Religion in Transforming Africa – serie

Examines Pentecostal conversion as a force of change, revealing new insights into its dominant role in global Christianity today.There has been an extraordinary growth in Pentecostalism in Africa, with Brazilian Pentecostals establishing new transnational Christian connections, initiating widespread changes not only in religious practice but in society. This book describes its rise in Maputo, capital of Mozambique, and the sometimes dramatic impact of Pentecostalism on women. Here large numbers of urban women are taking advantage of the opportunities Pentecostalism offers to overcome restrictions at home, pioneer new life spaces and change their lives through the power of the Holy Spirit.Yet, conversion can also mean a violent rupturing with tradition, with family and with social networks. As the pastors encourage women to cut their ties with the past, including ancestral spirits, they come to see their kin and husbands as imbued with evil powers, and many leave their families. Conquering spheres that used to be forbidden to them, they often live alone as unmarried women, sometimes earning more than men of a similar age. They are also expected to donate huge sums to the churches, often money that they can ill afford, bringing new hardships.Linda van de Kamp is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

A counterbalance to the predominant study of Islam's role in social and political struggles, this book examines life in Ede, south-west Nigeria, offering important analyses of religious co-existence.Since the end of the Cold War, and especially since 9/11, religion has become an increasingly important factor of personal and group identification. Based on an African case study, this book calls for new ways of thinking about diversity that go "beyond religious tolerance". Focusing on the predominantly Muslim Yoruba town of Ede, the authors challenge the assumption that religious difference automatically leads to conflict: in south-west Nigeria, Muslims,Christians and traditionalists have co-existed largely peacefully since the early twentieth century. In some contexts, Ede's citizens emphasise the importance and significance of religious difference, and the need for tolerance.But elsewhere they refer to religious boundaries in passing, or even celebrate and transcend religious divisions.Drawing on detailed ethnographic and historical research, survey work, oral histories and poetry by UK- and Nigeria- based researchers, the book examines how Ede's citizens experience religious difference in their everyday lives. It examines the town's royal history and relationship with the deity Sàngó, its old Islamic compounds and itsChristian institutions, as well as marriage and family life across religious boundaries, to illustrate the multiplicity of religious practices in the life of the town and its citizens and to suggest an alternative approach to religious difference.Insa Nolte is Reader in African Studies at the University of Birmingham, and Visiting Research Professor at Osun State University, Osogbo. She is President of the African Studies Association of the UK(2016-18) and Principal Investigator of the ERC project "Knowing Each Other: Everyday Religious Encounters, Social Identities and Tolerance in Southwest Nigeria". Olukoya Ogen is Provost of Adeyemi College of Education, Ondo; Professor of History at Osun State University, Osogbo; and Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham. He is the Nigerian coordinator of the "Knowing Each Other" project. Rebecca Jones is Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the "Knowing Each Other" project. Her book, A Cultural History of Nigerian Travel Writing, will be published by James Currey in 2017.Nigeria: Adeyemi College Academic Press (paperback)

An innovative study of Christianity and society in Cameroon that illuminates the history of faith and cultural transformation among societies living under French rule 1914 to 1939.Finalist for the 2019 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for Best Book in Africana ReligionsBetween the two World Wars, the radical innovations of African Catholic and Protestant evangelists repurposed Christianity to challenge local and foreign governments operating in the French-administered League of Nations Mandate of Cameroon. Walker-Said explores how African believers transformed foreign missionary societies into profoundly local religious institutions with indigenous ecclesiastical hierarchies and devotional social and charitable networks,devising novel authority structures to control resources and govern cultural and social life. She analyses how African Christian religious leaders transformed social and labour relations, contesting forced labour and authoritarian decentralized governance as threats to family stability and community integrity. Inspired by Catholic and Protestant doctrines on conjugal complementarity and social equilibrium, as well as by local spiritual and charismatic movements, African Christians re-evaluated and renovated family and community authority structures to address the devastating changes colonialism wrought in the private sphere. The history of these reform-minded believers reveals howfamily intimacies and kinship ties constituted the force of community resistance to oppression and also demonstrates the relevance of faith in the midst of a tumultuous series of forces arising out of the colonial situation peculiar to Cameroon.

