Conversion et quête d'une identité religieuse africaine : entre acculturation, inculturation et syncrétisme.

The religious fact is both ontological and cultural. Yet, in the African space where religiosity is at the everyday rendezvous of the human, the spring of conversions to the so-called revealed monotheistic religions that accompanied the colonial temporality was unfolded according to a dynamic straddling between a radical Metamora and a quest (or conservation) of a religious identity taking into account African traditions and customs. Thus, from the acculturating denial of ancestral religions to the awareness of values that one was tending to deny indiscriminately, the conversion will be both a surpassing and a necessity of a renewal capable of conferring more rooting on the adopted practice. The meeting of religions (that of the colonized and the colonizer) led to a path that imposes a choice between three ramifications: that of a fundamentalist conversion which aims at denying all ancestral cultures; that of an open conversion that integrates values which are specific to Africa in the practice of liturgy without omitting the meaning and the key theological concepts and that of an African conversion which is common in all religious practices to give birth to a sensual religiosity that best expresses the African reality. These tendencies respectively call for acculturation, enculturation and syncretism. Thus, the problem that underlies the approach of this article is the following: what type of conversion for a greater well-being of the African religious practice? The challenge of this debate which puts on the balance African authenticity and authenticity doctrinal of the religions is the one of the mode to be of the conversion or the reconversion for the depth of the relational commitment of the convert with the transcendence and the society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]