Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba
Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba

Author: John David Yeadon Peel

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2003-02-21

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 9780253215888

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"Peel is by training an anthropologist, but one possessed of an acute historical sensibility. Indeed, this magnificent book achieves a degree of analytical verve rare in either discipline." —History Today "[T]his is scholarship of the highest quality. . . . Peel lifts the Yoruba past to a dimension of comparative seriousness that no one else has managed. . . . The book teems with ideas . . . about big and compelling matters of very wide interest." —T. C. McCaskie In this magisterial book, J. D. Y. Peel contends that it is through their encounter with Christian missions in the mid-19th century that the Yoruba came to know themselves as a distinctive people. Peel's detailed study of the encounter is based on the rich archives of the Anglican Church Missionary Society, which contain the journals written by the African agents of mission, who, as the first generation of literate Yoruba, played a key role in shaping modern Yoruba consciousness. This distinguished book pays special attention to the experiences of ordinary men and women and shows how the process of Christian conversion transformed Christianity into something more deeply Yoruba.

Singing Yoruba Christianity
Singing Yoruba Christianity

Author: Vicki L. Brennan

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2018-01-23

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 0253032083

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Singing the same song is a central part of the worship practice for members for the Cherubim and Seraphim Christian Church in Lagos, Nigeria. Vicki L. Brennan reveals that by singing together, church members create one spiritual mind and become unified around a shared set of values. She follows parishioners as they attend choir rehearsals, use musical media—hymn books and cassette tapes—and perform the music and rituals that connect them through religious experience. Brennan asserts that church members believe that singing together makes them part of a larger imagined social collective, one that allows them to achieve health, joy, happiness, wealth, and success in an ethical way. Brennan discovers how this particular Yoruba church articulates and embodies the moral attitudes necessary to be a good Christian in Nigeria today.

Divining the Self
Divining the Self

Author: Velma E. Love

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2015-06-29

Total Pages: 159

ISBN-13: 0271061456

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Divining the Self weaves elements of personal narrative, myth, history, and interpretive analysis into a vibrant tapestry that reflects the textured, embodied, and performative nature of scripture and scripturalizing practices. Velma Love examines the Odu—the Yoruba sacred scriptures—along with the accompanying mythology, philosophy, and ritual technologies engaged by African Americans. Drawing from the personal narratives of African American Ifa practitioners along with additional ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Oyotunji African Village, South Carolina, and New York City, Love’s work explores the ways in which an ancient worldview survives in modern times. Divining the Self also takes up the challenge of determining what it means for the scholar of religion to study scripture as both text and performance. This work provides an excellent case study of the sociocultural phenomenon of scripturalizing practices.

Religion and the Making of Nigeria
Religion and the Making of Nigeria

Author: Olufemi Vaughan

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2016-11-10

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 0822373874

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In Religion and the Making of Nigeria, Olufemi Vaughan examines how Christian, Muslim, and indigenous religious structures have provided the essential social and ideological frameworks for the construction of contemporary Nigeria. Using a wealth of archival sources and extensive Africanist scholarship, Vaughan traces Nigeria’s social, religious, and political history from the early nineteenth century to the present. During the nineteenth century, the historic Sokoto Jihad in today’s northern Nigeria and the Christian missionary movement in what is now southwestern Nigeria provided the frameworks for ethno-religious divisions in colonial society. Following Nigeria’s independence from Britain in 1960, Christian-Muslim tensions became manifest in regional and religious conflicts over the expansion of sharia, in fierce competition among political elites for state power, and in the rise of Boko Haram. These tensions are not simply conflicts over religious beliefs, ethnicity, and regionalism; they represent structural imbalances founded on the religious divisions forged under colonial rule.

Crossing Religious Boundaries
Crossing Religious Boundaries

Author: Marloes Janson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-06-10

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 110883891X

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A rich ethnography of lived religious experiences in Lagos, offering a unique look at religious pluralism in Nigeria's biggest city.

City of 201 Gods
City of 201 Gods

Author: Jacob Olupona

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2011-12-13

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 0520265564

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The author focuses on one of the most important religious centers in Africa: the Yoruba city of Ile-Ife in southwest Nigeria. The spread of Yoruba traditions in the African diaspora has come to define the cultural identity of millions of black and white people in Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, and the United States. He describes how the city went from great prominence to near obliteration and then rose again as a contemporary city of gods. Throughout, he corroborates the indispensable linkages between religion, cosmology, migration, and kinship as espoused in the power of royal lineages, hegemonic state structure, gender, and the Yoruba sense of place.

Christianity in Central Tanzania
Christianity in Central Tanzania

Author: Mwita Akiri

Publisher: Langham Publishing

Published: 2020-02-14

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 1783688025

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In the telling of the history of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in Tanzania, the initiatives, contributions, and experiences of indigenous teachers have too often been neglected in favour of stories of sacrifices of Western missionaries. Bishop Mwita Akiri redresses this bias by using a socio-historical approach, written from an Afro-centric tradition, to evaluate the contributions and experiences of indigenous agents in the growth of Christianity in Tanzania. This book underscores the significance of oral tradition in African historiography and challenges the claim that foreign missionaries succeeded in destroying African cultures, when they are in fact alive and well. This much-needed research also provides a model for dialogue between the perspective of Christian missions and that of African religious and social heritage in order to continue forward with a Christianity that is authentic and also distinctly African.

African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade: Volume 1, The Sources
African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade: Volume 1, The Sources

Author: Alice Bellagamba

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-05-13

Total Pages: 587

ISBN-13: 110732808X

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Though the history of slavery is a central topic for African, Atlantic world and world history, most of the sources presenting research in this area are European in origin. To cast light on African perspectives, and on the point of view of enslaved men and women, this group of top Africanist scholars has examined both conventional historical sources (such as European travel accounts, colonial documents, court cases, and missionary records) and less-explored sources of information (such as folklore, oral traditions, songs and proverbs, life histories collected by missionaries and colonial officials, correspondence in Arabic, and consular and admiralty interviews with runaway slaves). Each source has a short introduction highlighting its significance and orienting the reader. This first of two volumes provides students and scholars with a trove of African sources for studying African slavery and the slave trade.

Christianity, Islam, and Orisa-Religion
Christianity, Islam, and Orisa-Religion

Author: J.D.Y. Peel

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 0520285859

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A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s open access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. The Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria are exceptional for the copresence among them of three religious traditions: Islam, Christianity, and the indigenous orisa religion. In this comparative study, at once historical and anthropological, Peel explores the intertwined character of the three religions and the dense imbrication of religion in all aspects of Yoruba history up to the present. For over 400 years, the Yoruba have straddled two geocultural spheres: one reaching north over the Sahara to the world of Islam, the other linking them to the Euro-American world via the Atlantic. These two external spheres were the source of contrasting cultural influences, notably those emanating from the world religions. However, the Yoruba not only imported Islam and Christianity but also exported their own orisa religion to the New World. Before the voluntary modern diaspora that has brought many Yoruba to Europe and the Americas, tens of thousands were sold as slaves in the New World, bringing with them the worship of the orisa. Peel offers deep insight into important contemporary themes such as religious conversion, new religious movements, relations between world religions, the conditions of religious violence, the transnational flows of contemporary religion, and the interplay between tradition and the demands of an ever-changing present. In the process, he makes a major theoretical contribution to the anthropology of world religions.