Cutting-edge research in the study of Islamic scholarship and its impact on the religious, political, economic and cultural history of Africa; bridges the "europhone"/"non-europhone" knowledge divides to significantly advance decolonial thinking, and extend the frontiers of social science research in Africa.The study of Islamic erudition in Africa is growing rapidly, transforming not just Islamic studies, but also African Studies. This interdisciplinary volume from leading international scholars fills a lacuna in presenting not only the history and spread of Islamic scholarship in Africa, but its current state and future concerns. Challenging the notion that Muslim societies in black Africa were essentially oral prior to the European colonial conquest at the turn of the 20th century, and countering the largely Western division of sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa, the authors take an inclusive approach to advance our knowledge of the contribution of people of African descent to the life of Mecca.This book explores in depth the intellectual and spiritual exchanges between populations in the Maghreb, the Sahara and West Africa. A key theme is Islamic learning. The authors examine the madrasa as asite of knowledge and learning, the relationship between "diasporas" and Islamic education systems, female learning circles, and the use of ICT. Diversifying the study of Islamic erudition, the contributors look at the interactions between textuality and orality, female learning circles, the vernacular study of poetry and cosmological texts, and the role of Ajami - the use of Arabic script to transcribe 80 African languages.Africa: Cerdis

Cutting-edge research in the study of Islamic scholarship and its impact on the religious, political, economic and cultural history of Africa; bridges the "europhone"/"non-europhone" knowledge divides to significantly advance decolonial thinking, and extend the frontiers of social science research in Africa.The study of Islamic erudition in Africa is growing rapidly, transforming not just Islamic studies, but also African Studies. This interdisciplinary volume from leading international scholars fills a lacuna in presenting not only the history and spread of Islamic scholarship in Africa, but its current state and future concerns. Challenging the notion that Muslim societies in black Africa were essentially oral prior to the European colonial conquest at the turn of the 20th century, and countering the largely Western division of sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa, the authors take an inclusive approach to advance our knowledge of the contribution of people of African descent to the life of Mecca.This book explores in depth the intellectual and spiritual exchanges between populations in the Maghreb, the Sahara and West Africa. A key theme is Islamic learning. The authors examine the madrasa as asite of knowledge and learning, the relationship between "diasporas" and Islamic education systems, female learning circles, and the use of ICT. Diversifying the study of Islamic erudition, the contributors look at the interactions between textuality and orality, female learning circles, the vernacular study of poetry and cosmological texts, and the role of Ajami - the use of Arabic script to transcribe 80 African languages.Africa: Cerdis

First scholarly treatment of Uganda's first elected ruler; offers new insights into the religious and political history of modern Uganda.Assassinated by Idi Amin and a democratic ally of J.F. Kennedy during the Cold War, Benedicto Kiwanuka was Uganda's most controversial and disruptive politician, and his legacy is still divisive. On the eve of independence, he led the Democratic Party (DP), a national movement of predominantly Catholic activists, to end political inequalities and religious discrimination. Along the way, he became Uganda's first prime minister and first Ugandan chief justice. Earle and Carney show how Kiwanuka and Catholic activists struggled to create an inclusive vision of the state, a vision that resulted in relentless intimidation and extra-judicial killings. Focusing closely on the competing Catholic projects that circulated throughout Uganda, this book offers new ways of thinking about the history of democratic thought, while pushing the study of Catholicism in Africa outside of the church and beyond the gaze of missionaries. Drawing on never before seen sources from Kiwanuka's personal papers, the authors upend many of the assumptions that have framed Uganda's political and religious history for over sixty years, as well as repositioning Uganda's politics within the global arena.Fountain: Uganda

