According to General Ishola Williams, African Ancestral Faith must be understood as a faith system rooted in indigenous cosmology, not as a religion shaped by foreign theological structures. He argues that what many people today call “Yoruba religion” has been heavily influenced by Christian and Islamic interpretations, causing a distortion of the original worldview of the ancestors..
Army General (Rtd.) Ishola Williams, founder of PANAFSTRAG (the Pan African Strategic and Research Group), is a social critic, a devotee of African Ancestral Faith, and a strong advocate for indigenous spirituality in Nigeria and across the world.
General Ishola Williams has led major discussions on African indigenous faith within academic and intellectual circles across Nigeria, Brazil, Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, Benin, and several other parts of the world, promoting deeper understanding of ancestral traditions, decolonization of African spirituality, and the preservation of indigenous knowledge systems.
In his view, Ifá was never meant to function like Christianity or Islam, and African spirituality was never built around the idea of one supreme God ruling from heaven, rewarding some with paradise and punishing others with eternal fire. Those concepts, he says, belong to Abrahamic religion, not to Yoruba ancestral cosmology.
General Williams strongly rejects the modern presentation of Olódùmàrè as the Yoruba equivalent of the Christian God or Islamic Allah. According to him, the statement that “Olódùmàrè created everything” or that “Olódùmàrè breathed life into Òbàtálá” is a theological reconstruction influenced by missionaries and colonial religion, not an original indigenous teaching.
He argues that this idea is logically inconsistent. If Òbàtálá is recognized in many traditions as the creator of humanity and the one responsible for molding existence, then placing another creator above him creates contradiction. He asks a direct question: if people ask, “Who created Òbàtálá?” then the same question must be asked of Olódùmàrè. Why should one be questioned and not the other?
For him, Òbàtálá is the original creative force within Yoruba ancestral understanding, and the attempt to place Olódùmàrè above Òbàtálá reflects the influence of monotheistic religion trying to reshape indigenous spirituality into the image of Christianity.
He further explains that African ancestral faith traditionally has no concept of heaven and hell as understood in Christianity and Islam. There is no eternal heaven where God sits above the clouds, and there is no eternal hellfire where sinners are condemned forever. Since these concepts do not exist in traditional Yoruba cosmology, he argues that presenting Olódùmàrè or Ọlọ́run as a heavenly supreme God becomes historically and spiritually questionable.
According to him, indigenous faith systems operate differently. They are based on balance, responsibility, ancestral continuity, spiritual consequence, and relationship with the visible and invisible world, not salvation theology.
This is why he says clearly: “God is not one.” He rejects the claim that all religions worship the same supreme God under different names. In his argument, saying Olódùmàrè is simply “God” is already accepting Abrahamic theology. Once Yoruba spirituality is forced into the language of one God, heaven, hell, Satan, and salvation, it stops being ancestral faith and becomes a religious imitation of Christianity.
He believes African Ancestral Faith has suffered deep Christian intervention. Over time, Christian missionaries and colonial scholars introduced parallels that reshaped Yoruba spirituality: God became Olódùmàrè, saints became Òrìṣà, Satan became Èṣù, heaven became Ọ̀run, and hell was inserted as a moral destination. These translations, he says, were not neutral, they were ideological.
According to General Williams, Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther played a major role in this transformation. He argues that Ajayi Crowther intentionally sidelined Òbàtálá and elevated Olódùmàrè so that Christianity could more easily be preached to Yoruba people.
By presenting Olódùmàrè as “God,” missionaries created a familiar bridge between Christianity and Yoruba spirituality. This made conversion smoother, because people were told they already believed in the same God, only under a different name. He also points out that Ajayi Crowther compared the Òrìṣà to Christian saints, mere intermediaries between man and God, rather than recognizing them as complete spiritual intelligences with their own autonomous divine functions.
Even more controversially, Èṣù was translated as Satan. General Williams rejects this completely. He argues that Èṣù is not the Christian devil. Èṣù is a divine principle of balance, consequence, justice, and spiritual accountability. Turning Èṣù into Satan was, in his view, one of the greatest distortions imposed by Christian interpretation.
He says this Christian intervention created a dangerous condition where African ancestral faith began to mirror Christianity so closely that people now assume they are structurally the same. We now hear of “one God,” “the devil,” “heaven,” “hell,” and even “salvation” inside systems where these ideas were originally absent.
For him, this is not preservation, it is replacement. He asks another important question: if Olódùmàrè truly exists as a supreme being in the same way the Christian God exists, then what exactly is His function? Every Òrìṣà already has a defined role. Ògún governs iron and technology. Ṣàngó governs justice and power. Ọ̀ṣun governs fertility and sweetness. Yemọja governs motherhood and waters. Ifá reveals wisdom and destiny. Òbàtálá governs creation and clarity.
There is already a complete spiritual structure based on division of labor. So where does Olódùmàrè fit? If all functions already exist within the Òrìṣà system, then introducing a distant supreme ruler above them all appears unnecessary and suspiciously similar to Abrahamic theology. For this reason, he argues that Olódùmàrè as a singular supreme God is largely a Christian theological construction rather than an original indigenous reality.
General Williams also criticizes how Ifá itself has been interpreted in modern times. He believes many Babaláwos have reshaped Ifá to fit religious expectations, sometimes more for authority, popularity, or financial gain than for truth. Since Ifá was preserved mainly through oral tradition, he says much of its interpretation depends on who is speaking. This creates room for distortion, especially when people try to make Ifá function like a Bible or Qur’an.
Some now describe Ifá as “the word of Olódùmàrè” or “the Bible of African Traditional Religion.”
He rejects this strongly. According to him, African cosmology traditionally has no scripture in the Abrahamic sense. There was no single holy book handed down from one supreme God. People are trying to force Ifá into that position because they feel religion must have scripture.
But Ifá is not scripture. Ifá is divination, guidance, memory, wisdom, and ethical direction. It teaches conduct, balance, and consequence. It tells people how to act and how to understand life, but it is not meant to be worshipped as a holy book.
In his words, Ifá is for divination, while Òrìṣà are for worship. Yoruba people should worship the Òrìṣà, not Ifá itself. He praises scholars like Wande Abimbola and Kola Abimbola for helping bring Ifá from oral tradition into academic study. Without scholars like them, he says, Ifá would remain vulnerable to manipulation and could not be properly cited in serious intellectual discourse.
He especially values the academic preservation of ancestral knowledge because it allows people to study Ifá critically rather than blindly accepting every modern interpretation. Ultimately, General Ishola Williams calls for the decolonization of Yoruba spirituality. He argues that African ancestral faith must be freed from Christian categories and understood on its own terms. It should not be measured by the standards of Christianity or Islam. It should not be forced to imitate the structures of foreign religion.
There is no need to invent one God where none originally existed. There is no need to force heaven, hell, Satan, and salvation into indigenous cosmology. There is no need to turn Ifá into a Bible. African ancestral faith, he says, already had its own complete philosophical and spiritual structure before colonial religion arrived. To recover that truth, Yoruba people must return to the foundations—not to imported theology, but to ancestral understanding.
