African Traditions in the Study of Religion in Africa

Emerging Trends, Indigenous Spirituality and the Interface with other World Religions

Ezra Chitando, Afe Adogame, Afe Adogame

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317184201
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ethnic & Tribal Religion

The historiography of African religions and religions in Africa presents a remarkable shift from the study of 'Africa as Object' to 'Africa as Subject', thus translating the subject from obscurity into the global community of the academic study of religion. This book presents a unique multidisciplinary exploration of African traditions in the study of religion in Africa and the new African diaspora. The book is structured under three main sections - Emerging trends in the teaching of African Religions; Indigenous Thought and Spirituality; and Christianity, Hinduism and Islam. Contributors drawn from diverse African and global contexts situate current scholarly traditions of the study of African religions within the purview of academic encounter and exchanges with non-African scholars and non-African contexts. African scholars enrich the study of religions from their respective academic and methodological orientations. Jacob Kehinde Olupona stands out as a pioneer in the socio-scientific interpretation of African indigenous religion and religions in Africa. This book is to his honour and marks his immense contribution to an emerging field of study and research.

PART I
Emerging Trends in the Teaching of African Religions

Chapter 1
African Religions in African Scholarship: A Critique

Umar Habila Dadem Danfulani

Introduction: A Historical Survey of African Religions in African Scholarship

In a separate work I have examined the contributions of Western scholarship to the study of African traditional religion, which is indeed historic and has remained valuable to our understanding of the discipline (Danfulani 2004; cf. Platvoet 1996; Onunwa 1984). In fact, despite their lapses, Western scholars are critical and crucial in training African scholars who in turn produced scholarship on African traditional religions, which is now under review in this book. African religions in African scholarship constitutes the second phase of what Jan Platvoet refers to as “Africa as Subject.” This, according to him, occurred “when the religions of Africa had begun to be studied also, and increasingly mainly, by African scholars.” The first phase belongs to a category he calls “Africa as Object,” a period “when its religions were studied virtually exclusively by scholars and other observers, from outside Africa.” These are outsiders or non-Africans who studied “Africa as Object” (Platvoet 1996: 118).

The critical examination and historical survey of literature on African traditional religion is not a new theme. It has been discussed in the past in the works of scholars such as p’Bitek (1971a), Westerlund (1985), Ikenga-Metuh (1985a), Onunwa (1984), and Platvoet (1996) among others. In charting a historical survey of African religion in African scholarship, the present book adds new insights by providing a contemporary picture of the current state of research. This contribution is based on the division of the writings of African scholars concerning African traditional religions as provided by Platvoet. He divided them into the following categories and paradigms: amateur anthropologists, professional anthropologists, Christian theologians and historians.

African Amateur Anthropologists/Ethnographers and Nationalists

African scholars who contributed to the early literature on African traditional religions as insiders were initially few. I refer to them as nationalist writers, but Platvoet gives them the befitting term of “amateur anthropologists.” Their studies covered mainly anthropology, religious studies, history, and race relations. This group of scholars has been greatly influenced by the life and works of Marcus Garvey. Within this early group of nationalist scholars are Edward Wilmot Blyden and the Fante lawyers J.E. Casely Hayford and John M. Sarbah, scions of well-to-do coastal merchant families who used the Western education they received to present a defence against what they considered a misrepresentation of African culture, and to defend the cause of the Negroes (Platvoet 1996; Onunwa 1984). Joseph Boakye Danquah, another Ghanaian, was later to follow in the same tradition.

Blyden was a brilliant West-Indian-born Sierra-Leonean Creole and Liberian statesman, educator, writer, diplomat, and politician. He was born on August 3, 1832 in Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, from where he emigrated to Liberia at the age of 18. He is one of the best known and most highly respected African intellectuals in the Western world.

His primary concern was to grapple with the fundamental problem of his race and how to dispel the lingering myth of European idea of the inferiority of the Negroes. By the early 1870s it became clear to Blyden that the modern trans-tribal West African nation which he envisaged would not come out through any large-scale New World Black emigration to West Africa. He therefore sought to make black Africa a respected and important participant in the community of nations, devoting his life to full-time enlightenment of the Blacks. An important means by which Blyden sought to create the consciousness of belonging to one West African community on the part of the English-speaking West Africans was by fostering pride in the history and culture of the Negro race.

In 1887, Blyden wrote Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race in which he advanced the controversial thesis that Islam had an elevating and unifying influence that did not disrupt the African social fabric. In 1908 he published African Life and Customs in which he sought to show that there existed an African social and economic system which in no way could be described as “inferior” to any other system (see Ajayi and Ayandele 1974: 28; Frankel 1974: 277; Lynch 1971: xi; Esedebe 1969: 14ff.; and Holden 1966: 111ff.).

