Making Saints and Making Ancestors

While the indigenous religious traditions of Africa appear far removed from Roman Catholicism, an important similarity between them is how they memorialize certain dead people. For Roman Catholicism and many indigenous traditions of Africa, not all the dead are worthy of special memory. Special memory is received for those whose lives have been proven worthy to receive such recognition. In Roman Catholicism such special memory is reserved for the saints while in many indigenous African traditions such memory is reserved for the ancestors. Ancestors, like saints, are not people whose lives have been found to be blameless but rather those whose lives are worthy of emulation in spite of their shortcomings. And just as in the case of the saints, people do not just become ancestors when they die - they are made ancestors. The processes of making ancestors and making saints are vastly different but the fact remains that both saints and ancestors are creations of their communities. Both saints and ancestors are seen to mediate between the physical and spiritual worlds. However, a major difference between ancestors and saints is that while most saints appear to be childless people, childless ancestors are an anomaly in many African societies. Today, one more childless person, Mother Teresa of Kolkata, was made a saint. The people called Roman Catholics made it so. If she were from an African society, she might have been made an ancestor also. In this case, she would become both a saint and an ancestor.