ABSTRACT
The history of African Atlantic religions is an epic story of continuous creation. It cannot be simply told because it is multilayered and moves through multiple transformations. In order to understand the bewildering complexity of African Atlantic religions, it is best to consider them in successive stages. Stage one begins in Africa, whose rich and multiple religious traditions animate African Atlantic religions to this day. The second stage begins in the Americas, with the establishment of the Luso-Hispanic Catholic world from roughly 1500 to 1700. Although there is no neat dividing line, the third stage begins with the period of massive African imports and extends well into the nineteenth century. Within each stage there are marked variations in the historical trajectory of different groups as local circumstances shaped religious expressions in distinctive ways. There are also deep patterns that bear the unmistakable signature of Africa. Geographically and historically African Atlantic religions begin on the continent of
Africa, with its mix of traditional religions, Islam, and Christianity. The overwhelming majority of Africans adhered to traditional religious forms, although by the time Islam and Christianity arrived indigenous religions had already experienced substantial change in response to massive transformations in communication and commerce. Despite great variations among different societies, certain unifying elements defined traditional cosmologies: a developing concept of a supreme being or ultimate power who controlled the universe; and a pantheon of subordinate deities, many of whom had a dual nature that recognized female participation in the divine, and each of whom had a cult with its own priests and priestesses, societies, and religious activities. Ancestral spirits occupied a special place in the spiritual hierarchy. Endowed with power to do good or harm, ancestral anger was appeased and their mercy implored through ritual objects and ceremonies, which were universally condemned by missionaries as fetich or grisgris. The great majority of Africans adhered to traditional religions, but communities of
black Jews, Muslims and Christians had existed in antiquity. Islam had made deep inroads on the continent, arriving in Africa through two gateways. Commercial networks established as early as 780 by Muslim merchants from the Arabian Peninsula formed the basis for the spread of Islam from the coastal towns of modern Somalia and Mozambique. Although Islam became a majority faith between 1200 and 1500, until the
nineteenth century it remained largely confined to the coast. In North Africa, Berber Muslims were the first practitioners of Islam. Camel caravans engaged in the gold trade crossed the vast Saharan desert with the riches of Africa into the states of Ghana, Mali, Songhay, and Kamen, introducing Islamic influences into West Africa. In West Africa, the long process of Islamization developed in stages, and was closely
linked to urbanization and to the work of Muslim scholars who travelled with the caravans. An early account of the conversion of the king of Mali points to the importance of rulers as early recipients of Islam, and to its nominal acceptance by common people. Assailed by droughts and a series of calamities, the king asked a Muslim guest of his kingdom for help. Throughout the night the Muslim led the king through a series of Muslim rituals and prayers. When dawn broke and rain fell, the king converted and “ordered the idols to be broken and expelled the sorcerers from his country. He and his descendants as well as his nobles were sincerely attached to Islam, while the common people of his kingdom remained polytheists” (quoted by Levtzion, 2007: 65). The development over centuries of Muslim religious and communal institutions such as Mosques and Qurani’c schools, the institution of public prayer and Islamic festivals, and the introduction of Islamic commercial law encouraged the conversion of the literate and commercial classes of West African towns such as Timbuktu, by the fourteenth century one of the great centers of Islamic learning. Nevertheless, the expansion of Islam into the countryside among the peasants was a slow process. Mystic poems written in vernacular languages were the medium through which the largely illiterate rural populations learned about Islam, but pre-Islamic beliefs and customs persisted among the rural populations of West Africa until the jihads of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries achieved conformity and orthodoxy. Islam had been established in West Africa for perhaps 500 years before Portuguese
