Birgit Meyer

This was the title of my lecture at the CAS-E on 1 July 2025. I could notice significant resonances between my own work that struggles to find a language to talk about African entities dismissed as “idols” and “charms” in colonial missionary discourse, and the research program Alternative Rationalities and Esoteric Practices from a Global Perspective that seeks to eschew an “imperialism of categories” in thematizing “esoteric practices”, broadly understood as “practices focused on predicting, manipulating and controlling contigent life events”, in a comparative global framework. The point of resonance and crux of the matter concerns translation, without which communication about and comparison of such practices would not be possible, yet which is tricky at the same time as colonial categories still linger on.

Take a look at this picture from the research of the multidisciplinary and transregional Legba-Dzoka project in which I participate from the Übersee-Museum Bremen. What do we see, and how to put it into words?

The artifacts depicted in the blue box are called dzoka (plural dzokawo) among the Ewe, where they were assembled by Carl Spiess, missionary of the Norddeutsche Missionsgesellschaft (NMG) that was active among the Ewe since the mid-19th century in what is today Southeastern Ghana and South Togo. They became part of the collection via multiple channels. As far as our research shows so far on the basis of mission reports, they were not seized by brute force or looted, but acquired as tokens of conversion to Christianity, received as gifts, bought or picked up by the roadside. This is not a neutral, innocent provenance, as the artefacts were taken in an overall context of colonization and missionization, in which the NMG acted as a power that sought to make Ewe people turn against their previous non-Christian spiritual practices and ideas. Artfacts as dzokawo were to be rejected and burned as a condition for conversion to Christianity (see Meyer 2024, De Witte and Meyer 2025). The artefacts depicted can be described as bundles of multiple elements (parts of minerals, plants, animals) tied together through knots, and often having a small pouch that contains some kind of powder, bearing traces of blood and alcohol presumably employed to activate them. The Ewe term dzoka consists of the terms “dzo” (fire) and “ka” (string). We know from written historical sources (missionary writings, travelogues) that they were employed for the sake of gaining protection and fortification (especially in war), as remedies against all sorts of mishap and attacks, and as harbingers of success. Dzokawo were certainly of crucial importance in the mid- to late 19th-century Ewe world, which was shaken by the tail end of the transatlantic slave trade, multiple interethnic wars fueled by European colonial powers, and the onset of systematic colonial rule in the aftermath of the Berlin coference (1884/5). Dzokawo were to offer personal security and assurance in a highly insecure world.

It would lead too far to delve into the intricacies of the meaning of dzo as fire, understood as a force of creation/destruction that has fa, coolneess, as its antipode. The central question here is how to translate dzokawo not only beyond the literal translation as fire-strings, but also, and more importantly, beyond welltrodden categories from the colonial lexicon that have functioned as an epistemic framework to represent people such as the Ewe in West Africa as “heathen” and “idolatric” (in missionary discourse) and as exponents of an early stage in the evolution of culture and religion (in anthropological discourse). The missionary and anthropological perspectives came together in the term “Zaubermittel” (means-to-do-magic) that was used to translate dzokawo. The fact that a missionary as Spiess did not only preach against their use, but also took some to a secular museum in Bremen testifies to the acknowledgement of their value as ethnographic specimens. Today, the colonial dismissive terminology imposed on dzokawo and similar artifacts across Africa still haunts them, creating an impression that they are “primitive”, problematic and still dangerous. Even for many Ewe Christians they are difficult to come to terms with. While dzokawo are still used to mitigate the uncertainties of the contemporary world, they are at the same time loudly condemned as tokens of a past “heathendom”.

The question how to talk about the dzokawo in the collection is a huge matter of concern for our Legba-Dzoka project. One the one hand, we critically explore the imposition of terms as “idol”, “fetish” or “means-to-do-magic” on dzokawo, whereby they were “converted” into colonial missionary discourse. This is a clear instance of a practice of translation that produces hierarchized distinctions, objectifying dzokawo and their makers and users as an instance of pre-modern, pre-Christian animism. Unpacking colonial and missionary translations, we seek to liberate these artefacts from these problematic ascriptions, reconceptualizing them afresh as parts of a so far silenced indigenous knowledge system.

