is the very reality of the individual. . . . The ‘muntu’ may have several names. Among the Baluba, there are generally three kinds of names – the inner name, the life name, or the name of the being. This name is never lost. A second name is the one given on the occasion of an accession of force, such as the name at circumcision, the name of the chief, or the name received by a sorcerer on initiation, investiture, or on the occasion when a man becomes possessed by a spirit. Finally, there are names that one chooses oneself, a name which serves only to indicate the person, without having any profound relationship to the person or to his individuality. . . . Such are the ‘majina a kizungu’. European names, as, for example . . . Is it not fitting, indeed, that the ‘muntu wa bazunga’ (the White’s man) who is putting himself under the living, dominating influence of white people, should have also an European name?”

 

19.   “In the mind of the Bantu, the dead also live; but theirs is a diminished life, with reduced vital energy. This seems to be the conception of the Bantu when they speak of the dead in general, superficially and in regard to the external things of life. When they consider the inner reality of being, they admit that deceased ancestors have not lost their superior reinforcing influence; and that the dead in general have acquired a greater knowledge of life and of vital or natural force. Such deeper knowledge as they have in fact been able to learn concerning vital and natural forces they use only to strengthen the life of man on earth.  The same is true of their superior force by reason of primogeniture, which can be employed only to reinforce their living posterity. The dead forbear who can no longer maintain active relationships with those on earth is ‘completely dead’, as Africans say. They mean that this individual vital force, already diminished by decease, has reached a zero diminution of energy, which becomes completely static through lack of faculty to employ its vital influence on behalf of the living. This is held to be the worst of disasters for the dead themselves. The spirits of the dead (”manes’) seek to enter into contact with the living and to continue living function upon earth.

 

20.   “Inferior forces, on the other hand (animal, plant, mineral) exist only, and by the will of God, to increase the vital force of men while they are on earth. Higher and lower forces, therefore, are thought of by the Bantu in relation to living human forces.

 

21.   Another law says that the living being exercises a vital influence on everything that is subordinated to him and on all that belongs to him. . . . The fact that a thing has belonged to anyone, that it has been in strict relationship with a person, leads the Bantu to conclude that this thing shares the vital influence of its owner. It is what ethnologists like to call ‘contagious magic, sympathetic magic”; but it is neither contact nor ‘sympathy’ that are the active elements, but solely the vital force of the owner, which acts, as one knows, because it persists in the being of the thing possessed or used by him.”

 

22.   The ‘kilumu’ or ‘nganga’, that is to say the man who possesses a clearer than usual vision of natural forces and their interaction, the man who has the power of selecting these forces and of directing them towards a determinist usage in particular cases, becomes what he is only because he has been ‘seized’ by the living influence of a deceased ancestor or of a spirit, or even because he has been ‘initiated’ by another ‘kilumbu’ or ‘nganga’. The general principles of Bantu ontology carry the corollary that every man can be influenced by a wiser one.”

 

23.   “Study and the personal search for knowledge does not give wisdom. One can learn to read, to write, to count: to manage a motor car, or learn a trade: but all that has nothing in common with ‘wisdom’. It gives no ontological knowledge of the nature of beings. There are many talents and clever skills that remain far short of wisdom. That is how the Bantu speak of their traditional wisdom.”

 

24.   “Bantu conscience: The moral conscience of Bantu, their consciousness of being good or bad, of acting rightly or wrongly, likewise conforms to their philosophical views, to their wisdom. The idea of a universal moral order, of the ordering of forces, of a vital hierarchy, is very clear to all Bantu. They are aware that, by divine decree, this order of forces, this mechanism of interaction among beings, ought to be respected. They know that the action of forces follows immanent laws, that these rules are not to be played with, that the influences of forces cannot be employed arbitrarily. They distinguish use from abuse. They have a notion of what we may call immanent justice, which they would translate to mean that to violate nature incurs her vengeance and that misfortune springs from her. They know that he who does not respect the laws of nature becomes ‘wa malwa’, as the Baluba would express it; that is to say, he is a man whose inmost being is pregnant with misfortune and whose vital power is vitiated as a result, while his influence on others is therefore equally injurious. This ethical conscience of theirs is at once philosophical, moral and juridical.

 

25.   “The notion of duty: The individual knows what his moral and legal obligations are and that they are to be honored on pain of losing his vital force. He knows that to carry out his duty will enhance the quality of his being. As a member of the clan, the ‘muntu’ knows that by living in accordance with his vital rank in the clan, he can and should contribute to the maintenance and increase of the clan by the normal exercise of his favorable vital influence. He knows his clan duties He knows, too, his duties towards other clans. However hostile in practice intertribal relations may be, Bantu know and say that it is forbidden to kill an outsider without a reason. Outsiders, in fact, are equally God’s people and their vital force has a right to be respected. The diminution and destruction of an outsider’s life involves  disturbance of the ontological order and will be visited upon him who disturbs it.”

 

26.   “The ‘muntus’ obligations increase in accordance with his vital rank. The elder, the Chief, the King know very well that their doings do not involve their own personal vital force only. They and their subjects fully realize that their deeds will have repercussions upon the whole community subject to them. From that proceeds the scrupulous care that can be observed among all primitive peoples to protect the Chief, the strengthener of life, against every injury to his vital force, by means of a bundle of vetoes and prohibitions. These are designed to maintain intact his ontological power, his vital force, the source of the inviolability of all his subjects.”