These leaders through greed and corruption ruin the image of their countries. African Cosmology. Whether it is being wrongly labelled voodoo, juju or witchcraft, indigenous African faith systems tend to be associated with darkness, animal and human sacrifices, violence and general backwardness. 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. Our parting a week later was hard for him! 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. 53 offers from $9.56. 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. 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;. The survey appears to support the prevailing narrative that the most . Each has a life force but no concrete physical form. In the primordial era, various forms of ethnic indigenous religions spread across the African continent, providing cohesive foundations of nations, peoples, and religious worldviews. Igbo religion is traditional according to Mbiti (1970), in the sense that it is rooted in their culture.It is received by oral authority by one generation and transmitted by the same process to subsequent generations and, thus, has effect of being widely diffused among its adherents and of deeply coloring their consciousness. These elements are worth exploring and espousing. For example, James George Frazer (18541941) and Edward B. Tylor (18321917) classified indigenous religious practices of natives not as universally religious or generative of religious cultures but as forms of primitive religion or magic arising from the lower of three stages of human progress. John Mbiti, chap. 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. In the Americas and the Caribbean, it is thought to be a combination of various African, Catholic and Native American traditions. 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). I ran into a co-resident, a famous Swiss author. They are less concerned with doctrines and much more so with rituals . A frica has 54 countries and more than a billion people. The most difficult task I face in characterizing African indigenous spiritual traditions is accounting for their diversity and complexity. Perhaps this is linked to the idea that Africa has an inadequate or substandard health care system. Without relevant knowledge, stereotypes are unavoidable. Continue with Recommended Cookies. Second, spirit beings occupy the next tier in the cosmology and constitute a pantheon of deities who often assist the supreme God in performing different functions. Religions of the African diaspora are of particular note and importance to the comparative study of African religions because of their resilience and the characteristic formations leading to their performance and expression. The African religious worldview is primarily indigenous, although Islam and Christianity continuously respond to its viability and strength through their transitive approaches, their theologies, and their knowledge systems. Majority of countries on the continent are . Unlike the Christian community, recited stories of creation are not performed by a single God, who ordered, by fiat, the creation of the universe with mere spoken words. .title-desc-wrapper .view-post {display: none !important} Indigenous traditions, however, did not capitulate to these forms, but, rather, creatively domesticated the new faiths, absorbing new rituals and tenets into their own belief systems and responding to the exogenous modernity in its wake. For one thing, a sizable number of African myths deal with events considered to have actually happened as narrated by the people themselves or as reformulated into symbolic expressions of historical events. 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. African religions command their own cultural ingenuity, integral logic, and authoritative force. . The Hausa man is different from the Igbo man who is also different from the Yoruba man. Take for instance the story of poverty in Africa. those misconceptions and misrepresentations of the facts presented by Eurocentric scholars. 7. Truly opening my eyes on traditions, cultures and rituals that I did not know existed. Regardless of where they find themselves, most Africans will always hold onto some form of their tradition, culture, and religion. Published. Africa is poor. Perhaps its the abundant wildlife, scorching deserts, or the vast uninhabited plainlands. African Religion is not Ancestor Worship. Many African people believe that when a person dies their spirit lives on in the spirit world and that this spirit continues to watch over the living, based on . 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. Many foreign nations and organizations do send aid to African countries. When Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code was released, it generated both curiosity and criticism for its portrayal of 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. Most Africans at home and in the diaspora have made a name for themselves and praised for their contributions to society. These one-sided stories or reports are among the major roots of stereotypes and myths about Africa. For example, in many African cultures, intending couples MUST perform both traditional and white weddings. Myth 3: Africa Is Lacking Innovation. .pagination {display: none !important} No. 