The title of this book was inspired by the critique of Western interpretations of African religions developed in the late 1960s by the Ugandan poet, philosopher and anthropologist Okot p'Bitek, in his now-classic work entitled African Religions in Western Scholarship. P'Bitek (1970; 1990: 80) opens his tenth chapter, which he calls the “Hellenization of African deities”, with the following words: “When students of African religions describe African deities as eternal, omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, etc. they intimate that African deities have identical attributes with those of the Christian God.” He closes the same chapter with an indictment of such conclusions, which he labels as “absurd and misleading” (p'Bitek 1990: 80), by referring to the same attributes: “African peoples”, he writes, “may describe their deities as ‘strong’ but not ‘omnipotent’; ‘old’, not ‘eternal’, ‘great’, not ‘omnipresent’” (ibid.: 88). He then concludes in a way that indicates how I obtained the title for this volume: “The African deities of the books, clothed with the attributes of the Christian God, are, in the main, creations of the students of African religions” (ibid.).

P'Bitek has suggested quite correctly that African Christians nowadays generally take for granted that there can always be found an equivalent in the local language to a concept of a Supreme Being. This uncritical attitude primarily has resulted from years of missionary teaching and carries with it the assumption that the Supreme Being can be translated into Christian categories.