Religious Complexity in Postcolonial South Africa: Contending with the Indigenous

Abstract

The history of religions during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been closely tied to the classification of Indigenous religions. However, recent scholarship in the field of religion has increasingly drawn on the work of subaltern and postcolonial historiography as a way of disrupting the European canon and dislodging Indigenous and non-western ways of knowing and being from the tyranny of the classical taxonomies of religion. Recent approaches to religious diversity have been challenged for reproducing imperial hierarchies of religion—assuming an accommodationist approach to Indigenous religions while also rendering invisible the internal diversity, fluidity, and adaptive orientations within Indigenous religions. In this paper, I contend that in the postcolonial context, Indigenous religions uncouple themselves from traditional taxonomies of religion, and, in particular, I propose religious complexity as a suitable framework and approach for accounting, contending with, and reporting on religious change in postcolonial South Africa. I explore questions about how to account for, ‘classify’, or ‘measure’ change related to everyday African Indigenous religious efforts and practices in the aftermath of and in response to colonialism, where conventional ideas about religious authority and affinity are displaced by Indigenous practices that can variously be described as simultaneously vital, viral, or feral.

1. The Long History of Taxonomy

In South Africa, much of our society has been characterized by preoccupations with the history of racial, religio-racial classifications of colonialism, late colonialism, and Apartheid. This history of differentiation and classification continues to shape social relations in the country long after the end of Apartheid. This history of racial classification has, through the practice of imperial science, also significantly determined how different religious traditions are viewed (Abraham 2021; Saville 2024; Roux and Becker 2021). Under colonialism and Apartheid, religions were by and large associated with particular racial categories to the extent that the spatial segregation ambitions of the Apartheid project were supported and underscored by the idea that racial identities were religiously inscribed. Thus, during the colonial period, Africans who lived outside colonial mission stations were regarded as heathens who adhered to superstitious ancestral religions (Chidester 1996). Later, the world religions paradigm proved very useful in supporting the Apartheid State’s Christian national project, stating that Christianity belonged to the whites and those of other races that converted to Christianity, and Islam and Hinduism came to Southern Africa as by-products of colonial trade and indentured labor from Southeast Asia and India, respectively. Thus, it was convenient to assign each race a primary religious tradition.

Although the philosophical and scientific preoccupation with taxonomy dates back centuries, the modern iteration of taxonomy dates back to the 18th century at a time when scholars, like Carl Linnaeus who is regarded as the father of taxonomy, sought to explain and theorize similarities and differences between various human cultures. These imperial scholars all relied on assumptions about organizing the world into particular classes of species and believed these classificatory practices provided a way of explaining the world, proposing hierarchies and giving legitimacy/meaning to particular classes of things, and, by extension, groups of people. More recently, Michel Foucault in his Order of Things suggested that classificatory systems rely on a culturally inflected set of interpretations, and, therefore, classifications emerge to both create and limit discourse. Thus, Snyder (1984) argued that for Foucault, classifications “often arise in institutional practices or take effect in such practices, he also sees classifications as social instruments, powerful codes whose frequent function is to exclude, confine, or incarcerate “deviant” types” (Snyder 1984, p. 210). Chidester argued in his Savage Systems (Chidester 1996) that the imperial efforts to classify and conquer local religious practices and beliefs in Southern Africa also emerged as a humanizing project. He noted that when the local people’s religious beliefs increased in proximity to European norms—largely through conversion—the more Indigenous people moved up the hierarchy of classes and were endowed with humanizing qualities. In Chidester’s argument, Indigenous people’s religions moved from a position of denied the status of religion by colonial scholars to later recognition and discovery of their traditions as worthy of being called religion; and thus he writes that “the discovery of religion arose out of the practice of comparison itself. Making sense out of the strange in terms of the familiar frontier comparativists resorted to analogies between Indigenous customs and known religions” (Chidester 1996, p. 17). In her work, The Invention of World Religions, Masuzawa argues and suggests that the classification science used to produce a discourse of world religions was not only a project concerned with the religio-spatial account of religion’s histories/futures, but that the system of classification “that has been closely associated with, and given its justification by, a racialized notion of ethnic difference” (Masuzawa 2005, p. 3) ultimately served (intentionally or otherwise) to set apart some traditions as primitive religions.

Similarly, Richard King (1999) in his Orientalism and Religion helps us grasp the particular ways that race and orientalism emerged in colonial India to produce a set of foundational assumptions about not-so-theistic religions as variously exotic or savage insofar as they draw on rituals/practices that explain particular kinds of premodern orientations towards the supernatural. These colonial efforts to classify and conquer ultimately served to justify and explain assumptions about different Indigenous groups/First Peoples (Native American, African, Australasian Aboriginals, and Siberian/Sámie) as pre-modern, primal, and primitive in their religious practices.

