People usually meet this subject as a list of unfamiliar names: Orisha, Ifa, Ekpe, Abasi. The names make sense only once the structure underneath them is clear. Across many West African peoples, that structure has four levels. A supreme creator stands at the top. Lesser deities and spirits often stand beneath. Ancestors hold a place of deep honor. Sacred societies give shape to community life. None of these levels sits in a separate religious compartment. Religion runs through economics, government and family as one whole, and that changes where a Christian conversation has to begin.
Abasiano Udofa lays out this structure in order. He is a Nigerian American whose family comes from a small group in southern Nigeria near the Atlantic coast, and he studied at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics. His account works because it starts with what a newcomer lacks: a shape to hang the names on.
Why does the phrase “West African religion” mislead?
The first correction is the singular. Udofa points out that West Africa has sixteen countries, and many of those countries hold several tribal groups. Each group developed its own understanding of God, because “most of the tribal groups had their ways that they viewed God engaged with the spiritual.” So he prefers a plural description: “I think it’s more properly said, like traditional indigenous tribal religions.”
Treat these traditions as one religion and you will assume that a practice from one group explains the belief of another. You will also miss the actual finding: a common shape appears across many groups even though names and practices differ. The shape can be described in general terms. The details belong to particular peoples.
A second prerequisite follows. These were not religions of a book. Udofa says the indigenous ways of relating to God were passed down orally, generation to generation: “it wasn’t codified, so it wasn’t written down in a book.” Keep that fact in mind. It explains why one of the levels below carries so much weight.
The four levels
The creator
At the top is a supreme being. Udofa describes the belief as widespread: “a lot of them believed in a supreme being, right. A being that was very, very great.” He also names this being’s role: “Usually the supreme being is attributed with creating the world.”
Two words in his description deserve attention. He says “a lot of them,” and he says “usually.” He is describing a strong pattern, not a creed every group signed. The responsible general statement is that many West African traditions recognized one great creator above everything else, known by different names among different peoples. Among Udofa’s people that name is Abasi, and his own name, Abasiano, means God’s gift. The idea of a high creator God lived in ordinary language long before any Bible was translated into it.
The lesser powers
The second level holds lesser deities and spirit beings. Udofa’s wording is more cautious here: beneath the supreme being “sometimes there were lesser deities.” This level is common but less uniform than the others.
His clearest example is the Yoruba, north of his own people. They recognized a great supreme being, a population of lesser beings called the Orisha, and the practice of Ifa divination. The Igbo, he notes, had different names for God again and different societies. The examples show the same two tiers, one great creator and many lesser powers, reappearing in different dress.
A predictable error is to assume the lesser deities replaced the creator, as though the high God were forgotten. Udofa’s description does not support that. The creator remains the great being at the top, and the lesser beings occupy a lower place. The structure is layered, not flat.
The ancestors
The third level is the one Udofa calls most consistent. Of all the features he lists, “some of the things that I think are uniform is, you know, beliefs and ancestors.” He extends this beyond West Africa to African religion more broadly: “people really, really respect their ancestors.”
He ties this directly to oral transmission. If nothing is written down, the elders keep a community’s knowledge, and the family line becomes the means by which belief and identity survive. In Udofa’s account, ancestors were honored because they maintained the family and the community.
Here a Christian needs a careful distinction, and Scripture supplies both sides of it. The commandment in Exodus 20:12 says, “Honour thy father and thy mother,” and the instinct to remember those who came before fits that command well. The same law, in Deuteronomy 18:10-12, forbids seeking out the dead as a source of spiritual guidance. Honor looks back at a person with gratitude. Veneration and contact treat that person as a spiritual power to be addressed. Jude 3 draws the line in the same place: memory and honor, yes; veneration and spiritual contact, no. That line lets a Christian take the ancestor level seriously without dismissing the very human loyalty underneath it.
The sacred societies
The fourth level is social, though it cannot be separated from the spiritual. Udofa says various societies arose among the tribal groups. Among his own people there was the Ekpe society, which he describes as “something that most people believed in or were a part of.”
He does not describe the inner workings of these societies, and it would be wrong to supply details he did not give. What he establishes is their reach. These were not clubs for the especially devout. Most people belonged to them or believed in them, so religious belief had a public, organized form.
Why can’t the levels be pulled out of ordinary life?
