Indigeneity in African Religions, based on mixed methods and sources: religious ethnography, in-depth interviews and archival data, is the first book to explore the historical origins, worldviews, cosmologies, ritual symbolism and praxis of the indigenous Oza people in south-western Nigeria. The book provides robust insights of Oza people as a dynamic, unfolding narrative in motion. Through decolonizing burdens of history, memory and method, Afe Adogame reconstructs Oza cultural and religious imagination. The author's locationality and positionality plugs the book within decolonizing knowledges and indigeneity discourses, thus unpacking the complexity of 'indigeneity' and contributing to its conceptual understanding within socioreligious change in contemporary Africa. Historical migration myths, encounters and relationship with neighbours, religious traditions, and multiple colonial hegemonies demonstrate a framework of understanding Oza indigenous religious, sociocultural, and political imaginaries.
Oza understanding of the cosmos is expedient in appreciating their religious worldviews, thought patterns and praxis, genealogies of kinship and sacral kingship. The book demonstrates how ritual spaces, gendered roles and powers and rituals of passage are expressions of a coherent system of thought and action. The future of Oza indigeneity in the face of modernity is illuminated against the backlash of encounters, contestations with multiple hegemonies; transmissions of Christianity and Islam; and indigenous agencies and (re)appropriations. Thus, any theorizations of such encounters must be cognizant of instantiations of indigeneity politics and identity, culture, tradition and power dynamics.
