  I define spirituality as a heightened form of religiosity reached by certain individuals in the community who have, or claim to have, mystical contacts with the supernatural, the divine. It would be correct to assert, however, that the encounters are the results, rather than the sources, of religion in Africa in the traditional setting. And, even though ‘spiritual messages’ may be received by the practitioners of traditional African religion through those mystical encounters part of which (‘messages’) may relate to moral conduct, nevertheless such messages appear to be too few and far between to constitute an adequate basis for a coherent ethical system. Moreover, the .moral character of such ‘messages’ would, in a non-revealed religious context, have to be judged by the people themselves on the basis of their own moral insights. This is a telling point that implies the independence (autonomy) of the moral attitudes of the people with regard to the conduct of the spiritual beings. This is the reason why an eminent Ghanaian sociologist observed that “The gods are treated with respect if they deliver the goods, and with contempt if they fail….Attitudes to [the gods] depend on their success [i.e., the success of the gods], and vary from healthy respect to sneering contempt” (K. A. Busia in Forde, 1954: 205). The moral disapprobation of the people with regard to the actions—particularly the unsuccessful actions—of the deities constitutes the ground for the extinction of some of the deities from the Akan, possibly the African, pantheon. The fact that the behavior of a supernatural being is thus subject to human censure implies that it is possible for a deity to issue commands that can be considered unethical by the practitioners of traditional religion. All this implies, surely, that it would be correct to assert that, rather than regarding African ethics as religious (or, religious-based), it would be more correct to regard African religion as ethical.