African Sacred Spaces: Culture, History, and Change ed. by 'BioDun J. Ogundayo and Julius O. Adekunle (review)

African Sacred Spaces is an intriguing and diverse collection of essays. Nigeria predominates—fully three-quarters of the chapters are about Nigeria—but the book also ranges from sacred groves in Zimbabwe to ritual performances in Cameroon and Afro-Christian traditions in the Americas. Its contributors' approaches to these subjects are diverse: literary-critical, ethnographic, historiographic, exegetical, eco-critical, archaeological. As is often the case with collections of essays, this range of materials and methodologies is both a strength and a weakness; it is fecund but lacking in focus. This effect is amplified because the editors of African Sacred Spaces clearly decided not to define their terms, preferring to leave it up to their contributors to decide what is meant by the term space, how space might be defined as sacred, and what it means for a sacred space to be African. The results are predictably variable.

Every chapter is, in its own right, serious and well-researched. In some instances, however—Kevin Young's chapter on the sixteenth-century Moroccan slave Esteban de Dorantes, for example, or Donald O. Omagu's chapter on the expense of contemporary funeral rites in Nigeria, or Haakayoo N. Zoggyie's analysis of the novel Changó, el gran putas—the relevance of the concept of space, let alone sacred space, is obscure. All three of these studies deal implicitly with what is sometimes called cultural space, but none attempts to explain how such metaphorical space might be read as sacred.

Other chapters implicitly use the term space in the sense sometimes used by geographers who distinguish between space, which lacks personal significance for those experiencing it, and place, which is rich in personal meaning and associations. For example, Muhammadu Mustapha Gwadabe and Muhammad Kyari offer an introduction to the concept of the mosque in Islam: "a space conformable to Islamic worship … devoid of any form of human character or precept" (100) "meant for just worship and nothing else" (106–07). Most of the other chapters use the terms sacred space and sacred place interchangeably; very few interrogate either term, treating their significance as self-evident.

The exceptions are Enoch Olujide Gbadegesin's "Sacred Spaces: Mountains in Yoruba Spirituality," Saheed Balogun Amusa's "Tradition and Modernity: The Dynamics of the Management of Osun Sacred Groves in Osogbo, Nigeria," and Oluwasegun Peter Aluko's "Sacred Space and Sacred Time on an African University Campus." Without taking anything away from the intrinsic merits of the other contributions to this volume, these three chapters represent a significant contribution to the scholarship on sacred space in Yorubaland. Indeed, anyone coming to this collection for a theoretical understanding of what is meant by sacred space would do well to begin with Gbadegesin's and Aluko's short, articulate discussions of the contributions of Rudolf Otto, Mircea Eliade, and Chris Park to the subject.

Gbadegesin's own contribution to the discourse begins with the observation that "virtually all places are regarded in Yorùbá tradition as the abode of spirits," so, the Yorùbá say, "Ibi gbogbo mi ilè òwò ('Every space is a hallowed place')" (143). As a result, mountains in Yoruba spirituality are "multivalent spaces" "subject to secular or spiritual usage, depending on the perceptions and reinterpretations of individuals and communities" (154). Amusa's discussion of sacred groves in Yorubaland examines the way these reinterpretations sometimes occur. "African sacred spaces," Amusa notes, "are fast losing their spiritual importance and relevance due to aspects of modernity such as tourism, commercialism, and urbanization" (165). Aluko's discussion of sacred space at Obafemi Awolowo University, conversely, provides valuable insights into how new sacred spaces emerge. The university, Aluko observes, has "more religious groups than available sacred space" (237). As a result, "some otherwise mundane spaces have been converted, over time … into sacred spaces" (237). It is a fitting final chapter to the volume, emphasizing as it does that all spaces, and perhaps most...