African Religious Practices Research Articles

The Impact of “Kekweimet” on Christian Beliefs and Practices Among the Keiyo Community of Kenya

African religious practice constitutes an important component of the social and religious makeup and the cycle of harmony in the community. Despite the introduction of Christianity, most African communities have sustained cultural practices, some of which contrast with Christian beliefs. The main aim of this research was to evaluate the persistence of the cleansing ritual of Kekweimet among the Keiyo people of Kenya. This inquiry also sought to understand the social and religious implications of this cleansing ritual on the Keiyo Christians. A qualitative ethnographic approach was used for the study with a target sample size of 95 participants in Kapkei village on the Keiyo Border. Interviews and focus group discussions were used to collect data and a thematic strategy was adopted for data analysis. The findings of the study revealed that Kekweimet was an important collective cleansing ritual still practiced by Keiyo Christians. The ritual process was meant to cleanse, remove bitterness in the grieving family, and repair the relationship between the clan of the deceased and the one who had committed murder. From the setting, there was a strong interaction between the Keiyo Christians and the cleansing ritual because of the involvement of church elders and the use of Christian-based prayer. The researcher determined that despite the constructive outcomes of Kekweimet the practice among Keiyo Christians surmounted syncretism and risked leading the faithful away from the Christian Faith.

‘When Faith Is Not Enough’: Encounters between African Indigenous Religious Practices and Prophetic Pentecostal Movements in Zimbabwe

African Pentecostalism remains the fastest growing form of Christianity on the African continent. Scholarship on Zimbabwean Pentecostalism has noted how the emergence of New Pentecostal Movements (NPMs), specifically Prophetic Pentecostalism (PP), has increased this growth. Apart from other attracting factors, such as the Holy Spirit, claims of faith healing, deliverance and prophecy, among others, African Pentecostalism is known for its emphasis on faith as a major anchor of any Pentecostal Christian. Hebrews 11, with its emphasis on faith, is, therefore, a central scripture in this Christian tradition. However, the emergence of NPMs at the height of the Zimbabwean crisis from the year 2008 to the present, has challenged Zimbabwean Pentecostal Christians from their sole dependency on faith. The crisis called for much more than faith could stand on its own. Hence, NPMs responded to this need by infusing indigenous religious practices with biblical ones as a way of strengthening believers through the crisis. Prophetic Pentecostal Movements (PPMs) in Zimbabwe introduced touchable objects such as anointed towels, handkerchiefs, wrist bands, stickers, oils and even condoms. While this appears to be sophisticated syncretism, a critical analysis of the practices shows how steeped they are in the African indigenous religious worldview. This article, therefore, seeks to examine the religious encounters between indigenous African religious practices and Pentecostal practices as practiced in the NPMs in Zimbabwe. The focus of this paper is to establish the resilience of indigenous religious practices within a Christian tradition that claims to have totally broken from the past. It further argues that the fast growth of PPMs depends on the ‘Christianization’ of indigenous religious practices, which are presented to believers as ‘purely biblical’. This is largely a desktop research project in which secondary sources were used as sources of data.

The coloniser or the missionary? Identity crisis as a conflict in Biblical reception among the Agikuyu of Central Kenya

The Bible was a new phenomenon among African cultures that treasure the oral traditions governing their moral and spiritual life. Many African communities were reluctant to welcome the biblical discourse because it not only disagreed with traditonal African religious practices, but it was also imposed on them by foreigners laden with negative political motives. This article examines the difficulty of distinguishing between the coloniser and the missionary as an initial conflict in biblical reception among the Agikuyu of Central Kenya. The article analyses how the missionaries inculcated the biblical message and how the Agikuyu gradually shifted from their initial belief that "there is no difference between a White coloniser and a White missionary" to a friendly relationship with missionaries and acceptance of Christianity. To explore these dynamics, the article employs witness accounts from African scholars, intertextual analysis of texts regarding Agikuyu because of the initial challenge of distinguishing British colonialists from missionaries. The results will contribute to understanding the dynamics of conflict in the reception of the biblical discourse and the reception of people by others in the world nowadays.

