Sky

The sky, as well as the Earth, plays a central role in African functional systems of beliefs. The sky, like any other place or natural entity in the world, possesses its own ancestral spirit who, like every creative spirit, watches over the daily needs of the African people to promote social harmony and a sense of accountability among them.

Many creation narratives, beginning with the Kemetic civilization, conceive of the sky as the abiding place of the creative force of the universe that in Kernet was Ra, the sun.

Because African ontological systems revolve around the core concept of spirits as the vital universal energy that embodies all living and nonliving things, humans and nature alike, their holistic concept of balance and harmony demands a sense of agency on the part of every human being as well as his or her own responsibility toward the community that gives a sacred or religious dimension to his or her respect for these spirits.

The spiritual dimension of traditional African cultures and religions that refers to a first creator as a carver among the Akan or as a carpenter among the Tiv of Nigeria also conceives of this first creative moment as a generative power or the first coming into being of a great, great, great ancestor or Unkulunkulu as among the Zulu peoples, who created the universe and everything in it, and the human beings whom he gave everything for them to have a pleasant life on Earth and live in harmony with nature.

Although cosmological and spiritual interpretations of the world greatly vary according to the diversity of the people who professes them, African cosmological and religious interpretations of the world show commonalities that conceive the spirits and even the first creator as sharing the same life experiences, needs, and attributes as those of the average human being.

Therefore, the sky and the Earth, respectively, the masculine and the feminine concepts of origin, as well as the metaphor of the two halves of a calabash, are also powerful symbols of creation in the traditional African systems of beliefs and are conceived exactly as any African compound. In the case of the sky, whose chief is often called the lord of the sky, associations of its spirit with natural phenomena that create havoc in the community, such as thunder and lightning, storms, and rain, are common and often seen as a result of the regular activities going on in that particular environment.

In some cases, this functional interpretation overlaps with the concept of the abiding place of the great, great ancestor and, as a consequence, a place for the ancestors' world.

The fact that Semitic and Islamic religions have been impacting African peoples for more than 700 years, as well as the Arab, Jewish, and Christian influences in Africa since the 1st century, in such a persistent mode that they have transformed, [Page 619]added to, and sometimes even erased the traditional African cultures, makes it virtually impossible to draw a clear line between what can be assessed as consistent with traditional African systems of beliefs and the result of Christian and Islamic influences.

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