Journal articles: 'African Cosmology'

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Ngong, David T. "Reading the Bible in Africa." Exchange 43, no. 2 (May 12, 2014): 174–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1572543x-12341316.

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Abstract This paper describes inculturation biblical reading in a narrow way to include mainly that reading of the Bible that takes for granted what is believed to be a peculiarly African spiritualistic cosmology. A central element of this method includes pitting a supposedly African spiritualized cosmology against a supposedly Western rationalistic and disenchanted cosmology. Proponents of this method claim that a relevant biblical interpretation in the African context should enable Africans to deal with issues arising from their belief in an enchanted world. This essay problematizes the focus on this enchanted cosmology and argues that the African condition can be effectively addressed through interpreting the Bible in ways that encourage the development of the scientific imagination, which could lead to the development of science and technology and an improved standard of living for the people.

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Oosthuizen, George C. "Interpretation of Demonic Powers in Southern African Independent Churches." Missiology: An International Review 16, no. 1 (January 1988): 3–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/009182968801600101.

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African Independent Churches (AIC) have grown especially in South Africa at a tremendous pace—from thirty-two denominations in 1913 and hardly one percent of the African population to over three thousand denominations in 1980 and nearly 30 percent of the African population. Various reasons account for this tremendous growth such as several major emphases: Africanization of the church, socioeconomic deprivation, the adaptation process from the microcosmic to the macrocosmic world, and a holistic approach to healing which takes note of the indigenous cosmology. The latter aspect is a central issue. There are two types of diseases—natural, behind which are no malicious external forces, and those which are understood only within the context of African cosmology such as witchcraft, sorcery, ancestor wrath, spirit-possession. The missionaries ignored these forces and the problems Africans encountered with them. To these malicious forces the AIC give attention and their handling of them makes a decisive impact. This is the main theme of the article.

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Exkano, Jessica. "Toward an African Cosmology." Journal of Black Studies 44, no. 1 (November 8, 2012): 63–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0021934712465313.

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Akasaka, Ken. "Toshinao Yoneyama, Cosmology of African Peasants." Journal of African Studies 1990, no. 37 (1990): 89–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.11619/africa1964.1990.37_89.

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Martin, Denise. "Maat and Order in African Cosmology." Journal of Black Studies 38, no. 6 (March 20, 2007): 951–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0021934706291387.

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Datsau, Abednego Audu. "Religious and Humanistic Principles in African Ethics: Panacea for Overcoming Inhumanity in Contemporary Nigeria." African Journal of Culture, History, Religion and Traditions 5, no. 1 (September 11, 2022): 39–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.52589/ajchrt-7kd7wwvp.

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Although humanistic ethical principles are usually seen as secular in nature, yet it is important to note that African humanistic ethical principle is unique when compared to other ethical principles. What makes African humanistic ethical principle to be different from other humanistic ethical principles is that it is an ethical principle that is not separated from religion. The researcher was motivated to carry out this research because, unlike other humanistic ethical principles that are unconnected to religion, African humanistic ethical principle is informed by African Traditional Religion. The aim of this research is to show how understanding the peculiarity of African humanistic ethics will help in solving inhumanity which Africans are passing through. The research achieved the aim through the following objectives: By pointing the relationship between religion and ethics in African Traditional Religions, by showing the place of man in West African religious cosmology, by showing peculiarities of West African Religious ethics, and by showing the peculiarities of African humanism. This is an expository research that is based on existing information. The researcher carried out the research by comparing and contrasting, analyzing and synthesizing secular and African humanistic ethical principles. The research will help people in contemporary Africa to work toward promoting the wellbeing of fellow Africans who are suffering from all forms of inhumanity. The scope of the research is on the religious and humanistic principles in West African ethics. The research has shown that religious and humanistic ethical principles are inseparable in African traditional world view.

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Ghanbari, Javid. "An Investigation into Architectural Creolization of West African Vernacular Mosques." International Journal of Multicultural and Multireligious Understanding 8, no. 9 (September 4, 2021): 66. http://dx.doi.org/10.18415/ijmmu.v8i9.2874.

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In investigating the influence of religious thoughts on architecture, much attention has been given to divine world-wide religions by the researchers, while indigenous religions have to a great extent been neglected. Ancient tribes in different parts of the world, have, on the basis of their cosmology, shaped beliefs which reflect on their architecture, especially on their sacred buildings. Regarding the Dogons-a well-known and a dominant tribe in West Africa- their Gods, cosmology and beliefs have led to the formation of settlements comprising houses, temples and other types of buildings in accordance with their religious thoughts while also being in harmony with nature. Up on the expansion of Islam throughout Africa, especially West Africa, vernacular mosques are shaped gradually beside shrines making a typology of Islamic architecture which has traces of both Dogon and Islamic architecture within it; While the influence of natural materials and indigenous building techniques should not be neglected. Taking a descriptive-deductive analysis approach, this paper will search for the architectural creolization process and will eventually conclude that West African vernacular mosques inherit their formal and spatial features mostly from Dogon house and pioneer mosques in Medina and their physical features, elements and exterior decorations from Dogon temples.

