PATIENT
African traditional religions
SCALE
3,000+ ethnic groups, 2,000+ languages
DEPTH
Yoruba, Akan, Bantu and Dogon
STATUS
Living traditions, in Africa and the diaspora
CHIEF COMPLAINT
What do you owe the community, the ancestors and the force that runs through everything?
HISTORY OF PRESENT ILLNESS
The indigenous religious systems of the African continent: not one tradition but a family of related traditions sharing structural features across enormous diversity. Africa has more than 3,000 ethnic groups, over 2,000 languages and religious traditions spanning at least 10,000 years of documented practice. What European colonizers called 'animism', 'paganism' and 'fetishism' tells you more about the namers than the named; the guide notes that the Yoruba theological system is more internally consistent and philosophically developed than many traditions that got serious academic attention centuries earlier. These are living traditions with hundreds of millions of practitioners in Africa and, through the diaspora, across the Americas and the Caribbean. The guide covers Yoruba, Akan, Bantu and Dogon, plus the diaspora.
REVIEW OF SYSTEMS
SHARED STRUCTURE
A supreme being who is distant, divine intermediaries who can be addressed directly, ancestors as active members of the community, and the living community as the primary spiritual unit.
VITAL FORCE
Ashe in Yoruba, nyama in Mande, ntú in Bantu: a single divine energy expressing itself through all of reality at different degrees. Not animism.
YORUBA
Olodumare, the 401 Orisha, and Ifa divination: 256 chapters carried in memory, recognized by UNESCO in 2005.
AKAN
Nyame, the Abosom, Anansi the spider, and Sankofa: it is not wrong to go back and fetch what you forgot.
BANTU
Ubuntu: personhood is relational and is an achievement, not a given.
PHYSICAL EXAM — STYLE & STRUCTURE
- —Ifa's binary structure, eight throws giving one of 256 patterns, is structurally the same as the binary system underlying computing and is far older than Boole.
- —The diaspora traditions are direct descendants of Yoruba religion: Candomblé in Brazil, Santería in Cuba, Trinidad Orisha, Haitian Vodou and Louisiana Voodoo.
- —Eshu is addressed first and last in Yoruba ritual because he controls the roads and doors between worlds.
- —In Bantu tradition illness is read as a broken relationship, and the healer diagnoses that as much as the symptom.
- —European colonial scholarship dismissed these traditions to justify colonial domination. Their recovery as a field of study is largely a 20th-century achievement.
ASSESSMENT & PLAN
Start with vital force, then Olodumare and the Orisha, then Ifa. Read Sankofa and Ubuntu for the philosophy. It is a non-denominational reference guide, and these are living traditions, so learn from practitioners. The full guide recommends Wande Abimbola's Ifa, John Mbiti's African Religions and Philosophy, Kofi Asare Opoku's West African Traditional Religion, Jacob Olupona's African Religions: A Very Short Introduction and Lydia Cabrera's El Monte, and says to read alongside the Hermetic Corpus and Mesoamerican guides.