Reception and Makings of African Vocal Ensemble Sounds beyond Binaries

Abstract Since 1877, the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) Church from North America has established its presence in Southern Africa. As with missionization in other denominations, this introduced a variety of primarily Euro-American musical influences into African religious practices. Over the years, Adventist musicians have constantly negotiated a complex relationship to their African contexts, often yielding musical outcomes that cannot be reduced simply to an indigenous vs exogenous or ‘African’ vs ‘Western’ binary evaluation. This intersectional phenomenon is not thoroughly explored in the current scholarship on SDA music. This paper provides background and details on collaborations and exchanges in various repertoires since the 1980s. I argue that these embody intersectional ideas that emerge beyond geographical, cultural, and chronological boundaries. The study is developed from analyzing unstructured interviews and audio recordings to illustrate perpetually blurred boundaries in musical practices that have conventionally distinguished “African” vocal sound.

Consultations in New Prophetic Churches and African Traditional Religions: A Case Study of Divine Healing in Assessing Syncretistic Practices in the South African Context

New prophetic churches have a different approach to classical Pentecostalism when it comes to the practice of divine healing. Unlike classical Pentecostalism, new prophetic churches embrace the practice of consulting prophets in divine healing in the same way as that in which a traditional healer would be consulted in traditional African religions. During the consultation, the prophet charges a fee and prescribes sacred products that are similar to those of traditional African religious practices. This article uses a case study to illustrate the similarities between new prophetic churches and traditional African religions. Although there are similarities between the two movements, there is a need to also demonstrate their differences. The similarities are framed as continuities, and differences as discontinuities. When diagnosing the problem, a traditional healer throws traditional bones, but a prophet relies on the Holy Spirit to utter a prophetic word. When exorcising a demon causing sickness and diseases, a traditional healer uses rituals to invoke the spirits, but new prophetic churches, with all their weaknesses, would still use the name of Jesus to cast out the evil spirits. The findings in this article have some implications within the theoretical framework of syncretism. The similarities demonstrate syncretistic practices, and the discontinuities demonstrate the nonsyncretistic nature of new prophetic churches in South Africa.

Quest for African practical theology: lived religion, social transformation and public aspiration as organising centres

ABSTRACT This article considers the notion of lived religion conceived from African religious practices and experience, social transformation, and public practical theology as practical theology praxis. These elements are influenced by the contextual understanding of religion as a shared communal phenomenon, post-colonial conversations and pressing social, economic, governance, and economic challenges, among other things. The elements and context are located within the global practical theology conversations. The article aims to answer the question: what are some aspects that can be discerned to constitute a practical theology organising centre in Africa? The article describes the practical theology emphasis on context followed by Africa's specific contextual aspects, and then suggests some practical theology organising centre elements.

“Building Community through Death”: Freed African Religiosity and Faith-Based Social Networks in Nineteenth-Century Salvador da Bahia, Brazil

This article adds to existing discussions on slave religions by offering the analysis of four post-mortem testaments left behind by formerly enslaved African women in nineteenth-century Salvador da Bahia to elucidate the different roles that faith and religiosity played within their lives, communities, and understandings of self. After contextualizing these primary sources within the relevant historiography on African and African descendant religiosity in Atlantic slave societies, it focuses on the centrality of baptisms, strong pleas for forgiveness, elaborate funerary arrangements, irmandade membership, and lives spent within the precepts of Roman Catholicism present in the testaments. It also considers the realities of enslavement and the Atlantic slave trade as important factors that shaped the considerations of freed Africans when faced with the imminence of death. In a world where life was fleeting, death became a major site for community formation, for the assertion of principles, and for exercising agency. The proximity of death and the realities of Atlantic slave societies shaped libertos’ considerations of justice and honor, as well as the final rites they required for their dignified passage to the afterworld. This article concludes that Africans in the diaspora constantly managed, negotiated, and enlarged the small spaces for self-determination, and for the preservation and recreation of identities and communities, with which they were left, while they also carved out other parallel spaces for themselves. Among these, Roman Catholic-derived religious communities and affiliations, and the continuation and creative adaptation of African religious practices, were of essential importance to the identities and community formations of libertos.

