Module Assignments
- Study the assigned curriculum — both Parts 1 and 2.
- Submit your essay (or your contracted alternative), which must include thoughts on both parts of each module.
- Your peer exchanges are due two days after your essay is due.
The essays are designed to be meaningful exercises of self-exploration (reflections) rather than busy work (summaries).
The practice of philosophy is a major goal of your essays and exchanges. This practice promotes and supports independent, creative and original thinking.
Essays Due by 11:00 PM on Mondays and Thursdays.
- Your essays need to be a thoughtful “journal-like” reflections.
- Essays must address both part 1 and part 2 of each module’s curriculum.
- A good reflection is one that I could not have read before. This is because it is the essay that only you could have written — due to your unique set of life experiences.
Minimum Requirements
- Essays are not summaries. That is busy work.
- Summaries do not receive credit because they do not require serious thought — simply the ability to record information.
- Your essays must be more than 700 words to receive credit and be eligible for a C, more than 800 words to be eligible for a B, and more than 900 words to be eligible for an A.
- Your assignments are not eligible for A’s if they require proofreading.
- Assignments that are partial (not meeting minimum requirements) do not receive partial credit.
- Late assignments are not eligible for credit.
Essay Prompts
You are not required to use the following prompts, but they may help you think about what you are studying:
- What did you learn? What surprised you and/or caused enough doubt that you were inspired to do a little research and fact checking?
- Did you find any specific ideas confusing or difficult?
- Did you have an emotional response, negative or positive? Do you know why?
- Have you had any experiences you are willing to share with our class that help you relate to and understand any of the material in this module?
- Did this assignment contain any “awakening” ideas, those that inspire you rather than depress you?
- Did you find any of the ideas surprising? Why?
Final Assessment Prompts
You do not need to use these final assessment prompts either, but they may help you put what you are studying this semester into a larger perspective.
- Can you give an example or two in your essay that demonstrates you were engaging with, and thinking about, our curriculum in a serious way?
- Did you study everything required or did you rush and skim?
- Did you find yourself thinking about class content when you did not have to, such as finding yourself discussing ideas with friends or family?
- Did you seek clarification about class material that confused you? If not, why not?
- Have your studies contributed to any increase in self-knowledge (how you understand the world and your place in it) or a deeper understanding of one’s current world view?
Africa
The Falashas and the Coptic Christians
For our African unit, rather than begin with traditional African Religion, I thought it might be interesting to look at two traditions closer to home, but at the same time very different due to the cultural context of their arising. Most of us are familiar with both Judaism and Christianity, but how they look in their African context will hopefully provide a unique angle in which to view these traditions. I will start with the Falashas, who are known as the Ethiopian Jews, or sometimes more simply the Black Jews.
We don’t know for a fact where they come from. There are traditions only and no documented evidence. The most interesting story is that these Jews traveled to Ethiopia with the son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, but no one can find evidence to confirm this. Other people think they may have slowly moved south from the known Jewish communities in Egypt, but again, we lack evidence.
Despite the lack of evidence, they are accepted as Jews because they themselves say they are Jews. For hundreds of years they have remained a small and often persecuted minority who referred to themselves as the House of Israel. They never actually called themselves Jews. Many of their customs are definitely Jewish, such as the dietary laws and celebrating the Sabbath on Saturdays. What is probably most interesting to the scholars who study these things is that their customs give expression to a much older form of Judaism than anything in the last two thousand years.
An example to illustrate this is that while they study the Bible and some of their own Jewish books, they seem to have had no familiarity with the Talmud, the mainstay of rabbinic Judaism. Another example is that they honor the same day the Jews remember the destruction of the temple, but they honor Solomon’s temple, destroyed by the Babylonians, not the second temple, destroyed by the Romans, which they seem to know nothing about. If we truly accept their Jewishness, then they seem to go back to an ancient form of Judaism and then were virtually cut off from Jewish developments for centuries. This is one of the reasons that the legends go all the way back to Solomon. Other legends mention that they represent some of the lost tribes of Israel, some small group that survived the destruction and expulsion of the ten northern tribes by the Assyrians.
What does seem accepted is that Jewish influence goes back a long time, perhaps beginning with trading and then advancing to ideas and culture. The Christian Church there, for example, “resembles ancient Judaism and includes in its rites circumcision, a form of Sabbath observance, dietary laws similar to those found in the Torah, and other practices preserved in its doctrine” (internet). There is some biblical evidence that there was knowledge of Jews living in Ethiopia, when Isaiah (11: 11-12) refers to calling all of the Jews home in the last days including those in Cush, which was a part of Ethiopia at that time.
Religious Life
“The most remarkable aspect of Falasha culture is their peculiar form of non-Talmudic Judaism, developed in isolation from the main currents of Jewish religious thought. They believe in the god of Israel; the Old Testament commandments are their guidelines. The Falasha celebrate most festivals and fasts mentioned in the Torah, observe food taboos, and offer sacrifices. Circumcision is carried out on the eighth day after birth, and the Sabbath is closely observed. The Falasha Holy Book is the Ethiopian Bible, without the New Testament, but with some added Ethiopian books not followed by other Jewish groups. Their prayer service, prayer texts, and other religious books appear to be heavily influenced by medieval Ethiopian Christian sources. There is no clear evidence of a Hebrew tradition and of independent Jewish influence on the formation of Falasha Judaism. Some religious holidays of the Falasha are not marked by other Jews, and the Falasha traditionally did not celebrate post-Exilic festivals such as Hanukkah and Purim” (internet).
These are some of the reasons why people think that the Falashas may not be Jewish, but simply might be an offshoot of Christianity itself. This argument also has weaknesses, such as the fact that the Judaism witnessed is much older than the type of Judaism around at the time of the formation of Christianity. Where there is little evidence, all sorts of theories can arise.
Another interesting area of Falasha religious life that is unusual is their belief in monasticism as an inherent part of Jewish faith and practice. While this would seem a more solid argument in favor of Christian origins, we have learned in the past 200 years about a number of Jewish groups that were previously unknown, the most famous now being the Essenes.
