African Traditions

33 entries

Practice · African Traditions○

The Healing Dance of the Juǀʼhoansi

A Kalahari healing dance using an induced trance state, often cited as one of the world's oldest continuously practised religious traditions.

What it isIt is frequently called 'the world's oldest religion' on the strength of ancient regional rock art, but the actual documented anthropological record of the practice itself only begins with twentieth-century fieldwork. It remains, regardless, one of the longest continuously and carefully documented ecstatic healing traditions studied anywhere, and a standard example of non-hierarchical communal healing.

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Being · African Traditions · 1852

Ògún

Old Metal, New Machines

The òrìṣà of iron: work made holy, and the same metal is the blade. Still taking new trades.

Who they wereHe cleared the path for the other òrìṣà with his blade, and the tradition keeps both halves of that: the same iron makes the road and the wound. He takes in new trades as they appear — drivers, surgeons, mechanics — because his domain is what metal does, not which metal it was.

The FindingCrowther's 1852 vocabulary glosses Ògún as the god of "iron, implements of war, and hunting", and Sandra Barnes's argument is that a god held to a material rather than a domain never acquires a closed list of trades: the smith and the hunter, then the lorry driver and the mechanic — and an iron oath for which Nigeria's Oaths Act of 1963 still leaves room.

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Object · African Traditions · 1659

Opón Ifá

The Page, Not the Oracle

The carved wooden tray on which a Yoruba babaláwo marks the odù of Ifá in dust, then wipes them away.

What it meansÈṣù's face is carved at the top edge, facing the diviner, because the messenger must be present for the reading to reach anywhere. The marks are made in wood dust and wiped away after: the tray is a page that is never kept, only used.

The FindingThe tray form's only hard date is Weickmann's Ulm inventory of 1659, on an object two traditions still claim — Yoruba Ifá and the Fá of the Bight of Benin — and nothing read on it survives, because the odù are marked in dust and wiped.

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