Religion, Culture and Spirituality in Africa and the African Diaspora

William Ackah, Jualynne E. Dodson, R. Drew Smith

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315466194
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Religion, Culture and Spirituality in Africa and the African Diaspora explores the ways in which religious ideas and beliefs continue to play a crucial role in the lives of people of African descent. The chapters in this volume use historical and contemporary examples to show how people of African descent develop and engage with spiritual rituals, organizations and practices to make sense of their lives, challenge injustices and creatively express their spiritual imaginings.

This book poses and answers the following critical questions: To what extent are ideas of spirituality emanating from Africa and the diaspora still influenced by an African aesthetic? What impact has globalisation had on spiritual and cultural identities of peoples on African descendant peoples? And what is the utility of the practices and social organizations that house African spiritual expression in tackling social, political cultural and economic inequities? The essays in this volume reveal how spirituality weaves and intersects with issues of gender, class, sexuality and race across Africa and the diaspora. It will appeal to researchers and postgraduate students interested in the study of African religions, race and religion, sociology of religion and anthropology.

1 Introduction

Mapping the Religious Expressions and Spirituality of African Descendant Communities

William Ackah

Religion, Culture and Spirituality in Africa and the African Diaspora explores key dynamics that shape the continuities and discontinuities of spirituality and religious practices of people of African descent.

African descendants are people of the spirit.¹ Whether it is invoking the spirit of ancestors in family locations in West Africa, the Caribbean,² and North America, bowing down to pray in mosques and churches of Europe and the Americas,³ or in formal gatherings and informal settings, people of African descent are infused with beliefs in connections to realms beyond secular rationality.⁴ Although there are African descendants who espouse atheism,⁵ they are fewer in number. For the most part, African descendant communities, wherever they are found, are predominantly communities with spiritual underpinnings, and spirituality is the guiding element by which their lives are framed, no matter their location in the world.

African communities are dynamic and diverse,⁶ with their religions and spirituality having been shaped by factors of geographic location, organized religious settings, enslavement, colonialism, social oppression, and the contemporary globalized world. Broad structural influencers, however, are not the whole story. Creativity, reflexivity, performative power,⁷ spiritual insight, organizational prowess, sense of collective agency, and the intangible and sometimes incomprehensible movements of the Spirit have also shaped the communities’ spirituality. This book, Religion, Culture and Spirituality in Africa and the African Diaspora, is our attempt to explore and explain how these processes are combining and have combined to produce engaging, powerful, diverse, and sometimes contrasting forms of religious spiritual life and practice.

As scholars have attempted to find a commonality in the spiritual practices of African descendants, they have argued that community, generosity, justice, respect, openness, integrity, honor, and dignity⁸ are defining ethical values. It’s true that these values are evident in the spiritual practices of African descendant people in some contexts, but in others, religious life is infused with patriarchy, sexism, corruption, compromise, and divisiveness. Why do these discontinuities exist? The Christian biblical New Testament proposes that “Can both fresh water and spring water flow from the same spring?” (James 3:11). The chapters of our volume present case studies that engage this possibility by critically examining multiple sources that flow into the well-springs of African descendants’ religious and spiritual lives. The chapters reveal how multiple sources that stem from diverse and similar spaces as well as shared and divergent experiences, not merely spirituality, have shaped the forms of religious expression throughout Africa and the African Diaspora.

This book of collective essays emerges from conferring activities of a cross-disciplinary group of Pan-African-inspired scholars and faith leaders. The work of the Transatlantic Roundtable on Religion and Race (TRRR), is worth outlining in detail, as the participants’ contributions to the ideas and context of this book were invaluable. The TRRR was founded in 2010 in Chicago, USA, and since then has brought together academics, faith leaders, and community activists from across Africa, the African Diaspora, and the rest of the globe. These conferring participants have engaged in critical conversations on the role of religion in African descendants’ struggle for liberation, dignity, and equality for themselves and other stigmatized and marginalized communities. The collective has held meetings in South Africa, the United Kingdom, Ghana, and Trinidad and has produced noted academic volumes: Churches Blackness and Contested Multiculturalism: Europe, African and North America⁹ and Contesting Post-Racialism Conflicted Churches in the United States and South Africa.¹⁰

This current work, Religion and Spirituality in Africa and the African Diaspora, is the third such published work. The Roundtable’s first volume concerned issues of religion, race, and politics in the contexts of migration flows across Africa, Europe, and the Americas and was set against a background of examining rising xenophobic sentiments that were impacting African descendants. That volume explored how, over time and place, African descendants have employed remarkable dexterity and courage to navigate inhospitable spaces and places and to develop spiritual practices and religious communities that continue to regenerate vital ways of knowing and being humane.

The second volume focused on the enduring significance of racism in the lives of U.S. African Americans and Black South Africans as they confront a falsely labeled “post-racial” epoch that presumed the U.S. and South Africa were entering a new period of racialized social harmony and togetherness. That work utilized a combination of historical and contemporary accounts of African American and Black South African’s faith-based encounters that demonstrated the erroneously imagined nirvana of post-racial democracies. Indeed, the incorrect contemporary imaginings were contributing to a worrying amnesia about white supremacy’s historical legacies and current manifestations. The volume highlighted the need for a more comprehensive call for justice rather than mere reconciliation between groups in the U.S. and South Africa.

