African Religions and Philosophy

A survey of the religious thought of African peoples by a Kenyan theologian and Anglican priest, drawing on material from some three hundred ethnic groups. Mbiti opens by calling Africans notoriously religious, meaning that religion runs through every part of life rather than forming a separate sphere. His most debated thesis concerns time: in traditional thought, he argues, time is a two-dimensional movement from the present into a long past, with almost no distant future. He then describes beliefs about God, spirits, and the living-dead, the recently departed who remain part of the family. Chapters on kinship and the rites of birth, initiation, marriage and death contain his often-quoted summary of African community: I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am. Later chapters discuss specialists such as healers and rainmakers, and the meeting of African religion with Christianity and Islam. Critics, including Paulin Hountondji, fault its generalisations across a whole continent.

It introduced African religious thought to a world readership and remains the starting point for debates about community, personhood and time in African philosophy.