More recently, Jakob Olupona edited a volume titled “Beyond Primitivism” which argues that much of the history of religions presents as an effort to also explain the origin of the West as an epistemic and/or ontological community. In this volume, John Mohawk argues that “the reason that Indigenous cultural values and religious traditions are devalued in the West is that they are not perceived as part of this quest for a utopian future. They are not part of the discourse of the West and do not qualify for serious consideration. These are distinct, unrelated narratives, and, as such are classified somewhat disparagingly as ‘folk tradition’, not philosophy” (Olupona 2004, p. 117). In his examination of religion and modernity, Abdulkader Tayob (2018) reminds us that where religious traditions are viewed as outside of the history of the modern West, these religious traditions, practices, and beliefs are often vilified insofar as they are not just regarded as pre-modern, but positively anti-modern, and a threat to the imagined utopian project.

I mention these efforts to problematize the history of classification in the field of religion, not that it contains an exhaustive list of scholars, because it does not, but they help me raise certain critical junctures between religion, race, and the histories of classification, and they set the scene for how to make sense of Indigenous religions/the Indigenous after colonialism and Apartheid. A key insight from postcolonial studies for the field of religion is as follows:

The idea of the ‘West’ as White, Christian, rational, civilized, modern, sexually disciplined and indeed masculine was put into place in a protracted process in which the colonized Others were defined in opposition to these virtues. It was in constructing the ‘natives’ as black, pagan, irrational, uncivilized, pre-modern, libidinous, licentious, effeminate and child-like that the self-conception of the European as superior, and as not only fit to govern but as having the positive duty to govern and ‘civilize’ came into being.

(Rattansi 1997, p. 482)

I contend that when Ali Rattansi, like other postcolonial scholars, made this assertion it was done to lay bare the ways that European identity was simultaneously constituted in the frontier fires of colonialism and the imperial centres of Europe. However, in this paper, I look at how the Indigenous actors and Indigenous religions manifest or present in everyday life when it uncouples itself from this history of classification where it is already determined as primitive, superstitious, untheorized, and lacking a recognizable epistemological tradition. Now, postcolonialism, in its efforts to expose the ways that colonialism shaped, fractured, or erased Indigenous religion and cultures, as well as how it persists long after colonialism, is largely pre-occupied with exposing the classificatory practices of othering and alterity, and in doing so, finds itself often arrested within the same discursive narratives—the binaries between savage and civil, metropole and margin, etc., thus it raises a series of questions such as the following:

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Is religion after colonialism post-colonial?

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How do we move beyond the binaries of self–other, colonizer–colonized, center–periphery, savage and civil, and sacred–profane in examining religion after colonialism?

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How do we adequately account for religious change after colonialism without being arrested in imperial classifications?

2. Religious Complexity in Postcolonial Contexts

In the immediate aftermath of Apartheid during the 1990s there was an optimism and curiosity about the ambition to offer recognition and protection for previously marginalized religions. These sentiments included the introduction of multi-religion education in public schools, and the establishment of a Commission of Religious, Linguistic and Cultural Rights as one of key, constitutionally mandated Chapter 9 institutions “designed to protect and support democracy” (Lugo 2010). This post-Apartheid State’s recognition of religious freedoms and protection from religious discrimination saw the steady rise in discussions about the recognition of Muslim Personal Law and African Customary Law coming into the public domain (Rautenbach 2010). This tentative embracing of legal plurality as a suitable posture was accompanied by, and in part made possible by, the state’s recognition of religious institutions as holding an exceptional status within South African society. The decade immediately following the end of Apartheid was characterized by a period when there was seemingly great interest in interracial harmony and interreligious understanding. In 2010, David Chidester and I argued that this increasing religious plurality obscured society’s lack of interreligious understanding. Through an analysis of a research report by Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, titled Tolerance and Tension: Islam and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa, we noted the following:

76% of Christians in South Africa say that they know not very much or nothing at all about Islam. Yet ignorance of other religions does not preclude drawing conclusions about them, since 63% of Christians say that even though they do not know anything about Islam they can conclude that Christianity and Islam are “very different”.

(Chidester and Settler 2010, p. 215)

What this tells us is that while the state sought to codify and regulate religious diversity in various everyday contexts, religious actors and non-religious actors alike sought to make sense of and navigate the expanding religious diversity of this formerly Christian national culture. The pursuit and recognition of religious diversity was widely celebrated and welcomed in South Africa during the 1990s, culminating in the Parliament of World Religions choosing Cape Town as the host city for their 1999 gathering. In this regard, the organization noted that “The 1999 Parliament brought the religions of the world together, in a spirit of hope and possibility, at a critical moment in the history of South Africa. Its people, its traditions, and its rich story provided some of the Parliament’s most profound experiences”1. Of course, other forces also appeared to be at work during this period, and Jean and John Comaroff in their Ethnicity Inc remind us how, in the immediate aftermath of Apartheid, contests over the commodification of Indigenous mineral resources and the healing technologies of others, such as the Bafokeng and the San, respectively, point towards the ways in which the emergence of the Indigenous also become framed by neoliberal market practices (2009). They conclude the following:

Ethnicity, Inc.—in its mature form, a projection of the entrepreneurial subject of neoliberalism onto the plane of collective existence—emerges out of a loose, labile dialectic: a contrapuntal interplay of, on the one hand, the incorporation of identity and, on the other, the commodification of culture.

