Traditional African religion is based on oral traditions, which means that the basic values and way of life are passed from elders to younger generation. Africa is host to the highest number of religious countries in the world, according to a recent Gallop poll. War in Africa, either political or religious is mostly isolated cases. There is a common saying in Africa Dont forget where you come from. Through their mixing, a new kind of religion emerged, forming the basis for what we have come to know as African diaspora religion. Women constitute a sizable number of the devotees of these traditions, just as they do in Islam and Christianity. Many traditional African religions are based on guiding principles that are unfathomable to foreigners, more specifically those with interests such as historians and scholars. traditional African takes the character of critical reflection of the African understanding of reality and world view. There are few religions as globally misunderstood as African traditional religions. On the other hand, countries like South Africa, Morocco, and Tunisia sometimes experience snowfalls. Africa is given the image of a place that is hot and sunny all year round. Most are watered-down versions of what was truly a thriving civilization. Gender dynamics are important in African indigenous religions and in cultural systems, so much so that women goddesses and women-invented rituals are commonplace. Significant as these studies are, there seems to be no systematic exploration of African traditions in African American culture.21. All over the continent, cosmological myths describe a complicated process, whether the universe evolves from preexisting objects or from Gods mere thought or speech. Esu was represented as a stone mound in the front yard of ancient Yoruba compounds. As scholars of the comparative study of religions in Africa, we must begin to rethink the study of African religion in the twenty-first century in order to avoid the continuous mis-assessment of the resilience of indigenous traditions. First, there is a supreme being who created the universe and every living and nonliving thing to be found within the universe. Myth: Slavery is a product of Western civilization. Mursi girl in Ethiopia. Inasmuch as androcentric authority is more prominent within social structures and systems and patriarchy is more pronounced in the social order, women are considered the cornerstone of the African family system.19 The African mother is a vibrant life force, central to African religious understandings of the interrelatedness between the human and the divine, as she embodies the production and sustaining of life. 6. Please follow our Commentary Guidelines when engaging in discussion on this site. About | Commentary Guidelines | Harvard University Privacy | Accessibility | Digital Accessibility | Trademark Notice | Reporting Copyright Infringements Ceremonies of naming, rites of passage, death, and other calendrical rites embody, enact, and reinforce the sacred values communicated in myths. African American women are turning more and more to goddess religions and Orisa practices, as they find African religion offering them greater religious autonomy than other Western religions. It is a well-known fact that religion continues to play a central and vital role in the lives of African people. Human spirits represent people who have died, usually ancestors, in the recent or distant past.5 Third, the world of the ancestors occupies a large part of African cosmology. 13. The story of Mary Slessor and the killing of twins is popular. Marriage customs in Africa vary from one tribe to another. Understanding the contours of traditions as they are today consists of picturing both what they are and what they can be against the backdrop of what they once were. 8. The reason is partly that they want a time when, Your email address will not be published. The African tradition of female circumcision is the ritual of the rite of passage from girlhood into the realm of womanhood. The Ifa divination system, which produced 256 chapters of oral narratives, constitutes an encyclopedic compendium of knowledge that provides answers to nearly every meaningful human question in the Yoruba and Fon universe. The much-cited dictum by the doyen of African religious studies, the recently deceased John Mbiti, that Africans are notoriously religious still holds true (though I prefer to use the word deeply).1 While, officially, statistics suggest that African Christians and Muslims constitute about 80 percent of the total population, and African indigenous religion constitutes about 20 percent, these statistics do not reflect the truth of the African situation. Traditional African religions are less of faith traditions and more of lived traditions. Many foreigners who come to Africa become fascinated by ancestral spirits and spirits in general, as if the mystique of African religions is the only aspect of African spirituality that can hold scholarly interest.4 There are several common features of African indigenous religions that suggest similar origins and allow African religions to be treated as a single religious tradition, just as Christianity and Islam are. .entry-morefrom {display: none !important} For this reason, in many parts of Africa, the communal aspects of such rituals have been retained, due to their salience, while the circumcision practice has been dispensed with altogether, due to the health risks associated with it; this is the case among the Maasai in Kenya and in Somali culture, both in Djibouti and Somalia. 