Life, Death, Reincarnation, and Traditional Healing in Africa

Abstract

Over the years, studies of materials about Africa, especially in the fields of religion, history, anthropology, culture, and sociology, have contributed to the reconstruction of the predominant modes of thought and reason that led to the rise of the people’s belief systems, values, and religious doctrines. Though limited in many ways and still in the most rudimentary stage, the study of African religion has helped in some ways in the understanding of the basis of thought and action which determine African cognitions and total experience, in other words, African consciousness of his universe, feeling, and understanding of the state of being. It is important that interest in the study of African religion should be sustained, for one is still confronted today–often by those who should know–with derisively cynical questions such as: Is there an African religion? What in fact is it if there is one? Isn’t it really the worship of ancestors? Is not African healing merely the practice of magic and mumbo-jumbo?