Short answers, pulled from the story.
African traditional religions are the diverse traditional beliefs and practices of African people, including various ethnic religions. They are generally oral rather than scriptural and are passed down through narratives, songs, myths, and festivals. Most can be described as animistic, with polytheistic and pantheistic aspects, including belief in spirits, higher and lower gods, the veneration of the dead, magic, and traditional African medicine.
Adherents of traditional religions in Africa are distributed among 43 countries and are estimated to number over 100 million. Followers are also found around the world, with the religions of the Igbo and Yoruba popular in the Caribbean and parts of Central and South America. In the United States, Voodoo is more predominant in the states along the Gulf of Mexico.
Ancestors are an integral part of reality and are believed to occupy a higher level of existence than living human beings. They can bestow blessings or illness on their descendants, offer advice and good fortune, and make demands such as insisting their shrines be properly maintained. Most ancestral spirits are believed to be good and kind.
Ubuntu is an Nguni Bantu term meaning humanity, part of a concept sometimes translated as I am because we are or humanity towards others. In Zulu it is expressed as umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. It is a collection of values and practices that people of Africa view as making people authentic human beings, part of a larger relational, communal, societal, environmental, and spiritual world.
Islam and Christianity have largely displaced indigenous African religions but are often adapted to African cultural contexts, and many people practice both their traditional beliefs and an Abrahamic religion in a form of religious duality. Islam spread across North and West Africa partly through Sub-Saharan trade routes and Muslim merchants, while Christianity arrived through European missionaries. Traditional African religions have also faced persecution, including forced conversion and the destruction of sacred places.
Because Africa has many ethnic groups and cultures, there is no single technique of casting divination. Casting may be done with small objects such as bones, cowrie shells, stones, strips of leather, or flat pieces of wood, sometimes using sacred wooden divination plates or performed on the ground within a circle. Diviners, also known as priests, are sought for their wisdom as counselors and their knowledge of herbal medicine.