These were a group of Jews who seemed to practice a form of religious life that represents monasticism at a time that predates Christianity. “Religious leadership was provided by “monks” and priests. These monks have disappeared since the late 1960’s, but the priests still function as liturgical and community leaders. Since the mid-twentieth century, Falasha Judaism has been much influenced by Talmudic Judaism; religious practices not in accordance with it have, for the most part, been abandoned. In Israel, the priests are retrained as spiritual leaders. They learn rabbinical law, but few attain the status of rabbi. After arrival in Israel, Falasha immigrants are familiarized with the basics of Talmudic religious law. It is the requirement of a symbolic “conversion” that has caused the most problems in Falasha social adaptation n Israel. In addition to their Judaic belief, the Falasha traditionally shared the common Ethiopian beliefs in supernatural forces and spirits. They also consult magicians; some Falasha were themselves famous magicians, who were also revered by Christians” (internet).
This is, of course, one thing that they would have had to give up in order to adjust themselves to Israeli society and Jewish religious customs, which forbids the use of magic and the practice of other traditional psychic phenomenon.
“The Falasha believe, in accordance with the tenets of the bible, in life after death, and that the dead will be resurrected at the end of days. Burial takes place as soon as possible, even before all relatives may have arrived. Death is the strongest source of ritual pollution of living persons. Those having touched the corpse must remain in isolation for several days before rejoining the community. Various relatives give eulogies on the deceased on the day of the funeral or before. There is no particular veneration of the dead, which is fairly traditional in Africa. Commemorative gatherings in honor of the dead person are held one week, one month, and one year after the burial” (internet).
The Falasha beliefs concerning death and dying are one of the arguments in favor of their Jewish heritage, as they are much more aligned with Jewish custom than they are with anything found in Ethiopia. Even today, Jewish members of the priestly family are not allowed to attend funerals except for the closest relatives and have to undergo purification rites when they do come into contact with the deceased.
Probably what is most interesting about the Falashas is that through them, we gain insight into ancient Judaism without all of the developments of theology and philosophy over many years. What would it be like for us today if we could discover a group of people calling themselves Christians who had never heard of the great Church Councils that formulated many of the key ideas of Christian doctrine in the early centuries of Christianity? Would we recognize it as Christian? I would think we probably would, but at the same time it would provide a glimpse into the way the very first Christians probably lived that is difficult for scholars to understand today.
This is because most of the known versions of Christianity, from the formality of the Orthodox to the simplicity of a Protestant Bible Church, all share certain basic beliefs about Jesus, such as that he was both fully God and fully human, a declaration that was not formalized into the creeds until hundreds of years after the time of Jesus.
Ethiopian Jews provide us with a living example that Judaism is not a racial group, but rather a shared religious culture. Jews come in all colors and in many different ethnic groups, just as Christians and Muslims do. It is all too easy for us to associate Muslims with Arabs and Christians with white Europeans, when they are actually world religions that include many different people. With Judaism it is a little more complicated, because they do associate themselves with a bloodline, but this bloodline is very old and not easy to track. In addition to that, Jews do welcome converts, so this limits the validity of the bloodline, which is not a definitive matter in determining one’s Judaism.
The modern country of Israel is an interesting study for many reasons. We can get so caught up in the modern political situation in the Middle East and all of the problems, that we can sometimes forget that outside of all of that it is an interesting sociological phenomenon.
An example of this is the revival of the Hebrew language into regular and official use. This is as astounding as if Latin were suddenly to be made into the official language of Europe again. Another interesting aspect of Israel is the way they welcome Jews from around the world. This is an ideal that still has many practical problems. Ideally, you want a melting pot situation as you have in the United States. But while all people used to be welcomed here, we also see our own racial and ethnic problems. Israel has the same problem. They have welcomed Jews from around the world, but it has not been easy to have these different groups merge. However, there are now more than 50,000 Ethiopian Jews living in Israel and very few left in Ethiopia. By all accounts, they are managing to get on with their lives and adjust to a much different culture than the one from which they came.
Coptic Christianity
Now that we have looked at a unique version of Judaism preserved in Africa, it might be interesting to take a look at Egyptian Christianity. We don’t have an early version, as you might think, because this church did not separate from the other Christian churches until a few hundred years after the time of Jesus. Nevertheless, we get an unusual look at Christianity in its formative years by studying the Coptic Orthodox Church.
All of the ancient churches try to trace themselves back directly to Christ by claiming to have been founded by one of the original disciples of Jesus. In the case of the church in Alexandria, they claim to have been founded by the disciple Mark, who at the time was believed to have been a disciple of Jesus. Modern scholars think that he was probably a disciple of Peter. Either way, he is so closely connected to Jesus that one of the Gospels is named after him.
It is also important to note that before Rome achieved prominence in the Church, there were five early centers of Christianity that shared authority later claimed by Rome alone. Alexandria was one of the five places, as was Jerusalem, Antioch, Constantinople, and Rome. We know that the Church in Alexandria was a major influence, and we also know that early monasticism flourished in the Egyptian desert. This also had an immense influence on Christian self-understanding. For these reasons alone, it is good to know something about this religious community.
“The Egyptian Orthodox Church of Alexandria is the official name for the largest Christian church in Egypt. The Church belongs to the Oriental Orthodox family of churches, and has been a distinct church body since the Council of Chalcedon in 451 A.D., when it took a different position over Christological theology from that of the Eastern orthodox and Catholic churches, then still in union. The precise differences in theology that caused the split are still disputed, and highly technical. They are mainly concerned with the Nature of Christ. The foundational roots of the Church are based in Egypt, but it has a worldwide following” (internet). That following includes a church in Monterey, California.
“The head of the church, and the See of Alexandria, is the Pope of Alexandria and the Patriarch of All Africa on the Holy See of Saint Mark, currently His Holiness Pope Shenouda III. More than 95% of Egypt’s Christians belong to the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria” (internet). There is also a Coptic Catholic Church as well as a Greek Orthodox tradition, but they are very small.
