The idea that Africans are inherently religious is a constructed colonial-era tradition.

Evidence

The empiricists, such as Okot p’Bitek, Jan Platvoet and Henk van Rinsum, strongly doubt this proposition that Africans are religious. They regard philosophy as a critical discussion among individuals. They criticize the religious discourse of African philosophy because it was constructed by ethnologists with biases. According to Platvoet and Van Rinsum (2003, 2008), the paradigm of Africans as deeply religious is an invention of tradition, a paradigmatic identity constructed by a particular group of people at a time of change, by which they claim continuity of identity with a suitable, but mainly mythical, past (Hobsbawm, 1992). As a reaction to colonization, Mbiti (1990, p. 1) created the foundation for the construction of a complete African ideological identity with his saying “Africans are notoriously religious”. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 804

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Hobsbawm’s ‘invented tradition’ concept, a recurring framework across the reader’s colonialism/modernity reading.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did Mbiti’s ‘notoriously religious’ framing compare to Tempels’ earlier project as a defense against paganism charges?