Dominance of Religion in Africa: A Historical Perspective

Mbiti observed in 1969 that Africa people are “notoriously religious” consciously or unconsciously, and is still true of a large majority of people, urban or rural, educated or less educated (Moyo 2013). No matter the time or what decade it is, religion will still dominate the world and especially Africa. Over the years’ religions from all over the world have formed and people from all over the world have taken up and practiced those religions, making some religions well known while others most people still don’t know about it. The main religions I wanted to highlight was the traditional African religions, Christianity, and the Islamic religion. I put African traditional religions in one category because they all seem to follow the same common

Christianity is the largest religion in sub-Saharan Africa, it was first introduced to north Africa, it slowly started spreading west to Ethiopia. But even with Christianity slowly spreading throughout Africa, it wasn’t prominent until slavery, where Christianity was being forced upon the enslaved Africans by the Europeans. There’s different variations to the Christianity religion, everybody practices and worship in their own way; but some things they do have in common is that Christians do have places of worship no matter what type of Christian you are, there is always a church for the people to worship and praise god. Even though most people interpret the bible differently, all Christians still use the bible as their layout of worship. The last religion I wanted to highlight was the Islam religion; there’s about 234 million Africans that follow the Islam religion. Most of the Africans who practiced the Islam faith was centered in north Africa, but even with all these religions being based in Africa; Muslims had a different way of worshipping their god. Muslims called their God (Allah), which was founded by the prophet Muhammed in the seventh century. Christianity and Judaism influenced the Islam religion, it

Over the years, they started different missions and expanded the Christian religion o most of Africa. When the Europeans realized that they needed labor for sugar, cotton and tobacco and they wanted it cheap and continuously, they turned to the holy roman emperor to allow the importation of slaves, which in the end was granted so now slaves were being sold and taken from Nigeria with the church being one of the trades biggest supporters. The British empire went into treaties with America and the other countries to end slavery because they were still selling slaves for trade and money way after the British had stopped. So, after the countries agreed to stop, what the British did was send their navy to capture the foreign slave dealers. When the dealers were captured they were sent to Freetown in Sierra Leone. Thus, Freetown became a conglomeration of people from several Nigerian and West African tribes. The Sierra Leone settlers were exposed to Christian doctrines and Freetown was to serve as a nerve center for the spread of Christianity and civilization in West Africa. The missionaries felt that education was an importance for the Africans to truly understand the Christian values and beliefs, without them knowing how to read they wouldn’t be able to read the bible and continue to pass