Traditional African religion is a catch-all term for the ethnic and folk religious traditions of the peoples of Africa (especially Sub-Saharan Africa), often involving syncretism with other traditions, especially Christianity and Islam.
Due to the vast scope and diversity of Sub-Saharan African ethnography, there is no single uniting aspect of traditional African religion beyond what is culturally universal of pre-modern religion worldwide, i.e. aspects of oral tradition and animism.
Read more about Traditional African Religion: Classification and Statistics, West African Religious Tradition, Deities, Practices and Rituals, Duality of Self and Gods, Virtue and Vice, Religious Offices, Holy Places and Headquarters of Religious Activities, Liturgy and Rituals, Mythology, Religious Persecution, Misleading Terms, Traditions By Region
Famous quotes containing the words traditional, african and/or religion:
“The community and family networks which helped sustain earlier generations have become scarcer for growing numbers of young parents. Those who lack links to these traditional sources of support are hard-pressed to find other resources, given the emphasis in our society on providing treatment services, rather than preventive services and support for health maintenance and well-being.”
—Bernice Weissbourd (20th century)
“We live in a highly industrialized society and every member of the Black nation must be as academically and technologically developed as possible. To wage a revolution, we need competent teachers, doctors, nurses, electronics experts, chemists, biologists, physicists, political scientists, and so on and so forth. Black women sitting at home reading bedtime stories to their children are just not going to make it.”
—Frances Beale, African American feminist and civil rights activist. The Black Woman, ch. 14 (1970)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)