SACRIFICE THROUGH SUPYIRE EYES
of transition: at birth, marriage and death. At birth, to inform the ancestors of the arrival a new member of the clan; at marriage, to make them aware of the change of
residence of the bride; and at death, they are vital for the safe change of residence to the village of the dead. These rites are seen as a vital contribution to the continued
cohesion of the clan. Equally, the sacrifices to the ancestors during the annual village festival
maintain an ongoing communication between the living and the dead, and ensure that those who have gone before are respected and content. At this week-long festival, the
whole community is involved: each family brings sacrifices, the young people dance and sing, and everyone participates in the feast. A united family eats together; and
through the eating together of the sacrificial meat, the village community, living and dead, is drawn together and gains strength through solidarity.
Should the peace and unity be disturbed through lack of respect or by not upholding tradition or for some other reason, again it is a sacrifice that is required to
restore harmony.
Fertility
Linked with the theme of the family is that of fertility. A Supyire man or woman is only really part of the community once they are married and have
produced offspring. In producing, preferably numerous, children, they contribute to the continued success of the family and leave behind descendants who will continue
to remember and honour them in the village of the dead. Escudero comments that for the Supyire “life constitutes the supreme value, so that the ideal for man, his ultimate
end, is to live life to its greatest intensity meaning longevity and numerous descendants.”
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Indeed, unless they do have at least one child, they will not be entitled to the honour of a full adult funeral
—they will be buried in a separate graveyard with the children and strangers. So singleness and infertility are viewed with dread, and are
the occasion for many sacrifices pleading for marriage partners and for children.
61
Escudero, La Célébration Senufo du Katyire et la Célébration de L’Eucharistie, p.340 my
translation.
Limited good
While infertility is openly acknowledged as a threat to the growth and success of the family, another threat which is probably more hidden and deep-rooted under
the surface of the Supyire mindset is what has been called the concept of limited good. This concept has been posited by observers of different cultures in West Africa
and can be explained as follows: There is only a limited amount of good, which has to be shared around everybody. If one person is successful, he is taking more than his
fair share of the good. Thus he becomes the object of jealousy. There is evidence for this among the Supyire. Naba
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was a successful farmer who had many cows. His fields were burnt time and again, and he was chased from
one village to another by jealous neighbours. Often jealousy leads to making sacrifices, linked to curses, which are aimed
at upsetting the success of another. The underlying logic is that as a result of the curse, there will be more good for the rest to share. In contrast to the sacrifices
celebrated by the whole community, mentioned above, these sacrifices will be done in secret. It is important to keep, even if only as an outward veneer, the appearance of
family harmony, but sacrifices made out of fear and jealousy often belie this appearance of peace.
Pragmatic man-centred religion
Another important aspect of Supyire religion that is common to many African traditional religions is that it is man-centred and pragmatic in that good and evil are
not defined in terms of moral absolutes; rather events are judged as good or evil in how they affect oneself.
The Supyire finds themselves in a universe populated by a host of seen and unseen people, beings, and forces, sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile. Sacrifice
is used as the principle means to gain as many allies and as much support for power and status and ward off any malevolent forces ranged against them.
Those offering the sacrifice may try and see what is the minimum they can get away with to secure the desired end. For instance, Joyce Carlson notes an
occasion when she saw the remaining feathers and blood from a sacrificed chicken lying on a path. She discovered that it had been made for the sacred fish of Ifola, the
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For a fuller account of his story, see above, p.13.
village lying several kilometres along the path, and concluded that the offerer did not have time to go to the sacred pool itself. If some sacrifice or rite does not work, it
can be jettisoned in favour of a more efficacious source of power. We have heard one report of a fetish that did not produce results, which was taken out and beaten by its
owner.
Gift and counter-gift
The pragmatic thinking behind Supyire sacrifice is further demonstrated when sacrifice is compared with the dynamics behind the giving of gifts.
If you see a bowl of millet paste doing the rounds in the village, it is either being given to say thanks for a past gift, or to signal that one will be requiring
something in the future. Things are given with an unspoken, but very real, obligation for the favour to be returned at some time. So the family that receives millet paste, in
return for a favour they have done in the past, may decide to pass on the same millet paste to someone who needs it, in order to store up goodwill for the future.