While we stick to Ewe terms as much as possible, translation is still a necessity. The question is not whether, but how to translate across languages without replicating the symbolic violence that underpinned colonial-missionary translations. Here I find the book Von Sprache zu Sprache: Übersetzung als Gastfreundschaft (2024) by the philosopher Bachir Diagne (2024) to be of great interest. He proposes a practice of translation understood as transmission along a horizontal rather than vertical axis, wherein the target language lends hospitality to the source language.Thus: translation is the coming together of at least two languages, and worlds of thinking. Indeed, translation is dialogue, just as dialogue is translation. The point is that those engaged in communication and translation are prepared to host and be hosted by others, for instance in speaking about the artefacts in missionary collections. Diagne expands the idea of translation to artifacts kept in European museums that have been framed, through colonial violence, as “fetishes” – and I think that this can be expanded to artifacts as dzokawo. He proposes to undertake a precise reading of the translations into which these artifacts have been forced so as to act as mediators of Western and Christian perspectives, and how they have been remediated by multiple actors, including artists and curators, up to our time. Studying translations involves both bemoaning the gap between the meaning in the original and the target language and finding possibilities to expand one’s horizon through lending hospitality to the foreign – and thus creating new meaning – through translation. This is what we’re doing in our Legba-Dzoka project.

The question of translation is most pertinent where it concerns the question how to convey words for that what makes dzokawo powerful. The English term spirit to translate the animatedness of dzokawo and similar artifacts came up many times. But what on earth is meant by spirit? There are many different meanings of spirit/esprit/Geist/Geest in various European languages and philosophical traditions (Cassin et al 2014). Moreover, the Ewe term “gbobgbo” which is usually translated as spirit, might not fully match the English term spirit, or the German term Geist or the Dutch geest or the French esprit. Gradually, I have come to realize that the unease I feel with regard to the term “spirit” has to do with the way it features in a particular scholarly discourse, in which spirits are claimed to be ontological realities. I am not against exploring ontologies as such; doing so involves crossing a threshold into another, unknown world. But I wonder how to translate across the threshold when returning into the sphere of scholarship. Spirit has a religious ring about it. Why recur to the discursive frame of religion at all, which after all, as I argued in my article “What is religion in Africa?” (2021) was imported to Africa and to the Global South as an initially foreign, colonial concept? Should we not cast our efforts in translation much broader, and be more critical about the category of religion that had a big role in colonial govermance, and rather think against it?

Here it is important to bring in that the Vodu-priest Christopher Voncujovi, who is part of our Legba-Dzoka project team, consistently rejected the framing of dzokawo as a matter of belief and worship. For him, the world is in vibration and the making and use of dzokawo involves tapping into energies of animals, plants, and other substances. This should caution us against trapping the term spirit in a religious frame. He suggested an analogy between the pow(d)er in the interior of a dzoka to a SIM card, able to tune in with different energies to achieve certain ends. From this angle, dzoka involves dealing with forces and energies that include a combination of materials activated through words and ritual acts. Dzokawo, then, may well be translated as an assemblage of forces to generate certain desired effects, grounded in an indigenous cosmology based on meticulous observation, skillful combination and powerful activation.

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Birgit Meyer (PhD, 1995) is Professor of Religious Studies at Utrecht University. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, she studies religion from a material and postcolonial angle. She directs the research program Religious Matters in an Entangled World (www.religiousmatters.nl) and co-directs the collaborative Legba-Dzoka research project (https://religiousmatters.nl/the-legba-dzoka-project-tracking-and-unpacking-the-collection-carl-spiess-ubersee-museum-bremen/).

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