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AFRICAN TRADITIONAL RELIGIONS
AND CULTURE
ARTICLE ASSESED: African Religions: An Interpretation Contributed
By: Robert Baum
www.africana.com/Articles/tt_349.htm
The key issue connected with the content or substance
of African traditional religion revolves mainly around the kind of
questions that should be given prominence in research. Should they
be mainly issues that emanate from the nature of the subject and for
those advance the literary reconstruction of the indigenous
religion, or rather those that are aimed at answering academic
concerns that are largely external to the subject? I am inclined to
believe that greater attention and emphasis should be given to the
latter than the former. In other words, topics that are of
importance to the religion and its adherents should engage the
attention of scholarship. Religion has always played a major part in
the different cultures of Africa. The author of this article has
done solid research on the impact of African religion on the western
world.
We know that each group of people in separate regions of the
continent have creation stories that tie them directly to the God or
Gods they worship.
Usually the God would create the Earth and animals and last would
create the humans to take dominion over the region in which the
people happen to inhabit.
The four primary sources for the study of African religion are the:
1. Oral traditions that are told from parents to children and
priests to the people for centuries.
2. Archeological and linguistic evidence tells of the remaining of
the ancient people1s beliefs by physical evidence of their religion
and way of life and the speech patterns that have evolved over the
years.
3. The religions that are still practiced give a definitive view of
the way religions were practiced in the old days.
4. The arts and sacred spaces have to do with what is considered
Holy by the different practicing groups.
Many beliefs common among different
African religions appear in their creation stories such as:
1. The spiritual cosmos populated by
divine beings, sometimes in a hierarchial order.
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AFRICAN
TRADITIONAL RELIGIONS AND CULTURE
The key issue connected with the content or substance of African
traditional religion revolves mainly around the kind of questions
that should be given prominence in research.
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2. The belief of Earth and material
life as created.
3.A multitude of Gods and other spirits.
4.The role of ancestors.
5.A belief in sacred places and spaces such as a mountain that God
inhabits.
6.Males and females as parts of the cosmic scheme.
7. Idea of society being organized around values and traditions
drawn from common beginnings in history.
The religious leaders in many of Africa's religions have tried,
sometimes in vain, to preserve the society from foreigners
encroaching upon their lands and customs.
Their role has always been to preserve the histories and traditions
of the people. They teach the ways of survival to the people, be it
wedding procedures or planting times
The village priest is there to and serve through the God. The
rituals practiced in many traditional African societies are all
connected by the belief of being stepping stones to the ultimate
goal of death and the afterlife. There are rituals that enhance all
of the transitional stages of life such as birth, puberty,
initiation into adulthood, marriage, having children, old age, death
and life after death. The rituals allow the people celebrating to
know what is expected of them in the next stage of their life and
what is socially acceptable. Another important point of view that I
have reached after assessment of this article is that It is nearer
the truth to say that traditional societies use one kind of myth,
contemporary western society another. Theirs assumes that the
universe is peopled by personal wills acting at every point of human
experience: ours that the universe is impersonal and that the only
centres of personal will are individual men and women.
In the west, the changeover from one
set of myths to the other was closely associated with the growth of
capitalism, nationalism, Puritanism and experimental science.
Essentially the author emphasizes the important role that African
religion and traditions played the changes that came with time all
are traced in an easy to understand and logical method to help the
reader to grasp the material and knowledge. The way the author
traces history and then makes his points are indeed very positive
and logical. If God was needed at all - the conclusion was drawn -
it was simply as the Great Mechanic, who had made the Clock of the
universe and then left it to run by its own inherent power. He was
very much a 'God out there'. Individuals were left face to face with
the iron laws of nature; and some of them began to wonder whether
the game was worth the candle. If everything - including human love
and choice - could be predicted from knowledge of the position and
velocity of atoms, was there anything left to live for? I may
perhaps begin to worry about my own 'identity', to ask, 'Who am I?'
Indeed one of the signs of the change which has taken place is that
individuals in traditional societies did not have to ask that
question. Identity was given to them by God in serious question,
ancestors an affair of out-on-the-wing 'spiritualists', and society
in a state of constant change, there can be no such certainty. If I
am to find an 'identity', I have to choose it for myself. I may do
so by finding in myself what I have put into nature. I also am no
more than a complex organization of atoms. Thirty years ago, this
was a popular view among thinking people. It is much more likely,
today, that I shall think in terms of psychoanalysis. The external
psychic forces of God and the ancestors have been replaced by the
internal psychic force of the unconscious. IN the end I have reached
the conclusion that there are here a number of different
possibilities of interpreting man in his relation to the universe;
and they are not exhaustive indeed religion will always be an
important part of our lives not just Africa but indeed the world
over.
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