(Comaroff and Comaroff 2009, p. 140)

A great deal has been written about the role of religion at moments of significant social change or upheaval (Ammerman and Farnsley 1997; Davie 2010; Wuthnow 2005), and in this regard, South Africa is no different (Villa-Vicencio and Niehaus 1995; Tayob and Weisse 1999; Chidester et al. 2004). In the 30 years since the advent of democracy in South Africa, there appears to have been a shift from discourses of religious diversity, characterized by the inclusion and recognition of Indigenous religions by the state, the courts, and the faith institutions (Mndende 1998, 2013) to a more widespread interest in the recovery of Indigenous religious practices and institutions, regardless of whether it is recognized by the state or other religious traditions. Local historians of religion have noted the increased currency and prevalence of Indigenous religious practices associated with dreams and bodily possession in increasingly public appetites for diagnoses by Indigenous sacred specialists (Denis 2006; Masondo 2012; Boaz 2018). This shift from recognition and inclusion to self-organization among Indigenous sacred specialists and faith communities also highlighted the failure of traditional sociological tools and methods to account for and explain the kind of religious change or emergent practices that were taking place. This methodological failure is partly due to the refusal by Indigenous sacred specialists and communities to submit to Western epistemic models and methods for measuring/accounting for religious change or classificatory practices. For example, during the last 30 years, inquiries regarding African Indigenous Churches have often centered around whether to count these as Christian or Indigenous religious institutions, and both practitioners and institutions have resisted efforts to be classified as one or the other. Similarly, traditional data about religious change in post-Apartheid South Africa require a more nuanced approach because while there is the reported vitality and increased number of adherents to African Indigenous religion (Denis 2006; Mndende 2013; Mokhoathi 2020) and Pentecostalism (Chipkin and Leatt 2011; Burchardt 2013), the overall trend suggests a steady decline in religious affiliation and public practices related to religion (Kotze and Loubser 2017; Forster 2024; Schoeman 2017).

What has been a common orientation in this body of scholarship on religion and social/demographic change is its tendency to focus on the vitality-decline nexus of religion and the presumption that the mobility between traditionally recognized religious orders and institutions is a fair measure of the inclusivity of religious differences. While I recognize the huge importance of the formal recognition of religious institutions and the immense scholarly efforts that have gone into reporting and reflecting on various historically important transitions, like others in the field of religious studies (Bouma et al. 2022), I contend that much of the sociology of religion has focused on diversity at the expense of a religious complexity framework that would enable us to make sense of religious change outside the world religions paradigm. Where religious diversity offers an account of the distribution of, and relations between religious traditions within the World Religions paradigm, religious complexity offers us the possibility to not just account for the relations between and towards other religions but also to give an account of the internal changes that religions have/are undergoing because of the changing socio-environmental conditions, as well as a result of encounters with other religions, belief systems, and philosophical traditions. During the last decade, several attempts have been made to draw on complexity as a framework for thinking about religion. In 2016, Wilde and Glassman proposed the notion “complex religion” as an “approach to religion [that] simply means taking what researchers already take for granted and operationalizing it more precisely” (Pilgrim et al. 2020, p. 98). This approach relies on traditional approaches to measuring religious affiliation but through drawing on complex inequality goes on to suggest that by taking seriously inequalities of race, gender, and socio-economic status in analyses, we realize that the difference within and between religious groups are also, and often to a significant degree, the result of processes of social reproduction linked to the longer, often troubled history of American society. Should we follow their notion of complex religion, Wilde and Glassman insist that “Affiliation is by far the most common, and analytically necessary, way to operationalize religion… if one wants to take complex religion seriously and examine group-level effects, affiliation must be included” (Wilde and Glassman 2016, p. 410).

We could argue that religious complexity should allow for the possibility of examining religious change outside of the traditional registers of religious change—such as affiliation, conversions, and how religion impacts socio-political or moral positions (such as sexuality or environmental care)—to include the manifestation of the religious in banal or seemingly mundane everyday situations and relations away from the authority of religious institutions. More recently, and in an attempt to make sense of the contestations over diversity, plurality and complexity as explanatory categories in the field o religion, Bouma et al. (2022) propose the concept of worldview complexity as a way to account for religious change and relations that moves beyond the traditional binaries of the secular and the profane, as well as allow for a substantive engagement with the posts, as in post-Christian, and the nons, as in non-belief. They argue the following:

Until relatively recently, religious diversity seemed to clump with other diversities such as class, ethnicity, and political orientation. If you knew someone’s religious identity you could predict, with a fair degree of confidence, many other aspects of that person’s life. This is clearly no longer the case. Not only has diversity itself moved from simply denoting differences across one single domain to recognising diversity across multiple domains—‘diversities’—but these diversities intersect with other diversities producing much richer and more complex forms of diversity than that previously acknowledged.

