The Importance of African Prophets

That women were able to access power through prophecy is one important element of religion in East Africa. That Africans in general were able to access power for resisting colonialism is another important feature of prophecy, explored by Marcia Wright in her examination of the Maji-Maji Rebellion in Tanzania in 1905. In this uprising, a young prophet named Kinjikitile led his people to believe that if they drank certain magic water (Maji), they would be able to withstand bullets, disease, and hunger.

Wright demonstrates the fallacies of positing one prophet (Kinjikitile) as the main source of an ideology that fuels an uprising, yet also suggests that historians have neglected the emergence of both belief and action as a result of prophecy in their treatment of Maji-Maji. She suggests there were a multiplicity of causes behind the uprising, but the words of prophets should be seen not in isolation from those causes or as a cause in and of themselves but "as galvanizing disparate sources of mass sentiment into a focused movement" (128).

Although Wright argues that Kinjikitile must "yield" the place he currently holds as the main motivator and ideological creator of Maji-Maji (130), she admits that because he will live on in the popular mythology of Tanzania, he must "continue to claim attention as a key commissioning agent" (139). She further points out that Maji-Maji needs to be viewed from a gendered perspective, that the female presence was a "substantial, integrated element" among the uprisers. Her argument regarding gender indicates a potentially fertile (pun intended) topic of study.

Charles Ambler writes about both the mutability of prophetic meanings and messages, but also of the importance and centrality of prophets and prophetic idioms in explaining historical events and creating identities and heroes. His piece looks specifically at prophecies relating to the arrival of European invaders, to predictions of Europeans' power in the form of such things as "iron snakes" and "sticks that spit fire," and to ideas about how central Kenyans should respond to the invaders--ideas that were not followed by all people living in central Kenya. These prophecies were a way for central Kenyans to accept, reject, and explain colonialism. Thus, Ambler suggests that there is room for seers and their predictions in historical analyses, in part because seers and prophets are leaders (and leaders can be made prophets, as we see with Kenyatta) but also because prophecies are "expressions of an

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