Africa is the birthplace of human spiritual life, and its indigenous traditions — from the Yoruba religion of West Africa to the Ubuntu philosophy of the Bantu-speaking peoples to the Zulu cosmology of Southern Africa — represent some of the most sophisticated and ancient spiritual frameworks on earth. These traditions are not primitive precursors to later religions but complete philosophical and ethical systems: they address the nature of divinity, the structure of the cosmos, the obligations of the living to the dead, and the proper conduct of human life with extraordinary depth. To encounter African indigenous spirituality seriously is to discover that the conversation about what is real and what matters has been going on here for as long as it has been going on anywhere.
Each step builds on the last.