Fá Divination, Well-being, and Coolness in Bénin, West Africa

Abstract For more than 40 years the relationships that exist between divination and knowledge have become central to anthropology’s understanding of African religious practice. This paper deemphasizes the commonly mobilized ‘divination as knowledge’ trope in favor of highlighting its role in achieving well-being. Indeed, I argue that by focusing on divination as a way of knowing ethnographers have inadvertently ignored what happens after said knowledge is acquired. It is these moments that I find to be at the heart of divination’s enduring value. Through an analysis of divination rituals, initiations, and material objects, alternative ways to examining divination in the West African rain forest are considered and explored. Looking to Fá divination, one of the major oracular systems employed by Fon speakers in the Republic of Bénin, I turn my attention to the ways in which divination helps individuals fulfill their destinies and achieve goodness in the world. In this way I argue that West African systems of divination are only secondarily about knowledge and first and foremost about achieving a sense of balance (coolness) and well-being.

AFRICAN TRADITIONAL RELIGION AND NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT: THE ROLE OF TOTEMS AND DEITY WORSHIP IN GHANA

Purpose: The exploitative tendencies of human activities have hugely hampered the environment, diversely. To that end, the international community has adopted several devices that are mainly anchored on law, ethics and religious doctrines to address the challenges. This paper looks at the relevance of religion towards environmental conservatism. In that regard, the main objective of the study was to ascertain how Traditional African Religious practices, in particular totemism and deity worship, do enhance the sustainable utilization of natural resources and the preservation of ecosystems.
 Methodology: This study which was guided by qualitative methods using in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and participant-observations; purposively selected 45 participants based on their knowledge on the subject area across three ethnic groups in Ghana.
 Findings: Findings showed that even though practices of totemism and deity worship by African Traditional Regions (ATRs) have aided environmental protection throughout the centuries, it is only coincidental as reasons behind the practices are spiritual and not born out of environmental consciousness or pragmatism. And that, practices of totemsim and deity worship are widely spread in Ghana and observed by all clans in the country.
 Recommendations: For effective environmental protectionism, it is recommended amongst other things that in addressing current ecological challenges, both modern scientific methods and indigenous traditional modes be synchronized efficiently. Findings in this article call for the festering of ideas amongst religious environmentalists, environmental institutions, governments and policy makers, towards the efficient management of environmental resources in the given circumstances.

Catching Power: Problems with Possession, Sovereignty, and African Religions in Trinidad

ABSTRACTIn 2010 and 2011, female students at my field site in southern Trinidad experienced ‘mass possessions’ that closed down the secondary school. While Pentecostal-charismatic Christians figured African traditions (particularly ‘Obeah’) as atavisms that caused the events, observers also blamed the ‘possessions’ on salient markers of a twenty-first-century modernity – particularly the Internet, ‘science’, citizen insecurity, and illicit transnational networks. I argue that this seeming temporal disjuncture in causal narratives points towards some common problems with sovereignty that have marked representations of both African religions of ‘possession’ and (neo)Liberal politics. African spirit manifestation religions have often been characterised by the trope of slavery, as a relation of non-sovereign possession between spirit and human, while Liberal politics (or born-again Christianity) have ostensibly promoted a contrasting ideal of self-determination and national (or spiritual) sovereignty. While these seemingly opposed representations show how ‘spirit possession’ has shaped modern ideals of sovereignty through a racialised ‘labour of the negative’, I examine how practitioners of an African religion at my field site questioned these terms of (dis)possession at the school. These practitioners’ conceptions of ‘catching power’ suggest alternatives to both political models of sovereign ‘possession’ and anthropological models of ‘spirit possession’. I close by arguing that African religious practices of ‘catching power’ can provide a critical alternative to these racialised and gendered dynamics of ‘possession’, modifying the conceptual and geographic province of Foucault's critique of Western political theories of sovereignty.

