Dalian Adofo and Verona Spence-Adofo, the creators of the brilliant, ground breaking, educational African Spirituality resource, Ancestral Voices, captured the main characteristics of African Spirituality. They have taken the work of many great African writers and spiritualists and distilled the information into digestible form.
They spent 7 years conducting literature and action research into the topic and broadened its scope beyond what previous scholars or writers have done. As many previously focused only on individual systems, it was presented as being peculiar to those systems.
The only work to come close to theirs was that of Christian priest John Mbiti (1969), but even that work focused on continental Africa and was laden with his religious bias.
Due to travelling to so many different countries and speaking to various practitioners in the various expressions of it, on the continent and in the Diaspora - ancient and modern, they could map and flesh out the commonalities that show very clearly that we are dealing with just modified forms of the same ideology.
Their work demonstrates that there were many tools that Africans had developed to understand the life force/spirit that all existence past, present and future are a part of. The tools depended on their place in time, their location and languages they spoke, therefore, the tools have many names e.g: Vodoun, Dagara, Kemetic Mystery System, Obeah, Ifa, Candomblé, Dogon. None were more correct than any other, they were just the methods the All gifted to humans to understand reality.
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