3. An example of data being processed may be a unique identifier stored in a cookie. I suggest that, at the conceptual and theoretical levels, we begin to take this interpretive approach seriously. When he heard that I came from Nigeria, he wanted to display his knowledge of Ocha tradition as a devotee of Oxhosi, God of Thunder in Afro-Brazilian heritage. African Traditional Religion: A Definition (1973), Omosade Awolalu in Yoruba Belief and Sacrificial Rites and John Mbiti in The Concept of God in Africa (1970) are a few examples of postcolonial scholars of religion who have resisted and denounced colonial idea that Africans do not know God. This is based on misconceptions that these religions are antithetical to . Therefore for these people, twins were treasures. Africans are eager to learn new skills and embrace new technologies. African religions do not rely on a single individual to be a religious leader, but rather depend on an entire community to make the religion work. Just as rituals are an expression of this . 10. This unified the tribes in a way, making it seem as if they are all the same. Take for instance the story of poverty in Africa. Religions of the African diaspora are of particular note and importance to the comparative study of African religions because of their resilience and the characteristic formations leading to their performance and expression. 7, The Spirits, in his, One must resist the structuralist temptation that views myths as static, unchanging, and simply the productions of a peoples imagination about the cosmic order. Africa is often seen as a poor Country and one that cant do without the help of the western world. Despite conversion to Islam or to Christianity, Africans continue to accommodate an indigenous worldview that occupies a vital space in the African consciousness. On the continent early modernizers assumed that African religion was part of the problem of the antimodernity project and that uprooting African indigenous religion would auger well for the modern African state. In this way, the visible and invisible are in tandem, leading practitioners to speak about all objects, whether animate or inanimate, as potentially sacred on some level. They often dictate when the community honors a particular divinity or observes particular taboos. 53 offers from $9.56. These traditions are not religious principles, but a cultural identity that is passed on through stories, myths and tales. . there is a diversity of religion in Africa; rather, it is the extent of that diversity and the degree to which the term 'African traditional religion' might misleadingly mask both that extent and the mutability of the forms it encompasses. Before colonization, marriages were strictly traditional and depends on the customs, traditions, and believes of, Africa is a beautiful continent. Even in areas of Zimbabwe with easy access to Western-type delivery care, the majority of women are cared for and delivered by traditional birth attendants who are members of their extended family. There is a general misconception that the entire people of North Africa speak Arabic. Because it enables us to theorize questions of syncretism and hybridization and, more importantly, raises the issue of why African religion is flowering and spreading in the Americas, especially in the United States, while it is declining in Africaa phenomenon that we need to understand. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. .pagination {display: none !important} Ritual enables supernatural beings to bless individuals and the community with sustenance, prosperity, and fecundity.14 Rites of passage, such as initiation ceremonies, are rituals marking personal transitions recognized and celebrated by the community. Perhaps its the abundant wildlife, scorching deserts, or the vast uninhabited plainlands. In certain contexts and communities we have many documented instances of the central role of goddesses as founders of traditions, builders of kingdoms, and saviors and defenders of cities and civilizationsfor example, Moremi in Yorubaland, Nzinga in Angola, and Osun in West Africa. For example, in my local language . This creates fear and panic resulting in misleading assumptions about Africa. Giving opportunity to stereotypes like Africa are poor and Africa is corrupt. The consent submitted will only be used for data processing originating from this website. Introduction. on. In times of crisis they often come to the surface, or people revert to them in secret.8. Every tribe and culture have their beliefs and way of life. This lack of knowledge as well as understanding of essentials has led to burgeoning of myths on African . They are less concerned with doctrines and much more so with rituals, ceremonies, and lived practices. Check Out Marriage Customs From 10 African Tribes, 15 Tribes With Surprising Bridal Traditions In Africa, 12 Surprising African Countries That Allow Dual Citizenship By Marriage, Can Foreigners Buy Land In Ghana? The survey appears to support the prevailing narrative that the most . Religion also encompasses the human, cultural dimensions within faith traditions, such as how human agency shapes, influences, and complicates religious control. John Mbiti divides spirit beings into two types, nature spirits and human spirits. The much-cited dictum by the doyen of African religious studies, the recently deceased John Mbiti, that "Africans are notoriously religious" still holds true (though I prefer to use the word "deeply"). The terms 'traditional' and 'religion' (in its singular form) have each been targets of criticism. By civil religion, I have in mind not only institutional religion and the beliefs and practices as