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Maithufi, Sope. "African Aesthetics: A Matter of Reason or Cosmology?" English Academy Review 39, no. 1 (January 2, 2022): 1–5. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10131752.2022.2122168.

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طلب, غادة محمد سيد. "African Cosmology in Gloria Naylor's Mama Day (1989)." مجلة الآداب والعلوم الإنسانية 99, no. 2 (July 1, 2024): 23–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.21608/fjhj.2024.232738.1521.

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Adepoju, Oluwatoyin Vincent. "Epistemic Roots, Universal Routes and Ontological Roofs of African “Ritual Archives”: Disciplinary Formations in African Thought." Yoruba Studies Review 3, no. 1 (December 21, 2021): 1–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.32473/ysr.v3i1.129934.

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One may compose an essay on another essay, and possibly an even longer one than the essay being studied, long as that one is, when one is confronted with one of those things one has to say something about after encountering them. “Ritual Archives”, the climatic conclusion of the account in The Toyin Falola Reader ( Austin: Pan African University, 2018), of the efforts of Africa and its Americas Diaspora to achieve political, economic, intellectual and cultural individuality, is a deeply intriguing, ideationally, structurally and stylistically powerful and inspiring work, rich with ideas and arresting verbal and visual images. His focus is Africa and its Diaspora, but his thought resonates with implications far beyond Africa, into contexts of struggle for plurality of vision outside and even within the West, the global dominance of whose central theoretical constructs inspires Falola’s essay. “Ritual Archives”, oscillates between the analytical and the poetic, the ruminative and the architectonic, expressive styles pouring out a wealth of ideas, which, even though adequately integrated, are not always adequately elaborated on. This essay responds to the resonance of those ideas, further illuminating their intrinsic semantic values and demonstrating my perception of the intersections of the concerns they express with issues beyond the African referent of “Ritual Archives”. This response is organized in five parts, representing my understanding of the five major thematic strategies through which the central idea is laid out and expanded. 316 Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju The first section, “Developing Classical African Expressions as Sources of Locally and Universally Valid Theory” explores Falola’s advocacy for an expanded cultivation of theory from Africa created and Africa inspired expressive forms. “Epistemic and Metaphysical Integrity in Ifá”, the second part, examines his argument for a re-centering of studies in classical African thought within the epistemic and metaphysical frames of those bodies of knowledge, using the Yoruba origin Ifá system of knowledge, spiritual development and divination as an example, an illustration I analyze through my own understanding of the cognitive and metaphysical framework of Ifá. The third unit, “Falola’s Image Theory and Praxis, Image as Archive, Image as Initiator”, demonstrates Falola’s dramatization of the cognitive possibilities of works of art as inspirers of theory, exemplified by a figurine of the Yoruba origin òrìṣà cosmology, the deity Esu. This is the most poetic and one of the most imaginatively, ideationally evocative and yet tantalizingly inadequately elaborated sections of “Ritual Archives”, evoking continuities between Yoruba philosophy, òrìṣà cosmology and various bodies of knowledge across art and image theory and history, without expanding on the ideas or building them into a structure adequately responsive to the promise of the ideas projected, a foundation I contribute to developing by elucidating my understanding of the significance of the ideas and their consonance with related conceptions and issues from Asian, Western and African cultures. I also demonstrate how this section may contribute to clarification of the nature of Yoruba philosophy understood as a body of ideas on the scope of human intelligibility and the relationship between that philosophy and òrìṣà cosmology, an expansive view of the cosmos developed in relation to the philosophy. This is a heuristic rather than an attempt at a definitive distinction and is derived from the relationship between my practical and theoretical investigation of Yoruba epistemology and Falola’s exploration, in “Ritual Archives”, of a particularly strategic aspect of òrìṣà cosmology represented by Esu. The distinction I advance between Yoruba philosophy and òrìṣà cosmology and the effort to map their interrelations is useful in categorizing and critically analyzing various postulates that constitute classical Yoruba thought. This mapping of convergence and divergence contributes to working out the continuum in Yoruba thought between a critical and experiential configuration and a belief system. The fourth section, “The Institutional Imperative”, discusses Falola’s careful working out of the institutional implications of the approach he advocates of developing locally and universally illuminating theory out of endogenous African cultural forms. The fifth part, “Imagistic Resonance”, presents Falola’s effort to make the Toyin Falola Reader into a ritual archive, illustrating his vision for African art as an inspirer of theory, by spacing powerful black and white pictures of forms of this art, mainly sculptural but also forms of Epistemic Roots, Universal Routes and Ontological Roofs 317 clothing, largely Yoruba but also including examples from other African cultures, throughout the book. Except for the set of images in the appendix, these artistic works are not identified, nor does the identification of those in the appendix go beyond naming them, exclusions perhaps motivated by the need to avoid expanding an already unusually big book of about 1,032 pages of central text. I reproduce and identify a number of these artistic forms and briefly elaborate on their aesthetic force and ideational power, clarifying the theoretical formations in which they are embedded and exploring the insights they could contribute to theory beyond their originating cultures. “Ritual Archives” is particularly important for me because it elucidates views strategic to my own cognitive explorations and way of life but which I have not been able to articulate with the ideational comprehensiveness and analytical penetration Falola brings to the subject of developing theory from endogenous African cultural expressions, exemplified by Ifá and art, two of my favorite subjects

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11

Hexham, Irving, W. Arens, and Ivan Karp. "Creativity of Power: Cosmology and Action in African Societies." International Journal of African Historical Studies 23, no. 3 (1990): 566. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/219639.