caravels brought Christianity to the African Atlantic coast. Flourishing Christian churches existed in Egypt, Ethiopia, and Nubia from the sixth century, but the modern phase of Christian activity in West and Central Africa began after the “reconquest” of the Iberian Peninsula by Christian armies. Expeditions to “cause injury to the Moors” established small Portuguese enclaves on the Atlantic islands of São Tomé and Cape Verde and in a few coastal towns in Senegal and on the Gambia River. In the 1570s, the Portuguese established a toehold in the Niger Delta kingdom of Warri. Christianity’s greatest impact, however, was in the West-Central African kingdom of Kongo, where Catholicism was embraced by King Nzinga a Nkuwu, baptized João da Silva. João’s son, baptized Afonso, established what John Thornton and Linda Heywood describe as “one of the most ambitious bilateral cultural programs in the period of European expansion” without resort to conquest or forced coercion (Heywood and Thornton, 2007: 62-63). The engagement of Africans with Christianity is inextricably linked to the history of
African Atlantic religions, and more broadly to Atlantic cultures and the roles played by Africans in shaping those cultures. Ira Berlin’s argument that West Africans who lived in close proximity to Europeans had already incorporated European cultures and religious ideas before they were enslaved, and further that the cultural predisposition of these “Atlantic Creoles” was a critical influence in shaping African American cultures and religions in the formative period of North American slavery, has been broadly influential (Berlin, 1996; Law and Mann, 1999). While not denying the importance of cultural connections between Africa and the Americas, recent studies challenge Berlin’s thesis on the
grounds that he exaggerated the extent of cultural creolization in West Africa and the numerical significance of Atlantic Creoles among exported slaves. Recent work by African scholars has produced a more nuanced concept of Atlantic Creole cultures that emerged along the coasts of West and West Central Africa during the seventeenth century. What they suggest is that different African Creole cultures – defined by language,
religion, clothing, foodways, and music – developed in relation to their principal orientation: the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) had links to Protestant Britain, Denmark, and the Netherlands; the Bight of Benin was overwhelmingly oriented toward Britain. Despite Dutch Calvinist penetration, Central Africa had continuous contacts with Portugal and with Catholic Christianity throughout the seventeenth century. The flood of new religious ideas created endless chances for complexity as some ideas were absorbed into and through traditional religions. The early history of African Creolization in Central Africa is the best documented, and can serve as a model of the process. A recent study by Linda Heywood and John Thornton (2007) defines two core areas of Atlantic Creole culture, Kongo and Portuguese Angola, where Catholic Christianity was voluntarily embraced. Anchored at one end by traditional religion beliefs and practices and on the other end by Catholic beliefs and rituals, the Kongolese variant of Catholic Christianity that emerged in Central Africa was rooted both inside and outside of European Christianity. As ruler of the most highly centralized state in Central Africa, King Afonso estab-
lished Catholicism as a royal cult under his direct control. In a pattern repeated elsewhere in Africa and later in the Americas, missionary culture and ritual were imported into the kingdom, and selective elements of Christian faith were incorporated into local beliefs and practices in such a way as to mutually enrich and inform both religious traditions. For example, to accommodate Kongolese belief that salt warded off evil, priests consented to “salt” baptism, which involved placing a small amount of salt on the tongue of the baptizand. Well versed in Catholic theology, Afonso and his advisors translated Christian terminology into Kikongo so that, for example, the “house of idols” became a church, a priest a nganga a ukisi. If originally Kongolese Catholicism was state-sponsored, its expansion into rural areas
was primarily an indigenous activity. Missionaries, hampered by language barriers, relied heavily upon native teachers, interpreters, and translators to prepare people in remote villages for baptism, a model successfully adapted by Moravians in the Dutch Caribbean and by evangelical Baptists and Methodists in the British Caribbean and North America. By 1516, Afonso had established a network of schools taught by Kongolese priests and teachers. Kongolese missionaries established a second center of Christianity in Angola in the early 1500s and in Loango in the 1580s. By the end of the sixteenth century, Kongo was a Christian country, Angola was a center of Christianity, and Ndongo and Matamba were influenced by Christianity but essentially adhered to traditional religions.1
