Things like demons or spirits that are just normal in African cosmologies are alien to the western world-view. They’re often commonly misunderstood as idols, but they actually should be viewed as a pictorial genealogy which describes someone’s spiritual and sometimes physical descent. Oftentimes when you look at world religion, you ask questions like: “What do they believe?”; “What are their underlying doctrines?”; and so forth. (a) Afrikania Missions (Ghana) (b) Godianism (Nigeria) (c) The future of West African Traditional Religion. (d) Conflict resolution and management in West African society(a) West African Traditional Religion and Reproductive Health Features: issues of Hygiene, sexuality and Promiscuity/Abortion(b) Circumcision Rites and Reproductive Health(a) The impact of foreign religions on (Christianity and Islam) WATR(b) The impact of West African Traditional Religion on Christianity and Islam.
You will learn about various aspects of African Traditional Religion (ATR), namely, (1) Cosmology in ATR, (2) the philosophical, ethical and psychological principles in ATR, (3) the Supreme Being, divinities and spirits in ATR, (4) religious experience: rites, power and communication with spirits in ATR, and how Christianity ought to interact with such features of ATR. This is normal in many parts of the world. The earlier idea was that African Traditional Religions were incompatible with monotheism. West Africa accounts for about one-fifth of the continent’s area, but it’s over 120 million people – half of Africa’s population. And therefore a better approach is to construct a broader African religious cosmology which extends beyond any one term.The fundamental problem with constructing an African religious cosmology is to understand how the one god and the many gods or lesser deities can co-exist in the African context. Even Christians, if someone is sick, we go to the doctor; we don’t think about casting demons out of people. It starts out with the supreme god at the highest level -- the supreme being or creator, and shades down into the pantheon of divinities, which would include sometimes a hierarchy of divinities, some that are more powerful than others and so forth, and would include also in that same level potentially a pantheon of human but divinized ancestors. Sometimes the ceremony, even though it’s associated with birth, may wait for weeks or months or even as long as a year after the birth to make sure that the child is going to live before they perform this rite of passage for the birth. So part of what we want to do is to redress some of the miscommunications that have occurred about African religion, and seek to develop a way of looking at this which would be coherent.What we want to do is to construct an African traditional cosmology. And it’s fundamental to understand African religions to see that you don’t have the basic western approach which is: Christianity explains that which we cannot see. But in the case of African Traditional Religion, we can’t do this because there are so many different varieties of ATR that are throughout sub-Saharan Africa. And even nature itself is part of this ongoing continuum.
And so one of the things we want to do in this study is focus on how ATR, African Traditional Religion has worked itself out in the practice of Nigeria.East Africa comprises the modern states of Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. The purpose of this is to help to orient a person who would like to work in the context of Africa. You also have in this same second tier oftentimes ancestors who have been divinized. This is a 3-hour summary lecture on the basic components of African Traditional Religions. African Traditional Religions are those practiced by the original inhabitants of Africa and can be divided into four different groups: the Nilo-Saharan, the Niger-Congo, the Khoisan and the Afro-Asiatic Religious Traditions. Now it’s important to recognize that in this second tier, I particularly used the word “divinity”. We have this in Islam, we have this in Christianity, we have this in Judaism (Judaism has Bar Mitzvahs, Bat Mitzvahs where men and women will go into accepting the yoke of the Torah and the responsibilities of Jewish life). In some parts of Africa, the Supreme Being is usually mentioned in prayers, songs and in some religious … So things are done with levels of power. You can pray, and God who’s on the other side of the wall can hear us and he can answer prayer through this portal. It stretches from Senegal along the Atlantic coast, all the way to Nigeria, down along the Gulf of Guinea. And then that shades down once again into various functionaries – mediators, priests, and so forth, herbalists, that mediate this power. Later, a well-known writer named Percy Talbot, who wrote in the 60’s a classic multi-volume work entitled One of the more creative suggestions that we have come across is one by E. Bolaji Idowu, who I’ve already quoted here, who described African religion as “diffused monotheism”. So for example later on we’ll look at how this works out in Nigeria.
We live in the west in a rather crunched-down universe because the invisible world, the spiritual world, has been taken away. New Religious Movements (NRM) in West African Traditional Religion. But certainly there’s no single codified system of beliefs and practices.But nevertheless, we want to distance ourselves from a number of the terms that have been used.