J.E. Caseley Hayford was born in Ghana to a clergyman, Rev. Joseph de Graft Hayford. He attended Fourah Bay College (Sierra Leone) before returning to Cape Coast as a teacher. Later, he went to England and studied law. Like Blyden, Hayford became one of the earliest African journalists. He used his privilege as a member of the Gold Coast Legislative Council in 1916 to project “African personality.” In his Ethiopia Unbound: Studies in Race Emancipation (first published in 1911, Hayford 1969) Hayford argued that the way to project African personality was through the conservation of traditional institutions. Advocating that African religions should be studied diligently, he described Fante religion as an epitome of African Traditional Religion (ATR).

Danquah (1895–1965), a member of the Akim-Abuakwa “royal family”, studied law and philosophy in London from 1921 to 1927. He was born Joseph Kwame Kyeretwi Boakye Danquah on December 6, 1895 and died in February 1965 at Nsawam, in Ghana. As a lawyer, he was called to the Bar in 1926 and obtained a doctorate in 1927. He started publishing academic works in 1928. While Danquah was at University College, London, he came under the influence of the “hyperdiffusionist” explanation of human cultures of the pan-Egyptian or “heliocentric” variety of Elliot Smith and W.J. Perry, together with the “pan-Babylonian” or “selenocentric” theory of Winckelmann that put the origin of all cultures in Mesopotamia (Platvoet 1996: 119; van Baal 1971: 101–2). Danquah (1968: 45–6) thus adopted a polemic and apologetic methodology which made him to come to a conclusion that looked rather artificial, since he deduced that Akan names and concepts of God were akin to those of the Ancient Near East—Mesopotamia, thus giving Akan traditional religion a longer pedigree than Islam and Christianity (cf. Onunwa 1984; Platvoet 1996: 119; Smith 1966a: 3–4, 1966b: 107; Dickson 1968: xff.; Westerlund 1985: 30, 49–50). It seems he was also influenced by Wilhelm Schmidt’s evolutionary theory of primeval-monotheism or urmonotheismus (Platvoet 1996: 119; Dickson 1968: xi). He regarded Akan ancestors merely as mediators that were not approached as independent agents and the gods as deified or divinised ancestors (Danquah 1968: 28, 53; cf. Dickson 1968: xx).

Danquah (1968: 28, 53) practiced law in the Gold Coast and became the leading nationalist politician up to 1947 when he was displaced by Nkrumah. His Gold Coast Akan Laws and Custom adds to our understanding of Akan religious rituals and practices, while he dedicates a chapter in his Akim Abuakwa Handbook to religion. In 1944 he published Akan Doctrine of God, out of a much bigger work. In this book, Danquah reacted against the European denial of the presence of the Supreme God in African life, whom he regarded as the monotheistic Creator-God and African-Ancestor (1968: 7–8, 19ff., 27ff., 58ff., 166ff., and 183, Platvoet 1996: 119; Lugira 1981: 58).

Following in his footsteps was Olumide Lucas (1996), whom Platvoet describes as the Yoruba Egyptologist, who looked at Egypt as the fountainhead of Yoruba religion (Platvoet 1996: 119). This hyper-diffusionist theory of African traditional religion was to have a great influence on a number of Nigerian scholars, particularly in the unitary theory of Bolaji Idowu and Joseph Omosade Awolalu and even in the so called Hebraism of West Africa that sought Semitic origins of African peoples both culturally and linguistically by promoting a Hamitic theory (see Wambutda 1983, 1991: 28–30; Samb 1981; Westerlund 1985: 38, 49; Hackett 1989: 21, 44; Zuesse 1991: 182, and Olupona 1993: 244).

African Anthropologists

Outside native white anthropologists of South Africa, African anthropologists were few and far in between owing to the stigma associated then with its study among early nationalists because of its close association with the colonial enterprise Platvoet (1996) and Westerlund (1989). Fine examples of this category of African scholars are found in Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and Kofi A. Busia of Ghana. Like Danquah before him, Busia belonged to the Akan royal odehye family, while Kenyatta’s father and grandfather were leaders in the Kikuyu rural society of Kenya. These scholars studied anthropology abroad. Kenyatta studied under Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) at the London School of Economics from 1935 to 1937, while the Ghanaian anthropologist Busia was at Oxford, where he studied under Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955) and Daryl Fortes from 1940 to 1942, and under Edward E. Evans-Pritchard from 1946 to 1947. Both of them worked for a while as administrators with the colonial government and became politicians in the latter parts of their lives.

Jomo Kenyatta worked with the Town Council of Nairobi from the early 1920s to 1928 when he became the Secretary-General of the Kikuyu Central Association. He later led Kenya to independence as its first Prime Minister after the exit of the British colonial regime in 1960. His anthropological works that focused on traditional Kikuyu society and religion were also very much a part of his political activism, as was his entire work and life. He was an eloquent politician who changed his Christian name of Johnstone to Jomo in 1938, which means “Burning Spear.” This coincided with the time when his book Facing Mount Kenya appeared. In this book,

He made the implied political and religious messages even more explicit by putting on the frontispiece of the book of a photograph of himself in traditional attire and a spear in his right hand, while testing the sharpness of its point with his left. There was certainly a political inspiration in the romantic picture which he presented of traditional Gikuyu society: it was orderly and cohesive even when executing “wizards.” (Platvoet 1996: 120; Kenyatta 1961: 199ff.)