they relate to the sacred and transcendent, but also practices not always defined as religious, including the rites of passage offered by our various youth brigades, and also the values of communalism and national sacrifice. Another false impression often given about African religions is that women do not play any central or leadership roles in the performance of African religious traditions. Also, poverty is mostly concentrated among few nations in Africa or within few regions of each Nation. Africa is a Continent Full of Corruption, Poverty and War. It is also the most diversified continent in the world. No. The myths held by the west about Africa are mostly founded on misinformation. Voodoo, however, is a dynamic religion with no standardized dogma. Indigenous religions are definitive of the African identity, as African religion and cultures provide the language, the ethos, the knowledge, and the ontology that enable the proper formation of African personhood, communal identity, and values that constitute kernels of African ethnic assemblages. those misconceptions and misrepresentations of the facts pre sented by Eurocent . In fact, the continent is the most diverse in the world. African indigenous religions provide strong linkages between the life of humans and the world of the ancestors. Most of these aids go into building infrastructures like schools and hospitals. Indigenous Bapedi music and oral tradition have been dismissed as myth, superstition and primitive stories. A porous border exists between the human realm and the sky, which belongs to the gods. Traditional African religions are not stagnant but highly dynamic and constantly reacting to various shifting influences such as old age, modernity, and technological advances. 5. Rather, institutional religion continues to grow in relevance and in the national imagination, whether its invocations are part of conversations concerning nation building, Maitatsine and Boko Haram violence, the secularism debate, the Sharia debate, the question of Islamic banking, or the role of the Organization of Islamic Conference. Although the slaves accepted Roman Catholicism, they did not give up their traditional beliefs either. Furthermore the issue of whether ATR should be called in singular or plural is another issue causing problems in the study of african tradional religion. Traditional African religions are not stagnant but highly dynamic and constantly reacting to various shifting influences such as old age, modernity, and technological advances. Igbo religion is traditional according to Mbiti (1970), in the sense that it is rooted in their culture.It is received by oral authority by one generation and transmitted by the same process to subsequent generations and, thus, has effect of being widely diffused among its adherents and of deeply coloring their consciousness. Countries like Senegal, Mali, and Burkina Faso that are close to the Sahara desert have the Sahel climate. The stoning of the devil in the Kaba in Mecca was a disguise for rejecting the local Esu, the Yoruba god of fate and messenger of the gods. In spite of the heuristic value of V. Y. Mudimbes distinction between myth and history in Africa, and by extension the cohesion of oral and written narratives,10 the notion that myth is nonrational and unscientific while history is critical and rational is false. Your email address will not be published. They tend to propagate peaceful coexistence, and they promote good relations with members of other religious traditions that surround them. Portia Zvavahera, Cosmic Prayer, 2019, oil-based printing ink and oil bar on canvas. African cosmogonic narratives posit the creation of a universe and the birth of a people and their indigenous religions. It is incorrect to assume that conversion to Islam or to Christianity dealt a deathblow to indigenous traditions. In my view, these common misconceptions are due to ill representation of the African culture. African Vibes is a one-stop global platform that connects the African diaspora to opportunities for growth, development, and social impact in Africa. For one thing, a sizable number of African myths deal with events considered to have actually happened as narrated by the people themselves or as reformulated into symbolic expressions of historical events. In the lived experiences of the people, there has been much borrowing and interchange, particularly in those places that have a history of peaceful coexistence among diverse religious traditions, as is so among the Yoruba. In many African countries a range of beliefs and attitudes underpin these alternative explanations. The range of African indigenous beliefs and practices has been referred to as African traditional religions in an effort to encompass the breadth and depth of the religious traditions on the continent.2 The diversity of the traditions themselves is tremendous, making it next to impossible for all of them to be captured in a single presentation. So it is the responsibility of the religious leaders in these . Little wonder John Mbiti, a famous African theologian said, Wherever the African is, there is his religion. Each has a life force but no concrete physical form. Common misconceptions of Africa include the idea that it is behind the rest of the world, lacking in innovative technology. Perhaps, it was a deliberate attempt to make Africans feel inferior about themselves. This article is an edited version of remarks he delivered for the annual Surjit Singh Lecture in Comparative Religious Thought and Culture at the Graduate Theological Union on April28, 2020. Voodoo has no scripture or world authority. Later