Examines the historical, political, religious, and social dynamics of Muslim minority status in Uganda, and important themes of pre- and post-colonial political community, religion and national identity.Between 2012 and 2016 several Muslim clerics were murdered in Uganda: there is still no consensus as to who was responsible. In this book Joseph Kasule seeks to explain this by examining the colonial and postcolonial history of the Muslim minority and questions of Muslim identity within a non-Muslim state. Challenging prevalent scholarship that has homogenized Muslims' political identity, Kasule demonstrates that Muslim responses to power have been varied and multiple. Beginning with the pre-colonial political community in Buganda, and Muteesa I's attempted Islamization of the country using Islam as a centralizing ideology, the author discusses how the political status of Islam and Muslims in Uganda has been defined under successive regimes. Muteesa I's Islamization faltered when Christianity entered Buganda in the latter half of the 19th century, resulting in division between Muslim and Christian sections. The colonial period created a new type of political project that defined the Muslim question as one of representation, and Kasule discusses how this laid the foundation for a politics of Muslim containment within a predominantly Christian power. He examines contrasting urban-based Muslim organizations and rural expressions of Islam; tension between representative claims of Muslim leaderships within the demand for Muslim autonomy; and the rise of new reform groups. As these splits turned violent, 'new' Muslim 'publics' emerged around opposing centres of Muslim power which sought different resolutions to their minority situation.East Africa (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi): Makerere Institute of Social Research

A counterbalance to the predominant study of Islam's role in social and political struggles, this book examines life in Ede, south-west Nigeria, offering important analyses of religious co-existence.Since the end of the Cold War, and especially since 9/11, religion has become an increasingly important factor of personal and group identification. Based on an African case study, this book calls for new ways of thinking about diversity that go "beyond religious tolerance". Focusing on the predominantly Muslim Yoruba town of Ede, the authors challenge the assumption that religious difference automatically leads to conflict: in south-west Nigeria, Muslims,Christians and traditionalists have co-existed largely peacefully since the early twentieth century. In some contexts, Ede's citizens emphasise the importance and significance of religious difference, and the need for tolerance.But elsewhere they refer to religious boundaries in passing, or even celebrate and transcend religious divisions.Drawing on detailed ethnographic and historical research, survey work, oral histories and poetry by UK- and Nigeria- based researchers, the book examines how Ede's citizens experience religious difference in their everyday lives. It examines the town's royal history and relationship with the deity Sàngó, its old Islamic compounds and itsChristian institutions, as well as marriage and family life across religious boundaries, to illustrate the multiplicity of religious practices in the life of the town and its citizens and to suggest an alternative approach to religious difference.INSA NOLTE is Reader in African Studies, University of Birmingham, and Visiting Research Professor, Osun State University, Osogbo. OLUKOYA OGEN is Former Provost, Adeyemi College of Education, Ondo,Professor of History, Osun State University, Osogbo, and Visiting Senior Research Fellow, University of Birmingham. REBECCA JONES, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Birmingham, is author of At the Crossroads: NigerianTravel Writing and Literary Culture in Yoruba and English, published by James Currey in 2019. All three editors worked on the ERC project 'Knowing Each Other: Everyday Religious Encounters, Social Identities and Tolerance in Southwest Nigeria'. Nigeria: Adeyemi College Academic Press (paperback)

A reinterpretation of the history of Sokoto that provides a new assessment of its leaders and their visions for the Muslim state.Sokoto was the largest and longest lasting of West Africa's nineteenth-century Muslim empires. Its intellectual and political elite left behind a vast written record, including over 300 Arabic texts authored by the jihad's leaders: Usman dan Fodio, his brother Abdullahi and his son, Muhammad Bello (known collectively as the Fodiawa). Sokoto's early years are one of the most documented periods of pre-colonial African history, yet current narratives pay little attention to the formative role these texts played in the creation of Sokoto, and the complex scholarly world from which they originated. Far from being unified around a single concept of Muslim statecraft, this book demonstrates how divided the Fodiawa were about what Sokoto could and should be, and the various discursive strategies they used to enrol local societies into their vision. Based on a close analysis of the sources (some appearing in English translation for the first time) and an effort to date their intellectual production, the book restores agency to Sokoto's leaders as individuals with different goals, characters and methods. More generally, it shows how revolutionary religious movements gain legitimacy, and how the kind of legitimacy they claim changes as they move from rebels to rulers.

