African Religions and Philosophy

Introduction

John S. Mbiti, a Kenyan Anglican theologian teaching at Makerere University in Uganda, published the book in 1969. Written against the missionary view of African religions as superstition, it surveys beliefs and practices from across sub-Saharan Africa as a coherent whole: belief in one God, intermediaries such as spirits and the “living dead”, rites of passage from birth to death, and an ethics bound to community. Its opening sentence, “Africans are notoriously religious”, and its thesis about time, drawn from the verb tenses of Kikamba and Gikuyu, became widely known. Okot p’Bitek accused Mbiti of giving African gods the attributes of the Christian God, Kwame Gyekye and others rejected the thesis on time, and Henry Odera Oruka classed the book as ethnophilosophy.

Connections

Taken up in

• Person and Community in African Traditional Thought1984 · Ifeanyi Menkiti

Criticized in

• African Religions in Western Scholarship1970 · Okot p’Bitek