“The first Christians in Alexandria were mainly Alexandrian Jews such as Theophilus, whom Saint Luke addresses in the introductory chapter of his gospel. When Saint Mark founded the church during the reign of the Roman emperor Nero, a great multitude of native Egyptians (as opposed to Greeks or Jews) embraced the Christian faith. Christianity spread throughout Egypt within half a century as is clear from the New testament writings found in Middle Egypt, which date around the year 200 A.D., and a fragment of the Gospel of John, written in Coptic, which was found in Upper Egypt and can be dated to the first half of the second century. In the second century, Christianity began to spread to the rural areas, and scriptures were translated into the local language, namely Coptic” (internet).
Theology as a formal discipline was established first in Alexandria, which has an amazing intellectual history, founded by Alexander the Great. Egyptian mystery religions flourished alongside a vibrant Jewish community and a rich philosophical community. “Around 190 A.D. the school of Alexandria became an important institution of religious learning, where students were taught by the likes of Clement and the native Egyptian Origen, who was considered the father of theology and who was also active in the field of commentary and comparative Biblical studies. Origen wrote over 6,000 commentaries on the bible among his other works” (internet).
Living in Alexandria during these years must have been like living in Florence during the Renaissance. It was the place to be if one was interested in not only the formation of Christianity, but also in the many other exciting religious movements at the time, such as Gnosticism in its Pagan, Jewish, and Christian versions.
“Many scholars such as Jerome (who translated the Bible into Latin) visited the school of Alexandria to exchange ideas and to communicate directly with its scholars. The scope of this school was not limited to theological subjects; science, mathematics and humanities were also taught there. The question-and-answer method of commentary began there, and 15 centuries before Braille, wood-carving techniques were in use there by blind scholars to read and write” (internet).
The desert fathers were important founders of what has become known as the monastic tradition, whose influence on Christianity cannot be adequately measured. Starting in the 3rd century, men (and eventually women as well) began to seek out lives of prayer and solitude as a way of dying to themselves, seeking new kind of martyrdom. As their numbers grew, it became necessary to organize them and to do so the first monastic rules were established.
These early monasteries were “instrumental in the formation of the Coptic Orthodox Church character of submission, simplicity and humility, thanks to the teachings and writings of the great fathers of Egypt’s deserts. By the end of the fifth century, there were hundreds of monasteries, and thousands of cells and caves scattered throughout the Egyptian desert. A great number of these monasteries are still flourishing and have new vocations to this day” (internet).
The importance of Egyptian thought and influence can be seen in the way church councils worked. One of the most influential councils, the Council of Nicea, was called to combat a heresy started by an Egyptian priest called Arianism. This was the teaching that Jesus did not preexist eternally with God, but was at some point created by God. This was in direct violation of what would become the Trinitarian doctrine where Christ was “begotten, not made” by God. The result of that council in 325 is the Nicene Creed, which is recited throughout the world. This creed was largely based on the teaching of another Alexandrian, Saint Athanasius of Alexandria, the chief opponent of Arius.
“In the year 381 A.D., Saint Timothy 1 of Alexandria presided over the second ecumenical council known as the Ecumenical Council of Constantinople, which completed the Nicene Creed by confirming the divinity of the Holy Spirit: “We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, …” (internet).
The Council of Chalcedon was where a break occurred. The theological issue is very technical. The real issue was one of politics and power, as it was later when the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches split. The issue was whether Jesus had two natures, human and divine, or one. Coptic Christians said there was one nature, and the more well known teaching now says that Jesus had two natures, that he was fully God and fully man, one person but with two natures. This was more semantics than anything else, because the mystery they are trying to describe cannot be adequately rationalized by either theological position.
The official Coptic position is that “Christ is perfect in His divinity, and he is perfect in His humanity, but His divinity and His humanity were united in one nature called “the nature of the incarnate word”, which was reiterated by Saint Cyril of Alexandria. Copts, thus, believe in two natures “human” and “divine” that are united in one person “without mingling, without confusion, and without alteration.” These two natures “did not separate for a moment or the twinkling of an eye” (internet).
We know from history that the Byzantine Eastern Roman Empire ruled Egypt and the Middle East. As a result, the Egyptian church was greatly persecuted and many people were martyred rather than convert to what they considered a heresy of Greek Orthodoxy. It is one of the many sad stories in Christian history how intolerant Christians can be to one another. Despite these persecutions, the Coptics held onto their faith throughout these years. Their next challenge was the Muslim conquest of Egypt, which took place in 639.
Despite the political upheaval, Egypt remained a mainly Christian land, although the gradual conversions to Islam over the centuries changed Egypt from a mainly Christian to a mainly Muslim country by the end of the 12th century. This process was facilitated, ironically, by the Crusades and by the adoption of Arabic as the liturgical language of the church. Coptic Christians have usually thrived under Muslim rule. They were often considered second-class citizens in some ways, but they were usually unharmed and allowed to practice their faith in peace. Today there are about 15 million Coptic Christians, 11 million of which live in Egypt.
Tribal Religion
We immediately run into problems when we discuss African tribal religion, because it assumes we know what we mean by Africa and religion! These are tricky words because they are Western scholastic terms that do not necessarily apply to the indigenous traditions of Africa.
“In the West, the adjective African has generally been used in a racially oriented way to refer to the darker skinned, black peoples who live south of the Sahara Desert and have been assumed to possess the “same” culture. The mistaken assumption about the cultural sameness originated with the slave-trading colonial powers, which imagined the vast area of sub-Saharan Africa to be a single place–as if it were a single country occupied by one people. The perception of cultural uniformity, which went together with the sociopolitical notion of race, developed in the late nineteenth century and ignored the separate linguistic, cultural, and ethnic identities that African societies had developed for thousands of years and that continue to define cultural life today” (Ray, p. ix).
However, once we clarify this, we can say that Africans do share some common foundational traditions. What makes someone culturally and religiously African is still an ongoing debate in Africa today. Local groups show many distinct characteristics, but there are also things they can all relate to.
We have an example of this in our own country with the Native Americans. Each tribe thought of itself as separate. It was not until colonial people arrived that the indigenous people found themselves being grouped together as “Indians.” As the years have passed, Native Americans themselves have begun to think of themselves as a whole people with much held in common.
