They appeared with music, movement, costume, rhythm, and community around them. A mask was often only one part of a muc…

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We recently read a chapter from Kofi Asare Opoku’s West African Traditional Religion, and it put into words something we have felt for a long time and often say: so much of what people think they know about African traditional religions has been shaped by people who were not trying to understand them on their own terms.

Unfortunately, we could only find the first chapter ‘African Traditional Religion: A General Introduction’. The full book, like so many important texts on African religions, is either very expensive, difficult to access, or almost impossible to find without digging. So we’ve uploaded the chapter we did manage to find here, because work like this deserves to be read and shared. You can find it at the end of this article.

The chapter made us think about how religion gets described, who gets to do the describing, and what happens when entire systems of thought are filtered through outsiders’ assumptions.

It also made us think about how often African spiritual systems are described through words like “pagan”, “animist”, “fetish”, “ancestor worship”, or “polytheism” words that often carry long histories of judgement.

And once you start looking closely, the question becomes: are these words actually explaining African traditional religions, or are they revealing the assumptions of the people who used them?

Religion as Everyday Life

One of Opoku’s central points is that religion, in many traditional African societies, is not separate from daily life. It is not something reserved only for a shrine, a ceremony, or a particular day of worship.

It is woven into farming, fishing, hunting, eating, drinking, travelling, birth, death, family, society, morality, and the way people understand both this world and the next.

That point matters because many people are used to thinking of religion as something that happens in a specific building, under a specific doctrine, with a specific text.

But in many African contexts, religion is not an isolated compartment of life. It is the framework through which life itself is understood.

It shapes how people relate to land, ancestors, community, the natural world, the dead, the unborn, and the divine.

The Problem with ‘Outsiders’ Telling the Story

A lot of early writing on African religions came from European explorers, missionaries, and anthropologists who viewed them through Christian, colonial, and European assumptions.

The people who practised these traditions often had their own explanations ignored, making it easier for outsiders to distort or dismiss what they did not understand.

Missionaries often dismissed African religions as superstition, while other writers used them to justify Europe’s so-called “civilising mission” and present African thought as inferior.

Some writers even denied that African societies had religion at all. Others could not accept that sophisticated religious ideas, such as belief in a Supreme Being, could have originated within Africa. If they encountered ideas that felt familiar to them, they often assumed those ideas must have been borrowed from Europe or the Middle East.

Opoku gives the example of A. B. Ellis, who argued that the Akan Supreme Being, Onyame, was a “loan-god” introduced by missionaries. That kind of thinking says a lot. It suggests that African societies could not possibly have developed deep theological ideas of their own.

This is why the issue is not just bad terminology. It is also about authority. Who gets to explain a tradition? Who gets believed? And what happens when the people closest to a tradition are treated as unreliable witnesses to their own culture?

When Religion Is Judged by the Wrong Standard

Another problem Opoku identifies is the tendency to judge African traditional religion by whether it resembled Christianity.

Many writers looked for written doctrines and religious systems that resembled Christianity, and when they did not find religion in that form, they assumed it had no depth.

But that misses the point. Religion is not only what is written down. It is also ritual, ethics, practice, community, memory, obligation, and how people live in relation to the spiritual world.

One quote that really stayed with us is from Mbonu Ojike, a Nigerian nationalist, writer, and cultural thinker known for defending African identity against colonial ideas of inferiority:

That is such a useful shift. Instead of asking, “Where is the doctrine?” we might ask: How do people honour the sacred? How do they remember the dead? How do they understand wrongdoing, healing, protection, fertility, justice, destiny, and community?

Those questions bring us much closer to the actual life of the religion.

This brings us to the words themselves: “animism”, “paganism”, “fetishism”, “ancestor worship”, and “polytheism”, words often used for African traditional religions, but not always in accurate or fair ways.

“Animism”

The term was popularised by E. B. Tylor and comes from the Latin anima, meaning breath, soul, or spirit. Tylor used it to describe the belief that spirits or souls exist in humans, animals, objects, and nature.

When this is applied to African traditional religions, it can be misleading. These traditions do not usually teach that every object automatically has a soul. Instead, certain objects may act as vessels, dwelling places, or points of contact for spiritual power.

That distinction is important. A river may be sacred, but that does not mean people are simply worshipping water. A tree may be associated with a spirit, but that does not mean the tree itself is the ultimate object of worship. A ritual object may be powerful, but that does not mean the whole religion is object worship.

