Ellis, Stephen, and Gerrie Ter Haar. "Religion and Politics: Taking African Epistemologies Seriously". The Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol.45, No.3 (2007): 385-401.

Ellis, Stephen, and Gerrie Ter Haar. "Religion and Politics: Taking African Epistemologies Seriously". The Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol.45, No.3 (2007): 385-401.

• The authors contend that African epistemologies, there ways of understanding the world, cannot be dismissed or denigrated as superstitious or crazy, but must be taken at face-value as a legitimate perspective which informs political action (386).
• Too often, scholars use different words to describe African religious practices, in particular 'occult' and 'superstitous', which draws unhelpful barriers between similar religious practices elsewhere. Understanding African religions in terms of global models is an important step to making the field less biased (391).
• One of the defining features of African religion is that almost all faiths, including traditional beliefs, established churches, and pentecostal movements, believe in a 'spirit world' parallel to our own. This world could contain ghosts, demons, or more conventional saints, but it always exerts some influence on the material world and can only be reached via religion (387).
• These spirits are usually imagined as individuals, sometimes referring to individual ancestors, but also individual spirits or demons (387-388).
• Religion remains important in many parts of the world because people view it as important. The majority of the world's population believes that ultimate power in the material and political world derives from the 'spirit world', through divine authority. Because of this, religious authority can translate into political power and visa-versa (390-391, 396). 
• African countries generally have four shared aspects of religious practice: a belief in the 'spirit world', a rich oral tradition beyond written documents, a shared experience of some form of colonial rule, and an understand of evil as a spiritual force rather than an individual trait (393).
• Religious understandings of political life often result in clashes between Western and African leaders in discussions of good governance and development, as Western technocratic standards frequently ignore elements important to Africans, like the basic morality of rule as determined by accordance with religious mores (395).
• African geopolitical and global position has created some unique psychological effects which translate into religious belief. The weight of structure forces disadvantaging Africa is translated into religious beliefs of great evil spirits working against African people through war, corruption, and disease. In these way, many huge material problems in Africa are given sources in the spiritual realm (397).
• Although, prior to colonization, Africans were able to mobilize around spiritual leaders to solve these great issues through point political-spiritual conflict, following the systematic suppression of indigenous spiritual leaders during the colonial era, traditional spiritual leaders lacked the political capital to actually confront the 'evil spirits' causing corruption, poverty, or war (398).