Crossing Africa and Beyond: essays in honour of Marian Charles Jedrej (1943–2007)

In collating this special issue in honour of a much-missed colleague, our purpose is to reflect upon some of Charles Jedrej's unique, if too often under-recognized, contributions to Africanist anthropology. Almost uniquely, Chuck, as he was affectionately known, crossed various boundaries that still often keep Africanists in check, in particular places, and tied to particular themes. He worked in Sierra Leone and then moved to Sudan. Later he worked on English settlers in Scotland. For many his work was marked by its strong commitment to structural and symbolic interpretation, and this is particularly apparent in his work on West African masking rituals, on Ingessana religious institutions and, in a different way, in his work on dreams. But he also worked on agriculture and ‘deep rurals’ and did consultancies for Department For International Development (DFID) and other development organisations. He wrote about female rain makers in Eastern and Central Africa, and later his work became increasingly historically focused, exploring the transition of Sudanese peoples from the fringes of 19th-century, ‘pre-modern’ states into ‘modern’ 20th-century ‘tribes’, anticipating a renewed historical sensibility in Africanist anthropology which is still gathering momentum. Here we publish a collection of essays by former colleagues and students, all of whom have engaged with his work in different ways and benefitted from his wise, warm, and often witty counsel. Several of these articles were first presented at the University of Edinburgh's annual Charles Jedrej Lecture in Africanist Anthropology, before revision and publication here. Collectively they give a warm insight into the subtle yet diverse and creative influence that Charles Jedrej's work continues to have on the broader field of Africanist anthropology.

The issue begins by republishing one of Chuck's own, lesser known articles, on the Southern Funj of Sudan under Anglo-Egyptian rule (1900–1933).¹ This was part of his larger body of work on the people of the Ingessana Hills on the Sudanese–Ethiopian borderlands (Jedrej 1995). In this article Chuck reviews political and administrative developments in southern Funj during the first 30 years of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium. He argues that Ingessana culture was not the outcome of a self-contained history isolated from the wider region but, on the contrary, the consequence of a long duree of engagement with neighbouring groups and shifting centres of authority across this volatile border region, over a very uncertain period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He argues that through the process of defending themselves from subordination, Ingessana culture and religious institutions came to reflect precisely those forces, which included invading imperial powers from the North such as the Funj Kingdom, Turco-Egyptian rule, the Mahdist state, and then the Condominium. He suggests that these circumstances, despite ‘being often inchoate from the perspective of the people’, should be understood as enduring and as ‘having appropriately hostile and unpredictable characteristics’. Although there is not much publically available material about the early decades of Anglo-Egyptian rule in the southern Funj, this era was, he suggests, ‘crucial towards understanding the historical formation of Ingessana society’. In particular, Chuck argues that for ‘the first thirty years of the [20th] century there were considerable continuities from the 19th century in terms of the actualities of local government’.

This question of continuities and discontinuities relates to the second purpose of the article, which has to do with the history of British rule at the local level in Africa. As he put it, ‘the issue of “the colonial inheritance” has a peculiarly ambiguous resonance here due to enduring aspects of the old Turco-Egyptian apparatus at the level of local government, which in some cases may have continued through Mahdist rule’. Here, Chuck's work contributed to a growing recognition of the need for a more sophisticated historical perspective in Africanist (and indeed all) anthropology in the 1990s, and at the same time anticipated a more recent, deepening concern in African historical studies for re-assessing the pre-colonial and early colonial periods in order to re-consider assumptions about the ‘rupture’ that European colonialism brought to existing political orders across the wider region in what were often fraught frontier zones during the unsettled 19th century. In Chuck's capable hands, the people of the southern Funj are presented within a particularly ‘complex ethnic, political, and administrative situation due to its location in the Ethiopian marches and the fact that part of the administrative boundary of Southern Fung District has always also been an international frontier’. ‘On the Ethiopian side of the frontier’ he explains, ‘Muslim rulers at various times enjoyed degrees of independence from, or acknowledged allegiance to, powers in the Sudan or in Ethiopia, according to political expediency’. The international boundary was formally agreed in Addis Ababa in 1902, yet, he notes, ‘despite the hostilities arising out of, or amplified by, this international frontier, the boundary line itself, has endured as one of the least disputed in Africa’. Chuck could not have anticipated the subsequent struggles that South Sudan's independence in 2010 would provoke, yet through the lens of his work, these recent struggles inevitably resonate within a longer, more complex history of a ‘frontier in transition’ (Jedrej 2004, 712), and for scholars working in these troubled areas, the historical sensibility embedded in his analysis surely sets both the vital historical and social context and the highest standards for any future research.

