ABSTRACT
Until quite recently rural Africans were thought of as tribesmen. Their religion was held to be the expression of traditional social values. Its study was the preserve of the anthropologist. Many anthropologists were sympathetic to African systems of belief, revealing their inner logic and their function as sustaining ideologies. On the other hand, their studies neither showed tribal religion itself as capable of change and innovation nor were at all sympathetic to such obvious evidences of religious change as rural adherence to a 'folk' missionary Christianity or the formation of African prophetic churches. Anyone committed to social revolution who read the works of these anthropologists must necessary conclude that African religion itself was archaic and irrelevant to existing or hoped-for social change and that other rural religious manifestations were merely a manifestation of social breakdown rather than of social reconstruction.