Perhaps most importantly, Native Americans did not start to receive justice until they could unite as a larger group. Africans are finding themselves in the same place. They want to honor their differences and local distinctions, but they are also finding that the development of a Pan-African consciousness facilitates a better life for all of them than when they are divided and try to “cut their own deals” with Western powers. It seems that today there is still resistance to Westerners lumping Africans together, but African scholars are themselves finding the term useful in new ways.
The word religion poses the same problems of definition. Africans did not have a word for religion, just as many native people around the world did not. This is because religion, as we understand the word in the West, is so much a part of daily life that it is not seen as a separate subject. Religion permeates all of life and cannot be broken down in the way scholars are used to doing.
The word religion also suffers from the fact that the earliest descriptions of African religions came from white explorers and missionaries who tended to see it in Eurocentric terms, that is, as primitive and superstitious. When we got more objective studies, much time had been lost, and the various traditional religions had changed under the influence of contact with other values and religions, especially Christianity and Islam.
“It was only in the late colonial period of the 1950’s that scholars began to use the terms religion and philosophy to characterize African religions in a positive way” (Ray, p. xi). When you think about that it is really amazing. It means that it was only in the lifetime of most of the people in this room that African religion was taken seriously!
These modern scholars “were among the first to emphasize the inherent rationality and theological integrity of African religious systems, and they employed Western philosophical ideas and theological concepts to interpret them. They also argued that the study of African religions was of great value to an understanding of the rest of the world’s religions” (Ray, p. xi).
Another problem with the Western use of the word religion is that it tends to concern “spiritual beliefs, worship of gods, and social ethics, to the exclusion of a vast area of African belief and activity devoted to sacred objects possessing mystical forces and to ritual practices with magical powers, including the large sphere of witchcraft and sorcery beliefs and procedures” (Ray, p. xii).
In other words, Western religions tend to look to transcendence and African religions tend to be more immanent. In Africa, religion and its practices are concerned not only with the worship of the gods (transcendent) “but also in a wide range of cultural creations, such as stories of origin, healing rituals, funerary rites, divination séances, public festivals, and sacred sculpture. Traditional religion is not a specialized creed separate from daily life but a diffused assemblage of sacred and moral ideas and practices that permeates all of life at the personal and social levels” (Ray, p. xii).
It is estimated today that only 10-15% of African people still practice their traditional faiths entirely, as most of Africa has now been converted to Christianity and Islam. We need to study these religions not only for their own sake, but because their values underlie the adaptation of Christianity and Islam found in Africa. Just as we saw Buddhism take on new and different aspects as it moved from India to China to Japan, so Christianity and Islam were changed by their encounter with Africa. Keeping all of this in mind, we are now ready to study some of the shared themes we find in African tribal religion.
Shared Themes in African Religion
“Prehistoric and tribal religion, the backdrop of all later religion, is a vast and complex phenomenon. But it possesses certain basic themes that, in modified forms, appear centrally in later religion as well. It is, first of all, cosmic religion–concerned with showing the relation of humankind to nature and the cosmos, it celebrates the turn of the seasons and places of special sacred power. It has myths telling of the creation of the world by Divine powers but often also adds a mythic account of a “fall” that explains why humanity is no longer as close to the creative powers as at the time of creation” (MPMF, p. 49.)
One of the common themes shared by the African religions is that they relied on an oral tradition. People spent years memorizing certain stories that were then passed down from storyteller to storyteller. With the African Religions, we study primarily symbols and rituals. “In most native cultures, spiritual lifeways are shared orally. Teachings are experienced rather than read from books” (LR, p. 26.)
It is important to keep the big picture (cosmic religion) in mind as we now go into more detail. “All of these [symbols and rituals] go together to make up a cosmos in which spirit and matter are thoroughly interwoven, and everything is more than it seems, as myth, rite, and art make the invisible visible. In this cosmos, human life is only complete in its total relationships–with family, tribe, ancestors, and all that is spirit”(MPMF, p. 30.)
This emphasis on the spiritual is a central idea of the African religions. In the world of cosmic religion, Spirit is essential and everything else derives its meaning and purpose from Spirit. “[African] religion is concerned with soul or spirit. Endeavoring to explain the diverse feelings people have within them, it sometimes tells of two or more souls. Confronting the eternal human dread of death, it describes the destiny of the soul in the afterlife: Sometimes different souls have different destinies, sometimes one at least goes to an alternative world, sometimes another aspect of the self remains around its familiar haunts as a ghost, sometimes one is reincarnated in this world. The spirits of ancestors or unappeased ghosts are usually feared and propitiated” (MPMF, p. 49.)
All of this information is passed on through stories that relate the myths of each culture. Here it is important to remember that myths do not mean lies. “Almost every religion has its stories about the dealings of the gods with humans. We call these stories myths, or poetic ways of telling great truths. Myths are ways of thinking in pictures rather than abstract concepts” (RW, p. 25.)
One of the first things you will run across in studying cosmic religion is the interest in stories, especially creation stories. “In preliterate societies, especially, a religion is sustained and explained by the transmission of its myths from generation to the next” (RW, p. 25.) Even today, many children love to be read to and hear stories, especially about their own families. M any people love films and television, because in some way they are part of that storytelling world.
Sitting in front of the television loses much of the flavor of sitting around a crackling fire listening to and telling stories, but there is some piece of it still there. People who complain about those who watch too much television are not as upset at the content of modern stories (although they may be) as they are upset at the passivity of just sitting and taking it all in.
When you don’t have a story shown to you, then you must use your imagination when you read, to picture the setting, characters, etc. Think about the huge impact modern movies, such as “Star Wars,” has had. One of the reasons is that it deals with universal themes like good and evil which have been the sources of countless stories for many thousands of years. Something in the human spirit responds to these themes!
All tribes have stories that tell not only where they came from, but also about the origins of the world. “Because the traditions are oral rather than written, these people must memorize long and complex stories and songs so that the groups sacred traditions can be remembered and taught, generation after generation. It is very important to Australian aborigines that their children learn about the origin of the people and the local creatures, and that they understand the weather and the patterns of the stars. Songs about these matters may have a hundred verses or more. Chants to the Yoruba orisa comprise 256 ‘volumes’ of eight hundred long verses each” (LR, p. 34.)
