It is accepted today that not only Africans, but the ancestors of all peoples in the world originated from Africa. This implies that all the religious thought, divinities, ancestry, and spirituality are connected to Africa. Therefore, one cannot talk of a Supreme God, without evoking Africa.

Unfortunately, African gods, belief systems, myths and traditions were adulterated by foreign influences. However, as the Collector states, through countless trials and tribulations, some core beliefs and spiritual applications have remained to this day, integrated and blended – Africanised!

Encyclopaedia Britannica says: “Generally speaking, African religions hold that there is one creator God, the maker of a dynamic universe. Myths of various African peoples relate that, after setting the world in motion, the Supreme Being withdrew and he remains remote from the concerns of human life”.

Edet (2009) has written thus: “African peoples do not consider God to be a man, but in order to express certain concepts, they employ languages and images about God as an aid to their conceptualisation of him whom they have not seen and about whom they confess to know little or nothing. God is experienced as an all-pervading reality. He is the constant participant in the affairs of human beings. Scholars who study religion in Africa tell us that all African societies have a belief in God. This paper aims at an in-depth study of these beliefs”.

From calling Africa the Dark Continent, foreign scholars and writers characterise Africa as the continent where its diverse traditional and cultural peoples did not know the Supreme God nor worship him, and only worshipped a plethora of strange god(s). This falsehood was, and continues to be, propagated with one central message to it: There was no God in Africa until the white colonialists came to the continent with Bible in one hand and gun in the other.

Aniedi Abasi and Okon Ekpatt (2021) have submitted in their article, ‘Concepts of God, Divinities, Ancestors and Spirits in African Traditional Religious Thought: Conceptual Analysis,’ which appears in the book Phenomenological Approaches to Religion and Spirituality, that “There is a widespread belief in God who is believed to be supreme and above all; God is essentially a spirit and is recognised as such in all the African tribes. He is invisible and infinite and cannot be comprehended by the finite man. This is why the Africans do not use any image to represent Him. He is believed to be the Creator of the world the sovereign ruler of the whole universe and all that is in it – man, animal, “and plants. God is everywhere and is all-knowing. He is believed to be both distant from men and near to him.”

The Collector (2022) in its article ‘African Gods: Deities, Belief Systems, and legends of Africa’ states that the supernatural and natural worlds blend seamlessly in African spirituality. Resourceful Africans circumvented doctrines of Christianity and Islam by blending them with African gods and belief systems.

One thing is true: There are several spiritual similarities across the whole Continent of Africa. One is that there is a belief in one supreme being over all animate and inanimate forms – the earth, the heavens and the universe itself, in whatever form that concept conjures in any particular culture. This supreme African God also rules over many deities and spirits in the supernatural world. Therefore, it is not true that it was European missionaries that introduced God to Africans. There is even a 2023 movie teaser titled God is African Official. The 2023 movie seeks to confirm that Africa knew God before the missionaries penetrated the continent.

In traditional Africa, God is experienced as an all-pervading reality. God is a constant participant in the affairs of human beings. Nothing and no situation is without God. God is the foundation of life, so nothing happens without God. God lives, God does not die, and so indeed humans do not die. Even when we do not occupy a touchable body, we still live on.

The way we experience God is portrayed in the language we use about God, especially the names by which God is known. Early researchers into AR like G. Parrinder, E. B. Idowu, and J. S. Mbiti have recorded for us several African names of God with copious annotations, which it is not necessary to rehearse at this stage. What needs to be said is that these names are still current and that more names descriptive of people’s experience of God are available in proverbs, songs and prayers. These names, says Idowu, are not mere labels: “They are descriptive of character and depict people’s experience of God.” God is experienced as the very foundation of existence” (Kitara Foundation for Religious Tourism.)

African people believe that all the good and well-being they enjoy come from God and that if one is not yet enjoying well-being it is because one’s time has not yet come. The African experience of God as beneficent is not only Muslim or Christian, but a living faith of Africans that has been reinforced by these “missionary” religions.

Some have argued that Africa had no knowledge of Supreme God and were only introduced to him by the missionaries. Some, however, argue that the missionaries only brought the gospel of Jesus Christ to an African continent, which was already worshipping God, albeit in a different manner (Terrence Tazvivinga (2023). Terrence Tazvivinga (2023) concludes that “the concept of God appears to have always existed in African Traditional Religion. Any divergent practices that seem to include other gods should not be the basis of concluding that Africans did not have a concept of God before the coming of the missionaries. Such is common even in western countries.

