African Traditional Religion (African Studies)

Introduction

The term “African Traditional Religion” is used in two complementary senses. Loosely, it encompasses all African beliefs and practices that are considered religious but neither Christian nor Islamic. The expression is also used almost as a technical term for a particular reading of such beliefs and practices, one that purports to show that they constitute a systematic whole—a religion comparable to Christianity or any other “world religion.” In that sense the concept was new and radical when it was introduced by G. Parrinder in 1954 and later developed by Bolaji Idowu and John Mbiti (see Proponents of African Traditional Religion). The intention of these scholars was to protest against a long history of derogatory evaluations of Africans and their culture by outsiders and to replace words such as “heathenism” and “paganism.” African Traditional Religion is now widely taught in African universities, but its identity remains essentially negative: African belief that is not Christianity or Islam. To understand the issue one must go back to the beginnings of anthropology in the 19th century and follow its evolution (see 19th-Century Background). As the European empires in Africa began to break up after World War II, both missionaries and African nationalists sought to defend Africans and African culture from their reputation for primitivism and to claim parity with Christianity, the West, and the modern world. At the same time a movement that began after World War I and intensified after World War II supported the idea that Africans retained values that the militaristic and materialistic modern world had lost and that Africans individually and collectively were spiritual people. Such generalizations have been challenged by scholars who say that Africa is too diverse to support these notions. Ethnographic studies contradict the simplicities of African Traditional Religion and reveal the complex relations of religion with politics, economics, and social structure (Ethnography). A more radical challenge has been mounted recently by anthropologists and historians who argue that the concept of religion itself has been defined in implicitly Christian terms and that the collection of data to be treated as “religion” depends on an implicit Judeo-Christian template that often radically mistranslates and misrepresents African words and practices (see Criticism). Certain religious topics have proved perennially fascinating to both scholars and the reading public with reference to the world as a whole, not just Africa. They include “witchcraft,” “symbolism,” and “ancestor worship.” These topics, lending themselves to exoticism, give rise in acute form to the problems of intercultural misunderstanding. “Healing,” on the other hand, sounds familiar and beneficial, although in practice what is called “healing” is often far removed from Western ideas of sickness and medicine.

General Overviews

African Traditional Religion is a thriving scholarly business, but a serious disconnect exists between contributions that celebrate a generalized African Traditional Religion and those that describe particular religions and aspects of religion on the basis of ethnographic and archival research. The generalizations begin by citing allegedly negative characterizations of African culture: it is argued that African beliefs and practices are misunderstood and unjustly condemned, that Africans are everywhere and always profoundly religious, and that their religion or religions are comparable to religions anywhere else. On the other hand, historians and anthropologists, skeptical with regard to abstractions and generalizations, focus on the religion of particular peoples to show how belief and practice fit into everyday life. They struggle with epistemological questions such as, “On what evidentiary basis can an individual or group be said to “believe” in anything?”. There is little dialogue between the two points of view, but the readings suggested in this section reveal some of the differences. Chidi Denis Isizoh’s website carries links to a variety of essays on traditional religion and its relations with Christianity and Islam; it also includes Ejizu’s overview (Emergent Key Issues in the Study of African Traditional Religions). More and more material is available on the Internet, notably at African Traditional Religion, but not all of it should be regarded as representative or authoritative. Journals such as the London-based Africa, Cahiers d’Études Africaines (Paris), and the Journal of Religion in Africa (Leiden, The Netherlands) publish articles on religion from time to time, representing the latest thinking. The edited collections Blakely, et al. 1994; Olupona and Nyang 1993; and Olupona 2000 provide essays on specific examples of African religion by leading scholars, while implicitly illustrating the gap between “spiritual” and “ethnographic” approaches. None of this literature, however, deals with the radical objections raised in Criticism concerning the definition of religion, the errors introduced by intercultural translation, and the depth of outside influence on supposedly timeless “traditional religion.”

Africa.
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The venerable journal of the International African Institute offers academic articles on all aspects of African history and culture, including religion.
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African Traditional Religion. Africa South of the Sahara.
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An idiosyncratic collection of sources from professional to popular.
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Blakely, Thomas D., Walter E. A. van Beek, and Dennis L. Thomson, eds. Religion in Africa. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1994.
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A wide-ranging symposium with contributions by major specialists in the field. Unlike Olupona’s collections (Olupona and Nyang 1993, Olupona 2000), this one does not presume or discuss “African spirituality.” One of the three sections deals with “religion and its translatability,” a topic and a problem of concern to both missionaries and anthropologists.
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Cahiers d’Études Africaines.
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Offers articles in French and English on all aspects of African culture, often manifesting a distinctly French intellectual approach.
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Emergent Key Issues in the Study of African Traditional Religions.
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A historical review and critique of the subject and of major problems and disagreements associated with it, written by Christopher Ejizu. The review suggests that the defensive tone of much writing about African Traditional Religion is directed against outdated studies that no one takes seriously anymore. The main website African Traditional Religions, maintained by Chidi Denis Isizoh, is a useful guide to further reading.
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Journal of Religion in Africa.
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Scholarly articles on Islam and on Christian and non-Christian religious diasporas. An excellent source for insights into contemporary scholarly issues and approaches.
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Olupona, Jacob K., ed. African Spirituality: Forms, Meanings and Expressions. New York: Crossroad, 2000.
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Olupona identifies African spirituality in myth, and ritual as that which “expresses the relationship between human being and divine being” (p. xvi). Leading scholars cover a wide range of topics and religious practices, including Islam and 3rd-century North African Christianity, rarely questioning the concept of spirituality itself.
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Olupona, Jakob K., and Sulayman S. Nyang, eds. Religious Plurality in Africa: Essays in Honour of John S. Mbiti. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1993.
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A collection representative of the “religio-phenomenological” approach to comparative religion, theology, and philosophy, in which religion is conceived of as a phenomenon sui generis, “the transcendent” is universally recognized, and religions are presented in isolation from their cultural and historical contexts. Two chapters concern Islam in Africa.
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Proponents of African Traditional Religion

