There are many individuals in Africa who break the mould and challenge our traditional stereotypes. These people challenge our view that every African holds religious beliefs. There are many more black atheists but I want to highlight only those that are still alive, born in Africa, who are making a public contribution to the debate around religious belief.
In the words of Leo Igwe,
“Africans are brought up to believe that there is NO alternative to religion. When in fact there is.”
It is this alternative that is the gift these men are offering us.
Leo Igwe (Nigerian)
Physical attacks, harassment and legal cases have not deterred Leo’s tireless campaigns against superstition and for humanism. He is the director of the Centre for Inquiry in Nigeria, the Nigerian Humanist Movement and the representative of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) in West Africa. His anti-witch craft campaigns have taken him led him around the African continent and to international conferences. His passionate exposure of child abuse, human rights abuses, the corruption of the Nigerian legal system and the harmful effects of irrational beliefs have made him many enemies but also many friends.
His views and reports can be read on his blog.
Adebowale Ojowuro (Nigerian)
Adebowale Ojowuro is a Nigerian born Philosopher, Atheist, and author of the Freethought related book, The Crisis of Religion.
He has been on self-exile in the Republic of South Africa since year 2001. A very inquisitive person from childhood, Adebowale upset his Sunday school teachers with his probing questions!
After bible study and a search for God in many different denominations he concludes in his book,
“Unto this day, what I empirically discovered is man’s inordinate search for security and not a fragment of his search for gospel truth and faithful worship.”
He consequently labelled all Africans as “perplexed servants to foreign gods,” in a recent interview published on the Echoes of Commonsense blog.
The Crisis of Religion represents the result of several years of insightful reflection and investigation into the myriad religions that dominate our lives.
The book can be purchased from the publishers and on Amazon.
Kwadwo Obeng (Ghanaian)
Describing himself as “Strongly anti-religion” he says that
“The Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions have shed too much African blood in the names of their man-made gods.”
Raised a Jehovah’s Witness, he served as a Ministerial Servant and Elder in several congregations in Ghana and the United States. His reading of the bible and the Koran led him to question the truths contained within. It prompted him to write his massive tome, We Are All Africans: Exposing the Negative Influence of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic Religions on Africans. He is also a public speaker and can be watched on YouTube here.
He currently lives in Los Angeles.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Somalia)
Named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world she renounced Islam and became an atheist in 2002. Her screenplay for Theo van Gogh’s movie Submission and her numerous books dealing with women in Islam have prompted death threats against her. She maintains that it is not just some Moslems that are violent but
“Violence is inherent in Islam — it’s a destructive, nihilistic cult of death. It legitimates murder.”
She is the founder and president of the AHA Foundation, “to help protect and defend the rights of women in the West against militant Islam.
Through education, outreach and the dissemination of knowledge, the Foundation aims to combat several types of crimes against women, including female genital mutilation, forced marriages, honor violence, and honor killings. “
UPDATE
Wole Soyinka
As pointed out by this blog post The Contributions of Freethinkers: Wole Soyinka, I missed this important figure. He writes in his interview Why I Am a Secular Humanist:
Humanism for me represents taking the human entity as the center of world perception, of social organization and indeed of ethics, deciding in other words what is primarily of the greatest value for humans as opposed to some remote extraterrestrial or ideological authority. And so from that point of view, I consider myself a humanist.
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Please notify me if you feel others should be included.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a well-known female atheist from Somalia.
I don’t know how I could have forgotten her! Thanks for that, have added her to the post.
Here are some examples of African free-thinking Christians:
- Mensa Otabil
- Mathew Asimolowo
- TD Jakes
Sel. A nice try but I think you missed the point of my post. Your names are fairly widely known, at least here in Ghana, but the names I want to profile are not.
