What Do West African Traditional Religions Actually Believe

Ask most people what West African traditional religions believe and you will hear about drums, masks, curses and whatever a film last showed them. The trouble with that picture is that it has no history in it. On the Jude 3 Project podcast, Abasiano Udofa, a Nigerian American who studied at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics, describes something very different. He describes many religions rather than one, carried orally through family lines, usually centered on a great creator God, often including lesser deities, marked by deep respect for ancestors, and woven into economics and government. This guide helps you build that picture by putting the pieces in order. Along the way, you will learn to tell what a source actually establishes from what people later said about it.

You can work through it alone in about an hour. A group can use one long session or two shorter ones, with the timeline practice as the dividing point. You will need a Bible, a large sheet of paper and the patience to leave some boxes empty. Questions about how a Christian should engage these traditions come later. Description comes first, because a response to something you have misdescribed answers no one.

Begin with what you were handed

Before reading further, write down three things you associate with West African traditional religion. Do not filter them. Next to each one, note where it came from: a movie, a sermon, a social media clip, a conversation with someone from West Africa, a book, or you cannot remember.

Most people find that their associations came from outsiders, entertainment or nowhere they can name. That is the starting problem. Udofa says that he pushes people to “please look at the actual historical story, not a caricature of it.” Lisa Fields names why the caricature survives even when information is plentiful: “people still look for easy answers.” Keep your list. You will come back to it at the end.

For groups: collect the lists anonymously and read a few aloud. The point is to see the pattern of sources, not to embarrass anyone. If someone in the room has West African family roots, do not turn them into the group’s expert witness unless they offer.

Scripture on peoples and their histories

Two speeches in Acts show Paul addressing Gentile audiences who had their own long religious histories. Read Acts 14:8-18 first. In Lystra, a crowd sees a man healed and tries to offer sacrifice to Paul and Barnabas as gods. Paul refuses that worship, and in the same breath he says of the living God in Acts 14:17: “Nevertheless he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.”

Then read Acts 17:22-31. Speaking in Athens, Paul says in Acts 17:26-27 that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us.”

These are speeches reported within a historical narrative, so read them first for what Paul said to these particular audiences. Do some careful observation before drawing any conclusion:

• What does Paul claim God did for every nation, including people who had no Scriptures?
• In Lystra, what does Paul reject, and what does he affirm, in the same moment?
• What do these passages not claim? Notice that neither speech approves every practice of its hearers, and neither treats their history as meaningless.

One more verse sets the method for the rest of this guide. Proverbs 18:17 reads: “He that is first in his own cause seemeth just; but his neighbour cometh, and searcheth him.” This is a proverb, a principle of wisdom rather than a guarantee, and it fits historical work well. The first account you hear of any people, whether it comes from a missionary, a film or a modern influencer, deserves a second witness.

Four facts about the evidence itself

A historian asks what kind of sources exist before asking what they say. Udofa’s account gives four facts that shape every later conclusion.

The subject is plural. Udofa points out that West Africa has 16 countries, many of them holding several tribal groups, and that “most of the tribal groups had their ways that they viewed God engaged with the spiritual.” Any general statement is a description of a pattern across peoples. It is not the creed of a single religion.

The tradition was oral. Udofa says the indigenous ways of relating to God were not written: “it wasn’t codified, so it wasn’t written down in a book.” Instead, “it was oral traditions passed down from generations to generations.” For a historian, this cuts two ways. There is no ancient scripture to consult. And many of the earliest written descriptions came from outsiders who were not members of the communities they described. Udofa connects the oral character directly to the honor given to ancestors, since the elders and the family line were how a community’s knowledge survived.

A common shape still appears. Udofa says many of these traditions believed in a supreme being, “a being that was very, very great,” and adds, “Usually the supreme being is attributed with creating the world.” Beneath that being, “sometimes there were lesser deities.” He gives the Yoruba as one example, with a great supreme being, lesser beings called the Orisha, and Ifa divination. He also notes that the Igbo had different names for God and different societies. Notice his care with “usually” and “sometimes.” He describes a recurring pattern without inventing a uniform doctrine.

Religion was not a separate compartment. Udofa contrasts the Western push for separating church and state with what he calls an integrated way of life, where religion “permeates every part of life. It permeates economics, it permeates government.”

Stop and compare these four facts with your opening list. Which of your associations would survive if you had to name the specific people, and the source, behind it?

Put the story in order

This is the main practice. Draw a long horizontal line across your paper. Beneath it, make three rows: what happened, who says so, and how someone could check it. Then place the following turning points from Udofa’s account along the line. Do not add dates he did not give. Where you do not know a date, leave the space empty and write a question mark.