GENDER PERSPECTIVES AND AFRICAN SCHOLARSHIP: BLIND SPOTS IN THE FIELD OF RELIGION, MEDIA, AND CULTURE

The cases of Prophet Paseka Motsoeneng, also known as Pastor Mboro, and Prophet Lesego Daniel – two controversial religious leaders in South Africa – caught media headlines between 2016 and 2017 when the Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities (CRL) released its report after an investigation into the commercialisation of religion and the abuse of people’s belief systems. A survey of reporting on the matter on popular news sites (following the release of the report) show that while Daniel and Mboro’s reaction to the report, and the findings of the report received widespread media coverage, their abuse of women and young girls received significantly less coverage, by both the media and Commission. Despite the complaints lodged by gender justice NGOS in June 2011 on the sexual abuse of women and girls in Mboro’s congregation; it was only when the matter became an economic one – i.e. the abuse of people’s belief systems in “profiting the prophets” – that the media and the state became interested. The lack of “gender interest” in the media is widely attested to in scholarship, at the intersections of religious studies, media studies, and cultural studies, which prides itself on well-established track records of interdisciplinary work. Hence, the “media turn” in the study of religion has played a crucial role in reconfiguring understandings of pertinent contemporary geo-political and social issues. Despite the identification of gender as a blind spot, in both media reporting and scholarship in the field, by leading scholars such as Mia Lovheim and Joyce Smith, further “blind spots” in the field and in the vision of those who have been at the helm of its development and advancement is evident, as I will show in this article. In identifying gender as a missing variable in the discussions, what is absent is a theorisation of this absence. When dealing with cases in Africa, it seems that an intersectional feminist approach requires at least two considerations – the first is that feminist scholars of religion and media may want to avoid the propagation of the perpetually oppressed, pious African woman being exploited at the hands of a powerful charismatic leader. The second consideration is the very real Afro-pessimism that accompanies such reporting – the spectacle of apparently backward African religious practices attracts the attention of the world, while child marriage in right-wing Christian conservative America, for example, goes under the radar. How should feminist scholars working at the intersections of religion, media and cultural and religious studies negotiate the sexualisation and racialisation of African bodies within parallel constructions of sexual violence and Afro-pessimism? Using the case study of CRL in South Africa, this article makes a case for theorising the study of gender, religion, and media outside of the epistemological and contextual frame of western sensibilities and motivates instead for a feminist intersectional lens to avoid the double bind of sexism and racism in the analyses offered.

Papist Devils: Catholics in British America, 1574–1783 by Robert Emmett Curran (review)

Reviewed by: Papist Devils: Catholics in British America, 1574–1783 by Robert Emmett Curran Jennifer E. Schaaf Papist Devils: Catholics in British America, 1574–1783. By Robert Emmett Curran. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2014. 320pp. $29.95. In Papist Devils, Robert Emmett Curran offers a concise history of the Catholic experience in the British Atlantic world. Curran begins his inquiry in 1574 on the eve of Catholic colonizing projects in North America and the West Indies. He establishes that the shifting fortunes of Catholics in the Mother Country created a ripple effect that directly impinged on the prospects of their colonial cousins across the Atlantic. Though most Catholics chose to remain in Britain and endure penal legislation and persecution as best they could, a very few intrepid figures saw emigration to colonial outposts as a means of achieving economic prosperity and spiritual sanctuary simultaneously. Other, less fortunate, Catholics made their way across the Atlantic under terms of indentured servitude, fleeing poverty or facing expulsion from the lands of their birth. Though Curran briefly describes the circumstances endured by Catholic colonists as remote from one another as Nova Scotia and the Leeward Islands, more than half the text describes the experiences of [End Page 92] Maryland Catholics. Curran deftly traces the demographic and financial realities that complicated Lord Baltimore’s motivating ambitions. Catholic Marylanders found themselves in the minority from the outset, and contended with Protestants’ resentment of their attempts to maintain power and safeguard Catholic spiritual prerogatives. Curran lucidly and adroitly unspools the tangled skein of shifting political, religious, and financial alliances that forced Catholics in Maryland and throughout the Atlantic world to navigate local antagonisms and distant geo-political machinations that converged in unexpected and often volatile ways. Provincial officials such as William Claiborne cynically exploited anti-Catholic sentiment in England to advance their economic and political agendas in Maryland. The colony’s Catholic elite employed various means of combating such intrigues, from casting their political lot with apparent sympathizers to implementing innovative legislation to protect religious freedom. Elsewhere in the Atlantic world, Catholics lacking political resources resorted to more drastic means of self-preservation. Some Catholic servants relegated to the most brutal locales in the West Indies, for example, allied with slaves to form maroon communities beyond the reach of merciless overseers. And Acadians struggled to maintain their religious and ethnic identity in the aftermath of being ruthlessly routed from their settlement. While Curran’s achievement is considerable, his work is not without its occasional flaws. A more careful and nuanced consideration of Catholic women would have greatly improved the volume. Curran observes that laywomen provided spiritual succor in their households and in underserved communities prior to the establishment of Catholic religious and social institutions. And he rightly asserts that such efforts earned them the esteem of their co-religionists. But he goes on to make the unsupportable claim that Catholic women enjoyed a higher status within their faith community than their Protestant counterparts. To make his case, Curran cites Catholic men’s willingness to appoint wives as executrixes of wills and to allow women’s participation in the management of family farms and businesses. In so doing, he ignores an extensive historiography that reveals women throughout the southern colonies exercised unprecedented legal and financial prerogatives in the early phases of settlement when seasoning frequently left them widowed and without male protectors. As men’s life expectancy rose, women’s legal and financial autonomy concomitantly fell. Curran touches only lightly on the unique circumstances of black and enslaved Catholics. He recounts how Maryland’s tobacco economy came to rely on slave labor. And he concedes that Catholics were among [End Page 93] Maryland’s most prominent slaveholders. Curran points out that Maryland Catholics followed the Jesuit directive to baptize and properly catechize slaves. And he speculates that various elements of Catholic worship may have dovetailed with West African religious practices and made conversion more palatable. This mild depiction raises more questions than it answers. Curran does not address whether enslaved and marginal Africans experienced Catholic evangelization as coercive. Nor does he explore whether slaves capitulated to their owners’ religious admonitions as a practical strategy...

