A vast continent, Africa is home to many cultures and a thousand or more languages. Although no single set of myths and legends unites this diverse population, different cultural groups and regions share some common mythological elements. Like myths from other parts of the world, those of Africa reflect its people’s beliefs and values. But while the mythologies of many other cultures no longer play an active role in religious beliefs, African myths and legends function as a meaningful part of everyday life. Some African myths deal with universal themes, such as the origin of the world and the fate of the individual after death. Many more spring from the continent’s own environments and history.
Roots of African Myths and Legends The Sahara, avast desert dividing the continent into two main regions, runs from east to west across the widest part of northern Africa. North Africa consists of the Mediterranean coast from Morocco to Egypt and includes the valley of the Nile River as far south as Ethiopia. With strong ties to the Mediterranean and Arab worlds, North Africans felt the influence of Christianity by the 300s ce. In the 700s, much of the area came under the influence of Islam.
Before the modern era, Africans south of the Sahara had relatively little contact with the rest of the world. Islam spread south past the Sahara very slowly, especially compared with its sweep across North Africa. Christian missionaries were not very active there until the 1800s. Since then, the spread of Islam and Christianity has overshadowed many indigenous (or native) religions, myths, and legends of sub-Saharan Africa. Despite this fact, the traditional beliefs have not completely disappeared. In some places they have blended with new religions from other cultures, so that an African Muslim might combine Islam with the traditional practice of ancestor worship.
Sub-Saharan myths and legends developed over thousands of years. Among the influences on their development were the mass movements of people that took place from time to time. About seven thousand years ago, the ancestors of the Khoisan people, an indigenous African group, began moving from the Sahara toward southern Africa. Five thousand years later, people who spoke Bantu languages began spreading out from Cameroon, on Africa’s west coast, until they eventually inhabited much of sub-Saharan Africa. Such migrations caused myths and legends to spread from group to group and led to a mixing of cultural beliefs. The migrations also gave rise to new stories about events in the history of those peoples. For instance, as Bantu groups settled in new homelands, they developed legends to explain the origins of their ruling families and the structure of their societies.
African cultural groups did not use written language until modern times. Instead, they possessed rich and complex oral traditions, passing myths, legends, and histories from generation to generation verbally. In some cultures, professional storytellers, called griots (pronounced GREE-oo), preserved the oral tradition. Written accounts of African mythology began to appear in the early 1800s with the arrival of European explorers and colonizers, and present-day scholars work to record the continent’s myths and legends before they are lost to time and cultural change.
World History