Many have recognized Charles Jedrej's anthropological approach as operating ‘in the structuralist mode',² yet his article reprinted here exemplifies how his work anticipated the need to accommodate change and historicity in structural analysis, and the vital question of understanding change through continuity, and vice versa. This article also demonstrates how Chuck's work anticipated an even more recent growth of recognition that African history can no longer satisfy itself with devoting its labours to colonial and post-colonial history without due attention to what co-exists from before. As scholars of Africa are increasingly acknowledging, there is need to think in the longer duree, and furthermore, by so doing to question the very temporal divisions (pre-colonial, colonial, post-colonial) through which Africanist scholars have tended to divide their labour (Fontein 2015; Landau 2010; Nugent 2008). This relates to a third anticipation of later scholarly threads that is already apparent in Chuck's work in the 1980s and 1990s: the focus on borderlands, margins and the periphery of political orders, for understanding how apparently ‘centralized’ states, authorities and bureaucracies are established, maintained and reproduced. In many ways this article exemplifies how Chuck's work anticipated the subsequent growth in interest in margins and peripheries in political anthropology (Das and Poole 2004; Tsing 1994), particularly Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed (2009), a strand of intellectual work which has been reflected in African studies with the rapid expansion of borderland studies.³

This takes us to the next two articles published in this issue, by Murray Last and Wendy James, respectively, which both focus attention, and give due credit, to the notion of ‘deep rurals’, coined by Last through his work in Northern Nigeria but carried to East Africa by Chuck's research in Sudan. As Last explains, Chuck's work on the Ingessana hills is ‘fascinating on the way that marginality can be an integral part of an autonomous community and its cultures’. In his contribution here Last sets out what he calls the ‘ethnographic rationale’ for his original use of the term ‘deep rural’, focusing on Hausaland in northern Nigeria, to ‘denote the distinctive ecological and socio-political context of areas that are very marginal to the core of a centralized Muslim state’. Such areas, Last explains, ‘are out of everyday reach of the central government yet not entirely beyond the frontier’, offering ‘places of security and escape for radical Muslim as well as non-Muslim groups over the last two centuries’. Again the importance of a thorough historical and historiographical sensibility is apparent here. The ‘deep rural’, Last concludes, can be analysed ‘as an evolving space marked by its marginality, its relative emptiness or dispersed settlement, its diversity and its freedom for the deviant and dissident’. A ‘zone’ that ‘may have a culture that is richer, in its repertoire of symbols and skills’ and ‘its idiosyncratic preoccupations and beliefs’ but also one ‘fertilized by flows from the central city and its parkland hinterlands’, flows of people, goods and ideas that are worthy of study in themselves, even if for Last it is the ‘cultural “work” that went into maintaining … the deep-rural way of life against the creeping extension of mainstream modernity … from the centre’ and which created ‘so distinctive a milieu’ that offers the deepest fascination.

