God

Tell me what kind of God you worship and I will tell you who you are! Such a maxim means that the notion of God impacts the perception of the nature of the African people because religion plays a crucial role in people's identity. Misconceptions abound on the African vision of God. The question regarding the African vision of God arises as a problem in the context of globalization, especially the encounter with modernity, the encounter between Africa and the outside world—namely, the West with its secularism, atheism, and Christianity, and the Arab world and Islam. This encounter occurred in a context of unequal power relationships. Dominated militarily, politically, and economically, Africa came to be dominated also culturally, epistemologically, and, most important, religiously. Its languages were demoted to meaningless dialects, its healers to witch doctors, its religion to fetishism, and its spiritual beings to idols.

In this context, several questions arose that have puzzled outside observers of African traditional religion. Do Africans have an adequate knowledge of God? Is the African God the same as the God of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or Hinduism? Is the African God a true God? Is he a personal being, an impersonal spirit, a sort of creative energy, or an abstract idea? Is the African God a loving God or a malevolent trickster? Is African traditional religion pantheistic, polytheistic, monotheistic, or henotheistic? Is the “chief god” indifferent to or actively involved in human affairs? Do Africans communicate with God or only with the ancestors and spirits? For Africans, especially those steeped in traditional culture, the reality of God is grounded in the reality of people's religious experience, and God is as real as the existence of the world or the African people. It is well established among scholars that an African cannot be understood apart from the categories of homo religiosus and homo symbolicus. In John Mbiti's memorable expression, “Africans are notoriously religious.” This religiosity begins with the belief in a world beyond the physical and mundane existence on Earth, the belief in a spiritual order of ancestors, gods, and goddesses. Thus, the concept of God stands at the heart of [Page 284]African cosmology and the conception of life. But what is meant by God in Africa? This entry begins by contrasting the perspectives of Westerners and Africans on African religion. Then, after a discussion of whether the African God is knowable, it describes several attributes of God and asserts the usefulness of the African vision in today's world.