II.

Characteristic Features

Even though no body of beliefs and practices can characterize African religion as a whole, certain similarities in worldviews and ritual processes cross geographic and ethnic boundaries.

A.

Worldview and Divinity

Generally speaking, African religions hold that there is one creator god, the maker of a dynamic universe. After setting the world in motion, this supreme being withdrew and remains remote from the concerns of daily human existence. As a result, people do not ordinarily offer sacrifices or organize a cult around this high god. Instead, they turn to secondary divinities who serve the supreme being as messengers or go-betweens. These secondary divinities are sometimes portrayed as children of the supreme god, but religious teachings also regard them as refractions of a divine being.

Finding no outward indications of the worship of a supreme being, early European travelers, missionaries, and explorers dismissed African religions as superstition, animism (attributing a soul to nonliving things, such as trees or rocks), or ancestor worship. However, African religions do recognize one supreme creator.

In East Africa, especially the regions around Lakes Malawi, Victoria, and Tanganyika, the supreme god Mulungu is always present but is sought only in prayer of last resort. People living in the valley of the Nile River also recognize a supreme being whom they address in prayers of petition (request) only after exhausting petitions to secondary divinities. In the tradition of the Yoruba people of Nigeria, the almighty creator, Olorun, oversees a host of secondary divinities called orisha, with whom worshipers develop a close personal relationship. According to Yoruba tradition, 401 orisha line the road to heaven, and diviners (people with special insight) identify the personal orisha to which an individual should appeal for guidance, protection, and blessing. Nevertheless, an individual’s ultimate destiny is considered to have been fixed before birth by Olorun.

B.

Rituals Relating the Human and Divine

African religions do not demand adherence to any single doctrine. Their focus is primarily practical: Religious rituals serve as strategies for reinforcing life, fertility, and power. The principal vision shared by African religions is that human beings must vigilantly maintain a harmonious relationship with the divine powers in order to prosper. African religions aim at harnessing these powers and channeling them for the good of the community, and ritual is the way to do so. Ritual helps ensure a community’s responsible relationship with ancestors who are guardians of the moral order, with spiritual forces within nature, and with the gods.

The worship of secondary divinities is evidenced by the many shrines and altars dedicated to them. Worshipers maintain contact and correct relations with these divinities through prayer, offerings and sacrifices, and other rituals. If people neglect ritual duties, it is expected that the divinity will call them to attention by causing illness or misfortune. Blood sacrifice—the offering of a sacrificial animal—is the most important ritual, expressing the reciprocal bond between divinity and devotee. Shrines and altars to the divinities are generally not imposing or even permanent structures.

The most dramatic and intimate contact between human being and divinity occurs in the ritual of trance, during which a divine spirit is believed to take possession of the worshiper. In most cases, rhythmic chanting, drumming, dance, and other techniques are used to facilitate an altered state of consciousness. Sometimes only the priest is susceptible to possession, but in other cases, as in the vodun religion of Benin, others also serve as receptacles. Under the direction of a specialist in the ritual, the possessing spirits enter participants, who submit to the spirits’ control. The presiding god engages the congregation in dialogue and delivers messages to devotees.

Contact with divinities is not always so direct and often calls for mediators between the human and divine realms. These intermediaries range from a simple servant at a family altar to prophets, sacred kings, and diviners (See also Divination).

Heads of lineages—long lines of important ancestors—commonly maintain ancestor cults and act on behalf of the community as priests, responsible for sacrifices offered to the spirits of sacred sites or ancestors. Among the Bambara people of Mali, the dugutigi, who serves as head of the village, also performs sacrifices before the first rains of the season or after the first harvest.

Beyond performing ritual operations on behalf of the community, certain priests are invested with powers that identify them more directly with the gods. For example, the Hogon, who officiates at rituals of the Dogon people of Mali, is also a sacred person. His saliva is believed to be the source of life-giving humidity, and if his foot should ever touch the ground, the land would dry up. Keeping his feet off the ground is one of a number of prohibitions to which priests with these special powers must submit.

Other powerful intermediaries between the human and sacred realms are sacred kings. Some derive their power from their association with the forces of nature. Because the king, or moronaba, of the Mossi people in Burkina Faso is linked with the sun, devotees believe that his feet would burn the ground if they touched it. Sacred kingship systems in Africa also help unify ethnic groups that have come together under the domination of a modern political state.

Diviners function as ritual specialists who have gained mastery of a technique for reading signs that communicate the will of the divinities. Typically, diviners are considered to share the power of insight usually reserved for spirits. Divination ritual is the centerpiece of African religions because it opens to all a channel of communication with the gods.

Other rituals mark transitions between the stages of life, such as puberty or death, which are coupled with a change in social status, such as child to adult, or member of the community to ancestor. Rites of passage are natural occasions for initiation, a process of socialization and education that enables the newcomer to assume the new social role. The progression of birth, growth, illness, death, and decay also shows that human existence shares in the fundamental dynamic of the universe: transformation.