For an overview of contemporary movements, see Robert W. Hef-
ner’s (ed.) The Politics of Multiculturalism: Pluralism and Cit-
izenship in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia (Honolulu,
2001); Raymond L. M. Lee’s and Susan E. Ackerman’s Sa-
cred Tensions: Modernity and Religious Transformation in Ma-
laysia (Columbia, S.C., 1997); and Tony Day’s Fluid Iron:
State Formation in Southeast Asia (Honolulu, 2002).
JAMES L. PEACOCK (1987 AND 2005)
SOUTHERN AFRICAN RELIGIONS
This entry consists of the following articles:
AN OVERVIEW
SOUTHERN BANTU RELIGIONS
SOUTHERN AFRICAN RELIGIONS: AN
OVERVIEW
There is a basic similarity in religious practice, symbols, and
ideas throughout southern Africa, from Uganda to the south-
ern sea, from the east coast to Cameroon. This is the area
in which Bantu languages are spoken, and there is a link,
though no absolute coincidence, between language family
and religious symbolism. Some of the religious symbols of
Africa also occur in Europe: The divine king of the Ganda,
the Bemba, the Nyakyusa, and the Zulu appeared in the
Grove of Nemi in ancient Italy and in Stuart England; but
there are many other symbols of more limited provenance,
such as fire, symbol of lordship or authority, and blowing out
water, or “spitting,” a symbol of the confession of anger and
the act of forgiveness and goodwill.
Religious belief in southern Africa can best be under-
stood through its symbolism, for religion here is expressed
more through drama and poetry than through dogma or
theological speculation. The invisible is embodied in tangible
symbols which are bent to human purposes. Hence attention
must focus on the rituals celebrated.
Among any one people there are likely to be dominant
symbols which recur in one ritual after another, and full un-
derstanding of them depends upon analysis of the whole ritu-
al cycle. Examples of such symbols are the mudyi tree (with
a milky latex), which among the Ndembu represents
matriliny, motherhood, and womanhood, and the plantain
and sweet banana—the leaves, flowers, fruit, succoring
stem—which among the Nyakyusa represent male and fe-
male respectively. These symbols are as obvious to a Nyakyu-
sa as the skirt and trousers used to differentiate gender on
washroom signs are to a European or an American.
The present tense is used for observations made during
the twentieth century (with some references to earlier observ-
ers); but since rapid change is going on throughout Africa
and since traditional African practice exists side by side with,
and interacts with, modern Christian and Islamic practice,
this article should be read in conjunction with others in the
encyclopedia. What is described here is but a fragment of
current religious practice in southern Africa: The symbolic
systems and institutions discussed here indeed still exist
widely but are not the sole beliefs or practice of whole popu-
lations.
CONCEPTS OF GOD. Throughout southern Africa there is an
apprehension of God as a numinous being associated with
light, brightness, and sheen. God may be represented by a
high mountain glittering with snow, a tree symbolizing the
mountain, or a sacred grove. There is a lively belief in the
survival of the dead and in their power over the living, a
power closely akin to that which living senior kinsmen have
over their juniors. There is a belief in medicines—material
substances which can be manipulated for good or ill, healing
or murder, and which include poisons put in food as well
as ointments which are rubbed on the body to make a hunt-
er’s aim true, a warrior “slippery,” a candidate successful in
examinations, or a choir or rugby team victorious in compe-
tition. Everywhere the power of evil is feared—a power
thought to be incarnate in certain persons or familiars they
control, which is called witchcraft. The notion of witchcraft
involves the personification of anger, hate, jealousy, envy,
lust, and greed—the negative feelings which people observe
in themselves and in their neighbors. All these beliefs are gen-
eral, but they appear in infinite variety, modified by kinship
and political structure, by economy, and by poetic imagina-
tion, and they have changed through time.How clearly God is distinguished from the first human,
or from the founding heroes of a particular lineage, also var-
ies with place and time. Among some peoples, at least, the
distinction became clearer as outside contacts extended and
the known world was no longer confined within a frame of
kinship. Over many centuries Hebrew, Christian, and Islam-
ic ideas of God, with their symbolism of monotheism and
of God on high, have impinged on other ideas in Africa, no-
tably the association of the dead with the earth; in some
places a process of change may be traced over the past hun-
dred years.
Throughout southern Africa God has been remote, ap-
proached only by exceptional priests or by the “elders.” The
dead are regarded as alive, and it is the shades, or ancestors,
the senior dead kin, who are the mediators between humani-
ty and divinity, communicating human needs to the divine.
Prayer or direct offerings to God himself rarely occur in tra-
ditional practice, but awe of God is constantly manifested,
as fear of contamination, as a distancing of humanity from
God, and avoidance of such emblems of sacred power as the
thunderbolt, the tree struck by lightning, and the python in
the grove. One does not speak readily of God, and one speaks
of him not at all if he is near. Once, when this writer was
at school in London, a fellow student (later a head of state
in Africa) started in his seat when this writer was so rash as
to discuss lightning on a day when the Lord was muttering
overhead. Unusual fecundity, such as twin birth, is also of
God and fearful, hence twins and their parents are isolated
from the normal village community and, because of their di-
vine connection, they function as “herds” to drive off storms.SOUTHERN AFRICAN RELIGIONS: AN OVERVIEW 8655