Serer Religion

Serer religion places one god at the top and then spends almost none of its ritual attention on him. Roog is self-created, the origin of everything, and is described in the tradition as having withdrawn; there is no cult of Roog, no image and no priesthood dedicated to him. He is invoked at the opening and closing of prayers and in the formula that names him as the one who gives and takes. This shape, a single high god who is real but not approached, recurs across West Africa and is one of the reasons the region's religions have been classified so inconsistently.

The pangool are what the religion actually works with. The word is plural; a single one is a fangool. They are the ancestors, and also the spirits attached to particular places, and the two categories are not sharply divided, because an ancestor of standing may become the fangool of the ground the family holds. A household keeps a shrine, sometimes a post, sometimes a stone or a tree, at which libations are poured and requests made. What is asked for is specific: a birth, a recovery, rain, safety on a journey. The pangool are understood to carry these to Roog, and also to act on their own account, and to be offended by neglect in the same way a living relative would be.

The saltigue stands apart from both. A saltigue is a diviner and rain-priest whose office is hereditary in certain lineages and whose training is long. What a saltigue does publicly is read the year ahead: the rains, the harvest, sickness, deaths, and dangers to the community. The office survived the Islamisation of the Serer better than most of the rest of the tradition, and saltigue are consulted today by people who are otherwise Muslim or Catholic, which tells you something about how these communities hold more than one thing at once.

Xooy is the tradition's public event. Held annually before the rainy season, most prominently at Fatick, it gathers saltigue from across the Serer country to deliver their readings of the year to come in front of a large audience that sits through the night. Each saltigue speaks in turn, in a formal and deliberately obscure style, and the pronouncements are debated afterwards against what actually happens. UNESCO inscribed Xooy on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2013, noting both its standing in Serer life and the difficulty of transmitting the saltigue's knowledge.

The Ndut is the other institution that has held. It is the initiation through which Serer boys pass into adulthood: a withdrawal from the village into the bush for a period of seclusion and instruction, and a return with a changed status. What is taught during the seclusion belongs to those who have passed through it, and the atlas records the institution rather than its content.

The wider setting is a community that is now largely Muslim and substantially Catholic. The Serer resisted Islamisation for a long time, and the resistance is part of how the community remembers itself: the battle of Fandane-Thiouthioune in 1867, in which a Serer force under Maad a Sinig Kumba Ndoffene Famak Joof defeated a jihadist army, is the episode most often cited. Conversion came anyway, gradually and mostly without force, through the twentieth century. What is striking is how much survived the change of religious affiliation. Family shrines to the pangool, consultation of saltigue, the Ndut, and the funeral obligations owed to the dead are all still practised by people who would describe themselves as Muslim or Christian, and who see no contradiction requiring their attention.