Skinny but imperishable truth: African religious heritage and the regeneration of Africa

Abstract

The increasing popularity of the guest religions of Christianity and Islam on the continent of Africa seems to have created the erroneous but widespread impression that the religious insights, values and institutions of our African forbears have been superseded by “world religions”, whose spiritual strengths have triumphed over the inherent weaknesses and woeful spiritual inadequacies of the host religious heritage. This has led to the assumption of “voicelessness in religion, ethics and theology” with respect to the African heritage. But there is no such thing as “voicelessness”; every person, every tradition has a voice, only people who claim power or authority , and traditions that lay claim to universality or world domination, choose not to hear other voices but their own and devalue other traditions by calling them “voiceless”, because they either do not see any value in them or that they consider their own traditions to be absolute. This tendency to put others down in order to make one’s position or viewpoint absolute is wisely countered by African wisdom in the Swahili proverb: “It is not necessary to blow out the other person’s lantern to let yours shine”. Using an African voice to restate a perspective that has become “skinny” as a result of centuries of denigration and distortion, the paper argues that the regeneration of Africa cannot be fully achieved, and meaningful recovery and growth in the new millennium cannot be complete, without the input of the African heritage; and fruitful dialogue with other religious traditions can take place only when it is recognized that the African religious heritage is part of the entire unified landscape and that in religion, ethics and theology there is a valid African perspective.