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12

Siegel, Brian, W. Arens, and Ivan Karp. "Creativity of Power: Cosmology and Action in African Societies." African Studies Review 34, no. 1 (April 1991): 120. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/524260.

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Zeitlyn, David, W. Arens, and Ivan Karp. "Creativity of Power: Cosmology and Action in African Societies." Man 26, no. 2 (June 1991): 359. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2803850.

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Goodman, Felicitas D., W. Arens, and Ivan Karp. "Creativity of Power: Cosmology and Action in African Societies." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 30, no. 2 (June 1991): 240. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1387242.

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15

Kavusa, J. "Humans and Non-humans as נפש ח;ה and Ntu-beings: Ecological Appraisal of Gen 2:7 and 19 in Dialogue with African-Bantu Indigenous Cosmology." Old Testament Essays 35, no. 2 (2022): 149–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2312-3621/2022/v35n2a3.

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The Hebrew text of Gen 2:7, 19 describes both humans and animals as nephesh hayya' (living being). However, a large number of contemporary influential Bible translations render this expression differently for humans and animals. It is translated living being for humans (v.7), but living thing/creature for animals (v.19). This is however not justified by any clue in the text, which views humans and non-humans as both adamah-beings and nephesh hayyah. Likewise, African-Bantu cosmology depicts humans and non-humans as ntu-beings (muntu: human being; kintu: non-human being; hantu: place and time; kuntu: means or approach).The root ntu in the word kuntu implies that the way muntu (human being) interacts with other beings (kintu, hantu) must be informed by a vision of nature not as a "thing" but a living being. In addition to elements of socio-historical approaches and African-Bantu indigenous cosmology, this study makes uses of a hermeneutics of suspicion and the Earth Bible principle of mutual custodianship to retrieve ecological wisdom of Gen 2 in the African context.

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Eshun, Ekow. "A Liquid Africa." liquid blackness 5, no. 1 (April 1, 2021): 75–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/26923874-8932595.

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Abstract This essay coins the term liquid Africa to describe the continent as protean and fluid, a convergence point of diverse ideas and influences, shaped by the tidal wash of local, regional, and international cultural influences. The notion of a liquid Africa opposes long-standing representations of the continent in the Western imaginary as a homogenous landmass sunk in a perpetual past, suspended outside progress, and the antithesis of modernity. Through study of Samuel Bazawule's short film Diasporadical Trilogía (2017) and a number of other recent films primarily by creative practitioners of African origin, liquidity is addressed here as a curatorial category, denoting a shared versatility of practice, and in aesthetic, geographic, and temporal terms. Aesthetic strategies such as the use of water as a thematic device and of music to weave a tapestry of auditory affinities across place and time act as means of conjuring narratives of collective memory, of multiple pasts always within reach of the present, across the African diaspora. Finally, the essay considers how Diasporadical Trilogía in particular embraces fantasy as a liberatory form, a means of resistance to notions of Enlightenment progress, and a route toward an epistemic decentering based on Africa's vast cosmology of myths and beliefs.

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Uzukwu, Gesila Nneka. "Crisis of Faith: Today's African Christians and Mami-Wata (Mother-Water) Spirituality." Journal of Ecumenical Studies 59, no. 2 (March 2024): 157–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ecu.2024.a931509.

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precis: This study provides an analysis of the impact of Mami-Wata spirituality on an understanding of the place and fate of Christianity in Africa today. A section of the Christian population negotiates their Christian beliefs through the prism of their traditional African religious cosmology and worldviews. This new Christian African spirituality is generating waves of faith crises. While previous scholarship has investigated the crises of African Christian faith from the dominant point of view of African culture and context, from Christian-Muslim interaction, or from the influence of Western elements, there are no works that show the multidimensional impacts of Mami-Wata spirituality on Christians and their faith, identity, and theological discourses. Departing from past works, the present work investigates how rudimentary constructs of African spirituality have engaged Christianity on several fronts, from the problem of faith crisis and the engagement of the Mami-Wata deity to how some African Christians wrestle with their devotion to the Virgin Mary vis-à-vis the traditional Mami-Wata deity. This analysis also demonstrates the indispensability of the female divine in spiritual and religious discourses, and it provides a pathway to construct a theology that is both truly Christian and grounded in African realities.

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Harlin, Kate. ""One foot on the other side": Towards a Periodization of West African Spiritual Surrealism." College Literature 50, no. 2-3 (March 2023): 295–322. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/lit.2023.a902220.