This theme of gift and counter-gift can be seen in all aspects of life. Negotiating a bride for a family traditionally requires a series of gifts stretching over
a number of years. To invite chiefs of a neighbouring village to attend the opening a new market, one is obliged to send presents of meat along with the invitation, with
the expectation that they will repay by honouring the occasion with their presence. Talking of the days when cowry shells served as currency, one old man Ladji
Bogodogo said “My father used to distribute about 3,000 cowries and receive about 5,000 during the festival.”
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Diarra
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writes that it is not the size of the gift that counts for the Supyire, but rather the meaning. The continual round of gifts and
counter-gifts draws members of the community into an ever tighter web of interlocking and interdependent relationships. Even the closest friendship is
formalised by the giving and receiving of gifts. This way of thinking then carries over into the use of sacrifices. It is most
clearly seen in the use of vows: “If you give me success, I will bring you a chicken.” Gifts to the ancestors, jinas or fetishes put them under an obligation to help in
return. On occasion, the assumption comes clearly to the surface, when the divinity
63
Quoted in Diarra, Le Pori, Une Fête Traditionelle en Milieu Senoufo, p.30 my translation.
64
Diarra, Le Pori, Une Fête Traditionelle en Milieu Senoufo, p.28 my translation.
has not fulfilled its obligation. While sacrificing a chicken, one man threatened the recipient: “If you do not answer, next year all you will get is a young immature
chicken w ho cannot sing.”
During the drought-ridden years of the mid 1980s, one prayer to the jinas during the annual festival ran:
“Children are dying in the village. It is not the fault of any person. It is the fault of the jinas themselves. It is necessary to say this to you, so that you take
notice, and you intervene to prevent it happening to us during the night, and you intervene to prevent it happening to us during the day. Here is the chicken
which precedes the sacrifice of the sheep.”
Intermediaries
Intermediaries have two principle functions in relations among the Supyire people. Firstly, they act as independent buffers; if there are tensions between parties
they can give vent to their feelings to the intermediary without directly offending the other party, and thus preserve the relationship between the negotiating parties. This is
particularly important in a culture where words spoken are particularly powerful and potentially dangerous. This role is equally important for negotiations between the
living and the dead, as was demonstrated by the family of Jeneba calling on a zìükunü› to carry out the sacrifice to her offended father.
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Under normal circumstances
zìükunmpii have no serious dealings with one another, but communicate by joking and bantering one another. This serves to emphasise their
mutual independence —they have no duties or obligations to one another. It is this
very independence which is so important in negotiating with the ancestors. Since they are outside the family, the ancestors have no power over them and so the
zìükunü› can conduct a sacrifice and related negotiations without fear of retribution. Secondly, the use of intermediaries ensures that transactions are carried out in
public. This is most important because acting alone is always seen as suspicious. If a Supyire man, out of sympathy, tries to help a widow, without giving his gift through
an intermediary, he will be automatically assumed to be doing so in return for sexual favours. Private sacrifices similarly attract suspicion. The natural conclusion a
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See pp.40-41.
Supyire would draw from someone performing a sacrifice alone is that he is seeking supernatural help to harm another.
Respect for age
In Supyire society, the respect one receives increases with age and experience. This ties in with the respect shown to the ancestors in remembering them
with gifts. “We know that our dead fathers are in a certain place, and therefore we honour them.” The jinas were in the land even before the forefathers of the Supyire,
and they too receive due honour.
Tradition and superstition
For the Supyire, the path is a strong image of the power of tradition. Once a path through the bush has been opened, it is natural for others to follow it. One strays
from the path i.e. the traditions of the ancestors at one’s peril. Hence many traditions such as circumcision are carried out even after the original rationale for
them has long been forgotten. The reason for killing a black chicken on the site of a grave is the subject of speculation rather than any firm knowledge.
Events also follow paths traced out for them in the past. So if something favourable happened on a certain day of the week, that day will be the path for more
good. Thus each village builds up a calendar of auspicious and inauspicious days or combinations of days in the six-day and seven-day weeks
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for certain rituals and sacrifices.
