AFRICAN WOMEN AND SPIRITUALITY

African women possess a psychic period of intuition and spirit possession is understood as a state of consciousness induced in a person by an alien, ancestral, demonic or deity spirit. Spirit possession is widely common phenomenon throughout indigenous cultures, but it is more widely found in the African, Pacific, and Indigenous American cultures. Women experience more spirit possession in these cultures.

Trance states, prophesy, convulsions, fasting, and other physical manifestations were often regarded as signs that a person was seized by spirits. It has been noted that women constitute the majority of the possessed. Amongst the Songhai of Niger, during the Holle Hori(the hoy possession ceremony), the possessed mediums are predominantly women. A similar practice is found amongst the closely culturally related Zarma, the Hausa of Nigeria and the Fulani of the Niger, where in some villages more than 70% of the possessed individuals are women. Similarly, amongst the Bulongic( a group located along the coast of Guinea-Conakry), the women have their own secret ritual organization named Keke. It is said that some women of the association are gifted with extraordinary power such as the "night eye", which enables them to see entities from the invisible world. The women come together to pray to their protective spirit, known as Mama; the entity is described as a fat woman with black skin; the moment that they are taken by Mama, some of the women become able to predict the future. They are also reportedly capable of locating ailments in a person.

In the Zar tradition of northeast Africa and the Arabian peninsula, many people(mostly women) take part in ecstatic trances, music, and intensive ceremonies that last all night and give a number of spirits or djinns the chance to intentionally take possession of their very bodies. The spirits causes the women's bodies to move and talk in strange foreign ways, dance and express sadness and pains/cravings.

In the Americas, some of examples of similar spirit traditions are found amongst the Jamaican Maroons who perform a ritual with a spirit possessive language called Maroon spirit language which is used after an ecstatic trance,  and African language Kromanti is used for the spirits of the oldest African ancestors who were born in Africa. The same can be said of Vodoun ceremonies and Ifa religious ceremonies.

In many Christian churches, African women or women of African descent are the majority that's seen "rolling" on the ground or made to confess through what the term "evil" spirits in them and according to traditional judaism women are endowed with a greater degree of "binah"(intuition, understanding, intelligence) than men. Many "exorcists" have remarked that women are prone to demonic possession as they are more open to the spiritual world.

Medically, spirit possession is not recognized as a psychiatric disorder or medical diagnosis by the Diagnostic and Statistical Association of Mental Disorders or ICD-10 Chapter 5:Mental and behavioral disorders. In cases of DISSASSOCIATIVE IDENTITY DISORDER in which the alter personality is questioned as to it's identity, 29% are reported to identify themselves as demons, but psychiatrists see this as a mental disease called demonomania or demonpathy, a monomania in which the patient believes that he or she is possessed by one or more demons/spirits.

Are African women under utilizing their spiritual gifts?

By Fatou Toure, 

@Pan African Liberation Movement[PALM].