I know they is already one topic dealing with the African Religions
but I just wanted to paste this article which gives a point of view
sympathetic to the African Religions especially juxtaposed with Christianity
and Isla-m. . .


Faiths that preach tolerance


Religion has always been a source of conflict and, as Christianity and Islam face a fresh crisis, Wole Soyinka suggests a new hope for peace - the 'secular deity'

Saturday May 4, 2002
The Guardian

Were anyone sufficiently reckless as to make me secretary-general of the United Nations, I would have ensured that the year 2000 or 2001 was declared the Year of the Secular Deities. A blasphemous oxymoron? Not in the least. Let me simply state that I do not exaggerate when I say that the world has great need of the promotion of the secular gods. Those of us who hold on to a belief in the unity, indeed the indivisibility, of the human community - no matter how buffeted such a concept has been during the last century, especially by the anti-human excesses of ideology, religion and doctrines of separatism - must consider ourselves fortunate if we happen to be heirs to systems of beliefs that have survived those overweening themes that appear to contest the world among themselves.

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We can treat them all within a framework of binaries: communism and capitalism, Buddhism and Hinduism, Judaism and Christianity, Christianity and Islam, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, the Crusade and the Jihad, fascism and democracy, the Judeo-Christian/Euramerican world and the Arab-Islamic, etc, etc, plus their extended families, aggressive offshoots and client relations. All these, to varying degrees, and despite their demonstrable and glaring errors of doctrine and conduct, continue to arrogate to themselves the monopoly of truth, perfection and/or dominance.

This mentality of binary organisation makes it easy to simplify the Other, to demonise it and focus on it as the sole obstacle to one's own survival. On the other hand, they do tacitly - and tactically - acknowledge it as equal contender for the stakes of hegemonic dominance. Tough luck on the other inhabitants of the real world - which happens to be a pluralistic one! They simply disappear through aversion of the eyes by the Super-Duo, conserving their energy for the final onslaught between the two monoliths.

As the African proverb goes, however, when two elephants fight, it is the grass beneath their feet that suffers. In fact, the grass simply vanishes! I believe that it is time to draw attention to the Invisible Faiths, especially those instructive faiths of the "secular" - that is, humanistic - temper, and to highlight the many subtle tactics that are utilised to render them invisible.

Against them has been ranged the devastating armoury of the "binary" conspiracy. Traverse human history at any moment from antiquity to the present; with negligible exceptions, you will encounter this pattern of collaboration between the most powerful contending systems. They say, in effect: let us join hands to take care of these minnows so that we can roam the ocean at will, not bothered by minor irritants - you take the west, we take the east. It is small consolation that, despite this hegemonic pattern and its historic rampages of destructiveness, a number of little-known systems of beliefs - in Asia, Africa, the Americas and Australasia - have survived and continue to thrive.

Our destination is one such world, that of the Yoruba. Nigeria, home to the Yoruba, offers us a contemporary model of the effect of binary conditioning, since it was within that nation, secular in its governance from the colonial period, that a state recently declared itself Moslem. The immediate effect has been to create an arena between two assertive faiths, thus sucking the anterior faiths - orisa, ancestor or nature worship, etc - deeper into invisibility.

Predictably, the arguments have gone back and forth: "The legal system being practised is based on Christian law, hence we must oppose it with ours," claims the Council of Imams and its surrogates. The other, the Christian Association of Nigeria, replies in kind, determined to defend its own established turf on similar grounds, both aided and abetted by the international media, which cannot refer to Nigeria except in such terms as the Moslem north and the Christian south. The neglected truth, however, is that this state, Zamfara, like many other parts of Nigeria, also consists of other religious faiths, those pre-Christian and pre-Islamic faiths that are so wishfully dismissed as vestigial and inconsequential paganism. The Jukums, the Tivs, the Bornos of northern Nigeria continue to follow (sometimes side by side with Islam or Christianity) the religions of their ancestors. So the moment a state opts to become a theocracy, no one bothers to ask: what are the pronouncements of existing traditional religions? What is the teaching of such religions on the imposition of a theocratic mandate on community, society or state? The answer is clear: abomination!

To address the world of the Yoruba, let us begin within human consciousness. That world repudiates the hegemonic tendency, as is demonstrable in its most fundamental aspect: the induction of a new living entity into the world and its dedication to the spiritual custody of unseen forces. A child is born. Quite early in its life, when the parents discern traces of personality, later to become known as character (iwa), this newcomer is taken to the babalawo , the priest of divination, who adds his tutored observations to the signs that have already been noted. The babalawo observes that it is a child of Osun, or of Sango, or of Obatala. It does not matter that neither parent is a follower of any such deity, or that no one in the entire household, or in the history of the family has ever been an initiate of this god. The child, it is accepted, brings his or her own ori , destiny, into the world. It is futile to attempt to change it or to impose a different one on him.

