History of Religion in East Africa

The history of religion in East Africa traces the documented development of indigenous, Islamic and Christian religious life across the region, establishing when a specific tradition or practice is first attested and how it has changed under trade contact and colonisation. The Kenyan theologian John Mbiti published African Religions and Philosophy in 1969, the first work by an African scholar to set out the traditional religious concepts of numerous African peoples, drawn substantially from his own East African background, as a coherent and serious philosophical system rather than as primitive superstition awaiting Christian replacement.

Mbiti's insistence on describing East African religious concepts, the meaning of ancestor veneration, the structure of time in traditional cosmology, the role of a diviner, in their own documented terms rather than through missionary categories imported from outside, is the standard the atlas applies to the region. The discipline supplies the atlas with the documented history of how indigenous belief, Islam along the Swahili coast and Christian mission activity have each developed and interacted in East Africa, distinct from any single tradition's account of the others.