Often, the visible thing is a point of contact with an invisible reality. In many African worldviews, the spiritual and material are not completely separate. They interact. The physical world carries spiritual significance. Nature is not empty matter. It can be inhabited, charged, protected, respected, feared, or approached carefully.

“Paganism”

Originally, pagan simply meant someone who was not Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. But in relation to Africa, it became derogatory. It was used to suggest that African traditions were not real religions, or that they had no serious spiritual value.

Calling African traditional religions “paganism” diminishes them entirely. It also places Christianity, Islam, and Judaism as the standards by which all other religions are measured. Anything outside that frame is treated as lesser, rather than different.

“Fetishism”

The word comes from the Portuguese fetico, and originally referred to works of art or man-made religious objects. But over time, it became shorthand for African religion itself, as if entire spiritual systems could be reduced to charms and objects.

And there was a clear double standard. Similar objects elsewhere were called talismans, amulets, or mascots, while African objects were labelled “fetishes”.

Opoku also points out that African languages themselves often make distinctions that early European writers ignored. He gives the example of the Akan, people primarily found in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, whose traditional religious worldview includes belief in a Supreme Being, divinities, ancestors, spirits, ritual objects, and the spiritual significance of the natural world.

In Akan traditional religion, suman refers to a man-made religious object or charm, while obosom refers to a deity or lesser spirit. These are not interchangeable categories. A suman may be made, empowered, carried, kept, or used for protection, while an obosom belongs to a different spiritual category altogether.

In other words, Akan thought already had its own vocabulary for distinguishing between ritual objects and divine beings. When colonial-era writers collapsed both into the word “fetish”, they erased that nuance and made the religion appear far simpler than it actually was.

“Ancestor Worship”

Ancestors are deeply important in many African traditional religions, but “ancestor worship” is an oversimplification. It takes one part of the religion and makes it seem like the whole system.

Across the continent and the diaspora, you do find ancestral veneration, but that is not the same as simply “worshipping ancestors”. Ancestral veneration is about respect, remembrance, lineage, and responsibility. It recognises that you come from people, that the dead still matter, and that family does not end at the grave.

Practices like libation, offerings of food, remembrance, and ritual acknowledgement are religious acts, but they are not always worship in the strict sense. Often, they express hospitality towards the dead, reverence for those who came before, and belief in the ongoing relationship between the living and the departed.

You probably practise this kind of remembrance in your own life, even if you do not call it ancestral veneration.

Maybe you visit graves with flowers, keep photographs and funeral programmes, tell stories about loved ones who have passed, name children after grandparents, or carry forward family recipes, songs, sayings, and memories.

Your grandparents are ancestors just as much as your great-great-great-grandparents. And one day, you will be an ancestor too.

“Polytheism”

Polytheism is another complicated label. On the surface, it might seem straightforward. Many African traditional religions recognise multiple divinities, spirits, or supernatural beings. But calling them simply “polytheistic” misses something crucial.

The question is not only whether many divine beings exist. The question is: what is their relationship to the Supreme Being?

In many African traditional religions, there is belief in a Supreme Being who is Creator, source of power, final authority, and the one who has power over life and death. This Supreme Being is not just one god among many. Opoku argues that God stands outside the pantheon and is the source from which other divinities derive their power.

That is why he says African traditional religions cannot simply be called polytheistic because it recognises many divinities.

A tradition can recognise divinities, ancestors, spirits, sacred forces, and ritual objects while still holding a clear idea of a Supreme Being.

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Some Shared Features Across African Traditional Religions

It is important not to suggest that all African religions are identical. Africa is far too vast for that, with thousands of peoples, languages, histories, and systems of thought.

Still, there are some shared features that appear across many African traditional religions:

• The first is belief in God, known by different local names. God is understood as Creator, source of life, source of power, final authority, and moral judge.

• The second is the importance of ancestors. Ancestors are treated with reverence and awe because they remain part of the community. They are not simply gone, they continue to matter.

• The third is the presence of lesser deities or supernatural beings. These beings may be associated with particular forces, places, needs, or areas of life. They may be called upon in times of difficulty, danger, illness, uncertainty, or need.

• The fourth is the sacredness of nature. Rivers, mountains, rocks, trees, animals, and plants may be associated with spiritual power. But again, the point is not that people are worshipping the object itself. The object may be understood as a dwelling place, emblem, vessel, or point of relationship.

• The fifth is the recognition of other mystical powers that can help or harm human beings. This includes ideas around magic, sorcery, protection, charms, amulets, and talismans.