The project of the original proponents of African Traditional Religion, in the context of the disintegration of colonial empires, was to counter negative stereotypes of other religions than Christianity, Asian as well as African, and to promote good relations among all religions on the basis of shared values. The term “African Traditional Religion” was introduced by Parrinder 1962. “Traditional” is substituted for “primitive” but raises as many problems as it solves. It is ambiguous as to time, because it implies both religion that has existed for a long time and religion that exists in the 21st century; however, that is contrasted with the “modern” in contemporary Africa. As “African” traditional religion it retains the sense that African religion is all alike because it belongs on the same “pre-modern” level; in practice “African” means sub-Saharan African, a unity apparently based on race, itself a problematic idea. The approach to African Traditional Religion of the African scholars E. Bolaji Idowu (Idowu 1962) and John Mbiti (Mbiti 1969) was different, even though they adopted the same term. Their concern was to raise the level of respect for Africans and African culture, past and present, by insisting that African religion has always had values and concepts similar to or identical with those of Christianity and other “world religions” in that, according to them, it was fundamentally monotheistic. The multitudes of “spiritual beings” recognized in much of Africa should be regarded as refractions or subordinates of a single God. A pioneer in this defensive campaign, though he did not use the term “African Traditional Religion,” was the distinguished statesman and scholar J. B. Danquah (see Danquah 1944). In the work of these scholars it is rarely clear whether the deity is one or multiple and identical with or analogous to the Christian God. Proponents of a single, self-justifying African Traditional Religion are committed Christians and teachers of religion, whereas the adherents of the religion (or religions) they are writing about are usually unconcerned with defending their beliefs. Much of their defense refers to a colonial library that is now out of date (Awolalu 1975). Chitando 2005 and Adogbo 2005 offer critiques of the “phenomenological” approach favored by Idowu, Mbiti, and others. For Mbiti’s career, see Olupona and Nyang 1993 (cited under General Overviews). The debt that many authors of the phenomenological school owe to European spirituality is explicit in Idowu 1973.

Adogbo, Michael P. “Methodological Problems in the Study of African Traditional Religions.” Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 122 (2005): 76–83.
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Summarizes the debates on African Traditional Religion briefly but effectively and concludes by advocating a “macro-theory” in five steps that amount to good ethnography.
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Awolalu, Joseph Omosade. “What is African Traditional Religion?.” Studies in Comparative Religion 9.1 (1975).
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A short, representative defense of African Traditional Religion against long-dead prejudices, citing equally dead defenders of Africans’ spirituality and monotheism.
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Chitando, Ezra. “Phenomenology and the Study of African Traditional Religions.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 17.4 (2005): 299–316.
DOI: 10.1163/157006805774550974Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Notes that the phenomenological approach to the study of religion is falling into disfavor everywhere except in relation to African Traditional Religion. Comprehensive review of the literature, with useful bibliography.
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Danquah, J. B. The Akan Doctrine of God. London: Lutterworth, 1944.
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A pioneering nationalist declaration: “There is only one God, but he is apprehended in different sense which can be discerned in the particular name that each people give him. . . . The ‘Christian’ and the ‘African’ therefore share between them a Supreme Being of like nature” (p. 10).
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Idowu, E. Bolaji. Olódùmarè: God in Yoruba Belief. London: Longmans, 1962.
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“The keynote of the life of the Yoruba is their religion. In all things they are religious” (p. 5). The deity is not remote from daily life and thought. The author proposes the term “diffused monotheism” to characterize religion in which the deity delegates work to multiple subordinates.
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Idowu, E. Bolaji. African Traditional Religion: A Definition. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1973.
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His “definition” of religion is a declaration of faith derived from the work of Rudolph Otto. Idowu challenges Mbiti 1969 and others, saying that “high god” and “a supreme God” are evasions to avoid identifying God in African belief with “the Supreme God.”
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Mbiti, John. African Religions and Philosophy. New York: Praeger, 1969.
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Mbiti dismisses the concepts of animism, totemism, fetishism, and naturism. For Africans, religion pertains to the question of existence or being. Offers a dynamic and comprehensive but idiosyncratic synthesis that is remarkably Christian. He does not investigate the extent to which indigenous views have been influenced by Christianity.
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Parrinder, Geoffrey. African Traditional Religion. 2d rev. ed. London: SPCK, 1962.
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After many years as a missionary and teacher in Africa, Parrinder became internationally distinguished as an activist for interreligious understanding based on shared values. First published in 1954. Widely influential in its day, this book is not now highly regarded as an account of African religion.
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19th-Century Background

The pejorative evaluation of African thought against which the concept of African Traditional Religion is directed was embodied in some of the highest products of 18th- and 19th-century European thought—products such as Fetishism and Animism, which scholars now reject but that survive in popular form. In the first half of the 20th century a more liberal anthropology excused the apparent irrationality of animism, together with magic and witchcraft, by arguing that such beliefs and practices served useful functions or could be given favorable interpretations. These “functionalist” accounts are no longer considered satisfactory; they attempt to show what religion does without dealing with its content.

Fetishism

In his The Philosophy of History (1837; see Pietz 1985), G. W. F. Hegel invented an Africa that he needed as the zero point in his story of the historical development of civilization. African thought was like that of children, governed not by intellect but random impulses, which took shape as “fetishism.” This term, which a French scholar had coined in 1757, referred to a kind of anti-religion in which men worshiped “gods” of their own making. Pietz 1985 shows how many European thinkers from the late 18th century through the 19th century used the idea of fetish to construct, by inversion, their sense of civilization and of reason as opposed to unreason. A version of Hegelian thinking was developed at enormous length by Frazer 1925, first published in 1890, which eventually expanded to twelve volumes and was a best-seller in its day. In West Africa today, “fetish” is still the name of any practice or object regarded by Christians or Muslims as pagan. English-speaking scholars are usually uncomfortable with the term “fetishism” because of its intellectual origins, but French-speaking anthropologists do not share these scruples. Modern studies of “fetishes” emphasize the complexity of the thought behind them and of the social contexts in which they are put to use (Janzen 1982, de Surgy 1985). Many fetishes, removed from their original context, are nowadays esteemed as works of art.