in my academic life, I explored theoretical issues at the national level, showing how Nigerian civil religionan invisible faithprovided a template for assessing how we fared at nation building, allowing the symbols of Nigerian nationhood to take on religious significance for the Nigerian public above and beyond any particular cultural communities of faith.17 I do not want to be misunderstood here. 7. The truth is that people in some African countries lack access to education and resources, but they make the most of what they have. Some of our partners may process your data as a part of their legitimate business interest without asking for consent. Indigenous traditions continue to define the African personality. So, why was it the negative stories about killing of twins that were promoted? There are abundant natural resources scattered across the 54 countries of Africa. Acceptably, this was a cruel act of ignorance, but like many other stories about African countries, this story is often generalized. Africa is the target of western stereotypes. The ability of the Black community to call on the spirits and ways of its ancestors is crucial to its continu Among its one billion inhabitants, more than 1,000 languages are spoken, and there is a massive variety of ethnic religions. A frica has 54 countries and more than a billion people. Perhaps this is linked to the idea that Africa has an inadequate or substandard health care system. Religion creates a significant part of African life. However, African indigenous religion has not only succeeded in domesticating Islam and Christianity; in many instances, it has absorbed aspects of these two other traditions into its cosmology and narrative accounts and practices. There are key developmental projects in some African countries that would not be possible without Foreign aids. Why is this important to our understanding of African indigenous religions? The African religion was condemned by the Early European scholars, travelers, investigators and missionaries. Ifa rejects the religious extremism of certain forms of radical Islam making life unbearable in todays world. Please note: This article was originally published by Oxford University Press on May 16, 2014. The first encounters are fascinating. Now it is our turn to Africanize it.. As many might know, one type of ritualinitiations for adolescent African girlscauses great consternation among Westerners, because these often involve rites like female circumcision or other bodied practices. Catholic moral theologian Laurenti Magesa argues that, unlike clothes, which one can wear and take off, for Africans, religion is like skin that cannot be so easily abandoned.7 Mbiti also captures this unique aspect in the following passage: Because traditional religions permeate all the departments of life, there is no formal distinction between the sacred and the secular, between the religious and non-religious, between the spiritual and the material areas of life. The term "African Traditional Religion" is used in two complementary senses. In my research into Ifa narratives, I showed how, in the Ifa worldview, a traditional banking system was created and made possible when Aje, a Yoruba goddess of wealth, visited Orunmila, god of divination, to seek tips on how to keep robbers from stealing her spurious wealth, for which the added task of securing it was becoming quite burdensome. In this postcolonial period, it has come to be established that there is what we may call . Many African people believe that when a person dies their spirit lives on in the spirit world and that this spirit continues to watch over the living, based on . The diviner, therefore, is also a counselor, psychologist, medicine man or woman, and the spiritual guardian of villages and towns. Given our current impending ecological crisis, indigenous African religions have a great deal to offer both African countries and the world at large. The orthodox Easternize it. Each of the more than 50 modern . Even within a single ethnic group or clan, there are often highly contested and even opposing stories or viewpoints when it comes to creation accounts, thus allowing for flexibility and hermeneutic creativity. The problem is, this number is often collated for the whole of Africa, instead of each country of Africa. There are so many interesting facts about Africa that you dont see every day. .title-desc-wrapper .post-title {display: none !important} God is the first Initiator of a people's way of Life, its tradition. Du Bois argued . They are less concerned with doctrines and much more so with rituals . Space constraints permit me to cite only one example. a. newly birthed babies. The Bambara and Malinke people of Mali believed that the primordial beings were twins. Yet in the scholarship on the history of religions, indigenous African religions were never considered a substantive part of the worlds religious traditions, because they failed to fulfill certain criteria defined by axial age civilization. Privileged European scholars denied the agency of African religions and singled outand thereby controlledAfrican identity. Our parting a week later was hard for him! What is fascinating about this odu (Ifa text) is that it supports a key and cardinal principle of Ifa traditionthat we seek counsel first, before we perform divination (Imoram la nda ki a to da Ifa). Hence, the aforementioned rituals are the entry point not only for an understanding of African tradition and religions but also for the visible manifestations and essence of African religious traditions. 2. Theres a globally shared perspective of Africa being full of diseases. 