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 traditional husband/father has always made choices concerning career, life-styles, values, and directions for the whole family, but he generally had another person on the team—called a wife. And his duties were always clear: Bring home the bacon and take out the garbage.”
—Donna N. Douglass (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)
“All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to children by the hands of storytellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the philosophers celebrate in vain. And nothing stands between the people and the fictions except the silly falsehood that the fictions are literal truths, and that there is nothing in religion but fiction.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)