Frazer, J. G. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. London: Macmillan, 1925.
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The Golden Bough, though discredited by its evolutionary assumptions and unscientific method, remains a treasury of exotic customs that appeal to many readers and of ideas anthropologists continue to wrestle with. The abridged edition, still in print, is enough for the reader to sample Frazer’s attitude toward “the dull mind of the savage.”
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Janzen, John M. Lemba, 1650–1930: A Drum of Affliction in Africa and the New World. New York: Garland, 1982.
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A sophisticated historical ethnography of a ritual system centered on the Lemba “fetish,” showing how it organized social and commercial relations in the hinterland of the Loango coast in the era of the slave trade and how, after its destruction under colonial rule, it survived in Haiti. Dense ethnography.
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Pietz, William. “The Problem of the Fetish I.” Res 9 (1985): 5–17.
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In this series of articles, the author is not concerned with describing fetishes as they were or are in Africa; he is concerned with the role the idea of fetish played as an indispensable term in the development of social theory by such 19th-century figures as Comte, Marx, and Freud. He quotes Hegel’s comments on fetish at some length on p. 7. First of a series of articles that continues in Res 13 (1987), pp. 23–45 and Res 16 (1988), pp. 105–123.
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Surgy, Albert de, ed. Fétiches, objets enchantés, mots réalisés. Systèmes de pensée en Afrique noire 8. Paris: École Pratique des Hautes Études, 1985.
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Articles on fetishism among particular peoples, showing the complexity of the data and of practices related to them, and clearly demonstrating the inadequacy of popular generalizations about “fetishes” and “magic.”
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Animism

Tylor 2010 (originally published in 1871) adopted what was then a generous attitude toward the “primitive,” saying that all men are “animists,” that is, believers in spiritual beings. The beliefs of the most primitive peoples were the least discriminating; all could be arranged on an ascending evolutionary scale according to the degree to which their ideas approached those of Tylor’s Europe. Ultimately Tylor, like Frazer, thought Christianity itself was destined to be superseded by science. The trouble with the idea of animism is that it is difficult to tell just what a spiritual being is, except that it is something the speaker does not believe in. Nevertheless, animism is still the all-purpose term used by journalists and others to describe any African religion that is not Christian, Islamic, or otherwise familiar; some anthropologists still think that “belief in spiritual beings” is the best available definition of religion (Goody 1961). A vaguer version of “animism” is the term “spirituality,” very widely used without explicit evolutionary connotations to characterize African thought, often with the implication that Africans retain a commendable attitude toward human experience that the materialistic “modern” world has lost. Ultimately this version is a form of orientalism, an essentializing caricature that simply inverts the 18th-century view that Africans had no religion at all while keeping in place a radical difference between “us” and “them” (see Belief).

Goody, Jack. “Religion and Ritual: The Definitional Problem.” British Journal of Sociology 12 (1961): 142–164.
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Opts for “belief in spiritual beings” as the best available definition of religion. Discusses the related problem of distinguishing between ritual (is it religious?) and ceremony (is it secular?).
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Tylor, Edward Burnett. Primitive Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
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Religion is “belief in spiritual beings,” which Tylor calls “animism.” The author denies that there have ever been tribes that have no religion, thus contradicting the prevailing views of 18th-century scholars. Examples from all over the world are taken out of context and linked by an assumed evolutionary scheme. First published in 1871.
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Ethnography

Ethnography is the practice of describing how people live, what they do, and what they think. The ethnographer, though he or she may be a member of the community, adopts the perspective of an observer. The classic ethnographies, dating from the early 20th century, reported on what seemed to be the rules of behavior and the normal beliefs and assumptions of the people (see Classics). Modern ethnographers are much more alert to uncertainty, conflict, and change in the situation they observe and more aware of the effects on the eventual report of the observer’s own personality, preconceptions, and social position. Ethnography, in short, is an interactive process.

Classics

An apparently unbridgeable intellectual gulf exists between most proponents of African Traditional Religion and anthropologists who write ethnographies based on field research. This section includes a few ethnographic studies that have become classics, influencing the thinking of many others. Each one deals with religious aspects of the life of a particular people but also wrestles with the problem of representing that life in European languages (see Translation). Evans-Pritchard 1937, the first study to take seriously an African system of thought, has been widely influential among philosophers as well as students of religion (Lienhardt 1961). Evans-Pritchard’s treatment of various forces recognized by the Nuer as “refractions” of a “High God” (Evans-Pritchard 1956) influenced E. Bolaji Idowu (Idowu 1962, cited in Proponents of African Traditional Religion), encouraging him to reconcile the ideal of monotheism with the diversity of forces in the religions of other African peoples. Nevertheless, that books on the Azande and the Nuer by the same author could be so different challenges the view that African religions are basically alike. Studies by French authors (Griaule 1948, Zahan 1979) focus on ideas rather than practices, managing to make African religion sound surprisingly French. Nadel 1954 was an early effort to study interaction among religions in a culturally diverse environment. Berglund 1989 is a modest but rich account of religion in ordinary life by a missionary well versed in the local language. (All such studies can be described as hybrid products of an encounter between a people and a scholar who only partially and temporarily shares their life and therefore does not internalize their experiences of it as “knowledge” rather than “belief.” Indigenous scholars such as J. Omosade Awolalu (Awolalu 1979) are no exception, because as scholars they must respect the language and epistemological categories of an international audience. Nor does indigeneity guarantee “objectivity.” All these ethnographies can be faulted to some extent for presenting the data as though they were timeless, failing to allow sufficiently for internal diversity, change, and the effects of colonial rule. The implicit and unexamined paradigm that orders the data is the Western folk category “religion.” These comments do not mean that such studies are “wrong”; all ethnographic reporting is to some extent a hybrid product of foreign research and local knowledge.

