Sacre impronte e oggetti - Università degli Studi di Torino

38
Michael Singleton
by some invisible Other. Though not going out of his way to meet up
with the Invisible, should this latter appear on the scene our nomad will
not pause to ascertain the credentials or speculate on the identity of the
Transcendent but immediately go about doing what is required of him.
He does not expect to learn anything about the Invisible – especially
how It might really look 36 . He would be extremely surprised were his interlocutor
to order a statue faithfully representing his features be made
and even more so to receive the precise plan of a temple to enshrine for
all to see the icon in question. Never tarrying for long in any particular
place, even striking features of the landscape will not leave an everlasting
impression on his mind. Nomadic believing is behaving not seeing.
In the second place, leaving so few traces of his own passing on the surroundings,
it would be quite out of character for a nomad, even if impressed
by the marks of the Invisible, to permanently and monumentally
modify the environment as a consequence. The marks a nomad himself
leaves are more moral than material. Significantly when I asked the
WaKonongo what they remembered most about their pioneering missionaries,
rather than mention the churches, schools and dispensaries
built, they spoke of their human qualities – padili huyu alikuwa mpole
kabisa lakini ndugu yake alikuwa mkali sana : “Father X was extremely
warm hearted whereas his confrere, Father Y, was excessively harsh”.
Rather than in any materialisation of the spiritual, the nomad lives on
his children, his offspring who will inherit his reputation rather than his
realizations. In the third place, when time soon renders invisible the few
visible traces your passing by produced, you are inclined to imagine that
even the Invisible comes and goes just as fleetingly. Not conceiving
Katabi as having always existed the WaKonongo were not surprised by
36 Throughout this contribution I have spoken in the masculine of the Invisible
but, as we have suggested, the sexual identity of the sacred is less of an issue for
Africans than it has become for feminist theologians who would like to see God
the (patriarchal) Father give place to a maternal figure which some go on to associate
with an earlier, supposedly matriarchal era of human evolution. Female goddesses,
however, can be every bit as violent and vicious as their male counterparts
and just as ethnocentric – though one can understand why some radicals oppose
Pacha Mama or Mother Earth to the Moloch of Globalization, since ancestral
Africa knew no such figure, crusading world wide in its favour (G. DE MARZO,
Buen Vivir. Per una democrazia della terra, Roma 2009) would merely substitute
one form of evangelization for another.