Studies of Religion in Africa

In Isaiah Shembe’s Hymns and the Sacred Dance in Ibandla lamaNazaretha, Nkosinathi Sithole explores the hymns of Prophet Isaiah Shembe and the sacred dance in Ibandla LamaNazaretha, and offers an emic perspective on the Church which has attracted scholars from different disciplines.
Isaiah Shembe’s Hymns and the Sacred Dance in Ibandla lamaNazaretha posits that in the hymns, Shembe found a powerful medium through which he could voice his concerns as an African in colonial times, while praising and worshipping God. Sithole also refutes claims by some scholars that the sacred dance was a response to colonialism and oppression, showing that in fact the sacred dance in Ibandla lamaNazaretha is considered to be a form of worship and is thought to exist on earth and in heaven.

The Khōjā of Tanzania: Discontinuities of a Postcolonial Religious Identity attempts to reconstruct the development of Khōjā religious identity from their arrival to the Swahili coast in the late 18th century until the turn of the 21st century. This multidisciplinary study incorporates Gujarati, Kacchī, Swahili, and Arabic sources to examine the formation of an Afro-Asian Islamic identity (jamatī) from their initial Indic caste identity (jñāti) towards an emergent Near Eastern imaged Islamic nation (ummatī) through four disciplinary approaches: historiography, politics, linguistics, and ethnology. Over the past two centuries, rapid transitions and discontinuities have produced the profound tensions which have resulted from the willful amnesia of their pre-Islamic Indic civilizational past for an ideological and politicized ‘Islamic’ present. This study aims to document, theorize, and engage this theological transformation of modern Khōjā religious identities as expressed through dimensions of power, language, space, and the body.

Bourdieu in Africa: Exploring the Dynamics of Religious Fields offers a view of religions as social games played by interested actors. Analyzing practices as strategic moves, this critical approach conceptualizes the religious field as relations of exchange and competition between experts and laity, and explores how the actors’ habitus, including religious beliefs, serve to misrecognize and thus legitimize relations of power within the religious sphere and beyond.
The authors discuss the volatile religious fields of Nigeria, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya and South Africa, with their variably configured tensions between African traditions, Christianity and Islam, but also consider the interrelations of religion with other social fields, with politics, economy, education and law.

Contributors are: Ulrich Berner, Chikas Danfulani, Jonathan Draper, Magnus Echtler, Gemechu Jemal Geda, Magnus Treiber, Asonzeh Ukah, Dale Wallace, Halkano Abdi Wario.

In Hindu Gods in West Africa, Wuaku offers an account of the histories, beliefs and practices of the Hindu Monastery of Africa and the Radha Govinda Temple, two Hindu Temples in Ghana. Using historical material and data from his field work in southern Ghana, Wuaku shows how these two Hindu Temples build their traditions on popular Ghanaian religious notions about the powerful magicality of India's Hindu gods. He explores how Ghanaian soldiers who served in the colonial armies in India, Sri Lanka, and Burma during World War II, Bollywood films, and local magicians, have contributed to the production and the spreading of these cultural ideas. He argues that while Ghanaian worshippers appropriated and deployed the alien Hindu religious world through their own cultural ideas, as they engage Hindu beliefs and rituals in negotiating challenges their own worldviews would change considerably.

Pentecostalism is among the fastest growing social movements in the 21th century. This volume discusses global aspects of Pentecostal churches in northern Cameroon, by describing how the local congregations interact with civil society, traditional religion, and Islam.
Extensive fieldwork and descriptions of the complex historical context within which the churches emerge, makes the author draw attention to Pentecostal leaders as social entrepreneurs inspired both by local traditions and by a global flow of images and ideas. This indicates that Pentecostalism can be interpreted both as a social and as a religious movement which manages to encounter mainline churches and Islam with flexibility and spiritual authority.

Ritual Imagination is a study of spirit possession and ritual dynamics. Based on fieldwork in eastern Madagascar, Hilde Nielssen shows how tromba possession works as a flexible and fluid force, whose ritual imaginary playfully draws together elements from radically different cultural and social domains, thereby constituting human realities and creating ways of relating to changing and disjunctive circumstances. Tromba's strength lies in its fluid capacities to relate to ongoing social change by altering its own practices, while at the same time continuing to heal person and cosmos. The book critically addresses the still dominant perspective in anthropology, where rituals are understood as representations of culture and society. Using tromba as a pivotal case in the critique of ritual as representation, this book offers a fresh perspective on ritual and spirit possession.

In 1952, there were probably fewer than 200 Baha'is in all of Africa. Today the Baha'i community claims one million followers on the continent. Yet, the Baha'i presence in Africa has been all but ignored in academic studies up to now. This is the first monograph that addresses the establishment of this New Religious Movement in Africa. Discovering an African presence at the genesis of the religon in Iran, this study seeks to explain why the movement found an appeal in colonial Africa during the 1950s and early 1960. It also explores how the Baha'i faith was influenced and Africanized by its new converts. Finally, the book seeks to make sense of the diverse and contradictory American, Iranian, British, and African elements that established a new religion in Africa.

This book gives a unique insight into the changing shape of contemporary religion examining the new role that Pentecostal Charismatic Christianity plays in the lives of young, professional, black women who are enjoying career success and becoming part of South Africa's new middle class. Amongst these women an interesting relationship has emerged between work and religion as they feel that the social networks and self confidence they gain from their religious communities are as important as their spiritual experiences. But not all the women who join these churches remain, and this book explores why some women leave the churches in which they had previously felt they gained so much.