Awolalu, J. Omosade Yoruba Beliefs and Sacrificial Rites. New York: Athelia Henrietta, 1979.
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Good example of a hybrid study, based on fieldwork, which presents Yoruba belief and practice in the framework of the author’s own Christian commitments. Seems convinced, without quite saying so, that witchcraft is real and that fetishes work. First published in 1966.
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Berglund, Axel-Ivar. Zulu Thought Patterns and Symbolism. London: Hurst, 1989.
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A book based on long and intimate familiarity with Zulu life and language, which reports on local preoccupations with God and the “shades” (ancestors) as revealed in conversations and everyday incidents. Minimal discussion of anthropological issues. First published in 1976.
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Evans-Pritchard, E. E. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon, 1937.
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Given unquestioned premises, Azande ideas of witchcraft, oracles, and magic are consistently logical and practical. Their beliefs have nothing to do with “the supernatural,” since for them there was only one “world”—that of everyday experience.
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Evans-Pritchard, E. E. Nuer Religion. London: Oxford University Press, 1956.
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Basing himself on his own intimate knowledge of the Nuer, the author systematically refutes 19th-century theories of religion and more recent ones that reduce religion to social structure. One of the greatest studies of religion in an African society.
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Griaule, Marcel. Conversations with Ogotemmêli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas. London: Oxford University Press, 1965.
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English translation of Dieu d’eau: Entretiens avec Ogotemmêli (Paris: Editions du Chêne, 1948). This book was an international success; it describes, in the words of a sage among the Dogon of Mali, a cosmogony known only to intellectuals. Like other French anthropology of the period, the book drew attention to symbolic and philosophic elements of African thought to which Anglophones were insensitive. Recent research has been unable to confirm the existence of this cosmogony.
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Lienhardt, Godfrey. Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka. Oxford: Clarendon, 1961.
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The Dinka do not recognize a division between natural and supernatural, but they encounter ultra-human forces the author calls “powers.” To translate a Dinka word for “the above” as “God” would misrepresent it; Lienhardt substitutes “divinity.” Detailed account of cattle sacrifice, which he calls a drama of human survival.
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Nadel, S. F. Nupe Religion. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954.
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Our category of the supernatural “alone enables us to mark out our subject-matter” (p. 5) and the primitive beliefs in phenomena we know to be imaginary—but this approach may be misleading. The author explains what the Nupe mean by the word we translate as “ritual.” Discussion of relations among indigenous Nupe religion, Hausa possession cults, and Yoruba deities.
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Zahan, Dominique The Religion, Spirituality and Thought of Traditional Africa. Translated by Kate Ezra Martin and Lawrence M. Martin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.
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Justifies speaking of African spirituality as a kind of humanism on the ground that the idea of a finality outside of man is foreign to Africans, who are unconcerned with pleasing or praying to a God who has removed himself from human contact. Translation of Religion, spiritualité et pensée africaines (Paris: Payot, 1970).
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Modern

Anthropologists now recognize that African and other non-European cultures are not divided into separate spheres such as religion, economics, politics, and family; that ethnic boundaries, as artificial products of colonial rule, may not demarcate “religions”; that “societies” are no longer taken for granted as discrete and solitary units; and that as we find them today they are products of precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial histories. There may be considerable variation in ritual practice from one neighborhood to another, and ritual may be as much a matter of conflict as of consensus. “Religion” appears with decreasing frequency as a discrete object of study in modern scholarship devoted to Africa. Instead of writing studies of “the religion of the So-and-So,” scholars present religion in relation to locally focused topics, sometimes in ways that challenge our usual expectations of religion (Baum 1999, Masquelier 2001). Scholars aim for reflexivity and for the critique of the observer as well as the observed. Greene 2002 approaches the entire narrative of social change among the Ewe through the framework of belief. Modern ethnography pays attention to the activities of women and to gender relations (Boddy 1989). Matory 1994 exemplifies the modern anthropological practice of integrating religion (and gender) with politics, in a historical perspective. The Yoruba, unified by this name by outsiders only in the 19th century, are among the largest, most varied, and most studied African peoples and are also the most influential in the diaspora; the sheer volume of writing about them, by foreigners and by Yoruba themselves, constitutes a fruitful field for those who want to understand how religion in Africa has been and is being represented. Peel 2000, a product of many years of close study, shows how influences from abroad, particularly Christianity, have been assimilated into “traditional” culture and the self-conception of the Yoruba.

Baum, Robert M. Shrines of the Slave Trade: Diola Religion and Society in Precolonial Senegambia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
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Prefatory discussion of the problem of “religion.” Historical reconstruction of the ways in which shrines were developed to protect “legitimate” slave raiders and illicit slave stealing in communities with no central government.
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Boddy, Janice. Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zār Cult in Northern Sudan. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
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In the Zār possession cult and the practice of genital infibulation women are not fantasizing escape from their marginal status nor submitting to male oppression; on the contrary, they consider themselves to be guardians of the core values of their way of life.
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Greene, Sandra. Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
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Describes how the Anlo adapted their beliefs and practices relative to shrines, bodies of water, and the human body in response to missionary activity and colonial and postcolonial experience.
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Masquelier, Adeline. Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power, and Identity in an Islamic Town in Niger. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.
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Political aspects of Bori possession cult in Niger, defending traditional culture in the face of Islam and the market economy.
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Matory, J. Lorand. Sex and the Empire That is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
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Shows how the rivalry among Oyo Yoruba between the cults of the possessing god Shango and the nonpossessing god Ogun is related to contrasting values concerning the conduct of women in the political process from early to modern times. The conclusion includes probative remarks on the problem of intercultural translation.
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Peel, J. D. Y. Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.
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Not only historical anthropology, this study recognizes that world religions bear messages from the past to the situations in which they operate. Resists the argument that missions were simply the servants of imperialism and capitalism; acceptance of Christianity was often governed by indigenous beliefs and local political opportunism.
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Time and Space

All societies give ritual expression to the land they occupy and to their real or imagined history, thus to space and time. Space means co-residence and common dependence on the forces of nature; time is the dimension of social reproduction, in which reference to the past serves as the measure of authority between ancestors and their descendants, senior and junior, firstcomer and latecomer, free and slave. In a classic study, Middleton 1960 showed how ancestor cults were about identity but also provided an arena in which political adjustments required by demographic change and provoked by personal ambition could be negotiated. Because African respect for ancestors has long been one of the attitudes Christians have been favorably disposed to, ongoing discussions among scholars concerning “ancestor worship” offer a proving ground for approaches to “religion” in general. Where social relations among the living are primarily governed by descent and kinship rather than occupation, ancestors are felt as being still very close to the living rather than removed to another world. Conversely, elders have very real power over their descendants and must be treated with a kind of respect that Westerners find difficult to understand (Singleton 2009). The website Ancestors in Africa introduces students to the academic debate provoked by Kopytoff 1971. African authorities differ on this subject; Idowu 1973 (cited in Proponents of African Traditional Religion) holds that “ancestor worship” incorrectly characterizes “a manifestation of an unbroken family relationship” (p. 192), but Awolalu 1979 (also cited in Proponents of African Traditional Religion) disagrees. Because of the exaggerated importance accorded to descent groups and therefore to ancestors, anthropologists have neglected local cults until relatively recently. Rituals of space and ecological relations take place at significant locales, sometimes called “Earth shrines,” where prayers for rain or successful childbirth may be addressed. They serve the interests of local communities, although they sometimes attract clients from far away (Allman and Parker 2005). In east-central Africa, major shrines are often centrally concerned with the political life of a specific land area; territorial cult is therefore preferable to “earth cult” (Schoffeleers 1979). Bazin 1986 insists that a shrine is above all a place, not a means of access to a deity located somewhere else. The keepers of local/territorial shrines say that the shrines have been there “forever,” but research has shown that they change with the rest of the social organization to which they belong (Liberski-Bagnoud 2002).