One of the things these stories have in common is a basic motif that things were better in the past. In the past, humans were much closer to the world of the gods. “For primal peoples, ‘past’ means preeminently, closer to the originating source of things” (IWR, p. 237.) Then something went wrong. As a result of this problem, humans now live the life we are familiar with-that is a life full of goodness, but also a life full of sorrow and hardship. Creation stories, by addressing this, help provide a sense of meaning to life. Knowing one’s story is very important, for it teaches one what steps need to be taken to bring how about renewal. “These steps are rites of renewal, which African religions regularly enact.
“Mircea Eliade has used the expression cosmic religion to refer to a religious outlook largely coextensive with the religion of archaic hunters and farmers but with continuations down to the present. Cosmic religion, he tells us, has little sense of history or of what was discussed as linear time. It finds and expresses sacred meaning in aspects of nature and human life–seasons, sacred rocks or trees, the social order, birth and death–without linking them to historical personalities or written documents as do founder-religions” (MPMF, p. 27.)
This was a religion that was closely observant of the natural world and thus formed a strong belief in “animism.” “Animism, or belief that everything in nature–stones, trees, mountains, lakes, as well as human beings–has a soul or spirit” (MPMF, p. 27.) “Indeed, the belief that nature is alive with spirits that have feelings and can be communicated with is one of the most common to human religious experience” (RW, p. 19.)
This is an important theme throughout the African religions. Many of the historical religions drew a sharp distinction between the secular and the sacred. Everything is seen as sacred. “It is the rites of hunting and archaic agriculture where there is no sharp division between the phenomenal world and an “Other” world; instead this world–here and now–is fundamentally sacred, and everything is alive with spirit” (MPMF, p. 27.)
This is one of those ideas that are beginning to be renewed in various religious traditions today, as we see a growing ecological crisis. How would our world be different if we treated everything as sacred?! I am hopeful that Africans are bringing this traditional aspect of tribal religion to their own understanding of Islam and Christianity, to which so many have converted. While animism is a very important aspect of African tribal religions, it is not the only one.
Most African religions have a sense of monotheism, even as they are often described as polytheistic. This is because many of the tribes believe in a high God or a creator God who is the one source of everything. Because something went wrong, this God has moved away from humanity, and the only way to deal with the divine is through a group of lesser gods and goddesses. We see the same thing in Hinduism, where the one god Brahman is the one source of everything, including both the lesser gods and humans.
Many of the spiritual entities took on roles as the gods did among the Ancient Greeks. There were gods of the sky and earth, of water and forest, etc. Other spiritual entities that played a strong role were ancestral spirits. “Ancestral spirits” are likely to be especially loved and feared, for they stay near their families to impart the strength that goes with the lineage, but they also punish individuals whose faults dishonor it” (MPMF, p. 31.) Many rituals and prayers were developed to honor and placate these ancestral spirits.
“[African] tribal religion is acted as much as it is thought. Among its best-known and most significant acts are initiations, scenarios that enact views concerning birth and death as stages through which the soul passes; and ancestors living and dead are seen as custodians of enabling power” (MPMF, p. 31.)
Initiation Rites of Men and Women
“Initiations are very important for many [African] peoples. They serve the end of social cohesion by inducting adults into the tribe after proper training and a potent shared experience, and they often serve the end of individual fulfillment as well by giving status and perhaps secrets of value in the soul’s journey after death. Initiations involve a process of separation, marginality when one is separated from the social structure but close to Divine powers, and re-incorporation of the individual into the social order. Such initiations also emphasize that the spirits of nature work through the natural processes of the human body and celebrate what sustains the tribe as coextensive with ultimate cosmic reality” (MPMF, p. 49.)
“For most tribal cultures, life is a series of initiations, and it is through them that its most meaningful signs of status are bestowed, as well as the deepest mysteries of the ultimate meaning of human existence revealed” (MPMF, p. 31.) These were forceful events, often traumatic and difficult, and sometimes they would go on for months. When a boy was taken off to the woods for the secret ceremonies, he would often come back looking different and acting different. Before he was a boy, now he is a man with all the rights, privileges, and responsibilities that go with manhood.
African Hunters and Gatherers
Until fairly recently, most African tribes practiced hunting and gathering. There were special rituals and ceremonies that went with hunting and gathering. “The religion of hunter-gatherer peoples expresses the hunter’s sense of dependence on the animal, as well as the gatherer’s dependence on the natural world to provide the staples of the diet of the tribe. The hunter knows that the hunted animal, and often a “master or mistress of animals” deity in charge of a species must be kept as a benign spirit if game is to be taken; the gatherer knows that the secrets of nature must be unlocked in order to receive the gifts of the earth spirit’s bounty” (MPMF, p. 49.) First, we will look at hunting.
Due to a lack of separation between the secular and the sacred, hunting was a sacred activity, as was everything else. “A hunter does not set out simply to forestall his tribe’s hunger. He launches on a sequence of meditative acts, all of which–whether preparatory prayer and purification, pursuit of the quarry, or the sacramental manner by which the animal is slain and subsequently treated–are sacred” (IWR, p. 238.)
There was an honorable way to hunt and a dishonorable way to hunt. “Going into the field, tracking, and taking the animal is, so to speak, an act of interplay with spiritual forces and in this respect is comparable to going to church or temple” (MPMF, p. 40.) African people did not hunt just for the fun of it. Animals were considered sacred and you did not kill lightly.
“Killing, in other words, entails all sorts of responsibilities. This is a different world of human-animal relations from that of the modern slaughterhouse or of many a modern sportsman with his high-powered rifle, telescopic sight, and desire for a “trophy” (MPMF, p. 40.)
“It is necessary to prepare spiritually for a great hunt” (MPMF, p. 40.) There were ceremonies in which the hunters prayed to the spirits of the animals, asking their permission to kill them and letting these animals know that they were needed for the hunters to survive. “To take the animal requires in some sense the consent of the animal or that of its Divine masters, due atonement for the wrong done to it, and proper magic to make anything happen at all” (MPMF, p. 40.)
