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Africa Today 49.4 (2002) 148-150



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Olupona, Jacob K., ed. African Spirituality: Forms, Meanings, And Expressions. World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest, volume 3. New York: Herder and Herder, Crossroad Publishing Company. 2000. xxxvi + 476 pp. $35.00.

This book consists of twenty articles, eleven of which relate to African traditional religions, six to Islam and Christianity, and the remainder to African religious movements of the Diaspora. Most of the contributions on African traditional religion are written from a classical anthropological perspective and present a description of the cosmology of one or another ethnic group in Africa. This perspective may form the reason why two major questions regularly arose when I read this part of the book: "When?" and "Who?" [End Page 148]

Little attention is paid to religious change. Religion is interpreted as a given, and the issue of religious history is by and large ignored. It remains unclear when the described beliefs were held by Africans and whether these beliefs are still important. In David Westerlund's article on spirituality and disease, at least reference is made to this problem: "Needless to say, this does not mean that important religious and other changes have not taken place." Westerlund decides, however, to ignore these changes and write in the "ethnographic present" (p. 153). Even if we accept this strategy, the reader may wish to know when this "ethnographic present" took place. In some articles, cosmology is conceived in strict structuralist oppositions, which leave little room for the flexibility, hybridity, and diversity that is ascribed to African religious thinking in general.

The second question is perhaps even more pertinent than the first. Is it possible to speak of an African spirituality at all? Are there shared features of religion in Africa that warrant a generalized interpretation? Although Olupona mentions this problem, he moves on to mention a number of characteristics of African spirituality. It remains unclear whether all Africans share the same notions of spirituality, what is specifically African about the characteristics sketched by Olupona, and whether the general features outlined in the introduction relate to the past or are also relevant today. This failure to address the core assumption of the book at times leads to disconcerting statements. Thus, in Ogbu U. Kalu's contribution, reference is made to an informant who expressed criticism on the Odo cult, leading the author to comment: "The bias betrays an educated indigene" (p. 65). Does education render Africans less African? Dominique Zahan states: "The African lives in a state of anamartesis" (p. 3). Neither the concept, nor the statement, is specified. Such general remarks cannot be proved or disproved, and should hence have been excluded from a scholarly work.

Because change, whether related to internal or external factors, has not been taken up as an issue in the volume in general, the interaction between African traditional religion, Islam, and Christianity is discussed from opposing perspectives. Thus, in G. C. Oosthuizen's article, Christianity is presented as leading to "African alienation" and "identity crisis." Sabine Jell-Bahlsen, in a contribution on female water spirits, takes up an intermediary position: she holds that, while change has been a feature of Igbo custom, "too much innovation may distort people's ethics" (p. 42). Especially in the articles on Islam, the interpretation is based on the concept of change. In the articles by Patrick J. Ryan on the interaction between African and Muslim spirituality and Louis Brenner on Sufism, religious change forms the core of the analysis, and is not presented as leading to alienation or crisis, but as a theme that can be studied in all societies.

This discrepancy should at least have been noted by the editor. Jacob Olupona has missed the opportunity to write an introduction that provides the reader with a discussion of the theoretical and methodological debates that have been held on religion in Africa. He defines spirituality as "the [End Page 149] deepest center of the person," thereby stressing an individual approach to spirituality. This contradicts his later statements about the importance of communal aspects of spirituality in Africa...

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