Allman, Jean Marie, and John Parker. Tongnaab: The History of a West African God. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.
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Charts the rise of a local territorial cult in northern Ghana to national status, with franchises throughout the country during the course of the 20th century.
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Ancestors in Africa.
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Part of the Experience Rich Anthropology project in the United Kingdom, this site provides a wealth of original texts, some of historical rather than current interest, including responses to Kopytoff 1971. Critics allege that Kopytoff recognizes no distinction between address to live and dead elders, overlooking his fundamental point that translation between cultures should begin with indigenous terms rather than foreign terms.
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Bazin, Jean. “Retour aux choses-dieux.” In Corps des Dieux. Edited by Charles Malamoud and Jean-Pierre Vernant, 253–273. Paris: Gallimard, 1986.
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Our understanding of shrines is warped by our idea that in religion one approaches a hidden person by way of a mediating object. In Mali a shrine attracts ritual attention by its singularity, complex composition, and the history of events attributed to it; it does not represent anything but itself.
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Kopytoff, Igor. “Ancestors as Elders in Africa.” Africa 41.2 (1971): 129–142.
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Argues that the “worship” of ancestors is similar to the respect appropriate to living elders.
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Liberski-Bagnoud, Danouta. Les Dieux du territoire: Repenser autrement la généalogie. Paris: CNRS, 2002.
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Discusses relations between chiefs and shrine keepers in southern Burkina Faso and the associated myths. These West African shrines operate on a different scale from those discussed in Schoffeleers 1979.
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Middleton, John. Lugbara Religion. London: Oxford University Press, 1960.
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Looks at types of shrines and their relationship to the social structure. Discusses how men use invocations addressed to ancestors as weapons in power struggles between rival elders and between elders and ambitious juniors.
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Schoffeleers, J. M., ed. Guardians of the Land. Gwelo, Zimbabwe: Mambo, 1979.
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Historical essays on territorial cults in Zambia, Malawi, and Zimbabwe. Discusses their ecological, communal, and political functions, as well as their various organizational forms.
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Singleton, Michael. “Speaking to the Ancestors; Religion as Interlocutory Interaction.” Anthropos 104 (2009): 311–332.
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A Catholic missionary anthropologist discusses the pitfalls of translation: To Singleton, rather than worshipping ancestors one discusses problems with them. To translate mganga as “native healer” locates him ethnocentrically in the field of health and medicine, whereas a mganga deals with all kinds of problems. Argues that African religion is pragmatic rather than spiritual.
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Divination and Witchcraft

All societies attempt to predict the future, and all respect the experts whom they pay to do so. In practice predictions often go wrong; but the experts, in Africa as in the rest of the world, always have excuses for why a particular prediction failed. In Africa the experts, called “diviners,” are commonly the intellectuals of the society, having to understand not only the forces at work but also the needs and psychology of their clients. Divination in West Africa, heavily influenced by Islam in the distant past, is particularly well studied (Bascom 1969 and Abimbola 1976 are classic studies). Divinatory methods are extremely diverse (Peek 1991). Divination performances are also art forms, focusing the client’s attention on visually intriguing objects and procedures (Pemberton 2000). Besides offering advice on the future, diviners are often called upon to identify the source of a misfortune, such as an illness, the death of a child, or theft. The question to be answered is two-fold: one asks not only, What happened? but Why did it happen to me? (see Evans-Pritchard 1937, cited under Classics). To identify the cause is to recommend a course of action from the repertoire of such actions recognized in that society. The cause most frequently identified is the hostile activity of a “witch,” but this English word perhaps more than any other calls up images of the primitive and superstitious. Like fetish and animism, it also obscures the variety of African theories and practices and prejudges their viability. Witches are not spiritual or supernatural; they are jealous neighbors or selfish relatives using techniques known only to themselves to cause harm and loss to others. The study of “witchcraft” therefore belongs in the field of micro-politics (West 2005). But “witchcraft” can also be a theory of power and an approach to controlling it. Geschiere 1997 demonstrates the flexibility of the witchcraft idiom in adapting to new distributions of power and goods, and its political effectiveness in the life of nations. Obi 2008 raises philosophical and psychological issues and asserts that African divination is based on a kind of double consciousness; this echoes the common African folk belief that a witch is “double” or composé—both what you see and what you cannot see. Bond and Ciekawy 2001 offers the best and most readable single introduction to the problem of establishing a shared rather than confrontational discourse for both scholars and African actors.

Abimbola, Wande. Ifá: An Exposition of Ifá Literary Corpus. London: Oxford University Press, 1976.
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Abimbola is an internationally known babalawo (priest of Ifá) and interpreter of the symbols and metaphors of this intellectually challenging system, which situates individual events in a cosmic order.
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Bascom, William. Ifa Divination: Communication between Gods and Men in West Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969.
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Ifá divination and its variants are widely practiced not only in coastal West Africa but also in the Yoruba diaspora. This is a classic collection and interpretation of Ifá texts.
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Bond, George C., and Diane Ciekawy, eds. Witchcraft Dialogues: Anthropological and Philosophical Exchanges. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2001.
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Highly readable prefatory and concluding chapters with bibliographies and case studies. Summarizes the best contemporary efforts of anthropologists and philosophers to find a common intellectual space in which to discuss “witchcraft” and “sorcery” without presupposing or reinforcing a radical difference between “us” and “them.”
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Geschiere, Peter. The Modernity of Witchcraft. Translated by Peter Geschiere and J. Roitman. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997.
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“Witchcraft” is the primary idiom of modern politics in Cameroon and other countries. Its idiom is dynamic and effective and not a holdover from the past. With its talk of “eating” the substance of others, it is not far removed from our own familiar idioms of exploitation, corruption, and intrusive government. Translation of Sorcellerie et politique en Afrique: La viande des autres (Paris: Karthala, 1995).
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Obi, Augustine C. “Philosophy of Divination.” Uche 14 (2008): 48–57.
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Situates African divination in relation to divination worldwide. African divination seeks “double” rather than “single” causality, based on a psychology that presupposes not only a soul but also a “double” that can operate in the world of the supernatural.
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Peek, Phillip M., ed. African Divination Systems: Ways of Knowing. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
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The first comparative collection to deal with divination, showing the wide range of devices employed in different parts of the continent; with an emphasis on the possibility that divination stimulates the imagination and prompts a new look at one’s situation.
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Pemberton, John, ed. Insight and Artistry in African Divination. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2000.
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Divination, like all ritual, is an art form, usually including music and visually stimulating artifacts. This collection effectively juxtaposes the divination process in west and central Africa with pictures of diviners at work and the objects they use (see also de Heusch 1996, cited under Symbolism, Intellect, Imagination).
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West, Harry G. Kupilikula: Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
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Describes how people manage their experience of an increasingly complex world through the political language of sorcery. Narrative account of the anthropologist’s personal encounters with alien beliefs.
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Healing