Facing Mount Kenya (1938) by Jomo Kenyatta remains an excellent source of Gikuyu religion. In it Kenyatta rejected the colonial enterprise as imposed, destructive and unjust and at the same time he discussed the details of Gikuyu traditional religion including the changes that were then taking place within it as a result of the introduction of Christianity. In it he also examined Arathi, a new religious movement of prophets that combined Christian and traditional practices and beliefs (Platvoet 1996: 120; Kenyatta 1961: 267ff.). He developed “his own religious evolution towards a post-Christian, neo-traditional synthesis with elements of parapsychology [that] coloured his interpretation of Gikuyu ‘magical and medical practices’” (Platvoet 1996: 120; Kenyatta 1961: 299). Malinowski was to chide him (though only mildly) for this approach (Platvoet 1996: 120–1; Malinowski 1938: xii).

Kofi A. Busia (1913–78) served as the first African Assistant District Commissioner from 1942 to 1944 when he quit the position because he fell out with his superiors. He was later appointed government anthropologist in charge of a survey of the Takoradi district from 1947 to 1949, when he took up a position as lecturer in African Studies in the new University College at Achimota. He became Professor of Sociology in 1954, and in 1956 leader of the opposition to Kwame Nkrumah in Parliament.

Busia examined the changes forced upon African traditional structures of governance by the colonial masters. Writing from a sociological viewpoint, he devoted a good portion of his work to commenting on African religion. Busia’s work on Akan religion that was published in 1968 (Busia 1968a, 1968b) remains a classic, providing useful ethnographic historical data and accurate descriptions of their belief system. He concluded that African religious heritage is one of the salient determinants of African consciousness (Platvoet 1996: 121).

The major criticism common to anthropological works by both outsiders and insiders is their failure to capture the dynamic aspects of African society (their works are ahistorical, and static because they were written in the anthropological present). The research works of both Kenyatta and Busia were obviously politically motivated as they appeared in “political anthropology.”

Okot P’Bitek (b. 1931, d. July 20, 1982) was a Ugandan anthropologist, artist, novelist, playwright/dramatist, footballer, lawyer, satirist, theologian, and post-Christian scholar, and thus an African culturalist. P’Bitek was born in Gulu, Northern Uganda into a Luo family at a time when Uganda was a protectorate of the British Empire. In addition to being the leader of her clan, his mother was a gifted singer, and composer. As a little boy, P’Bitek grew up learning the tales, proverbs and songs of Acholi (or Luo) folklore from his mother. P’Bitek himself was an accomplished dancer and drummer.

The greater part of his works, especially his novels, reflects themes in African traditional religion because African religion is at the root of African culture (P’Bitek 1971a, cf. Lugira 1981: 60). He was also famous for his literary works, with Song of Lawino (1960) being among the best known. His approach to the study of religion in African Tradtional Religion in Western Scholarship expresses a strong aversion to metaphysical, ontological and/or idealistic thinking (1971: 85). P’Bitek would rather disassociate himself with anthropology altogether because of the challenge his Oxford professors threw at him (1971: ix). His approach was clearly phenomenological in nature because in order to determine the meaning and social significance of the beliefs and practices of African peoples, he studied their religious universals such as deities, spirits, sacrifices, and rituals among others in a comparative manner (Lugira 1981: 60–1). He took both Western and African anthropologists and theologians to task, tacitly using a critical scientific approach. P’Bitek (1971: 129) points out the connection between colonialism and social anthropology of the day from the standpoint of an Africanist, writing “with the passion of defiant Africanness.” He opined that anthropologists justified the colonial enterprise by convoluting “the myth of the primitive” (1971: 1). For this reason, P’Bitek did not reserve a place for social anthropology in African universities, because “Africans have no interests in and cannot indulge in perpetrating the myth of the ‘primitive’” (1971: 5). P’Bitek observed correctly that:

Western scholarship sees the world as divided into two types of human society: one, their own, civilized, great, developed; the other, the non-western peoples, uncivilized, simple, undeveloped. One is modern, the other is tribal … It will be shown that this kind of thinking is one of the ways in which Western scholarship justified the colonial system. (1971: 15)

P’Bitek divided the context of African religion in Western scholarship into four epochs: first, the Western classical world and its relationship with Africa, second, the time of the early Christian Church Fathers (such as Lactantius Cyprian, Tertullian, and St. Augustine of Hippo) and the pagans, and the third the epoch of European Western superstitions concerning Africa. The fourth epoch refers to present-day studies of African religions. This is made up of of the time of the Christian apologists mounting a counter attack on the eighteenth and twentieth centuries’ non-believers, African nationalists fighting a defensive battle against the onslaught on African culture by Western scholarship and colonialism, and Christian missionaries scheming for what they refer to as “dialogue with animism”.

P’Bitek makes critical responses to what he considers to be pitfalls in the study of African rel...