11. Climate Rituals: Cultural Response for Climate Change Adaptations in Africa

The threat posed by climate change to Africa’s development and growth is real. To move along a climate-resilient-development pathway, Africa must respond and implement effective climate change adaptation measures, so that climate-related risks and opportunities support development objectives. This can partly be achieved by recognising the rich interactions between climate and culture, and harnessing cultural science, knowledge and technologies. Informed by the anthropological theory of cultural ecology, this chapter, framed on the prism of weather and climate-related modification rituals, sets an understanding of how communities across Africa have, over the centuries, characteristically, utilised this form of culture to respond and adapt to categories of climate change. Drawn from evidence from a swathe of extant data, this study interprets the ritual practices and explains the logical basis, wisdom, understanding, thought-patterns and imagination underlying and informing their foundation from purposively selected cases representing various regional zones across Africa. In considering the principal tenets structuring this body of knowledge across a multiplicity of socio-cultural, economic, political, geographical and anthropological settings, civilisations and histories, this chapter highlights insightful understanding of the existence of a pattern of unity and diversity in the ‘climate rituals’ which have developed as a human adaptation to climate change across Africa, and emphasises the value of such rituals as a prototype for cultural response adaptations to climate change. The study recommends incorporating the insights derived from this form of knowledge and science into the design of creative multipronged climate change response adaptations in contemporary Africa.