Traditional African Beliefs and Customs

In African context, Nigeria presents the largest concentration of everything that is traditionally African from tourism, traditions, customs and belief respectively. To elucidate this point, Ghanaian American writer Kwasi Sarkodie-Mensah points out:

For example, Peeking at the eggs on which a hen is sitting was believed to make you blind. A pregnant woman who ate pork could have a baby with a mouth like that of a pig. Among a Nigerian tribe Yoruba, it was believed that there were spirits hidden in rivers and hills in various cities. Since these spirits were there to protect the people, they were not to be disturbed on certain days of the week. In almost all Nigerian societies, there is a strong belief that most disease and death are caused supernaturally, by witchcraft, curses, or charms. For a long time, the tribe Ibos believed that twins were an abomination and be killed at birth. Among some of the Hausa people, it was believed that marrying a Yoruba woman could result in Mystical dangers such as serious sickness or even death.

In many Nigeria cultures, elders are supposed to be served first during a meal but leave food in the bowl for the children to eat as leftovers. The proverb, “the elder who consumes all his food will wash his own dishes,” attest to this belief. (Retrieved from http://www.everyculture.com/multi/Le-Pa/Nigerian-Americans.html on 20/1/2014).

Such context is crucial when analyzing what makes the country rich in custom, belief and culture which extends to various countries in African. However, such notion has been inexistence since festival and tourism plays a great impact in physical and environment, political and economy. Most research has tended to ignore or play down the impact which results from environmen...

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...will not be creative. Thus, our brain impose meaning on sensory information, they often present us with a coherent picture or the best hypothesis, when in reality there is always ambiguity (Snyder, 2002: 7). The context is important when we analyze the human behavior, emotion and belief in relation to festival. In order to elucidate this point, Charles Darwin discovered the reason why human exist and even went further to ask the question of the sort “What is Life?” Emotional/motivational circuits are innately wired into the brain by evolution and these bring about mediate functions that contribute to survival and wellbeing of the organism (Le Doux, 2012: 2). Charles Darwin went further to describe those human emotions as follows: Happiness, Fear, Sadness, Disgust and Surprise etc. He further explains that these aspects of human emotions reflect our ancestral past.