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Abstract: For both writers and scholars of African and diaspora literature, genre is a fraught concept. Western institutions, especially departments of English literature, have used the tool of genre to discipline Africana literatures and the people who create them, at once reducing conventional realism to a source of anthropological information and mischaracterizing realism with an indigenous or Nonwestern worldview as fantasy or "Magical Realism." "West African spiritual surrealism," as defined in this essay, offers a generic rubric that both attends to the literalization of Igbo and Yoruba cosmology in fiction as well as the ways these cosmologies can give rise to literary devices that resist hegemonic, Anglo-American centric literary interpretation. Through close readings of Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl (2005) and Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater (2018), this article historicizes West African spiritual surrealism as a geographically and ideologically diasporic genre that cannot be properly understood through frameworks of globalization alone. This genre and its writers require critics to read both deeply and widely in order to understand how West African spiritual surrealism places African cosmologies and people always already at the center of literary production.

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Baker, Benjamin. "“There’s A Day Coming”: The Origin, Reception, and Conception of the Catastrophic Apocalypse among Black Captives." Journal of Africana Religions 11, no. 2 (July 2023): 153–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.5325/jafrireli.11.2.0153.

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Abstract Blacks employed myriad means to survive the harrowing and protracted ordeal of American slavery. Arguably, the most important means were ideological, and one idea ubiquitous among Black captives was the catastrophic apocalypse: God physically coming to earth to destroy the planet and “wicked” people, while preserving “righteous” people. This article explores the origin, reception, and conception of this idea among enslaved Blacks in the United States. To do this, I first explore West and Central African cosmology during the era of the transatlantic slave trade to determine if there were philosophical antecedents that may have predisposed Africans to such a belief. I then examine how and why many displaced Africans in America embraced the apocalypse. I argue that Blacks received and conceived of the catastrophic apocalypse in a manner consistent with traditional African ways of knowing and ordering the world in order to survive and combat a novel and brutal system of oppression.

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Ben-Yehoyada, Naor. "Transnational Political Cosmology: A Central Mediterranean Example." Comparative Studies in Society and History 56, no. 4 (October 2014): 870–901. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0010417514000437.

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AbstractThis paper examines the workings of kinship and marriage idioms in transnational political imaginary in the central Mediterranean to challenge current academic reliance on the notion of fraternity as the symbolic building block of both national and global political relations. Since the 1960s, the Sicilian town of Mazara del Vallo and its fishing fleet have become entwined in intensifying interactions with Tunisia and the wider Maghreb. These interactions—specifically the Tunisian-Italian “Fish War” and construction of a trans-Mediterranean natural gas pipeline between North Africa and Europe—rejuvenated the old geopolitical imagination of the Mediterranean and helped produce the central Mediterranean as a spatio-temporal field of political action. Italians and Tunisians perceived each other as related, and staged the trans-Mediterranean infrastructural project as a sort of European-African (cross-cousin) marriage. I begin by examining the tensions between two central kinship idioms—fraternity and cousinage—in current understandings of transnational relations. I then discuss the growing prevalence of a transnational political cosmology of affinity across difference over that of shared descent and sameness that characterize national alignments. I conclude by examining how Tunisians and Sicilians in Mazara today cast each other in roles deriving from segmentary schemes they share, but on the content of which they disagree. By applying concepts associated with kinship and marriage studies to recent Mediterranean history, I show how segmentation, a concept anthropologists abandoned when they crossed the Mediterranean on their way into Europe, can help us understand transnational politics.

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Draper-Clarke, Lucy, and Caryn Green. "African Wisdom Traditions and Healing Practices: Performing the Embodied, Contemplative, and Group-based Elements of African Cosmology, Orality, and Arts Modalities." Creative Arts in Education and Therapy 9, no. 2 (December 22, 2023): 151–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.15212/caet/2023/9/14.

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This study on African wisdom traditions and their healing practices, as conducted through embodied modalities and in community settings, addresses a gap in mainstream discourse centered on Eastern meditation practices and Western cognitive therapeutic practices. During a research retreat in South Africa, traditional healers, creative arts therapists, and performers were invited to facilitate indigenous contemplative rituals and arts-based healing practices. The study intended to classify selected Southern African practices and question how they contribute to healing trauma, supporting well-being and enabling human flourishing. This article presents a definition, brief history, and the performed elements of five healing practices: Umphahlo, Umgidi Wokulingisa, Isicathamiya, Iintsomi, and Djembe drumming.

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Vähäkangas, Mika. "Negotiating Religious Traditions — Babu wa Loliondo’s Theology of Healing." Exchange 45, no. 3 (August 17, 2016): 269–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1572543x-12341404.

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Retired Lutheran pastor Ambilikile Mwasapila became the most celebrated healer in Eastern Africa for half a year in 2011. His healing consists of an herbal potion, brewed according to the recipe he got from God in dreams. According to Rev. Mwasapila, the potency of the medicine stems from the presence of the Word of God in it. It is efficient only when administered by him. He perceives himself as a prophet called by God to alleviate sufferings of humankind in a world pestered by illnesses sent by Satan. His theology of healing has clear Lutheran sacramental theological elements combined with views from African traditional medicine and Christian charismatic faith healing. His cosmology is deeply rooted in African views of the spirit world interpreted through Pentecostal-charismatic demonology. The ideas underlying his ministry can be seen as an oral charismatic Lutheran contextual theology lived out in practice.

