The place of African belief and germ theory on the causes of human diseases

This study looks into the African belief about the mystical causes of diseases and the tenets of Western germ theory. Despite widespread Western medical practices, African people still strongly believe in the mystical causes of diseases. This reveals that as far as the African traditional belief is concerned, Western germ theory cannot satisfy the African belief in the causes of diseases. This is as a result of some of the diseases defying Western healing. The study adopts a qualitative phenomenological research design and descriptive method for data analysis. Personal interview forms a primary source of data collection while the secondary source includes library resources. The study observes that some mystical agents in African cosmology, such as witches and sorcerers, ogbanje, and breaking of taboos are responsible for untimely deaths, infliction of diseases to humankind and other related ailments which are believed to be traditional in nature.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The study recommends that hospitals and healthcare centres, within and outside Africa, should take into consideration the mystical agents as well as the pathogenic agents for good and efficient healing.

Interrogating Issues of Sexuality in Africa: An African Christian Response

The issues of sexuality have been very contentious in Africa more so after the legalization of same-sex marriages by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2015 under the President Obama reign. Africans have resented the way sexuality is understood and practiced in the west and has termed it un-African. Some scholars and indeed African leaders have argued that the attitude towards sexuality is a modern practice which is being introduced and even forced to Africa by modernity and influenced greatly by the western worldview. In a modern setting, different sexual orientation has been accepted as a lifestyle and has been institutionalized. Although African does not refute the fact that there were and indeed still are people with different sexual orientation, they do not find it right to institutionalize it since according to African culture, this is an abnormality that needs to be corrected, sympathized with and tolerated. To that end, African peoples assisted those with a different sexual orientation to live normal lives as much as possible. At the same time, the community was kind and tolerant and never banished or mistreated them based on their sexual orientation. This paper will attempt to show the attitude taken by the African people, the process of assisting those with different sexual orientation and how they were incorporated into the society. The paper will draw valuable lessons to be learned by modernity and which will correspond to African Christianity in accordance with the teaching of Jesus Christ

Crossing Merfolk Narratives of the Sacred: Nalo Hopkinson’s The New Moon’s Arms and Gabrielle Tesfaye’s The Water Will Carry Us Home

This article defines what I call the ‘crossing merfolk’ narrative, the idea that African people who jumped or were cast overboard during the Middle Passage became water-dwelling beings. While critical attention has been increasing for 1990s’ electronic music duo Drexciya, whose sonic fiction contains the most well-known example of this narrative, this is actually a recurring tradition in Black oral and artistic culture that can be traced to West and Central African religions. I focus particularly on what I call ‘crossing merfolk narratives of the sacred’, M. Jacqui Alexander’s term for African diasporic religious traditions anchored in West and Central African cosmologies. Analysing the role of the sacred in two crossing merfolk narratives, Nalo Hopkinson’s 2007 novel The New Moon’s Arms and Gabrielle Tesfaye’s short film The Water Will Carry Us Home (2018), I argue that these texts expand the Black Atlantic imaginary and transform mermaid lore. I develop the term ‘diasporic collage’ to describe the ways in which Hopkinson and Tesfaye reference and combine water spirits and ritual practices from multiple African diasporic traditions into narratives that intersect mermaids and the Middle Passage.

Christological Contextualization as a Parameter to Strengthen Theology Formulation and Enhance Christian Evangelization in Africa

The quest for a contextual African Christianity is one that theological scholarship in Africa should be keen to formulate and construct if the Christian message is to gain the much-needed impact and transformational agenda that will facilitate the process of evangelization of the continent. This is because our theological discourse must be incarnational in theology and methodology. Our study endeavours to submit a contribution in this solemn expedition through an emphasis on the necessity of a contextualized Christology that is cognizant of the African realities and heritage to make the message of Christ be at home to the indigenous African audience. This calls for a paramount understanding of the history of the African people, the African primal religions and most importantly the African culture. The Understanding of these critical issues that together construct the identity of the African will enable the presenter of the Christological message to present the person of Christ that is relevant and addresses the perennial problems that are faced by African communities. This will in the long run make the African to be persuaded to the need to establish a relationship with Christ who is to him a friend or family, Mediator or Ancestor per excellence, Life giver or Healer, and Leader per excellence. These are the realities that Africans would be quick to identify and associate with. To accomplish this, the study observed the significance of the doctrine of Christology in the theological framework; it explored the means with which Christology was administered in Africa in the past. We were able to tackle the subject of Christological Contextualization by observing matters sources and methodology of African Christology and building on the same towards the models that are favourable to Christology in Africa

Indirect Subjects

In Indirect Subjects, Matthew H. Brown analyzes the content of the prolific Nigerian film industry's mostly direct-to-video movies alongside local practices of production and circulation to show how screen media play spatial roles in global power relations. Scrutinizing the deep structural and aesthetic relationship between Nollywood, as the industry is known, and Nigerian state television, Brown tracks how several Nollywood films, in ways similar to both state television programs and colonial cinema productions, invite local spectators to experience liberal capitalism not only as a form of exploitation but as a set of expectations about the future. This mode of address, which Brown refers to as “periliberalism,” sustains global power imbalances by locating viewers within liberalism but distancing them from its processes and benefits. Locating the wellspring of this hypocrisy in the British Empire's practice of indirect rule, Brown contends that culture industries like Nollywood can sustain capitalism by isolating ordinary African people, whose labor and consumption fuel it, from its exclusive privileges.

