Region

West Africa

Also Known As West African

Africa

West Africa is the coastal and Sahelian region running from Senegal to Nigeria, the homeland of Vodun and the related traditions that a captive population later carried across the Atlantic, and the territory of the medieval Mali and Songhai empires, whose rulers adopted Islam and made Timbuktu a centre of Quranic scholarship. It is catalogued here as the source region, distinct from Region 19, West Africa and the Caribbean, which holds the diaspora traditions the Atlantic slave trade produced abroad.

Facts

Geography

Latitude

10 degrees north 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

3 degrees west 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

From Senegal and Mauritania east through Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo, Benin and Niger to Nigeria. 1

Traditions

Principal Religious Traditions

Vodun among the Fon and Ewe and orisha worship among the Yoruba, both of which crossed the Atlantic; the Akan, Igbo, Serer, Dogon and Mande traditions of the wider region; Islam, established in the Sahel from the medieval empires onward and carried by the Tijani and Qadiri orders; and Christianity, including the Aladura and other African-founded churches. 2

Sacred and Liturgical Languages

Arabic for Islam and for the Timbuktu manuscript tradition, with African languages also written in the Arabic script as Ajami; the ritual registers of Yoruba, Fon and their neighbours carry the older traditions, and the Ifa corpus is transmitted in Yoruba. 3

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Two Religious Systems on One Coastline

West Africa carries two large religious systems that have been in contact for a thousand years, and neither displaced the other.

The first is indigenous, and although its forms vary greatly between peoples it shares recognisable features across the region: a creator who is real but distant and rarely approached directly, a working population of deities and spirits associated with particular forces, places and lineages, ancestors who remain active members of their families, and specialists who diagnose misfortune and prescribe remedy. Divination is central rather than peripheral, and the Ifa system of the Yoruba, with its two hundred and fifty six figures each attached to a body of memorised verse, is the most elaborately documented example anywhere in Africa.

The second is Islam, which crossed the Sahara with trade from around the ninth century and was adopted first by rulers and merchants. The empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhai built on that: Mansa Musa's pilgrimage to Mecca in the fourteenth century made Mali famous in Cairo and beyond, and Timbuktu and Djenne became centres of teaching with substantial private manuscript libraries, many of which survive.

Christianity arrived later and mostly along the coast, with missions following European trade and expanding rapidly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The result is a region where the Sahel is largely Muslim, the coast largely Christian, and the older layer present in both.

Sources West African Traditional ReligionKofi Asare Opoku with Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African HistoryNehemia Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins (eds.)

The Coast the Traffic Left From

West Africa is also the source region for religions now practised across the Americas, and the mechanism was the Atlantic slave trade.

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries several million people were shipped from this coast, and the ports through which they passed, Ouidah, Elmina, Bonny, Badagry and others, are documented in European commercial records in unusual detail. Robin Law's history of Ouidah traces how one such town's institutions, including its religious ones, were reshaped by the traffic over more than a century and a half.

What travelled was not a portable church. It was a body of ritual knowledge, held mostly in the memory of individuals who arrived without their communities, their shrines or their lineages, and who then reassembled something workable out of what several different peoples had brought. The concentration of particular origins in particular destinations explains the resulting map: Yoruba practice is heaviest in Cuba and Brazil, Fon and Ewe practice from the Bight of Benin in Haiti, Kongo practice in Cuba, Brazil and the southern United States.

The relationship since has run both ways. Practitioners in the Americas have travelled to West Africa to be initiated, West African priests have travelled to teach in Havana and Salvador, and the tradition's international literature is written in Spanish, Portuguese and English as well as in Yoruba. The atlas holds West Africa as the source region and the diaspora forms in a region of their own.

West Africa

2 entries

Place of Origin

Denominations

Scriptures

Origin Era

Conception of the Divine

Status Today

Establishment Status

Closed Practice Status

Giving Obligation Enforceability

Usury Position

Marriage Position

Sexuality Position

Kind of Tradition

Christianity

West Africa

Islam

West Africa

Connections

Associated With

Atlantic Ocean

West Africa is the source coast from which the transatlantic trade carried people and their traditions.

Mali Empire

The Mali Empire ruled much of West Africa and adopted Islam under its rulers.

Vodun (West African)

Vodun is a West African religion; the diaspora forms it gave rise to are catalogued at Region 19.

Attested Here

Izon (Ijo)

The principal language of the Ijaw of the Niger Delta in southern Nigeria.

Source Ethnologue: Languages of the WorldDavid M. Eberhard, Gary F. Simons and Charles D. Fennig (eds.)

Maninka

Spoken across Guinea and western Mali, the heartland of the old Mali empire whose founder the Sundiata epic celebrates.

Source Ethnologue: Languages of the WorldDavid M. Eberhard, Gary F. Simons and Charles D. Fennig (eds.)

Contains

Yorubaland

Yorubaland lies in West Africa.