West African Traditional Religion

Kofi Asare Opoku's West African Traditional Religion, published by FEP International Private Limited in Accra in 1978, is a widely used survey by a Ghanaian scholar of religion, written for university teaching across the region and long assigned in African religious studies courses as an insider synthesis of Akan and neighbouring traditions' cosmology, ritual and ethics. Its strength is that Opoku writes from within the traditions he describes as a specialist in African religion rather than as an outside observer, which gives the survey an authority period ethnographies by non African writers often lacked. Its limit is that a single author's synthesis published nearly fifty years ago, before much of the more recent regional scholarship, generalises across many distinct West African traditions under one heading, so a claim specific to one people's practice should be checked against a study of that tradition rather than treated as settled by the survey's general account.