So already, we can see how inadequate the old labels are. African traditional religion is not one thing. It is a layered worldview involving God, divinities, ancestors, spirits, nature, human beings, community, morality, and the unseen world.

The Unseen Is Part of Reality

One of the most important ideas in the chapter is that what cannot be seen is still understood as part of reality.

In many African worldviews, reality includes both the visible and invisible. The spiritual is not separate from the material in a neat Western binary. It is part of the same reality, and often understood as more powerful than what can be seen.

This affects how people understand nature, the human person, society, and death:

• A person is understood as both physical and spiritual.

• A community extends beyond those who are currently alive, holding together the living, the dead, and those yet to be born.

• Nature is not treated as empty background or raw material, but as something that can carry presence, memory, power, and responsibility.

This is such an important point because it helps explain why African traditional religions often feel so embedded in everyday life. The sacred is not separate from everyday life; it is already present in it.

The Living, the Dead, and the Unborn

The section on human beings and society is one of the richest parts of the chapter.

In many African societies, a human being is understood as both physical and spiritual. The body dies, but the spiritual part continues. Death is not seen as the end of life, but as a continuation of it

This is why the dead remain part of the community. There is the community of the living, but there is also the community of the dead, and both are connected. The living remember, honour, and seek guidance from those who came before, while the dead remain part of the family’s spiritual and moral world.

This changes how we think about ancestry. Ancestry is not only about the past; it is about continuity. It connects those who came before, those who are here now, and those still to come.

It also helps explain why rites of passage matter so much. Birth, puberty, marriage, parenthood, death, and the afterlife are not seen as random life events, but as transitions within a larger cycle. Ritual helps people move through those stages with care, meaning, and connection.

Life is not imagined as a straight line that ends at death. It is a cycle of movement, relationship, and regeneration.

Personhood and Community

In many African societies, belonging to a community is central to what it means to be human. This does not mean the individual does not matter. It means a person is understood through relationship.

You are not only yourself. You are someone’s child, someone’s descendant, someone’s future ancestor, someone’s neighbour, someone’s responsibility.

Society is often built around obligation, participation, and interdependence. Rights and responsibilities are not always treated as separate things; they are connected through how people show up for one another.

This is where religion and society become deeply linked. Religious life helps teach people how to live with others, honour their obligations, respect elders, relate to ancestors, maintain harmony, and move through life’s major transitions with care.

Religion as the Cement of Society

Religion also works as something that binds society together. It connects people to unseen powers, yes, but it also connects them to one another. It gives structure, support, moral guidance, and a shared sense of responsibility.

In many African societies, religion was not always taught through formal lessons in the way we might imagine today. People learned it by growing up inside it. They absorbed it through ceremonies, festivals, names, proverbs, taboos, family practices, rites of passage, songs, stories, and everyday behaviour.

This is a helpful way to understand religion as culture. It is not always taught through a textbook. Sometimes it is learned through repetition, participation, memory, and community.

You learn by watching. You learn by doing. You learn by being part of the life around you.

Sacred Kingship and Spiritual Authority

Opoku also explores how chiefs and kings often have both political and religious roles.

Among the Akan, for example, a chief derives authority from the ancestral stool. The stool is not just a seat. It is a sacred link between the living community and the ancestors. The chief represents the people before the ancestors, offers food and drink during festivals, performs sacrifices, and carries ritual responsibility in times of crisis or misfortune. This means chieftaincy is not only political. It is also spiritual.

Opoku gives the example of the Ooni of Ife among the Yorùbá. The Ooni is not only a ruler, but a sacred figure whose office is connected to Orisa-nla and Olódùmarè. Historically, the office was so sacred that the Ooni was sometimes regarded as an orisa. This tells us something important: in many African contexts, leadership, ritual, ancestry, and spiritual order are deeply connected.

To describe a king or chief as only a political leader can miss the sacred responsibilities attached to that office.

Why Specificity Matters

One of Opoku’s most useful recommendations is that we should stop forcing African religions into misleading general labels and call them by their names. When speaking broadly, “African Traditional Religion” can be useful. But when we are speaking specifically, we should name the tradition or community we mean.

That might be Ìṣẹ̀ṣe, Ifá-orisa, Akom, Vodou, Candomblé, Waaqeffanna, or another system entirely.

The point is not that all of these are the same. Africa is not one vague spiritual category. It is home to many peoples, languages, histories, cosmologies, and religious worlds.

