Please note: In times of crisis they often come to the surface, or people revert to them in secret.8. We and our partners use cookies to Store and/or access information on a device. These can be found all over the Americas and Europe. There is a common saying in Africa Dont forget where you come from. In my work, I consider civil religion in Nigeria as a central galvanizing feature that brings together different aspects of religious beingness under the banner of sacred kingship. For instance, the Asante people of Ghana see twins as sacred beings. .entry-morefrom {display: none !important} Ironically, this pivotal source of knowledge and spiritual edificethat modern-day Yoruba reject as constituting paganismis the cornerstone of global Orisa traditions in Brazil, Cuba, and the Caribbean. Header Photo:Traditional African Necklace Photo: Wikimedia Commons, Copyright 2016-2022, The Interfaith Observer | Site by FaithlabTIO is part of the Religica Theolab inside the Center for Ecumenical and Interreligious Engagement (CEIE) at Seattle University, Donna Bollinger Tapped to Lead Religions for Peace-USA, Interfaith Themes in Sub-Saharan African Tales (for Kids), Interreligious Literacy and Why It Matters, Religious Literacy & the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Thou Shalt Not Hate: The Role of Religious Actors in Addressing Hate Speech, When Wiccans & Evangelical Christians Become Friends, The Interfaith Rainforest Initiative: A Case Study of Religious Literacy, The Chinese Jews of Kaifeng (and what Ive learned from them), Reimagining Interfaith: Taking Our Lead from Kids. However, western culture has blurred to an extent the lines between African tribes. Africa has 4 main climate zones. An example of data being processed may be a unique identifier stored in a cookie. African Traditional Religion is the traditional religion of the African people before the coming of Islam and Christianity. This is based on misconceptions that these religions are antithetical to modernity. Each of these has its peculiar characteristics. These traditions have been passed from one generation to the next. b. certain clan outsiders. For many Africans, religion is a way of life that can never be separated from the public sphere, but instead informs everything in traditional African society, including politics, art, marriage, health, diet, dress, economics, and death. Having tried to dispel some of the misconceptions . 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. When Christianity and Western civilization came and interacted with African culture and religion, misconception of beliefs, values, and terms developed. In the Americas and the Caribbean, it is thought to be a combination of various African, Catholic and Native American traditions. Fact: Slaves were always subject to torture, sexual exploitation, and arbitrary . When it comes to cryptocurrencies, African countries are leading as well. African indigenous religions provide strong linkages between the life of humans and the world of the ancestors. There are many female goddesses along with their male counterparts. . The Trans-Atlantic slave trade led to the growth of African-inspired traditions in the Americas such as Candombl in Brazil, Santera in Cuba, or Vodun in Hati. Thus, it is easy to see why it seems that Africa needs help. Haitian Vodou is an African diasporic religion that developed in Haiti between the 16th and 19th centuries. However, some African nations have become addicted to these aids and seem unable to function without them. Another generalization about Africa is that they are all corrupt. African Cosmology. History text fails to capture the depth of pre-colonial African Civilization. Through a profound process of orality, Ifa as an interpretive tradition espouses an epistemology, metaphysics, morality, and a set of ethical principles and political ideology. It should be noted that any attempt to generalize about the nature of "African religions" risks wrongly implying that there is homogeneity among all African cultures. First, there is a supreme being who created the universe and every living and nonliving thing to be found within the universe. Religion creates a significant part of African life. The culture believes and traditions of the people of Africa is vast and should not be oversimplified in a stereotypical way. Du Bois argued . African Religion is not Ancestor Worship. This was amazingly written. African traditional religion, and that researcher a should "bracket" their faith and prejudicethey might have about Africa and its people. The unending political banditry and fraudulent activities by some individuals are the foundation of this stereotype. Without relevant knowledge, stereotypes are unavoidable. Common misconceptions of Africa include the idea that it is behind the rest of the world, lacking in innovative technology. 3. This lack of knowledge as well as understanding of essentials has led to burgeoning of myths on African . Hence to call African traditional religion ancestral worship would cause problems in the study of ATR. It was just the belief of a few groups of people known as Efik people, the predominant tribe in Calabar. It is a well-known fact that religion continues to play a central and vital role in the lives of African people. Myth 3: Africa Is Lacking Innovation. Each ceremony denotes passage from one social status to another and is an opportunity to celebrate the initiates on their journey. 