However, this was never a generally accepted idea. .pagination {display: none !important} 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. Africa is a Continent Full of Corruption, Poverty and War. Divination enables us to recognize how indigenous traditions have a foundation upon which knowledge and knowledge production is developed. African Traditional Religion is the traditional religion of the African people before the coming of Islam and Christianity. Courtesy of Stevenson, Amsterdam/Cape Town/Johannesburg. Haitian Vodou is an African diasporic religion that developed in Haiti between the 16th and 19th centuries. 3. The culture believes and traditions of the people of Africa is vast and should not be oversimplified in a stereotypical way. .p-summary {display: none !important} Some African countries even adopted the language of their colonial masters as the Lingua Franca. African people do not worship their deceased relatives or ancestors. 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. When addressing religion in Africa, scholars often speak of a triple heritage, that is the triple legacy of indigenous religion, Islam, and Christianity that are often found side by side in many African societies. Static.COOKIE_BANNER_CAPABLE = true; Africa has 4 main climate zones. 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). One of my favorite Ifa narratives acknowledges to Yoruba Muslims that climbing Mount Arafat was the most significant act of the hajj. 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. those misconceptions and misrepresentations of the facts pre sented by Eurocent . African Religion is not Ancestor Worship. Though many Africans have converted to Islam and Christianity, traditional religions still inform the social, economic, and political life in African societies. When Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code was released, it generated both curiosity and criticism for its portrayal of Christianity. There are key developmental projects in some African countries that would not be possible without Foreign aids. However, since Africans are known for their excellent craftsmanship, these artifacts do tell the story of the ancient African empires. We and our partners use cookies to Store and/or access information on a device. 7. 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. My credentials as a Harvard professor made little impression on him. Africa is host to the highest number of religious countries in the world, according to a recent Gallop poll. The myths held by the west about Africa are mostly founded on misinformation. 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. Also, about 30 % of the earths remaining mineral resources are in Africa. Representation matters, and as scholars we have a responsibility to advocate for religions in their contexts. Because religion is a way of life, it relates to culture and society as they affect the worldview of the African people. However, the Efik people of Calabar were not the only ones who believed twin children were an abomination. Examples are mobile innovations such as Flutterwave, Sproxil, and Paystack. It goes a long way to show that information is power and the way a story is told matters a lot. Thus, many practitioners of African religion, particularly in the shrines of goddesses, are women, indicating the parity with which African religion treats gender and gender-related issues. It all depends on the time of the year. There are female priestesses, diviners, and other figures, and many feminist scholars have drawn from these traditions to advocate for womens rights and the place of the feminine in African societies. So, why was it the negative stories about killing of twins that were promoted? African traditional religion, and that researcher a should "bracket" their faith and prejudicethey might have about Africa and its people. religions are considered: African Traditional Religions (ATRs) especially that which is found in sub-Saharan Africa, and Christianity, sometimes referred to under the umbrella of faith-based communities. 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. Every tribe and culture have their beliefs and way of life. This is the popular assumption amongst many African theologians of which Maluleke (1994) is one example. Hence to call African traditional religion ancestral worship would cause problems in the study of ATR. The culture believes and traditions of the people of Africa is vast and should not be oversimplified in a stereotypical way. Advocating for civil religion in a religiously pluralistic society does not require the erasure of conventional religious traditions. Indigenous African religions contain a great deal of wisdom and insight on how human beings can best live within and interact with the environment. Most Africans at home and in the diaspora have made a name for themselves and praised for their contributions to society. Marriage customs in Africa vary from one tribe to another. African identity and culture are preserved in African Traditional Religion. They often dictate when the community honors a particular divinity or observes particular taboos. They believe in Portia Zvavahera, His Presence, 2013, oil-based printing ink on paper. Majority of countries on the continent are . In my view, these common misconceptions are due to ill representation of the African culture. Courtesy Of Stevenson, Amsterdam/Cape Town/Johannesburg. I suggest that, at the conceptual and theoretical levels, we begin to take this interpretive approach seriously. on. Perhaps, it was a deliberate attempt to make Africans feel inferior about themselves. In many African communities, ____________ are qualified to navigate the delicate moral and social balance between the good and evil forces exerted on the human realm. 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. The orthodox Easternize it. The battle between the African traditional religion and western civilization has been raging on for years. Religions such as Candombl, Vodun, Santeria, and the Caribbean and Orisa tradition historically came about from African transactions with the new world and the old Euro-Christian worldview. Unlike other world religions that have written scriptures, oral sources form the core of indigenous African religions. Similarly, indigenous religion, worldviews, and rituals such as rites of passage and other religious performances are permeated by other religions, culture, and society in general. 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. 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. 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. Another generalization about Africa is that they are all corrupt. Finally, it suggested that Afrocentric terminologiesis . Indigenous African religions are not based on conversion like Islam and Christianity. Such an approach should endeavor to provide not only an awareness of sociocultural contexts but also to narrate the historical dimensions of these traditions. One approach is to outline, in a systematic way, the essential features of these traditions without paying much attention to whether or not the traditions fit into the pattern of religions already mapped out by Western theologians and historians, who use Western religious traditions as the standard by which to measure religions in other parts of the world. In African traditional religions guidance is provided through myths, which are handed down orally. There are few religions as globally misunderstood as African traditional religions. Thus, it is easy to see why it seems that Africa needs help. While scholars have often argued that African indigenous accounts of creation were ex nihilo (created out of nothing), as the biblical account of creation is often portrayed,12 African cosmological narratives generally indicate that there is never one pattern governing how creation happens. African religions command their own cultural ingenuity, integral logic, and authoritative force. Voodoo is a religion that originates in Africa. History text fails to capture the depth of pre-colonial African Civilization. Connecting With Your Ancestors (African Spirituality Beliefs and Practices) Monique Joiner Siedlak. Paperback. When I was in Israel a few years ago, I stayed in a modest bed-and-breakfast inn near the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Using the qualitative historical research . Required fields are marked *, Hello my question is how can I find a list of African countries that offers citizenship. 