Katunkumene and Ancient Egypt in Africa

This article, given life to a great extent by the “King Tut” craze of the 1970s, addresses the controversy regarding the “race” of the ancient Egyptians. It does so, however, not by interrogating the concept of race, but by simply inquiring into whether nonarchaeological, nonphysical anthropological evidence exists suggesting origins of the ancestors of present-day Africans in Egypt. A critical contention of the article is that mainstream Egyptology has failed to make the connection between contemporary Black Africa and ancient Egypt because its methods, steeped in positivism, assume that historical artifacts in themselves can furnish answers to questions of provenance without prior assumptions revolving around a particular provenance. At the very least, the methods have unjustifiably excluded from consideration contemporary Black Africa as the home of the descendants of the ancient Egyptians. Consequently, Egyptologists have characterized ancient Egyptian as an Afro-Asiatic language and failed to recognize its substantial Kiswahili-Bantu substrate, a failure that has resulted in many improperly transcribed hieroglyphs. Convinced that ancient Egyptian was substantially a Bantu language, I have been able not only to trace some names of its kings back to the ancient Nile Valley but also to link two words in Egyptian religious practice to traditional African religious practice. These measures, added to the alternative names for Egypt unearthed by my analysis of the existing terms in the literature suggest strongly ancient Egyptian ancestry of many people in southern Africa a provenance in ancient Egypt of a substantial number of Zambians.

