Portal:Traditional African religions/Selected biography

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Selected biography list

Portal:Traditional African religions/Selected biography/1 Louis Diène Faye (born : 13 February 1936 at Joal) is a Senegalese anthropologist, author and scholar of Serer religion, history and culture. Himself of Serer heritage, he undertook his secondary schooling at Thiès (in Senegal) before proceeding to study religious sciences and audio-visual at the Catholic University of Lyon.

Portal:Traditional African religions/Selected biography/2 Marguerite Dupire (born in Roubaix - 12 October 1920) is a French ethnologist who specialises on African people, and had worked extensively on the Fulani of Niger, Cameroon, Guinea, Senegal, and then after a mission in Ivory Coast, on the Serer people of Sine (in Senegal) since 1965.

Portal:Traditional African religions/Selected biography/3 Father Henry Gravrand (France, 1921 - Abbey of Latrun, Palestine, 11 July 2003) was a French Catholic missionary to Africa and an anthropologist who has written extensively on Serer religion and culture. He was one of the leading pioneers of interfaith dialog and believed that Traditional African religion was the "first covenant between God and man".

Portal:Traditional African religions/Selected biography/4 Issa Laye Thiaw (born 1943 at Sangué, Thies region of Senegal) is a Senegalese historian, theologian, and author on Serer religion, Serer tradition and history. Born into a Serer family, himself the son of a Serer High Priest (Saltigue), Thiaw is a specialist in the Serer religion. He was a former researcher at the Centre d’études des civilisations (CEC) de Dakar (Centre for Studies in Civilizations of Dakar).

Portal:Traditional African religions/Selected biography/5 Isaac Schapera (23 June 1905 Garies, Cape Colony – 26 June 2003 London, England), was a social anthropologist at the London School of Economics specialising in South Africa. He was notable for his contributions of ethnographic and typological studies of the indigenous peoples of Botswana and South Africa. Additionally, he was one of the founders of the group that would develop British social anthropology.

Not only did Schapera write numerous publications of his extensive research done in South Africa and Botswana, he published his work throughout his career (1923–1969), and even after he retired. As an anthropologist he focused on the lives and customs of the indigenous peoples of South Africa and was considered to be a specialist in the topic. Early in his career he would focus on studies of the Khoisan of South Africa until the 1930s, when he would begin to focus on Tswana of Botswana

Portal:Traditional African religions/Selected biography/6 Eileen Jensen Krige (1905–1995) was a prominent South African social anthropologist noted for her research on Zulu and Lovedu cultures. Together with Hilda Kuper and Monica Wilson, she produced substantial works on the Nguni peoples of Southern Africa. Apart from her research she is considered to be one of the 'pioneering mothers' of the University of Natal, Durban, South Africa, where she taught from 1948 until retirement in 1970. She inspired many women to devote themselves to research. Krige is also associated with a group of South African anthropologists who were strongly against the segregation policies of apartheid in South Africa. These include amongst others, Isaac Schapera, Winifred Hoernle, Hilda Kuper, Monica Wilson, Audrey Richards and Max Gluckman.

Portal:Traditional African religions/Selected biography/7 Safi Faye (born November 22, 1943) is a Senegalese film director and ethnologist. She was the first Sub-Saharan African woman to direct a commercially distributed feature film, Kaddu Beykat, which was released in 1975. She has directed several documentary and fiction films focusing on rural life in Senegal.

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Cheikh Anta Diop (29 December 1923 – 7 February 1986) was a Senegalese historian, anthropologist, physicist, and politician who studied the human race's origins and pre-colonial African culture. Though Diop is sometimes referred to as an Afrocentrist, he predates the concept and thus was not himself an Afrocentric scholar. However, Diopian thought, as it is called, is paradigmatic to Afrocentricity. His work was greatly controversial and throughout his career, Diop argued that there was a shared cultural continuity across African peoples that was more important than the varied development of different ethnic groups shown by differences among languages and cultures over time.

Diop's work has posed important questions about the cultural bias inherent in scientific research. Cheikh Anta Diop University (formerly known as the University of Dakar), in Dakar, Senegal, is named after him.

Portal:Traditional African religions/Selected biography/9 Molefi Kete Asante, (born Arthur Lee Smith Jr.; August 14, 1942) is an African-American professor and philosopher. He is a leading figure in the fields of African-American studies, African studies and communication studies. He is currently (as of 2019) professor in the Department of Africology at Temple University, where he founded the PhD program in African-American Studies. He is president of the Molefi Kete Asante Institute for Afrocentric Studies.

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Sundiata Keita was a puissant prince and founder of the Mali Empire. The famous Malian ruler Mansa Musa, who made a pilgrimage to Mecca, was his great-nephew.

Written sources augment the Mande oral histories, with the Moroccan traveller Muhammad ibn Battúta (1304–1368) and the Tunisian historian Abu Zayd 'Abd al-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun al-Hadrami (1332–1406) both having travelled to Mali in the century after Sundiata’s death, and providing independent verification of his existence. The semi-historical but legendary Epic of Sundiata by the Malinké/Maninka people centers on his life. The epic poem is primarily known through oral tradition, transmitted by generations of Maninka griots.