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. Connecting With Your Ancestors (African Spirituality Beliefs and Practices) Monique Joiner Siedlak. I did ancestry and, This is the genuine list of best African president. The absence of centralized and unified cosmologies indicates the multifaceted nature of African religious life and worldviews. Indeed indigenous African religions have provided the blueprint for robust conversations and thinking about community relations, interfaith dialogue, civil society, and civil religion. African traditional religions are structured very differently from Western religions in that there is relatively little formal structure. That is the case concerning issues The challenge is to study faith, proverbs, traditions and mythology across Africa to identify the fragments of religion passed down as oral traditions and mythology in the great . In most African cultures, history and beliefs have been explained and passed on through oral traditions and storytelling. African Traditional Religion is the traditional religion of the African people before the coming of Islam and Christianity. All over the continent, cosmological myths describe a complicated process, whether the universe evolves from preexisting objects or from Gods mere thought or speech. What we know as African history today is mostly based on the interpretations of our colonial masters. Africans are eager to learn new skills and embrace new technologies. The problem is, this number is often collated for the whole of Africa, instead of each country of Africa. Bolaji Idowu, John Mbiti, Wande Abimbola, Benjamin Ray, Gabriel Setiloane, Laura Grillo, Aloysius Lugira, Kofi Asare Opoku, Emefie Ikenga-Metuh, Charles Long, and others attempted to imbue African traditions with the vitality, status, and identity that is now finally recognized. Correcting Misconceptions About African Traditional Religions. 9 years ago. 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. Rather, institutional religion continues to grow in relevance and in the national imagination, whether its invocations are part of conversations concerning nation building, Maitatsine and Boko Haram violence, the secularism debate, the Sharia debate, the question of Islamic banking, or the role of the Organization of Islamic Conference. Therefore for these people, twins were treasures. It is the foundation on which the morals of pre-colonial Africa were built. Especially if you have never been to Africa. A 1685 law, for instance, prohibited the practice of African religions, and required all masters to Christianize their slaves within eight days of their arrival in Haiti. Acceptably, this was a cruel act of ignorance, but like many other stories about African countries, this story is often generalized. The diviner, therefore, is also a counselor, psychologist, medicine man or woman, and the spiritual guardian of villages and towns. About | Commentary Guidelines | Harvard University Privacy | Accessibility | Digital Accessibility | Trademark Notice | Reporting Copyright Infringements Loosely, it encompasses all African beliefs and practices that are considered religious but neither Christian nor Islamic. the belief that natural objects and natural phenomenon possess souls or spiritual beings. Therefore, this article will explore African spirituality, traditional religion, culture and the present way of life. 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). Misconception 1: "Entire North Africa natively speaks Arabic.". 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. This statement isnt true. It was just the belief of a few groups of people known as Efik people, the predominant tribe in Calabar. Symbolic and mythic narratives may exist side by side with narratives of legends in history that bear similar characteristics with motifs and events of creation or coming to birth. See Luc De Heusch, What Shall We Do with the Drunken King?,. When Christianity and Western civilization came and interacted with African culture and religion, misconception of beliefs, values, and terms developed. 15. One of my favorite Ifa narratives acknowledges to Yoruba Muslims that climbing Mount Arafat was the most significant act of the hajj. 45 Francis Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138. Africa is often seen as a poor Country and one that cant do without the help of the western world. Oct. 24, 2019. Fact: Slaves were always subject to torture, sexual exploitation, and arbitrary . Women are revered in African traditions as essential to the cosmic balance of the world. Fact: One-third of Moroccans and one-quarter of Algerians do not speak Arabic as their first language. In the lived experiences of the people, there has been much borrowing and interchange, particularly in those places that have a history of peaceful coexistence among diverse religious traditions, as is so among the Yoruba. 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. According to the Global peace index, Malaysia, Botswana, and Ghana are among the top 50 most peaceful countries, beating the United Kingdom and the United States that were ranked 45 and 128 respectively. Advertisement. An example is the Ancient Benin Kingdom, known for its impressive artwork which is now scattered across the world. Please note: They are known as upstanding citizens and have been entrusted with sensitive positions in society. have recognized the important ways in which "African" and "religion" are western constructs involving both misconceptions and changing perceptions, especially concerning religion (Ray:2000). c. medicine men and women. African Vibes is a one-stop global platform that connects the African diaspora to opportunities for growth, development, and social impact in Africa. Common misconceptions of Africa include the idea that it is behind the rest of the world, lacking in innovative technology. Traditional African religions are less of faith traditions and more of lived traditions. Du Bois argued . . Significant as these studies are, there seems to be no systematic exploration of African traditions in African American culture.21. Many sources define African worship as ancestral worship which is wrong. Let's begun by saying that ATR, refer to the indigenous religious beliefs and practices of Africans. 5.3.2 Intolerance and misconceptions about African traditional religion and Culture As already alluded, the stories told in Europe about Africa, the notion of racial and cultural superiority, and the notion of salvation, led to the western missionaries having a negative attitude toward African traditional religion and culture. As many might know, one type of ritualinitiations for adolescent African girlscauses great consternation among Westerners, because these often involve rites like female circumcision or other bodied practices. Today, several myths are mixed with facts in describing African traditional religion. It is misleading to say Africa when speaking about a specific tribe, ethnic group, or country in Africa. Indigenous traditions continue to define the African personality. In this way, the visible and invisible are in tandem, leading practitioners to speak about all objects, whether animate or inanimate, as potentially sacred on some level. 