Every level described so far is woven into how a community works. Udofa makes the contrast with the West explicit. Western societies strive for a separation of church and state. In West African traditions, he says, that separation is hard even to think: “religion permeates every part of life. It permeates economics, it permeates, you know, government.”
Read the levels again with this in mind. The ancestors are bound to the family and its continuity. The societies are bound to community order. The creator is bound to the existence of the world itself. Belief and social structure are one arrangement seen from different sides.
One comparison may help, within limits. In much Western life, religion works like a room in a house, entered on certain days and left again. In the traditions Udofa describes, it is closer to the wiring, running through every room at once. The comparison breaks quickly: wiring is impersonal and identical everywhere, while these traditions are full of personal beings and differ from group to group. It shows only that religion has no single location. Beyond that, set it aside.
Isn’t this just “spiritual but not religious”?
Many young adults now describe themselves as spiritual rather than religious, and it is tempting to file the old tribal traditions under that heading. Udofa’s answer is yes and no. Yes, because West Africans hold a high respect for the spiritual and the sacred. No, in the way that matters most. Modern spirituality without religion is usually personal and portable, kept apart from work, politics and family duty. What Udofa describes is the reverse: spirituality bound to economics, government, family and shared societies. Anyone drawn to these traditions as a looser alternative to church is reaching for something they were never.
If this is what our ancestors believed, isn’t it the authentic choice?
This is the strongest objection, and real history stands behind it. Some people are leaving Christianity for West African traditions because they believe this is what they would have practiced if enslavement had not taken it from them.
Udofa adds context that strengthens the objection before he answers it. Many Europeans who encountered Africa did not understand the way of life they saw. They demonized the people or claimed there was no religion there at all, and sometimes used that claim to argue that Black people were not fully human. Much early academic writing on West African religion, he says, pushed back against exactly this, insisting, “We did have customs, we had societies, we had religious beliefs.” He also refuses to pretend Christianity was never forced on anyone: “There are points where it was definitely pushed on.”
So the first half of the answer grants what is true. These were real religions with real structure, held by thinking people. Calling them nothing repeats an old injustice.
The second half is a logical limit. Lisa Fields states it plainly: “just because you’ve had a belief before that that’s your, that’s truth, I think is just a false assumption.” Age does not make a belief true, and heritage does not settle whether it is accurate. She points to Abraham, whose family served other gods before God called him, as Joshua 24:2 records. Abraham’s earlier belief was his heritage. It was not therefore the truth about God. The question of truth has to be asked on its own terms, of every tradition, including Christian ones.
For readers who want to test that question against the history itself, Udofa points to Jacob Olupona’s work on traditional Yoruba belief and Lamin Sanneh’s books on how Christianity came to West Africa. Because so much was passed on orally, he also suggests asking West African friends’ parents what the older beliefs were.
Where does a Christian conversation begin?
Udofa argues that the turning point for Christianity in West Africa was translation. When the Bible came into local languages, translators kept the names communities already used for God. Abasi stayed Abasi. In his account, this worked as a redefinition: the great creator you already know is here, and here is who he is. He describes the effect this way: “once Christianity was translated into their language, it became not something that was foreign, but it became something that was your own.” That is why he can tell Black people who feel forced to choose that “Christianity can actually handle your blackness.”
The gospel also makes a claim the four-level structure has to reckon with. Udofa does not say how the lesser deities or the ancestors relate people to the creator, so what follows is an application rather than his argument. Wherever a tradition places many powers between human beings and the great creator, the Christian claim in 1 Timothy 2:5 is specific: “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” The comparison is between many spiritual powers and one human person who entered history. A Christian can honor the longing for the high God that the structure expresses while saying plainly that the access it seeks has been given in Christ alone.
Fields connects the translation story to Paul in Athens. In Acts 17:23, Paul tells the Athenians: “For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.” Paul starts with something true they already sensed, a God above their many gods, and gives that God a name and a history. He does not leave the altar as it was. In the same speech he calls his hearers to repent and points them to the risen Christ (Acts 17:30-31).
Then notice how Paul describes this God to people whose religion filled their whole city. In Acts 17:28 he says: “For in him we live, and move, and have our being.” Paul offered no God of one compartment to people who had never kept their gods in one. A Christian who speaks with someone formed by these traditions, while living as though faith were a Sunday room, will offer something smaller than what that person already has. The God Paul declared claims every room of the house.