AFRICAN RELIGIONS

Religions of Southern and East Africa. Religions of West and Central Africa and the Horn of Africa. Religions of North Africa

Three religious forces have helped shape modern Africa. The oldest of these are Africa's indigenous religions. In fact, most of the hundreds of peoples of Africa have their own religious traditions. In some areas, these traditions still predominate. Elsewhere, two more recent arrivals, Christianity and Islam, claim larger followings. However, people who identify themselves as Christians or Muslims often continue to perform more ancient rituals, and African Christianity and Islam, especially south of the Sahara, often incorporate traditional beliefs and practices in a syncretic mix.

Religions of Southern and East Africa

Christianity predominates in much of southern and East Africa.

Religions of West and Central Africa and the Horn of Africa

In the horn of Africa, Ethiopians and Eritreans have practiced a unique form of Christianity for more than 1,600 years, even as surrounding peoples have converted to Islam.

Religions of North Africa

Some 13 centuries ago, Islam spread from the Arabian Peninsula across North Africa. Today the overwhelming majority of North Africans are Sunni Muslims

Dogon Funeral Dance

Wearing elaborate wooden headdresses, Dogon tribesmen in Mali leap in a funeral dance.

African Religions, traditional indigenous (native) religions practiced on the African continent. The phrase African traditional religions risks implying uniformity among African cultures, whereas cultural diversity characterizes the continent. More than 40 modern nations, each with its own particular history, occupy the African continent south of the Sahara. Certain features enable us to distinguish between East and West African religions. These features result from distinctive geographic conditions and long histories of trade and cultural contact within these regions.

Worldview and Divinity

Orisha Oko
This Nigerian figurine depicts Oko, a Yoruba orisha, or deity, associated with farming. The sculpture of a woman with many children symbolizes the fertility of women and the land

Generally speaking, African religions hold that there is one creator god, the maker of a dynamic universe. Finding no outward indications of the worship of a supreme being, early European travelers, missionaries, and explorers dismissed African religions as superstition, animism (attributing a soul to nonliving things, such as trees or rocks), or ancestor worship.

In East Africa, especially the regions around Lakes Malawi, Victoria, and Tanganyika, the supreme god Mulungu is always present but is sought only in prayer of last resort. In the tradition of the Yoruba people of Nigeria, the almighty creator, Olorun, oversees a host of secondary divinities called orisha, with whom worshipers develop a close personal relationship. Nevertheless, an individuals ultimate destiny is considered to have been fixed before birth by Olorun.

Rituals Relating the Human and Divine

African Shaman Divination is one of the main tasks of the shaman.

African religions do not demand adherence to any single doctrine. Their focus is primarily practical: Religious rituals serve as strategies for reinforcing life, fertility, and power. The worship of secondary divinities is evidenced by the many shrines and altars dedicated to them. Worshipers maintain contact and correct relations with these divinities through prayer, offerings and sacrifices, and other rituals. The most dramatic and intimate contact between human being and divinity occurs in the ritual of trance, during which a divine spirit is believed to take possession of the worshiper.

Contact with divinities is not always so direct and often calls for mediators between the human and divine realms.. Heads of lineageslong lines of important ancestors commonly maintain ancestor cults and act on behalf of the community as priests, responsible for sacrifices offered to the spirits of sacred sites or ancestors. Beyond performing ritual operations on behalf of the community, certain priests are invested with powers that identify them more directly with the gods. Other powerful intermediaries between the human and sacred realms are sacred kings.

Diviners function as ritual specialists who have gained mastery of a technique for reading signs that communicate the will of the divinities. Other rituals mark transitions between the stages of life, such as puberty or death, which are coupled with a change in social status, such as child to adult, or member of the community to ancestor.

African myths express values, identify moral standards, and embody profound philosophical reflections. In Africa, knowledge and culture have traditionally been transmitted orally from one generation to the next. The mythology of these oral cultures is embedded within their ritual practices.

Creation and Lifes Purpose

African mythology and ritual commonly depict the cosmos as an entity with human traits. The human body is thought to be modeled on the structure and dynamics of the larger cosmos, incorporating the same essential elements and forces that make up the universe.

Myths about the cosmos explain the origins of creation and offer insight into the nature of reality. They also address the place and purpose of human existence.. The clavicle, or collarbone, is the most important bone in the male skeleton because it resembles a hoe, indicating Gods intention for human beings: to bring together the elements of creation through agricultural labor.

Trickster and Culture Hero

Eshu

This carved wooden staff from West Africa shows the mischievous deity known as Eshu.

The trickster is a type of mythic character prevalent in African mythology. He introduces disorder and confusion into the original divine plan for the world, but in doing so paves the way for a new, more dynamic order. The Yoruba divinity, Eshu, is such a trickster. He disturbs peace, intentionally disrupts harmony among friends, and sows confusion everywhere. African myths thus communicate an important paradox: The cosmos, grounded in a fundamental order given by God, is characterized by constant change and renewal.

Sacred Christian Music of Nigeria Among the Igede people of Nigeria, Christianity has been syncretized with the existing religious belief system.

Today Christianity is widespread in Africa, but until the beginning of the 19th century, efforts to establish the religion in Africa had little success. During the 20th century new religious movements that fused indigenous religious traditions with Christian practices arose in Africa below the Sahara.

Independent and Indigenous Churches

By competing for membership and presenting rival doctrines, Catholic and Protestant churches fostered divisions in African communities and alienated many converts to Christianity. The churches that sprang up stimulated political action and played a significant role in Africas postcolonial struggle for independence. By the late 1990s, more than 15 percent of the total Christian population on the continent belonged to African Independent Churches.

Prophetic and Messianic Movements

Two types of religious movements were behind the independent churches: prophetic and messianic. Christian prophetic movements are organized around an individual who is believed to reveal a message from Godin great contrast to Africas traditional religious systems, which are more typically generated and sustained by the community. Prophets are seen as charged by God with the task of purifying the people and struggling against witchcraft. Public confessions, exorcisms (ridding people of evil spirits), and purifying baptisms are typically dominant features of the movements led by prophets.

NeoNeo-Traditional Movements
Movements described as neo-traditional, by contrast, retain elements of indigenous African beliefs and rituals within the context of Christian practice and teaching. These groups incorporate important aspects of African religious expression, such as the belief in the intervention of ancestral spirits. An example is the Bwiti cult originating with the Fang people of Gabon, which fuses traditional ancestral cults with Christian symbolism, theology, and prophetic leadership by a messiah.

Some scholars interpret the new African religions as protest movements within the struggle for political self-determination and the establishment of independent nations. But the persistence and proliferation of indigenous religions suggests to others that these movements exemplify the characteristic openness in Africa to religious experimentation and renewal. The new religions revive traditional cultural and symbolic forms. Stressing unity across ethnic groups, they appear to enable Africans to accommodate the changing needs of their communities.

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