Emitai

Emitai is the supreme creator of the Jola (Diola), a sky god whose name is built from emit, a word that denotes both the sky and the year. Remote and rarely petitioned in his own name, Emitai is nonetheless the origin of all life, the giver of rain, and the source of human knowledge of rice-farming, ironworking, and healing. The deity governs the community not through a shrine of its own but through the ukine (singular boekine), the many spirit-shrines that Diola tradition holds to be Emitai's first offspring and that act as intermediaries between people and the high god. Emitai also speaks directly to chosen individuals through dreams and visions, a channel of revelation that runs from the pre-colonial male prophets to the female prophets of the twentieth century. Sources differ on whether Emitai is gendered; the deity is most often invoked without a fixed sex, transcending the human categories of male and female.

Children

• Ehugna
• Hupila

Domains

• creation
• sky and rain
• agricultural knowledge

Powers

• creates the world and its inhabitants
• grants and withholds rain
• reveals commands through chosen prophets
• creates the spirit-shrines that mediate the deity

Epithets

• Ata-Emit

Relations

• child: Hupila
• child: Ehugna

Sources

• Robert M. Baum, Shrines of the Slave Trade: Diola Religion and Society in Precolonial Senegambia (Oxford University Press, 1999)
• Louis-Vincent Thomas, Les Diola: essai d'analyse fonctionnelle sur une population de Basse-Casamance (Dakar: IFAN, 1959)
• Molefi Kete Asante and Ama Mazama, eds., Encyclopedia of African Religion (Sage, 2009), s.v. 'Diola'