Region

East Africa

Also Known As East African

Africa

East Africa is the region running from the Ethiopian highlands and the Horn of Africa south through the Rift Valley to the Swahili coast and the Great Lakes, and it carries the offshore island of Madagascar under the wider United Nations geoscheme grouping the atlas follows here. It holds Waaqeffanna, the sky-centred religion of the Oromo, the age-set religious life of the Maasai and related Nilotic pastoralist peoples, the ancient highland church of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, and a long Swahili coast history of Islam carried by Indian Ocean trade. It is filed apart from North Africa because its pastoralist and highland religious life ran on its own terms, distinct from the Nile civilisations to the north and the equatorial forest traditions to the west.

Facts

Geography

Latitude

1 degrees south 1

Approximate reference point, rounded to one decimal place; a large or historical region has no formal center, so this coordinate is conventional, not a precise boundary claim.

Longitude

36 degrees east 1

Approximate reference point, rounded to one decimal place; a large or historical region has no formal center, so this coordinate is conventional, not a precise boundary claim.

Modern Area

Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Madagascar, under the grouping the atlas follows here. 1

Traditions

Principal Religious Traditions

Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Christianity in the highlands; Islam along the Swahili coast and across the Horn; Waaqeffanna among the Oromo and the age-set religious life of the Maasai and other Nilotic peoples; and mission Christianity from the nineteenth century, widely held alongside older practice rather than in place of it. 2

Sacred and Liturgical Languages

Ge'ez for the Ethiopian churches, Arabic for Islam and for the Swahili manuscript tradition, and Swahili itself as the shared language of coastal religious life. 3

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Highlands, Rift and Coast

East Africa runs from the Ethiopian highlands south through the Rift Valley to the Great Lakes and the Swahili coast, and it holds several religious systems that developed on their own terms.

Waaqeffanna is the indigenous religion of the Oromo, the largest single people of Ethiopia, centred on Waaqa, a sky god understood as the source of a moral order called safuu, approached through ritual specialists and through the seasonal thanksgiving of Irreecha, at which people gather at water to give thanks with fresh grass and flowers. It is bound up with the gada system, an age-grade institution in which men pass through defined stages of eight years and in which political and ritual authority rotates rather than being held for life.

Among the Maasai and related Nilotic pastoralists the religious order is likewise organised through age sets, with initiation, warriorhood and elderhood as ritual stages, and with Enkai as a deity of two aspects, giving and withholding rain. Paul Spencer's study of one Maasai section documents how the ceremonies mediate the friction between generations rather than merely marking their passage.

Along the coast a distinct Swahili Muslim civilisation developed from the ninth century on Indian Ocean trade, with stone towns, Islamic learning in Arabic and Swahili, and a devotional life centred on the mosque, the mawlid and the veneration of teachers.

Sources Oromo Religion: Myths and Rites of the Western Oromo of Ethiopia, an Attempt to UnderstandLambert Bartels with The Maasai of Matapato: A Study of Rituals of RebellionPaul Spencer

The Highland Church, and the Century That Reshaped Everything

The Ethiopian highlands hold a Christianity that has been continuously established since the fourth century, with its own canon that includes books preserved nowhere else, its own liturgical language in Ge'ez, its own musical notation and chant tradition, a monastic system of great antiquity, and practices including a strict fasting calendar and the veneration of the tabot in every church.

Around and against it, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reshaped religious life across the whole region. Protestant and Catholic missions arrived with and sometimes ahead of colonial administrations, established schools and clinics, reduced dozens of languages to writing, and produced Christian populations that in several countries are now majorities. The East African Revival, beginning in Rwanda and Uganda in the 1930s, spread a lay movement of public confession and personal transformation across the Great Lakes and left a permanent mark on the region's Protestantism.

Independent and prophetic churches grew alongside. Islam expanded inland from the coast along trade routes and is now the majority religion in Somalia, Djibouti and Comoros and a very large minority in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Kenya.

The indigenous traditions did not vanish, and in several cases have been reasserted politically. Irreecha now draws crowds in the millions and has become a focus of Oromo identity, and the gada system was inscribed by UNESCO in 2016 as an indigenous democratic institution.

East Africa

2 entries

Place of Origin

Denominations

Scriptures

Origin Era

Conception of the Divine

Status Today

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Closed Practice Status

Giving Obligation Enforceability

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Marriage Position

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Kind of Tradition

Christianity

East Africa

Islam

East Africa

Connections

Associated With

Islam

East Africa carries a long Swahili coast history of Islam carried by Indian Ocean trade.

Attested Here

Zar

Source Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession, 3rd editionI. M. Lewis