Seven.docx
Seven
DIASPORA Reciprocal Desires, Circulating Stories, Supernatural Contestations Chapters 4–6 have moved from the level of the person, to that of the house, to that of the community, exploring the way each is constituted as structure and practice. In this chapter I move to an even more encompassing context, that of relations between north and south within the Kabre diaspora. Since the early colonial period, this larger context has affected, and in many ways conditioned, all the life of northern Kabre, influencing gender relations, cultivation and marketing, rituals to the ancestors and spirits, initiation ceremonies, and so on. So, too, is the north an ongoing presence in the life of southerners. To reiterate one of my major points throughout: if exchange, gender, and ritual in the north are forever inflected with the experience of the diaspora, so too are they “inside” modernity, for this diaspora is colonial modernity’s creation through and through. A Modern Landscape When you leave the Kabre north, the hilly homeland, with its gardenlike terraces and rock paths and spirit groves, you board a bush taxi in oneof the major markets—Saturday in Farendé, Tuesday in Kara, Wednesday in Kétao. The road south threads its way through the Atakora mountain range, fighting tough terrain, across bridges and tunnels built by Kabre under the German and French whip. Today, many of the road’s sharp turns are littered with the rusted carcasses of 18-wheel trucks which, under heavy load, were unable to negotiate the mountain’s steep grades. These graveyard spectacles add fuel to the popular perception that travel on the national highway is fraught with danger, both mundane and mystical. 1 As the road reaches the southern edge of the mountains, it enters a sprawling market town, Sokodé, an important stop on the ancient trade route from Hausa to Ashanti. Home to Kotokoli, a Muslim merchant people whose men, kola-nut-in- Togo, Sokodé was the seat of colonial power in the north (and the place where Kuwdé members went to demand their own chief). Old German and French buildings, run-down and peeling, ring the market and taxi station in the center of town—and seem an apt fin-de-siècle emblem of crumbled colonial power. For Kabre, Sokodé is an unwelcome stop, for there is a long history of enmity between the two groups. Kotokoli were intermediaries in the slave trade, selling Kabre to the south, and Kotokoli assisted the Germans during the period of “pacification.” More recently, during the early 1990s when things were hot in Lomé, Kotokoli sided with Ewe and allowed only Kabre women to pass to the north. An aside here: in 1993, word reached Palabéi inthe north that his civil servant son, Kokou, had been killed by a mob in Lomé. Since Kotokoli were blocking north-south traffic, Palabéi was unable to confirm the report. He nevertheless initiated funeral ceremonies, for fear that if his son’s soul were not properly cared for, it would become angry and cause trouble. Just at that time, however, Kokou’s wife—who had planned a trip to the north to visit her parents—successfully passed through the blockade in Sokodé and arrived in Kuwdé just as the husband she had left in Lomé the day before was being symbolically “buried.” Stories like this—today told with equal parts humor, irony, and pathos—filled the air when I returned to Kuwdé in 1996 and 1998, and mark the culture of the 1990s as distinct from that of the 1980s. Fifty kilometers south of Sokodé, as you enter a huts that begin at roadside and extend deep into the tall grass of the savanna. This was one of the early resettled zones whose inhabitants—grandparents of contemporary Kabre—initially resisted relocation but then were won over by the rich soils they found. “Yams grow to twice the size of those in Kuwdé,” I repeatedly heard when asking about the advantages of cultivating in this central zone, “and the soils are not filled with rocks like they are in the north.” The bush taxis make frequent stops here, in roadside hamlets that often bear the names of Kabre communities in the north: Soutouboua, Lama-Tessi, Landa. Each stop generates a flurry of activity—the driver climbing atop the roof to dig for bags, people scurrying from huts to greet those they know andget news from the north—before a passenger descends and disappears into the tall grass beside the road. Interspersed amidst these smaller settlements are larger towns with daily markets, entrepots that feed satellite villages spread for miles into the bush. The stops in these centers are animated by the presence of food vendors, drawn to the bus as to a magnet, peddling fruit, bread, and skewers of grilled meat to the empty-bellied passengers. The Kabre Diaspora Continuing south, the savanna slowly turns to rain forest and the dry northern climate is replaced by sticky, tropical air. Tall teak trees, originally planted by the Germans, their pancake leaves covered in dust, line the road. The rains come frequently here, downpours that pound the road and drench the straw roofs of the hamlets. It is to this zone, with its rich soils and cash farming, that Kuwdé schoolchildren come during summers to help their brothers cultivate and to earn money for school. It is also in this southernmost tip of the diaspora that Kabre settlements intermingle with those of Ewe. Here there is a long history of cultural