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An Africa fly whisk is often encountered in a tourist shop, at an art gallery, in a museum, or in a private collection, where it is exhibited as a tribal or ethnic artifact. It has been transformed into an ethnic or tribal artifact among other such artifacts. It has been researched, and still is being researched, by cultural anthropologists and art historians to add to the stock of tribal or ethnic knowledge. It is now among the items in the landscape of African tourism. Undoubtedly, it is contributing to the national revenue in some African countries and has been an object of export to other countries. What has happened to it is nothing short of transubstantiation. It has ceased to be what it was, and to be what it ought to be. It was not, and it ought not to be, an artifact. It was, and it ought to be, a site where being African is constituted and illuminated. It is the lighting of the African world—a world in which being African is constituted and illuminated. It ought not to be taken exclusively as an object or as an artifact. In a primordial sense, it has no thingly character. Its being is to constitute and to illuminate what is constituted. It haunts those who encounter "it." In an encounter with "it," it ceases being an "it." The encounter is a self-encounter. In the encounter, the materials that make it collaborate with one another in common self-effacement and illuminate this effacement. After the effacement, what emerges and illuminates is comprehensive experience that opens up everything to everything. Here, boundarylessness is experienced and illuminated. Here is the home of the African fly whisk—a home that is, at the same time, the home of justice. Bringing together what ought to be together and maintaining this togetherness is the hallmark of justice. An African fly whisk is a site of justice. As such, it wards off injustice.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-52560-0_10

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