THE AMBIGUITIES OF OKOT PBITEK'S DECOLONIZATION OF AFRICAN RELIGION

Abstract 

A cursory glance reveals that anthropologists, philosophers, historians, colonial masters and missionaries have understood Africa variously. Unfortunately, this understanding has  often been in the negative. This has relegated  Africa  to  the background of mere obscurantism, and misled the world into believing that Africans are savages, primitive 

and reside in a dark continent where they sleep on trees, eat raw fruits and consort with apes. The need to reconstruct this history, has led to the emergence of positive efforts to re-establish, dig out and recover the stolen and damaged personality of the African by both scholars of African and western backgrounds. Okot p'Bitek remains one of those 

African  scholars  who  have  distinguished  themselves  in  the  critique  of  western misunderstanding  or  distortion  of  the  African  realities  or  worldview.  This  piece, therefore, focused on his critique of the western understanding of the African worldview. This work discovered that while trying to  make an  amend  to the  disfiguration of the 

African reality by western and African scholars, Okot showed himself a different class of his  western  and  African  counterparts  as  he  is  not  without  the  influence  of  western thinkers.  This  paper  employed  the  critical  approach  in  the  study  of  Okot  p'Bitek's understanding of the concept of African traditional religion by some western and African thinkers. Given the very nature and concerns of this approach in research, it would focus on a reflective assessment of Okot p'Bitek's perspective in order to reveal the power and challenge the structures of his argument. 

Keywords: Okot p'Bitek, Decolonization, Hellenization, African Traditional Religion