Flag and Flag Planting

The flag is especially significant in the African spiritual system because it symbolizes the connections among human beings and so helps to connect human beings to each other to form communities. It is a marker of remembrance and love. It connects and unites into one community all humans of a particular familial, spiritual, social, political, or even military group: those past (the ancestors), those living (who are in this dimension of time), and those who are yet to come (the unborn). The flag may also connect the members of a community to divinity because, as the divine symbol of a particular community (a family, a clan, a nation), it may also recall and represent a founding ancestor, although it may also represent an animal or an object that equally may embody the principles, vital forces, or soul of the community in question.

The fundamental understandings that instruct flag planting are the interrelation of all beings and things in the cosmos and, as a consequence, the critical importance of humans maintaining their connections with these forces, especially the Creator, their ancestors, with the living and the unborn and with the environment in which they live.

Today, flags are regularly planted in special rituals and ceremonies held within an African spiritual community (e.g., in Vodu, in the Orisha tradition, and, indeed, all over the African spiritual world). Flags are considered symbolic, especially to particular social and religious groups, and may even be held as sacred by some. This entry describes the flag and its use and recalls its long history in Africa.