(Bouma et al. 2022, pp. 190–91)

In their thorough examination of religious diversity, Bouma et al. (2022) offer some possible ways forward in a saturated field of theories and concepts; however, their efforts remain focused on the trends in religious change in primarily Western normative religious actors and institutions, with little attention to the colonial–coloniality nexus within the study of religion and its implications for Indigenous religion.

Thus, another way to think about religious change after classification, after colonialism and Apartheid, is through the concept of complexity—not just religious change or religious diversity. Earlier, I mentioned the Comaroffs’ examination of the postcolonial emergence of the Indigenous and how it was significantly shaped by neoliberal market forces in an effort to survive. However, what is evidently lacking in the Comaroffs’ analysis of indigeneity in South Africa—whether it is occult violence or the commodification of ethnicity—they largely present Indigenous religions as a set of pre-modern traditions and practices trying to survive or thrive but caught between the domesticating efforts of the state and the seductive appeal of the market. In a more comprehensive mapping of the multiple ways and places that Indigenous religion comes to be framed or imported to the political economy of the sacred after Apartheid, David Chidester’s Wild Religion remains the best example of the complexity of the religious entanglements of the Indigenous religions and practices in contemporary South Africa. Citing a range of civic and everyday entanglements of Indigenous religions, Chidester argues that as a primary exemplar of the Indigenous in Southern Africa, “African religion is an open set of resources and strategies for sacralising” (Chidester 2012, p. 190) and that through citing several examples of the transactional nature of African religion, he contends that “the transactions suggest the variety of ways in which Indigenous religion is not preserved in splendid isolation from time immemorial but always entangled in a changing world” (Chidester 2012, p. 196). Echoing Chidester, Thomas Alberts in 2015 produced a provocative text titled Shamanism, Discourse, Modernity, wherein he maps the complex ways that Indigenous communities exert agency as they interact with state actors, markets, and transnational movements; however, the work nevertheless remains hugely influenced by functionalist analyses and does little to elicit the agency of the Indigenous or indigenists.

In our efforts to examine the ways that postcolonial religious changes manifest, are embodied, practiced, and received, within and between religious traditions, and in our efforts especially to analyze how religion operates beyond mainstream religious institutions, in everyday life, away from religious authority and actors—sociologists of religion have increasingly agreed that traditional approaches and methods in the sociology of religion do not always allow us to adequately account for or to examine the complexity of religion (Furseth 2018; Spickard 2017; Settler 2022b). We suggest that more nuanced optics and critical methods are required to ‘measure’ religious change and practices in postcolonial contexts. In this regard, Furseth suggests that “the complexity frame of reference challenges theories that stress linearity and a hierarchical view of social change. Theorists differ in their emphasis on chaos and order, although many emphasize nonlinearity, ruptures, and a rejection of reductionism” (Furseth 2018, p. 16). She goes on to argue that “religious complexity refers to a broader set of phenomena, namely the coexistence of religious decline, growth, and change at macro-, meso-, and individual levels, and the multiple religious forms at each level” (ibid.).

I find this argument compelling and relevant to the way we might view religious developments in postcolonial South Africa. Now while Furseth’s notion of religion complexity offers a way to account for multidirectional religious change, such as how declining individual religious practices are entangled and coexist with the increasing public significance of religion, I feel that attention to the colonial and racialized dimensions of religion is absent. Nevertheless, the tension between chaos and order that Furseth refers to resonates with the sentiments expressed by David Chidester in the preface of his Wild Religion (Chidester 2012, pp. viii–xi). The simultaneity of the growth and decline of religion at multiple levels echoes an argument I have made about the changing nature of sociology of religion as a field and the need for suitable methods to understand the operations of the field in postcolonial context. By teasing out these two elements, I thus propose that a complexity frame may offer one such starting point and a way to think about the nature of religion after colonialism.

[the sociology of religion] has emerged as a field that helps us expand the definitional boundaries and contestations over what constitutes religion, about who possess religious authority especially with respect to the embodied experiences of religion, and the activation of religion in the everyday life. It is precisely because of my location as a scholar of color from the global South that questions of authority, the material and the embodied are coupled with issues of religious belonging and practice.

(Settler 2022b, p. 766)

As a sociologist of religion who seeks to make sense of religion after and in response to colonialism, I am curious about how religion can be understood as also emerging from everyday practices of those affected by colonialism or how such everyday practices are reshaping what comes to be regarded as religion, where it is slightly more free from the epistemic impulse to classify. In the postcolonial context, it is noteworthy that we at once resist and object to the imperial scientific classifications, and yet we work vociferously to obtain recognition for traditions, practices, and methods that have been excluded from the classical world religions paradigm. African religion scholars pursue this recognition despite the fact that in doing so we run the risk of re-inscribing the coloniality of classification. As I looked to understand how Indigenous sacred specialists and communities try to uncouple themselves from practices of religious doctrine, dogma, and liturgy, I found great appeal in the notion of religious complexity with its emphasis on non-linearity, how it tries to hold apparent chaos and order in tension, its efforts to account for what appears to be the simultaneous growth and decline of religion, and its decentering of religious hierarchies. I suggested previously that the

apparent decentering of the church and religious authority, also demands that we let go of the idea of faith organizations as stable communities into which new members are incorporated, but rather to move to a self-understanding as precarious communities defined by postures of discomfort.