Politics, Profit, and Practice in Early American Religion

Politics, Profit, and Practice in Early American Religion Lauren F. Winner (bio) Carla Gardina Pestana. Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. 302 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliographic essay, and index. $55.00 (cloth); $22.50 (paper). Katherine Carté Engel. Religion and Profit: Moravians in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. ix + 313 pp. Illustrations, map, bibliography, notes, and index. $55.00 (cloth); $22.50 (paper). Janet Moore Lindman. Bodies of Belief: Baptist Community in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. 270 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, appendix, notes, and index. $39.95 (cloth); $22.50 (paper). In Protestant Empire, Carla Gardina Pestana argues that religion was more important than any other “cultural practice” in colonization and the making of the British colonial world. Religion animated migration, justified conquest, “sorted people into migration streams,” and helped structure authority in the colonies (p. 6). If, at first blush, this seems an unsurprising thesis, what distinguishes this remarkable book is its scope—Pestana moves from Scotland to the Bahamas to Maryland with the apparent ease of the ballet dancer who makes all those grand jetes and developes look effortless—and Pestana’s insightful readings of relatively familiar episodes in American history, readings that tease out the religious underpinnings of episodes like Leisler’s Rebellion and King Philip’s War. One of Pestana’s central interests is the religious diversity—and concomitant fractiousness—of the English Atlantic world. From the start, Pestana argues, the multiplicity and strife of English religious life was mapped onto English colonies. Although the Crown made some effort to ensure that only those loyal to the Church of England would migrate—in the 1630s, Charles I went so far as to order port authorities to interview all departing passengers about their religious affiliation—English colonies reproduced the range of English church life: Anglicans, Catholics, and separatists all found their way across the ocean. (Indeed, the desire for a little religious breathing room was precisely what [End Page 581] motivated some dissenters to migrate.) The colonial world was, in fact, more religiously varied than England: neither Massachusetts Bay nor Jamestown, after all, was a religious tabula rasa; both were home to Native Americans who had their own religious traditions. The late seventeenth century saw an increase in religious diversity, as French Huguenots and German-speaking Pietists migrated, and as ever more Africans were forced to the English colonies, bringing with them traditional West African religious practices. Despite the use of the cheery term “diversity,” Pestana does not imagine that the coming together of these many religious groups was without friction. Indeed, she finds religious tension lurking in political and military events that appear, at first blush, to have little to do with religion. Both King Philip’s War and Bacon’s Rebellion, Pestana argues, had religious undertones. New England’s Indians took up arms because they wanted to resist colonists’ encroachments on their land, but also because they wanted to resist the spread of European Christianity. In their attacks on colonists’ settlements, native fighters sometimes desecrated religious objects like Bibles. In turn, colonists experienced a religious revival of sorts during the war, with men and women embracing and finding solace in the practice of covenant renewal. Furthermore, Puritans interpreted the war religiously, narrating the violence in a providential key: the war was a punishmen, or a test, or both, and it could and should ultimately reaffirm God’s sovereignty and quicken the spiritual lives of godly men and women. Bacon’s Rebellion was similarly inflected. Governor Berkeley interpreted Bacon’s actions as a challenge to the divinely ordained monarchy, but Bacon would not let Berkeley lay sole claim to religious language—Bacon argued that he was trying to rescue the colony for the king, and insisted that the “most sacred Majestie” was his “Refuge and Sanctuary” (p. 136). Pestana also identifies witch hunts as moments when the political and the religious intersected. Acknowledging that “no scholar has been able to come up with a perfectly satisfying explanation” for witch hunts (p. 151), Pestana focuses, in her discussion of Salem, on the political disruptions that preceded the frenzy: the...

Traditional African Religion in Natural Resources Conservation and Management in Cross River State, Nigeria

This article assessed the roles Traditional African Religion can play in the conservation and management of natural resources especially forest resources in Cross River State Nigeria. Some religious practices in the African Traditional Religion like methods worship, initiation rites, and the invocation of the sacred powers of the supreme beings, how these gods communicate their will to humans through the chief priests and how the gods are atoned if provoked were examined. The stronghold of African religion rests wholly on the ascription of psychic powers to any part of the natural environment as the abodes of the gods and goddesses of the land and the protection of these abodes of the gods/goddesses. The protection of the abodes of the gods from entrance, utilization and exploitation overtly or covertly encourages conservation and management of natural resources. Forbidden areas associated with worship contribute to natural resources conservation and management in Cross River State. These African traditional religious strategies for natural resource conservation and management have somehow been eroded by acculturation and enculturation of most African communities through the introduction of Christianity as a modern way of worship. The use of literature review and personal interviews was adopted by the authors for the study. The authors recommended a re-visitation of the principles of traditional African religious practices where modern conservation programs could integrate traditional knowledge systems into their activities in the conservation and management of our natural resources.