“Healing” is treatment for what Turner 1968 (cited under Symbolism, Intellect, Imagination) called “afflictions,” which in Africa include not only physical and mental disease but also misfortunes of all kinds. These afflictions include, for example, failure to find a job, loss of money, “accidents,” and the supposed consequences of witchcraft or of breaking taboos. It seems to rest on irrational beliefs, although it may well be effective (Singleton 2009, cited under Time and Space). “Healing” can include collective efforts to deal with colonial oppression. As a topic it therefore overlaps with not only politics but also religion and allopathic medicine, studied by the subdiscipline of medical anthropology. The field is enormous. Three reports represent, in three different regions, three different resolutions of the immersion/detachment tension implicit in all ethnographic work (see Rosny 1985, Ngubane 1977, and Janzen 1978).

Janzen, John M., and William Arkinstall. The Quest for Therapy in Lower Zaire. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
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Ethnography carried out in collaboration with a physician enabled the author to follow Kongo sufferers through sequences of therapy in a variety of situations and to evaluate what constituted both “illness” and “cure” in a postcolonial situation of medical pluralism. The concept of the “therapy managing group” has been influential.
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Ngubane, Harriet. Body and Mind in Zulu Medicine. New York: Academic Press, 1977.
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A Zulu woman anthropologist considers the role of women, who are the principal healers in Zululand and are believed to mediate between life and death. In a color symbolism valid all over sub-Saharan Africa, red mediates between white and black; red medicines bring the sick back from death into life.
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Rosny, Éric de. Healers in the Night. Translated by Robert R. Barr. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985.
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A Jesuit missionary teacher in Cameroon, who admits that from childhood he longed to immerse himself in another culture, tells the story of his quest to understand another religion, eventually undergoing initiation as a healer.
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Symbolism, Intellect, Imagination

For anthropologists of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly those of the British school of social anthropology, religious belief was something of an embarrassment to be explained away by showing how it contributed to the maintenance of social structure or by arguing that magic was not meant to make things happen but dramatically expressed desire. Such an approach leaves in place the ethnocentric judgment that our sense of what is instrumental necessarily rules (Peel 1969). French anthropologists were the first to suggest that Africans might have ideas as well as beliefs and that they lived in conceptually organized worlds (see Griaule 1948, cited under Classics). Fortes and Dieterlen 1965 was the product of an international conference convened to discuss these ideas, which were controversial at the time. Turner, no enthusiast for structure, raised the ethnography of ritual to a new level of detail and interpretive subtlety in his works Turner 1967, Turner 1968, and Turner 1975. These works focused on symbols as communication rather than belief, implying an intellectual as well as an emotional component. He introduced the concepts of “drum (or cult) of affliction” and “social drama,” which other anthropologists have used extensively, and he extended his insights to cultures beyond Africa (Janzen 1982, cited under Fetishism). His prefatory discussions of how to understand ritual remain richly stimulating decades later. All social activity has its communicative or “symbolic” dimension; it makes no sense to set apart some section of it as symbolic rather than instrumental. Communication itself is as often about conflict and misunderstanding as about shared values. Beidelman 1986, distancing himself from Turner’s view of symbols as systems, shows how imaginative materials are deployed in situations of social uncertainty and conflict. Douglas’s encounter with what seemed at first a random assemblage of ritual practices among the Lele led her to new respect for African responses to experience (Douglas 1966). In nonliterate societies, art forms, particularly sculpture, communicate how people think about relations among worlds that are natural, spiritual, and human; not all African art (sculpture, masquerades, architecture) expresses religious ideas, but much of it not only expresses but realizes them (de Heusch 1996; see also Pemberton 2000, cited under Divination).

Beidelman, T. O. Moral Imagination in Kaguru Modes of Thought. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.
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Within a conceptual framework taken from Wittgenstein, Beidelman shows how the Kaguru of Tanzania construct the scenarios of their social life, forming a consistent system that interprets and guides interaction. Critique of Turner 1967.
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de Heusch, Luc, ed. Objects: Signs of Africa. Ghent, Belgium: Snoeck-Ducaju and Zoon, 1996.
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Superbly illustrated essays by Belgian scholars and a Kongolese reunite the study of form with that of meaning in objects from west and central Africa.
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Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger. New York: Praeger, 1966.
DOI: 10.4324/9780203361832Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Douglas adopted an “intellectualist” rather than belief-centered approach to the religion of the Lele in Congo. The inevitable “anomalies” in any classification system become “sacred” as a way to preserve intellectual order. This insight, applied to other cultures, was the foundation for this highly influential book.
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Fortes, Meyer, and Germaine Dieterlen, eds. African Systems of Thought: Studies Presented and Discussed at the Third International African Seminar in Salisbury, December 1960. London: Oxford University Press, 1965.
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Bilingual symposium, French and English, raises many of the issues central to the emerging study of African systems of thought at that time, including the question of their systematicity and whether religion is identifiable as a discrete body of data.
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Peel, J. D. Y. “Understanding Alien Belief Systems.” British Journal of Sociology 20 (1969): 69–84.
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This paper is dated, but it lucidly anticipates many later arguments: it will not do to disregard actors’ statements about what they are doing and call it symbolic. Also argues that we should not draw our own line between efficacious and nonefficacious acts and call the latter magic/religion.
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Turner, V. W. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967.
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In these seminal essays, Turner investigates the polyvalence of symbols, their psychological functions, and their integration in ritual processes. He is critical of “universal” definitions of witchcraft and sorcery, which pigeonhole the data and discourage the examination of actual behavior.
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Turner, V. W. The Drums of Affliction: A Study of Religious Processes among the Ndembu of Zambia. Oxford: Clarendon, 1968.
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As this study tells us, in a cult of affliction a person suffering from anxiety seeks the care of a healer who imposes a regime of instruction with some degree of social isolation. As in psychoanalysis, the client learns a new vocabulary, is initiated into new understanding of his or her problem, and may in turn become a healer.
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Turner, V. W. Revelation and Divination in Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975.
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The clearest statement of Turner’s opposition between communitas, the experience of wholeness in marginal situations, and societas, the experience of a social structure rife with competition and discrimination. “Revelation” in ritual confrontation with powerful symbols leads to wholeness, whereas “divination” increases conflict; “real diviners,” he writes, “create suspected witches” (p. 23).
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Criticism