The anthropological literature on religious innovation and resistance in African Christianity tended to focus almost exclusively on what have come to be known as African Independent Churches. Very few anthropological studies have looked at similar processes within mission churches. Through an ethnographic study of localizing processes in a Charismatic movement in Cameroon and Paris, the book critically explores the dialectics between ‘Pentecostalization’ and ‘Africanization’ within contemporary African Catholicism. It appears that both processes pursue, although for different purposes, the missionary policy of dismantling local cultures and religions: practices and discourses of Africanization dissect them in search of ‘authentic’ African values; Charismatic ritual on the other hand features the dramatization of the defeat of local deities and spirits by Christianity.

This volume explores how AIDS is understood, confronted and lived with through religious ideas and practices, and how these, in turn, are reinterpreted and changed by the experience of AIDS. Examining the social production, and productivity, of AIDS - linking bodily and spiritual experiences, and religious, medical, political and economic discourses - the papers counter simplified notions of causal effects of AIDS on religion (or vice versa). Instead, they display people’s resourcefulness in their struggle to move ahead in spite of adversity. This relativises the vision of doom widely associated with the African AIDS epidemic; and it allows to see AIDS, instead of a singular event, as the culmination of a century-long process of changing livelihoods, bodily well-being and spiritual imaginaries.

Christianity and migration have greatly influenced society and culture of sub-Saharan Africa, yet their mutual impact is rarely studied. Through oral history research in north eastern Congo (DRC), this book studies the migration of Anglicans and the subsequent reconfiguring of their Christian identity. It engages with issues of religious contextualisation, revivalism and the rise of Pentecostalism. It examines shifting ethnic, national, gender and generational expressions, the influence of tradition, contemporanity, local needs and international networks to reveal mobile group identities developing through migration. Borrowing the metaphor of 'home' from those interviewed, the book suggests in what ways religious affiliation aids a process of belonging. The result is an original exploration of important themes in an often neglected region of Africa.

This book examines the history of the Anglican Diocese of Mashonaland/Southern Rhodesia (virtually co-extensive with modern Zimbabwe) in the period 1890-1925, when its institutions took shape and its religious character was formed. While work among indigenous communities is outlined, the primary subject is the church’s work with white settlers. A fresh general narrative is provided and an examination of clergy recruitment and finance relates events in Mashonaland to developments in global Anglicanism. Among the questions addressed are those of religion and empire, church and state and the complexities of relationship between the Church of England and her overseas extensions, particularly those covering areas of white settlement. Local developments in religious practice are also explored: most striking of these was the settler apprehension of the vast landscapes of South-Central Africa as a locus of the sacred and their custom of veld burial.

Far too long, the relationship between European and African biblical scholarship has been a non-relationship. Divergent insights into how biblical texts should be interpreted and made fruitful for the current context, cultural differences, colonial past and post-colonial future, radically different social situations – this all made companionship and real interaction difficult. This rich and multilayered volume (result of a Stellenbosch conference 2006) attempts to disclose new modes of dialogue between readers of the Bible from those two worlds.
More than twenty theologians from Africa and Europe reflect together on how readers from radically different contexts – professional and ordinary alike –, may become allies in an ethically accountable way of relating the biblical text to their current (global) situations and how a process of mutual learning may be established.
This book provides important insights in intercultural hermeneutics, the relationship between classical historico-literary approaches and new forms of interpretation. It also gives examples of new forms of how to read the Bible in the secularised European context and the HIV/Aids stricken Africa. Particularly enriching is that every contribution is followed by a personal letter of response of another contributor to the book, giving impulses for further dialogue and debate.
The book is useful for all biblical scholars and students, in particular for those interested in how to do contextual exegesis in a manner that also takes into account the context of the other.

The anthropology and history of African American religious formations has long been dominated by approaches aiming to recover and authenticate the historical transatlantic continuities linking such traditions to identifiable African source cultures. While not denying such continuities, the contributors to this volume seek to transcend this research agenda by bracketing "Africa" and "African pasts" as objective givens, and asking instead what role notions of "Africanity" and "pastfulness" play in the social and ritual lives of historical and contemporary practitioners of Afro-Atlantic religious formations. The volume’s goal is to open up contextually salient claims to "African origins" to empirical scrutiny, and so contribute to a broadening of the terms of debate in Afro-Atlantic studies.

This book, divided into two broad sections, examines the state in the Republic of Benin and the socio-political role of the Christian churches. The first looks at the remarkable pre-colonial kingdom of Danxomέ and its place in the imagining of the modern contrat social béninois. The second section looks at both the historical role of the mainline churches and the more recent development of a Christianisme béninois.
The study concludes that the churches are above all a commentary upon the society in which they find themselves. Rather than an overt challenge to the state, they articulate social distress and the desire for a different future. In times of stress they may prove to be the only viable institutional buttress as well as the arbiter.
This study seeks to make a contribution to the understanding of the public role of Christian churches in Africa.

Charismatic Christianity is the most recent and fastest growing expression of Pentecostal religion in Sub-Saharan Africa. In Ghana's capital, Accra, the charismatic churches dominate the religious scene. This book focuses on the gender discourses of Ghana's new churches, and considers charismatic perspectives on womanhood, manhood, marriage and family life. Offering a fresh perspective on the organisational structures of the charismatic churches, this study looks at the leadership roles of female pastors and pastors' wives, and draws attention to the links between female leaders and spiritual power. By highlighting the importance of spiritual power in interpreting gendered social change, the book sheds new light on the socio-cultural role of Ghana's new churches.