Sacre impronte e oggetti - Università degli Studi di Torino

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Michael Singleton
quite different from that associated with such traces in a monotheistic
culture such as ours.
The contrast, however, between a religiosity centred on the ancestors
rather than on God, is still far too general to do full justice to the materiality
and meaning of traces as experienced by peoples (re)producing
themselves in the way the WaKonongo do. Readying myself to descend
upon the WaKonongo by reading what little had been recorded of them
in the literature, I had been led to believe that they could be catalogued
as “swidden agriculturalists” 26 . Slashing and burning stretches of the
surrounding forest 27 , they did not remain fixed on one spot for more
than a decade in their nuclear family homesteads isolated in the middle
of fields they hoed to cultivate maize, manioc, sweet potatoes and the
like but which became ever less fertile over the years. During the time I
spent with them (from mid 1969 to the end of 1972), I too cut down
trees and planted enough maize to become relatively self-reliant (as at
the time Mwalimu Nyerere urged everyone in the country to do), making
even a couple of shillings thanks to the local cash crops – peanuts
and rice – and the honey obtained from the hives my hosts afforded me.
None the less, it took thirty years or more, before it dawned upon me
that describing their mode of (re)production as shifting agriculture constituted
a pseudo-scientific smokescreen masking their truly nomadic
identity. It was not until after the turn of the century that I came to realize
to what extent the Konongo way of life and its accompanying
Weltanschauung answered to the most authentically nomadic of existences.
26 A. SÜRIÄINEN, Swidden Cultivation in Precolonial History of Africa, in J.
RAUMOLIN (ed.), Suomen Antropologi (special issue on swidden cultivation) 12/4
(1987) 269-278.
27 Though it appeared never ending to the first Europeans, the forest of
UKonongo (consisting mainly of miombo or brachtstegia) was not particularly
spectacular (as tropical forest can be) and contained nothing of particular note
such as impressive mountains or large waterfalls. The exceptional features of the
Australian landscape could partly account for the primordial importance of traces
in the aboriginal philosophy and practices of their world. But once again the traces
in question are not so much vestigial reminders of times gone by as sacraments reactivating
the vital activities of the ancestral founders of the aboriginal milieu (I
counted over thirty explicit mentions of traces in B. GLOWCZEWSKI, Du rêve à la loi
chez les Aborigènes. Mythes, rites et organisation sociale en Australie, Paris 1991
not to mention the theme being the leit-motiv of a less scholarly work by B.
CHATWIN, The Songlines, London 1987).