This paper surveys the state of research on ideology and belief in Africa, a subject made up of two often separated notions but significant as a conjunction in current African history and in need of theoretical elaboration. Although there have been writings on this subject in numerous disciplines, this essay will concentrate on the anthropological perspective of the relationship of ideology and belief, as stimulated by anthropologists' confrontations with African developments

The paper presents three major arguments or themes. First, it contends that the distinction between ideology and belief is invidious and should be transcended. Second, it documents that the study of these phenomena in Africa, whether labeled cultural superstructure or labeled ideology and belief, has become increasingly a historical rather than a mythological science. This trend should be hastened. The argument applies to the study of belief principles similar to those that Professor Ajayi (1967:274) invoked in a well known essay for the study of history. It was time, Ajayi said, to replace the mythical Africa of colonial thought with knowledge of what real men did in real situations. The third theme of this essay is that although the models of society constructed by its members and the models constructed by outside observers are, as Lévi-Strauss says (1967:274), phenomena of the same order, the models belong to different cultures, meet different requirements, cannot be reconciled, and should not be confused, although they often have been in the past, in African studies in particular.

The past thirty years have seen, particularly in the United States, a transformation in the public image of “Kongo,” an ill-defined entity (a tribe, a kingdom, a culture, a region?) on the Atlantic coast of Central Africa. The efforts of R. F. Thompson, professor of art history at Yale, and A. Fu-kiau, himself Kongolese, have done much to popularize a “Kongo” characterized more by its romantic appeal than by historical or ethnographic verisimilitude. Elsewhere in the Americas, the reputation of “Kongo” has suffered by comparison with “Yoruba,” another historically emergent Atlantic identity, based in West Africa. These identities, and the supposed contrast between them, are products of an increasingly complex trans-Atlantic discourse.

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.

Jan Vansina's Paths in the Rainforests (1990) provides an instructive example of progress in overcoming the continuing burden of nineteenth-century evolutionary theory in studies of precolonial Africa in both historiography and anthropology. This article focuses on a critical section of the book, which outlines social evolution and ‘the invention of matrilinearity’ in the area around the lower Congo, showing both the strengths and the weaknesses of Vansina's approach.