(Settler 2022b, p. 771)

Thus, in attempts to find a way to theorize religious complexity in postcolonial South Africa, I found that Hampejs and Chalupa’s “Complexity theory and the Historical study of Religion” (Hampejs and Chalupa 2018) offered the most helpful framework for engaging with complexity in the study of religion. They argue that the study of complex phenomena is not simply focused on the objects, structures, and institutions but also on the relationships between them and the historical processes that shape them. This resonated with my own efforts that locate the histories of colonialism/coloniality and racism as part of what constitutes religious complexity in postcolonial South Africa. Hampejs and Chalupa (2018) go on to suggest that those systems that complex behavior will likely have the following attributes:

self-organization (achievement of order without an external central cause), nonlinear dynamics (presence of feedback mechanisms causing a nonlinear course of change), and emergence (the whole possesses, through internal interactions, emergent observable properties that do not seem to result from the operation of its parts).

(Hampejs and Chalupa 2018, p. 103)

This conception of religious complexity provides a particularly helpful framework for engaging with religious contexts outside the West where the binary framing of the sacred and the secular are less pronounced and where colonially vilified or excluded Indigenous religious traditions are asserting forms of self-organization and self-description through embodied and social practices away from and often in resistance to religious orthodoxy. What is also evident in this trend is the non-linear and emergent character of religious change in the postcolonial South African context. Not only are we witnessing a simultaneous increase and decline in religious traditions, but also the proliferation of religious institutions and practices within and between religions, as well as the increasing visibility of those religious actors and institutions who refuse to be easily classified according to a world religions paradigm.

My ambition is to tease out the simultaneously volatile and vital dimension of religion as a way to speak or think about religion away from the world religions paradigm and from normative religion institutions. In a similar attempt to consider the seemingly vital and volatile nature of religion, David Chidester, in his book Wild Religion, introduces the notion of “wild religion” as a way to explain the religious complexity after Apartheid. Chidester (2012) suggests that “Wild Religion explores Indigenous African religion” (p. viii), “Wild Religion also explores religious diversity in South Africa” (p. ix), “Wild Religion breaks the mould of that redemptive narrative by enabling the emergence of different stories about religion in South Africa” (p. x), and finally, that “Wild Religion provides an opportunity for rethinking how we understand the sacred in the recent history of a changing society” (Chidester 2012, p. x). While these opening passages appear evasive, Chidester later reminds his readers that “Indigenous African cosmologies have associated the wild with dangerous, disruptive forces” (Chidester 2012, p. 3), yet while the wild can be feared as disruptive to social order, it also provides space where primal and environmental energies can be harnessed in the interest of social cohesion, while also noting the seemingly messy, monstrous, and chaotic aspects of the wild (Chidester 2012, p. 4). Chidester concludes the following:

Wild religion, as we have seen, lives in the home, the polity, and the practices of sacred specialists who move between domestic and public space, operating within the most intimate relations of the home and the most contested politics of the state. In all of these domains, wild religion can configure spiritual insecurity, fear, and terror. But it can also generate surprising creativity, energizing a variety of personal, social, and political projects.

(Chidester 2012, p. 208)

3. African Indigenous Religion and Religious Complexity in South Africa

Having set the theoretical framework that I am working from and writing in response to, now let me share three anecdotes or case studies regarding the Indigenous as a way to illustrate Indigenous religions’ complexity and viral orientations—how the making, reception, and vectors of religion after colonialism/Apartheid emerges largely from the everyday embodied practices of religious actors and stakeholder communities that were marginalized under Apartheid or classified by imperial science of religion as superstitious and primitive.

In a 2017 conference paper titled “The Indigenous as Seductive and Disruptive”, I argued that when Indigenous religion uncouples itself from traditional taxonomies of religion and from normative methods of knowledge production, the coloniality of classification becomes redundant and something new emerges from the embodied practices. The particular manifestations of the Indigenous that I explored in these three vignettes are linked to recent uses of spirit possession among young, (and sometimes) queer activists, student activists decolonizing university movements, and everyday discourses related to the recognition of Indigenous healers and their healing practices. These three vignettes reflect some of my experiences as a scholar, activist, and colleague who worked alongside students and academics that have sought to make sense of and make space for the Indigenous within the postcolonial knowledge economy.

