Religion, African Scholars of

The focus of this topic deals primarily with research on indigenous African religions that has been carried out by mainly Protestant African scholars in West and East Africa. Secondarily, some references are made to studies on these religions by Catholic scholars from Central Africa. Whereas in Anglophone Africa, much research has been undertaken in (officially) nonconfessional university departments of religious studies, work on indigenous religions by scholars of religion in Francophone Africa has normally been produced in centers and seminaries of the Catholic and other churches. In addition, a great deal of work on these religions has been conducted by scholars in faculties of humanities and social sciences, although such work will not be presented here. In terms of time, the focuses are mainly on the period from the 1960s to the early 1990s.

An overwhelming majority of African scholars of religion who have studied indigenous African religions have been Christians, and many of them...