cross-fertilization and ritual collaboration; tragically, however, this tradition was largelyforgotten when Ewe opposition to Eyadéma emerged in the early 1990s, and lives on both sides were threatened and houses sacked. Kuwdé goes south: northern teens cultivating in southern Togo during the summer holidays; Goudevé-Kpéledji, August 1998The ceaseless circulation of people, goods, and information along the national highway that connects north and south, and along the latticelike paths that connect villages in the two zones, is one of this diaspora’s defining traits. On my trips to the south I was repeatedly surprised to discover people I had just a day or two previously seen in a market or a homestead in the north, and to find that the latest news from the north—of a death, about the rains or the harvest—was already common knowledge. When sending mail between the zones, as friends would instruct me whenever I was tempted to use the postal service, it is always quicker, and saves the cost of postage, to find someone making the voyage. That way, you are virtually assured of next-day delivery. Needless to say, this dispersed yet dense network roads and cars its lifeblood; crucial information about recent deaths circulates between the zones as much by radio as by word of mouth. Each day at 7 P.M ., people throughout the country, in bush and city alike, tune in state radio to listen to the latest funeral announcements. (While the aim of these broadcasts is, of course, the speedy dissemination of information, they also enable the state to insert itself into local culture. In that it has become a mark of distinction to have a deceased family member’s name announced on the radio, this practice has also come to play a role in the production and reproduction of local prestige hierarchies.) Another artifact of modernity also figures prominently in the culture of far-flung Kabre: the tin roofs in thenorthern homesteads that sparkle like cut gems amidst the browns, yellows, and grays of mud and straw. Purchased by those who have left, they convey connection to those who remain behind. Moreover, as a measure of this commitment, in the southern zone of cash crops and money, tin is much scarcer: there homestead roofs are typically made of straw. Needless to say, none of this landscape—the teak trees, the road with its bridges and tunnels, the web of southern hamlets and market towns that line the national highway, the tin-hatted northern homesteads—existed before the colonial era began. This is a landscape that owes its distinctive features to modernity. For all that, however, it is no less “Kabre.” the colonial era began, Kabre were leaving the mountains to establish offshoot communities in the plain surrounding the two massifs. Each of the first communities in the northern massif where Kuwdé is located—Faren, Boua, Kuwdé, Wazilao, Somdé, Asiri—has one or more offshoot communities in the plain—Tchi-Kawa, Kawa, Kaningada, Ayangtoro, Kagninsi. The same pattern—originary communities located in the mountains and offshoots in the plain—is true of the southern massif as well. The relationship between the communities of origin and their off-shoots is seen as that of “parent” to “child,” and, as with the filial relationship generally, the latter are expected to “respect” the former. Such respect is especially evident on ritual occasions, when offshoot communities are expected to defer to their “parents” in the mountains. Thus, it is to the mountains that initiates from plains communities must return to participate in the big dances, and in the mountains that deceased men of important houses in the plain are buried. If these respect relations break down—if the hierarchy is flaunted—hardship and calamity invariably follow. When a mini-drought gripped the area in June 1989, for instance, a diviner suggested that the rain’s absence was caused by the failure of a house in Kawa, one of Kuwdé’s offshoots, to bury an important elder in the mountains. When, at the diviner’s suggestion, the burial was reenacted, the the grass) communities is also conceptualized as the difference between “male” and “female,” and, as in the domains of the house and the community, these gendered differences are seen as mutually constitutive (the “female” bush is both complement to and productive of the “male” mountain, and vice versa) and reciprocally dependent. So, too, is the bush, like women and children in the house, seen as possessing an essential source of vitality without which the larger whole could not exist. It is at the time of important community-wide rituals to the spirits that these dependencies and reciprocal potencies are made visible. When Kuwdé sacrifices a cow to a major food spirit (it is mountaincommunities alone who perform such sacrifices for the region as a whole), it obtains the cow through barter with a bush community—Kagninsi in 1982, Kawa in 1989, Tchi-Kawa in 1996. 