In the first vignette, I recall the experience of attending a multidisciplinary conference in Johannesburg, South Africa. The conference, titled “Decolonizing Arts Education” was held in a refurbished precinct known as Constitution Hill—described on its website as “a living museum that tells the story of South Africa’s journey to democracy. The site is a former prison and military fort that bears testament to South Africa’s turbulent past and, today, is home to the country’s Constitutional Courts”.2 Within the dense stone walls of this beautifully refurbished Old Fort and women’s prison, our conference got off to a dynamic start on the first day. However, after a morning of deliberations, the proceeding was interrupted when a young woman announced that her friend had become possessed by the spirit of one of the women formerly incarcerated at the old Apartheid prison. It was announced and requested that we needed to welcome/recognize the ancestors as we were now in their space. The conference deliberations were suspended for several hours as a cleansing ritual had to be performed to offer recognition to the spirits of the women, our ancestors who have imposed on our meeting. Most delegates were requested to leave the space and wait in the courtyard (under what was an unforgiving sun) while a selected group of delegates accompanied a traditional healer through the ritual process. After the cleansing ritual was performed, the conference slowly reconvened, but what was clear was that the event of spirit possession/ancestral imposition was not just an occasion of invoking the ancestors, but also through inserting an Indigenous ritual into the proceedings of a multi-cultural and largely secular conference; the spatial, religious, and social power relations had become reconfigured for the remainder of this conference. I am confident that the events of that day raised, for many as they did for me, questions about the memorialization of sites of trauma and about how we enter and mediate such spaces for social and academic deliberation. The events of that morning were a concrete example of Anzaldua’s borderland where the political, physical, and economic converge with the shamanistic (Anzaldua 1987) and a space where Indigenous epistemic traditions and practices define our deliberations.

About a year after the events described in the first vignette, I was one of the faculty members supporting student activists on our university campus during the #RhodesMustFall and #FessMustFall campaigns as they sought to decolonize university campuses and curricula in South Africa. While we as staff provided seminar rooms and lecture halls as spaces for deliberation, the students determined the agendas and decided on the processes. During one such week, students were printing t-shirts from early in the morning until late at night, during which times they also chatted and strategized their next interventions. I recall vividly when one morning, a young student activist walked into the seminar room where everyone was busy with stencils and ink and, he announced to the room something from a feverish Fanonian dream of the previous night. He announced that the ancestors emerged as allies to the students’ struggle and implored him “burn everything! we must burn everything”. I quickly scanned the room to gauge the students’ reactions and found that no one met this announcement with surprise or skepticism but rather met his dreamscape with recognition. While my own impulse as a sociologist of religion was to query and verify the authenticity of the ancestral declaration and the interpretive claim from the young student activist, I refrained from questioning his embodied experience. I was also reminded in this moment of Fanon’s assertion that “The first thing which the native learns is to stay in his place and not to go beyond certain limits. This is why the dreams of the native are always of muscular prowess; his dreams are of action and aggression… During the period of colonization, the native never stops achieving his freedom from nine in the evening until six in the morning” (Fanon 1963, p. 51). In African Indigenous religion, it is believed that the ancestors convey their needs to the living through dreams, although sometimes such dreams require interpretation with the assistance of a diviner (Masondo 2012, p. 22). What I would come to learn over the subsequent months was that the ancestors emerged as key actors in everyday deliberations and that dreams became part of a series of Indigenous diagnostic practices within the students’ protest movement. Thus, not only did the student activists place the Indigenous at the center of the public deliberation, but they also introduced their peers or themselves as interpretive or diagnostic specialists—disrupting religious hierarchies within African religious practices—and they disrupted the normative perceptions about African Indigenous religion and practices in everyday spaces.

The final vignette is an account of events that occurred several years later in a first-year anthropology class taught by my partner, an interdisciplinary gender studies scholar. She had at that point taught this class on “Families and Households” for the second successive year when she instructed her students to consider and discuss their family and kinship ties before drawing a family tree according to one of the templates prescribed in their textbook. During the course of the exercise, one student stormed out of the class and was then quickly followed by a close friend. When they returned to class a short while later, it appeared that the student was presented with bodily discomfort and was overwhelmed by a strong sense that she had to include her ‘deceased’ ancestors, but the textbook template did not make provision for an African Indigenous conception of family. The student and her close friend understood this as the ancestral intervention insofar as she felt that the ancestors insisted on being counted and recognized in this first-year university classroom exercise. My partner was briefly bewildered but soon came to understand this was an event where Indigenous ontologies pressed up against and disrupted the normative anthropology curriculum. She also understood that, for a moment, space needed to be created in this classroom to recognize the way that Indigenous worldviews dissolve Western distinctions between the living and the dead when it comes to the idea of family and households.

I am conscious that all three vignettes illustrate incidents where religion appears to manifest in everyday spaces, but I selected them deliberately and precisely because they emerged away from religious institutions, and almost with disregard for traditional religious authorities and hierarchies. What is also evident from the three accounts is that the manifestation of Indigenous religion, or Indigenous religious practices, can be seen to assume characteristics that are simultaneously persistent and emergent in form, insofar as it does not present as an entire religious tradition and that its appearance in unexpected space with irregular religious actors not only reflects the persistence of Indigenous religions but also speaks to the non-linear and self-organizing character of Indigenous religion in postcolonial context. It is thus precisely because of an apparent refusal to be classified within a normative world religions paradigm—which relies on measuring religious diversity through affiliation and religious authority—that the notion of religious complexity offers ways through which to ‘measure’ and contend with Indigenous religious orientations, impulses, and practices after and in opposition to colonialism.

