Two aspects of my education have surfaced in my mind as I follow the events around me. The first of these aspects is Middle English, and the second is systemic scepticism. Middle English (ME) I encountered in my sixth form days, back in the early 1960s, when I had to read and study the 14th-century poet and author Geoffrey Chaucer.
As for systemic scepticism, I cannot easily say when I first met it. Systemic scepticism, you see, is a broad, open-minded approach to analysing and interpreting experiences. I only realised in my early professional life that it is this approach that most of my university teachers and advisers had inculcated in me, even without their always calling it by name. A sceptic is a doubter, a person who never takes anything at face value.
I know that in a world yearning for certainties and “definite” positions, scepticism is not particularly popular. In matters of faith or religion, for example, the principle is, “doubt not but believe.” Sceptics are lambasted and dismissed as quibbling “atheists and non-believers”. Yet the reality is that even the “doubt” itself is under question or interrogation.
Scepticism regards all beliefs and experiences as provisional stages in an infinite process. Faiths or standpoints, which are “amazing graces” to the conventional believer, are operational choices, necessitated by our existence. The choices are never easy and they are made with “anguish” (Jean-Paul Sartre’s “angoisse). This is what Robert Frost contemplates in his famous poem, “The Road Not Taken”.
But let us get back to some story. You may have been wondering why I, an African schoolboy in the latter half of the twentieth century, had to learn Middle English and read Chaucer’s literary creations in it. The answer is that in 1963 when I embarked on the adventure, I had to be immersed in a proper English education. The British colonial syllabus, as well as the teachers who enforced it, had not changed a bit. We, as pre-university English majors, had to be not only thoroughly fluent in “our” language but also conversant with every aspect of it, including its historical evolution.
I was mercifully spared the Germanic convolutions of Beowulf, in Old English, but I could not escape Chaucer’s Middle English, with its pseudo-Latin Norman inflections. Curiously, I ended up enjoying the texts thoroughly, my favourite Chaucerian work being The Canterbury Tales. It is a rollicking collection of twenty-four fables and folktales adapted from European orature and rendered in elegant narrative verse. Chaucer enlivens the narratives with not only sparkling humour but also by assigning to each story a narrating character, each introduced and described in meticulous detail. We can learn a lot of narrative techniques from Chaucer.
What, however, brought The Canterbury Tales back to my mind is the context in which the stories are told. In another stroke of narrative structure, Chaucer stages his characters around a pilgrimage. The characters are on a road travelling to Canterbury Cathedral in Kent, England, a shrine or holy place, where the Saintly Bishop Thomas Beckett was martyred. Bishop Beckett had some differences with the secular ruler, King Henry II, who had “inspired” a few of his servants to assassinate him as he led prayers in the Cathedral. The incident was the source of T. S. Eliot’s play, Murder in the Cathedral.
Soon after Beckett’s assassination in 1170 A.D., believers started travelling from all over Britain to Canterbury, to honour the martyr and to pray at the scene where he was killed. They probably believed that their prayers would be answered because of the martyr’s closeness to God. This is a scenario enacted at thousands of supposed holy places around the world. The visitors, tourists or, as they are called in spiritual terminology, pilgrims to these sites traditionally walk at least part of the way, even where vehicles are available.
This is a fairly close reflection of what was happening in Kampala last Saturday, the annual Uganda Martyrs Pilgrimage to the Namugongo shrines and other surrounding areas. This is where a few score mostly young men, Muslim, Anglican and Catholic, were executed on the orders of two Ugandan Kabakas or Kings, between 1884 and 1887, for their decision to embrace the “foreign” faiths introduced into the country by Swahilis, Arabs and Europeans.
The pilgrimage has been a regular and growing annual event for more than half a century. Now it has become a huge international affair, packing millions of pilgrims around the few hillocks and valleys in a suburb about ten kilometres from the centre of Kampala. Some official sources were quoting three million people in the area around June 3 this year. Many of the faithful attending come on foot, from as far away as Tanzania, Kenya and the DRC, as well as from every corner of Uganda.
Several questions keep swirling in my mind as I watch this phenomenon. Do all these people come here out of sincere faith, or is there an element of sheer excitement among some? The martyrs are widely acclaimed as heroes. But were those who executed them just savage, bloodthirsty tyrants, or did they have some justifiable intentions of resisting external influences? I heard of a claim this year, by the descendants of the executioners who carried out the burning, spearing and hacking of the “readers”, that the executioners, too, should be given recognition during the celebrations. Is this outrageous or is it worth pondering?
I also note that the Hajj, the obligatory Pilgrimage to Mecca, is just around the corner. The crucial dates are from June 26 to July 1. What vision might have inspired Islam to receive the Hajj as a pillar of the faith? Maybe the voluntary show up of believers at other places of pilgrimage is a witness to an inherent need of human beings to challenge themselves, get out of some of their comfort zones, and express their relationship to the supernatural and to one another.
Whichever way you look at them, pilgrimages are fertile grounds for reflection.