Sorry to disappoint but your 3 men are not freethinkers. Freethought is an intellectual position that holds that tradition, dogma and authority should not determine our opinions. As Mr Ashimolowo has been very free with the funds of his charity and Mr Jakes is free with his modalistic heresy regarding the Trinity we could argue they are free thinkers. But they cannot be freethinkers.
so essentially what you’re saying is Atheism = Freethought…
I’m trying not to say that. In my opinion an agnostic and a deist could be freethinkers. I know people who believe in some kind of ‘higher power’ yet do not use that belief to inform the way they live their lives and make decisions. Perhaps they are also freethinkers?
Do your pastors inform their opinions based on religious belief? Perhaps we could argue that Ashimolowo and Jakes are freethinkers as they make decisions based not on religious ideals but on financial ones! Why do you think these men are freethinkers?
Members of organised religions be they christian or otherwise are not free thinkers because they subscribe to the dogmatic group think of the church. True free thinkers can be spiritual and have faiths but they don’t need the validation of a church.
Thanks for that concise definition and explanation.
…then all ‘but’ Christians are capable of becoming free-thinkers? Is this the definition we want to adopt?
Can you not notice your own bigotry? It seems so plain to see. Also seems clear that this is how all forms of discrimination and exploitation begin as far as I know. We form these groups and then try to justify the exclusion of others claiming basis of some sort of ‘special right’.
For the ‘free-thinking’ (I use literally) erudition we claim to have, this seems a little narrow-minded (un-freely thought) to me.
Sel, there is no such person as a Christian Freethinker. Are you really trying soo hard to make up your own dogma…give me a break. Well, a freethinker would question church and biblical ideas. All those three you suggested are nowhere closer to being Freethinkers.
Christian Freethinker is an illogical idea, it’s either you are Christian or a Freethinker.
Annette Nalunga in Uganda founder of the EMITOS girls Humanist football club (soccer) http://wofewoug.org/
Betty Nassaka in Uganda chairperson of the amazing UHESWO see http://uganda.humanists.net/uheswo.htm
Thank you Josh.
“to help protect and defend the rights of women in the West against militant Islam.” and why not against Christians?
Thank you Graham for including me in this list deep thinkers.
I am amazed at how the definition of a freethinker can elude some people. A freethinker is one who can think independently and come to conclusions based on sound evaluation of an issue based on facts, and has the fortitude to accept or reject without coercion. Faith, which is what all believers live by does not require thinking or evaluation. You simply have to accept precepts or conjectures based on someone’s opinion or views without any concrete evidence.
T.D. Jakes and all these religious charlatans believe in the following:
1. man-made gods – Yahweh created by Moses and Trinity created by Romans and of course the almighty dollar.
2. one earth-day of 12 hours creation of a universe that stretches more than 28 billion light years containing over 150 billion galaxies each contains trillions of stars
3. a man or ‘son of man’ Jesus as their savior when this Jesus could not save himself from crucifixion or save more than 50 million Africans who drowned and were eaten by sharks during the middle passage.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam, sham religions, were forced on us. Only freethinkers can see it.
You’re very welcome Kwadwo. Thanks for your contribution.
I must say that you are wrong Mr Obeng. Christianity by no means precludes critical thought and evaluation.
I think that your definition of free-thought is quite lacking.
And as for your argument against faith, why this whole world spins by the faith of millions everyday including yourself even though you might not have realized it yet.
Why do we accept pieces of paper believing that they are worth some imagined value that could be exchanged for tangible objects/services. We have faith in currency and financial markets. These things work because the rules they function by are a sort of shared voluntary hallucinatory-based agreement that the involved parties have acquiesced to – or through faith/believing that they do. If you doubt this, then by all means try the experiment on a secluded society of pygmies. See how far trying to convince one of them to accept payment of a sliver of paper for their hard-laboured harvest of produce gets you.