Performing a sacrifice is fairly mechanistic. If one follows the tradition, performs the prescribed actions and says the correct words in the right order, then
that should produce certain results. If it does not, for example, if a chicken dies on its stomach indicating that an offering has been rejected, then something has gone
wrong in the procedure. The diviner may then be consulted to discover what went wrong, and the sacrifice may have to be repeated several times before one gets
the desired result. In one village festival in Kabakanha, when three out of four chickens sacrificed to the jinas were rejected, the eldest of the women started
hunting around on the ground for some reason. Then the jinas spoke to her and told her that the man who had been delegated by the old blind chief to do the
66
See Appendix C: The Supyire Calendar, p.146.
sacrifices had refused to do it. That was the reason for the displeasure of the jinas. So this man was called on, and when he killed two more chickens, they were both
accepted.
Duality
Supyire naturally think in dualistic terms; every phenomenon has its opposite, and the two opposites make up the whole. For example, day when humans work
and night when ancestors and jinas work make up the totality of time; village domestic and safe and bush untamed and inhabited by wild beasts and jinas make
up the world; men and women make up humanity; men are represented in rituals by the number four and women by the number three, with their sum seven being the
complete, perfect number. There is a village of the living where people are right handed, and there is a village for the dead where one becomes left-handed.
It is important that the two sides of any realm are kept apart. There is danger when the two come too close in contact. Indeed, there are usually nefarious
consequences. One does not go out into the bush at night, for fear of encountering the spirits. Sexual relations should be confined to the village; otherwise the earth gets
spoiled. Men generally live very separate lives from their wives: they have different roles, expertise, areas of knowledge; the idea of making joint decisions is quite
foreign. This dualistic thinking impacts on Supyire sacrifice in a variety of ways:
1. Sacrifices are required to avoid two sides of a duality coming into too close
contact for example, sacrifices ensure that a deceased person happily settles in the village of the ancestors and is not left roaming the village of the living.
2. They are similarly required to repair the damage done when the relationship has
been upset as when the owners of the earth have to repair the earth. 3.
Often the perfect number seven figures in the sacrifice which a diviner prescribes to deal with a problem. It could be the wearing of a piece of clothing made up of
seven long painted strips of cloth. Again, he may tie seven knots in a cloth while holding it to his mouth and speaking into it the necessary words.
4. Only domestic animals raised in the village are acceptable as sacrifices. Wild
animals and birds do not belong to villagers and so are not appropriate to offer. Domestic animals belong to the offerer in a way that a wild animal does not, so in
sacrificing them you are in a way sacrificing part of yourself.
Funeral rites clearly demonstrate the dualistic thinking. The wealth cowry shells or coins that the deceased accumulated during his lifetime is thrown away, the
pots are broken over the grave, and the goat and possibly the chicken are killed to provide a start for the de
ceased’s livestock. Here it seems we are close to the heart of the Supyire idea of sacrifice. The
throwing away, or the destruction or sacrifice of something belonging to one on this side of the domain, can be beneficial for someone on the other side. One’s loss is the
other’s gain.
Ambivalent attitude to the supernatural
Supyire people have mixed feelings towards the supernatural. They see the need to harness the power available there, but also have a fear of coming too close to
beings who are not always favourably disposed towards them. The view of sacrifice is similarly mixed. While it is the channel to receive blessings and power, it is
potentially very dangerous. One needs to exercise caution to avoid incurring their wrath. The head and feet of the black chicken that is sacrificed on the site of the
grave are put in a small earthen pot and taken off and hidden away in the graveyard; if someone else should happen to touch it, he would get ill in the head and die. The
rest of the chicken is given to the family of the deceased to be cooked and shared. Any man could eat it except if he had committed adultery with the deceased, in
which case partaking would result in falling ill and death.
We have seen that the Supyire use of sacrifice is multi-faceted. It is viewed as a practical, if potentially dangerous, means of gaining favour with the unseen beings
and forces —those who determine the outcome of life’s quest for status and a large,
united and successful family. The benefits are considered to outweigh the dangers, as evidenced by the multitude of sacrifices that continue to be performed.