There is a thriving literature of religious tracts in Africa. The
few
formal bookshops, and the far more numerous market-stalls and
itinerant hawkers who sell books, offer for sale pamphlets and popular
works on religious subjects in every country of the continent, it would
seem. Some are theological inquiries into aspects of the Bible or the
Koran. Others contain moral lessons derived from these sacred books.
Perhaps the most common category, however, is testimonies of personal
religious experiences. Much of this literature hardly makes its way
outside Africa and is only rarely to be found in even the finest Western
academic libraries.
The most puzzling genre, at least for anyone educated in modern
Western academies of learning, is that of the numerous works on
witchcraft and other perceived forms of evil, sometimes in the form of
a description of a personal journey into a world of spirits. While many
pious works on Christianity on sale in Africa are authored by American
evangelicals and published in America, popular books on witchcraft
and mystical voyages are almost invariably written by Africans and
published locally. Similar material is circulated through churches,
sometimes in the form of video recordings. This is also true of African-led
churches in the diaspora, among African communities on other
continents. It is impossible to know with certainty how many people
give any credence to stories like these, but the indications are that very
many do so. Not only do pamphlets describing mystical journeys
appear to circulate in large numbers, but such accounts may clearly
be situated within an older tradition of stories about witchcraft and
journeys into the underworld which is to be found in collections of
folklore and even in the literature of high culture. Studies of churches
and of healers in almost any part of Africa indicate that incidents of
perceived witchcraft and of shamanism or near-death experiences are
relatively common, and probably have been for as long as it is possible
to trace. Such evidence may be drawn not just from studies of the
pentecostal churches which have attracted so much scholarly interest of
late, but also of many other sorts of church including African
independent congregations, of Muslim communities and of indigenous
religious traditions. Thus, the popular literature written by people
who claim to have experienced spiritual journeys or to have expert
knowledge of witchcraft is not, we believe, an ephemeral genre but
rather represents a modern form of an important tradition of mysticism
in Africa.