2 This transaction makes manifest not only the (ritual) dependence of bush to mountain but also—the inverse—mountain communities’ dependence on (the wealth of) the bush. Indeed, in this case, and again on the model of exchange discussed earlier, since it is the mountain that has the greater “need” and thus initiates the exchange, here is an example of a center that is in debt to its periphery. Note, too, that it is the differences between mountain and bush (a mountain identified with ritual, a plain with wealth) that matter in this scheme, and that it is rituals such as this that are responsible for producing (rather than—the classical view—overcoming) them. 3 the relationship between mountain and bush. These stories often refer to acts of transgression that led to the founding of bush communities. Both Tchi-Kawa and Kawa (offshoots of Boua and Kuwdé respectively), for instance, are said to have been established by a brother and sister from the mountains who were sent to chase birds from a field in the distant plain, and there had sex. As punishment for their transgression, they were ostracized from the mountain and made to live in the plain—at the site of their misdeed. Of course, such accounts position mountain and bush within a hierarchy that defines mountain communities as upholders of norms and bush communities asviolators, valuing the former and devaluing the latter. At the same time, however, these stories portray norm violation (incest) as dictated by necessity, associating it with food production and, by extension, the pursuit of wealth. Moreover, food/wealth is something that all desire and on which all rely. As such, these origin accounts capture something of the mix of affirmation and ambivalence, dependence and disavowal, that characterizes not only the relationship between mountain and bush communities but also the culture of Kabre regionalism more generally. the plains community of Kagninsi, in exchange for a cow demanded by a spirit in the mountains; January 1983 It was almost certainly during the colonial era that the tension between ritual and wealth, and its constitutive role in defining relations betweenmountain and bush communities, became salient. During the nineteenth century, not only was the mountain ritually superior, but those from the mountains were also said to have possessed greater wealth—manifest in large herds of cattle. With the advent of colonial rule, however, the wealth of plains communities came to surpass that of the mountains. At the insistence of colonial administrators, some of the major markets were relocated from the mountains to the plain, centering commerce in these communities and giving their members greater access to sources of wealth. 4 It was also in communities of the plain that colonial administrators conducted cash-cropping experiments, and while many of these failed, some, like cotton, succeeded and contributed to the growing wealth of plains communities—and thus of zones revalued ritual and resignified the relationship between “ritual” and “wealth.” To wit, as bush communities gained greater access to wealth, mountain communities came more and more to assert the importance of their rituals, and, through their ceremonies, several of which involve the symbolic appropriation of peripheral wealth, to assert that ritual still trumped wealth. By the same token, peripheral communities came to challenge such privilege, if not in a direct and absolute way (for they still acknowledged that spirits reigned supreme in the hierarchy of values), then in a less direct but nevertheless inordinately powerful manner: through the display of that which they purchased with their newfound wealth—radios, clothes, bicycles, and occasionally cars. Through mere visibility—and, ironically, by drawing on local cultural principles: achieving effects and making things real by making them visible (see chapter 4 )—this emergent colonial culture of wealth staked claim to a power that captured the imagination of many. Even if unspoken, wealth’s allure became hegemonic, in the Comaroffian sense (1991, 1997), 5 unconsciously shaping desires and identities, and engendering antagonisms, that remain at the heart of Kabre culture today. 6 Reprise on Identity Before returning to the larger landscape of the diaspora, I would like to note the way personal identities in this system are transformed by more Drewal 1992; Matory 1994). Consider, for instance, the identity of a man who comes from a house in Kuwdé’s female moiety as opposed to a man from its male moiety. The former, the man in a house from the female moiety, becomes “female” in various contexts. Thus, when participating in calendrical ceremonies in the sacred groves, he sits on the west (female) side of the forest, is associated with the right (female) hand and with white (a female color). He also eats female portions of sacrificed meat and is associated with the wet season and wetness generally. And, since the male moiety is superior (as men are in the homestead), he must follow rather than lead during various ritual activities. This man’s female identity is one he carries with him not just atthe time of calendrical ceremonies but also when he is initiated and at death. At these crucial junctures in his life, he is associated with all of the symbols of femaleness and becomes “female.” Conversely, this man’s wife may undergo the opposite transformation. If she is a member of the male moiety (often, though not always, the case), she eats male portions of sacrificed animals, is associated in various contexts with the symbols of maleness (the color red, the east, the left, dryness), and will be buried in a tomb of the male clan at death. Whereas her husband is “female,” she is “male.” At the level of the region, a similar transformation occurs, for here a person’s