African Traditional Religions are religions of salvation and wholeness. Africans believe that life is a complex web of relationships that may either enhance and preserve a life or diminish and destroy it.
The life of the individual comes into fruition through the social ritual of rites of passage. These rites are the process that can help the individual to attain the goals of his or her destiny, given at birth by God. Those who successfully go through rites of passage will become candidates for ancestorhood-the goal of the ideal life.
God in Africa is a relational being who is known through various levels of relationship with creation. God is the great ancestor of the human race, and God is portrayed more as a parent than as a soverign. God is a husband who stands behind the creative fecudity of the earth that sustains human life. God is the creator from whom life flows and is sustained.
African religion is a this-worldly religion of salvation that promises well-being and wholeness here and now. It is a religion that affirms and celebrates life in its fullness; this accounts for all the lively and celebrative mood that characterizes African worship in all its manifestations.