At the same time, African traditional religions are part of humanity’s wider religious heritage. They ask universal questions: Where did we come from? What happens after death? How should we live? What do we owe to the dead? How should we live with nature? What is our relationship to the divine?

Every society asks these questions, but each answers them through its own language, landscape, symbols, rituals, and history.

So why demonise an entire continent just because its answers did not look like yours?

Traditional Does Not Mean Dead

When we say “traditional”, we do not mean dead, primitive, or outdated. Traditional means rooted in indigenous values, inherited practice, and historical memory.

African traditional religions are still practised by millions today. They continue to shape identity, values, family life, art, festivals, ethics, ritual practice, and how people understand the world.

This matters because people often speak about African traditional religions as if they belong only to the past. As if they disappeared once Christianity or Islam arrived. As if they are museum objects rather than living traditions.

But these religions are not simply relics. They are contemporary realities.

They have survived colonialism, missionary pressure, ridicule, distortion, and misnaming. They continue to live in ceremonies, prayers, shrines, songs, divination systems, family obligations, diasporic religions, artistic practice, and everyday ways of seeing the world.

What We Take From Opoku

What we take from Opoku’s chapter is not only a better understanding of African traditional religion, but a better understanding of how misunderstanding works.

Misunderstanding is not always accidental. Sometimes it is produced by bad language. Sometimes it is produced by power. Sometimes it happens when outsiders refuse to listen to the people who practise the traditions they are describing.

Words like “animism”, “paganism”, “fetishism”, “ancestor worship”, and “polytheism” are not always innocent. They can flatten complex systems into caricatures.

• They can make African religions seem primitive when they are philosophical.

• They can make sacred objects seem like superstition when they are part of a larger spiritual system.

• They can make ancestor veneration seem irrational when it is rooted in memory, lineage, and responsibility.

• They can make multiple divinities seem like confusion when they may exist within a wider belief in a Supreme Being.

Read the chapter below and spend some time with Opoku’s words for yourself. And please let us know your thoughts!

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Opoku West African Traditional Religion

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How much power can a small shell hold?

At first glance, cowrie shells seem simple. Smooth, rounded, almost polished to a shine, with a narrow opening running along the underside. They are small enough to sit in the palm of a hand.

And yet, across African histories and spiritual systems…

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Have you ever wondered why so many African creation stories begin with clay?

Clay is one of the simplest materials in the world, and one of the most profound. It is earth mixed with water. It sits beneath people’s feet, grows their food, stains their hands, and can be shaped into vessels, homes, sculptures, shrines, and tools. It yields easily to touch, yet once fired, it can outlast generations. Across African cosmologies, clay becomes more than a material. It becomes a way of thinking about life itself.

That is why it appears so often in stories about beginnings

Clay in creation stories

Across very different African traditions, human beings are described as being formed from earth:

• In a Yorùbá creation account, Ọbatálá moulds the first human beings from clay.

• Among the Shilluk of the Sudan and South Sudan region, Juok is said to have made people from clay, with different skin tones linked to the colours of the earth itself.

• In one Efé account from Central Africa, the creator Baatsi forms the first human out of clay, skin, and blood.

These traditions come from different places, languages, and spiritual worlds, yet they return to a strikingly similar image: the human body as something shaped from the ground.

That image is powerful because it feels true to lived experience. Clay is not an abstract substance. It is part of everyday life. People walk on it, farm through it, build with it, and make vessels from it. So when a culture asks what human beings are made of, clay offers an answer that is both symbolic and immediate. It explains origin through a material people already know intimately. Human beings come from the earth because they are already in relationship with it.

There is also something especially fitting about clay itself. It is malleable, but not formless. It can be worked, pressed, smoothed, and remade. It responds to touch. In that sense, it becomes an ideal material for imagining creation, because it captures the sense that human life is shaped rather than simply produced. To be made from clay is to be made carefully. It suggests intention, touch, and process.

The pot as womb

That same logic carries into the symbolism of the pot. Across parts of Africa, clay vessels are closely associated with fertility, womanhood, and the capacity to carry life. The pot is not only an object of domestic use. It can also stand in for the womb.

• Among the Bemba, a woman about to marry may be given a clay pot by her father’s sister, and the vessel is understood in relation to the hope of future pregnancies.

• A similar symbolism appears in Shona marriage practice, where a paternal aunt presents a bride with a clay pot filled with water, itself closely tied to fertility and generative power.

In both cases, the vessel matters because it holds, carries, and sustains. It remains a living metaphor for how life continues.