Several more of these analogies exist. How many Ghanaians know logically and by critical thought how a mobile phone works and yet this does not prevent them from picking one up and dialing some numbers expecting that they will be somehow connected with a voice on the other side. Is this not a kind of faith? How many of us have seen an atom? How many electro magnetic waves? Sound even? Air? Doesn’t prevent you from believing in it and breathing it, does it now? ‘Seeing’ is obviously NOT believing. Yet with all these everyday dismissed acts of faith it is still unfathomable that a benevolent God exists?
I did not quite mean to leave such a long post. The world could sure do with a lot more open-mindedness and less division. We’re probably better off focusing on our similarities than differences, no?
…these are ‘my free-thoughts…
religion is crap it preaches slavery of the mind. In religion u cant ask question and dat mean u dont need to think and i wonder what make us human.
I am a Nigerian with a strict religious background but started asking questions when i was 15.i quickly concluded that we were only christian because we were colonized by Christians.had we been colonized by Buddhists,we would be having the same argument about the truth of Buddha.I then went to university to study classical history which gave me a grounding in the origin and early days of Christianity.i became aware of the role which the emperor Constantine played in laying the foundations that has made this religion what it is today.how Christianity borrowed from even older religions and how ordinary and quite common the virgin birth,resurrection,etc,was in the ancient world.
Also the idea that we get our morality from the bible is a joke.the irony is that most religious people have never read the bible in its entirety.I have,and its prejudiced,ignorant and downright inhumane. Leviticus and Deuteronomy makes me shiver.all that stoning.lol!
more importantly,the Galileo and Giordano Bruno affair confirms that the church knows nothing about our world and how it works.also evolution has done enough to, at the very least strip away the nonsensical facade of religion as the absolute truth.
Thanks for your contribution. It’s always interesting to see what prompts people to question their ideas.
The Question of Faith
When people cannot defend anything in the Bible by evidence, they resort to faith.
They say: “Just believe because it is in the Bible or Qur’an or Talmud.”
These religions want us to believe in the scriptures or holy books based on faith. Well, what is faith anyway? I am sure you will agree that the most authoritative definition should be one that comes from the Bible, a book presumably inspired by God. Or you believers will say the definition given by God to men. So the Christian god defines faith as follows in some Bible translations:
Hebrews 11:
11 “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” – NASB
“Now faith is a well-grounded assurance of that for which we hope, and a conviction of the reality of things, which we do not see.” – WEY
“Faith is the assured expectation of things hoped for, the evident demonstration of realities though not beheld”. (New World Translation)
Now let’s consider the dictionary’s definition to clarify God’s:
“Faith – firm belief in something for which there is no proof” – Webster Dictionary
“Faith: is a belief, trust, or confidence, not based on logic, reason, or empirical data, but based fundamentally on volition often associated with a transpersonal relationship with God, a higher power, a person, elements of nature, and/or a perception of the human race as a whole.”–Wikipedia
Considering the Bible’s definition, how can you be assured of something you hope for? If you hope for something, it is your wish that you might get it sometime in the future.
This hope can be trusted only if there is credible, proven and reliable evidence of it occurring. The giver of the hoped-for thing must have demonstrated in the past that he/she can be trusted. But the “the evident demonstration of realities though not beheld,” means that there is absolutely no guarantee or evidence that the hope, pipe dream or perceived reality will ever materialize.
In other words, faith does not require proof by empirical data.
Since it lacks any semblance of realistic basis that what is hoped for will be obtained, it is not assured.
There is no certainty that what is hoped for can be achieved. Faith is therefore fantasy or wishful thinking! Faith is not based on fact or demonstrated trust or proof. This definition of faith is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron crafted in sophisticated language of deception.
Illustrate with a teenager wishing for a Ferrari from a mother on welfare after graduation.
You have heard the expression “Walk by faith and not by sight”.
Let me ask you, would you allow yourself to be blindfolded, placed on the edge of a cliff and walk unaided?
Would you cross a busy highway with your eyes closed, having faith that God will protect you as you cross the street without being hit by a vehicle?
I would like to have my eyes wide open so I can see the ‘Walk’ sign of the traffic light, look out for speeding cars and anything that could be a potential life-threatening danger so I can take corrective action.