identity is also governed by membership in a particular gendered zone of the larger region. For example, for a man of the female the female zone of the bush are inferior to their mountain counterparts, the bush’s identity as female serves to transform the relations between bush moieties, resulting in a system different from that which operates in the mountains. In the bush, the female moiety is superior to the male moiety, because of the bush’s location in the regional system’s female zone. Thus, houses of the female moiety have ritual priority, and men in the male moiety are inferior. A man in the male moiety in the bush, therefore, is ranked below all other men throughout the entire system. A man thus has multiple identities—male in one context, female in another, and male again in yetanother. A woman, too, has multiple identities—as a woman, as a man, and so on. Only the male identities of men in the male moiety in mountain communities remain untransformed. However, for such men, there is an intensification of what it means to be male, for they are triply male, as it were—an intensification that has its own obviational logic. These identity switches are not trivial. A person’s moiety and regional identities are every bit as important as his or her household identity. While household identities govern the everyday, moiety and regional identities govern the two most important moments in a person’s life—initiation and death. So, too, do moiety and regional affiliations define a person’s role in the calendrical ceremonies that govern the annual cycle. It is important to note, of politics, for the relationship between different Kabre domains is a political one. Hierarchies structure the domains and impose themselves on lower-level domains. Thus, moieties dominate houses, setting up hierarchies among them; and regional identities dominate moieties, similarly establishing hierarchies between the moieties. It makes a difference in terms of the hierarchies of the system, then, whether one belongs to one moiety or the other and to one region or the other. Moreover, to claim that the relationship between domains is about politics is also to claim that it is about history, for the long history of Kabre migration and regional expansion lies behind the identity politics—a politics of priority and privilege—that characterizes thisregional culture. Attractions and Antagonisms When, during the 1920s and 1930s, the French began relocating Kabre to southern Togo, these emigrants carried with them northern models of, and sensibilities about, intercommunity relationships. Thus, southern Kabre were regarded by northerners (and regarded themselves) as “children,” and they deferred ritual privilege to those who remained in the north. It has always been in the north that major initiations are held, that a person is buried and enshrined as an ancestor, and that the major spirits reside. Consequently, southerners (and, indeed, family members as far away as France and the United States) flock back to of commitment to the principle of inalienability in a truly Marxian sense, the soul ( war ɩ t Ʊ , behind-person) of every Kabre, even those who are second and third generation southerners, is returned to that person’s natal and/or family homestead in the north at death—there to become an ancestor. The south, by contrast, is the land of cash-cropping and wealth, wealth that is used to support not only those who reside there but also those they have left behind in the north. It is also to this southern zone that northerners journey (mainly during the dry season) in search of money to feed their families and to help finance upcoming ceremonies. Kuwdé, January 1984 As with mountain and bush communities in the north, it is these two values and identities—ritual and wealth—that define north and south, homeland and frontier, as distinct yet dependent, and it is the family and homeland on the one hand, and the need/desire for wealth on the other—that keep Kabre constantly on the move back and forth along the national highway. Indeed, I find it useful to think of the diaspora as constituted by these reciprocal desires (of northerners for southern wealth and of southerners for northern ritual). Note, moreover, the way ritual and wealth interact and cycle into one another—for it is southern wealth that feeds northern ritual and northern ritual, as producer of people, that generates wealth. And, in one of modernity’s ironies, and evidence of Appadurai’s (1990, 1991, 1997) point that globalization generates difference as well as homogeneity, this colonial diaspora has produced an expansion of the ritual sphere. “Today,” I heard repeatedly, “we do morerituals than in the past.” Such expansion—as if parrying capitalism’s commodity proliferation—follows from the fact that it is ritual that has become a mediator of the translocal and a signifier of attachment. Here I want to draw attention to two additional features of this diaspora, features that contribute to maintaining a sense of identity among far-flung Kabre (Marguerat 1994: 206–11)—and to preserving the north as homeland and moral center. One is its reliance on forms of mimesis, the other the way in which it is constituted and reconstituted through discourses/stories that circulate between north and south. 