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The King of Oussouye is a religious, spiritual and traditional leader of the Jola people who follow their traditional religion. The Jolas believe in a god called Ata Emit. The King is an intermediary between God and men. The king is described as a "collaborator of God who receives offerings to pray and intercede with the spirits".

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Akhenaten (/ˌækəˈnɑːtən/; also spelled Echnaton, and Khuenaten; meaning "Effective for Aten"), known before the fifth year of his reign as Amenhotep IV), was an ancient Egyptian pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty who ruled for 17 years and died perhaps in 1336 BC or 1334 BC. He is noted for abandoning traditional Egyptian polytheism and introducing worship centered on the Aten, which is sometimes described as monolatristic, henotheistic, or even quasi-monotheistic. An early inscription likens the Aten to the sun as compared to stars, and later official language avoids calling the Aten a god, giving the solar deity a status above mere gods.

Akhenaten tried to shift his culture from Egypt's traditional religion, but the shifts were not widely accepted. After his death, his monuments were dismantled and hidden, his statues were destroyed, and his name excluded from the king lists. Traditional religious practice was gradually restored, and when some dozen years later rulers without clear rights of succession from the 18th Dynasty founded a new dynasty, they discredited Akhenaten and his immediate successors, referring to Akhenaten himself as "the enemy" or "that criminal" in archival records.

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Soumaoro Kanté (var.: Sumanguru Kanté) was a 13th-century king of the Sosso people. Seizing Koumbi Saleh, the capital of the recently defunct Ghana Empire, Soumaoro Kanté proceeded to conquer several neighboring states, including the Mandinka people in what is now Mali. However, the Mandinka prince Sundiata Keita built a coalition of smaller kingdoms to oppose him at the Battle of Kirina (c. 1235), defeating the Sosso and leaving Sundiata's new Mali Empire dominant in the region.

Soumaoro Kanté is portrayed as a villainous sorcerer-king in the national epic of Mali, the Epic of Sundiata.

Portal:Traditional African religions/Selected biography/14 Lamane Jegan Joof (or Lamane Djigan Diouf), was a Serer lamane who according to Serer tradition founded the Serer village of Tukar now part of present-day Senegal. The Raan festival (a major event in the Serer religious calendar) takes place each year at Tukar, two weeks after the appearance of the new moon in April.

Portal:Traditional African religions/Selected biography/15 Maad Semou Njekeh Joof (or Maad Semou Djiké Diouf) was a member of the Joof Dynasty of the Kingdom of Sine now part of independent Senegal. Maad means king and Maad a Sinig means king of Sine in Serer. He was the founder of the Royal House of Semou Njekeh Joof, founded in the early eighteenth century. His royal house was the third and last royal house founded by the Joof family of Sine and Saloum. Since its foundation, at least seven kings of Sine from his royal house had succeeded to the throne including his son Maad a Sinig Boukar Tjilas Sanghaie Joof.

In the Serer religion, Semou Njekeh Joof is immortalized in the cult of Tagdiam. The principle shrine of Tagdiam is named after him. Tagdiam in present-day Senegal was where he lived.

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Ra (/rɑː/; Ancient Egyptian: rꜥ or rˤ; also transliterated rˤw; cuneiform: 𒊑𒀀 ri-a or 𒊑𒅀ri-ia) or Re (/reɪ/; Coptic: ⲣⲏ, Rē) is the ancient Egyptian deity of the sun. By the Fifth Dynasty in the 25th and 24th centuries BC, he had become one of the most important gods in ancient Egyptian religion, identified primarily with the noon sun. Ra was believed to rule in all parts of the created world: the sky, the Earth, and the underworld. He was the god of the sun, order, kings, and the sky.

Portal:Traditional African religions/Selected biography/17 Ogotemmeli (died 1962) was the Dogon elder and high priest (Hogon) who narrated the cosmogony, cosmology and symbols of the Dogon people to French anthropologist Marcel Griaule during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, that went on to be documented and adapted by contemporary scholars. A lot of what we know about Dogon religion, cosmogony and symbolism came from Griaule's work, which in turn came from Ogotemmeli—who taught it to him.

Portal:Traditional African religions/Selected biography/18 Babacar Sedikh Diouf (Serer: Babakar Sidiix Juuf) is a Senegalese historian, author, researcher, campaigner against "Wolofization", a Pan-Africanist, and former teacher. He has written extensively about the history and culture of Senegal, Africa, and that of the Serer ethnic group to which he belong. He usually writes by the pen name Babacar Sedikh Diouf.

Diouf was one of the first (if not the first) to explain the Serer religious significance of the Senegambian stone circles. His work published on July 7, 1980 on the Senegalese newspaper Le Soleil became headline news and was picked up by the prehistorian and archaeologist Professor Cyr Descamps and his colleague Professor Iba Der Thiam. Professor Descamps was one of the archaelogisgts who excavated the monuments back in the 1970s. On July 28, 1980, Professor Descamps issued a response to Diouf—thanking him for explaining the significance of the Senegambian megaliths which until then were unknown or undocumented. Some of that included the arrangement of the stones and their religious symbolism based on Serer numerlogy. In his joint paper with Iba Der Thiam – titled: La préhistoire au Sénégal: recueil de documents, published in 1982, Descamps and Thiam republished Diouf's work and reiterated their thanks to him for his work two years earlier.

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