Apr 14 2008
The Loss of African Spirituality
Christianity and Islam has infiltrated their way into African countries, leaving traditional spirituality by the wayside. A lot of traditional African religious practices are deemed as “primitive” or “evil” and if practiced, it’s done in concealment.
In this essay on the African Path blog, Kofi Akosah-Sarpong explores African spirituality - its history and its present. While it may have lost proud backing on the continent, in the diaspora its a different story.
Despite unkind words used to describe African religion, it has been moving on and accessed by most Africans, even those in the diaspora. While African religion and its deities are worshiped wholly in Africa, diasporan Africans, with their heavy mixtures of all sorts of neo-liberal values, have been mixing African religion with other Western religions perfectly – a feat that demonstrates the resilience of African religion as a global religion without any propaganda or fundamentalism or suicide bombing or the urge to convert anybody to its creed but as one sees it or feels it. African religion do not have problems with American social scientist Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations that argues people’s cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world.
In the United States of America and South America, among others, some think Jesus Christ is Black or African. In the Brazilian state of Bahia, where Yoruba’s Obatalahas been syncretized with Catholic’s Our Lord of Bonfim or in Cuba where Santería is the fusion of Yoruba religion with Catholic’s Our Lady of Mercy, African religion has been mixed with Christianity, especially with Roman Catholicism across the Western Hemisphere.
To Akosah-Sarpong, treating traditional African spirituality as “pagan” is part of the on-going problem of labeling everything African as backwards and leaves Africans with a lost identity. He doesn’t seem to think that Christianity or Islam are false religions in comparison to African spirituality, but instead feels outside religions should be translated through African spirituality.
I find his argument interesting just because, like him, I do believe that missionaries not only evangelized but also manipulated Africans in the spread of their religion. Whether bring back African spirituality is one of the keys to progress on the continent (which seemed to be an underlying part of his argument), I’m not sure. But it’s something to think about.
Obatala Santeria
