West African

This is a heading over many peoples, languages and traditions, and the atlas holds it as a heading rather than as a religion. The Akan, Igbo, Dogon, Serer, Mende and dozens of others are distinct, and where the atlas can name a tradition it does so separately.

What recurs widely enough across the region to be worth stating as a shape is a supreme creator who is not the focus of cult. The high god made the world and is spoken of with reverence, and observance goes to a working order of powers below: deities of rivers, of the earth, of thunder, of iron and of the market, together with the ancestors of the lineage. The creator's remoteness is not neglect in the tradition's own terms but a description of how the world is arranged.

Below that, the organising principle is locality and lineage. A deity belongs to a place or to a descent group, and a person's obligations follow from where and to whom they were born. There is rarely a single roster that a whole people would recognise as complete.

The ancestors are not a separate department. They are part of the working order, addressed, fed and consulted, and a distinguished ancestor may over time be served in a way that is not sharply distinguishable from a deity.

These are living traditions with living custodians, several of them listed by this atlas as restricted. What is transmitted within an initiated office is not reproduced here.

These traditions transmit orally, through divination corpora, praise poetry, proverb, song and the training of office holders, and they were not written down by the people who held them.

The written record therefore begins with outsiders, and the earliest substantial European accounts belong to the era of the Atlantic slave trade. They were written by people engaged in it or dependent on it, and they should be read as such. Missionary accounts follow, then colonial ethnography, which was frequently commissioned to make populations governable and which imposed categories, tribe, chief, fetish, that did not fit and are still being unpicked.

One case shows the cost with unusual clarity. The Dogon became internationally famous through a French ethnographic account of an elaborate esoteric cosmology, later the basis of claims about astronomical knowledge that circulate to this day. Subsequent fieldwork could not reproduce the account, and the episode is now a standard example of what happens when a single charismatic researcher and a small group of informants produce a system neither party would have produced alone.

From the mid twentieth century, African scholars writing about their own traditions changed the field, and their work is the appropriate starting point.

The atlas records what kind of institutions these are and reproduces neither the material held inside initiated offices nor the reconstructions that outsiders built on top of them.