The Ibibio Traditional Religion

The traditional religion of the Ibibio people of South-Eastern Nigeria is an integral aspect of the African Traditional Religion (ATR), thus, it shares its basic features of the latter which include: the belief in God, belief in divinities, belief in the spirits, belief in ancestors, as well as the practice of magic and medicine, each with its own attendant cult. The cult involves the performance of rituals and ceremonies (or worship) and the existence of religious functionaries. The Ibibio, like other Africans have always been very religious and religion permeates all aspects of their life so fully that there is no distinction between the sacred and the secular and between religious and non-religious. The Ibibio developed their religion before the advent of the Europeans and were satisfied with the worship system and the outcomes. In recent past, the Ibibio religion, and indeed, the African Traditional Religion (ATR) have been denigrated by most Western scholars and commentators. In a bid to justify the erroneous claim that before the advent of the Europeans that Africa was a “Dark Continent” with no civilisation, diverse derogatory epithets were ascribed to African religion such as paganism, fetishism, primitive, savage anti-Christ, etc. The study discovers that despite the deliberate Eurocentric attempts to discredit the indigenous religion as well as some drastic legislation which bar certain traditional practices and regulation of its workings, some Ibibio still adhere to aspects of their traditional religion to this day. The paper adopts a historical narrative methodology.