The terms 'traditional' and 'religion' (in its singular form) have each been targets of criticism. Thus, it is easy to see why it seems that Africa needs help. 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. I suggest that, at the conceptual and theoretical levels, we begin to take this interpretive approach seriously. The diversity of Native American religions could fill whole libraries with descriptions of belief, tales of lore, definitions, explanations, and insights into spiritual practices and ceremonies. In summary, it is not every part of Africa that is hot. Traditional African religions are less of faith traditions and more of lived traditions. .title-desc-wrapper .view-post {display: none !important} This statement isnt true. It goes a long way to show that information is power and the way a story is told matters a lot. Your email address will not be published. If you take these reports at face value, you may start to believe that all Africans are poor. Religious contexts are shaped and determined by the identity of these religions. Having tried to dispel some of the misconceptions . For African-American parents, transmitting an awareness of cultural values and norms . Gradually, there was a shift from ATR to Christianity. Courtesy Of Stevenson, Amsterdam/Cape Town/Johannesburg. Get it as soon as Wednesday, Oct 26. 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. It is misleading to say "Africa" when speaking about a specific tribe, ethnic group, or country in Africa. Due to the centrality of ancestral tradition to the African lifeworld, death itself is a significant transition from the current life to the afterlife and marks a continuity in life for those living and those to come. Ifas religious thought systemfriendlier to Islam than to Christianitynot only predates Islam but also engages Islam in serious conversation. Little wonder John Mbiti, a famous African theologian said, Wherever the African is, there is his religion. The problem is, this number is often collated for the whole of Africa, instead of each country of Africa. 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. Therefore for these people, twins were treasures. Their many realities that Africans have not been . .entry-morefrom {display: none !important} 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. One reason that might account for the gap in African history is the unavailability of any written document. 13. Once again, this is far from the truth. This is far from the truth. Copyright 2023 President and Fellows of Harvard College. Divination enables us to recognize how indigenous traditions have a foundation upon which knowledge and knowledge production is developed. Advocating for civil religion in a religiously pluralistic society does not require the erasure of conventional religious traditions. Majority of countries on the continent are . A common stereotype about Africa is that the continent is poverty-stricken, full of corruption, and always at war. This corrective scholarship and critical intervention helped to redefine African worldviews and spirituality and, as such, showed how African religion is pivotal to the individual and communal existence of the people. God is the first Initiator of a people's way of Life, its tradition. Slavery and World History. That is the ultimate and absolute being who originated and gives meaning to all existence.9 III. They tend to propagate peaceful coexistence, and they promote good relations with members of other religious traditions that surround them. That is the case concerning issues 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. 2. Information was passed down mostly by oral communication in the form of folk tales. The culture believes and traditions of the people of Africa is vast and should not be oversimplified in a stereotypical way. 1. Each has a life force but no concrete physical form. Africa is host to the highest number of religious countries in the world, according to a recent Gallop poll. On the other hand, we now know from research and archival sources that, by their very nature, sources and records of missionaries, colonial administrators, and indigenous elites, which were preserved by colonial administrations, were equally susceptible to distortion and perforation, having been written from the angle of an invented modernity that the colonizer considered superior to the worldviews of local peoples. There are rituals that celebrate the passage of time and mark time as it passes for the people, orienting them to the seasonal changes, such as the new yam festival and celebration of the old season and beginning of a new one. 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. There are key developmental projects in some African countries that would not be possible without Foreign aids. Also, poverty is mostly concentrated among few nations in Africa or within few regions of each Nation. Though many Africans have converted to Islam and Christianity, traditional religions still inform the social, economic, and political life in African societies. It all depends on the time of the year. 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. Today, several myths are mixed with facts in describing African traditional religion. Her growing fascination led to an Emerson Foundation-funded research project this summer, titled "Demystifying African Religion." Indeed indigenous African religions have provided the blueprint for robust conversations and thinking about community relations, interfaith dialogue, civil society, and civil religion. A primary goal of parenting is to transmit values, beliefs and ideas around lifestyles based on cultural knowledge of the adult tasks and competencies needed for appropriate functioning in society (Gershoff, 2002; Harrison, Wilson, Pine, Chon & Buriel, 1990). Ritual practices are central to the performance of African religion. For instance, the Asante people of Ghana see twins as sacred beings. My essay Om ptadran, an Africanist Griot: Toni Morrison and African Epistemology, Myths, and Literary Culture, in. It is also the most diversified continent in the world. They held the view that twins were a symbol of excessive fertility which is a characteristic of animals. Loosely, it encompasses all African beliefs and practices that are considered religious but neither Christian nor Islamic. African traditional religion (ATRs) and spirituality have always been surrounded by negativity. nanseezy@gmail.com Teaching Assistant, Department of History University of Cape Coast, Ghana "The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward . 7. Representation matters, and as scholars we have a responsibility to advocate for religions in their contexts. Such dismissal has been based on the misconception and assumption that indigenous Bapedi . . Among its one billion inhabitants, more than 1,000 languages are spoken, and there is a massive variety of ethnic religions. Whether these words carry weight or simply make for a good quote, the fact remains that Africans are unique. Temperature varies from one country to another depending on the climate type. Required fields are marked *. 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. However, African traditional religion is resilient which explains its continued existence after so many years. Please allow a few minutes for this process to complete. 8. I did ancestry and, This is the genuine list of best African president. However, the Efik people of Calabar were not the only ones who believed twin children were an abomination. Your email address will not be published. Each of these has its peculiar characteristics. a. newly birthed babies. When Christianity and Western civilization came and interacted with African culture and religion, misconception of beliefs, values, and terms developed. Today as a minority tradition, indigenous African religions have suffered immensely from human rights abuses. This article analyses the legal processes of recognising customary and religious (Muslim) marriages in South Africa's constitutional democracy. As Jaco Beyers puts it, the African understanding of religion is an understanding of the connectedness of all things. Some biblical cosmological narratives have parallels in African cosmogony, for example, when the Supreme Being summons the hosts of heaven and declares to them, Come let us make man in our own image. This same script appears in the creation of the Yoruba world, when Olodumare designates to the Orisa (deities), the job of creating the universe. African religions should be studied on their own terms, examined through their own frames rather than set in a Judeo-Christian framework. There are abundant natural resources scattered across the 54 countries of Africa. African spirituality more generallyand Nigerian spirituality in particularis shaped by how individuals in their daily existence make sense of their interactions with religious experience. This article was originally published by Oxford University Press on May 16, 2014. Such scholars stereotyped African religionand African peoples themselvesas primitive social forms, part of a lower social order. The majority of Africans are hardworking and honest people. Most importantly, the rite itself should not be condemned together with circumcision or female genital mutilation. 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. 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. Africa is often seen as a poor Country and one that cant do without the help of the western world. Foreign aid has been helpful to many small African countries that are struggling economically. Therefore, this article will explore African spirituality, traditional religion, culture and the present way of life. 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. 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. The myths held by the west about Africa are mostly founded on misinformation. By Jacob K. Olupona. First, there is a supreme being who created the universe and every living and nonliving thing to be found within the universe. 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). Courtesy of Stevenson, Amsterdam/Cape Town/Johannesburg. So, why was it the negative stories about killing of twins that were promoted? African religions command their own cultural ingenuity, integral logic, and authoritative force. Africans are eager to learn new skills and embrace new technologies. Kofi Johnson Fayetteville State University kjohnson@uncfsu.edu. Especially if you have never been to Africa. Although it is difficult to generalize about African traditional cosmology and worldviews, a common denominator among them is a three-tiered model in which the human world exists sandwiched between the sky and the earth (including the underworld)a schema that is not unique to Africa but is found in many of the worlds religious systems as well. MISCONCEPTION OF THE SUPREM BEING IN ATR There have been widespread misconceptions about the African Traditional Religion (hereinafter ATR). 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. So it is the responsibility of the religious leaders in these . 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. Because religion is a way of life, it relates to culture and society as they affect the worldview of the African people. Although many African languages do not have a word for religion as such, it nevertheless accompanies the individual from long before his birth to long after his physical death. For example, in my local language . There is a general misconception that the entire people of North Africa speak Arabic. Compared to most patriarchal traditions, where womens participation and roles are curtailed, African religions attitude toward gender inclusion is unique. Through modern change these traditional religions cannot remain intact, but they are by no means extinct. . Elders, priests, and priestesses have served as guardians of the sacred traditions. South Africa, Tunisia, and Kenya rank among the top countries with the best health care system in Africa. It is a well-known fact that religion continues to play a central and vital role in the lives of African people. Portia Zvavahera, His Presence, 2013, oil-based printing ink on paper. These elements are worth exploring and espousing. .p-summary {display: none !important} 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. 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. It is a well-known fact that religion continues to play a central and vital role in the lives of African people. It is incorrect to assume that conversion to Islam or to Christianity dealt a deathblow to indigenous traditions. The oral nature of these traditions allows for a great deal of adaptability and variation within and between indigenous African religions. It arose through a process of syncretism between several traditional religions of West and Central Africa and Roman Catholicism.There is no central authority in control of the religion and much diversity exists among practitioners, who are known as Vodouists, Vodouisants, or Serviteurs. Each transition has a function within the society. Traditional African religions are not stagnant but highly dynamic and constantly reacting to various shifting influences such as old age, modernity, and technological advances. ao Ajima OM, Ubana EU (2018) The Concept . It is the foundation on which the morals of pre-colonial Africa were built. 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