7 The first, the mimetic, is manifest in the way the southern communities reproduce many features of their northern communities of origin. In addition to (Marguerat 1994: 206–8). They also imitate many aspects of northern social and productive organization. The gendered division of labor within households—with men cultivating and women cooking and marketing—remains unchanged, 8 as does the way productive processes themselves are organized (e.g., southern men cultivate through the same work group structures— ɩ kpar ɩ and ha ʠ aa —found in the north, women work with their daughters, daughters-in-law, and co-wives as northern women do, and so on). So, too, is the ritual organization of southern communities similar to that in the north—with each centered around two (similarly named, similarly gendered) moieties that organize spirit worship andinitiations. 9 In many ways, then, southern communities are attempts to produce near-perfect copies of their northern communities of origin. (Recall, of course, that for Kabre mimesis is a form of power.) I am not suggesting that there is cookie-cutter imitation going on here. As Derrida ([1972] 1982) has shown with language, and Gates (1988) with (African) diasporic narrative forms, mimesis always involves slippage—“repetition with a difference.” If the southern communities are “copies,” they are at best imperfect ones. Moreover, subtle changes in practice, such as replacing straw roofs with tin, are also conveyed back to the north and there transform village culture in significant ways. Indeed, it may be more accurate in this case to say that the “original” rather than the “copy” is the site of transformation, those Kabre I know in Lomé—civil servants of the state, researchers, petty entrepreneurs: people like Bassari and Kokou—seem every bit as committed to preserving northern practice in their everyday lives as are those in the farming communities of the central and southern zones. They, too, tend to marry those from their villages of origin in the north and to follow its gendered patterns of household labor. And although they are often unable to live in neighborhoods with their same-village compatriots from the north, many convene monthly in associations organized by northern village affiliation. Thus, members of Boua and Kuwdé gather on the first Sunday of each month (as domembers of Faren, Wazilao, and Asiri) to share news from the north, to talk about upcoming northern elections and ceremonies, and to provide aid to members in need. With the press of events in the early 1990s, this latter activity became particularly salient, with members spending much time aiding others who were in trouble or in prison, providing shelter for those whose houses had been destroyed, helping one another send information back to the north, and so on. Here, then, was a conjunctural moment (Sahlins 1981, 1985; Apter 1992) that had both innovative and conservative effects, organizing southern Kabre around issues focused more on the nation than the north, but doing so on northern terms. Perhaps even more important to the maintenance of a sense of Kabreness than mimetically spread like brush fire along the roads and pathways of this diasporic landscape. One such debate occurred at the time of the rain’s disappearance in July 1996 (see chapter 2 ). As the drought stretched on, discussion as to its cause spread from the north into the farming villages of the south, and then into the neighborhoods of Lomé. Once the cause became widely agreed upon—namely, that the southern sons of a deceased member of the house of rainmakers in the northern community of Faren had failed to bury him properly—attention shifted to deciding what should be done to rectify the situation and bring back the rain. Of course, such discursive events not only produce a sense of common identity but alsocontinue to position the north as moral center and homeland—here, a homeland to which all deceased Kabre must return at death. Another flap over a funeral drew in people from both north and south in summer 1996. When an elderly woman died—a woman born in Wazilao who married into Kuwdé—one of her sons, who runs an auto parts store in Lomé, refused to take her ceremonies back to the north. Among other things, these ceremonies make public the woman’s passing, and, through the distribution of meat from the sacrifices, acknowledge those who fed and nurtured her as a child as well as those who similarly nurtured her parents. Without the ceremony, a deceased person remains “alive” and cannot enter the ranks of the ancestors; and, as several Kuwdé-ites pointed out to me, without the ceremony, there her children. This acknowledgment, one woman told me, is the main purpose of these ceremonies. News of the son’s refusal carried quickly to the north, where he was roundly condemned. His decision was also discussed at meetings of the Boua-Kuwdé association in Lomé, where there was widespread consensus that he had erred in not taking his mother’s ceremony back to Kuwdé. The son claimed penury—his business had never recovered from the events of the early 1990s—but everyone knew that his refusal really had more to do with his strained relationship with those in his natal village. 