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Salami, Ali, and Bamshad Hekmatshoar Tabari. "IGBO NAMING COSMOLOGY AND NAMESYMBOLIZATION IN CHINUA ACHEBE’S TETRALOGY." Folia linguistica et litteraria XI, no. 33 (2020): 39–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.31902/fll.33.2020.2.

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Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God and A Man of the People, the first four novels by Chinua Achebe, the contemporary Nigerian novelist, are among the most outstanding works of African postcolonial literature. As a matter of fact, each of these four novels focuses on a different colonial or postcolonial phase of history in Nigeria and through them Achebe intends to provide an authentic record of the negative and positive impacts of ‘hybridity’ on different aspects of the life of native subjects. Briefly stated, Achebe is largely successful in taking advantages of variable discursive tools he structures based on the potentials of the hybrid, Igbo-English he adopts. Thus, it might be deduced that reading these four novels in line with each other, and as chains or sequels of Tetralogy, might result in providing a more vivid picture of the Nigerian (African) subjects and the identity crises emerging in them as a result of colonization. To provide an account of the matter, the present study seeks to focus on one of the discursive strategies Achebe relies on in those four novels: Igbo Naming Cosmology and Name-symbolization.

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Salami, Ali, and Bamshad Hekmatshoar Tabari. "IGBO NAMING COSMOLOGY AND NAMESYMBOLIZATION IN CHINUA ACHEBE’S TETRALOGY." Folia linguistica et litteraria XI, no. 33 (2020): 39–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.31902/fll.33.2020.2.

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Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God and A Man of the People, the first four novels by Chinua Achebe, the contemporary Nigerian novelist, are among the most outstanding works of African postcolonial literature. As a matter of fact, each of these four novels focuses on a different colonial or postcolonial phase of history in Nigeria and through them Achebe intends to provide an authentic record of the negative and positive impacts of ‘hybridity’ on different aspects of the life of native subjects. Briefly stated, Achebe is largely successful in taking advantages of variable discursive tools he structures based on the potentials of the hybrid, Igbo-English he adopts. Thus, it might be deduced that reading these four novels in line with each other, and as chains or sequels of Tetralogy, might result in providing a more vivid picture of the Nigerian (African) subjects and the identity crises emerging in them as a result of colonization. To provide an account of the matter, the present study seeks to focus on one of the discursive strategies Achebe relies on in those four novels: Igbo Naming Cosmology and Name-symbolization.

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Osha, Sanya. "Spaces of African Thought: A Critique of an Enactivist Rendering." Philosophia Africana 22, no. 1 (July 2023): 23–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.5325/philafri.22.1.0023.

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Abstract This article addresses Bruce Janz’s “enactivist” reading of African philosophy from two perspectives. The space in which African philosophy finds itself remains problematic, and, thus, this article attempts to unpack this issue. Janz argues that African philosophy allows for only a few or no possibilities for radical thought. However, his own reading of the Nigerian philosopher Sophie Oluwole serves to debunk this claim. Oluwole’s thought highlights the challenges of building a modern African philosophy within the context of postcoloniality, in which problems of untranslatability are encountered when utilizing a metropolitan language, which, in her case, is English. But, beyond the problem of untranslatability, she is able to delineate a holistic cosmology that, in multiple ways, incorporates, complicates, and extends the borders of philosophy.

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Alves, Maria Rosa Almeida, Adeilda Ana da Silva Martins, Enos André de Farias, Geovani José Gonçalves, Carlos Eduardo Romeiro Pinho, Genivaldo do Nascimento, Pamela Rocha Bagano Guimarães, and Rosiane Rocha Oliveira Santos. "Orality, its Linkages and Interfaces: An Approach from the African Cosmology." International Journal of Advanced Engineering Research and Science 7, no. 3 (2020): 81–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.22161/ijaers.73.14.

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Matory, J. Lorand, W. Arens, and Ivan Karp. "Creativity of Power: Essays on Cosmology and Action in African Societies." Journal of Religion in Africa 23, no. 2 (May 1993): 175. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1581221.

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Hampson, Jamie. "Termites of the gods: San cosmology in southern African rock art." Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 51, no. 4 (September 2, 2016): 540–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0067270x.2016.1228689.

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O'Connell, Hugh Charles. "“Can We Imagine a World Without Funds or Banks?” Abderrahmane Sissako's Bamako as African-Utopian Speculative Fiction." Utopian Studies 30, no. 1 (May 1, 2019): 67–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.30.1.67.

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ABSTRACT This article reconsiders Abderrahmane Sissako's 2006 film Bamako as a formal example of sf predicated upon an African-utopian impulse that intervenes in the political closure of capitalist realism and the ontology of debt perpetuated by structural adjustment programs. Due to the radically unlikely events of the film's narrative, in which international financial institutions can be put on trial by ordinary citizens, this article argues that Bamako is best understood as an sf “alternate cosmology” narrative. Moreover, given the pseudo-utopian ideologies of neoliberal and neo-imperial enterprises, this article examines how Bamako operates as the preconceptual figuration of African-utopianism itself. To do so, it first raises a pseudo-African-utopianism in order to negate it and point the way toward the structurally unenunciable, inconceivable content of a radical African-utopianism. As such, Bamako needs to be read as both a desire for and a preconceptual harbinger of African-utopianism and situated alongside the rise of African sf more broadly.

