nature – African deep thought

African spirituality eschews abstraction

I came across a post on a social media site which featured a video of what appeared to be an African American woman thanking God for slavery, which supposedly saved her from being somewhere in Africa worshiping a tree. A commentator who re-shared this post indicated that he would rather worship a tree since trees are, after all, real.

His was a good commentary on the logic of African spirituality, that is that it eschews abstraction and elevates that which gives life to the status of the divine. After all, why shouldn’t humans worship the trees, the sun, the earth, and those other things upon which life depends?

Below I list a few examples of how Africans recognized nature as divine from the Akan, Igbo, and Yorùbá traditions.

Divinity	Aspect of nature	Culture/tradition
Anyanwu	Sun	Igbo
Asase Yaa	Earth	Akan
Ala	Earth	Igbo
Ṣàngó (Changó, Shango, Xangô)	Lightening	Yorùbá
Amadioha	Lightening and thunder	Igbo
Nana Adade Kofi	Lightening and iron	Akan
Ògún (Ogun, Ogum)	Iron	Yorùbá
Ọ̀ṣun (Oshun, Ochún, Oxúm)	River, fertility	Yorùbá

Nature, humanity, and the divine

A few days ago I posted something about the implications of the desacralization of nature and the erosion of humans’ relationship with it. I was happy to see that this topic was recently addressed on the Medicine Shell. The reality is that not only was Africa historically wealthy in terms of our ancestors’ knowledge of nature, but also their ability to apply such wisdom in ways which were sustainable. The loss or suppression of this knowledge vis-á-vis enslavement, colonization, globalization, and modernization–all processes of westernization–have not only attenuated our connection to the natural world as a people, but have limited our consciousness to a paradigm of life where nature is seen only for its extractive, instrumental value–a form of relation that has and will continue to be disastrous for humanity.

I think that people were better off believing that the forests, the rivers, the lakes, and so forth were inhabited by divinities, ancestral spirits, and other spiritual beings. Once these beliefs were supplanted the forest became lumber, the river and the lakes became dumps, and generally, nature was reduced to commodity.