African Religions and Philosophy

Western missionaries, anthropologist, journalists and scholars who keep harping about ‘ancestor worship’ should look at or consider cemeteries in their home countries and see how many flowers, candles, and even photographs of the dead, are put on the graves of relatives and friends. That is often more extreme than anything we find in Africa and I do not know what from of ‘worship’ to call this beloved custom in the West. African peoples do not feel ashamed to remember their departed members of the family. Remembering them, as we shall see later in the book, is not worshipping them.