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Ngong, David T. "Theology as the Construction of Piety: A Critique of the Theology of Inculturation and the Pentecostalization of African Christianity." Journal of Pentecostal Theology 21, no. 2 (2012): 344–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/17455251-02102010.

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This essay argues that an important task of theology is the construction of piety. It draws from a few critical moments in the development of Christianity, such as the development of the doctrine of God and Christology in the early church and the rejection of materialistic Christianity in early modern Europe, to argue that these moments reflect the theological struggle to shape Christian piety. The idea that theology is concerned with the shaping of piety is then used to evaluate African theology of inculturation, which has now flowered in the Pentecostalization of African Christianity. It argues that although the theology of inculturation may be helpful in constructing a viable African theology, uncritically embracing the spiritualized cosmology of African traditional societies in salvific discourses promotes a form of piety that is ill-equipped to overcome the marginalization of the continent in the modern world.

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Iyanaga, Michael. "Ancestrality, Affliction, and Catholic Song: Resonances of Africa in Alternative Caboclo Cosmology in Bahia, Brazil." Journal of Africana Religions 12, no. 1 (January 2024): 53–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.5325/jafrireli.12.1.0053.

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Abstract The present article highlights the way in which a central African worldview served as the structural backbone for the development of the caboclo spirit as conceptualized by countless devotees in Bahia, Brazil. This study is chiefly interested in the traditions of caboclo veneration common outside of explicitly Afro-Brazilian religious houses of worship, and especially among those who affirm Catholicism as their primary religious identity. By placing over a decade and a half of fieldwork in Bahia, Brazil, in dialogue with the historiography on Afro-Brazilian religions and historical research on central African Catholicism and Bantu culture, this article argues that caboclos might serve as cogent reminders that an important facet of the African legacy in Brazil can be found at Catholic saint parties and therapeutic “white table” sessions.

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Adé, Taharka. "Africological Historiography: Primary Considerations." SAGE Open 12, no. 1 (January 2022): 215824402210798. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/21582440221079881.

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Africological Historiography is scholarship dedicated to the preservation of African cosmology in the telling of African history. Such an historiography also serves as a means to tease out the agency of African people in any circumstance of marginality, misinterpretation, suppression, and omission of said historical agency. For the purposes of developing Africological Historiography, Africologists may take on various interests in other fields in order to garner the data necessary for their inquiries. However, it is important to make sure that the data garnered from other disciplines are approached using Afrocentric methodology or they will be no good for Africological research. In this article, I explore the benefits and dangers of other fields of interests, the dangers of Eurocentric theoretical models, afrophobic historiographies, and the inherent praxis of the discipline in its use for producing Africological Historiography. These are primary considerations for Africologists in the presentation of African history.

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Parish, Jane. "The cosmology of economy: West African witchcraft, finance and the futures market." Culture and Religion 19, no. 1 (December 19, 2017): 113–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14755610.2017.1416646.

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Gundaker, Grey. "African-American history, cosmology and the moral universe of Edward Houston's yard." Journal of Garden History 14, no. 3 (September 1994): 179–205. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01445170.1994.10412508.

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Kozieł, Patrycja. "From Afrofuturism to Africanfuturism: Contemporary Expressions within Popular Culture." Hemispheres.Studies on Cultures and Societies 36 (2021): 69–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.60018/hemi.ldvc3494.

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The futuristic representation of the world is an important aspect of understanding contemporary cultural processes, literary and musical trends, and artistic activities, both in Africa and in the African Diaspora. In order to examine effectively the development of the futurist path, I will briefly trace two categories: ‘Afrofuturism’ and ‘Africanfuturism’ (as proposed by Nnedi Okorafor), containing elements of science-fiction, speculative fiction, non-Western history, technology, and fantasy. In this article I will discuss how the concept of Afrofuturism has evolved, how techno-utopian visions of the future are created, illustrating terrestrial and cosmic existence, while extracting knowledge about ancestors, mythology and cosmology. Is it a kind of cultural script – based on ephemerality, temporality and imagination – that has been adapted to the conditions of modern popular culture in Sub-Saharan Africa? Or is it an accurate form of crossing time-space boundaries and discourses?

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Santos, Tiganá Santana Neves. "A tradução de sentenças em linguagem proverbial e o diálogo com o pensamento bantu-kongo a partir de Bunseki Fu-Kiau." Cadernos de Literatura em Tradução, no. 16 (May 10, 2016): 49–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.11606/issn.2359-5388.i16p49-62.