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 article was originally published by Oxford University Press on May 16, 2014. African cosmogonic narratives posit the creation of a universe and the birth of a people and their indigenous religions. The majority of Africans are hardworking and honest people. Myths, folklores proverbs therefore become the major sources of African philosophy (Jaja, 1995:28). Depending on the kind of religious activity being performed, different religious authorities can be leaders for specific events. Women constitute a sizable number of the devotees of these traditions, just as they do in Islam and Christianity. Take for instance the story of poverty in Africa. African traditional religion refers to the indigenousor autochthonousreligions of the African people. 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. John Mbiti, chap. Ritual practices are central to the performance of African religion. Courtesy Of Stevenson, Amsterdam/Cape Town/Johannesburg. Myth #2. All Religions has truth hidden in them for those who objectively seek them through the path of the religion. Africa is not homogenous. A porous border exists between the human realm and the sky, which belongs to the gods. This is an incorrect representation of the continent that is so vast and with diverse political, social and economic differences. African Traditional Religions (ATRs) will be discussed within the context of which it belongs to, the African traditional life (ATL). Again, this isnt true. .title-desc-wrapper .view-post {display: none !important} That is the ultimate and absolute being who originated and gives meaning to all existence.9 III. Before colonization, marriages were strictly traditional and depends on the customs, traditions, and believes of, Africa is a beautiful continent. I suggest that, at the conceptual and theoretical levels, we begin to take this interpretive approach seriously. In fact, the continent is the most diverse in the world. While some countries are hot most of the year, other countries experience different types of weather. Thank you. In Africa, dance is a means of marking life experiences, encouraging abundant crops, honoring kings and queens, celebrating weddings, marking rites of passage, and other ceremonial occasions.Dance is also done purely for enjoyment. Based on sacred narratives, these traditions espoused their unique worldviews, defining cosmologies, ritual practices, sociopolitical frameworks, and ethical standards, as well as social and personal identity. Post-colonial Africa is yet to be completely free from the mental slavery and stereotype created by the colonial masters. During the era of Western religious and cultural encounters in Yorubaland, some children were named Oguntoyibo, signifying Ogun (god of war and iron) is as powerful as the European god. Some children received names such as Ifatoyinbo, Ifa is as powerful as the white mans god. Such names and concepts illustrate the force and creative resistance of indigenous thought and its ability to engage Western modernity in rigorous debate. 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. Information was passed down mostly by oral communication in the form of folk tales. Not the one we saw, very clear and good article easy to understand. They are less concerned with doctrines and much more so with rituals . Ceremonies of naming, rites of passage, death, and other calendrical rites embody, enact, and reinforce the sacred values communicated in myths. John Mbiti, a prominent Christian theologian from Kenya who helped debunk entrenched ideas that traditional African religions were primitive, giving them equal weight with major . Whatever it is, the assumption that Africa is lacking innovation is laughable. 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. Ifas religious thought systemfriendlier to Islam than to Christianitynot only predates Islam but also engages Islam in serious conversation. For example, in many African cultures, intending couples MUST perform both traditional and white weddings. Traditional African religions are less of faith traditions and more of lived traditions. Thank you for this interesting essay on African religion. d. politics, everyday life. The colonial masters brought with them a new religion which they believe to be superior to African traditional religion. 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 African roots of Voodoo may stretch back over 6000 years, making it one of the world's oldest ancestral traditions. Africans combine a belief in the existence of a omnipresent and omnipotent supreme god, with multitudes of subordinate deities. Each of the more than 50 modern . African spirituality more generallyand Nigerian spirituality in particularis shaped by how individuals in their daily existence make sense of their interactions with religious experience. Why is this important to our understanding of African indigenous religions? Mostly, the temperatures of these zones vary between the extremes (Either very hot or very cold). Among its one billion inhabitants, more than 1,000 languages are spoken, and there is a massive variety of ethnic religions. Like Mbiti and Green, Magesa notes that the world of African Traditional Religion is a hierarchically ordered place where, God is seen as the Great ancestor, the first Founder and the Progenitor, the Giver of Life behind everything that exists. Women play a key role in the practice of these traditions, and the internal gender relations and dynamics are very profound. The Hausa man is different from the Igbo man who is also different from the Yoruba man. Since growth and innovation come as a pair, it is impossible to say that African countries are growing without being innovative. Although the slaves accepted Roman Catholicism, they did not give up their traditional beliefs either. The cosmological structure, however, is much more defined and precise. African dance occupies central place in cultures throughout the African continent, embodying energy and a graceful beauty flowing with rhythm. Traditional African religions are less of faith traditions and more of lived traditions. The most difficult task I face in characterizing African indigenous spiritual traditions is accounting for their diversity and complexity. Introduction. Fact: Slavery is older than the first human records. 