In many ways, it comes down to respect. There is a primary recognition that other forms of life also have the right to live. There is also an important recognition that life does have a brutal aspect to it. In order to live we all must eat. What is important is how we go about eating, and the kind of respect we show in the process of getting our food.
Balance is the key idea. African religions are not sentimental. They can, in fact, be quite brutal. It is inspiring, though, how they try to bring a spiritual understanding to even the most horrible facts of life, such as death and killing. “It is therefore important that humanity live in reverent harmony with the biological and spiritual ecology of nature. Animals treated rightly will cooperate and return to offer themselves as game to hunters again; those who are not will be enemies, now and hereafter” (MPMF, p. 41.) You can see why the modern ecology movement looks toward traditional spiritualities for some of its inspiration.
In many films and books, a great deal of emphasis has been placed on the hunting aspect of tribal life that makes it appear that it played a larger role than it did. In actuality, women and children provided most of the tribe’s diet. Some estimates are that as high as 80% of a tribe’s calories came from food that was gathered rather than hunted.
“The relation of the archaic gatherer to the land also reveals an especially rich center of spiritual life. Here, too, there is interplay of ordinary activities for the well being of the tribe with spiritual forces. Recent archeological and anthropological evidence indicates that for many prehistoric and tribal groups, the main diet consisted not of large game (an occasional and special food) but of plant-foods and small animals gathered, for the most part, by women. The gatherers had special knowledge of the earth spirit (or spirits) who provided these “gifts” out of her (or sometimes his) bounty” (MPMF, p. 41.)
Because women provided so much of the diet, there was a level of respect and equality that is missing from many of the historical religions. When agriculture took over, women did not do as much food provision. Of course, they worked hard cooking and preparing it, but something seems to have changed between men and women when men started providing more of the tribe’s calories.
“The important role of women as gatherers is reflected in the high status accorded them in hunter-gatherer societies where there appears to be an egalitarian bent exhibited by a great degree of sharing in the roles of men and women” (MPMF, p. 41.)
In the days of hunters and gatherers, there were medicine women as well as medicine men. Again, a person was chosen and gender did not matter. Aptitude is what mattered. There is also a good chance that as the gatherers of plant food, women had a superior knowledge of the plants used to heal, which was an important part of the medicine man or woman’s business.
Modern African Religions
Twenty-first century Christianity is probably the main religion in most of sub-Saharan Africa, while in the northern part of the continent it is a minority religion, where the majority of the population are Muslims. There has been tremendous growth in the number of Christians in Africa. For example, only nine million Christians were in Africa in 1900. By the year 2000, there were an estimated 380 million Christians.
According to a 2006 Pew Forum on Religion and Public life study, 147 million African Christians were “renewalists” (a term that includes both Pentecostals and charismatics). Much of the Christian growth in Africa is now due to African evangelism rather than Western missionaries. In South Africa, it is rare to find a person with no religious beliefs. It is almost always Christianity amongst the whites, but Christianity is also popular among the Blacks, especially city-dwellers. Christianity in Africa shows tremendous variety, from the ancient forms of Oriental Orthodox Christianity in Egypt and Ethiopia, to the newest African-Christian denominations of Nigeria, a country that has experienced massive conversion to Christianity in recent times.
Some experts tell about the shift of Christianity’s center of gravity from the Western industrialized nations to Africa, Asia and Latin America in modern times. Yale University historian Lamin Sanneh stated: “African Christianity was not just an exotic, curious phenomenon in an obscure part of the world, but that African Christianity might be the shape of things to come.” The statistics from the World Christian Encyclopedia (David Barrett) illustrates the emerging trend of dramatic Christian growth at the continent and supposes, that in 2025 there will be 633 millions of Christians in Africa” (Wikipedia).
“The history of Islam in Africa begins in the earliest days of Islam, when Muslims fleeing persecution in Mecca arrived in Ethiopia. Islam spread to Africa via passages through the Sinai Peninsula and Egypt and well as through Islamic Arab and Persian traders and sailors. Islam in Africa probably doubled, between 1869 and 1914. Despite its large contribution to the makeup of the continent, Islam is predominantly concentrated in North Africa, West Africa and East Africa. This has provided an increasing difference between the culture and laws of different parts of Africa” (Wikipedia).
Christianity in Africa
African Initiated Churches (AICs, since the initials can stand equally well for African Independent Churches, African Instituted Churches or African Indigenous Churches) are African churches that were founded by Africans and function without referring to western missions or churches. They range from churches that are indistinguishable from Mission churches to those which are really African traditional religions using Christian vocabulary. AICs are strongest and most numerous in Kenya, Nigeria and Southern Africa, but there are hardly any in Tanzania, Uganda, or Sierra Leone.
Most AICs are Protestant churches. As Adrian Hastings phrased it: “African Catholics were being good Catholics (putting the unity and authority of the Church first), African Protestants were being good Protestants, members of a tradition in which Church unity had always taken second place.” [Hastings 528]
Their Protestant roots allowed the AICs to break away from the mission churches with few qualms. Most AICs share the Protestant stress on the authority of the Bible, usually read literally. They differ from most mission churches in that they read the Bible with an African cultural background rather than a western cultural background, which made it easier to read some things literally.
Most often, the AICs arose as a result of disagreements between African Christians and western missionaries over the extent to which traditional African practices were permissible. Many AICs permit polygamy following the Old Testament cultural practices, which the New Testament does not reject. Very few Mission churches tolerate polygamy. AICs often have a vividly spiritualistic view of reality as a cosmic spiritual battleground, sprinkled with demons and witches, in which diseases have spiritual causes and cures and prayer can persuade God to bring rain.
This view, which is much closer to the Biblical world than to the western world, led them to clash with the scientific western mission view which had little time for exorcism, faith healing or rainmaking through prayer. Where missionaries tolerated polygamy or fought traditional gods with their own spiritual powers, Christians usually remained within the mission churches. Where missionaries introduced converts to the Bible and then insisted that they become more western than biblical, AIC flourished.