10 It was only when his younger brother intervened—a brother who, although living and teaching in France, had maintained strong ties withthose in Kuwdé—that he agreed to hold the ceremony. A similar translocal fracas occurred in the early 1990s, this one with a tragic outcome. Halitoké, the head of the house I lived in in Kuwdé, had for years had testy relations with a brother who lived in the south. The brother, who made good money as a cocoa farmer, repeatedly promised to help Halitoké in meeting family ritual obligations. (As senior male residing in the north, Halitoké was responsible for sacrificing to house spirits and ancestors, and for repeatedly hosting southern family members who returned for funerals or initiations.) But the brother rarely helped out, often claiming that the harvest had been bad or that obligations to near-kin had absorbed his surplus cash. And yet when this same brother made his annual visit to the north, he spend limitless amounts of money on s ɩ l ɩ m , the local beer. Halitoké returned the insult in the only way he knew how—through public humiliation on ritual occasions. Thus, Halitoké openly made fun of his brother when the latter had forgotten the particulars of a sacrifice—which types of animals were demanded by different spirits, which pieces of meat to distribute to whom—and relished jumping in and taking over. (I was caught in the crossfire between these brothers at one point, for, unbeknownst to me at the time, the tin-roofed house we rented from Halitoké belonged to the brother. But Halitoké kept all the rent money for himself, and indeed had never sent word to the brother that we were staying in his house. Thus, when the brother showed up in Kuwdéfour months into our stay, he was, not surprisingly, astonished to find us living in his house. Moreover, when he discovered that we had been paying rent, and that his brother had, as he put it, “eaten” all the money, he became incensed—as much over the fact that he had not been informed that we were living there as that he had received no money. A row ensued between the brothers, and then a mediation session with Palabéi, before it was agreed that our future rent money would go to paying for a door for the house and cement for the floors.) The tensions between the brothers carried into relations between their children as well. Thus, when Halitoké was doing a sacrifice for one of the brother’s sons who had returned to Kuwdé for waa ɣ a (the quinquennial age-grade ceremony for kεŋnaa ) in 1990, he intentionally kept a piece of and died, the son was immediately blamed for the death and accused of witchcraft. I am suggesting that discursive translocal events such as these—ironically, events typically touched off by conflict (and often triggered by the ritual/wealth divide)—provide a sense of common Kabre identity. For it is through the heated arguments and debates that course through the arteries of this diaspora—debates about rain and funerals and witches, but also always about the proper treatment of kin and community—that far-flung Kabre come to be participants in a single moral community. The Value of a RelationThe prolific return of departed southerners to the north has always intrigued and amazed me: why do Kabre keep coming back by the tens of thousands—to cover the roofs of their parents’ and siblings’ houses with tin, to initiate their children, and to bury their dead? Why do these emigrants convert wealth into ceremonies and tin for relatives they have left behind, while often depriving themselves? Moreover, why does the president of the country, accompanied by his cabinet, return to the north each year—not only to further his nationalist project but also to show those in the north that he remains a good “son”? If, for the capitalist, value and wealth reside in commodities—and lead in societies of the metropole to a proliferation of commodity production and consumption—for Kabre value is also measured by through exchange and embodied/externalized in, among other things, gifts and ceremonies. This, then, is what tin roofs and ceremonial return are all about. “When someone from the south brings a ceremony to us [in the north], or when a son buys tin for the house of his father,” Tamouka once said in response to my probing, “they show us respect. They show that they have not forgotten where they were born. This is all that we ask.” Tin roofs and ceremonies are material—and highly visible/public—expressions of relatedness and respect, of dependence and deference, between kin. 11 As such, they embody connection (as well as hierarchy) and constitute diaspora. In so doing, they call up a history of dispersal and return that is as intrinsically “Kabre” as anything else. Of course, in thus suggesting that Kabre return—that they are diasporic—because they are committed to social relations—that they convert wealth to ceremonies and tin because they continue to value their commitments to persons—I risk tautology. Namely, the suggestion is that they attend to relationships because they value relationships. But this, as I have repeatedly stressed, is an irreducible premise of this social world (and, in any case, is no less self-referencing than the claim that the capitalist is a seeker of profit). Moreover, I see little gain in reducing such a premise to something other—to a “utility” or “function”—as social science would have us do. Not only are such functional reductions tautological in their own right; but also, in that they are rooted in the individualisms and colonization.
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