ure on the scale of Egypt. In East Africa, the site of Asian-African trade centers, Islam made religious and cultural inroads (Davidson, 1964). In black Africa more generally, the sacred was largely manifest as animist and particularist. Individual communities had their own gods, shrines, and priestly class, the last-named functioning as intermediaries with the divine and/or as healers. African gods in general were associated with "the mysteries of nature . . . to whom one appealed for help and protection against the unknown" (Davidson, 1966, 126). Ancestors, or more exactly their spirits, had semi-divine status and functioned as moral authority for community life and were the locus of rites of passage. The use of ritual masks appears to have been most strongly associated with initiation rites connected to ancestor worship, "one of the central organizing factors in African society" (Davidson, 1966, 126). In addition to god worship and ancestor worship, spiritual life in Africa entailed magic. The structure and depth of belief varied. According to Davidson (1966, 128), the Zande of Sudan organized daily life around belief in sorcery and witches, while the Tallensi of Ghana were more secular of disposition. However, there was belief in good spirits and bad, good magic and bad, as well as in the power of so-called witch doctors to leaven any perceived threat by evil spirits.
The political structure of black Africa is misleadingly called tribal, according to Davidson (1964), who refers instead to communities. On the other hand, they can be called royalist in disposition, with chiefs or kings functioning as community leaders. According to Labouret (1962, 20-21), kings were invested with religious power in tropical Africa, governing by divine right, and inherited by the matrilineal line, for as long as they remained physically able. Davidson (1964, 13) attributes the proliferation of multiple tribes in Sub-Saharan Africa to social compl...