Mother Earth, Mother Africa and African Women’s Role in Indigenous Religions

This paper explores the nexus between African indigenous religio-culture and ecology, gender, rituals and the environment, in current ritual debates. Current debates demonstrate that ritual has filtered into the public space thereby being resilient and at the same time vulnerable to exploitation by the public sphere. Examining the current debates on rites of passage, this article reviews four chapters from the book Mother Earth, Mother Africa and African Indigenous Religions. African indigenous rituals are spaces that produce knowledge for African ways of living. However, in search of progress, development and better life, most African people have been neglecting rites as they seem unprogressive. In ritual spaces, the novices were instructed about how to engage with nature and how to live with others within communities. Ritual spaces gave women and men (initiates) agency over a vast number of life issues. Drawing on African feminist cultural hermeneutics, I examine ritual functions as a tool to understand how contemporary African people’s search for justice can be gleaned within such African rituals in order to uplift women’s agency.

Misnaming Africa: Dehumanising Images of Africa in Twelve Years a Slave and The Good Lie

Since the advent of slavery and colonial rule, Africa has been portrayed as a dark continent, hence slavery and colonialism were said to be on a civilising mission. Colonial administrators were responsible for disseminating ideas that dehumanise Africa. Since the acquiring of freedom of Africans, including those in the diaspora, the media have been used to maintain dichotomies that existed prior to the liberation of Africa. Against this background, the total emancipation of the mind and spirit of Black people on the continent and in the diaspora becomes urgent and inevitable. Deploying Afrocentricity, this paper explores the portrayal of Black people in the movies, Twelve Years a Slave (2003) and The Good Lie (2014). It revolves around interrogating the various images of Black people in the two selected movies. The implications and agenda of such images are discussed. The paper establishes that the way in which Africans are portrayed in the movies is dehumanising. The images border on stultifying representations that seek to subjugate and subvert African humanity and agency. The representation of Africans in the movies is informed by the ideology of Eurocentrism, which maps Europeans as the superior race and Africans and other oppressed peoples of the world as a peripheral race. The movies aim to disempower and induce a sense of self-hatred in people of African descent. The paper concludes that movies can be agents of the miseducation of African people and may inadvertently valorise European people.

phenomenon of divorce and its challenge to the black African communities: A need for pastoral and indigenous African marital therapy

Divorce is a painful and traumatic experience that disrupt the lives of people. Research has shown that the phenomenon of divorce among black South Africans is escalating on a yearly basis. This is accompanied by both emotional, spiritual and psychological effects which impact on the well-being of people. Furthermore, divorce is understood as a disruption of normal life and it also threatens the stability and sustainability of social institutions. As the article is written from a context of pastoral care and counselling, it acknowledges the existence of other forms of care beyond the boundaries of the Christian ministry of healing. The indigenous African martial therapy plays a vital role in black African communities in strengthening marital bonds and its longevity. Even though this African model has been disrupted by the wave of industrialisation and urbanisation, the article argues that its methods of healing, counselling and mediatory role are necessary for African people and in response to the collapse of the institution of marriage.

Are Methodist Church bereavement ritual’s sufficient for its black African members?: A qualitative analysis of a church in Mamelodi, South Africa

A phenomenon is observed during bereavement amongst the Methodists residing in Mamelodi, Pretoria. Families often seek the churches to be involved, and this normally entails offering pastoral care and leading Christian bereavement rituals. Ironically and at the same time, the same families require, perform, and observe African traditional bereavement rituals. This observation raises the question: Are the Methodist Church’s bereavement rituals conducted during bereavement insufficient? Does this phenomenon mean that what the Methodist Church offers its members is inadequate/lacking to offer healing and comfort to the bereaved families during their time of grief? A qualitative approach and interviews were used as a data-collection method within a (descriptive-explorative) case study design. Many African scholars acknowledge and have written at length about the significance of bereavement rituals among African communities. This research found that it is not a matter of being sufficient or insufficient, but rather that there is a deficit in teachings regarding what these rituals mean. The Methodist Church’s rituals are devoid of the African-ness, which embraces the culture and identity of the Black African members to whom they are ministering. As much as they are appreciated, they run short of embracing their identity as African people. Some participants interviewed did acknowledge that the Methodist Churches’ Christian bereavement rituals are sufficient for them but this is not the case for all adherents of the faith.