Indigeneity in African Religions: Oza Worldviews, Cosmologies and Religious Cultures

Based on religious ethnography, in-depth interviews and archival data, Indigeneity in African Religions explores the historical origins, worldviews, cosmologies, ritual symbolism and praxis of the indigenous Oza people in South West Nigeria. The author’s locationality and positionality plugs the book within decolonizing knowledges and indigeneity discourses, thus unpacking the complexity of ＂indigeneity＂ and contributing to its conceptual understanding within socioreligious change in contemporary Africa.

The future of Oza indigeneity in the face of modernity is illuminated against the backlash of encounters, contestations with multiple hegemonies, transmissions of Christianity and Islam and indigenous (re)appropriations. Thus, any theorizations of such encounters must be cognizant of instantiations of indigeneity politics and identity, culture, tradition and power dynamics. Through decolonizing burdens of history, memory and method, Afe Adogame demonstrates a framework of understanding Oza indigenous religious, sociocultural and political imaginaries.

Afe Adogame is Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Christianity and Society at Princeton Theological Seminary, USA. He was previously Senior Lecturer and International Director at the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh, UK. He is the author of The African Christian Diaspora (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). He is Secretary General of the International Association for the History of Religion, and has previously been General Secretary of the African Association for the Study of Religion.

Olusegun Lawani is an independent researcher, Paris, France. He is trained as an ethnomusicologist, and has produced a number of visual productions, publications and concerts, including ＂When People Dance Ozah＂ (1991).