This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Africa gathers the atlas's largest continental country grouping, fifty four nations running from the oldest continuous religious history anywhere to legal orders naming a single faith as the state's own, with indigenous systems that persist inside, rather than beside, whatever else arrived.
Egypt carries the deepest run: pharaonic cults of Amun, Osiris and Isis at Karnak and Luxor gave way to Ptolemaic syncretism, a Coptic Church claiming descent from the apostle Mark, and an Islamic conquest that made Cairo's al-Azhar one of the oldest universities anywhere. Ethiopia's Christianity is nearly as old, tracing to Aksum's fourth century conversion, and the country also holds Africa's oldest Muslim population and once held Beta Israel, whose community mostly emigrated to Israel in the late twentieth century.
Indigenous religion did not stay outside the faiths that reached the continent later, it moved inside them. Benin's Vodun, carried by the slave trade into Haiti, Brazil and Cuba, remains an officially recognized religion practiced alongside Christianity and Islam by the same people; Nigeria's Yoruba orisha veneration crossed the Atlantic the same way, into Santeria and Candomble; and the Poro and Sande societies of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau still carry ritual authority no chieftaincy alone holds.
A further group writes religion into law. Comoros, Mauritania and Somalia constitutionally establish Sunni Islam and criminalize leaving it, while Senegal's Mouridiyya and Sudan's Khatmiyya hold comparable authority as Sufi brotherhoods instead. Most remaining countries, Tanzania among them, hold Christian and Muslim populations in close balance under constitutions naming no state religion, which is where the grouping's edges blur.