Introduction to African Religion

John Mbiti's Introduction to African Religion is a widely used scholarly introduction to traditional African religious thought and practice, published by Heinemann. Mbiti was a Kenyan theologian and one of the most influential scholars of African traditional religion of his generation, and the book's authority rests on his combination of academic training with an insider's familiarity across many African religious traditions. It has served for decades as a standard entry point in African religious studies courses. Its limit, noted by later scholars including some African ones, is that Mbiti's project of describing African traditional religion as a broadly coherent whole can flatten real differences between hundreds of distinct traditions across the continent, so a claim about one specific ethnic or regional tradition is better supported by a dedicated study of that tradition specifically.