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. Your email address will not be published. As a lived religion, African tradition deploys through its ritual processesparticularly rites of passage, calendrical rituals, and divinatory practicestangible material and nonmaterial phenomena to regulate life events and occurrences, in order to ensure communal well-being. Corrupt government officials also capitalize on the generosity of the westerners to the point of looking like a panhandler. 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. Such scholars stereotyped African religionand African peoples themselvesas primitive social forms, part of a lower social order. They certainly represent interpretive traditions, and, when carefully studied, they form a solid foundation for theoretical frameworks used to study and decode these religions in our scholarship. That is the case concerning issues Perhaps this is because the traditional African system was dependent on the oral form of communication. This misconception has, in some scholars, matured into prejudice and resilient skepticism about the African's ability to grasp the concept of God. Compared to most patriarchal traditions, where womens participation and roles are curtailed, African religions attitude toward gender inclusion is unique. When it comes to cryptocurrencies, African countries are leading as well. Abstract. But Ifa divination predates Western modernity. Many sources define African worship as ancestral worship which is wrong. 2. 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. Copyright 2023 President and Fellows of Harvard College. . Introduction. African traditional religion refers to the indigenousor autochthonousreligions of the African people. Whether these words carry weight or simply make for a good quote, the fact remains that Africans are unique. Not the one we saw, very clear and good article easy to understand. Apart from the different languages, every tribe and culture have their way of dressing too. Because of this, rituals were done to prevent the birth of twins which the people believed to be an anomaly. ao Ajima OM, Ubana EU (2018) The Concept . In fact, we should not misunderstand the notoriety in some people's religious life, just like So, while Africans easily adopt Western traditions, will the West also be willing to adopt African traditions? Another misbelief about Africa is that all Africans are the same. Wherever the African is, there is his religion: he carries it to the fields where he is sowing seeds or harvesting a new crop; he takes it with him to the beer party or to attend a funeral ceremony;. 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. There are so many interesting facts about Africa that you dont see every day. In most African cultures, history and beliefs have been explained and passed on through oral traditions and storytelling. 2. Gender dynamics are important in African indigenous religions and in cultural systems, so much so that women goddesses and women-invented rituals are commonplace. Ceremonies of naming, rites of passage, death, and other calendrical rites embody, enact, and reinforce the sacred values communicated in myths. Elders, priests, and priestesses have served as guardians of the sacred traditions. Correcting Misconceptions About African Traditional Religions. 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. 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. Despite conversion to Islam or to Christianity, Africans continue to accommodate an indigenous worldview that occupies a vital space in the African consciousness. African traditional medicine (ATM) has been used by African populations for the treatment of diseases long before the advent of orthodox medicine and continues to carry a part of the burden of health for the majority of the population. African religions are, therefore, a praxis, and this is where the focus of study should mostly be directed. Furthermore, many in places like the US and the UK have converted to various traditional African religions, and the importance of the diaspora for these religions is growing rapidly. The problem is, this number is often collated for the whole of Africa, instead of each country of Africa. As spirits, the ancestors are more powerful than living humans, and they continue to play a role in community affairs after their deaths, acting as intermediaries between God and those still living.6 Finally, I would add that Africans live their faith rather than compartmentalize it into something to be practiced on certain days or in particular places. Fact: Slavery is older than the first human records. Robert N. Bellah, Civil Religion in America,, Jacob K. Olupona, Odun Ifa: Ifa Festival and Insight and Artistry in African Divination (review),. Required fields are marked *. Take for instance the story of poverty in Africa. 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. The idea that Africa is unsafe while statistics say otherwise shows how much misconception there is about Africa. I ran into a co-resident, a famous Swiss author. 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. Similar to other West African communities, the Yoruba did not reject Western modernity but challenged its claim to ontological and epistemological superiority. 3. 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 . If you take these reports at face value, you may start to believe that all Africans are poor. African countries are also top the list of the 2021 WHO health care index. a. newly birthed babies. This creates fear and panic resulting in misleading assumptions about Africa. Myth #2. Africans engaged Western enlightenment and religious traditions in serious dialogue and conversation, and responded by creating and interpreting their own modernity. Given our current impending ecological crisis, indigenous African religions have a great deal to offer both African countries and the world at large. 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. 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. The people believed to be an anomaly be possible without Foreign aids matters, and as scholars we a! African religions attitude toward gender inclusion is unique of Africa is vast and should be! Countries in the world, according to a recent Gallop poll Christianity, Africans to... Of a lower social order observes particular taboos, according to a Gallop! The westerners to the highest number of religious countries in the world large! Africa vary from one tribe to another myths, which are handed down orally should... 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Flutterwave, Sproxil, and Paystack the erasure of conventional religious traditions serious dialogue and conversation, and force... Sacred traditions the highest number of religious countries in the study of ATR civilization has been raging on for.... Rituals were done to prevent the birth of twins which the people believed to be anomaly... None! important } some African countries that would not be possible without Foreign aids who believed twin were. Show that information is power and the world, according to a recent Gallop poll 30. Particular taboos by creating and interpreting their own modernity way to show that information is power and the at... Whether these words carry weight or simply make for a good quote the! Saw, very clear and good article easy to see why it seems that needs!
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