Explores the impact of Jesuit missions on the development of Christianity in postcolonial French Africa, which found itself at the centre of major shifts and struggles within global Christianity and world politics.At a time when most African countries were moving towards independence, the Vatican was speeding up the Church's indigenization agenda in an effort to secure its survival in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, at the same time, African nationalism was on the rise and, following the collapse of its colonial empire, France was attempting to reassert its influence in Africa. This book shows how the Vatican, French Jesuits, the rising Cameroonian indigenous clergy and leadership, and the first Cameroonian Jesuits competed for the Catholic evangelization of French Africa during the mid-20th century. In the mission field, they also competed with different Protestant groups, with whom they shared acommon aim: to convert African traditional religionists and different groups of African Muslims to Christ, while containing the spread of anti-religious ideologies such as Communism.Tracing the rapid expansion of Christianity in Central and Western French Africa during the second half of the twentieth century, the author shows in this book how this competition for faith helped both build the church in French West Africa and Africanize the church alongside missionary Christianity in postcolonial Africa. He also explores the African reaction to this diverse and competing global agenda of Christianization, especially after Chad and Cameroon came together as part of a single Jesuit jurisdiction in 1973, and the way in which, despite differing interpretations of Catholicity which generated internal conflicts, Western Jesuits focus on popular masses and the poor, was able to contain the spread of Islam, counter the Chad's persecution of Christians during the Cultural Revolution (1973-1975) and secure the survival of Christianity as a missionary movement in which Western missionaries worked alongside a rising African clergy and leadership.JEAN LUC ENYEGUE, SJ is the Director of the Jesuit Historical Institute in Africa, Nairobi. He also lectures on church history at Hekima University College, Catholic University of Eastern Africa.

Important and broadening study of the way Africans engaged with missions, not as beneficiaries of humanitarian philanthropy, but as workers.The important role missions played as places of work has been underexplored, yet missionaries were some of the earliest Europeans who tried to control African labour. African mission workers' roles were not just religious and educational, as they were actively involved, not always voluntarily, in building and domestic work. Focusing on the Anglican Universities' Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) in Tanganyika and Zanzibar in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Michelle Liebst shows how missionaries both supported and undermined the livelihood trajectories of Africans. Revealing the changing nature of relations over time between missionaries - who referred to themselves as "workers" - and the African mission workers, including teachers and priests - whom missionaries referred to as "helpers" - reflected broader political transformations, and this innovative study of missions' role in society adds a critical dimension to our understanding of their function and socio-economic impact and the history of Christianity in Africa.

An invaluable insight into the narrative politics and theologies of LGBTQ+ life-storytelling, a key text for those in African Humanities, Queer Studies, Religious Studies, and Refugee Studies.Presenting the deeply moving personal life stories of Ugandan LGBTQ+ refugees in Nairobi, Kenya alongside an analysis of the process in which they creatively engaged with two Bible stories - Daniel in the Lions' Den (Old Testament) and Jesus and the Woman Caught in Adultery (New Testament) - Sacred Queer Stories explores how readings of biblical stories can reveal their experiences of struggle, their hopes for the future, and their faith in God and humanity. Arguing that the telling of life-stories of marginalised people, such as of Ugandan LGBTQ+ refugees, affirms embodied existence and agency, is socially and politically empowering, and enables human solidarity, the authors also show how the Bible as an authoritative religious text and popular cultural archive in Africa is often used against LGBTQ+ people but can also be reclaimed as a site of meaning, healing, and empowerment. The result of a collaborative project between UK-based academics and a Nairobi-based organisation of Ugandan LGBTQ+ refugees, the book provides a valuable insight into the narrative politics and theologies of LGBTQ+ life-storytelling. A key text for those in African Humanities, Queer Studies, Religious Studies, and Refugee Studies, among others, the book expresses an innovative methodology of inter-reading queer life-stories and biblical stories.