Pottery as knowledge and discipline

Across the continent, pottery traditions reflect a deep understanding of material, process, and environment.

African pottery is often hand-built rather than wheel-thrown, using coiling and moulding techniques passed down through generations. Terracotta clay is commonly used and fired in open conditions, producing vessels that are both durable and functional. These objects are not purely decorative. They are made for cooking, storage, brewing, architecture, and ritual use.

Knowledge of clay itself is highly developed. In some regions, potters source clay from riverbanks during dry seasons, storing it for later use. In others, termite mound clay is used because of its natural binding properties, strengthened by termite secretions. The process of digging, drying, soaking, and shaping clay follows seasonal rhythms and environmental awareness.

At the same time, pottery is often surrounded by social and ritual structures.

In many communities, pottery is associated with women, though this varies by region. Among the Bamana, for example, pottery knowledge may be passed through specific lineages, sometimes with initiation processes tied to the transmission of skill.

Among Chewa potters, sexual abstinence may be observed during key stages of production, while in other contexts menstruation can restrict access to clay or participation in pottery-making.

These practices differ across cultures, but they point to a shared idea: claywork is not neutral. It carries weight. It is often treated as a form of controlled power, shaped through discipline, restriction, and inherited knowledge.

When the pot breaks

That same symbolic power appears again in death. Clay is not only there at the beginning of life. It also returns at its ending.

Clay also appears at the end of life.

• In some traditions, when a woman dies, one of her pots may be broken and buried with her. Among the Chewa, this act can mark the conclusion of her life.

• Among the Gurunsi of Burkina Faso and Ghana, the broken pot can stand as an image of the lifeless body. The symbolism is direct. A vessel that once held water, grain, or nourishment is now shattered. It can no longer contain what it once carried. In that moment, clay becomes a language for mortality.

Clay as a home for the spirit

And yet clay does not only signify endings in the sense of disappearance. In many African contexts, vessels can also hold presence. Clay pots are sometimes treated as containers of memory, relation, and spirit.

• Akan memorial terracotta heads (often called nsodie), are placed in funerary groves, where they serve as points of connection between the living and the dead.

• That same principle continues across the diaspora. In Haitian Vodou, the govi, a red clay jar, serves as a vessel through which the dead may remain active in community life. It can be fed with offerings and approached as a site of guidance, protection, and continued presence. The body may be gone, but clay still offers a place where relation can be held.

Here, clay becomes a container not just of substance, but of relationship.

White clay and sacred marking

Across many African ritual contexts, white clay is used to mark bodies, masks, and sacred objects.

It often signals transition, purification, or proximity to the spiritual realm. In many cosmologies, white is associated with coolness, clarity, and the ancestral domain. When white clay is applied, it marks a shift in status. It indicates that something has moved into a different register of meaning.

This continues in diasporic traditions. Among the Saramaka of Suriname, white clay (pemba dote) is used to mark sacred objects within ritual practice.

If you enjoyed this, you may also like our ASMR A–Z essay on Clay, where we explore how earth, water, pottery, fertility, and ritual come together across African spiritual traditions.

You can read more like this across our ASMR A–Z series, where we break down key ideas in African mythology, spirituality, and religion from A to Z.

Why clay keeps returning

What makes all of this so compelling is that clay moves across the whole cycle of life. It appears in stories of creation, in marriage, in fertility, in craft, in ritual restriction, in funerary practice, and in relations with the dead. It is there when life is imagined, when life is sustained, and when life is mourned. Few materials carry that much symbolic range while remaining so ordinary and so close to the ground.

So perhaps clay keeps returning because it reminds us that human life is never separate from the ground beneath us. We are shaped by land, by hands, by memory, by spirit, and by everything that continues to hold us long after we first begin.

Sources & Further Reading:

• Asante, M. K., & Mazama, A. (eds.). (2009). Encyclopedia of African Religion. SAGE Publications. (Internet Archive)

• Jacobson-Widding, A., & van Beek, W. (eds.). (1990). The Creative Communion: African Folk Models of Fertility and the Regeneration of Life. Almqvist & Wiksell International. (Internet Archive)

• Frank, B. (1998). Mande Potters and Leatherworkers: Art and Heritage in West Africa. Smithsonian Institution Press. (Internet Archive)

• Barbour, J., & Wandiba, S. (1989). Kenyan Pots and Potters. Oxford University Press. (Internet Archive)

• Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Govi” (Vodou). (Encyclopedia Britannica)

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Akan terracotta memorial heads (nsodie) and their placement in asensie memorial groves. (metmuseum.org)

Among the Igbo people of southern Nigeria, few ideas sit closer to the centre of life than chi. Chi is how identity forms and how fate is understood. In the Encyclopaedia of African Religion, the entry goes as far as to say Igbo culture “revolves around” this idea: chi as an omnipresent for…

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When people ask how African spiritual traditions survived the Atlantic slave trade, Candomblé is one of the clearest answers. It is a living spiritual system created by communities who refused to let language, ritual, and sacred customs die, even when the system around them tried to erase it.