Man of God Prophesy Unto Me: The Prophetic Phenomenon in African Christianity

One of the features of African primal religions that has stood the test of time is the practice of seeking the cause of evil occurrences, power to deal with it or to avert any future reoccurrence and the search for one's destiny through divination which has been designated ‘prophetism’ in Christianity. The African Indigenous Churches were the first to build the bridge between primal religion and African Christianity by appropriating resources from the gospel to deal with this typical African religious practice. This essay looks at the phenomenon in primal religion, African Indigenous Churches (AICs), the older or Classical Pentecostalism, and contemporary Pentecostal movements. One can establish a continuum from primal religion to the current renewal movements with regards to prophetism, due to the deep-seated quest of the phenomenon in African worldview, which indeed was predicted by Professor C. G. Baëta, Ghana's foremost distinguished scholar who studied the phenomenon more than four decades ago.

Ekpe: An aspect of African religious practice

Ekpe: An aspect of African religious practice

Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770

“The great leaveners of power in the slave societies of the African-Portuguese world were not muscle and might, but rather, African forms of religion and spirituality” (p. 83). With this bold statement, James Sweet concludes the first section of Recreating Africa and announces the thesis of the rest of this provocative book. Rejecting the view that the slave trade so disoriented and dislocated Africans that they could only build creolized African-American cultures in the New World, Sweet argues that in the Portuguese world, “the beliefs and practices of Central African slaves were more than culturally detached or diluted ‘survivals.’” Rather, “an essential character or worldview . . . was transferred to the Americas and survived in large measure” (p. 227).Focusing on the first three centuries of slavery in the Luso-Atlantic world—the period about which we know the least—Sweet offers a rich feast of vignettes of African religious practices culled from Inquisition records, which he juxtaposes with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century missionary descriptions of religious practices in Central Africa. By this means, he shows how Africans’ “core beliefs were not destroyed by the influences of Western Christianity” (p. 103). Rather, the “broad cosmological core” (pp. 116–17) of African religions (explanation, prediction, and control of human affairs) endured under slavery. Chapters on divination, calundú (spirit possession) and other forms of curing, and understandings of witchcraft amply document African practices. Moreover, African culture profoundly influenced Portuguese masters, who routinely turned to African healers and acknowledged the power of African spirits. (In the 1730s, even a priest admitted that exorcism had no effect against African witchcraft.) Other masters resorted to African divination, thereby ceding “judicial power” to their slaves and offering them spaces for resistance.Sweet stresses repeatedly that African religious practices were powerful weapons of slave resistance. To Africans, enslavement was a form of diabolical witchcraft that could best be fought by religious means. “Many masters” lived in constant fear of their slaves’ feitiços (spells), the “stealthy, silent killer[s] of the hated master, and a very real threat to the colonial status quo” (pp. 159–60). Slave diviners employed by masters, he argues, tended to protect their immediate communities by finding outsiders guilty. Others used their divining skills to win economic advantage.Recreating Africa is also an extended critique of John Thornton’s arguments about the strength of Kongolese Christianity and the continuation of Africanized Christianity in the New World. From the early sixteenth century, elites in the Kingdom of Kongo accepted Christianity, and a thin but steady stream of missionaries (to whom we owe most of our knowledge of Central African culture) served there. According to Sweet, however, what Christianity filtered down to the common people of Kongo was thoroughly integrated into African cosmological frameworks, and he finds virtually no evidence that “the so-called Christian beliefs” (p. 196) of Central Africans influenced Brazilian slave Christianity.At times, Recreating Africa is Atlantic history at its best. Sweet is well versed in both African—especially the relatively well-documented cultures of Angola—and Brazilian cultural history, and he deftly weaves his cases together to construct his central argument about African religious practices. He carefully avoids reifying a generic African culture. Occasionally, his evidence allows him to distinguish between West and Central African practice, but given that the majority of Brazil’s slaves came from the latter region, the dominant culture in Portuguese America was “probably Mbundu in origin” (p. 227). Indeed, Recreating Africa makes a useful counterpoint to the essays in Linda Heywood’s Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002).Some portions of the book do not cohere quite as well; early chapters on demography, kinship (including same-sex relationships), and the brutalities of slave life—the latter graphically detailed—are not fully integrated into the discussion of religious practices. Similarly, the chapter that analyzes the determined allegiance of Christian and Muslim slaves to their respective faiths does not advance his argument about African culture. Inevitably, one is left to wonder whether the cases brought before the Inquisition are truly representative of cultural practices in colonial Brazilian society. And, at times, Sweet may be overstating the efficacy of religious resistance. Many slaves, after all, opted to flee to Palmares, the long-lived quilombo (runaway slave community) also profoundly shaped by Angolan culture, which represented a very different response to slavery.

