The Palgrave Handbook of African Traditional Religion ed. by Ibigbolade S. Aderibigbe and Toyin Falola (review)

Reviewed by: The Palgrave Handbook of African Traditional Religioned. by Ibigbolade S. Aderibigbe and Toyin Falola Blair Alan Gadsby The Palgrave Handbook of African Traditional Religion. Edited by Ibigbolade S. Aderibigbe and Toyin Falola. Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. xxiii + 642pages. 249. 99 hardcover; 249. 99 softcover; ebook available. This impressive book claims to be the "only single volume or Handbook on African Traditional Religion" (25). I would characterize it rather as the latest significant addition to a growing body of literature on African End Page 125Traditional Religion. Most definitely, the Handbook's encyclopedia-level comprehensiveness makes it a substantive and unique contribution with a balance of topical chapters (46 total) that would be difficult to duplicate due to the variety and depth of the articles. Fortunately, we are in the era, and this has accelerated in the last five to ten years, where books on African religions' importance in their own right, rather than as a category within a foreign context, are being written and celebrated. This volume furthers that effort and advances the field of African Religious Studies markedly, thanks to a collection of essays that bring updated methodological and heuristic issues to bear upon the African religious scene, including Africa's diasporic communities. There is a certain bittersweet element to the arrival of these much-needed volumes on African religions, especially when we read from the Handbook'sIntroduction that, "Unfortunately, it can be argued that there seems to be no other religion that has been so degraded and misrepresented in the minds of Western audiences as the African Traditional Religion" (29). That was the bitterness. The sweetness, however, is an expanding library of books, now including this Handbook, which give ATR its proper place in world history and highlight its contributions to the world religions, and even make a convincing case for ATR to be categorized as a world religion. Among the forty-six chapters, three broad categories of essays are assembled. Part I (chapters 2 to 19) focuses upon the beliefs and practices of ATR including: the supreme being, the veneration of divinities and ancestors, magic and medicine, cosmologies, rituals and sacrifices, women's roles, and much more. Andrew Philips Adega's discussion of witches, wizards and sorcery is very interesting. It intimates the definitional and methodological challenges in studying religion cross-culturally when Adega states: They are realities in African cosmology and their activities are not in doubt except for Euro-Americans and neo-Africans who have found a new faith in Christianity. The irony of the matter is that amidst these denials, most Christian ministries and ministers, particularly Pentecostal pastors, spend considerable time organizing crusades to ward off the influence of these realities (207). Part II (chapters 20 to 36) covers the many ways ATR intersects with a host of sociological issues, such as ethics and morality, gender, equality, feminism, sexual orientations, transgender, conflict resolution, and the new religious movements from the continent, to list just a few. Part III is the final grouping (chapters 37 to 46) and concentrates upon academic issues relating to various topics for African and African diasporic communities and how they are presented in scholarship. These essays seek to clarify the insider/outsider role in studying ATR, knowledge transmission in African culture, and ATR's representation End Page 126within global scholarship, among several other issues. The final three chapters assess the works of E. Bolaji Idowu, John S. Mbiti, Edward Geoffrey Parrinder, Kofi Asare Opoku, Joseph Omosade Awolalu, and Peter Ade Dopamu. These are scholars who have pushed the field of African Religious Studies beyond the colonial stereotypes. One advantage to the digital editions of books is that searches are quite easy. I was a little surprised to see that the word "colonialism" appears only thirty-two times in the entire text, while "decolonization" appears nine times—and this is a rather large book at 642 pages. The words decolonize and decolonialism have no entries whatsoever. I suspect the time has arrived when international scholarship about African religions and philosophies can stand on its own quite comfortably and independently without need of referencing the colonial past. Perhaps this is a sign of the maturation of the. . .