In her contribution Wendy James offers a more systematic account of how Chuck developed his work on ‘deep rurals’, first among the Mende in Sierra Leona during his doctoral fieldwork, and then, after his move to Sudan where he taught at the University of Khartoum (1969–1973), to his research in the Ingessana hills. In her review of Chuck's published and unpublished work, she focuses on how ‘effective his work was in helping to break down the old oppositions between “state” and “stateless” societies, and even “urban” and “rural” life’. Importantly, she emphasizes how one of Chuck's most important contributions to the concept was in his recognition that the ‘distinctive milieu’ of the deep rural (to paraphrase Last) was marked by ‘aspects of cultural withdrawal among minorities in the face of dominant pressures’ – and therefore amounted to what others might consider ‘cultures of resistance’ (cf Scott 2009) – and the ‘reciprocal participation in the economy and politics of a wider region and links with those controlling its networks from the centre’. The point here is that apparently ‘distinct minorities’, often rural with an emphasis on difference, withdrawal and (perhaps) ‘resistance’ from centralizing political authorities, were necessarily ‘full participants in a mutually constituting regional system of social relations’. Therefore, the ‘world of the Ingessana … was not so much set apart from this outside world’ of shifting regional power hierarchies in the middle Nile valley, ‘but it was set against the substance of those powers and practices whilst assimilating something of their style, their artistic presentation, and their appearance in dreams’. There is much here that echoes Gluckman's approach to social fields, although perhaps set at a larger geographical scale, and within a deeper historical framework.

James's article offers wonderful insight into how the coherence of Chuck's intellectual work developed as he moved from west to east Africa – a rare shift in regional focus amongst Africanist scholars – and how his sophisticated ideas about the complexity of rural life served him well in his later work with Mark Nuttal (Jedrej and Nuttall 1996) among ‘white settlers’ in Scotland. She also traces how Chuck's work has influenced the research of other scholars, both those working in west and east Africa, and research done in very different contexts. She recounts, for example, how Paul Richards's work on ‘maroon societies in the New World’ draws on the ‘deep rural’ concept.⁴ Particularly striking is James's discussion of how Chuck's work on ‘deep rurals’ in Ingessana has over the last decade been picked up by Spanish archaeologists working in western Ethiopia, who have made explicit reference to Chuck's 1995 book. This new archaeological work has recently been published in a major volume by Alfredo González-Ruibal entitled An Archaeology of Resistance: Time and Materiality in an African borderland (2014), which draws explicitly and repeatedly on Chuck's work, both specifically on the Ingessana and, more generally, in its presentation of the first ‘coherent picture of the borderlands between Ethiopia and Sudan’. The value of Chuck's elaboration on the notion of deep rurals and the historical sensibility his work embodies suggest that we should not be surprised that it is archaeologists of this region who have recently found inspiration in his work. Papers presented at a workshop on ‘Deep Rurals Today’ hosted by the African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford in December 2015 illustrate how Murray Last's notion and Chuck's unique elaboration of it continue to have analytical purchase across the wider region.⁵

As James stresses, citing Chuck himself, the relationships of deep rurals with regional authorities, centres and hierarchies was ‘in a Maussian sense … a total social phenomena’ (Jedrej 1997, 14), not confined to economic and political relations, but deeply cultural and linguistic, expressed through material culture, and partly realized through geography and the political materialities of landscape. Indeed, whatever the extent (or not) to which the geographical materialities of deep-rural societies are elaborated in the work of James, Last, Jedrej and others, it is clear that the geographies of the margins and peripheries are a central aspect of ‘distinctive milieu’ that the notion of deep rural implies. This offers a link to the next article published here, Fontein's article on ‘Rain, uncertainty and power in southern Zimbabwe’, which derives from a larger, recently completed research project (Fontein 2015) that was initially conceptualized and developed in close collaboration with Chuck, in the mid-2000s, but which he sadly did not see completed. This article focuses on the politics of water, specifically rainmaking, in southern Zimbabwe. Rainmaking is a subject that both James (1972) and Jedrej (1992) have written on, and this article makes explicit reference to both works. Across the eastern and southern African region, rainfall and drought have long been measures of contested political legitimacy in ways not limited to the politics of food, famine and agricultural production. Around Lake Mutiriwki in southern Zimbabwe, this is true not only for spirit mediums, chiefs and other ‘traditionalist’ authorities for whom rainmaking practices are well-established means of demonstrating ‘autochthony’, sovereignty and legitimacy, but also for war veterans, new farmers, government technocrats and others involved in land reform during the 2000s. This is what is examined here. Whilst the focus is particularly on rainmaking practices, encounters with njuzu water spirits, and national biras [possession ceremonies] that took place in 2005–2006 when fieldwork was carried out around Lake Mutirikwi, the larger point pursued is that water acts as an index of power – of the entangled but contested play of legitimacy and sovereignty – across many different registers of meaning and regimes of rule. In making this argument Fontein engages with Keane (2003, 2005) and Engelke's (2007) elaboration of Peirce's (1955) theory of signs in order to build upon and beyond the arguments made by James (1972) and Jedrej (1992), who argued that rainmaking across eastern, central and southern Africa is less a form of applied meteorology and more an idiom of politics and power. The point being made here is that they are necessarily both at the same time.