9. With exception of those who take history classes, the majority of young Africans will fail to elaborately tell the story of their origin. Whatever it is, the assumption that Africa is lacking innovation is laughable. Intentional or not, this interpretation creates a distorted and misconstrued view of Africans by the rest of the world. That is the case concerning issues African Cosmology. Gradually, many Africans began to buy the narrative. In the primordial era, various forms of ethnic indigenous religions spread across the African continent, providing cohesive foundations of nations, peoples, and religious worldviews. 4. Religious contexts are shaped and determined by the identity of these religions. Courtesy of Stevenson, Amsterdam/Cape Town/Johannesburg. Temperature varies from one country to another depending on the climate type. When I was in Israel a few years ago, I stayed in a modest bed-and-breakfast inn near the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. There are quite a number of revival groups and movements whose main aim is to ensure that the tenants and practice of African indigenous religion that are threatened survive. These countries are often very hot. Examples are mobile innovations such as Flutterwave, Sproxil, and Paystack. Similarly, although ancestors dwell inside the earth, their activities also interject into human life, which is why they are referred to as the living dead.13 African cosmologies, therefore, portray the universe as a fluid, active, and impressionable space, with agents from each realm bearing the capabilities of traveling from one realm to another at will. If you take these reports at face value, you may start to believe that all Africans are poor. Her growing fascination led to an Emerson Foundation-funded research project this summer, titled "Demystifying African Religion." But Ifa divination predates Western modernity. Despite the plethora of denominations and sects, African religions continue to be viewed as single entities,3 and their (our) religions are perhaps the least understood facet of African life. His many publications include African Religions: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2014); City of 201 Gods: Il-If in Time, Space, and the Imagination (University of California Press, 2011); and Kingship, Religion, and Rituals in a Nigerian Community: A Phenomenological Study of Ondo Yoruba Festivals (Almqvist & Wiksell, 1991), which has become a model for ethnographic research among Yoruba-speaking communities. This is the popular assumption amongst many African theologians of which Maluleke (1994) is one example. Myth: Slavery in the non-Western world was a mild, benign, and non-economic institution. Similar to other West African communities, the Yoruba did not reject Western modernity but challenged its claim to ontological and epistemological superiority. Second, spirit beings occupy the next tier in the cosmology and constitute a pantheon of deities who often assist the supreme God in performing different functions. Many people have bought into the narrative of African traditional religious beliefs as something untrue and based on delusions, but they have also forgotten that all religions have the same thing in common. It all depends on the time of the year. While those who identify as practitioners of traditional African religions are often in the minority, many who identify as Muslims or Christians are involved in traditional religions to one degree or another. For Ivy Akumu '15, it sparked an interest in the history of Christianity and, by extension, of other religions. So, while Africans easily adopt Western traditions, will the West also be willing to adopt African traditions? Mudimbe's . It is also the most diversified continent in the world. One reason that might account for the gap in African history is the unavailability of any written document. Continue with Recommended Cookies. By Jacob K. Olupona. To each his own. Loosely, it encompasses all African beliefs and practices that are considered religious but neither Christian nor Islamic. Nature spirits are associated with objects seen in nature, such as mountains, the sun, or trees, or natural forces such as wind and rain. This inaccurate assessment of African belief even affects the definition of African religion. A proper ongoing study of Ifa in West Africa would enable us to understand how one groupthe Yoruba of West Africaencounters transcendence and the sacred in practicing their tradition in ways radically different from Western constructions of religion. African countries like Ghana, South Africa, and Kenya are among the fastest-growing economies in the world. Many centuries ago, Ifa must have envisaged the possibility of Boko Harams Islamic extremist movement ravaging Nigeria today. Indigenous religion has always played a pivotal role in the African public sphere, as my study of the Ifa divination system has shown.18 In indigenous religion, communities are governed according to the dictates of the gods, particularly through a divination system such as Fa (Benin) and Ifa (Southwest Nigeria), which encompass the political, social, and economic conditions of life. Beautiful continent was represented as a poor country and one that cant do without the help of year! The consent submitted will only be used for data processing originating from this website denied the agency African... To our understanding of reality and world view, 2014 Ghana, South Africa, Morocco, and are... Traditions and more than a billion people African American culture.21 a cultural that. 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