Birthed in Ghana during a roundtable-style dialogue between scholars from around the world, this third TRRR volume focuses on the religions and spirituality of African descendants. The critical dialogue focused on the unfolding nature and forms of African spiritual engagement across time, space, and place, and the meanings of these for our understanding of relationships between African descendants worldwide and the quests for dignity and justice. These quests have a long history, and TRRR is part of the trajectory of African and African diasporic connectivity that has resulted in memorable Pan-African meetings,¹¹ writings, as well as African descendants’ political¹² and artistic endeavors.¹³ These quests also have been infused with spiritual and organizational religious significance,¹⁴ with Africa at times regarded as the spiritual homeland for her children scattered around the world.¹⁵ A dream of unity, however, is yet to be realized, in spite of energies from some key figures of the global African experience to make it a reality. The fractures, divisions, and differences that exist within and across African and African descendant communities are real,¹⁶ and religious organizations and thinkers have contributed to these divisions.¹⁷ The TRRR has engaged these realities and in this volume, makes key contributions to a dream of unity in diversity, even as it troubles the waters of our academic and experiential knowledge.

Gendered Expressions

Gender is a key social division featured in the volume,¹⁸ as the work explores and explains ways in which African and African Diaspora women’s spirituality have impacted the religious and cultural life of societies in which they have been an intrinsic part.¹⁹ The role of women in the life of African and African Diaspora religious organizations has been conceptualized in terms of a dichotomy of visible yet invisible.²⁰ In general, women have been viewed as the visible backbone of religious organizations.²¹ Yet, women’s presence in providing physical, material, and spiritual resources that keep organizational arrangements intact and in carrying out unheralded duties that sustain a community is rarely acknowledged or replicated in the organizational leadership of African and African Diaspora religious structures.²² At the highest levels, women are usually excluded, marginalized, and too often deemed unsuitable for leadership purely on the basis of their gender. A painful truth that needs to be articulated is that religious organizations have been important conduits of socially constructed and institutionalized sexism and culturally biased behavioral practices that continue to marginalize the experiences of Africa and African Diaspora women (Baloyi, this volume).

Although we do not minimize discriminatory practices of many religious organizations operating in Africa and the African Diaspora, viewing women’s experiences solely through this lens of gender is too narrow. Through their dynamism and agency across time and geographical location, women of African descent²³ have shaped and continue to shape spiritual cultures and communities. At times, they have occupied the highest leadership positions in religious organizations, and their influence has been exhibited in such myriads of ways as socio-political protest, community engagement, preaching, prayer, and the everyday life-cycle engagement processes from birth to death.²⁴ This rich tapestry of ideals, thoughts, and practices becomes tangible by way of women’s spiritual engagement with communities’ cultures.²⁵ Women’s spirituality, their endeavors, and their impact on broader communities in which they are members is multi-faceted and multi-layered. By viewing women’s spirituality in this way, we hope to move conceptual and analytical understandings beyond simple dichotomies and toward more complex explorations of how women’s voices,²⁶ contemplations, practices, and experiences continue to help shape cultures and spirituality in African descendant communities.

Cultural Expressions and Religious Organizations

Just as African and African Diaspora gendered expressions of spirituality exhibit local specificities and broader commonalities/connections, so too do religious organizations. Mosques, churches, temples, and other formal and less formal organized spaces of worship and sacred activities play a complex role with regard to culture.²⁷ These collectivities serve as transmitters of values, beliefs, and ritual practices. They also act as filters, interpreters, and barriers against unwanted intrusions. From drums to chants, liturgies to incantations, silence to shouts, prayers to recitations and by way of their doctrines, rituals, processes, procedures, religious organizations impart to their adherents distinctive ways of being and knowing, which help to shape communities lived cultural and spiritual experience.

In thinking about the current role of religious organizations in the dissemination of ideas and practices across Africa and the African Diaspora, it is worth noting that for millennia, religious collectivities have been engaged in transnational activities. In our contemporary era, there is an under-examination of the extent to which, across time and space, organizational practices influence the sense of identity for cultural practices and practitioners. For example, do we consider whether the lived cultural experience of a Nigerian Presbyterian in Lagos is the same as that of a Nigerian Presbyterian in London or Los Angeles? And what is the role or context for a Presbyterian congregation in facilitating shared cultural experiences across geographical boundaries? Does hierarchical leadership structure, a recognized liturgy, or a robed male clergy elicit different responses across time and location than a non-hierarchical structure or one that has a free-form worship structure, informal dress, and women leaders? The phenomenal growth of Pentecostal Christianity in Africa and the African Diaspora,²⁸ based on expressive worship and focused on “spirit,” suggests that some ordered forms of religious practice lend themselves to spiritual and cultural renewal across geographies. However, is religious form or spiritual practice the key? Such important questions require deeper analysis of relationships between faith, gender, ethnicity, religious tradition, race, geographical locale, and everyday experience.

For many religious adherents, the food eaten, clothes worn, music heard, media consumed, and even the intimacy of relationships are refracted and reflected through the prisms of their religious organization(s) and/or spiritual practice.²⁹ However, religious collectivities are themselves reflectors and refractors of wider cultural forces emanating from many spheres of influence. Which leads to the question, how are we to understand the ways in which other cultural forces are understood and mediated within religious spaces?³⁰ The relationship between the U.S. Black Church and music as an artistic and cultural form is illustrative of the kinds of complexities that arise in the organizational context. In the tradition of the U.S. Black Church, congregations were progenitors of such glorious musical expressions as Spirituals, the Blues, Gospel, Rock and Roll, and Soul. At the same time, many such traditions also attest to historical and contemporary difficulties they experience in attempting to reconcile their congregations to such musical forms as the musical forms moved from church confines and became connected to wider societal relations. Hence, at times, congregations ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Mapping the Religious Expressions and Spirituality of African Descendant Communities
• Section 1 Religious Expressions, Traditions and Identities
• Section 2 Arts, Aesthetics and Culture
• Index