As Elizabeth Isichei phrases it: “They found in the world of the Bible, a world of victory over sickness and death, of mastery over evil spirits…. The emphasis on healing and miracles was not wholly absent from the mission churches, but, typically, they interpreted disease in a rationalist-scientific way, and relied more on hospitals than prayer to solve health problems.” (Isichei, p. 254)
The Shona prophet John of the Wilderness (Johane Masowe) expressed the same idea: “When we were in these synagogues [churches] we used to read bout the works of Jesus Christ… cripples were made to walk and the dead were brought to life… evil spirits driven out…. That was what was being done in Jerusalem. We Africans, however, who were being instructed by white people, never did anything like that…. We were taught to read the Bible, but we ourselves never did what the people of the Bible used to do.” (Isichei, p 256)
While AICs share basic cultural assumptions with traditional African culture and particularly traditional African religion, most firmly reject the practices of traditional African religions as evil. They believe that witches have real powers, and that the traditional gods and spirits exist, but they believe these are evil spirits and must be resisted in the name of Jesus. Many AICs prohibit traditional dancing and participating in traditional ceremonies, as engaging too closely with evil spirits.
This rejection of traditional culture and practices has led the AIC members to distinguish themselves as sharply as possible from the rest of society. Often they wear distinctive costumes — white robes with particular designs, all of the same color embroidered on them, with distinctive headgear. Often AICs observe the Saturday Sabbath as well as Sunday, and have firm dietary laws to keep them apart.
Dietary laws are based on Old Testament dietary law, but many prophetic groups expand the prohibitions to include abstention from beer and tobacco. Refraining from beer, which is often more like gruel, nutritious and low in alcoholic content, means that the adherents of the prophetic church cannot participate in the community work parties, where beer is the staple food” (Wikipedia).
Church of Jesus Christ of the Prophet Simon Kimbangu
Simon Kimbangu was a Congo resident, living in the southwest of what was then the Belgian Congo. Shortly after his birth, a Baptist missionary, G.R. Cameron, was attacked by a group of villagers. He found refuge in the house of a woman, who sheltered him and gave him some water. Cameron blessed the woman and her baby son, Simon Kimbangu.
Kimbangu and his wife, Mivilu Marie, were baptized in 1915. He hoped to become a teacher and evangelist, but he didn’t read well enough. He was probably a marginal figure both in the traditional world (he may have been descended from slaves) and in the modern one.
In 1918, the year of the great worldwide influenza pandemic, Kimbangu began to have visions calling him to be a healer and apostle. Like the biblical Jonah, he fled his calling, to Kinshasa, where he was miserable and where the visions continued. He returned home, hoping to be appointed evangelist in his hometown Nkamba, but his hopes were once again frustrated.
Kimbangu began a ministry of faith-healing in 1921, drawing great crowds to Nkamba, overflowing the mission churches as far away as Kinshasa, and alarming the Belgian authorities, who feared that he might become a focus for nationalistic rebellion. They attempted to arrest him in the summer of 1921, but he escaped with some of his followers, only to give himself up to the authorities three months later.
He was tried, sentenced to 120 lashes and death. Protestant missionaries protested this travesty of justice, since Kimbangu neither participated in nor advocated any rebellion against the colonial powers, but had consistently preached obedience to authority. His sentence was commuted, and he spent the next thirty years as a model prisoner. The Prison Warder and the Governor of the province of Shaba both appealed for him to be released, but to no avail. He died, still in prison, in 1951.
Simon Kimbangu was entirely orthodox in his teaching, down to a strong advocacy of monogamy, which the Kimbanguist church still maintains. He attacked traditional religion, demanding that his followers burn their fetishes, and refrain from traditional dancing, ceremonies, and the consumption of alcohol — especially traditional palm-wine. “To make palm-wine,” he declared, ” is to create sin — to sell it or offer it is to spread sin.” Lamin Sanneh goes on to describe Simon Kimbangu’s religious teachings in the following words:
“Kimbangu summed up in his own person the destiny of his people and their age. In his prayers he pleaded for their weakness, their hardship, their poverty and suffering their powerlessness and apathy, and above all their capacity of evil and their need for deliverance. In the attempt to minister to a condition he had himself diagnosed with such authoritative comprehensiveness, Kimbangu called on the ancestors to share in the work of awakening and renewal. Having first proceeded to dismantle the cults which had offered themselves as effective vehicles of spiritual contact, he reintroduced the ancestors by the new route of the Christian faith and discipline….” [207]
The Kimbangu church calendar is dominated by three main dates: April 6 marks the date the ministry of healing began, October 12 was the day he died in prison, and Christmas day, the birth day of Christ. These are the only three days that the Lord’s Supper is celebrated, and even that only began in 1966. The Kimbangu church is not very sacramental. Worship is a joyful time of fellowship often lasting several hours, with the leader acting as a master of ceremonies, announcing the various parts of the worship, but not controlling them.
The service opens with a procession into the sanctuary, with participants waving palm branches. Congregational participation is encouraged through singing, which is often accompanied by waving palm branches and through prayers offered from the congregation by both men and women, though there is little of the spirit filled enthusiasm and dancing often associated with independent churches. The services are, in fact, relatively calm and sedate. Members of the congregation often raise questions, which the pastor answers in the course of the sermon. Offerings play a central role in the service, and church members give generously and fervently.
The Belgian authorities clamped down on the Kimbanguists, subjecting many of them to floggings, which they took on as a form of the imitation of Christ. The authorities also sacked Nkamba, which had become the Kimbanguists New Jerusalem, exiling the faithful to various provinces of the Belgian Congo. The exiling had the unintended consequence of spreading the Kimbanguist message and creating a multi-ethnic, rather than Congo-based, movement. The persecution continued into the 1950s. In 1957, 600 leading Kimbanguists signed a letter that read:
Wherever we meet for prayer, your soldiers arrest us. In order not to burden the police with added work, we shall all gather, unarmed, in the Stadium, where you can arrest us all at once, or massacre us.
Two years later, they were officially recognized by the government and made the transition from underground movement to church. Kimbangu’s youngest son, Joseph Diangienda, led the new church into the era of independence, joining the World Council of Churches in 1970. The modern church has tamed some of the enthusiasm of the underground church, discouraging ecstatic trembling, and even spiritual healing. A number of other groups have regarded Simon Kimbangu as an African savior, with some prophets (bangunza) claiming to be Kimbangu, reincarnate.