Pioneering study of the role of the Christian churches in the Rwandan genocide of the Tutsi; a key work for historians, memory studies scholars, religion scholars and Africanists.Why did some sectors of the Rwandan churches adopt an ambiguous attitude towards the genocide against the Tutsi which claimed the lives of around 800,000 people in three months between April and July 1994? What prevented the churches' acceptance that they may have had some responsibility? And how should we account for the efforts made by other sectors of the churches to remember and commemorate the genocide and rebuild pastoral programmes? Drawing on interviews with genocide survivors, Rwandans in exile, missionaries and government officials, as well as Church archives and other sources, this book is the first academic study on Christianity and the genocide against the Tutsi to explore these contentious questions in depth, and reveals more internal diversity within the Christian churches than is often assumed. While some Christians, Protestant as well as Catholic, took risks to shelter Tutsi people, others uncritically embraced the interim government's view that the Tutsi were enemies of the people and some, even priests and pastors, assisted the killers. The church leaders only condemned the war: they never actually denounced the genocide against the Tutsi. Focusing on the period of the genocide in 1994 and the subsequent years (up to 2000), Denis examines in detail the responses of two churches, the Catholic Church, the biggest and the most complex, and the Presbyterian Church in Rwanda, which made an unconditional confession of guilt in December 1996. A case study is devoted to the Catholic parish La Crête Congo-Nil in western Rwanda, led at the time by the French priest Gabriel Maindron, a man whom genocide survivors accuse of having failed publicly to oppose the genocide and of having close links with the authorities and some of the perpetrators. By 1997, the defensive attitude adopted by many Catholics had started to change. The Extraordinary Synod on Ethnocentricity in 1999-2000 was a milestone. Yet, especially in the immediate aftermath of the genocide, tension and suspicion persist.Fountain: Rwanda, Uganda

An innovative study of Christianity and society in Cameroon that illuminates the history of faith and cultural transformation among societies living under French rule 1914 to 1939.Finalist for the 2019 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for Best Book in Africana ReligionsBetween the two World Wars, the radical innovations of African Catholic and Protestant evangelists repurposed Christianity to challenge local and foreign governments operating in the French-administered League of Nations Mandate of Cameroon. Walker-Said explores how African believers transformed foreign missionary societies into profoundly local religious institutions with indigenous ecclesiastical hierarchies and devotional social and charitable networks,devising novel authority structures to control resources and govern cultural and social life. She analyses how African Christian religious leaders transformed social and labour relations, contesting forced labour and authoritarian decentralized governance as threats to family stability and community integrity. Inspired by Catholic and Protestant doctrines on conjugal complementarity and social equilibrium, as well as by local spiritual and charismatic movements, African Christians re-evaluated and renovated family and community authority structures to address the devastating changes colonialism wrought in the private sphere. The history of these reform-minded believers reveals howfamily intimacies and kinship ties constituted the force of community resistance to oppression and also demonstrates the relevance of faith in the midst of a tumultuous series of forces arising out of the colonial situation peculiar to Cameroon.

A fresh perspective on conflict and peace-making that highlights the cosmologies and invisible entities that state, society and religious authorities draw on to claim or reclaim legitimacy and control.Peace-making can be a violent, arbitrary assertion of power. At the same time, the spheres of power, politics and religion are rarely discrete: when governments behave like gods through demonstrations of arbitrary violence, the remaking of moral and spiritual worlds can provide radical ways to contest the brutality of both conflict and peace. This book is an exploration of the way that Nuer- and Dinka-speaking communities living around the Bilnyang and connected river systems in Warrap and Unity States in South Sudan have experienced peace-making and conflict in an increasingly militarized South Sudan. The book traces patterns of violence in peace-making back to colonial and mercantile activities in the late 19th century, but focuses on the period since the 1980s. Challenging dominant understandings of conflict and peace centred on neo-liberal brokerage and settlements or a politics entirely driven by instrumentalist, neo-patrimonial, marketized logics, this book shows how South Sudanese authorities, particularly religious authorities, have contested the legitimacy of violence and peace by drawing on divinely inspired notions of authority and norms of conduct. Drawing on archive, ethnographic and oral history research, as well as participant observations of the elite peace negotiations since 2013, Pendle describes the peace-making efforts of a range of actors from international diplomats to chiefs, Nuer prophets and local priests, to show how peace-making in South Sudan became an instrument used by actors to build authority by reshaping rituals, remaking hierarchies and re-encoding moral protest against oppressive regimes. By recasting anthropological and historical scholarship on divine authorities and moral communities in South Sudan, this book brings a new perspective to conflict, peace and governance that will be invaluable not only to scholars but to policymakers, practitioners and NGOs.This book is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC.

