African ontology is fundamentally religious with no sacred-secular divide

Evidence

Religion is the strongest element in traditional background, and exerts probably the greatest influence upon the thinking and living of the people concerned … there is no formal distinction between the sacred and the secular, between the religious and non-religious, between the spiritual and the material areas of life. Wherever the African is, there is his religion … The whole environment and the whole time must be occupied by religious meaning, so that at any moment and in any place, a person feels secure enough to act in a meaningful and religious consciousness … Where the individual is, there is his religion, for he is a religious being. It is this that makes Africans so religious: religion is in their whole system of being. … Africans have their own ontology, but it is a religious ontology, and to understand their religions we must penetrate that ontology. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 260

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the core claim that African religiosity stems from an ontology where sacred and secular are not separable.
• XREF: Connects to wider African philosophy debates on ontology, and to Mugambi/Bediako’s work on religion’s permeation of African life.