Igbo

Igbo religion sets a supreme creator, Chukwu, above a body of lesser deities and above the ancestors, and it is famously decentralised. There was no priesthood covering all Igbo communities and no political centre, so the shape of practice varies from one village group to the next. Elizabeth Isichei's history treats that absence of centralisation as the governing fact of Igbo life rather than an incidental feature of it.

The nearest and most demanding power is Ala, the earth goddess, who is the ground of law rather than of fertility alone. Offences described as nso ala, abomination against the earth, are the serious crimes, and they are crimes because the earth is offended by them. Herbert Cole's study of mbari houses records the most spectacular response to her: an entire building of moulded and painted clay figures, commissioned at a diviner's direction, made in seclusion by people called to the work, and then left to the weather, because the making is the offering and the object is not meant to last.

Each person also carries a chi, a personal spirit or portion allotted at birth, which is negotiated with rather than simply obeyed. The proverb that where a person says yes, that person's chi says yes too, is the tradition's own summary of how much room it leaves to the individual.

The long distance institution of Igbo religion was the oracle. Ibini Ukpabi at Arochukwu, known in colonial writing as the Long Juju, arbitrated disputes for communities across the region and was reached by pilgrimage. The Aro traders who controlled access to it built a commercial network on that authority, and their involvement in the slave trade is why the British destroyed the shrine in the expedition of 1901 and 1902.

Christianity spread through Igboland from the later nineteenth century faster than through most of Nigeria, and today the great majority of Igbo people are Christian, with Anglican and Catholic churches long established and Pentecostal ones now prominent. Chinua Achebe's fiction is, for many readers, the only account of the older religion they will ever meet, and it is a novelist's account of the moment it broke.

The older practice has not ended. John McCall's ethnography of Ohafia records masquerade and dance traditions carrying historical knowledge into the present, and the ancestral cult, the ozo title system and the annual new yam festival continue in forms that sit alongside church membership rather than in opposition to it. Odinani, as a named and consciously revived religion, is a more recent development, and describes itself as a recovery rather than as an unbroken line.