You scroll past it on a Tuesday. A post that says the faith you grew up in was handed to your grandparents at gunpoint, and that the older, truer thing was the spirituality the missionaries burned. If you are African or of African descent, that lands somewhere tender. So here is the honest answer before the argument: it depends on what you mean by African spirituality. Mahlatse Mashua, a South African apologist raised inside African Traditional Religion, says the culture colonialism demonized deserves to come back. But the core practice of ancestor veneration, on his reading, cannot sit beside biblical faith, because both hand the same job to a different person.
There are real views in this conversation, and people who love God hold different ones. What follows is where Mashua lands the weight, and where he keeps his hands open.
Is African spirituality one thing, or many?
Many. And Mashua thinks the conversation goes sideways the moment we forget that. When the topic trends online, the loudest voices are often from the diaspora, Black Americans and Caribbeans, describing something that does not always match what continental Africans actually practice. Mashua grew up in South Africa. His family took him to a sangoma when he was a child. So when he pushes back, he is not theorizing from a distance.
His move is careful. He does not tell people their experiences were fake. He separates the experience from the reading of it.
“I can agree with the fact that you’ve had an experience without necessarily agreeing with how you interpret your experience.” (Mahlatse Mashua)
That distinction has to land before anything else can. A real encounter is one thing. What it means is another. Mashua wants the conversation to slow down long enough to tell them apart.
Abasiano Udofa, who studies West African traditional religion, fills in the picture from another corner of the continent. Most of these systems, she notes, held a supreme being who created the world, alongside lesser deities, and almost all of them honored ancestors. The shape is not uniform across Africa, but the family resemblance is real. Lumping it all into one online caricature, from either side, does it an injustice.
Did colonial Christianity damage African culture?
Yes, and Mashua says the church has to own that out loud before it earns the right to critique anything. He is not defending a clean version of mission history. Clothing, music, rites of passage, ordinary cultural things with nothing spiritual to condemn, got swept up in a wholesale rejection that was never theologically required. That left a wound. For a lot of people exploring African spirituality today, that wound is the starting point, not the doctrine.
But he holds two truths at once, and refuses to drop either.
“There were some beautiful aspects of African cultures that were demonized. But at the same time, there are certain things which are part of that culture, part of that history, which come into direct and sharp conflict with the biblical data.” (Mahlatse Mashua)
Both things are true. The demonization was wrong. The theological critique still stands. Mashua will not trade one for the other, and that refusal is the whole posture of the piece.
Joseph Byamukama, a Ugandan scholar, pushes the point further and turns it around. Africans, he argues, traditionally held to one supreme creator long before any missionary arrived. So the missionary did not bring God to Africa. On his reading, God brought the missionary to Africa, to a continent already reaching for the One it half-knew. That reframe matters. It means the gospel was not a foreign god conquering a godless place. It was a name finally given to a presence already felt.
What does African Traditional Religion actually teach about ancestors?
Mashua describes a world where the spiritual and the physical overlap. The dead do not vanish. Ancestors stay active, able to bless or curse, and they sit in a middle seat between the living and a Creator God who is real but felt to be far off. He explains the internal logic without mocking it, because it was his own.
“We don’t pray to ancestors. We pray to God through our ancestors. They sense their places as mediators in the relationship between man and God. In some African communities, God is considered a king who’s so far away that, how dare you just walk into the cult of the king? You need somebody to mediate for you, somebody who lives at least in proximity with the cult of the king.” (Mahlatse Mashua)
Read it slowly and you can feel why it makes sense to people. You do not barge into a king’s throne room off the street. You go through someone with standing. The ancestor is the relative who already has a seat near the throne. Udofa describes the same instinct from the West African side: religion there is not a Sunday compartment. It runs through economics, government, family, the whole of life, with none of the church-and-state separation a Western reader assumes. To get the objection right, you first have to feel the pull of the thing you are objecting to.
Why does Mashua say ancestor veneration conflicts with the Bible?
Because of one word: mediator. The seat ancestors hold in African Traditional Religion, the go-between linking people to a distant God, is the exact seat the New Testament reserves for Christ and no one else. That is the collision.
His anchor is 1 Timothy 2:5, “There is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” He reads Deuteronomy 18:11, which forbids consulting the dead, as a direct word on the practice. And he points to Isaiah 8:19, where God asks, “Why should the living consult the dead? Should not my people look to their God?” The question in the text is the question of the whole conversation.
Mashua’s conclusion is blunt. Biblical Christianity, he says, is not compatible with the core elements of ancestral practice. He does not arrive there as an outside critic. He weighed both frameworks from the inside and found them at odds at the very center.
