East Africa

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 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.