4. Discussion and Conclusions

Scholars such as Rattansi (1997), Mignolo (2011), Lugones (2010), and Maldonado-Torres (2007), respectively, have pointed to the limits of postcolonial approaches, insofar as it necessitated a critique and revision of the knowledge canon, and the ongoing effects of colonialism and its institutions. These scholars and others have argued that postcolonialism failed to adequately provide an epistemic framework for Indigenous knowledge forms and practices to not just gain recognition but to flourish. Thus, in recent decades, decoloniality emerged as a theory and set of practices that provided a pathway for the recognition and promotion of Indigenous knowledge traditions that challenges Western epistemic hegemony. Both postcolonial and decolonial scholarship draw on the Indigenous to both disrupt imperial knowledge regimes, as well as a way to bolster anti-colonial movements and discourses. In their 2018 text, On Decoloniality, Mignolo and Walsh emphasize two things which are relevant for our purposes: firstly, that decoloniality is a praxis that simultaneously “continues in the cracks, margins and border of the dominant order” and a “proposition of thought, analysis, sensing, making, performing, feeling, and being that is actional (in the Fanonian sense) praxistical and continuing” (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, p. 100). Secondly, and in the latter part of the same text, Mignolo reminds us that this posture is an option, an intentional choice. Mignolo and Walsh (2018) writes the following:

The option that decoloniality offers is not to overturn rewesternization and dewesternization... Decolonial thinking and performing has a hard task to germinate coexisting with overpowering forces. However, the growing need and desire to delink in order to re-exist is a driving force from the Zapatistas and Peasant Way to intellectuals, artists, and people, in general, reinventing organization.

(Mignolo and Walsh 2018, p. 223)

It is Mignolo’s two praxes of decolonialism—its continuous and actional nature and intentional choosing of letting new/latent epistemes germinate—that resonates strongly with my argument that religious complexity in the postcolonial context indicates that Indigenous religions are persistent, self-organizing, and emergent. The three vignettes shared above reflect some efforts by Indigenous religious actors and communities to uncouple themselves from the history of religion/taxonomies of religion while also opening new pathways through which Indigenous religious practices and ideas bleed into postcolonial public culture. As my thinking about this developed, I found it more appropriate to think of religious complexity in the postcolony and specifically in terms of Indigenous religion, as simultaneously vital and viral, and at times even feral. It accounts for the persistent and emergent dimensions of religion in postcolonial South Africa, where in general, religion is in decline, but Indigenous religion, and its public significance, have enjoyed unprecedented vitality. At the same time, as hierarchies of religious orders and authority become diffused, new religious actors have emerged that produce an unanticipated tension between order and chaos, and what Chidester notes as the seemingly messy, monstrous, and chaotic aspects of the wild—what I consider the viral and often feral. The viral and feral dimensions of religious complexity for the postcolonial context offer a range of ways to understand Indigenous religion’s ambivalent relationship with and resistance to both colonialism’s connotation of it as primitive, and the world religions paradigm’s tendency to “draw on the Western assumptions of religion when evaluating non-Western religions” (Vencatsamy 2024, p. 21).

To understand and theorize the function of the Indigenous or Indigenous religion in the postcolonial context, it is not just the traditional taxonomies of religion that have to be set aside, but we also need methods and modalities for tracing the vectors of Indigenous religion as it emerges out of everyday practices. The particular manifestations of the Indigenous that I sought to tease out in the vignettes are indicative of the increasing prevalence of spirit possession among young, decolonial and queer activists (Murrey 2017), public discourses related to the recognition of Indigenous healers (Mndende 2009), the commodification of their healing practices (Alberts 2015; Comaroff and Comaroff 2009), and the incorporation of ancestral being as integral to everyday decisions, diagnoses, and interventions.

In these contexts, the idea of Indigenous religion as viral is predicated (1) on the body as a site of knowledge production, (2) on spirit invocation and possession as a mode of discernment and resistance to dominant, Western epistemes, and (3) the recognition of Indigenous healing practices in private and public contexts. In centering the Indigenous through embodied practices of social resistance, these activists cited in the vignettes produced a register that expels normative white, Western epistemic traditions, ultimately rendering their Indigenous ways of knowing and being largely unaffected by hegemonic modes and methods self-expression. Indigenous, as a religious category, thus emerges as a necessary container and catalyst of resistance, recovery, and self-authoring in postcolonial South Africa. In all three vignettes, the Indigenous religious landscape becomes the vehicle through which histories of political, epistemic, and familiar exclusion and erasure are being re-written and their maps redrawn.

In the first instance, these narratives make it clear that the body or embodied practices become the abrasion, scar, or entry-point through which the Indigenous break into the postcolonial everyday and disrupt modernity’s world religions paradigm. In her 1997 volume titled, A Genealogy of Resistance and Other Essays, Marlene Nourbese Philip argues that in pushing back against racial hegemony, we “speak with the whole body” (Nourbese Philip 1997, p. 25). Similarly, in their editorial of the journal Agenda, Ndelu et al. (2017) carefully map the entanglement of the body and the ancestral in the South African student protests during 2015 and 2016 to illustrate the centrality of the body and bodily practices in postcolonial self-representation.

