| Author Quoted | Bengt Sundkler |
| Title Quoted | Bantu Prophets in South Africa |
| Date (Year/Month/Day) | 1967/08/24 |
| Imprint | [S.l.] : Oxfort Press. 1961 |
| Quotation | You are much in my thoughts as I continue my explorations of Bantu ideas. I have on interlibrary loan an essential book: Bantu Prophets in South Africa by Bengt Sundkler, Oxford Press, 1961. The thing is not to distill "Bantu philosophy" out into pure speculative projects as we Westerners like to do. This particular book deals with the syncretism of Zulu religion and a kind of Evangelical Christianity in South Africa: prophetic cults (hundreds of them), nativistic and healing sects. Pursuit of health is a central theme. Joining you in your forecast I would say that in our coming Bantu society (is that accurate though, because our Negroes came from Dahomey, maybe that's a different bunch?) there will be considerable interest in medical diagnosis, psychosomatic illness, questions of potency, interesting treatments, resistance against nefarious influence of dead ancestors ("Uncle Toms" perhaps). |
| Quotation Source | The Courage for Truth: Letters of Thomas Merton to Writers.; Selected and edited by Christine M. Bochen. / New York : Farrar Straus Giroux. 1993, p. 283 |
| Letter to | Walker Percy |
| Notes | |
| Link to Merton's Copy |
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