By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

BIG THINK magazine on March 7 2023 published an article titled, ‘Modern workplaces don’t mix well with our ancient instincts’.

It was based on Kevin Dickinson’s interview of molecular biologist John Medina who also referred to the work of British geographer Jay Appleton  concerning what is called ‘Prospect-Refuge Theory’ in architectural design and art. 

This theory is now being explored from the perspective of neuroscience and the development of the human brain in order to establish the kinds of  physical and organisational structures best suited for us to work within optimally and to maintain good health.

Much of the research has found that the human brain has evolved to favour and seek physical and social environments and habitats that balance refuge (for rest, reflection and safety) with prospect (for growth, expansion, adventure, forecasting the future and  imagining our fate and destiny).

In my own research, I have been trying to find reasons for the prevalence, persistence and survival of dariro and dariro-like formations among Africans on the continent and in the Diaspora. 

I have been trying to explain the qualities of this form of organisation which caused most Africans everywhere  to continue adapting and re-organising this dariro even after it was banned by white regimes under slavery and apartheid, indeed even long after it was severed from the African drum, which was also routinely banned. Moreover, I have also tried to understand why historians and researchers in African philosophy ignore the dariro.

The most surprising persistence and adaptation of the dariro is found in the history of African communities under slavery in North America, the Caribbean and Brazil.

In North America, the dariro persisted under its much pared-down derivative, the ‘ring-shout’, which is a dariro reduced to a religious/liturgical ritual. 

It was so reduced through efforts of white society and the white Church to abolish it completely.

As Sterling Stuckey documented in his book Slave Culture:“There is, in fact, substantial evidence for the importance of the ancestral function of the circle in West Africa, but the circle ritual imported by Africans from the Congo region (to North America) was so powerful in its elaboration of a religious vision that it contributed disproportionately to the centrality of the circle in slavery. 

The use of the circle (dariro) for religious purposes in slavery was so consistent and profound that one could argue that it was what gave form and meaning to black religion and art (in the African Diaspora).  

It is understandable that the circle became the chief system of heathenism for missionaries…leading them to seek either to alter it or to eradicate it altogether. 

That they failed (to wipe it out) owes a great deal to Bakongo influence in particular, but values similar to those of Congo-Angola are found among Africans a thousand or more miles away, in lands in which the circle (dariro) is  also of great importance. 

Thus, scholarship is likely to reveal more than we now know about the circle in Africa, drawing West and Central Africa closer together culturally (more) than they were previously thought to be.”  (p.11)

So, what is it about dariro that has made it survive the hostility, repression and violence of slavery, apartheid and Eurocentric, linearist religion?

This is where current neuroscientific research comes in, explaining that there are inherent structural, ecological and psychological qualities of dariro which suit the nature of the human brain itself.

As history tells us, what is now the Sahara Desert used to be wet and green, with forests and grasslands teeming with wildlife.

When it began to dry up two million years ago, the change jolted the human psyche, caused the human brain to demand a balance between being as clear as possible about one’s prospects and having adequate  places of refuge to retreat to and to reflect. 

It is not surprising that wildlife featured prominently as one source of critical information about our ancestors’ prospects for thriving and surviving in the face of a changing ecology.  

We see the evidence in ancient cave paintings and in the adoption and sharing of animal totems. 

Totems philosophically and symbolically incorporate animals into the dariro as a source of wisdom and data about one’s surroundings and prospects.

Originally balancing the prospect-refuge requirement was met by just ensuring access to high places, such as hills, mountains and trees, from which to survey the horizon, on one hand, as well as ensuring ready access to caves and built and secure spaces to which people could retreat, on the other. 

Both requirements mutually reinforce each other, which is why they must be balanced.

Later, it was realised that the effectiveness and capacities of built and natural structures could be enhanced through human agency, through organised human structures providing both literal and symbolic education for the group to keep prospect balanced retreat/reflection.

The dariro is a human cave, a refuge. 

The people summoned and organised there sit or stand facing one another (kuonana) as well as seeing far in all directions (kuonesana). 

The drum used to summon them to the venue of the dariro is also used to accompany and enhance the play, dance, ritual, poem or song employed to deepen reflection during the retreat in the refuge.

There is no angle or bearing of the entire globe: North, south, east, west; north-east, north-west; or south-east and south-west: which remains uncovered. 

If I sit facing south, the person facing me sees what is coming from behind me which I cannot see.  

Through a meticulous division of perspectives and bearings among self-organising participants, the dariro requires and ensures comprehensive surveillance of the group’s prospects: and it provides a flexible human refuge even away from the cave, hut or bunker.

Now, conditions for captured Africans going through the Middle Passage to the Americas; conditions for survivors of that Middle Passage after arriving on the plantation; conditions of Africans under apartheid characterised by forced removals, a police State and terror – all these conditions intensified the need for Africans to confront permanently, minute-by-minute, the question of Prospect-Refuge.

As happened to Steve Biko, who went out with a friend and was picked up and murdered in the process of ‘interrogation’, no-one knew, if you were gathered with friends or ‘family’, no-one knew on parting whether they would see one another again the next day or next hour. 

You were not even allowed to question the slave master or chief of police about the disappearance of an African.

This terror, this precariousness of life, intensified the need for a dariro experience. 

It deepened the need for, and meaning of, solidarity.

The surviving content of the ritual called ring-shout in North America demonstrates the intensity caused by this permanent precariousness of life as well as the lack of refuge; that refuge  meaning not only a place to rest but also space in which to contemplate one’s humanity away from the utter debasement.

According to Tamara Williams in Reviving Culture Through Ring Dance, one 

of the dance songs in the ceremony went as follows: 

“Call: This may be the last time we get together

Response: Fare-ye well, this may be the last time

Call: This may be the last time we sing together

Response: Fare-ye well, this may be the last time

Call: This may be the last time we praise together

Response: Fare-ye well, this may be the last time

Call: This may be the last time we dance together

Response: Fare-ye well, this may be the last time.”

This cry and dance was not just to express despair and helplessness; it was a call on all Africans under slavery and apartheid to sharpen their fighting skills and stiffen their determination to resist slavery or apartheid. 

Belief that these systems would end was kept alive by summoning and evoking the resources of the dariro, a structure much, much older than slavery and apartheid and yet capable of confronting and challenging it so that efforts to ban it affirmed its viability as living philosophy.

Genres or variants of the dariro as a discourse structure

There are scores of genres or variants of the African dariro as a discourse structure. 

The ring-shout is liturgical. 

In Zimbabwe, some variants are pedagogical and others legalistic or mythical and cosmological. 

With varying degrees of emphasis, all of them integrate the internal quest with the external, the local with the global, the periodic closure for serenity and reflection with the venturesome look-out upon and beyond the horizon. 

That is why the counterpart facing you in the dariro  here and now also has a clear view of what is approaching from behind you which you cannot possibly see. 

But the need to know about it is there. 

The dariro provides the means, thereby meeting the ancient and current  need to balance prospect with refuge.