Oxford Dictionary of World Mythology

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Africa

Africa

Sahara, The West Coast, East and South Africa, Madagascar

Mythologies abound in Africa. Tribes possess their own traditions, and even where they share a language with their neighbours, like the Bantu-speakers of East and South Africa, it is the diversity of local belief that surprises rather than the evidence of a common heritage. Factors making for this mythological variety are several. First, there is the size of the continent itself, along with the accompanying range of climate. Some tribes wander the open plains, herding cattle and hunting game; others raise crops or fertile riverside clearings amid dense equatorial jungle: these peoples would find the habitat of the Bushmen unendurable. Once the sole inhabitants of the area south of the Zambezi River, the Bushmen were decimated by incoming Bantu tribesmen and by later white settlers, until today surviving tribes eke out a living on the fringes of the Kalahari Desert. A second...

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