The Spirit(s) in Africa: African Traditional Religions

Buhring, Kurt

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-09887-1_2

Kurt Buhring⁴

Part of the book series: Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice ((BRWT))

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Abstract

Buhring explores theological concepts and religious practices that are found among several African religions, as well as elements and nuances that might be distinctive to particular religions and communities, including Fon, Yoruba, Akan, and BaKongo cultures. More specifically, one purpose of this chapter is to lay out some African views of spirit(s), which include the Supreme Being, subdivinities, and ancestors, as well as humanity and spirit–human interactions such as possession and divination. Buhring’s intention in tapping into these resources is to build a constructive theology and pneumatology later in the work.

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Notes

1.
Jacob K. Olupona, African Religions: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 5.
2.
Ibid., 8.
3.
There is a similarity here to Jewish textual interpretation. Within the Jewish tradition differing, and at times opposing, interpretations of the Bible, for example, might be enlightening because of the very differences and conflicts. Truth(s) emerge in the tensions themselves.
4.
Jawanza Eric Clark, Indigenous Black Theology: Toward an African-Centered Theology of the African American Religious Experience (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 75.
5.
Olupona, African Religions, 3.
6.
Kwesi Dickson, Theology in Africa (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1984), 50.
7.
Laurenti Magesa, What is Not Sacred?: African Spirituality (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2013), 30.
8.
Olupona, African Religions, 26.
9.
Ibid., 4.
10.
Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa: The BaKongo of Lower Zaire (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 43, 49. MacGaffey writes, “In dreams the soul sees, and can be active in, the world of the dead, which is simply the daytime world in its alternative phase. Likewise, the daylight activities of the body are supposed to be experienced as dreams of the soul.…Usually the dream event is seen as some sort of inversion of the real event to come.” On page 50, MacGaffey gives the example of a dream of a successful fishing expedition, followed by an actual bad expedition the next day.
11.
Olupona, African Religions, 21.
12.
Ibid., 21. Olupona also points out that African communities most strongly influenced by the presence of Christianity and Islam seem to stress the superiority of the Supreme God more than communities that have been influenced less or not at all.
13.
Ibid, 20.
14.
John S. Mbiti, Introduction to African Religion (Oxford; Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann Educational Books, 1991, 2^nd rev. ed.), Ch. 5.
15.
Olupona, African Religions, 22.
16.
Ibid., 22.
17.
Ibid., 24.
18.
Ibid, 25.
19.
Ibid., 26.
20.
Mechal Sobel, Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988, reprint), 13.
21.
Laurenti Magesa, What is Not Sacred?, 94–95.
22.
Sobel, Trabelin’ On, 12.
23.
Noel Leo Erskine, Plantation Church: How African American Religion Was Born in Caribbean Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 38.
24.
Sobel, Trabelin’ On, 12.
25.
Peter J. Paris, The Spirituality of African Peoples: The Search for a Common Moral Discourse (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 30.
26.
Dominique Zahan, “Some Reflections on African Spirituality.” In African Spirituality: Forms, Meanings, and Expressions, ed. by Jacob K. Olupona (New York: Crossroad, 2000), 5.
27.
Anthony B. Pinn, Varieties of African American Religious Experience (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998).
28.
Olupona, African Religions, 27–28.
29.
John Pobee, “Aspects of African Traditional Religion,” Sociological Analysis 37 1 (1976), 6.
30.
Will Coleman, Tribal Talk: Black Theology, Hermeneutics, and African/American Ways of “Telling the Story” (University Park, PA: Penn State University, 2000), 4.
31.
Robert Awusu Agyarko, “God of Life: Rethinking the Akan Christian Concept of God in the Light of the Ecological Crisis,” The Ecumenical Review Vol. 65 No. 1 March 2013, 53.
32.
Olupona, African Religions, 8–10.
33.
Carolyn Morrow Long, Spiritual Merchants: Religion, Magic and Commerce (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press), 5; Zahan, “Some Reflections,” 6.
34.
Sobel, Trabelin’ On, 16.
35.
Dickson, Theology in Africa, 53–58.
36.
Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill, NC and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 11.
37.
Erskine, Plantation Church, 48–49.
38.
Long, Spiritual Merchants, 5.
39.
Sobel, Trabelin’ On, 16.
40.