In discussing my experiences of the Constitution Hill conference with a colleague a few months after the event, it became clear to us that the reclamation of spirit possession and ancestor rituals not only functioned to provide for the recognition of Indigenous religion but also presented a different epistemic register for diagnosing and analyzing postcolonial social and spatial contexts. This embodied possession and invocation of the ancestral, like the example cited above, ultimately served to decenter and disrupt white feminist activism as well as the normative patriarchal discourses that occupied much of the student protest movements in particular and higher education spaces more generally (Liphosa and Dennis 2017). What these vignettes reveal is that Indigenous religions do not fit neatly into a world religions paradigm because they increasingly reflect a mix of emergent and disruptive orientations. For example, in both the anthropology classroom and in the student dreamscape vignettes, religious specialists are displaced and religious interpretations are conducted by peers, and in all three examples, Indigenous religion emerges in the course of everyday life, instead of at a designated place or scheduled time. The self-organizing and viral orientation—how it (re)emerges and presents in unexpected ways and unexpected places—make Indigenous religion resistant to easy incorporation into the world religions paradigm and simplistic (re)presentations of religious diversity.

Its time in the epistemic wilderness, so to speak, meant that the Indigenous religions appear to have assumed a viral, maybe even feral character, insofar as they appear to have developed qualities that render it unruly and irreverent towards epistemic and religious orthodoxy. When these young student activists claim a certain kind of religious and political authority—endowed by the Indigenous—they not only produce new registers of analyzing social relations and power, but they also center the Indigenous as integral to the postcolonial and decolonial endeavor. This reminds me that in Gloria Anzaldua’s four-fold description of the borderland (Anzaldua 1987), her reference to the shamanistic embraces both the premodern characteristics of the Indigenous and it owns its sense of being an outlier, operating outside of the domains, classifications, and practices of normative theistic religions. This, in my view, offers something quite true to how Indigenous religions present in the three vignettes as examples of the persistence, emergence, and self-sustaining characteristics which are now inherent to Indigenous religions. The refusal to submit to the force of the world religions paradigm—which traditionally rendered the Indigenous as primitive—and these young activists’ and other Indigenous religious actors’ refusal to honor imperial histories of classification are disruptive and decentering forces. This postcolonial location creates a social and epistemic borderland between the colonial and the post-colonial, between the modern and the Indigenous—where local actors are both at home and strangers. As I have argued elsewhere it is in the uncertainty, instability, and complexity of the borderland as a space “where emotional, spiritual and cognitive converge to reconstitute subaltern knowledge… that a decolonial praxis emerges as a mode of trespassing, negotiating and sustaining” (Settler 2022a, p. 241).

I wish to draw this paper to a close by returning our attention to how the notion of religious complexity provides us with a framework to account for the simultaneous persistence of Indigenous religions despite efforts to deny it recognition, its (re)emergence through evolved practices and new religious actors, and its ability to self-organize and devise among other practices and resist colonial and epistemic classification. Applying religious complexity, while taking seriously the effects of colonialism and the imperial science of religion, requires that we recognize the active, praxis orientation of Indigenous religion, how it emerges in everyday postcolonial contexts, and operates in the borderland between order and chaos, between the desire for recognition and the resistance to coloniality. Finally, and although there is no room to elaborate on it in this article, the metaphors of Indigenous religion as simultaneously vital, viral, and feral offer additional registers through which to map religious complexity in contemporary South Africa because it recognizes the continuing effects of colonial contact; it accounts for the emergent and non-linear ways that Indigenous religion and religious practices are mutating—freeing itself from the classificatory preoccupation of religious diversity. Further, these additional registers open up space for working with the frame of religious complexity which is empirically located in everyday practices in postcolonial contexts—not defined by religious affiliation, identity politics, hierarchies, and institutions. Thus, I wish to argue that, in the postcolonial religious context or landscape, we need to be increasingly comfortable with religious complexity as an analytical framework insofar as neither the colonial taxonomies of religion nor the world religions paradigm appeal to Indigenous religious actors and communities. Similarly, religious diversity as an extension of the world religions paradigm is increasingly met with suspicion because traditional ‘classes’ of religions are not suitable containers for explaining and coding Indigenous ways of knowing and being—we need to also become comfortable with the idea that it does not have to fit.

In examining the Indigenous religious practices through embodied everyday incidents of social resistance or self-authoring, activists and/as religious actors produce for us a register that decenters normative positions of religious power and hierarchies, ultimately asserting their Indigenous ways of knowing and being largely away and set apart from hegemonic modes of classification. Indigenous religions, through the lens of religious complexity, thus emerge as a necessary vital container and catalyst of resistance, emergence, and religious self-authoring in postcolonial South Africa, always resisting classification, as we continue to look for appropriate frameworks for understanding the changing religious landscape in postcolonial South Africa.