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RST1501 Summary Notes Study Unit 2
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Summary notes on African Indigenous Religion
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2.1 The academic study of Africanindigenous religion
‘Indigenous’ refers to the claim to have been the first or original inhabitants of a territory
Historians challenge the conceptualization of ‘indigeneity’ as referring to an unchanging,
fossilized, pure essence.
They instead emphasize the changing and hybrid nature of all cultures and religions and
ascribe such changes primarily to migration and interaction with other groups
In the case of African indigenous religions it is helpful to describe the changes in terms of
precolonial, colonial and postcolonial encounters.
The historians rely on archaeological evidence and comparative anthropological fieldwork
among oral societies as written records are not available for the pre-colonial period
For the colonial period the historian does however have written records, but these must be
must always be critically analysed due to the racist prejudices that European colonial
authors typically showed towards African cultures and religions as a ‘primitive’ phase within
an evolutionary scheme
The persistence of elements of African indigenous religions in postcolonial African states
cannot be understood without attending to their changing function within the context of
modern state formations
, 2.2 The religion of San hunter-
gatherers, as evidenced in
Drakensberg rock paintings, and
their current predicament
2.2.1 Beliefs
It is evident from the rock painting that these San believes in a spirit realm beyond the
surface of the rock face
The believe in a spirit world inhabited by strange rain and spirit animals, humans with eland
or smaller antelope heads and cloven hoods, and dangerous spirits of the dead
San shamans, while in trans, often imagined climbing a rope to the spirit world, where they
would plead with the supreme creator god and receive supernatural potency to heal the
sick, facilitate success and make it rain
In the rock painting this rope is represented as a thin red line fringed with white dots that
intertwines spirits animals and human-like beings
The belief system was thus linked to the hunt, but also served to bind them together as a
group
Veneration of ancestors did not feature in the religion of traditional hunter-gatherers
The pygmy hunter-gatherers in the central African forest simply covered a dead relative with
branches and moved on so that the corpse could again become part of the spirit of the
forest
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