Where Candomblé comes from

Candomblé developed most visibly in 19th-century Brazil, strongly associated with Bahia (especially Salvador), though it later spread widely inside and beyond Brazil. It emerged from the forced migration of African peoples, particularly those carrying Yorùbá, Fon/Ewe (often grouped as “Jeje”), and Kongo/Angola (Bantu) religious worlds, into a Portuguese Catholic colony.

Because enslaved Africans were often grouped, sold, and “relabelled” in the Americas, religious life had to become both adaptive and strategic. Candomblé formed as an African-centred way of worship that could survive colonial surveillance, while still keeping deep continuity with African concepts of divinity, sacrifice, initiation, possession, and community ethics.

Candomblé belief system

At the centre of Candomblé is the idea of a Supreme Creator (often framed in Brazil through Yorùbá cosmology as Olódùmarè) and a world filled with sacred forces and spirits who mediate between the Creator and human life.

Those sacred forces are known by different names depending on the tradition inside Candomblé:

• in a Yorùbá-influenced context, people often say orixás (Portuguese spelling), while the Yorùbá form is orisa

• in Jeje contexts, people may say vodun

• in Kongo/Angola contexts, people may say inkice/minkisi

A useful way to understand an orisa/orixá is as a divine power linked to nature, destiny, and character, a force people build relationship with through ritual, offerings, song, and ethical obligations.

Just as importantly: Candomblé is not run by one pope, one central book, or one global authority. It is organised around autonomous houses of worship called terreiros, each with lineages, ritual protocols, and leadership (often priestesses and priests).

Syncretism: why Catholic saints show up

One of the most discussed features of Candomblé is syncretism, the blending or alignment of sacred figures across systems. Under colonial rule, African religions were frequently criminalised or treated as “superstition,” so people often protected their worship by aligning an orisa with a Catholic saint.

This wasn’t always a simple one-to-one “disguise.” It was also cultural translation: recognising overlaps in symbolism (storms, iron, oceans, motherhood, healing) and using those overlaps to keep worship viable in a hostile environment.

Some well-known examples include:

• Ọya (often called Iansã in Brazil) being associated with Saint Barbara

• Yemoja/Yemanjá being linked in parts of Brazil with Our Lady of the Navigators or Our Lady of the Conception

And when looking at related traditions like Cuban Santería, a classic pairing is:

• Babalú Ayé with Saint Lazarus (San Lázaro)

The important point is this: syncretism shows intellectual and spiritual agency. People did not simply lose African religion; people actively re-engineered how it could be practised.

Music, dance, and the body

Candomblé is famously embodied through drumming, chant, dance, and trance/possession. They are how knowledge is held and transmitted when books are not the primary archive. This is also why the religion is inseparable from cultural life in places like Bahia.

Why it matters now

Candomblé matters historically because it records what slavery tried to destroy: continuity of African metaphysics, ritual technologies, and communal life under extreme coercion. It matters culturally because it has shaped Brazilian music, aesthetics, festival life, and ideas of identity, while also facing ongoing religious intolerance in different forms. And it matters spiritually because for practitioners it represents a relationship with divinity, ancestors, community, and with the balancing of life’s forces in a world that rarely feels balanced.

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Recommended reading

• Stefania Capone, Searching for Africa in Brazil: Power and Tradition in Candomblé (Duke University Press). Duke University Press

• J. Lorand Matory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (Princeton University Press). Cultural Anthropology

• Paul Christopher Johnson, Secrets, Gossip, and Gods: The Transformation of Brazilian Candomblé (Oxford University Press). Oxford University Press+1

• Rachel E. Harding, A Refuge in Thunder: Candomblé and Alternative Spaces of Blackness (Indiana University Press). Indiana University Press

• Luís Nicolau Parés, The Formation of Candomblé: Vodun History and Ritual in Brazil (University of North Carolina Press). The University of North Carolina Press

• Robert A. Voeks, Sacred Leaves of Candomblé: African Magic, Medicine, and Religion in Brazil (University of Texas Press). University of Texas Press

• Reginaldo Prandi, Mitologia dos Orixás (Companhia das Letras) — a major collection of orisa/orixá myths used widely in Brazil. Companhia das Letras

Quick reference sources

• Encyclopaedia Britannica: “Candomblé”. Encyclopedia Britannica

• Oxford Reference: “Candomblé of Brazil” (The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature). Oxford Reference

• Oxford Research Encyclopaedia (Latin American History): “Africans in Brazil and Afro-Brazilian Religion and Culture”. Oxford Research

• Oxford English Dictionary: entry for “candomblé” (useful for definition + usage history).

