In the absence of significant archival materials, it is difficult to reconstruct the exact nature of precolonial sub-Saharan African religions. Current understandings about early African religious practices are based on accounts written by missionaries during the colonial period and date primarily from the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, ethnographic research can help contemporary scholars envision the religious traditions that existed prior to European contact. Indeed, the cosmogonic structures and general praxis found in the colonial and postcolonial eras emerge from a preexisting polytheistic worldview that had been heavily influenced by newer monotheistic traditions. This essay seeks to outline the nature and structures common to many African belief systems prior to 1800. Surprisingly, long before the transatlantic slave trade, these belief systems contained elements not only of traditional African religions, but of Islam and Christianity as well.

An inquiry into African religions requires an understanding of the African contexts in which these religions developed. Human species have walked the continent for at least two million years. Archeological finds since the early twentieth century verify the existence of hominids in Africa during this period. Thus Africa, we understand, was the human beings' initial home. As Homo sapiens migrated, new ethnic groups and cultures emerged. The San and Khoi Khoi, among the earliest groups, inhabited the Kalahari Desert, a thirstland stretching across Namibia and Botswana that sustains water-retaining vegetation such as the tsamma melon and the gemsbok cucumber.