African traditional medicine is the oldest, and perhaps the most assorted, of all therapeutic systems. Africa is considered to be the cradle of mankind with a rich biological and cultural diversity marked by regional differences in healing practices. African traditional medicine in its varied forms is holistic involving both the body and the mind. The traditional healer typically diagnoses and treats the psychological basis of an illness before prescribing medicines, particularly medicinal

The Dinka people are an ethnic group inhabiting the Bahr el Ghazal region of the Nile basin, Jonglei and parts of southern Kordufan and Upper Nile regions. The Dinkas are mainly agripastoral people, relying on cattle herding at riverside camps in the dry season and growing millet (awuou) and other varieties of grains (rap) in fixed settlements during the rainy season. They number around 4.5 million people according to the 2008 Sudan census, constituting about 18% of the populationThe Dinka

Emily Clark’s new work, A Luminous Brotherhood, is an extensive study of a subject that has weirdly been neglected in scholarship: the career of the Afro-Creole Spiritualist Cercle Harmonique from 1858 to 1877. Religious studies scholar Clark has thoroughly mined the records of the Cercle, kept at the University of New Orleans, and produced one of the most important recent works I have seen in race and religion in American history.By focusing on Afro-Creole Spiritualism in New Orleans, we get

The focus of Blier’s book is on works she categorizes under Florescence and Post-Florescence eras. She ties the Florescence era to Obalufon II, an Ife king noted in Yoruba tradition as a major art patron and who Blier describes as the king and art patron that encouraged the marriage of old and new Ife, the period before and after the ‘emergence’ of Oduduwa. Drawing connections between Ife rituals such as Oramfe and Olojo in particular, Blier identifies the preoccupation of ancient Ife