Now the fair objection. Someone inside the tradition would say this is not worship at all. We do not pray to ancestors. We pray to God through them, the way Mashua himself described it. They are more like elders who carry the message up, not gods who answer it. So why call it a rival to Christ?
Mashua’s answer is that the function is the problem, not the label. Whether you call it worship or honor, the structure puts a created being in the one seat Scripture says is filled. Justice Okoronkwo, who comes at this from the diaspora rather than the continent, names the danger without softening it.
“Having one leg in Christianity and the other in African traditional religion is setting yourself up for a great fall.” (Justice Okoronkwo)
Okoronkwo and Mashua reach the same place from opposite shores. The African instinct that God is real is right. Okoronkwo puts it plainly: the concept of the divine was not brought to Africa by the missionaries. The problem he names is the next step, that the tradition believes in the supreme God but does not build a way to actually relate to Him. That gap is exactly the gap Christ closes.
Where is the line between culture and idolatry?
This is the most useful thing in the conversation, and the part most people skip. Mashua draws a line between culture and religion. Not everything African is African Traditional Religion. And not everything in African Traditional Religion is equally in conflict with Scripture. Some of what got burned was just culture, food, dress, ceremony, rhythm, and it should come home. Some of what was practiced does collide with the biblical account. Sorting the two is the work.
He guards both edges. Against the church that demonized everything, he says reclaim the culture. Against the romantic who wants to baptize the whole pre-colonial past, he says this:
“Not everything is right just because it existed.” (Mahlatse Mashua)
Pre-colonial Africa was not a theological paradise. He can say that without flinching, because he is not an outsider scoring points. Kevin Muriithi Ndereba, a Kenyan theologian, gives the line a working grid. Inside any tradition, he says, there are things that conflict with the faith, things that are neutral, and things that are excellent. The job is discernment, not a verdict on the whole. And he keeps the default warm: culture, he argues, is a gift from God, not a threat to be managed. You start by receiving it, then you weigh it, piece by piece.
Has Christ always been present in African history?
Mashua closes by pulling the floor out from under the whole either-or. If African Christians feel forced to choose between their African self and their faith, the faith was handed to them wrong. Christianity in Africa is not a foreign implant. Its roots on the continent run older than most of European Christianity. He reads Hebrews 1:1, that God spoke in many ways across the ages, as a reason to expect God’s fingerprints already in African history, pointing forward.
“I would say to people who are really struggling, embracing African spirituality as an alternative to the wrongs, before you do that, look at the person of Christ, who, by the way, has always been present in our cultural histories.” (Mahlatse Mashua)
Byamukama lands in the same key. The resurrection, he says, is one of the most beautiful things Christianity brought to the continent, and the God it announces has already triumphed over every principality and power. That is the offer underneath the whole argument. Not a trade of your blackness for someone else’s religion. Udofa says it about as clearly as it can be said: Christianity can actually handle your blackness. The question was never whether God has been near Africa. He has. The question is where His full self shows up. Mashua’s answer, and Okoronkwo’s, and Byamukama’s, is the same. In Christ.
Quick answers
Is African spirituality bad? Mashua says it is not one thing, so the question needs splitting. The culture that colonialism demonized deserves reclaiming. The specific practice of ancestor veneration, on his reading, conflicts with Scripture, because it puts a created being in the mediator seat the Bible reserves for Christ.
Is African spirituality the same everywhere? No. Mashua argues continental practice often differs from how diaspora communities describe it, and Abasiano Udofa shows the metaphysics vary across regions. Conflating them distorts the conversation.
Did Christianity destroy African culture? In part, yes. Mashua says missionaries and colonial Christianity unjustly demonized clothing, music, and rites of passage that had nothing spiritual to condemn. He owns that wrong and still holds a theological objection to ancestor veneration.
Why does Mashua say ancestor veneration conflicts with the Bible? Both ATR and the New Testament assign the role of mediator between God and people to one figure. ATR gives it to ancestral spirits. The New Testament gives it to Christ alone (1 Timothy 2:5). Mashua argues both cannot be true at once.
Can African Christians reclaim their culture? Mashua says yes, and they should. Kevin Muriithi Ndereba calls culture a gift from God and sorts any tradition into what conflicts with the faith, what is neutral, and what is excellent. The culture comes home. The theological claims get weighed against Scripture.
Has Christ always been present in African history? Mashua argues yes, reading Hebrews 1:1 to say God has left fingerprints in African history pointing toward Christ. On his view, Christianity in Africa is not an import but the recognition of what was already there.
This piece draws on Mahlatse Mashua’s conversation on the Jude 3 Project podcast, with added voices from the Jude 3 corpus. Listen to the full episode for his personal story and the African theologians he recommends.