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. Long before the arrival of Christianity and Islam, Africans practiced African traditional religion (ATR). Initially, Christian missionaries and propagators of Islam assumed that indigenous religion would eventually fizzle out, while Islam and Christianity would dominate the African religious scene. Courtesy of Stevenson, Amsterdam/Cape Town/Johannesburg. While some Christian mission historians, such as J. D. Y. Peel, for example, correctly argue that the Yoruba had their own enlightenment (Olaju), this is always presented in the context of Christian conversion and is very much tied to the escalating Christian missionary movement. 4. When I was in Israel a few years ago, I stayed in a modest bed-and-breakfast inn near the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The reason is partly that they want a time when, Your email address will not be published. Understanding African Traditional Religion. For African-American parents, transmitting an awareness of cultural values and norms . Most of these aids go into building infrastructures like schools and hospitals. Colonization may seem to be over but for African traditional religion, it is not. African traditional religious beliefs in East Africa. The consent submitted will only be used for data processing originating from this website. As the late African historian Cheikh Anta Diop argued, matriarchy was embedded in the African way of life. Divination enables us to recognize how indigenous traditions have a foundation upon which knowledge and knowledge production is developed. Even the word religion, used in reference to these traditions, is in itself problematic for many Africans, because it suggests that religion is separate from other aspects of ones culture, society, and environment. And why should our work in critical theory not begin from indigenous hermeneutics before we invoke Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, or Jrgen Habermas as platforms for interpreting our own worldview and society? As with myths the world over, African mythology includes multiple, often contradictory, versions of the same event. Africa is given the image of a place that is hot and sunny all year round. War in Africa, either political or religious is mostly isolated cases. 3. 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. Published. Because religion is a way of life, it relates to culture and society as they affect the worldview of the African people. It deals with their cosmology, ritual practices, symbols, arts, society, and so on. Lets take the killing of twins as a case study. .pagination {display: none !important} Written by: Lloyd Jarrison; 0083985 MSA Global School of Theology Abstract The principal objective of this paper is to demonstrate the ability, success, and penetrative principles that have seen a tremendous growth in African Pentecostal Christianity. Robert N. Bellah, Civil Religion in America,, Jacob K. Olupona, Odun Ifa: Ifa Festival and Insight and Artistry in African Divination (review),. Given our current impending ecological crisis, indigenous African religions have a great deal to offer both African countries and the world at large. During the colonial era, most of these traditional believes became a target of the colonial religion. Because of this, rituals were done to prevent the birth of twins which the people believed to be an anomaly. 2. African countries are also top the list of the 2021 WHO health care index. We must be careful not to give the impression that African religious lives are compartmentalized into what is often called the triple heritage (Islam, Christianity, and African traditional religion). That is why we have freewill, and regardless of whether we choose to acknowledge that a living God exists or not, and regardless of how we choose to worship Him, directly or through deities, we will all be eventually accountable. 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. Africa is poor. Abstract. Apart from a few instances in West Africa, where women actually ruled as kings, the designation queen was not often used in isolation from the position itself (which was defined in male terms). Perhaps this is because the traditional African system was dependent on the oral form of communication. traditional African takes the character of critical reflection of the African understanding of reality and world view. The ability of the Black community to call on the spirits and ways of its ancestors is crucial to its continu That is the case concerning issues Many sources define African worship as ancestral worship which is wrong. In one particular odu of Ifa, Ifa informs us and, correctly so, that the most cardinal event of the hajj is the climbing of Mount Arafat (Oke Arafa). Representation matters, and as scholars we have a responsibility to advocate for religions in their contexts. 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.