Encyclopedia of African Religion

Encyclopedia of African Religion

The Encyclopedia of African Religion is the first comprehensive work to assemble ideas, concepts, discourses, and extensive essays on African religion. Over the years, there have been numerous encyclopedias on religion from other parts of the world, but African religion has often been relegated to “primitive religions,” “African mythologies,” or “tribal religions” sections of such works on religion.

It is as if African religion is an afterthought in the eyes of the authors and editors of such volumes. Of course, these designations are clearly based on outmoded and problematic Western notions of Africa, and we have created this encyclopedia as a monument to the memory of those Africans who left us enough information from which to rediscover for the world the original beauty and majesty of African culture. There were two objectives in advancing this work to the public. First, we wanted to provide the primary material necessary for further research, analysis, and exposition of the concrete beliefs of African people. Second, we sought to elevate the discourse around African religion, suggesting by the presentation of nearly 500 entries that there was still much we did not know about African culture.

Africa is the second largest continent in the world. Yet its intellectual and cultural contributions remain among the least understood if we take the written records about the continent and its people as sources of knowledge about the continent. There are still those whose knowledge of Africa is grounded in the perceptions and attitudes of missionaries, merchants, and marines who have occupied the continent through foreign religions, trade, or guns. 

The enormity of African contribution to ideas of religion, spirituality, and ethics has gone unappreciated by religious scholars, although at the beginning of human history, Africa makes its case for the origin of religion in an official, formal manner. It is our hope that the reflection on African religion occasioned by these entries will enhance our understanding of the African world and provide a new adventure for comparative studies. Unquestionably, a work as innovative and comprehensive as this encyclopedia makes its mark in the area of intellectual inquiry by staking out new areas of knowledge. It provides the reader with new metaphors, tropes, figures of speech, modes of reasoning, etymologies, analogies, and cosmogonies to satiate the intellect. Only in such an encyclopedia as this can one truly grasp the enormity of Africa’s contribution to religious ideas. Thus, this work presents richly textured ideas of spirituality, ritual, and initiation while advancing new theological categories, cosmological narratives, and ways to conceptualize ethical behavior. Given that we viewed African religion as one religion and the African continent as a whole, we were inclined to introduce classical African religious ideas, from the beginning of Kemet to the arrival of Christianity and later Islam in Africa, as significant forerunners of much of continental African thought. The same appeal to ethics, based on righteous character; the same search for eternal life, found in living a life where good outweighs evil; and the same openness to ancestral spirits, kas, as remaining among the community of the living, creates an appreciation of the recurring cycle of humanity.

Correspondences of language and concept as with Amen, Amani, and Imani, which are transgenerational and transcontinental, remain vibrant parts of the African legacy of religion. When the Akan use the words Kwame, Asare, and Nkwa, they recall the more ancient Amen, Ausar, and Ankh. Several books, starting with the older works of Eva Meyerowitz, have examined these correspondences. Of course, in more recent times, Afrocentric authors such as Mubabinge Bilolo, Chinweizu Chinweizu, and Theophile Obenga