Abrahamic Religions and Africa (opinion)

It is amazing how Africa has abandoned its traditional religions to fully embrace the religions of its former oppressors. 

Our history does not remind Africa repeatedly that Arabia enslaved and colonized the people of Africa for centuries, allowing for huge swaths of north Africa to fully embrace the teachings and lifestyle practices of these oppressors while abandoning their native religions and codes. 

Not to be outdone, other parts of Africa endured the more celebrated transatlantic slave trade for many centuries only to eventually abandon its traditional religions (animists and idols, as illicit as our gin) and embrace Christianity with all its incongruities. 

These abrahamic religions cause Africans to read holy books out of variance with african culture and perform pilgrimages to foreign lands where Africans are traditionally treated as 2nd class both in deed and by the root theology of these religions instead of visiting our shrines and revering our symbols like the golden stool of the Asante's revered like the Jews biblical lost "arc of the covenant" and consulting our prophets, soothsayers and herbalists derogatorily referred to as juju men to name a few.

These inconsistencies in religious practices rear themselves at the most base times when you wonder why we have parallel church and traditional weddings, and when trying to comply with Christian rites and natives laws and ordinances during burials to name a few in Christian dominated enclaves in Africa. etc. (don't forget the abubaku and the ooni burial saga) 

These inconsistencies of alien practices also show up through the rise and incessant incidences of suicide bombings, a practice almost unheard of and traditionally abhorred in black Africa as a crime against Mother Earth and by the Kanuri people and other tribes of northern Nigerian tribes who dominate the ranks of boko harem. 

It is safe to say those practices of suicide bombings are Arabic in origin and mostly practiced by the Japanese and imperceptibly imported into Nigeria over the years as the part of the ethos of Arabs passed on to Nigeria through Islam. 

A study of religions suggests that an oppressor forces his religions on a conquered people and vassal states as in the case of the Ottoman Empire which dominated the world at one time spreading Islam after the fall of the Roman Empire only to be subsumed and seemingly dominated by the European based powers presently pushing through their version of Christianity on conquered territories. 

It has also been the curse of Africa that its history was passed on orally and not scripturally. Can Africans imagine if the verses of the griots that allowed Alex Haley trace his roots to a village in Africa from his well documented "Roots" book were written down and codified over the centuries, it would have rivaled many books of the bible in popularity. 

It has cost Africa greatly with its veneration of its ancestors that the great acts and sayings of its sages were not documented and monuments similar to the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials built for them with their famous edicts which governed Africa before the incursion of Europeans engraved in stone for all to see. 

Perhaps these things were achieved looking at the pyramids of egypt and if you subscribe to the belief that Egypt and its pharoahs were once black, you might understand that great histories and traditions can be washed away and lost with time so perhaps black Africa should not be too harsh on itself for this stitch in time that has seen its traditional institutions and practices dominated by foreign and alien religious practices.

But It is time for the African Union and its member countries to prioritize the re-education of Africans with a focus on history as a matter of necessity to understand our history and get unglued from abrahamic and western influenced religion that have caused so much misery, misdirection and hardship for the continent. 

By Michael Amakor