It is important to note that the coming of missionaries did not result in the names for God being reinvented. The same names like Mwari, Musikavanhu, Nkulunkulu, Modimo etc are still being used to refer to the Christian God. This implies that he is the same God who was being worshipped in Africa before the coming of missionaries”.

Wieland (1983) in his book Will Marriage Work in Today’s World, writes that African religions, without exception, recognise that God created the first man and the first woman, thus instituting marriage. The Luhyia of western Kenya believe that God made the husband first and then a wife for him so that he would have someone with whom to talk. The Mende of Sierra Leone likewise understand that there was one man and one woman in the beginning. The Akamba of Kenya have a rock at Nzaui where God is supposed to have brought out the first man and his one wife. The Herero of South West Africa (Namibia) say that God caused the first man and his wife to come from a tree of life in the underworld. The Lang’o of Uganda also have a myth of the first husband and wife coming from another world”.

Wieland cites Mbiti (1977), who has researched a lot about African religions and spirituality thus: “There are stories of this general type among the Ashanti, Azande, Banyoro, Masai, Mondari, Ovimbundu, Lugbara, Luo, Turkana and other peoples all over Africa. Wieland concludes by saying that all these African traditions, however, dim or shadowy they have become through the ages, reveal that their common source is the Bible Story, “And God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image after our likeness: So God created Man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them’” (Genesis1: 26, 27).

The Bible in Psalm 14.1 says: “The fool says in his heart ‘There is no God. They are corrupt, and their actions are evil; not one of them does good!’” From what is written in this article so far, in traditional Africa there are no such “fools.”. Such fools are found elsewhere. However, it is not uncommon to hear young people instructed in white man’s education dismissing the existence of God and claiming God has no role in human society in general and Africa. They dismiss God as the God of Israel.

This article, by citing many sources, shows that God existed in Africa long before the Islamic and Christians arrived on the continent, and was at work in the lives of Africans. As one writer cited above rightly submits, the Christian missionaries did not bring God to Africa; they brought the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which was unknown to the peoples Africa. Africa is strongly Godly in the traditional sense. It did not need anyone to bring God to it or preach to it about God. More over since everything started in Africa so did God.  

Challenging the African God

Unfortunately, in the Western world from where people called missionaries brought the Gospel of Jesus Christ to Africa the “missionary Christian religion”, are turning their backs towards their religion, which Africa did not need. They now want to reverse Christian gains in Africa by preaching the practices of homosexuality and same sex marriage, which were never integral to African spirituality. They are rejecting the whole concept of God and doing exactly what their God condemned: homosexuality. They have politicised, economised and raised the two evil practices in international relations. They are forcing their self-declared practices upon Africa, which had their God and is generally stuck to God.

It must be remembered that most countries in the West and those countries with strong biological, historical and cultural ties with Europe, have legalised homosexuality and same-sex marriages, which God condemns. As of 2024, marriage between same-sex couples is legally performed and recognized in 37 countries, with a total population of 1.5 billion people (20 per cent of the world’s population). The most recent country to legalise same-sex marriage is Nepal.

The 37 countries in which same sex or gay marriages are recognised are: Andorra, Argentina, Australia Austria Belgium Brazil Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Denmark, Ecuador, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States, and Uruguay.

Two more countries, Liechtenstein and Thailand, are set to begin performing same-sex marriages in late 2024 or in early 2025. Of the five countries, which formed a new economic bloc called BRICS (i.e. Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa) only South Africa has legalised same sex marriage. Most South Eastern Asian countries and virtually all Islamic countries of the Middle East and North Africa have not legalised same sex marriage.

Recent reports in the media cite US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken saying that the recent US sanctions against the Speaker of the Parliament of Uganda and other Uganda Government officials were not because of corruption, as originally reported international, but the country’s Anti-Homosexuality Act (2023). Blinken is cited as saying at the 2024 Pride Month Convention on US Foreign Policy in Washington DC on June 27 thus: “Where human rights abuses are carried out against LGBTQI…we hold the perpetrators responsible” The said Convention was held under the theme “National Security, Inclusive Development and the Human Rights of LGBTQI”

Clearly, the West has decided to confront God by adopting sexual practices that led to destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Yet human-God confrontations in the past always resulted in God winning and Man losing. Empires and Kingdoms collapsed and were erased from the face of the Earth. Time, the ultimate judge, will tell when total collapse of the new sexual empire built on the basis of homosexuality and same sex marriage will be erased from the face of the Earth, just like Gomorrah and Sodom were.

For Africa, poverty in modern times should not be reason to abandon its God, who is embedded in virtually all traditional religious practices.

• A Tell report / By Prof Oweyegha-Afunaduula, a former professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences of the Makerere University, Uganda