Isn’t that what we teach our children, to observe the light, look before crossing?
Dr. Martin Luther King once gave a definition of faith. I was stupefied when I heard it. CNN ran it a lot of times in February.
This is what he said in paraphrase. “Faith is taking the first step when you do not know there is a staircase.”
After much thought I rationalized that only a preacher can say something like that.
He said that because he was raised as a believer and he was a preacher.
Imagine that you live on the tenth floor of a building in Southern California.
One night there is an earthquake that shakes the building and tears down the back wall of your bedroom. You wake up to no electricity, but street light in the open. You get up and walk towards where the wall was.
Knowing that you live way up on the tenth floor would you take a step out of the room when you feel no stairs or wall because you have faith in your lord and savior?
You know what will happen. You will fall and break your neck.
The wise thing to do would be to wait for the firefighters to bring you a ladder, and not take a step to walk out without seeing a staircase or ladder.
That is what I would do and I am sure you would too.
Intelligence and everyday experience teach us to ‘walk by sight’, not by faith.
Religious leaders want you to close your figurative eyes and have faith so they can lead you astray while they have their hands in your pocket.
They have faith, and like blind men that they are, they are going where they do not know and leading all who follow them to a fall on the side of this cliff of disaster and disappointment.
No, I walk by sight, experiential reality, what I can see, read, feel, observe, and not by faith (credulity). So should you.
I think you really want to take a look at Teekay Akin on facebook. A Yoruba African and a freethinker to the core of it!
He’s been attracting lots of debates, controversy on his page for weeks now, some even drawing as many as 20, 000 comments before getting deleted by facebook!
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001210566872
Even though the gap between Atheism and African-Americans is beginning to shrink, I wanted to see if it will also happen among the Africans themselves. So far after searching on Google, Yahoo, etc., I’ve only found 4 people on here who are setting the example. But, are they the only ones out there? Or is there more Africans that are coming up out of the darkness?
In my experience people seem less afraid to ask questions about religion. There may be only a few public faces but behind them are others working behind the scenes – this is certainly the case with the Nigerian Humanists. It’s a slow process.
Wow, at least it’s a good start. Check this out and tell me what you think:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6LgzBaTBSE
That’s one brave gentleman!
Elements for the superstitious – Lack of courage, stupidity, lunacy, insanity, mental subjugation, spiritual dependency, callousness, ignorant of; facts, general religions, evolution, reading, writing, arithmetic, beauty of nature, oppressive imprints, industrial arts, neurology, biology, medicine, physics, psychology and humanity.
I started seriously having doubts about religion when I was 13, but I have been scared to admit my scepticism even to myself. Religion is very harmful in Africa, as it gives us an excuse to not find logical and well-thought out solutions to problems. “God will provide.” I can still see the problems though.
RELIGION IS REALLY DESTROYING US. I EVEN WONDER WHY AID IS GIVEN TO AFRICANS WHEN WE JUST NEED CRITICAL THINKING! OMG
AFRICANS DONT NEED FORIEN AID! WE NEED CRITICAL THINKING, LOGIC AND SCIENCE
I am 16, and have been having doubts about my religion since I turned 16. I later declared myself faithless, and have told my parents about my lack of faith…they have not taken kindly to it. My dad had tried to punish me for it and told me I was wrong in my decision. My mother tried to guilt-trip me and tell me I was breaking her heart. I have tried to tell them that there is no feeling of animosity towards them in my decision, but it is simply the result of a series of mental excursions I have taken in the search for truth.
Hi Jason and sorry to hear about the difficulties with your parents. It may be better not to talk too much about your journey with them if it causes them so much distress. Or maybe to thank them for raising you with the freedom to think for yourself and form your own conclusions and hope that they will eventually learn to understand and respect them. I am impressed with your mature response to your parents. If you are in Ghana feel free to get in touch with the Humanist Association.