The significance of focusing on the ‘materiality of signs’ here is that it allows analysis that does not reduce everything to the endless play of discourse and meanings, separate to the material world. Rather than the significance of the material world amounting simply to the way it reflects the politicized play of language, symbol, culture, memory and even ‘ontology’, Peirce's approach incorporates how the material qualities of signs in part condition, enable and constrain meanings. In this way it does have ‘a much easier time incorporating the stuff of ethnography’ (Engelke 2007, 32), and it helps us to understand how, as this article argues, rainfall really can, in part, determine political fortune. This argument is not to denigrate Chuck or James's reflections on how rainmaking is rooted in the play of symbols embedded in political structures, because the materiality of signs gains political efficacy in relation to the constant play of contested ‘semiotic ideologies’ (Keane 2003, 419), shared ‘basic assumptions about what signs are and how they function in the world’. Rather, this approach is deliberately open ended and ultimately indeterminate; the efficacy of particular ‘semiotic ideologies’ is contingent and gains traction in relation to the material world, even as the material world or features of it achieve their contingent significance in relation to particular ‘semiotic ideologies’. Around Mutirikwi not only the legitimacy of particular chiefs, mediums or senators is at stake when the rains are promising or fail, or when children are abducted by njuzu, but also the different, contested ‘traditionalist’ regimes of rule put forward in the localized processes of remaking authority over land. In a context where droughts are recurrent, unpredictable, yet to be expected, water is of course always politically salient, but how this salience is realized is dependent upon both its unstable material qualities (and in relation to other material substances and forms: landscape, soil, climate and so on) and the unstable registers of meanings and regimes of rule with which these are intertwined.

This article therefore reaches beyond Chuck's work on rainmaking. But it is also hugely indebted to it. Its central argument about the ambivalent ubiquity of water's salience – its ‘excessive, imbued meaningfulness and unstable materialities’ – and the ‘deep anxiety’ this provokes ‘not only for new farmers, chiefs and mediums waiting for rain, but also for state officials and politicians' builds directly upon Chuck's observations about the links between the ‘ambivalent attributes of rain’, and the ‘ambivalent power of rainmakers’. It is not clear if Chuck would have agreed with the ‘materiality’ approach adopted here, and it remains a big regret that I never had the chance to discuss it with him. It would have been a wonderful conversation, particularly because it was just such a conversation that had inspired me to embark upon the larger research project from which this article derives, in pursuit of what Chuck had called, tongue-in-cheek, a ‘hydrological anthropology’. As we set about developing various funding proposals for that project in 2004, we had even planned to do some fieldwork together but we did not get the right funding grant for that, and I remember his disappointment that he was not able to make another research trip to Africa. I still share that disappointment. It would have been both fun and hugely enlightening.

