I ask myself if it weren't for colonisation, if it weren't for the curiosity of white people to travel the world, would there be any fate for our salvation? And if Christianity never got to Africa would that means none of us would make it into heaven and what about who passed on before the missionaries got to Africa? And if colonisation brought us religion surely we have a lot to be thankful of to colonisers.

But that is not the case, Africans had their structured religious practises like your Chritianity, Islam and Hinduism but it was downplayed to some pagan because probably we had no Bible or Quran?

As Xhosa people we believed in uQamata and we would pray to him and offerings were given unto uQamata, it then came that we have traditions (amasiko nezithethe) I believe that this is were I think confusion kicked in for black people because they started doing things directly for their ancestors, they started offering directly to their ancestors.

Isithethe is a popular practise among a family, clan or society and through popularity then that practise is sort of elevated to isiko, which is something that is to somewhat compulsory.

I will highlight how this process goes: usually only the first born child would get imbheleko. Imbelekho, the word by definition means something to carry the baby on your back. A goat would be slaughtered and the dried hide would become imbheleko and would be used for the other babies to come, that was isithethe and probably was only practiced by people who actually could afford to. Today it is almost compulsory for every child to have imbheleko to be "recognised" by their ancestors.

One thing that modifies or makes our practises easy to downplay is that there is no uniformity, you'll find that people from Port Elizabeth go about doing a traditional wedding differently to people from East London and East London people do a wedding differently from people from eCofimvaba, which also isn't the same as the Port Elizabeth style. There a lot of factors that influence the way we do things, firstly is the popular way in that society and secondly as a family and dominantly the way of practising of the clan you belong to and we often see clashes because people have different understandings and interpretations to things. In the past there were ways to distinguish which denominator would take preference and it would respected.  

But if you were to ask a person on the street today who uQamata is they might not know or they'll tell you they've heard that word before, what I'm basically saying is we have let ourselves forget what kept us for so long, there is a Xhosa proverb that goes like: imbo ayilahlwa ngo phoyiyana, which basically means don't forget where you come from because you have found a new venture now.

God has always been with us, we just called him uQamatha, the Bible came and because this was a "new" idea to us he was given the name Thixo which by the way from the Khoi-San.