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Esta pesquisa tem o intuito de fazer emergir um contexto teórico em que se contrastam estudos paremiológicos vigentes no Ocidente e outras chaves de pensamento, principalmente aquela que diz respeito ao pensar africano bantu-kongo, conforme apresentado pelo autor congolês Bunseki Fu-Kiau em seu ensaio African Cosmology of the bantu-kongo: principles of life and living, obra jamais traduzida para a língua-cultura (luso)brasileira. O principal meio de contato entre os distintos modos de pensar envolvidos no presente artigo dá-se através da tradução, seguida de comentários, do que cunhamos como sentenças em linguagem proverbial (kingana), registradas, originalmente, de modo bilíngue (língua kikongo – língua inglesa) no ensaio aludido. Desta forma, trazemos a potenciais leitores brasileiros uma tradução necessariamente vinculada aos referenciais de linguagem e pensamento ancorados na cultura bantu-kongo, um dos vetores constitutivos da cultura brasileira.

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Peters, Pauline E. ": Creativity of Power: Cosmology and Action in African Societies . W. Arens, Ivan Karp." American Anthropologist 93, no. 1 (March 1991): 219–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/aa.1991.93.1.02a00620.

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Ajayi, Murphy. "I am Because We Are: Balance and Harmony in a Devine African Cosmology." Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 2, no. 2 (December 2005): 44–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15505170.2005.10411542.

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Eagle, Gillian T. "Therapy at the Cultural Interface: Implications of African Cosmology for Traumatic Stress Intervention." Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy 35, no. 2 (July 2005): 199–209. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10879-005-2700-5.

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Lumwe, Samuel. "The Cosmology of Witchcraft in the African Context: Implications for Mission and Theology." Journal of Adventist Mission Studies 13, no. 1 (2017): 83–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.32597/jams/vol13/iss1/10/.

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Kufandirori, Joyline Takudzwa, and Tawanda Ray Bvirindi. "African Spirituality and the Gukurahundi Mass Grave Exhumations in Zimbabwe." African Conflict & Peacebuilding Review 13, no. 2 (September 2023): 86–101. http://dx.doi.org/10.2979/africonfpeacrevi.13.2.07.

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ABSTRACT: The mass killings in the southern part of Zimbabwe from 1983 to 1987, which are commonly known as the Gukurahundi massacres, raise a number of issues, including the need to exhume bodies of those killed in order to bury them in a proper way. This article contributes to the debates on exhumations of mass graves in an African context by examining the connection between avenging spirits and transitional justice through a detailed discussion of Bantu cosmology. The article argues that though the exhumation of the graves of those killed during the Gukurahundi massacres is resisted by those in power, exhumations are pertinent and in line with the Bantu traditions of properly re-burying the dead. Doing so fills a need to appease avenging spirits in order to achieve proper transitional justice and closure .

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Rapetti, Valentina. "La rinascita della tragedia dallo spirito del blues nel teatro di August Wilson." Le Simplegadi 18, no. 20 (November 2020): 147–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.17456/simple-163.

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Born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August Wilson was the most prolific and represented African American playwright of the twentieth century. His Century Cycle, a series of ten plays that chronicle the lives of African Americans from the early 1900s to the late 1990s, is an expression of Wilson’s spiritual realism, a form of drama that, while adhering to some conventions of the Western realist tradition, also introduces elements of innovation inspired by blues music and Yoruba cosmology. This essay analyses the double cultural genealogy of Wilson’s work to show how, despite respecting the Aristotelian principle of mìmesis, his playwriting draws on a quintessentially black aesthetic. In conceiving of theatre as a ritualistic performative context where music and words intertwine, Wilson restored what Friedrich Nietzsche regarded as the authentic spirit of Greek tragedy – the harmony between Dionysian and Apollonian – while at the same time injecting an African American ethos into the Western theatrical canon.

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Ingram, R. "Similarities in Pentecostal and traditional African culture: a positive potential in a context of urbanization and modernization." Verbum et Ecclesia 27, no. 1 (November 17, 2006): 339–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/ve.v27i1.141.

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This article reflects the findings of a study that was conducted by NOVA (a research organization for the alleviation of poverty) for CDE (the Centre of Development and Enterprise) in 2004 with regard to the potential contribution of Pentecostalism to the socio-economical well-being of people who are effected by the forces of modernization and urbanisation in South Africa. The case study was conducted among Pentecostal congregations in Witbank with special focus on congregations who serve people who have recently moved from the rural areas to Witbank. We made the interesting discovery that Pentecostal congregations do not serve as a new spiritual and social home for these new-comers by accident, but because their are underlying cultural similarities between Pentecostalism and Traditional African Culture. These similarities pertain to cosmology, social structure, personhood, morality and the value of esthetical experience. Because of these similarities Pentecostal communities create a context in which people who move from the rural areas to the city may feel at home and in which they are protected from the strange and confusing environment that is the city.

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Jedrej, M. C., and Anita Jacobson-Widding. "Body and Space: Symbolic Models of Unity and Division in African Cosmology and Experience." Man 27, no. 4 (December 1992): 909. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2804211.

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Jegede∗, Olugbemiro J., and Peter Akinsola Okebukola. "The relationship between African traditional cosmology and students’ acquisition of a science process skill." International Journal of Science Education 13, no. 1 (January 1991): 37–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950069910130104.

