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Life, Death, Reincarnation, and Traditional Healing in Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 August 2021

Austine S. O. Okwu
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Extract

Over the years, studies of materials about Africa, especially in the fields of religion, history, anthropology, culture, and sociology, have contributed to the reconstruction of the predominant modes of thought and reason that led to the rise of the people’s belief systems, values, and religious doctrines. Though limited in many ways and still in the most rudimentary stage, the study of African religion has helped in some ways in the understanding of the basis of thought and action which determine African cognitions and total experience, in other words, African consciousness of his universe, feeling, and understanding of the state of being. It is important that interest in the study of African religion should be sustained, for one is still confronted today–often by those who should know–with derisively cynical questions such as: Is there an African religion? What in fact is it if there is one? Isn’t it really the worship of ancestors? Is not African healing merely the practice of magic and mumbo-jumbo?

Type
Research Article
Information
African Issues , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , Fall 1979 , pp. 19 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1979 

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References

Notes

1. See the writings of DrLambo, T. A.. and the works of MajorLeonard, Arthur Glyn, The Lower Niger and Its People (London, Frank Cass, 1968)Google Scholar, and Parrinder, Geoffrey, West African Religions (London, 1961)Google Scholar.

2. John, Janheinz, Muntu: The New African Culture (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1961), p. 107 Google Scholar.

3. For a more detailed study of the African concept of the soul see Meyerowitz, E., “The Concept of the Soul among the Akam” in Africa, XXI (1951), p. 27 Google Scholar; Smith, Edwin and Dale, , The lla-Speaking Peoples of Northern Rhodesia (London: Macmillan, 1920), Vol. II pp. 162-3Google Scholar.

4. Mbiti, John, African Religions and Philosophy (New York: Praeger, 1969), p. 85 Google Scholar.

5. See Griaule, Marce, Dieu d’eau (Paris, 1948), p. 166 Google Scholar.

6. Kingsley, Mary H., West African Studies (London: Macmillan Co., 1899), p. 330 Google Scholar.

7. Mbiti (1969), p. 75.

8. Ackerknecht, E. H., “Problems of Primitive Medicine” in Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. II (1942), pp. 50-52Google Scholar.

9. See Parrinder, E. G., West African Religions (London, 1961), pp. 137–155 Google Scholar, for divination in West Africa especially among the Yoruba and the Fon of Dahomey (now Benin); and also Turner, Victor, Ndembu Divination: Its Symbolism and Techniques (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961)Google Scholar.

10. Marrett, R. R., The Sacraments of Simple Folk (Oxford: Oxford Clarendon Press, 1933), p. 180 Google Scholar.