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Previously on Our Long Walk:
The next step on Our Long Walk: An update on the changes - and new additions - planned for 2024.
Is Africa still rising? (Guest post): Daniel Gallardo Albarran examines the slowdown of economic growth in Africa, emphasising that assessing development through only economic indicators overlooks significant improvements in health and education.
Three useful links:
I chatted with Melt Sieberhagen about Skatryk, the Afrikaans version of Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom. Skatryk is this month’s Huisgenoot Boekklub’s book of the month. Skatryk is now also available as an audiobook (luisterboek) on Netwerk24.
Although African countries will face many challenges in 2024, Ken Opalo is optimistic about Tanzania. I highly recommend Ken’s blog to anyone interested in African politics.
Paul Krugman turns economic historian in The New York Times, explaining the origins of the American Civil War.
Humans want to intervene in the natural world. Our desire has led us to develop various rituals and practices aimed at controlling elements of nature, like rain.
Religion is often the medium we use to control the environment. Various religions propose that faith or specific actions can compel a higher power to grant rain. However, when the rain does not materialise, it can lead to scepticism about the religious authorities – the induna, the priest, the prophet – and their supposed divine influence. This scepticism is a crucial aspect of understanding rainmaking beliefs.
Take the Tswana. Rain is pivotal to the lives of the Batswana, so pivotal that the country’s currency, the pula, literally means ‘rain’. In traditional Tswana culture, rainmakers, typically revered figures in their communities, believed that placating ancestors was key to inducing rainfall. The rituals involved the village chief, as the senior living person, performing acts of propitiation like sacrificing an ox or pouring sorghum beer or grain on an ancestor’s grave.1
After Christianity arrived in the 19th century, many of these traditional practices coalesced with the newly adopted Christian traditions. When droughts threatened, for example, the community organised collective prayers. These gatherings were marked by reading specific Bible verses related to rain and praying for divine intervention. Some hymns explicitly requested rain from God, reflecting a merging of Christian faith with local concerns about weather and agriculture.
But the surprising thing is that these are not only ancient customs; many of these traditions persist, even if we now have advanced meteorological science that can predict weather patterns pretty accurately.
So why would traditional rainmakers or church leaders continue to engage in prayer events?
Anthropologists would argue that this persistence can be attributed to how these rituals are deeply embedded in the cultural fabric of Tswana society, for example, serving both to raise ecological awareness amongst the people and to reinforce social bonds, assert political authority, and maintain harmony within the community.2
But a new NBER Working Paper by the economists José-Antonio Espín-Sánchez, Salvador Gil-Guirado and Nicholas Ryan offers a different perspective. The authors ask why people continue to believe in rainmaking, particularly when its effectiveness is inconsistent. To do so, they introduce a model where a religious authority, symbolised by a church, claims to have the power to induce rain through prayers. On the other side is a peasant, representing the common people, who assesses the likelihood of rain based on their observations.
Think of it this way: The church does not actually have the power to bring rain and is unaware of when it will occur. The peasant, observing the frequency of rain, might be convinced of the church’s power if the prayers coincide with rainfall. This perception is heavily influenced by local rainfall patterns, which vary significantly across different regions.
For instance, in some areas, such as where the Ainu of Japan live, the probability of rain is constant, regardless of recent weather. In other regions, like the Puyallup tribe’s area near Seattle, the likelihood of rain decreases the longer it has been dry. Conversely, in places like where the Herero of Namibia resides – or the Batswana – the chance of rain increases with prolonged dry periods.
The authors posit that rainmaking beliefs are particularly persuasive in environments where rain is more likely after extended dry spells. In such scenarios, if a church begins to pray for rain during a drought and rain follows, it appears as though the prayers were effective. This timing creates a compelling coincidence that can reinforce the belief in the power of rainmaking.
This is a cool theory, but what adds credence to their model is that they then test the idea of rainmaking as an instrumental religious practice through two types of evidence.
Firstly, the research looks closely at the daily prayers for rain by the Catholic Church in Murcia, Spain. Murcia is notable for its increasing likelihood of rain after longer dry spells. Here, the church has been organising prayers for rain, known as ‘pro pluvia rogations’, since the 14th century. These prayers are not random but follow a specific pattern that aligns with their model: they are more likely during droughts and continue until rain falls. By analysing historical records from 1600 to 1836, the study finds that a recent prayer for rain significantly increases the likelihood of notable rainfall. This is not just a coincidence with seasonal patterns; even within a given month, prayers are predictive of rain, suggesting a strategic timing of prayers that aligns with natural rainfall patterns.
The case of Murcia provides insight into how the timing of rainfall prayers can align with actual rainfall. To understand the broader origins of rainmaking beliefs, however, the study expands its scope globally. Using the Ethnographic Atlas which documents traditional practices of over a thousand ethnic groups, and additional anthropological sources, the researchers examine rainmaking practices worldwide. These practices vary greatly, from the Cherokee’s rain dance in North America to the Herero’s ritual in Namibia involving a calf, a practice that is similar to the neighbouring Tswana.
Their analysis reveals two things. First, the practice of rainmaking is more common in societies heavily reliant on agriculture. This reliance creates a greater demand for controlling nature, as these societies’ livelihoods are directly tied to the climate. Secondly, and more crucially, the likelihood of adopting rainmaking practices is significantly higher in areas where the probability of rain increases after a prolonged dry period. In such environments, the timing of rainmaking rituals can align more closely with natural rainfall events, making the rituals seem effective.
The adoption of rainmaking as a religious practice is influenced by its persuasiveness. For the Spanish of Murcia or the Tswana of Botswana, centuries of rainmaker activity have shown a high correlation with actual rainfall, a pattern that is feasible in areas with an increasing likelihood of rain after dry periods. On a global scale, the tendency to adopt rainmaking rituals is higher in environments where they are likely to be more successful. This indicates that rainmaking is not just a matter of faith, social bonding or even political authority but is simply tied to its perceived effectiveness.
The proof of praying, as they say, is in the precipitation.
An edited version of this article was published on News24. Support more such writing by signing up for a paid subscription. The image was created with Midjourney v5.2.
Landau, P.S., 1993. When rain falls: Rainmaking and community in a Tswana village, c. 1870 to recent times. The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 26(1), pp.1-30.
Sheridan, M., 2023. When rain is a person. Climate Change Epistemologies in Southern Africa, p.49.
You might find this and the related articles interesting, if you're not already aware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise_problem.
The problem with the whole "pray for rain" belief is that it's heavily reliant on obeservation bias.