The first historical account of the dramatic growth of Christianity in Western Tanzania during the twentieth century and of the role of former slaves in this process.Examining the intersection of post-slavery and evangelism, this book shows the ways that former slaves from a variety of linguistic and cultural backgrounds came together to create new communities in the Christian missions of western Tanzania. It shows how converts adapted to Christianity and, at the same time, shaped it through their translations of the Bible and other religious texts into the Kinyamwezi language, integrating concepts from their own cultures and experiences of slavery. Working as teachers, pastors, and catechists, former slaves and their descendants laid the basis for the growth of African Christianity in the region, and the book pays particular attention to women's agency in creating spaces for negotiating kinship ties and mutual relations with the wider communities. It also delves into the range of missionary sources to show the experience of lay Christians who opposed religious authority in Catholic and Moravian missions, examining the division caused by catechists' demands for equality of status, recognition, and appropriate pay in the context of ujamaa and the turmoil brought about by the revival movement. Through narratives of religious experience from multiple missions and village outstations, the book shows how former slaves created a Kinyamwezi-speaking Christian culture, taking inspiration both from European missionaries and neighbouring African villagers, and became part of evolving rural communities in the inter-war period, enabling their descendants to achieve a significant degree of social mobility.

Illuminates how Christian communities shaped the trajectory of one nation's liberation struggle through the life of Namibian refugee pastor, Salatiel Ailonga.Born at a Finnish mission station in South West Africa (SWA), Salatiel Ailonga was part of a generation of contract labourers who first imagined themselves as belonging to a multi-ethnic Namibian nation and who played a central role in liberating it from apartheid South African rule. This book examines the interplay between Christian missionary work and anti-colonial nationalism through Ailonga's life, in the context of Southern Africa's liberation wars and exile experiences during the late twentieth century - a period that united an international community across the Cold War divide and shaped the future of an African region. Ailonga joined the South West African People's Organisation (SWAPO) in 1960, and in 1974 he became the first chaplain affiliated with a Southern African liberation movement in exile. When, amidst SWAPO internal conflict, he and his Finnish missionary wife were deported from Zambia to Finland, he sought to free Namibians detained in the frontline states and became part of a SWAPO dissident community. In 1990, just after Namibian independence, the Ailongas repatriated to Namibia, where conflicts and rumours from exile followed him home; competing memories of his life have reverberated ever since, outliving his death in 2015. Highlighting the way in which Christian communities have sought to shape the trajectory of African nationalism, the book casts light on the interplay between religion and politics and the role of religion in conflict and peace-building processes in Africa.

First scholarly treatment of Uganda's first elected ruler; offers new insights into the religious and political history of modern Uganda.Assassinated by Idi Amin and a democratic ally of J.F. Kennedy during the Cold War, Benedicto Kiwanuka was Uganda's most controversial and disruptive politician, and his legacy is still divisive. On the eve of independence, he led the Democratic Party (DP), a national movement of predominantly Catholic activists, to end political inequalities and religious discrimination. Along the way, he became Uganda's first prime minister and first Ugandan chief justice. Earle and Carney show how Kiwanuka and Catholic activists struggled to create an inclusive vision of the state, a vision that resulted in relentless intimidation and extra-judicial killings. Focusing closely on the competing Catholic projects that circulated throughout Uganda, this book offers new ways of thinking about the history of democratic thought, while pushing the study of Catholicism in Africa outside of the church and beyond the gaze of missionaries. Drawing on never before seen sources from Kiwanuka's personal papers, the authors upend many of the assumptions that have framed Uganda's political and religious history for over sixty years, as well as repositioning Uganda's politics within the global arena.Fountain: Uganda

