Religion in East Africa

The main Dinka prophets may well have influenced the prophetic water cults that arose in Uganda at the time of the Uganda Mutiny, marked by the drinking of divine water that would remove the Europeans and their weapons.Among the Lugbara, to the south, a water cult known as Yakan emerged about the turn of the century in response to human and cattle epidemics and to the intrusion of Arabs and Europeans, which seriously affected local life. "Spirit Possession, Islam, and European Power." State Responses to Minority Religions. In all traditional East African religions the factor of healing is, and has probably always been, a central one.

Nyikang, whose parentage is usually given as a father of heavenly provenance and a mother who was a creature of the River Nile with the attributes of the crocodile, is thus associated with sky, river, and earth; he separated the Shilluk from their neighbors and united his people as their first king. These rites, as with all rites of transition, begin with a rite in which the initiates are separated symbolically (and often physically) from their families and is followed by a series of rites that takes place in seclusion or secret from the remainder of society. The disturbance of a traditionally ordered society led the people to seek a famed prophet, Rembe, from the Kakwa people to the north. It has been the meeting place of several main language groupings, and its peoples are remarkably diverse in their cultures and forms of economic, political, and familial organizations.In the northern part of the region live peoples representing several main language families and groups: Semitic and Hamitic (Cushitic), mainly in Ethiopia and Somalia, and three subgroups of the Chari-Nile group of the Nilo-Saharan familyThe situation is different as regards economic, political, and familial types, and belief and practice are more obviously linked to them.

The population comprises some two hundred more or less distinct societies, each defined by its own language and sense of identity, its own traditional territory and political structure, and its own system of family relations, marriage, and religious belief and practice. Trade and wars have also often linked peoples together in varying ways and degrees. The women thus form a kind of mirror organization to that of the men. A belief in witchcraft regards the activities of witches as "the second spear," in the Zande phrase. Their most northerly relatives, the mainly Islamic Bilen, are sedentary and engage in agriculture, as nearly all Agaw do. But today initiation rites have lost much of their former importance and are performed somewhat perfunctorily in most of the region.In those societies where ancestral cults are important, mortuary rites are likewise important; an example comes from the Lugbara of Uganda, where mortuary rites, especially for senior men, are long, drawn out affairs that involve the participation of kin over great distances. View detailed information on Eastern Africa including data on religious adherents, religious freedoms, demographics, And other social measures. At the end of the nineteenth century the Nuer prophet Ngundeng, claiming inspiration from a Dinka sky divinity and spending much time fasting and living in the wilderness, was able to bring together large, normally autonomous groupings to raid neighboring peoples and to stand together against Arab slavers and, later, British colonial rule. These evildoers are traitors, coming symbolically from the outside of the community, and efforts are made to cleanse whole communities of them by mass purificatory religious movements led by prophets and healers, both Christian and non-Christian.East African societies have never been static, and at times in their history change has been rapid and radical. Thus where the basic local group is a kinship one, witches are held to be kin of their victims and sorcerers thought to harm unrelated persons. Priests are repositories of divine knowledge and power that are usually considered to be vested in a descent line, so that there are myths that explain how this line was originally selected by the Deity for this task.

ALTERNATE NAMES: Eibe, Ebwe, Ehwe, Efe, Eve, Eue, Gbe, Vhe, Krepe, Krepi, Popo Explanations of evil and responses to it are typically expressed in beliefs in witchcraft and sorcery, which are thus integral parts of any system of religion. Among the neighboring Dinka, Arianhdit was perhaps the greatest prophet, flourishing at the time of the First World War; he died in 1948. Britannica Book of the Year 2003.

All traditional African religions are united by a shared animistic core with special importance to ancestor worship. The first fully adequate study of witchcraftThese beliefs are found throughout the region, although each culture has its own peculiarities of idiom in which to express the ideology of evil; in all of them, however, the ideology of a witch is that he or she is in some way a reverse of a full and properly behaving member of a community.

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