Afro-American religion

Afro-American religions (also African diasporic religions) are a number of related religions that developed in the Americas among African slaves and their descendants in various countries of Latin America, the Caribbean, and parts of the southern United States. They derive from African traditional religions, especially of West and Central Africa, showing similarities to the Yoruba religion in particular.

Characteristics

These religions usually involve ancestor veneration and/or a pantheon of divine spirits, such as the loas of Haitian Vodou, or the orishas of Santería. Similar divine spirits are also found in the Central and West African traditions from which they derive — the orishas of Yoruba cultures, the nkisi of Bantu (Kongo) traditions, and the Vodun of Dahomey (Benin), Togo, southern Ghana, and Burkina Faso. In addition to mixing these various but related African traditions, many Afro-American religions incorporate elements of Christian, indigenous American, Kardecist, Spiritualist and even Islamic traditions. This mixing of traditions is known as religious syncretism.

List of traditions

* Does not refer to the religions' indigenous origins in continental Africa, but only to their development in the New World.

Other closely related regional faiths include Dominican Vudú in the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rican Vudu in Puerto Rico, Xangô de Recife^[3] and Xangô do Nordeste in Brazil, Tambor de Mina in Brazil and Candomblé Ketu in Bahia, Brazil.

New religious movements

Some syncretic new religious movements have elements of these African religions, but are predominantly rooted in other spiritual traditions. A first wave of such movements originated in the early twentieth century:

• Santo Daime (folk Catholicism and Spiritism, Brazil);
• Moorish Science Temple of America (Islam and Christianity, USA);
• Nation of Islam (Islam, USA)
• Rastafari movement (Abrahamic, Jamaica); and
• Espiritismo (mixture of Taino and Kongo beliefs, Puerto Rico)

A second wave of new movements originated in the 1960s to 1970s, in the context of the emergence of New Age and Neopaganism in the United States:

• União do Vegetal (Brazil, entheogenic, since 1961);
• Vale do Amanhecer (Brazil, Spiritism, since 1965);
• Ausar Auset Society (USA, Kemetism, Pan-Africanism, since 1973); and
• Black Buddhist Community in America (USA, Buddhism, since the 1960s).

See also

• African traditional religion
• Afro-Brazilian Religion

References

Further reading

• Charles Spencer King, Nature's Ancient Religion ISBN 978-1-4404-1733-7

External links

• Roots and Rooted