The Vitality of African Indigenous Religion

📗 In this book, we deal with an ecstatic eruption of spirit possession among Christians, who judge it indigenous. It is not new that active Christian prophets turn out to be indigenous spirit mediums, healers and/or diviners. Here, we take serious the implication that the Shona spiritual worldview of Mwari is carried into Christianity unchanged and that the Spirit that inspires Shona traditional spirit mediums is exactly the same Spirit that is operational in the popular African Christian churches of the Spirit. Thus, becoming Christian does not mean that one is no longer a traditionalist. The spirit medium in this event links and equates Jesus to Yawe, the God of the Jews, so also of Christians and to Mwari, the only God there is according to the Shona. The oracle had it that worshiping him through the name of Jesus, as Christians do, is equally efficacious as praying to him through patriarchs- the damned-by-Christianity ancestor cults. We suggest in this analysis that Mwari is the translated Hebrew name Yhwh, and that Yowe, the Shona’s cry for help, is the untranslated name for the Hebrew Yhwh.