1. Before written records. Many peoples, many names for God, beliefs carried orally through families and communities.
2. European encounter. Udofa says many Europeans did not grasp what they saw “because they just didn’t understand the lifestyle,” and that “they would essentially just demonize the people and or say that there was no religion.” He adds that the claim of no religion was sometimes used to argue that Black people were not fully human.
3. The first church. Udofa says that, as far as he knows, “the first church in West Africa was in Ghana,” through the Portuguese. He says he knows of no historical evidence of Christianity in West Africa before Europeans arrived. Christianity was present far earlier in North Africa and Ethiopia, but that is a different region. Lisa Fields raised exactly this gap, because the enslaved Africans brought across the Atlantic did not come mainly from North Africa.
4. Translation. According to Udofa, Bible translation into local languages involved missionary linguists and Black abolitionists, including recaptured enslaved Africans who knew the languages. The translations kept existing names for God. Among his people, the word for God is Abasi, and his own name means God’s gift. He calls the preservation of languages an unintended consequence of this work.
5. The colonial period. Udofa does not deny coercion: “There are points where it was definitely pushed on.” He also says conversions in this period were low.
6. After colonialism. Udofa says “the numbers of conversions were quite low compared to the numbers of conversions post-colonialism.”
7. Early academic study. Udofa describes early scholarship on West African religion as a defense against the claim of no religion, insisting, in his words, “We did have customs, we had societies, we had religious beliefs.”
8. Today. Lisa Fields notes that some people are leaving Christianity for West African traditions, believing this is the faith they would have had if it had not been taken from them.

Now go back over the line with a second pen. Circle every entry that is a datable event, something that either happened at a time and place or did not. Underline every entry that is an interpretation of why things happened. “The first church in West Africa was in Ghana” is a claim about an event, and a reader could check it against historical records. Udofa’s argument that translation was the driving force behind West Africans accepting Christianity is an interpretation. It may be correct, but it is proved differently, by weighing many cases and motives. A speaker on a podcast is a witness to his own reading of the history. His statement is not the end of the investigation, and the “how someone could check it” row is where your next reading begins.

Udofa names where he did his own checking. He mentions the work of Olupona, a Yoruba scholar at Harvard Divinity School who writes on traditional Yoruba belief. He says he has read nearly all of Lamin Sanneh’s books on how Christianity came to West Africa. And he mentions academic articles on specific peoples. If you want to extend this practice, choose one people group and one of these sources, and test a single entry on your timeline.

Two claims that have to stand together

The timeline makes one thing hard to avoid. Christianity was sometimes forced on West Africans, and many West Africans also chose it, in large numbers, after the forcing powers left. Udofa holds both. Lisa Fields does the same when she describes how the church should talk about it: “we’re not gonna say it was never forced on them, but to be honest about the facts.”

A simple morality play needs only one of those claims. Real history needs both. It also guards against two opposite mistakes. One is assuming that later church growth explains why earlier people believed what they believed. The other is assuming that an older belief is the true one because it came first. Lisa Fields makes the second point directly, arguing that holding a belief earlier does not make it the truth. Truth has to be tested on its own terms, for every tradition, including Christian ones.

Notice too that the sources themselves had purposes. Outsiders who denied any African religion had reasons for denying it. Udofa hears a defensive tone in the early scholarship that answered them. Neither fact makes a source worthless. Both tell you what question each source was trying to answer.

Oral history, one family at a time

Because these traditions were passed on orally, Udofa recommends a second kind of research. He suggests that if you have West African friends, you “ask their parents and kind of see what they tell you.” He did this himself. When his grandmother visited the United States, he sat her down and interviewed her about how their family became Christian.

He reports her account as follows. When his great-grandmother’s infant daughter, his grandmother, was sick with polio, the great-grandmother took her to a local traditional healer, who said there was no hope. She then lifted the child up to God and prayed. The child recovered, and his great-grandmother went to church and was saved. Udofa says he researched the story for himself. Treat it as what it is: one family’s remembered testimony, not a promise about how God answers every prayer. Also notice what it shows historically. Within three generations of one family, the traditional healer and the church stood in the same town. “Traditional religion” is not a distant abstraction for many West African families. For them it is family memory.

Practice: If you have access to an elder from a West African family, and they are willing, ask for a short conversation. Explain why you are asking and accept a no without pressing. Possible questions include what names their people used for God, who people went to in sickness or trouble, what societies existed in their community, and how and when their family first became Christian, if it did. Write down their words as exactly as you can. Then mark which details they saw themselves and which they heard from others. Some people regard certain practices as private or sacred, so do not push past what someone offers. If you have no such contact, read one academic article on a specific people group and do the same marking with it.

Questions for discussion

1. Which entry on your timeline changed your picture the most, and was it a datable event or an interpretation?
2. Udofa’s evidence includes his reading, his family’s testimony and his own experience as a Nigerian American. How should each kind of evidence be weighed, and where would you want a second witness?
3. Acts 14:17 says God “left not himself without witness” among people without Scripture. What does that claim require you to take seriously in West African history, and what does it leave unsaid?
4. Why might the earliest written descriptions of an oral tradition be the least reliable ones? What would make an outsider’s account more trustworthy?
5. How can a history include real coercion and real free acceptance at the same time? Can you think of another history that works this way?
6. If you were explaining these traditions to someone who knows only the film version, which single fact from this study would you start with, and why that one?

For groups: when your study later turns from description to engagement, keep the distinction Jude 3 draws on ancestors in view: memory and honor are legitimate, while veneration and spiritual contact are not. That conversation goes better once the group can describe accurately what it is evaluating.

Return to your first list

Take out the three associations you wrote at the start. Cross out any that did not survive. Rewrite the others so they name a specific people, a period and a source. If one still has no source, leave it marked with a question mark rather than letting it settle back into certainty.

Then keep one question for the coming week: when someone tells you what a people believed, whether that person is a preacher, a filmmaker, a convert or a critic, how do they know?