Mbiti, an African scholar, states that "Africans are notoriously religious." Indeed, much of what we consider social, political, or cultural and thereby secular is considered religious in African thought. "The whole organization of society is maintained by the spiritual forces that pervade it." The pervasiveness of religion involves all aspects of the culture: kinship, health and disease, fertility of crops, animals, leadership and man. It offers a general sense of security and well being, "For Africans, the whole of existence is a religious phenomenon; man and woman were deeply religious beings living in a religious universe, there is belief in the hierarchy of spirit forces. First there is God, who is seen to be in and behind .... objects and phenomena: they are his creation, they manifest him, they symbolize his being and presence .... The invisible world presses hard upon the visible and tangible world." God is conceived as a distant, relatively unapproachable deity."
"The great creator has very few temples or images, but is almost everywhere believed in." Ordinarily there is little direct contact between man and the Supreme deity. "The general picture in Africa is that regular communal prayers to God are rare." However, "in times of great distress many Africans turn to God in desperation. He is the final resort, the last court of appeal." Below God are the spirits, which Mbiti describes as invisible, ubiquitous, and unpredictable. They live all around: in the sky, the sun, the earth, bodies of water, rocks, or trees. "There are spirits of mountains and forests, of pools and streams, of trees and other local objects." In addition to the beliefs in the spirits of animals, storms, thunder and lightning, and household spirits. Men's and women's associations "have their own presiding spirits, crafts have their particular gods, villages have their guardians. The spirits can be protectors or they can bring illness or madness, particularly if they have been neglected or angered through the breaking of taboos.
A special category of spirits is the living dead, the recent ancestors, still remembered, who can intercede with other spirits or even God for the good of the living. Thus although Africans may believe in a high God from whom all mystical power flows, it is through the spirits, including the ancestors, that man is able to make contact with the deity to tap that mystical power. "That means that the universe is not static or 'dead': it is a dynamic 'living' and powerful universe."