There has long been a tendency to blame Christian missionaries for coercing Africans into converting to Christianity and abandoning African Traditional Religion and with it, African Indigenous knowledge. However, in some instances, it was the reality of how African Traditional Religion was practiced, along with other factors, that made Christianity a preferable option for native populations.
This essay focuses on some accounts of human sacrifice in African Traditional Religion before missionary activity began in the region. Mostly European explorers and missionaries wrote these accounts but some were written by Africans. Many European accounts have been dismissed as grossly exaggerated, or even invented, to win sympathy and, with it, financial contributions from the faithful, the church and government.
Even in the unlikely event that much of these accounts were invented, what is undeniable are the more recent accounts of human sacrifice in some parts of Africa. The writer, who is in her 40s, remembers the fear that gripped her community in childhood whenever a notable traditional ruler of a nearby community died. There were tales that the community was notorious for burying deceased rulers alongside living people, including children. At such times, children refused to go out alone for fear of being kidnapped.
This essay argues that some natives may not have been coerced into Christianity at all but were grateful to shed the yoke placed on their necks as adherents of African Traditional Religion when such religion was intermingled with human sacrifice. It is this distaste that was also transferred to Africa’s Indigenous knowledge system, which in many instances is not directly related to the practice of African Traditional Religion.
Human Sacrifice in Old Calabar
There are numerous records of human sacrifice in the Old Calabar region. One account notes that a young albino girl was sacrificed to bring slave-buying ships back when their numbers dwindled around the region. In March 1847, the American abolitionist newspaper Signal of Liberty reprinted a letter from Rev. J. Clark, a Baptist missionary at Bimbia in West Africa, describing a mass human sacrifice at Calabar in late 1846. According to Clark, a son of the royal household died suddenly after a day of dancing and heavy palm-wine drinking, and people suspected he had been poisoned. The king’s elderly mother, grieving what she called the loss of her last child, demanded that slaves be killed in his honor. Clark reported that more than a hundred people were sacrificed: about thirty enslaved women, forty enslaved men and twenty-nine “Creoles,” or town-born residents. Many who expected to be chosen fled into the bush to hide. Clark wrote that the local missionaries tried and failed to persuade the King to stop the killings. He argued that a single message from the Queen of England would have been enough to end the practice. Clark asking for a ruling from the Queen of England to end the sacrifices may indicate that he wrote out of concern for human life rather than for financial gain.
The Kabaka’s Sacrifices in Buganda
From time to time, the king of the Buganda people, known as the Kabaka, ordered large numbers of people to be seized and killed. These mass killings, known as kiwendo, were often carried out on the advice of priests of the lubaale (national gods), to ward off illness, respond to omens or strengthen the kingdom. The best-known killing sites were Namugongo and other execution grounds.
Between 1885 and 1887, Kabaka Mwanga II ordered the execution of 45 Christian converts, many of them young pages at the royal court. Mwanga came to see their new faith as disloyalty and a threat to his authority at a time when European influence in the region was growing. The pages also refused his homosexual advances and would not give up their religion. The killings took place over two years, but the worst came on 3 June 1886 at Namugongo, where Charles Lwanga and more than a dozen companions were wrapped in reed mats and burned alive.
The Oba of Benin’s Sacrifices
Apart from accounts of human sacrifice in ancient Egypt, some of the earliest explicit written references to human sacrifice in Africa are letters from Portuguese Catholic priests who visited Benin City. In 1539, these visitors complained that the Oba (King) of Benin persistently engaged in “human sacrifices, idolatries and diabolical incantations night and day,” and noted that captives and slaves were used in these rites.
The Portuguese priests’ 1539 account aligns closely with Edo oral history and legal tradition, which modern historians such as Professor Philip Igbafe have verified. Under Edo law, freeborn citizens of Benin could not be used as ritual victims. Sacrifices were strictly limited to foreign prisoners of war and slaves. The scale and purpose of these sacrifices have been debated by historians; see James D. Graham, “The Slave Trade, Depopulation and Human Sacrifice in Benin History” (Cahiers d’Études Africaines, 1965).
In fact, many of the “slaves” used in these ceremonies were hardened criminals, traitors or prisoners sentenced to death by the Oba’s supreme judicial court. Instead of a secular execution, their deaths were built into state religious ceremonies to appease the gods or ancestral spirits.
The Kingdom of Dahomey (Modern-Day Republic of Benin)
In his 1793 book The History of Dahomy, Dalzel, a British governor and slave trader, compiled detailed records of the Xwetanu ceremonies (the Annual Customs). He described the public execution of war captives and criminals and noted that their blood was collected and poured onto the ancestral shrines of deceased kings to obtain spiritual blessings.
Similarly, naval commander Frederick E. Forbes the journals of Frederick E. Forbes (1849–1850) published eyewitness accounts in his book Dahomey and the Dahomans. Forbes documented the “Grand Customs,” describing how platforms were built in the capital, Abomey, from which victims, mostly captured from neighboring peoples, were thrown down to a waiting crowd and beheaded to secure spiritual protection for the kingdom. For the political and ritual meaning of these killings, see Robin Law, “‘My Head Belongs to the King’: On the Political and Ritual Significance of Decapitation in Pre-Colonial Dahomey” (Journal of African History, 1989).
Non-Sacrificing Cultures and Christianity
As stated, gross discontentment with aspects African Traditional Religion such as human sacrifice may have led some people to convert. Yet, it is worth noting that many kingdoms and societies across Africa where there are no records of human sacrifice as a known or popular practice also converted to Christianity in large numbers. These include the kingdoms of Ruanda (Rwanda) and Urundi (Burundi). They also include the San peoples of southern Africa, whose spirituality centres on trance dances, healing and communication with the spirit world through animal metaphors, and who have no recorded history of human ritual killing. Among the Maasai of East Africa, religious life centered on the benevolent god Enkai. Their rituals rely heavily on blessings involving milk, grass and cattle blood drawn from live cows without killing them, rather than on killing humans.
Conclusion
The “dark” sides of African Traditional Religion, including human sacrifice, may have helped win converts to Christianity across Africa, especially among the lower ranks of society. Both missionaries and African converts mistakenly took conversion to Christianity as a call to reject the whole of Africa’s vast store of Indigenous knowledge. That should not have been so. African Indigenous knowledge includes centuries of intellectual work that did not necessarily spring from the society’s spirituality.
Today, many Africans who know about the “dark” sides of African Traditional Religion are reluctant to embrace African Indigenous knowledge, because they do not wish to return to practices such as human sacrifice. Yet the distinction exists and should be emphasized between African Traditional Religion and African Indigenous knowledge. One can practice any faith and still seek to understand African Indigenous knowledge, which, is an intellectual tradition within its own rights.