Imagine a night in the forest. Rain is falling. Thunder rolls overhead. Hundreds of enslaved Africans gather in secret, soaked, silent, waiting. A priest and a priestess step forward, invoking the spirits. A prayer is spoken, a vow is made, and within days, plantations burn and an empire begins to fall.

At th…

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What if we told you that a single string of beads could tell a story about who you are, where you come from, and even protect your spirit?

Take waist beads. Across the African continent, they’ve been worn for centuries, by children for health, and by women to mark milestones of growth. But waist beads are just one example of how beads hold layered meanin…

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In Batwa tradition, the forest is a gift and a responsi…

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For us, it’s these breathtaking works of cast metal, intricately detailed plaques, regal heads, and ceremonial objects, created to honour kings, record history, and embody spiritual power.

In reality, these works were never meant to sit silently in European museums. They were cast to stand on royal altars, to speak for ancestors, to remember battles and treaties, and to embody the spiritual power of a kingdom.

The Kingdom of Benin

The Benin Bronzes are not a single, uniform set of objects, and not all of them are even bronze. The term now refers to several thousand works in brass, bronze, ivory, coral, and wood created by the Edo people of the Kingdom of Benin, in what is today Edo State, southern Nigeria.

From at least the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the royal palace became the centre of a sophisticated artistic system. The Oba (king), both a political ruler and a spiritual figure, patronised royal guilds of artists specialising in brass casting, ivory carving, wood sculpture, and coral work. These guilds lived and worked close to the palace and produced almost exclusively for the court.

The objects they created were not decorations in a modern sense. Palace plaques recorded diplomatic encounters, military campaigns, court rituals. Commemorative heads of past Obas and queen mothers stood on ancestral altars. Carved ivory tusks spiralled with dense scenes of myth, ritual, history, and proverbs.

Each piece functioned as a kind of visual text. These were historical records, spiritual tools, and mnemonic devices. They helped priests and court historians remember genealogies, treaties, and crises. They anchored the Oba’s authority and tied the well-being of the kingdom to the proper care of royal ancestors.

How the bronzes were made

The technical brilliance of the Benin Bronzes is inseparable from their spiritual purpose. Brass casters in Benin used the lost-wax technique:

– a model shaped in wax over a clay core
– encased in more clay
– fired so the wax melted out
– then filled with molten brass or bronze.

When the outer clay mould was broken, what remained was a single, unique casting with crisp lines and astonishing detail: a leopard with lifted paw, a court official framed by patterned background, a royal head crowned with coral.

These works demanded skill, but also ritual discipline. Brass casting was itself a sacred practice tied to the Oba and to deities associated with metal, water, and wealth.

One of the most distinctive traditions was the casting of commemorative heads for each Oba. When a king died, a new head was placed on his ancestral altar, often supporting a carved ivory tusk. These heads were likenesses, but they were also containers of spiritual force, a way of making the presence and guidance of the ancestor materially present in the palace.

1897 British Punitive Expedition

By the late nineteenth century, British commercial and imperial ambitions in the Niger Delta had intensified. Benin’s control over local trade, especially in palm oil and other commodities, was increasingly framed as an obstacle. Under Oba Ovonramwen (r. 1888–1897), the kingdom remained politically assertive and spiritually grounded.

In January 1897, a British delegation approached Benin City despite warnings that major rituals were underway and visitors should not enter. An attack on that delegation, whose details are still contested, was seized upon as justification for a “punitive expedition”.

In February 1897, British forces launched a full-scale invasion. Benin City was stormed, sacked, and burned. The palace complex was looted. Thousands of objects were seized: brass and bronze works, carved ivory tusks, coral regalia, wooden sculpture and more.