Yet even this allotment of the child's spiritual aura is not definitive, nor is it exclusive. Some other incidents in its life passage - a series of setbacks, a display of talent, creative or leadership precocity, or indeed some further revelation of earlier hidden traits such as a tendency towards clairvoyance, or simply the child's habit of enigmatic utterances - may lead the babalawo to conclude that a different guardian deity is indicated, or an additional one. Thus, a new deity is admitted into the household. There is no friction, no hostility. All gods, the Yoruba understand, are manifestations of universal phenomena of which humanity is also a part.

Ifa, the Yoruba's corpus of prognostic verses that interpret the future and prescribe options and directions for the seeker, is replete with odu (signs): those verses that are at once morality tales and historic vignettes filled with curative prescriptions. They narrate at the same time the experiences of both mortals and immortals for whom Ifa divined, advised, and who either chose to obey or ignore Ifa. The sceptics are neither penalised nor hounded by any supernatural forces. The narratives indicate that they simply go their way.

The deities have themselves been the subject of a large body of traditional drama, in the manner of, but owing nothing to, Greek classic drama: Oba Koso, Oba Waja, by Duro Ladipo, The Imprisonment of Obatala, by Obotunde Ijimere, Esu Elegbara, by Wale Ogunyemi, and numerous epic narratives and adventure tales. My own long poem Ogun Abibiman merely follows an ancient tradition, albeit one turned to a contemporary political use.

Ifa, like the orisa, does not proselytise. Ifa does not anathematise non-believers; on the contrary, there are verses in Ifa that warn against disrespect of other religions. Of course, Ifa is not without its own tendency towards a little self-promotion, and so we find that Ifa is also filled with narratives of the headstrong and cynics who disobey the injunctions of Ifa and thus fall deeper and deeper into misfortunes, until they return to the original path mapped out by Orunmila, the divination god of Ifa.

There is a crucial difference, however, in this process of cause and effect that differs from what I call the jealous religions. It is never Orunmila, or any agent of his, who is responsible for their misfortunes. No, it is their ori, destiny, the portion that they brought with them into the world, the very definition of their being, that Ifa merely diagnosed before leaving them to their own devices, to their own choices. The gods remain totally indifferent to who does or does not follow them or acknowledge their place in mortal decisions.

The Yoruba understanding of the nature of truth is echoed by the Vedic texts from yet another ancient world, the Indian, which declares: "Wise is he who recognises that Truth is One and one only, but wiser still the one who accepts that Truth is called by many names, and approached from myriad routes." The accommodative spirit of the Yoruba gods remains the eternal bequest to a world that is riven by the spirit of intolerance, xenophobia and suspicion.

The dominant religions of the world and their theologies as received up to the present day, have meant not the search for, or the love of, but the veneration and consolidation - at whatever cost, including torture and massacres - of propositions of truth, declared revelation. It has meant the manipulation of truth, the elevation of mere texts to dogma and absolutes, be those texts named scriptures or catechisms. This failure to see transmitted texts, with their all too human adumbrations, as no more than signposts, as parables that may lead the mind towards a deeper quarrying into the human condition, its contradictions and bouts of illumination, a re-examination of the phenomena of nature, of human history and human strivings, of the building of community - it is this failure that has led to the substitution of dogma for a living, dynamic spirituality. And this is where the Yoruba deities have an urgent and profound message to transmit to the rest of the world.

There is an urgency about this, as the world is increasingly being taken over by the most virulent manifestations of dogmatic allegiances. In the 12 months since the introduction of the theocratic state in Nigeria, at least 15,000 lives have been lost, often in the most ghoulish manner. But the orisa continue to insist: leave the gods to fight their own wars. This brief voyage into the world of the orisa, hopefully, may challenge a few ears and eyes into embarking on a serious, sobering critique of their world.

Before Islam or Christianity, before its enslavement at the hands of Arabs and Europeans, the African world evolved its own spiritual accommodation with the unknown, evolved its own socio-economic systems, its cohering systems of social relationships, and reproduced its own material existence within an integrated world-view. Those systems have affected both liturgy and the practice of alien religions, even to the extent of rendering them in some instances docile and domesticated. Thus, whenever the aggressive face of world religions is manifested, our recourse is primarily to the unextinguished virtues of our antecedent faiths, the loftiest of which will be found in such attitudes as tolerance. I refer, of course, to genuine tolerance, one that is demonstrable by the very histories of the deities - their travails, errors and acts of reparation, as recorded in their mythologies - and their adaptability to the dynamic changes of the world.

Orisa is the voice, the very embodiment of tolerance. And the tenets of Ifa are governed by a frank acknowledgement that the definition of truth is a goal constantly sought by humanity, that existence itself is a passage to ultimate truth, and that claimants to possession of the definitiveness of knowledge are, in fact, the greatest obstacles to its attainment. Acceptance of the elastic nature of knowledge remains Ifa's abiding virtue.