WHY STUDY AFRICAN TRADITIONAL RELIGION?

Abstract

African traditional religion has variously been criticised as quaint or obsolete religion which belongs to the people of yore. Some school of thought prefer to view it as a setting back of the clock of religious education, saying it is about time the old religion is dumped into the garbage can where it belongs. Some critics believe that thinking about traditional religion at all is plunging our generation into Stone Age. Some still hold that gazetting African traditional religion as a subject of study in schools is more deadly than poison, since it is a calculated attempt to drag people into mortal sin. Some still think that since Islam and Christianity have come with sweeping force of conversion and as a matter of fact doing very well momentarily; struggling to study ATR is simply becoming a nuisance and forcing a lot of converts back to what they have abandoned. However, in as much as the above vaunted opinions are not really bad, it is good to note that all the advocates of the abolition of African traditional religion are up against their root and the history of their religion. This will only mean spiting the forbears of our religion and indeed God who created them and ordered that we should emerge from them—the author of our religion. This is why this work decides to probe into the Africa’s religious past so as to reread it into the religious life of the present generation through traditional process. This will enable us to discover the vital clarion evocation of “God of Our Fathers” from both the OT and NT as traditional outcry linking the past and the present human generations. Here then, we’ll appreciate African traditional religion as a necessary linkage between the ancestors and their progenies. We’ll then come to the conclusion that African traditional religion is an indispensable value every African child must study with the intensity it deserves.