Spirit: Histories of Religion and the Word

All major forms of religious practice in West Africa – indigenous belief systems, Islam and Christianity – place a strong emphasis on the word. Capable of addressing both the profane and the spiritual, words are always potentially powerful links between seemingly mundane aspects of everyday life and the sacred. Words are not only used to transmit the information contained in oral and written texts, but they also serve as the practical means to transcend the boundaries between the past and the present, and between the secular and the divine. Through incantation, divination and prophecy as well as prayer, believers invest words with the power of communication with the spiritual world. The power of words to transcend the mundane is manifested in the transformation of the present, and of believers’ lives.