Are Africans Religious People or Fetish Inhabitants? Do They Have a Unifying Religion and Culture? Towards a Pedagogical Response!

My response as to whether African culture, religion is unifying or fetish takes bearing from the scholarly alarm raised by the Ugandan Poet, Okot, P'Bitek. Without any form of misunderstanding, the missionaries motive to evangelize African as alarmed by Okot, P'Bitek, and against the hubris of trimming African wisdom to fit Western missionary prejudices e.g. the “myth of the primitive” brings the scope of my review to the spotlight in this ongoing reflection. Some years ago I was asked to make a critic on this particular subject. I was even persuaded without any clue as to why I should do a critic on a subject that raises great controversy. In the first place, I was wondering why I should make such criticism giving the fact that these are issues that spin heads and leads scholars to head into opposite intersections in opinions. A scholarly judgment and assumptions on African faith, cosmos and culture was what was at stake. However, I was hesitant in the first place to bare my mind. In the other hand, I was interested in knowing why I should bare my mind on these controversial issues. Secondly, I wanted to know so that any criticism I would put forward would not sound as a lame argument from the wayside. More still, I wanted to know what inspired his curiosity to ask me to write a critic or compile a storehouse of what I believed to be acceptable beliefs of a people. I wanted to know whether his curiosity was astonishingly provoked by the willingness to question people's assumptions, people's acceptable beliefs system and people's way of life. His persuasion made a defining and compelling impression, but in an unintelligible manner. Using Socratic Method, he tried to win my confidence. Already, I had prepared my mind not to win his admiration in return. Again, my countenance did not show that I prepared even eager to engage in an impromptu rationalization. My indifference to his demand caused him to peg off as sullen type who would give up at first refusal. When he saw I was not positive to do a critic, he glided away as one attempting a disappearing act. The manner in which he glided away was filled with sudden mixture of anger and sadness. It made me knew that he was one of those optimists who had never received a “No” from an answer. The fact that the issues under review has been debated in many different quarters or written in a very lucid parlance jarred my mind of how other people and other culture view African society in general. With the spin of time, and after persistent request, I took up the task with bold courage and enthusiasm without minding any spill over or dialogical reaction. Scholarly alarm that African wisdom and thoughts are primitive is not only unfounded but illogical. Africa was not the only continent that has received callous remark in the past or in the present. Jerusalem that city of the living God was equally castigated as a city where “nothing good would ever come.” The response under review does not in any way intend to create cultural or cosmological imperatives. It does not aim to add to classical tales of triumph of the sacred over fetish, modern over primitive, advance over stateless societies. Again, this narrative does not in any way intend to investigate whether something good ever came from Jerusalem or not, but it intends as it may seem to clarify some misinterpretation or if you may say, misrepresentations of African cultural outlook and cosmological values.