A Response to Comments

Introduction

The scholarly community has gathered sufficient ethnographic data on African ethnic and religious traditions to engage in serious theoretical and comparative work on religion in Africa. Now is the time for scholars of African religions, who are deeply interested in the discourse on the religions and cultures of the region, to embark on in-depth analysis of how indigenous African religion is similar to or different from other world religions. We especially need to distance ourselves from the tendency in academia to see African religions as less significant than other world religions and therefore less worthy of serious study. Even though religious studies as a discipline claims to recognize the value of religion to all humankind, the field remains parochial, sectional, and not universally appreciative of all human religions. The good news is that scholars of non-Western religions in places like Asia have liberated their fields from these kinds of difficulties and have developed unique approaches with which to conduct in-depth studies of their own traditions and compare them to other Western religious traditions such as Judaism and Christianity. As a result of the unfamiliarity with the models of discourse in indigenous religion in Africa and other continents, however, religious studies departments in America, Europe, and Africa continue to produce scholars who know little about these traditions. This impoverishes the comparative study of religions and, particularly, the understanding of indigenous religions worldwide.

The field of anthropology, which has played a prominent role in the study of African religions, has remained unchanged because religious studies scholars have not developed sufficient arguments to counter models that they tend to deem intellectually inappropriate for interpreting religious data derived from the African context. For example, scholars of anthropology often use the label “magic” to reference sacralized material objects connected with rituals and religions of native traditions, such as the nkizi ritual objects of the Bakongo peoples of the Central African region. It is clear, however, that these objects constitute the core element of spiritual actions and practices of the people. The materiality of such religious traditions forms the very essence of the sacred and does not in any way represent what Western scholars refer to as “magic.” In this manner, problems with translation, interpretation, and meaning lead to serious misunderstandings of what African religions truly represent.

My book City of 201 Gods challenges several of the paradigms that have plagued Western scholarship on indigenous religions. It also offers a new context for understanding tradition and modernity in contemporary Yorùbá society and culture and, by implication, Africa at large. My brief response to the three fine reviews here attempts to explore further how scholars in our discipline can continue to expand the project of indigenous hermeneutics that I have spelled out in the book.

Wale Adebanwi

Wale Adebanwi’s response to my work is fascinating in both its depth and its theoretical and conceptual references. What he refers to as “the age of confusion” in nineteenth-century Yorùbá history, which J. D. Y. Peel so brilliantly describes in Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yorùbá, was followed by “the age of restoration,” during which the Yorùbá encountered and engaged the global world and modernity. It is fascinating that the Yorùbá see their encounter with Christian missionaries and the colonial government as a divine response to the centuries of devastation suffered as a result of the transatlantic slave trade, the fall of the Oyo Empire, and the confrontation with Jihadist Islam—that Christianity became an avenue for remaking their world. As Peel noted in his review of my first book, Kingship, Religion and Rituals in a Nigerian Community, it was the Yorùbá sacred kingship that provided the ground for mediation between tradition and modernity. In that book, I cited an Ondo national anthem composed by Bishop Philips that suggests that the restoration of the Ondo year of the locust was made possible with the help of the Christian missionaries. Even today, the Ondo people sing their native anthem in a way that shows that they are proud of and thankful for the Christian God and the...