Our Lady of Guadeloupe Visits the Confederate Memorial

Truisms are sometimes true. And if anything has seemed self-evident to interpreters of South, it's religious homogeneity of Bible Belt. With exception of Mormon cultural area in Utah and adjoining states, no U.S. region seems less diverse. Fervent revivalism, civil war, and minimal immigration allowed a southern evangelical Protestant establishment--mostly Baptist and Methodist--to form by nineteenth century. Free of challenges from immigrants, that evangelical alliance has shaped religious landscape. Some observers have trumpeted South as last stronghold of faithful Christian witness; others, like Baltimore-born iconoclast H. L. Mencken, have dismissed it as the bunghole of United States, a cesspool of Baptists, a miasma of Methodism, snake-charmers, phony real-estate operators, and syphilitic evangelists. However assessments diverge--and they still do--almost all interpreters have agreed on one point: South looks more homogenous than rest of nation. (1) There is much truth to still standard interpretation: South seems more uniformly Protestant and more institutionally pious. Surveys indicate that southerners join churches and attend services more than Americans do in other regions. Even unchurched in South admit to a lingering piety: in one 1978 poll nearly three-fourths believed that Jesus was son of God and rose from dead, and another survey a decade later found that almost two-thirds of unaffiliated believed in life after death. Recent surveys reveal same pattern of attendance, membership, and belief. For example, spring 2000 Southern Focus Poll found that nearly a quarter of southerners (23 percent) attend services more than once a week, as compared to about 15 percent of nonsoutherners, and significantly more southerners than nonsoutherners (40 percent compared to 29 percent) say that religion is extremely important in their byes. According to fall 1999 Southern Focus Poll, more southerners than nonsoutherners claim Bible is their authority for daily life (31 percent compared with 19 percent), and more than six out of ten say they prefer biblical creation account to Darwinian evolutionary theory to explain universe's origins. And some geographers and sociologists have argued that this regional pattern of piety shows few signs of changing. (2) The South is not just more pious, either; it is also still predominantly Protestant. The 2000 Southern Focus Poll found that 65 percent of southerners claim Protestant affiliation, while rest of nation was only 43 percent Protestant. Two sociologists who have conducted most comprehensive telephone survey of last decade came to similar conclusions. Barry A. Kosmin and Seymour P. Lachman have found that Baptists, both black and white, are concentrated south of Mason-Dixon Line. They are largest religious group in fourteen states, nearly all of which are in South, and Baptists comprise more than half residents of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Furthermore, Kosmin and Lachman suggest, a relatively stable southern Protestantism, evangelical and Pentecostal, persisted into 1990s. (3) Truisms, however, need nuancing. We need to qualify claims about continuing evangelical Protestant dominance in several ways. First of all, diversity has a long history in South. Among earliest settlers, West African religious practices mixed with Christian piety to produce new creole spiritual forms, and even Christian faiths Europeans transplanted bore varied fruits. Roman Catholics built first permanent settlement in South (and in North America) at St. Augustine in 1565. They have a long history in Texas and Louisiana, and Catholics built churches in small towns and larger cities. Jews also found a place in some southern cities--Charleston, Wilmington, Savannah, and Miami Beach, for instance. …

Conjuring in the Big House Kitchen: An Interpretation of African American Belief Systems Based on the Uses of Archaeology and Folklore Sources

AbstractJoining archaeological and folkloristic methods, the authors compare the archaeological remains of African religious practices found in Virginia sites from the 18th and 19th centuries with historical data on conjuring and divining. The contents of diviners’ bundles buried beneath hearths and sills and in northeast corners are presented from Virginia sites occupied by enslaved Africans and free African Americans. Those bundles are contextualized using data from narratives of former slaves and the ideas of West African religion.