Bilad al-Sudan: African History in a Global Context

Religious Overview in Africa When one thinks about religion in Africa, one might tend to exaggerate — images of men kneeling before wooden or stone idols often come to mind. However, this article offers a broader and more balanced overview of the history of religion across the African continent. Ancient Egypt Ancient Egypt is perhaps the African religious tradition most widely known. Egyptian religion was polytheistic, with deities often represented as hybrid human-animal figures. Among the most prominent were Horus, Osiris, Isis, Seth, Ra, and Anubis, each with specific theological roles. Pharaoh Akhenaten attempted a radical reform by promoting the worship of Aten , sometimes interpreted as an early form of monotheism. His religious reforms challenged the traditional priesthood and were later reversed. Aten was symbolized as a solar disk, and some scholars have noted thematic similarities between Atenist hymns and later monotheistic traditions. Akhenaten and his family rece...

  “Africa has no history.” At first sight, this may seem like an absurd statement. However, it is not a phrase that we have invented for this article. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we find European intellectuals who argued, in one way or another, that Africa stood outside universal history, that its societies had not reached a level of development comparable to Europe, or that the African past was of little historical importance. Not all Europeans thought this way, and it would be a mistake to present European intellectual history as a single, uniform tradition. There were travellers, researchers, archaeologists, linguists and historians who made important contributions to the study of Africa. But there was also a deeply Eurocentric current of thought that turned the European historical experience into a standard by which other societies were judged. And Africa was one of the regions upon which these ideas had particularly important consequences. Therefore, the que...