The God Akans call Oboadeɛ (Creator), Onyame (Supreme Being), Asaase Wura (Owner of the earth), Ahunabobrim (Awesome and Majestic); and whom the Ewes call Mawu (God), Gbedegbleme (Almighty), Sogbolisa (Creator), and the Gas call Ataa Naa Nyonmɔ (God Almighty); the God who is Almighty Spirit (Chukwu in Igbo), Almighty Creator (Oludumare in Yoruba), Nzambi (Omniscient, Unique) in Angola, Unkulunkula (Supreme Creator) in Zulu, is the same God that is called the Word in St John 1:1.
The commonality of knowledge of God in Africa means the African world view is primarily theocentric, and that defines the African’s interaction with the world of spirits, nature, and humanity.
Notwithstanding the diversity of ethnic groups across Africa, with their varying religious practices, scholars have nonetheless distilled common features that lend themselves to a description of what African Traditional Religion (ATR) is.
Beyers, J. (What is religion? An African understanding. 2010) quotes the opinion of Ghanaian scholar, Opoku, K.A. (African Traditional Religion: An enduring heritage. Religious plurality in Africa: Essays in honour of John S. Mbiti, 1993), who says:
African traditional religion … is part of the religious heritage of humankind. Born out of the experience and deep reflection of our African forebears, it provides answers to the stirring of the human spirit and elaborates on the profundity of the experience of the divine-human encounter based on the resources of Africa’s own cultural heritage and insight.
The African ontology (concept of Beings and their characteristics) has God at the apex of spirits. Next to God are deities (abosom) controlling oceans, forests, land, air and other natural creations, and worshipped accordingly.
Next in line are the ancestors (nananom nsamanfo); the last are spiritual forces, charms and magic.
View
Within the world view of the African, God is both immanent in his creation, and also transcendent; that is, God has energised the whole of creation with his spirit and determined the life of all created things; but, as spirit, he is also beyond his creation and dwells in an invisible realm.
Africans see God as the giver of morality through natural, self-recognisable laws. Whatever rituals exist in any African society are meant to achieve an open thoroughfare between the visible world of man and the invisible world of God, ancestors and other spirits.
According to one of Africa’s foremost scholars, J. S. Mbiti (African Religions and Philosophy), and cited by Beyers J., the idea of redemption, or salvation from “sin” is not part of the African outlook on life and God; that is to say, God is not a Redeemer in African theology; on the contrary, God is seen as a Provider who must be worshipped and appreciated for a continuance of his providence in life.
Naturally, the African religion is orally transmitted, so that one cannot lay hands on a book that documents the experiences and the laws of the interactive relationship with God, the spirit world, and nature, as it prevails in the Judeo-Christian Bible.
A principal element in African religious thought is the veneration of ancestors. To be an ancestor, one must have lived into ripe, old age, and must have lived an honourable life, and died a natural death: not through sickness, murder, suicide or premature death.
In his essay: “Religion in the Ghanaian Society” (1963), J.B. Danquah wrote that “ancestors act as friends at the court to intervene between man and the Supreme Being and to get prayers and petitions answered more quickly and effectively.”
This simply means ancestors are conceived as intermediaries between man and God. And it is so, because ancestors emerge from the family; they know their lineage, and the lineage knows their forebears. As spirits, they are deemed to have powers to confer blessings and to punish; besides, they also protect the family.
Adetoyese, J. O. (The present state of African religion), cited by Nana Osei Bonsu (African Traditional Religion: An Examination of Terminologies Used for Describing the Indigenous Faith of African People, Using an Afrocentric Paradigm), states that: “ancestors are regarded as spirits in the sense that they are no longer visible.
But they are not spirits in the sense that they are like Divinities or God. Thus African people distinguish between ancestors, divinities and God”.
This distinction is necessary to show Africans do not substitute God with ancestors, who, in their humanity, died in sin, even though we venerate them. In Ghana, the stool symbolises the presence of the ancestors.
ATR
What does African Traditional Religion (ATR) say about the human? For an answer let’s consider what pertains in Ghana. Writes Robert Owusu Agyarko (God of life: Rethinking the Akan Christian concept of God in the light of the ecological crisis):
According to traditional Akan anthropology, all human beings receive okra and sunsum from the supreme being, while ntoro is derived from the biological father and mogya from the biological mother.
“Ntoro” is regarded as more spiritual in nature, a being that originates from God. From the myth of the first ntoro ever bestowed upon the akan – the “Bosommuru ntoro” – it can be deduced that ntoro, although genetically associated with human fatherhood, is a spiritual entity that originated from God.
The activities attributed to ntoro and sunsum sometimes overlap. But the distinction between the two gains weight on the basis of the Akan belief that the three, okra, sunsum, and ntoro, share information and interact in distinct ways. There is no subordination among them.
These three vital forces – together with mogya, which is purely physical – constitute being human.
It is ironic that whereas the Akan conceives the person as a spiritual being, by virtue of possessing okra (soul) and sunsum (spirit), in the same breath, Owusu asserts that “human as well as non-human forms of life are not regarded as divine (although there are also lesser divinities), only as embodying sparks of the divine.”
Divinity
Contrary to the Akan (Ghanaian) view of the human, the divinity of man was accentuated by Jesus Christ, when he declared that the kingdom of God was within us (man). And his gospel was to lead us into the discovery of this kingdom within us.
We could pardon the Akan (Ghanaian) for not knowing this, because it came through Christianity.
We could ask: If the Akan (Ghanaian) knew man had the divine spark within him, by what means was this to be developed for man to be a luminous being?
Now, the interpolation of Christianity into the world of ATR arises from the conflation of Christianity with that of indigenous African religion, and its spread through the formal educational system.
As Yaw Sarkodie Agyeman noted in his paper: African Traditional Religion in Contemporary Africa: The Case of Ghana), “the realities of globalisation, (mean) no religion can claim to be without the slightest influence of those it has come into contact with.”
For me, the conflation of Christianity with that of ATR means ATR’s knowledge of God has been enlarged to provide a historical and more comprehensive ontological understanding of God, and the place of man in the scheme of things.
For example, ATR does not adequately encompass the breadth of knowledge evident in Christianity, as evident in no reference made to the eschatological (end-times) redemption of humanity before the second coming of Jesus Christ.
Unlike the orally transmitted knowledge of ATR, the Christian knowledge has been documented in the Bible, as a reference book, and the formulae for man’s earthly and spiritual transformation and progress have been made open in the Bible.