The Search for Peace in Times of Chaos—Volume more than other aspects in their records, partly because the travelers had found them most exotic and curious For centuries, TAR has been subjected to the view that African people are spiritually inferior TAR seemed unlike the religious forms people were familiar with in their respective homelands They had not seen any religious temples, churches or mosques This in particular, had raised some serious doubt in their minds whether indigenous Africans had any religion at all.5(Basing this theory on their own standards, of course.) Early European Christian missionaries as well as colonial soldiers and administrators who worked in Africa are credited with having made the first real effort to study Traditional African Religion and culture They were motivated largely…by the practical objective of gaining some knowledge about Africans to be able to work and communicate with them Christian missionaries in particular, needed to understand the language, basic ideas and concepts of the people in order to proclaim and preach the Gospel and thereby convert them A couple of them, especially those of the British and North American extraction, did in fact, spend some time with liberated African slaves in an effort to acquire a working knowledge of the culture and religion of their respective groups With the help of local interpreters and assistants, some were able to translate hymn books and catechism texts in local African languages Rev Thomas Jefferson for example, compiled a dictionary of the Yoruba language and wrote sympathetically about the traditional religion of the people in 1857 Several other missionaries who did not publish works supplied descriptive accounts of traditional religious materials in the periodic reports they sent back to the headquarters of their religious congregations, or sponsoring agencies Most of those reports are still available in archives in Europe.6 The desecration of Africa in the past by the Western…powers seriously affected the traditional cultures of the indigenous African people to the extent that many traditional beliefs, social values, customs, and rituals were either totally destroyed or ignored In most cases they were considered to be nothing more than Pagan values and superstitions Another level at which a real stigmatization of Africa occurred is that of scientific research, specifically with reference to human and social