Understanding Religion and Spirit in the art of Africa

The text below is the excerpt from the book African Art (ISBN: 9781783107865), written by Maurice Delafosse, published by Parkstone International.

Islam, Christianity, and Animism

In general, a very exaggerated role is accorded to Islam regarding the extent and importance of its domain in Negro Africa. It has hardly penetrated in a profound and effectual fashion except among the Negro and Negroid populations who live on the border of the Sahara; its adepts become more and more rare in proportion as one advances towards the south and, even in the region which we commonly call Sudan, it is far from being the numerically dominant religion. It may be said that the only peoples of Africa who are in the majority Muslims, aside from the populations of the white race in Egypt, Berbery and the Sahara, are the Wolofs who are, moreover, with the exception of the Lebu of Dakar, of recent Islamisation the Tukulors, the Fulani of the Futa-Jallon, the Sarakolle, the Jula, the Songhoy, the Kanuri of Bornu, the Kanembu, the Teda of the Kawar, Tibesti, and Borku, some of the tribes of the Wadai of Darfur and of Kurdufan, the Bishari, the Danakil, the Somali and certain collectivities on the islands and the coasts of Zanzibar forming a very small total population. The other Fulani, the Mandinka, Susu, Yoruba, Hausa, Bagirmians are partly Muslims and partly pagans. Portions of the Galla people and other Negroid populations of Abyssinia or its vicinity are Christians, others are pagans, and some few others are Muslims.

All the rest, that is to say, the immense majority of the Negro population of Africa, is pagan, with the exception of some hundreds of thousands of Christians dispersed here and there in the proximity of Catholic and Protestant missions, notably on the coast of Senegal, at Sierra-Leone, in Liberia, on the Gold Coast, in Dahomey, in Lagos, uin Duala, and Yaunde in the Cameroons, in Libreville, in Angola, in the territories of the [former] Union of South Africa, in Mozambique and in the Uganda. It seems that there is not a single Negro people who have been converted en bloc to Christianity.

It must be added that, on the whole, the Muslim Negroes and the Christian Negroes remain faithful in good numbers to their ancestral beliefs and to many rites of their ancient paganism. Of what does this paganism or so-called paganism consist? Since it is the religion of almost all the Negroes, it merits more interest than seems to have been brought to it up to the present. It is generally characterised as “fetishism,” but fetishism, that is, the belief in the power of fetishes or talismans is not a religion; it is only one of the most apparent aspects of universal superstition. Fetishism is met with in all religions, even the most advanced and most disengaged from material things, and the Christian Negroes like the Muslim Negroes are as fetishistic as the pagan Negroes: only they have a greater number of “fetishes”, for they have kept those of paganism and have added to them those that they found in a number of practices, to be sure not very canonical, of Christianity and Islam.

Individual Spirits of People and Things

The religion of the Negroes of Africa is in reality animism, that is, the belief in the all-powerfulness of spirits, to whom the faithful render a consistent cult of prayers, offerings and sacrifices, with a view to attracting their favours, deterring their anger or calling for help against enemies. What are these spirits? It is not the spirit of good and the spirit of evil; there are not good spirits and bad spirits. The animism of the Negroes has nothing of dualism and that which has led several missionaries to present it under this aspect can be only a subjective reminiscence of the opposition made by certain Christians between God and the Devil. Neither do they make the distinction, dear to the religions with dualist tendencies, between gods and devils, between good and bad spirits: no divinity is considered as essentially good or bad in itself and there do not exist souls of whom one seeks only to attract the favour and others of whom one seeks only to avoid the wrath; the faithful demand of the same divinity aid for themselves and harm for their enemies.

To get a better insight into the The Art of Africa, continue this exciting adventure by clicking on:

Ebook

Hardcover

Furthermore, you can visit these exhibitions below for a deeper insight into African Art:

• Arts of Africa in the Met museum – The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Ongoing)
• Community and Continuity: African Art and Indigenous American Art in Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (September 27, 2025 – August 1, 2026)
• Arts of Africa Gallery in Denver Art Museum (Ongoing)