An invaluable insight into the narrative politics and theologies of LGBTQ+ life-storytelling, a key text for those in African Humanities, Queer Studies, Religious Studies, and Refugee Studies.Presenting the deeply moving personal life stories of Ugandan LGBTQ+ refugees in Nairobi, Kenya alongside an analysis of the process in which they creatively engaged with two Bible stories - Daniel in the Lions' Den (Old Testament) and Jesus and the Woman Caught in Adultery (New Testament) - Sacred Queer Stories explores how readings of biblical stories can reveal their experiences of struggle, their hopes for the future, and their faith in God and humanity. Arguing that the telling of life-stories of marginalised people, such as of Ugandan LGBTQ+ refugees, affirms embodied existence and agency, is socially and politically empowering, and enables human solidarity, the authors also show how the Bible as an authoritative religious text and popular cultural archive in Africa is often used against LGBTQ+ people but can also be reclaimed as a site of meaning, healing, and empowerment. The result of a collaborative project between UK-based academics and a Nairobi-based organisation of Ugandan LGBTQ+ refugees, the book provides a valuable insight into the narrative politics and theologies of LGBTQ+ life-storytelling. A key text for those in African Humanities, Queer Studies, Religious Studies, and Refugee Studies, among others, the book expresses an innovative methodology of inter-reading queer life-stories and biblical stories.

A reinterpretation of the history of Sokoto that provides a new assessment of its leaders and their visions for the Muslim state.Sokoto was the largest and longest lasting of West Africa's nineteenth-century Muslim empires. Its intellectual and political elite left behind a vast written record, including over 300 Arabic texts authored by the jihad's leaders: Usman dan Fodio, his brother Abdullahi and his son, Muhammad Bello (known collectively as the Fodiawa). Sokoto's early years are one of the most documented periods of pre-colonial African history, yet current narratives pay little attention to the formative role these texts played in the creation of Sokoto, and the complex scholarly world from which they originated. Far from being unified around a single concept of Muslim statecraft, this book demonstrates how divided the Fodiawa were about what Sokoto could and should be, and the various discursive strategies they used to enrol local societies into their vision. Based on a close analysis of the sources (some appearing in English translation for the first time) and an effort to date their intellectual production, the book restores agency to Sokoto's leaders as individuals with different goals, characters and methods. More generally, it shows how revolutionary religious movements gain legitimacy, and how the kind of legitimacy they claim changes as they move from rebels to rulers.

Important and broadening study of the way Africans engaged with missions, not as beneficiaries of humanitarian philanthropy, but as workers.The important role missions played as places of work has been underexplored, yet missionaries were some of the earliest Europeans who tried to control African labour. African mission workers' roles were not just religious and educational, as they were actively involved, not always voluntarily, in building and domestic work. Focusing on the Anglican Universities' Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) in Tanganyika and Zanzibar in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Michelle Liebst shows how missionaries both supported and undermined the livelihood trajectories of Africans. Revealing the changing nature of relations over time between missionaries - who referred to themselves as "workers" - and the African mission workers, including teachers and priests - whom missionaries referred to as "helpers" - reflected broader political transformations, and this innovative study of missions' role in society adds a critical dimension to our understanding of their function and socio-economic impact and the history of Christianity in Africa.

