Religions in Contemporary Africa

An Introduction

Laura S. Grillo, Adriaan van Klinken, Hassan Ndzovu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351260701
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

Religions in Contemporary Africa is an accessible and comprehensive introduction to the three main religious traditions on the African continent, African indigenous religions, Christianity and Islam. The book provides a historical overview of these important traditions and focuses on the roles they play in African societies today. It includes social, cultural and political case studies from across the continent on the following topical issues:

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• Witchcraft and modernity

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• Power and politics

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• Conflict and peace

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• Media and popular culture

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• Development

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• Human rights

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• Illness and health

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• Gender and sexuality

With suggestions for further reading, discussion questions, illustrations and a list of glossary terms this is the ideal textbook for students in religion, African studies and adjacent fields approaching this subject area for the first time.

Part I

Religious Traditions and Trends in Africa

1 African indigenous religions

Problems of terminology and approach

As we begin considering the indigenous religious traditions of Africa, the first order of business is to recognize that scholars and students bring certain assumptions to the study, largely introduced through the terms we use unselfconsciously. Unless we take note of these terms and their nuances, we risk importing distorting biases.

Some literature refers to African Traditional Religion in the singular, often using the abbreviation ATR. Pioneers on the subject, like E. Bọlaji Idowu (1973) and John S. Mbiti (1975), defined the subject in this way. They attempted to consolidate the many diverse traditions on the continent to show them as offering a systematic philosophy that is commensurate with other world religions. Seemingly more intent on fostering respect for Africa than conveying the substance of its religious realities, they emphasized features consistent with Christian doctrine, such as belief in a Supreme Being, and characterized “African Religion” as essentially monotheistic. They also underplayed the degree to which religious identity and ethnicity are inextricably entwined, and the multiplicity of religious ideas and practices on the continent. By contrast, in this chapter, we intentionally refer to African indigenous religions in the plural. Although there are common features or themes among them, Africa’s innumerable traditions demonstrate the tremendous capacity of the religious imagination to create diverse but equally meaningful and effective systems of belief.

The use of the term “traditional” is also problematic. It suggests that African religions are fixed and timeless, or not part of modernity. In reality, African religions are dynamic and reflect the historical circumstances and lived experiences of their practitioners. Moreover, they are still a vital part of contemporary Africa. Therefore we prefer the term “indigenous”.

“Indigenous” refers to that which is original and intrinsic to a place. What is indigenous is local, as opposed to imported or transplanted, foreign, or alien; locality lends a distinctive and deeply rooted character to all that naturally belongs to it. Indigenous does not mean “primitive”, in the sense of crude, rudimentary, undeveloped or unsophisticated. In the past other terms adopted to refer to the local nature of the religions of Africa were tainted by this nuance. “Native” is one of them. It too means, “originating in the place where found”. Narratives of explorers, missionaries and colonialists about “natives”, depicted as unsophisticated and credulous people, created the sense that all things native are necessarily simplistic. Native practices and indigenous traditions are not inferior or embryonic forms of greater ones. Nor are African traditions obsolete and destined to be surpassed. Although some scholars predicted that indigenous religions would disappear in the wake of the impact of so-called world religions and their cosmopolitan influence, history proved them to be wrong. Quite to the contrary, indigenous religions showed themselves to be innovative, adaptive and therefore tenacious (see Chapter 4). The beliefs and values, customs and rituals that have been so critical to the establishment of ethnic identity are as important as ever for establishing a meaningful orientation in an ever-changing world. They continue to inform the contemporary social imaginary. They constitute an active heritage that is self-consciously responsive to history.

What may be most surprising is that another problematic word is “religion”. Scholars of religious studies were slow to acknowledge and classify African indigenous systems of belief and practice as “religion”. They simply did not appear to fit the Western image of what “religion”, conceived as institutionalized doctrine existing apart from the rest of social life, should look like. Criteria that supposedly define religion are absent from African religions:

1. There are no historical founders (like Jesus or the Buddha); instead anonymous ancestors are recognized as the founders and guardians of the moral order.
2. Although there are religious specialists, like priest(esses), diviners and healers, there is no ultimate religious authority (such as the Pope or an Imam) that protects orthodox claims or maintains an exclusive circle of the faithful. The focus of African religions is not doctrine but adherence to communal ritual practice, which favours inclusive participation.
3. There are few permanent structures of worship such as temples, mosques or churches; shrines and altars are typically not imposing or permanent structures.
4. There are no sacred scriptures. Oral literature including mythology, epic tales, praise poetry, and proverbs are integral to African traditions. They relate sacred histories, laud culture heroes, relate critical values and transmit wisdom, but they are first and foremost embodied and performed in ritual contexts.