Zahan, “Some Reflections,” 4.
41.
For more on shrines, see Zahan, “Some Reflections,” 14–19. For a full treatment of Yorùbá festivals, see Jacob K. Olupona, City of 201 Gods: Ilé-Ifè in Time, Space, and the Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
42.
Coleman, Tribal Talk, 4, 5.
43.
Olupona, African Religions, 10.
44.
Zahan, “Some Reflections,” 7.
45.
Pinn, Varieties, 13.
46.
Coleman, Tribal Talk, 8.
47.
Ibid., 14.
48.
Olupona, City, 29.
49.
Ibid., 88.
50.
Ibid., 147.
51.
Ibid., 145–149.
52.
Ibid., 229.
53.
Ibid., 226, 231.
54.
Ibid., 233.
55.
Ibid., 112.
56.
Marcus Louis Harvey, “Engaging the Orisa: An Exploration of the Yoruba Concepts of Ibeji and Olokun as Theoretical Principles in Black Theology.” Black Theology 6.1 (2008), 61–82. From concepts of Olokun, Harvey develops the theological idea of mystery, uncertainty, and the unknown, and thus human humility.
57.
Olupona, City, 180.
58.
Patrick J. Ryan, “‘Arise, O God!’: the Problem of Gods in West Africa,” Journal of Religion in Africa 11 3 1980, 169.
59.
Pobee, “Aspects,” 10–11; Dickson, Theology, 55–56.
60.
MacGaffey, Religion, 57.
61.
Ras Michael Brown, African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 98–103. Brown adds, “As spiritually potent beings, simbi children received special treatment and provided essential assistance for people in life and death” (103).
62.
Ibid., 105.
63.
MacGaffey, Religion, 6, 8, 63, and 90.
64.
Paris, Spirituality 51.
65.
Olupona, African Religions, 28.
66.
Zahan, “Some Reflections,” 10. On the same idea within BaKongo traditional religions, see MacGaffey, Religion, 44.
67.
Clark, Indigenous, 74.
68.
Ibid., 75.
69.
Ibid., 94.
70.
Dickson, Theology, 68.
71.
Zahan, “Some Reflections,” 11.
72.
Clark, Indigenous, 92–93; Zahan, “Some Reflections,” 10–12.
73.
MacGaffey, Religion, 63, 72–73.
74.
Olupona African Religions, 28.
75.
Clark, Indigenous, 86.
76.
Paris, Spirituality, 47.
77.
Ibid., 85.
78.
Olupona, African Religions, 32.
79.
Ibid., 29; Olupona, City, 102.
80.
Olupona, African Religions, 29.
81.
Pobee, “Aspects,” 8.
82.
Dickson, Theology, 68–69; Zahan, “Some Reflections,” 12. MacGaffey writes that BaKongo believe children and the elderly, as “closer” to the land of the dead, are more likely to be able to see or communicate with its inhabitants. See MacGaffey, Religion, 54.
83.
Dickson, Theology, 69
84.
Clark, Indigenous, 94.
85.
Some scholars, such as Jacob K. Olupona, speak of a category of “mediumistic divination.” In this understanding, divination is the broader category that includes a spirit medium and a diviner. See Olupona, African Religions, 40–45.
86.
Sobel, Trabelin’ On, 19. Interestingly, Sobel notes that it is typically women who are possessed. Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood explain, “In contrast to Western Christianity,…traditional religions recognized the female as participating in the divine and thus allowed for the parallel and complementary development of male and female ritual leaders.” Frey and Wood, Come, 12.
87.
Tony Perman, “Awakening Spirits: The Ontology of Spirit, Self, and Society in Ndau Spirit Possession Practices in Zimbabwe,” Journal of Religion in Africa 41 2011, 59–92, 66.
88.
Sobel, Trabelin’ On, 12–13; Zahan, “Some Reflections,” 24.
89.
Magesa, What is Not Sacred?, 35. For more on human interaction with West-Central African spirits, see also Brown, African-Atlantic, 113–114 and 123–125.
90.
Olupona, African Religions, 44.
91.
Zahan, “Some Reflections,” 24; Long, Spiritual Merchants, 6; Adekunle Oyinloye Dada, “Old Wine in New Bottle: Elements of Yoruba Culture in Aladura Christianity,” Black Theology Vol 12 no. 1, April 2014, 19–32, 23.
92.
Sobel, Trabelin’ On, 20.
93.
Olupona, African Religions, 44.
94.
Sobel, Trabelin’ On, 20.
95.
Perman, “Awakening,” 68.
96.
Ibid., 86.
97.
Ibid., 82; Sobel, Trabelin’ On, 19.
98.
Coleman, Tribal Talk, 22–23. Coleman discusses the role of charms, or gob, in Fon Ifa divination. Similar charms are also evident throughout the Americas as “gris gris, mojos, tricks, hands, and hoodoos.”
99.
Olupona, African Religions, 45–47.
100.
For a thorough and nuanced discussion of divination in Yorùbá traditional religions, see especially Chap. 6 in Olupona, City.
101.
Olupona, City, 169.

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Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, IN, USA
Kurt Buhring

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Buhring, K. (2022). The Spirit(s) in Africa: African Traditional Religions. In: Spirit(s) in Black Religion. Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09887-1_2

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09887-1_2
Published: 11 September 2022
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-09886-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-09887-1
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