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Samuel Tobbytex007  · CC BY-SA 4.0  · a work of art, not a likeness

Tradition collection 96 records

African traditions

Yorùbá, Akan, Igbo, Dogon, Zulu and diaspora traditions, and the Ethiopian and Coptic churches.

  • Extent Sub-Saharan Africa and the Atlantic diaspora, antiquity to the present.
  • Holds 74 gods · 21 traditions
Meet the gods

Before you count

Oral traditions are systematically under-recorded in structured data, and this collection is the clearest case of it on the site.

What else it is missing

Gods · 74

The gods

The most widely linked across Wikipedia, this collection’s own first. A picture of a god is a work of art, never a likeness.

All 74 gods

More of its best-linked gods

Traditions · 21

Many paths, shared histories

The traditions, schools and movements this collection holds — each with its own page.

All 21 traditions

Also here · 1

Also in this collection

Kinds it holds only one or two of, each with its own page.

What this collection holds

Counted, not scored. Each count opens its list.

Every collection

A record can be more than one kind — a monastery is a place and an institution — so these counts add up to more than its 96 records. The sections above count the same way, and draw each record once, under the kind its own page is filed under.

Statements
152
With references
32
Undated
93
Accounts
0
Reviewed here
0
What it is missing, and how it was assembled

What this collection is missing

Written by an editor, not computed. A count of records cannot say any of this, and a collection read without it is a collection read wrongly.

  • Oral traditions are systematically under-recorded in structured data, and this collection is the clearest case of it on the site.
  • Diaspora traditions — Vodou, Candomblé, Lucumí — are recorded through their Atlantic forms more than their West African ones.
  • Colonial-era ethnography is the source for much of this and its categories are not neutral.

Counted across the collections

Festivals, practices and events follow how densely Wikidata records them, not how much a tradition keeps: 77% of the 845 held across the collections are Christian, and this collection holds none.

What the counts mean

Statements
Relationships and facts recorded on these records.
With references
Statements that cite a source outside Wikimedia.
Undated
Records with no date on any of the three clocks.
Accounts
Named versions of a story, kept apart.
Reviewed here
Read by a person and signed with a date.

How it was assembled

Discovered from Wikidata by class and by religion, ranked by incoming links, then filtered against each item’s own claims. Relationships are imported statements unless a row says otherwise; none of them has been read here.

“Reviewed” means a person read it and signed it with a date — which is why it is zero. Nothing here measures how good the material is.

Records here have an article in 16 languages between them. The interface is English only for now. Published 2026-09-25.

Keep going

Walk African traditions another way.

A family tree as the accounts give it, every mapped place on the atlas, and the dates on the timeline — each on its own clock.

Yemaja’s family tree On the atlas The timeline, from Marie Laveau