While the differences of form are significant, rather than disqualifying African traditions because they do not fit the Western category of what religion should look like, it is more profitable to shift the criteria by which we understand the category “religion”. Religions are complex systems of thought and practice that convey foundational ideas in ways that allow adherents to experience them as a compelling ground of being. Instead of asking what religions are, we focus on what religions do: (1) They orient practitioners to what is sacred and significant; (2) they reveal and engage the invisible sources of spiritual power; (3) they distinguish adherents by establishing their unique identity in relation to divinity, and (4) they empower practitioners to act as self-conscious, ethical agents, allowing them to shape and transform their lives in conformity with ultimate values.

Viewing religion as a dynamic and coherent system organized to achieve such ends can make it clear that African indigenous religions are indeed comparable to the so-called world religions. It also allows us to identify common ways of knowing and being without suggesting that Africa’s traditions are all the same. It helps us avoid reifying “religion” as if it were a concrete institution, a thing apart from actual practice or separate from the living cultures in which they are embedded. It underscores that African religions are not fixed or timeless but vital and timely, shaped by experience and history.

Worldly and embodied

It is an often-repeated truism that African religions are pragmatic. Instead of looking forward to meeting God in heaven, devotees call divinity into this world to support them and their community. Rather than promises of rich rewards in the afterlife, the greatest spiritual blessings are this-worldly: health and long life; prosperity and proper social standing; fertility and offspring. African mythologies offer more than imaginative explanations of the world. They are a mode of reflection on its complex dynamics and the place of the human being in it. A Yoruba proverb says, “The world is a marketplace”. It is a crossroads of divine and human activity and a place of constant negotiation. African indigenous religions provide systems of ethical guidance and choice, initiatory insight and teaching, healing and reconciliation. In other words, their complex systems of thought are oriented towards sustaining the human community and supporting its spiritual anchors.

Just as African indigenous religions are worldly, they are also embodied. The physical world is considered a manifestation of the invisible spiritual realm. It may well be that this emphasis on the intrinsic value of the physical world is one of the most distinctive contrasts between the “world religions” in Africa (Christianity and Islam), and indigenous religions. The “religions of the Book” give primacy to time as the sphere in which God is revealed. Their sacred scriptures chronicle human history as a means of tracing God’s presence and knowing the divine will. By contrast, African indigenous religions look to space as the medium of divine revelation. The cosmos and the material world, including the human body, are imbued with significance as the locus of God’s presence and the medium of divine guidance.

Ritual and the visual arts, concretely grounded in space, are therefore foundational to indigenous religions. Altars and power objects, like carved statuettes, do not only represent gods and spirits, but are mediums for making them appear and channel their power. They are not idols or icons, but “the material incarnation of the spirit itself” (Landry 2016, 55). Ritual’s imaginative dynamics appeal to the body to enable participants literally to make sense of themselves and the world, and to situate themselves in it meaningfully (Grillo 2012). African rituals are replete with the sounds of drumming and song, the visual splendour of fantastic costumes, masks, painted bodies, or lavish adornment. Special foods and offerings are shared in feasts, or participants are required to fast. Some rituals inflict pain and permanently mark or transform the bodies of practitioners. African mythologies do not exist as a disembodied corpus, either. Myths are embedded into living practices and transmitted in vibrant spectacles, like masquerades. Through these embodied arts, abstract thought is transformed into tangible, lived experience that makes religious principles vivid and real. They are the means by which they are most effectively transmitted, not as transcendent ideals but as palpable truths and substantial commitments. Ritual is not devoid of thought; it is a form of reflection through bodily ways of knowing.

In what follows, we present some characteristic examples of the material and embodied forms of African religious thought, showing what the traditions do for practitioners and how they achieve the common aims of all religion. While many common ritual practices – like divination or masking – are detailed here, the aim is to show how they fit into an overarching religious system of thought. These practices should not be viewed as entirely separate or unconnected, but as components of an overarching way of understanding the world and being in it.