The common complaint of critics is that more attention should be paid to the fact that not only religion but the study of religion is embedded in the political relations of its time and place; it is not simply a matter of reporting the facts (see Proponents of African Traditional Religion). Anthropologists and historians express concern that the religious aspect of African cultures has been misrepresented by mistaken translations from long ago (which are now deeply implanted not only in scholarly work but in African discourses), by erroneous and exoticizing emphasis on belief rather than practice, and by the distorting effect of a Judeo-Christian template (see Translation). They express their increasing discomfort by placing the word “religion” in quotation marks. The problems are methodological and epistemological, not aspects of a denial either of religion in general or of a place for religion in African life. In social science it is considered epistemologically unsound for scholars, whatever their personal faith commitments may be, to base their analyses on such commitments (or lack of them). It is equally distorting for a secularly minded anthropologist to categorize anything that makes no sense to him as “belief” as it is for a believer in the universal transcendent to assume that an African practice is a response to it (see Belief). Serious scholars now argue that African Traditional Religion (in its narrow sense) is not African, traditional, or religious but a product of the long history of Christian intrusion in Africa and the responses of Africans to this and other new factors (see The Category “Religion”). Ethnographers have long reported that “traditional” Africans not educated in Christianity or Islam do not distinguish the two worlds of the natural and the supernatural and often marginalize or fail to recognize a supreme being. The institutional characteristics of the “world religions”—a founder, a founding event, a body of scripture, a class of authorized interpreters, an explicit moral code, and the possibilities of conversion or apostasy—are absent. Yet there are always the rituals, ethical principles, philosophical speculations, and materially embodied signs and symbolic processes by which people everywhere figure out where they are and what they should do.

Belief

The world religions, supported by literacy and trained theologians, expect the faithful to be aware of and to endorse authorized creeds, cosmogonies, and moral codes likely to be absent from non-literate cultures or at least not to be elaborated and institutionalized as such (Needham 1972). Most people have only a vague idea of what they believe or are supposed to believe; anthropologists now focus on what they do rather than on the uncertainties of belief (Brenner 1989). In many African languages there was no word for “belief,” although nowadays the idea has been widely introduced. To “believers,” in Africa as elsewhere, their belief is knowledge—“belief” itself is therefore ethnocentric (Kopytoff 1981, Pouillon 1982).

Brenner, Louis. “‘Religious’ Discourses in and about Africa.” In Discourse and its Disguises: The Interpretation of African Oral Texts. Edited by Karin Barber and P. F. de Moraes Farias, 87–105. Birmingham, UK: Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham, 1989.
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Most academic studies emphasize belief rather than religious participation because of the Western and Christian concept that religion is closely tied to belief. Field studies show that Africans seek solutions to problems without bothering much about the theory behind them.
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Kopytoff, Igor. “Knowledge and Belief in Suku Thought.” Africa 51.3 (1981): 709–723.
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Deals with the idea that Africans do not believe ancestors are active—they know that they are active. The author insists we should be discussing knowledge rather than belief; such knowledge may be incorrect, but its falsity does not entitle us to call it religion.
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Needham, Rodney. Belief, Language, and Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972.
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A sophisticated philosophical inquiry into the problem of whether “belief” is a property of individual minds or a collective dogma to which everybody mindlessly subscribes. Belief is not a discriminable experience, it does not constitute a natural resemblance among men, and it does not belong to the common behavior of mankind.
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Pouillon, Jean. “Remarks on the Verb ‘to Believe.’” In Between Belief and Transgression: Structuralist Essays in Religion, History, and Myth. Edited by Michel Izard and Pierre Smith, 1–8. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
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Analysis of the several meanings of the word “belief.” Notes that, “It is not so much the believer who affirms his belief as such, it is rather the unbeliever who reduces to mere believing what, for the believer, is more like knowing” (p. 6). Translation of “Remarques sur le verbe ‘croire,’” in La Fonction symbolique (Paris: Gallimard, 1979).
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Translation

Horton 1967 was one of the first studies to raise the issue of translation as a general problem. He compared the search for explanation, prediction, and control in African practices such as divination to the similar goals of Western science—the difference being that scientifically oriented cultures have institutionalized the critique of established ideas. In practice that difference is often more ideal than real. The attempted comparison has proved stimulating but ultimately unsatisfactory (Wiredu 1992). In any translation between languages and cultures, some reformulation is inevitable; it should ideally lead not to distortion but to illuminating interpretations (see Appiah 1992, Olivier de Sardan 1992, and Wiredu 1992). Relations between the “traditional” and the “modern” have been corrupted, however, initially by the political imbalance between invading Europeans and subordinated Africans (Mudimbe 1988), later by the sheer international weight of communication media: the press, the publishing houses, the English language, and the international university system. This imbalance means that all translations should be read as interpretations rather than transcriptions and treated as documents of their time and place. Mistranslations often persist as a means of communication not only between Westerners and Africans but between Africans speaking different languages: “fetish,” “gods,” “sacrifice,” and “supernatural,” for example, contribute to institutionalized dialogues of the deaf (Janzen and MacGaffey 1974). In fact no one—anthropologist, theologian, or indigenous spokesperson for African cultures—has resolved what is usually summarized as “the translation problem”; each new attempt, however, adds something to public understanding of the cultures in question. Assertions about correct or incorrect translations are part and parcel of ongoing ideological and political maneuvers within and between continents (see The Category “Religion”).