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Ohia, Dr Ben-Fred. "A Literary Analysis of Oral Tradition in Ogba Cosmology." Journal of Humanities,Music and Dance, no. 36 (September 23, 2023): 11–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.55529/jhmd.36.11.17.

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The whole world in Ogba cosmology exists for man’s sake and the universe is divided into two: the visible and invisible parts (the heaven or sky and the earth). The sky is the invisible as well as the underworld that is below the earth, while the earth is visible part. Ogba people believe in the link between earth and heaven which they reflect in their oral traditions. This paper analyses the oral tradition of the Ogba people; their origin, religion, belief system and their functions and relevance to human experience. And to achieve this, a brief analysis of Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s Devil on the Cross and Chinua Achebe’s Thing Fall Apart are used as oral traditional novels. The paper comprises the introduction, themes and languages of the oral tradition, the oral tradition of Ogba people, an overview of the oral tradition and finally conclusion. The paper discovers that oral tradition features prominently in the works of African writers; explaining in details the culture milieu as perceived in festivals, dances, funerals and songs. The paper focuses on the aesthetic values of the Ogba cosmology using ethnopoetics and historicism as a theoretical framework. The paper finds out that the oral tradition of Ogba people is a unifying force that brings the people together to live in peace, unity and love.

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Stanley, Brian. "The Missionary and the Rainmaker." Social Sciences and Missions 27, no. 2-3 (2014): 145–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18748945-02702003.

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The dialogue between the missionary and the rainmaker found in various forms in David Livingstone’s writings needs to be interpreted against the background of Livingstone’s relationship with the Bakwena during the late 1840s, a time of severe drought and one in which chief Sechele’s repudiation of his rainmaking functions after his baptism threatened the displeasure of the ancestors. Livingstone’s recording of the dialogue reveals his indebtedness to the moral philosophy of the Scottish thinker, Thomas Dick, but also suggests that Livingstone remained fascinated by the very African cosmology that his Christian faith and Scottish scientism led him to repudiate.

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Sebola, Moffat. "Alienation in Ntshavheni Alfred Milubi’s poetry." Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 60, no. 2 (May 22, 2023): 13–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/tl.v60i2.13893.

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In this article, I analyse the thematization of alienation in the poetry of the Muvenḓa poet, playwright, and scholar Ntshavheni Alfred Milubi. Milubi ascribes people’s abandonment of moral values to their perpetual frustrations, herein described as alienation. Reference is made to the crumbling African traditional institutions, which, in the past, seemingly functioned as havens for the rehabilitation of alienated individuals in African communities. These institutions are shown to be triggering alienation in the modernising and globalising space, seemingly with no room for recuperation unless one heeds the poet’s clarion calls. I restrict my analysis of Milubi’s poetry only to social and cosmic alienation, guided by a fixed set of themes, namely, from society, a romantic lover, and God, respectively. The article represents the idea that African-language literatures provide insights into how the indigenes have grappled with the interface between tradition and modernity. The three forms of alienation as treated by Milubi serve as a representative sample of how Tshivenḓa poetry in particular and African-language literatures in general often register subaltern voices and the ways in which they inscribe their experiences to explain their relationship with God or god(s), society, and intimate partners, among others. This trifocal relationship is essential to the Vhavenḓa and other African communities because it reveals their concept of cosmology, community, and intimacy.

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Okwuobi, Charles. "The long lost Ebionites. A relook at the Ibo region of West Africa." International Journal of Modern Anthropology 2, no. 20 (November 24, 2023): 1346–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ijma.v2i20.4.

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The Ebionites were a Jewish sect that knew Jesus intimately; had their own Nazarene Gospel; but held immovable beliefs that challenged key tenets of Christianity. They disappeared in the fourth century leaving a vacuum physically and ideologically. About a millennium later, the Portuguese reported of a people in West Africa with a Pope and Papacy similar in structure and veneration as the Roman Catholic Pope. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, missionaries and anthropologists scouring the region confirmed those reports, as well as the presence of other Levitical influences amongst the Igbos of Nigeria. This paper researches those similarities with a focus on the religious cosmology of the Ibo people of Asaba. It applies ethnographic qualitative research, then places the findings over the tenets of Catholicism with respect to their organizational structure; sacraments; rites; and steps to becoming sons of God. The results show that the ideologies of the Ibo and the Romans were deeply intertwined in every area of the study. The paper posits that the only way the religious ideologies of the Romans and the Ibos could have so closely mirrored each other, is if they were both in the same place at the same time. Thus, concludes that the Ibos [Eboe, Igbo] are the Ebionites. The paper offers hypotheses to explain the role of the ego in creating the core tenet of this unifying cosmology, and possibly how the convergence occurred. The paper could form the basis for renewed research in Hebraic-African studies; Black-American dispersion; Mary Magdalene; Jesus’ crown of thorns; the sequence of biblical gospel events; and even a template for future religion in this ego-driven civilization.

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Mowatt, Rasul A. "Understanding Ifá: inserting knowledge of an African cosmology in leisure studies and nature-based research." Leisure Studies 37, no. 5 (June 18, 2018): 515–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02614367.2018.1486451.

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Journal articles on the topic 'African Cosmology'

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