Islam in Africa
Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa has known a thousand years of cohabitation with traditional religion and adaptation to it, even to the extent of inter-mixture. Today this experience is rejected by a significant number of African Muslims, who instead turn consciously to the Arab model of living Islam, as they imagine it to have been instituted by the Prophet Muhammad and lived by the founding community in Medina. In Africa, perhaps more than elsewhere, the “Islamizing” tendency, in whatever form it presents itself, is a challenge to an entire way of being, behaving and living in community – a challenge to the very roots of the African way. Can there still be a valid African way of being Muslim?
The mass adoption of Islam by Africans is a relatively recent occurrence. It was preceded by a long period of co-existence, during which Islam remained a minority religion. It was not the superiority of the religious message of the Koran that finally tipped the balance in Islam’s favor, but purely sociological factors, which as in the case of colonialism and the arrival of modern technology, were completely external and foreign to both spiritual universes.
Traditional African religion, aside from the diversity of its actual forms of expression, is in reality much more than people in the west mean by the term religion. It is a global framework of life, encompassing every human situation and governing the whole of society. It is closely linked to the ancestral soil, and places each African in the succession of the generations (the ancestors), in his relationship with his fellow creatures, and in his productive activities. Everything is religious!
The direct relation with God is rarely explicit, but the belief in one God, Who is Creator and Good, underlies everything else. God does not intervene in the day-to-day affairs of life. These are governed by other invisible forces, good or evil, from which it is possible to win favors through the ritualized experience of the ancestors.
Strict observance of the rites and taboos, and total solidarity within the group, are the best guarantee of group survival and the transmission of life to descendants. Seen from the outside, constraint and fear seem to be the dominant notes of traditional African religion, but this would be to forget that it offers an overall framework of security in an often very hostile environment, where only the survival of the group ultimately counts.
In many regions of Africa, Islam has gradually substituted itself for the traditional religion, sometimes under the influence of external factors, and in the overwhelming majority of cases without violence. One could cite a whole series of factors that show a degree of cultural and sociological proximity between these two religious worlds. At the same time there are other respects, equally fundamental, in which the two religions seem irreconcilable. Ancestor worship, for example, is something fundamental to traditional religion if ever anything was, and yet it is completely foreign to Islam. The real proximity of Islam with traditional religion lies far more in the fact that both are more than a religion, in the sense of dealing solely with the relationship of man to the Spiritual.
And indeed, in all the difficulties of life for the African uprooted or disillusioned with his traditional socioreligious universe, Islam offers a new framework, as all embracing, as secure and as reassuring as the old one. A new solidarity within the Muslim community replaces the village and tribal solidarities without changing the laws and habits of the life of the group. New prescriptions and prohibitions replace the old ones, without the need to try to understand their deeper meaning.
The only real novelty is the centralization of the worship on God, especially in the ritual prayer. This does not exclude other ritual practices from existing alongside – and for a long time – in order to appease the intermediate powers. African Islam has never expressly forbidden these practices. On the contrary, given the central place of the sacred Organic text in Islam and the impossibility for most Africans of gaining direct access to it, since they do not know Arabic, the more or less qualified custodians of the Scriptures have themselves become the new intermediaries. They were sought out and feared, and replaced the healers, the fetishists and the other members of the secret societies, without which traditional religion could not function.
In the process of “Islamization,” the primary motive is clearly the desire to belong to a community, far more than the interior assent to a new religious message. In this respect, it has demonstrated great flexibility and patience over the centuries. Gaining access to the Muslim community has always been very easy: a change of name and the recitation, before witnesses, of the profession of faith. The regular fulfillment of the other religious duties and the deepening of religious knowledge will follow perhaps only a generation or two later. There is no real break in the passage from one community to the other, but simply a progressive disengagement from the one and a progressive integration with the other.
The long cohabitation of Islam with traditional African religion has also had an effect at the cultural level. The African languages are, in general, languages with a concrete vocabulary, rather limited in the expression of more abstract realities or more developed reflections. With the Arabic language, Islam has been able to fill a gap. Many African people, some scarcely touched by Islam, have borrowed a complete abstract, and especially religious, vocabulary from Arabic, with no more than the changes proper to the structure of each language. The actual “Islamization” has come later, confirming and assembling within a coherent structure these scattered modes of thought and expression that were from Islam in the first place. Thus the enculturation of the religious message has in many cases preceded the “Islamization” itself.
Islam was brought to Sub-Saharan Africa via the trade routes from the Arab countries and North Africa. The African Muslims have always maintained quite close links with the Arab world, from which a number of reformers have come. Africans themselves, who shared the same life, essentially carried out “Islamization,” spoke the same language, lived in the same cultural world entirely. There is no doubt that, for African Muslims, “Africanicity” and Islam are in no way opposed.
For them, Islam is not an imported religion. For many, abandoning the Muslim religion is equivalent to the rejection of all their family and tribal traditions, so intermingled are the two socio-religious universes. One must conclude that Islam, in its traditional African form, is entirely a part of the African cultural heritage, and thus an African reality.
Summary
It is one of the strange twists of fate and history that a church, which so dominated the early centuries of Christian formation, is little known today. One of the ironies of history is that African Christianity may be making a comeback, as Africa has now the fastest growing Christian membership in the world. In addition, Africa is providing some new versions of Christianity that are as exciting for scholars to watch and study as they are a bit nerve-wracking for some Christians, who see these movements as possibly heretical.
We have looked at two different versions of modern religions. Jews have had the joys and challenges of welcoming into their fold a group of Ethiopians who have claimed to be members of the House of Israel since before written records. This movement has been both controversial and successful, and the vast majority of this remnant has been relocated to Israel where it seems to be adapting and even thriving.
Christians, as our world shrinks and scholarship becomes ever more accessible, have the opportunity to increase their knowledge of the intellectual history of the formation of their faith. In the process, they can deepen their understanding of the role of Egypt and Coptic Christians, and especially of the way monasticism has influenced Christian faith, even in those churches that no longer practice monasticism.
We live in a global village. It is an amazing
