Ellis tells us of the spirit belief of the Ewe people, who believe that men and all nature have the indwelling “Kra,” which is immortal; that the man himself after death may exist as a ghost, which is often conceived of as departed from the “Kra,” a shadowy continuing of the man.  Bryce, speaking of the Kaffirs of South Africa, says, “To the Kaffirs, as to the most savage races, the world was full of spirits—­spirits of the rivers, the mountains, and the woods.  Most important were the ghosts of the dead, who had power to injure or help the living, and who were, therefore, propitiated by offerings at stated periods, as well as on occasions when their aid was especially desired.  This kind of worship, the worship once most generally diffused throughout the world, and which held its ground among the Greeks and Italians in the most flourishing period of ancient civilization, as it does in China and Japan to-day, was, and is, virtually the religion of the Kaffirs."[54]

African religion does not, however, stop with fetish, but, as in the case of other peoples, tends toward polytheism and monotheism.  Among the Yoruba, for instance, Frobenius shows that religion and city-state go hand in hand.

“The first experienced glance will here detect the fact that this nation originally possessed a clear and definite organization so duly ordered and so logical that we but seldom meet with its like among all the peoples of the earth.  And the basic idea of every clan’s progeniture is a powerful God; the legitimate order in which the descendants of a particular clan unite in marriage to found new families, the essential origin of every new-born babe’s descent in the founder of its race and its consideration as a part of the God in Chief; the security with which the newly wedded wife not only may, but should, minister to her own God in an unfamiliar home."[55]

The Yoruba have a legend of a dying divinity.  “This people ... give evidence of a generalized system; a theocratic scheme, a well-conceived perceptible organization, reared in rhythmically proportioned manner.”

Miss Kingsley says, “The African has a great Over God."[56] Nassau, the missionary, declares, “After more than forty years’ residence among these tribes, fluently using their language, conversant with their customs, dwelling intimately in their huts, associating with them in the various relations of teacher, pastor, friend, master, fellow-traveler, and guest, and in my special office as missionary, searching after their religious thought (and therefore being allowed a deeper entrance into the arcana of their soul than would be accorded to a passing explorer), I am able unhesitatingly to say that among all the multitude of degraded ones with whom I have met, I have seen or heard of none whose religious thought was only a superstition.