Many of these pieces were treated as war booty. Some went directly to the British monarch; others were kept by officers or sold on the London art market to help pay for the expedition. From there, they entered collections across Europe and North America. Oba Ovonramwen was exiled to Calabar, where he died in 1914. The kingdom was reduced to a British protectorate, and its political autonomy was profoundly curtailed.

The very dispersal of these objects, in Berlin, London, Chicago, Lagos, Benin City and beyond, has become part of the story the Benin Bronzes now tell: a story of royal splendour and spiritual depth, but also of colonial violence and long-running demands for justice.

Repatriation

Calls for the return of Benin’s royal artworks are not new. Nigerian scholars, artists, and officials began asking for their repatriation as early as the 1930s. After independence in 1960, these claims became more organised and visible. In 2007, the Benin Dialogue Group was formed, bringing together Nigerian and European museums to explore long-term solutions, including rotating displays and shared curatorship in Benin City.

Digital projects have also changed the conversation. The Digital Benin platform brings together data on more than 5,000 objects from over 130 collections worldwide: catalogue entries, photographs, provenance notes, Edo-language terms. In one place, you can see how far the bronzes have travelled and how fragmented the story has become.

Digital restitution is not a substitute for physical return. But it does support research, education, and advocacy. It makes it harder for institutions to quietly ignore where their Benin collections came from, and it gives Edo communities and Nigerian institutions a powerful tool for tracing, and challenging, the histories of specific pieces.

Alongside this, a growing number of museums, particularly in Germany and the Netherlands, have begun to transfer legal ownership of Benin objects back to Nigeria. In the UK, progress has been slower and complicated by legislation, but there have been important shifts.

The Horniman Museum: return, loans, and replicas

One of the most significant UK examples is the Horniman Museum and Gardens in south London. The Horniman holds a collection of objects from the Kingdom of Benin, acquired by its founder Frederick Horniman in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These acquisitions were made in the shadow of the 1897 looting.

In 2022, Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM) issued a formal request for the return of Benin objects in the Horniman’s care. In November 2022, the Horniman transferred legal ownership of 72 objects to the NCMM. All of them had been forcibly taken from Benin City during the 1897 British military incursion and then purchased by Frederick Horniman. Six of these objects were physically returned to Nigeria immediately. The remaining pieces now stay at the Horniman on loan from NCMM, continuing to be used for display, research, and consultation.

Some of these loaned objects are on view in the Benin Kingdom display in the World Gallery and in the Music Gallery. Others are part of behind-the-scenes work with researchers and community partners. The labels in the gallery acknowledge both the history of looting and the fact that ownership has changed.

For handling and education, the museum works with contemporary brass casters in Benin City to create replica plaques and figures. These replicas are made using traditional techniques, but they are designed to be touched, held, and studied closely by school groups and visitors. It is a small but significant shift: rather than only extracting knowledge from historic works, the museum is investing in living Edo artistry.

Why does the return of these objects, and debates around them, matter so much?

It matters because these works are part of living cultural and spiritual systems. For more than a century, major European museums have told stories about Benin, and about Africa more broadly, through objects that were taken by force. Returning ownership, sharing decision-making, and commissioning contemporary work all help to rebalance who gets to speak.

And it matters because the Benin Bronzes have also shaped global art histories. They influenced how European modernists thought about form and abstraction. They forced art historians to confront the sophistication of African metalwork. For too long, that influence has been acknowledged without fully confronting the violence that brought these objects into Western collections.

Repatriation is not a magic fix. It will not undo the destruction of 1897 or erase the decades these bronzes spent in glass cases far from Benin City. But it opens the door to a different kind of future, one in which Edo communities, Nigerian institutions, and contemporary artists can decide, together, how these works live on.

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Further reading and resources

• Asante, M. K., & Mazama, A. (2009). Encyclopedia of African Religion. SAGE Publications.

• Ben-Amos, P. G. (1995). The Art of Benin. Smithsonian Institution Press.

• Plankensteiner, B. (Ed.). (2007). Benin – Kings and Rituals: Court Arts from Nigeria. Snoeck.

• Egharevba, J. U. (1968). A Short History of Benin (4th ed.). Ibadan University Press.

• Dark, P. J. C. (1973). An Introduction to Benin Art and Technology. Ibadan University Press (reprints and PDFs available online).

• Hicks, D. (2020). The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution. Pluto Press.

• Wood, P. (2012). “Display, Restitution and World Art History: The Case of the ‘Benin Bronzes’.” Museum and Society, 10(2), 84–99.

• Digital Benin – digital-benin.org – an online catalogue of more than 5,000 Benin objects across global collections.

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