The next contribution in this special issue, Jeanne Cannizzo's ‘postcard’ to Chuck, echoes this sentiment, and at the same time points to another important aspect of Chuck's research, his work on masks and masquerades in Sierra Leone. Chuck's work on masks was also the subject of David Pratten's annual Charles Jedrej Lecture in Africanist Anthropology held in Edinburgh in March 2012, which unfortunately could not be included here (although it is hoped it can be published in a future issue of Critical African Studies). In her vivid description of the hilarious ‘rude dude antics’ of the Kongoli mask she encountered in Kenema, Sierra Leone, in 1976, Cannizzo points to the inversions, reversals and ‘anti-aesthetics’ that are inherent to both the form and substances of the mask itself, and to its performances: mimicking mourners to ‘lighten’ funerals and ridiculing politicians, community leaders and local dignitaries in parodies of established sacred, ritual and political orders. Chuck would indeed ‘have loved the Kongoli’ not only because of its joviality, but because it brilliantly expresses the potential for politics, history and change inherent in rituals and performances, a key aspect of Chuck's emphasis on accommodating change and historicity in structural analysis.

This is explicitly picked up in Paul Richards's contribution to the issue. It reviews how Chuck's research on Mende sodalities in Sierra Leone could inform policies directed towards changing funerary practices in the context of the 2014–2015 Ebola epidemic in upper West Africa. As Richards explains, in his work on the Mende women's sodality, Sande, Chuck argued that ‘Sande mobilizes power (hale) to dissolve cultural complexity into its elementary form, so that causes of social confusion can then be “pulled”’. Examining the ritual mechanisms involved, Chuck argued that ‘collective representations could be reformulated and strengthened through the ideational momentum generated by ritual practices within the sanctity of the secret cult’. Therefore, ‘sodalities do not perpetuate fixed traditions, but are a means through which social change can occur’. As Richards points out, in making this argument Chuck anticipated ‘more recent (neo-Durkheimian) accounts of ritual-based “models” of social dynamics’. Importantly, Chuck's argument emphasized the temporal – rather than the spatial, as Mary Douglas did in her early work – so that ‘pollution inheres in being “out of time” or “missing a step”’ and ‘Mende masquerades are polluted … if they miss a beat’. As a result, ‘the moral order is danced into being, and the mechanism of social regeneration is an unerring sense of timing’. Richards then discusses how this observation became key to engaging with sodality members in order to change burial practices, a crucial element in the response to the Ebola epidemic after funerary practices and ‘the movement of corpses’ were identified as ‘major infection pathways accelerating the spread of the disease’. ‘By putting his finger on a temporary ritual dynamic through which social complexity can be resolved into elementary forms, and from which new complex configurations of social ideas and collective behavioural commitments can be assembled’, Chuck had ‘supplied a key to unlocking the considerable puzzle of “safe burial” for large parts of Ebola-affected Sierra Leone’. As one local chief cited by Richards put it, Sande women ‘went into the bush and “danced a solution”’.

Chuck had a healthy sceptical view of international development programmes in Africa, but he did recognize the value that good historical and anthropological research offered for better-informed interventions. In the 1990s he became involved in numerous project evaluations for DFID. Sierra Leone's healthcare system faces many challenges, including both the Ebola epidemic and its faltering, donor-funded decentralization programme, and Chuck would have been pleased that his insightful ethnographic engagement with Mende sodalities in the 1960s helped generate important solutions for containing the Ebola epidemic in 2014–2015. Closing this special issue, published in Chuck's honour, his long-term friend and colleague, Alan Barnard, reflects on the continuing impact of Chuck's work on Africanist anthropology, and on a more personal level, on his many former students and colleagues, who benefitted from his skillful guidance, his conscientiousness and his insightful judgement.

Notes

1. This article was first published as an Occasional Paper (no. 61) by the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh in 1996. Reprinted with permission here.

2. ‘Obituary. Charles Jedrej 1943–2007’ Alan Barnard, Scotsman, December 17, 2007.

3. See for example the The African Borderlands Research Network (Aborne). Accessed December 13, 2015. http://www.aborne.org.

4. James is referring here to different work from Richards's account of how his recent engagement with Sierra Leone's Ebola crisis drew directly on Chuck's work on Mende sodalities, which is a separate article published in this issue.

5. See Accessed December 20, 2015. http://www.africanstudies.ox.ac.uk/sites/sias/files/documents/Deep%20Rural%20Today%20Programme.pdf.