In 1816, Richard Allen and other Black Methodists established the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Although this independent, historically Black denomination began in the United States, its early members and ministers had global ambitions. They intended for the AME Church to serve marginalized people of color around the world. Planting the institution in Africa played an important role in this vision.
African Methodists began migrating to Sierra Leone and Liberia in the first half of the 19th century. In these locales, they hoped to find a respite from the oppression they faced in the American South. The AME Church grew in these regions and, later, in South Africa. By the AME denomination’s bicentennial year in 2016, there were six African episcopal districts spanning various regions of the continent.
Women, both clergy and lay, have played significant roles in AME Church history. African women are a part of that historical pattern. Charlotte Manye Maxeke helped to initiate African Methodism in South Africa. Europa Randall facilitated AME expansion in Ghana. Louise York served as a pioneering educator at two AME schools in Liberia. Her daughter, Katurah York Cooper, established a thriving church in Monrovia. These and other trailblazing women assisted in the growth and development of African Methodism in Africa.
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The African Methodist Episcopal Church in Africa
Christina Dickerson-Cousin
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Bori Religion in West Africa
Kari B. Henquinet
Bori is a religious tradition with origins in West Africa dating to at least 1500 ce. Based on oral histories, ethnographies, archaeological analysis, and limited written sources, its origins lie in complex, syncretic blendings of pre-Islamic Arna (Maguzawa) religious traditions, Hausa aristocracies, and Islam throughout what became Northern Nigeria and south-central Niger over many centuries. Bori practitioners have special knowledge of the spirit world and thus are skilled at healing spirit-induced illnesses or interpreting communal problems with a spiritual basis. Individuals are frequently initiated into Bori as they seek healing but also sometimes through their heritage. Once initiated, Bori adepts learn to live with their spirits for the rest of their lives, inviting spirits to possess them during ceremonial rituals.
Bori specialists are more prominent in areas heavily influenced by Arna traditions or Hausa aristocracies that maintained special leadership positions connected to Bori for the protection of the kingdom. Women have often found opportunities for power and prestige through Bori in a patriarchal society, although in some regions, men dominate religious leadership and healing practices in Bori. From the early 19th century, Bori was condemned and banned in the Sokoto caliphate and subsequently under British rule in Nigeria. Nevertheless, it persisted in these areas and especially flourished in regions of Hausaland outside of the caliphate, where historical practices of Hausa kingdoms and Arna religion were practiced more openly and centrally in society. Over the course of the 20th century, Bori has been studied by researchers not only in these regions of West Africa but also among diasporic communities and pilgrims with ties to West Africa.
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Mami Wata
Sabine Jell-Bahlsen
There are several moments of approaching the image of Mami Wata and their associated concepts, beliefs, and behaviors: first, the art history of the famous Mami Wata icon; second, anthropology, ethnography, archaeology, religious studies, myth, psychology, healing, and initiate scholarship; third, artistic inspirations in fiction, fine art, and music; fourth, New World and Caribbean connections; and, finally, Christian narration and agency.
Mami Wata speaks to human beings’ essential values, for example, life, death, rebirth, and continuity of life in connection with water and the female side of the universe. This belief system prevails in different West African countries in rural and urban areas, along the coastal region, and farther inland. Water is life—and death. Water is essential for human life. A baby floats in the womb before birth, and water floods a dying person’s lungs. Africans have venerated water spirits and deities since time immemorial.
The Mami Wata complex harbors three significant elements: a Pidgin English term spelled in numerous ways, a German image turned into an icon of a woman with abundant hair holding two massive serpents, and, most importantly, pre-Christian African histories and religious beliefs and practices. These vary among ethnic groups, are complex, and may incorporate foreign ideas differently. Pan-African devotees correspond to Mami Wata’s popular image created abroad in analogous ways whereby the concept of healing plays an important part. According to Henry Drewal, she is at once originally African and imported. Still, the deity’s shrines can absorb a multitude of African, European, Christian, Hindu, and American Indian images. Caribbean variations connect to the adoration of African divinities manifest in the forces of nature, such as water.
Several subthemes emerge from an ethnographic case study among the Igbo in southeastern Nigeria: first, concepts of the divine forces of nature, especially earth, and water; second, priesthood, vocation, prophecy, illness, and healing; third, the notion of time, reincarnation, and the continuity of life; fourth mythology, color, and animal symbolism; fifth, gender, fecundity, procreation, behavioral and reproductive norms, and their social and psychological implications; sixth, artistic interpretations and expressions; and, seventh, modernity, changing concepts of wealth, Christian rhetoric, and witch-hunting.
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Women in Muslim Northern Nigeria
Beverly B. Mack
Women’s roles in Muslim northern Nigeria have been shaped by both pre-Islamic traditions and Islamic customs dating to the earliest introduction of Islam into the region around the 11th century. Contemporary women in the region draw their identities from a legacy of illustrious 19th-century Muslim women teachers, scholars, and authorities who in turn acknowledged a historic legacy of titled, renowned pre-Islamic women in the region.
The more consolidated Islamic period, which resulted from the 19th century Sokoto Jihad (1804–1808) of Islamic reformation, pushed back against syncretism to establish orthodox Sunni Qadiriyya Islam in its place. The Sokoto Caliphate (1804–1903), which developed in the Jihad’s wake, spread orthodox Islamic practices and principles widely in the region. Instrumental in this spread of Islam was the ‘Yan Taru (“the Associates”) extension program of women’s Islamic education. This grassroots program was begun by Nana Asma’u bint Usman ‘dan Fodiyo (1793–1864), a daughter of Jihad leader Shehu Usman ‘dan Fodiyo (1754–1817). (This surname has variants, including Fodio and Fudi.) Asma’u, a multilingual scholar, poet, and teacher, was just one of a multiplicity of women who were well educated and led activist lives. The ‘Yan Taru’s efficacy was enhanced by its incorporation of Nigerian pre-Islamic women’s authoritative roles and titles. Since its founding in the mid-19th century, the ‘Yan Taru has served the needs of urban and rural women, literate and illiterate, providing Islamic cultural literacy in an oral society. The late 20th century saw a rise in Muslim women’s organizations modeled on the ‘Yan Taru template. An understanding of women in Muslim northern Nigeria depends upon attention to early Islamic, pre-19th-century women’s titles and authority; the 19th-century reformation period; and a post-independence period, in which 20th- and 21st-century women define their identities in the framework of Nigerian women’s historical legacies.
