Over 100 million people across 43 countries still follow Africa's traditional religions
Africa's indigenous faiths have no single scripture. They live in songs, myths, festivals and the memory of ancestors, who are believed to bless or trouble the living. Even where Christianity and Islam dominate, a Pew survey found many people across 19 countries holding onto six or more traditional beliefs.
These religions are enormously varied, but they share a family resemblance. Most are animistic, with polytheistic or pantheistic strands: spirits of nature, animals and places, higher and lower gods, sometimes a supreme creator such as Olodumare, Nyame or Chukwu, and in some cases a paired god and goddess like Mawu-Lisa. Humanity's task is usually understood as keeping nature and the supernatural in balance. Knowledge passes orally, as a cultural identity handed down through stories rather than a written creed.
Ancestors sit at the centre. The Harvard scholar Jacob Olupona calls ancestor veneration central to the African worldview. The dead are believed to occupy a higher plane than the living and can offer advice, luck and honour, or send illness, and they may insist their shrines be kept up. Many traditions also teach reincarnation within the family line; among the Serer, the supreme deity Roog is never reincarnated. Healers and diviners, who must be called by ancestors or gods and trained rigorously, counsel and treat the community.
Olupona rejects labelling these faiths as monotheistic or not, arguing that Western and Islamic categories flatten traditions in which some have a supreme being and others do not. He describes them as a whole way of life. In West and Central Africa, communal ceremonies often use driving drums and song to bring participants into trance, as in the Okuyi practised by Bantu peoples of Gabon and Cameroon. Neighbouring regions share patterns; across Central Africa, ancestor rituals and shrine cults recur.
Islam and Christianity have largely displaced indigenous religion, but people commonly blend both. The traditions also travelled: Yoruba and Igbo religions are popular in the Caribbean and parts of Latin America, and in the United States Voodoo is strongest along the Gulf of Mexico. Monotheism had a brief ancient precedent in Egypt, where Akhenaten imposed worship of the Aten until Tutankhamun reversed it.
Source: African traditional religions
