Knowledge and belief in Suku thought

Opening Paragraph This discussion grows out of an attempt to account for the presence among the Suku of Zaïre of a rather common but somewhat puzzling feature of African ‘ancestor cults.’ For all the importance of ancestors in African traditional life and thought, there is surprisingly little elaboration of the mode of their existence in the other world. In a masterly discussion of ‘ancestor worship’ in Africa, Fortes (1965: 126ff) notes this fact but does not attempt to explain it. To be sure, the issue is distinctly secondary to his main concern—the sociological matrix of ancestor cults. In sociological perspective, what matters about ancestors is their social role in this world, not their style of life in the next. This sociological perspective is in tune with African ethnographic fact: like Fortes, African informants are primarily interested in the social relationship of the ancestors with the living and they show little sympathy with the ethnographer's occasional curiosity about the details of the ancestors' own existence.