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Aspects of Religion in the Senegalese Novel

Every social activity in Africa is invested with a religious flavor. The family, for instance, has a spiritual foundation: the ancestors who constitute an integral part of it act as intermediaries between the dead and the living. This explains ancestral worshipping. The ancestors plead in favor of the living before the gods, asking for their good health and prosperity. A religious spirit also informs the traditional matrimonial system. The goddess of birth, primary source of life, is thus worshipped. Sterility engenders metaphysical doubts and spiritual anxiety. A barren woman is the carrier of bad luck because she is suspected of being under a divine curse. The land also has a religious and sacred quality. It is a collective property and "factor of solidarity between the living and the dead" (see SAC, 1962: 232).1 Education in the traditional community is equally religiously inspired: initiation or the rite de passage is simply a means of discovering the traditional cosmogony, a search for an answer to existence. In effect, every single activity in the traditional African society has its own god, very similar to what existed in ancient Greece. The gods reveal themselves through a number of natural phenomena: rain, tornado, tempest, wind,