West Africa

West Africa carries two large religious systems that have been in contact for a thousand years, and neither displaced the other.

The first is indigenous, and although its forms vary greatly between peoples it shares recognisable features across the region: a creator who is real but distant and rarely approached directly, a working population of deities and spirits associated with particular forces, places and lineages, ancestors who remain active members of their families, and specialists who diagnose misfortune and prescribe remedy. Divination is central rather than peripheral, and the Ifa system of the Yoruba, with its two hundred and fifty six figures each attached to a body of memorised verse, is the most elaborately documented example anywhere in Africa.

The second is Islam, which crossed the Sahara with trade from around the ninth century and was adopted first by rulers and merchants. The empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhai built on that: Mansa Musa's pilgrimage to Mecca in the fourteenth century made Mali famous in Cairo and beyond, and Timbuktu and Djenne became centres of teaching with substantial private manuscript libraries, many of which survive.

Christianity arrived later and mostly along the coast, with missions following European trade and expanding rapidly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The result is a region where the Sahel is largely Muslim, the coast largely Christian, and the older layer present in both.

Sources West African Traditional ReligionKofi Asare Opoku with Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African HistoryNehemia Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins (eds.)

West Africa is also the source region for religions now practised across the Americas, and the mechanism was the Atlantic slave trade.

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries several million people were shipped from this coast, and the ports through which they passed, Ouidah, Elmina, Bonny, Badagry and others, are documented in European commercial records in unusual detail. Robin Law's history of Ouidah traces how one such town's institutions, including its religious ones, were reshaped by the traffic over more than a century and a half.

What travelled was not a portable church. It was a body of ritual knowledge, held mostly in the memory of individuals who arrived without their communities, their shrines or their lineages, and who then reassembled something workable out of what several different peoples had brought. The concentration of particular origins in particular destinations explains the resulting map: Yoruba practice is heaviest in Cuba and Brazil, Fon and Ewe practice from the Bight of Benin in Haiti, Kongo practice in Cuba, Brazil and the southern United States.

The relationship since has run both ways. Practitioners in the Americas have travelled to West Africa to be initiated, West African priests have travelled to teach in Havana and Salvador, and the tradition's international literature is written in Spanish, Portuguese and English as well as in Yoruba. The atlas holds West Africa as the source region and the diaspora forms in a region of their own.