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. . Portia Zvavahera, His Presence, 2013, oil-based printing ink on paper. My credentials as a Harvard professor made little impression on him. The west, by trying to learn more about the African tradition will avoid the bias and ignorance of being misinformed. Mary Slessor is accredited to ending this savage act in ancient Calabar, Nigeria. Similarly, there are others like Henry Louis Gates who has appropriated images of the Yoruba deity of Esu in his own work. Investors are moving to take advantage of the African market. In the case of the Yoruba kings and their people, sacred kingship formed a sacred canopy that sheltered the followers of each of the three major traditionsIslam, Christianity, and African traditional religionforging bonds of community identity among followers of the different traditions. For African-American parents, transmitting an awareness of cultural values and norms . The problem of Africa isnt wealth but the unequal distribution of wealth. The story is the same in the political sphere. Please confirm you want to block this member. Mudimbe's . This misconception has, in some scholars, matured into prejudice and resilient skepticism about the African's ability to grasp the concept of God. There is a general misconception that the entire people of North Africa speak Arabic. 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. For Ivy Akumu '15, it sparked an interest in the history of Christianity and, by extension, of other religions. African identity and culture are preserved in African Traditional Religion. All Religions has truth hidden in them for those who objectively seek them through the path of the religion. However, since Africans are known for their excellent craftsmanship, these artifacts do tell the story of the ancient African empires. All rights reserved. Advocating for civil religion in a religiously pluralistic society does not require the erasure of conventional religious traditions. More so, myths encode the traditional settings of the African and their belief system. First, there is a supreme being who created the universe and every living and nonliving thing to be found within the universe. As scholars of the comparative study of religions in Africa, we must begin to rethink the study of African religion in the twenty-first century in order to avoid the continuous mis-assessment of the resilience of indigenous traditions. This view wasnt held in many other tribes in Nigeria. Africa is a continent that is made up of 54 countries, 1.3 billion inhabitants, more than 3000 ethnic groups, and 2100 unique languages. Divination enables us to recognize how indigenous traditions have a foundation upon which knowledge and knowledge production is developed. Thus, I have argued that religion should be examined not only as a sacred phenomenon, but also as a cultural and human reality, all the while remembering the importance of integrating the sociopolitical dimensions of religiosity into any examination of an African state. 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. But this was not an African thing. Will OAthers Follow Suit? .p-summary {display: none !important} 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. One of the most ridiculous myths about it is that homosexuality did not exist in the continent until white men imported it. Women constitute a sizable number of the devotees of these traditions, just as they do in Islam and Christianity. As the late African historian Cheikh Anta Diop argued, matriarchy was embedded in the African way of life. Another misbelief about Africa is that all Africans are the same. Another crucial aspect to consider in the comparative study of African religions is the reality of the transfer of these religions across the Atlantic through the Middle Passage and transnational migration and cultural exchange. Required fields are marked *. /* Must be below squarespace-headers */(function(){var e='ontouchstart'in window||navigator.msMaxTouchPoints;var t=document.documentElement;if(!e&&t){t.className=t.className.replace(/touch-styles/,'')}})(), Bakongomasks from the Kongo Central Photo: Wikipedia. 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. Most of these aids go into building infrastructures like schools and hospitals. Hence to call African traditional religion ancestral worship would cause problems in the study of ATR. Introduction: Some Standard Misconceptions There have been widespread misconceptions about the African Traditional Religion (hereinafter ATR). Gender dynamics are important in African indigenous religions and in cultural systems, so much so that women goddesses and women-invented rituals are commonplace. In these times of intense turmoil, people of African descent are facing serious threats and challenges to their well-being. These narratives come to us in the form of myths. Unlike its popular usage, in scholarly language myths are sacred stories believed to be true by those who hold on to them. There are quite a number of revival groups and movements whose main aim is to ensure that the tenants and practice of African indigenous religion that are threatened survive. They are less concerned with doctrines and much more so with rituals . 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. 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. This article analyses the legal processes of recognising customary and religious (Muslim) marriages in South Africa's constitutional democracy. In describing African traditional religion, culture, and social impact in Africa the traditional religion is the foundation which! 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