Religion In West Africa

The religions, or beliefs, of the people of this particular region of Africa may be divided for convenience into Christianity, Islam, and paganism, the two former having been introduced from the outside in more modern times. In describing paganism as a religion, we use the term religion in its widest sense, i.e. a system of faith worship, and before dwelling on the advent of the Crescent and the Cross into this part of West Africa, we will glance at some of the pagan beliefs of the natives, for, savage thought the various tribes may be, there is none devoid of a belief in some deity, and most have an idea of the soul and of an afterlife. These ideas may be confused, and to the Christian or Muslim absurd, but after all they are no more peculiar

In the main their beliefs are identical with that in Europe we now term “superstition”; and it is not long ago very similar ideas were held by such northern Christians as the Scandinavians, and a student of folklore will find in rural Ireland, even today, traces of not a few of the superstitious customs of the African pagans. This is the case with the general belief in invisible beings, or “spirits,” capable of working good or evil against mankind; whether the origin of this animism, so prevalent among all primitive and tribal people in every part of the world, is to be found, as Lubbock and Herbert Spencer suggest, in the dreams of the sleeper, or whether the African may be considered as a species of “medium” dwelling in “Borderland,” are questions beyond the scope of this work. Certain it is, however, that every action of the pagan African is influence by his unbounded faith, for good or bad, in the spirit world. There are spirits who rule the sea, the rivers and the streams, the mountains, the valleys, the forests, the wind, lightning and thunder, and all the elements. To the native mind these spirits are mostly hostile to mankind, and, unless humoured, are ready to work destruction; consequently the spirit is raised to the rank of a deity, and propitiated with such votive offerings as are thought to be particularly appreciated by this exalted being. There is nothing new in all this; it is merely the earliest stage of a developing religion, or, to put it plainly, the pagan African is in his religious views (if not in most other respects) some ten or fifteen centuries behind the times. This fact is what Europeans are so prone to forget; “horrible atrocities” are frequently chronicled from West Africa, and are regarded (perhaps naturally) by us as the most vicious acts of a