The traditional African religions (or traditional beliefs and practices of African people) are a set of highly diverse beliefs that includes various ethnic religions. Generally, these traditions are oral rather than scriptural, include belief in an amount of higher and lower gods, sometimes including a supreme creator, belief in spirits, veneration of the dead, use of magic and traditional African medicine.
Published in Chapter:
Religious Tourism in Africa's Global South: Indigenous African Traditional Spirituality
Unathi Sonwabile Henama (Department of Tourism Management, Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa) and Lwazi Apleni (Department of Recreation and Tourism, University of Zululand, South Africa)
Copyright: © 2021
|Pages: 14
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-5792-1.ch017
Abstract
International tourist arrivals are projected to surpass 1.8 billion by 2030 on the back of rapid growth in emerging tourism economies. Tourism has emerged as an economic messiah for a plethora of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. It has emerged as a cost-effective means by which countries can diversify their economies, especially countries with low economies that depend on agricultural products to diversify their economies. Religious tourism can contribute to deeper economic benefit for a destination. The synthesis of literature adds to the paucity of academic gaze on religious tourism in Southern Africa. The synthesis takes the reader on a religious tourism journey that includes African spirituality, Pentecostal Christianity, and the interface between Africans spirituality and Christianity. These areas are neglected in the academic gaze and are outside the tourism beaten track, and these forms of religious tourism bring in much needed economic activities for areas on the tourism fringe.