Form: Short Note

TRADITIONAL RELIGION STILL PRACTICED IN AFRICA

There are still 100M Africans practicing traditional religion.

The various religious traditions of Africa are united by a basic Animism. The belief in spirits and ancestors is the most important element of African religions. Gods were either self-created or evolved from spirits or ancestors which got worshiped by the people.

Animism

Animism builds the core concept of traditional African religions, this includes the worship of tutelary deities, nature worship, ancestor worship and the belief in an afterlife. While some religions adopted a pantheistic worldview, most follow a polytheistic system with various gods, spirits and other supernatural beings. Traditional African religions also have elements of fetishism, shamanism and veneration of relics.

Ancestor Worship

Every action undertaken by Africans required consideration of the ancestors. Unlike Christianity, in which the dead cannot interact with the living, African religion dictated that the dead, as well as the unborn, are full members of the community. The ancestors were wise spirits whom people could not easily mislead. People who did not fulfill the wishes of the ancestors, who were always watching, could suffer tragedy.

The African Spirit World

Spirits inhabited the world along with the living. It is they that interacted with humans on a daily basis, rather than God, as is true in Christianity. God created the spirits and could use them to achieve purposes on earth. Nature spirits are those that Africans held to live within non-human physical objects. The existence of these spirits helped explained phenomena, such as lightning, floods or droughts.

Polygamy

African religions allowed men to possess more than one wife. Africans saw benefits in the arrangements. First, only wealthy men could marry large numbers of wives because each marriage required presenting a considerable dowry, or wedding gift, to the bride’s father. A man had to consider seriously the women with whom he sought to cohabit. In addition, since these were agrarian societies that considered farming a domestic chore for women, multiple wives actually served to lessen the workload.