Welcome to the African Cultural Astronomy Project

Cultural astronomy focuses on the many ways that people and cultures interact with celestial bodies and celestial events. More familiar names for cultural astronomy are ethnoastronomy, indigenous, endogenous, traditional or folk astronomy. Like ancient people everywhere, Africans wondered at the sky and struggled to make sense of it.

The cultural astronomy of Africans is rich with mythical figures, cosmology and cosmogony, and divination methods that use observations of celestial bodies. African cultural astronomy entwines with religious beliefs and practices, agriculture, artistic mediums, folklore, and social hierarchies. Africans use celestial bodies for practical purposes. Africans use the positions of stars for navigating at night. They observe the Sun and Moon for timekeeping and creating an accurate calendar. African women study the phases of the moon to keep track of their menses and fertility cycles. Thus, while modern astronomy is quite new and unpopular in most parts of the continent, cultural astronomy has a long and rich tradition in Africa and a far more extensive cultural impact.