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Africa Knows! It is time to decolonise minds

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Accepted Paper: E34-01. To panel E34.

Title of paper:

Author:

Rune Larsen (KU Leuven, Faculty of Social Sciences).

Long abstract paper:
Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Windhoek, Namibia I will in this paper analyse my experiences of going to creation with 'the Mountain Iyahs'. This is a group of primarily coloured break-away Rastafarians from Namibia's Khomas region. In search of a spiritual sanctuary the Mountain Iyahs had found a channel of inner communication with the Divine by means of bush-meditation combined with consultations of different teacher-plants. They do this through syncretic and individualized spiritual practices that draw inspiration from spiritual and religious sources from across the globe. I explore how these experiences speak of the spiritual-existential journeys of the Iyahs (and myself); how global flows of images and information influence these younger Namibians' spiritual ontologies; and how the Iyahs' spiritual politics enable a rethinking of both spiritual and scientific epistemological boundaries. I hereby counter public and political narratives in Namibia that depicts the country's younger population as idle and (politically) disengaged. I do this by showing how the Iyahs' Saturday retreats to the bush brings forth a critical engagement on social and existential issues that haunts life in contemporary Windhoek. Likewise, the spiritual and recreational use of psychoactive substances such as the Iyahs' teacher-plants comes with great stigma globally. In light of this stigma I address the spiritual significance and socially productive forces of such use. I argue that the Mountian Iyahs' consultations with teacher-plants is an anti-ideological and barrier-breaking mediation between the positively disclosed world and its otherwise invisible and hidden spiritual realms. This mediation facilitates their inclusive spiritual practices. These practices are characterized by an ingenious combination of critical religious suspicion and radical openness towards a multiplicity of sources of spiritual knowledge and divine possibilities.