Appiah, Kwame A. In My Father’s House. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
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In chapter 6, “Old Gods, New Worlds,” an Asante philosopher analyzes the rationality of ritual and the problem of translation between the “traditional” and the “modern.” For the modern Westerner, calling something “religious” connotes a great deal that is not there (as happens in Africa) and overlooks much that is present.
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Horton, Robin. “African Traditional Religion and Western Science.” Africa 37.1–2 (1967): 50–71, 155–187.
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This much-discussed article argues that we should not just hunt in the English dictionary for equivalents to African words but scrutinize the categories of Western thought, a process that may require the recombination of areas of discourse such as “science” and “religion” differentiated in the course of Western history.
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Janzen, John M., and W. MacGaffey. An Anthology of Kongo Religion: Primary Texts from Lower Zaire. Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1974.
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Sermons, testimonies, and essays—mostly translations from the Kikongo language—in which Kongolese discuss their beliefs, practices, worldview, and experiences of colonialism. Discusses the problems of translating religious terms between cultures, to which Catholic scholars are more sensitive than Protestants.
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Mudimbe, V. Y. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.
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Looks at how European preconceptions have shaped Africa’s image. Western interpreters and African analysts have used categories and conceptual systems that depend on a Western epistemological order. (“Invention” is to be understood in the double sense of “discovery” and “fabrication.”) A highly influential work, but not easy reading.
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Olivier de Sardan, J. P. “Occultism and the Ethnographic ‘I’: The Exoticizing of Magic from Durkheim to ‘Postmodern’ Anthropology.” Critique of Anthropology 12.1 (1992): 5–25.
DOI: 10.1177/0308275X9201200101Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The Western concepts of magic, possession, and sorcery are linked with the supernatural phenomena beyond comprehension, but in Africa what others call spirits and magic are elements of ordinary common sense. The skeptical Western attitude toward supernatural phenomena makes Africans seem irrational.
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Wiredu, Kwasi. “Formulating Modern Thought in African Languages: Some Theoretical Considerations.” In The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947–1987. Edited by V. Y. Mudimbe, 301–332. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
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Clear exposition by a Ghanaian philosopher of the problems of intercultural translation, with examples. Traditional Africans believe in nonhuman beings and powers; but as the author explains, to Africans these beings and powers are not supernatural but an integral part of the real world.
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The Category “Religion”

Missionaries eager to eradicate the false religion they presumed to exist in Africa picked out what looked to them like worship, spirits, gods, priests, shrines, and sacrifice, mistranslating the associated terms in African languages (see Translation). Scholars who were not missionaries accepted this collection of misrepresentations as constituting the religion of the people in question; anthropologists have added everything that seems irrational to them, so that “religion” tends to subsume everything in need of charitable interpretation. Thus the 19th-century image of African irrationality persists in benevolent guise (Shaw 1990, Landau 1999; see also 19th-Century Background). The Kenyan poet Okot p’Bitek first challenged the “intellectual smuggling” of Christian ideas into the African religious landscape (p’Bitek 1980), but his protest was long ignored. Chitando 2000 defends African proponents of African Traditional Religion from the charge that they impose a Christian model. Chidester 1996, following Jonathan Z. Smith and Charles Long, argues that the entire discipline of comparative religion—identifying and comparing religions—was entangled in the power relations of frontier conflict, military conquest, and resistance in Africa and elsewhere. Unfortunately we are stuck with the resulting linguistic distortions, signalled by ironic quotation marks. Landau 1999 goes further, however, saying that we should go back to the beginning and assume that all people operate in a landscape of what they consider to be the “real.” This approach might relieve scholarship at last of judgments about what is or is not irrational. Any study of religion should not assume that it has been there forever: the study should situate its words and practices (and commentaries on them) in historical context, revealing them as products of interactive processes (see Azuonye 1987 and Peel 2000, both cited under Modern, and Bond and Ciekawy 2001, cited under Divination and Witchcraft).

Azuonye, Chukwuma. “Igbo Folktales and the Evolution of the Idea of Chukwu as the Supreme God of Igbo Religion.” Nsukka Journal of Linguistics and African Languages 1 (1987): 43–62.
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The supreme God of the Igbo was originally Àlà, superseded by Chukwu because of the political power of the Aro Chukwu shrine. More recently, Christian ideas of God have merged with Igbo tradition. This article shows the importance of a historical perspective and reveals the inadequacy of assertions about supposedly universal and timeless beliefs.
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Chidester, David. Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1996.
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Comparative religion was not an innocent endeavor; it emerged out of the Enlightenment heritage but also out of a violent history of colonial conquest and domination. “Religion,” “religions,” and “nonreligion,” objects of knowledge, are also instruments of power.
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Chitando, Ezra. “African Christian Scholars and the Study of African Traditional Religion: A Re-evaluation.” Religion 30.4 (2000): 391–397.
DOI: 10.1006/reli.2000.0290Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Evaluation of the work on African Traditional Religions of African Christian scholars, responding to criticism that they are “too theological,” or that they impose Christian norms.
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Landau, Paul. “‘Religion’ and Christian Conversion in African History: A New Model.” Journal of Religious History 23.1 (1999): 8–30.
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On contradictions in the work of scholars who, as such, do not accept that “God” is a universal factor in human experience but accept the missionary categorization of African practices as religious. Imposed Christian meanings have been internalized by native speakers who have come to be treated as elements of “African religion.”
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p’Bitek, Okot. African Religions in European Scholarship. New York: ECA Associates, 1980.
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Okot p’Bitek, poet and ethnographer of his people, the Luo of Kenya, denied that Africans were constantly aware of things otherworldly and said writers on African Traditional Religion were “intellectual smugglers” who purported to find in Africa ideas they brought with them from elsewhere. This book is not widely available. Originally published in 1953 (Kampala, Uganda: East African Literature Bureau).
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Shaw, Rosalind. “The Invention of ‘African Traditional Religion.’” Religion 20 (1990): 339–363.
DOI: 10.1016/0048-721X(90)90116-NSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A critique of religious studies. Argues that illogical categories have the effect of imposing Western ideas of religion and that our understanding of African religion is a product of “translation from above,” selecting certain forms rather than others and asserting their equivalence to Christian forms. The author’s title invokes Mudimbe 1988 (cited under Translation).