To orient: God, cosmos and the place of human beings

African cosmologies, myths about the creation of the world, underscore that God and the world exist together inextricably as “the spatio-temporal ‘totality’ of existence” (Wiredu 1998, 29). They resist the idea of a creator who generated the world directly and from nothing (creation ex nihilo). Rather than an abstract being acting outside of creation, God is the matrix of nature, time and space. No one overarching orthodoxy, text or set of mythologies provides this guiding orientation. But the innumerable myths of countless traditions reiterate similar concepts.

The Yoruba peoples of Nigeria are the largest ethnic grouping in that most populous nation in the most densely populated sub-region of West Africa. Yoruba thought maintains that Olodumare, the Supreme Being, is the coordinator of the dynamics of the universe. Invisible and so unfathomable as to be beyond identification with any particular place, Olodumare has no direct cult. By contrast, there are said to be 401 divinities (orisha) in the Yoruba pantheon to whom devotees may turn for spiritual support, a number meant to suggest that the divinities are ubiquitous and everywhere active in human affairs. The first 16 are said to have descended from the sky to the centre of the world to found the holy city, Ile-Ife. The secondary divinities may be local deities and spirits identified with sacred places such as important rivers, or associated with natural phenomena such as thunder. Or they may be deified culture heroes, legendary founders whose acts definitively shaped society. Constantly solicited for personal and collective welfare, their central place in the community is visible in the many shrines and altars consecrated to them.

The Akan peoples of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire call God Nyame, meaning “Absolute satisfier”, or Onyankopon, which means, “One who is alone great” (Wiredu 1998, 29). Such divinity is beyond personification or gender. Proverbs, legends and myths that constitute the body of Akan religious wisdom as it was revealed by the spirits and transmitted by ancestors are encoded in distinct designs of brass weights and figurines. The collection of these emblems, thedja, is wrapped in a package and treated as a sacred relic (Niangoran-Bouah 1973, 211–12). Despite such rich material imagery of spiritual power in Akan tradition, the creator God is never represented concretely. The strong belief that “the one who dwells on high” or “the High One” cannot be represented or contained was also dramatically demonstrated in Southern Africa by the open protest of the Batswana people against the missionaries’ building of the first churches, for “there is no God (Modimo) for whom a house has to be built” (Ntloedibe quoted by Dube 2012, 127).

Early European writers surmised that the absence of a formal cult to the Supreme Being indicated that Africans believed that God was indifferent to the fate of human beings. That claim is clearly belied by the pivotal role that divination plays in African indigenous religions. Among the Yoruba, for example, Olodumare is the ultimate source of every individual’s personal destiny, a path chosen before birth by the human soul. Divination provides the means to remember that destiny and get the spiritual guidance needed to fulfil it. Therefore the goodwill of God is not in doubt. Many African societies tell a strikingly similar, witty tale to explain why a benevolent God is nevertheless remote from human society. In West Africa, the Ashanti say that once the realms of heaven and earth touched, but whenever women pounded yams for food the upward thrust of the pestle knocked against the sky. Constantly annoyed by this, God retreated. Across the continent in East Africa, the Dinka have an almost identical story. Therefore, like the Ashanti, they call on the Creator only at the most dire of moments, turning more regularly to the lesser divinities for daily support. Nevertheless, the Ashanti Supreme Being Nyam is honoured with regular libations.

In many African cosmologies, the fullness of God is represented as a twinned being, simultaneously male and female, united in self-generating force. For the Ga people of Ghana, the name of this Supreme Being is Ataa-NaaNyonmo, or “The Male-Female One” (Oduyoye quoted by Dube 2012, 134). The idea of a dual-gendered God is widespread among Bantu groups in Central and Southern Africa too. Accordingly, Maweja created the world in two successive creations, a rainy season and a dry one, during which male and female beings were fashioned and paired as brother and sister, husband and wife (Mudimbe and Kilonzo 2012, 51). According to the mythology of the Chewa of Malawi, God is both male (in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: Why and how this book helps you understand religions in Africa
• PART I: Religious Traditions and Trends in Africa
• PART II: Topical Issues of Religions in Africa
• Index