A dimensão ritual na solução de conflitos na justiça tradicional de sociedades africanas

Abstract

This essay demonstrates that the spoken word, in addition to its fundamental moral value, possesses a sacred character in certain traditional African societies, in so far as the word is connected to a divine origin and to its occult forces. As a magic agent par excellence and a carrier of ethereal forces, the word takes its operative power from the sacred, and is directly related to the maintenance or the rupture of both man’s and his surrounding world’s harmony. Man is the privileged mediator of the vital force that animates the word. This helps us to better understand the oral African societies’ magic-religious and the social contexts, in which respect for the word is an underlying principle. The adagio is one of the ritual formulas that integrate individuals within a particular society, invoking the established order, the ancestors’ authority (mythical principles) as well as the authority of their living mediators: the chiefs. That is to say, if the word is essential to the socialization of the youngsters, it is also the expression of the cosmic and the social order and power.