Explores the impact of Jesuit missions on the development of Christianity in postcolonial French Africa, which found itself at the centre of major shifts and struggles within global Christianity and world politics.At a time when most African countries were moving towards independence, the Vatican was speeding up the Church's indigenization agenda in an effort to secure its survival in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, at the same time, African nationalism was on the rise and, following the collapse of its colonial empire, France was attempting to reassert its influence in Africa. This book shows how the Vatican, French Jesuits, the rising Cameroonian indigenous clergy and leadership, and the first Cameroonian Jesuits competed for the Catholic evangelization of French Africa during the mid-20th century. In the mission field, they also competed with different Protestant groups, with whom they shared acommon aim: to convert African traditional religionists and different groups of African Muslims to Christ, while containing the spread of anti-religious ideologies such as Communism.Tracing the rapid expansion of Christianity in Central and Western French Africa during the second half of the twentieth century, the author shows in this book how this competition for faith helped both build the church in French West Africa and Africanize the church alongside missionary Christianity in postcolonial Africa. He also explores the African reaction to this diverse and competing global agenda of Christianization, especially after Chad and Cameroon came together as part of a single Jesuit jurisdiction in 1973, and the way in which, despite differing interpretations of Catholicity which generated internal conflicts, Western Jesuits focus on popular masses and the poor, was able to contain the spread of Islam, counter the Chad's persecution of Christians during the Cultural Revolution (1973-1975) and secure the survival of Christianity as a missionary movement in which Western missionaries worked alongside a rising African clergy and leadership.JEAN LUC ENYEGUE, SJ is the Director of the Jesuit Historical Institute in Africa, Nairobi. He also lectures on church history at Hekima University College, Catholic University of Eastern Africa.

Pioneering study of the role of the Christian churches in the Rwandan genocide of the Tutsi; a key work for historians, memory studies scholars, religion scholars and Africanists.Why did some sectors of the Rwandan churches adopt an ambiguous attitude towards the genocide against the Tutsi which claimed the lives of around 800,000 people in three months between April and July 1994? What prevented the churches' acceptance that they may have had some responsibility? And how should we account for the efforts made by other sectors of the churches to remember and commemorate the genocide and rebuild pastoral programmes? Drawing on interviews with genocide survivors, Rwandans in exile, missionaries and government officials, as well as Church archives and other sources, this book is the first academic study on Christianity and the genocide against the Tutsi to explore these contentious questions in depth, and reveals more internal diversity within the Christian churches than is often assumed. While some Christians, Protestant as well as Catholic, took risks to shelter Tutsi people, others uncritically embraced the interim government's view that the Tutsi were enemies of the people and some, even priests and pastors, assisted the killers. The church leaders only condemned the war: they never actually denounced the genocide against the Tutsi. Focusing on the period of the genocide in 1994 and the subsequent years (up to 2000), Denis examines in detail the responses of two churches, the Catholic Church, the biggest and the most complex, and the Presbyterian Church in Rwanda, which made an unconditional confession of guilt in December 1996. A case study is devoted to the Catholic parish La Crête Congo-Nil in western Rwanda, led at the time by the French priest Gabriel Maindron, a man whom genocide survivors accuse of having failed publicly to oppose the genocide and of having close links with the authorities and some of the perpetrators. By 1997, the defensive attitude adopted by many Catholics had started to change. The Extraordinary Synod on Ethnocentricity in 1999-2000 was a milestone. Yet, especially in the immediate aftermath of the genocide, tension and suspicion persist.Fountain: Rwanda, Uganda

Traces changing visions of mystical power and authority on the island of Pemba, whose people's reputed resistance to outside rule has shaped the national narratives of both Zanzibar and Tanzania.For two centuries, Pemba, the second largest island of Zanzibar, has been known by East Africans and outsiders alike as rich in dangerous knowledge. Despite Pembans' reputation for piety and deep Islamic knowledge,uchawi- 'mystical work and power', sometimes termed 'magic', 'witchcraft', or 'sorcery' - has long featured in diverse visions of their identity and as key to worldly power. Today, as traditional methods of securing agency are called into question and new ways proliferate, the mystical world is an intensely conflicted realm where the nature of power, ethical action, and reality itself is continually reframed. This luminous ethnography follows Pemban notions of invisible and worldly power through the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964, the trials of multiparty democracy, the rise of Islamic revival, and intensifying neoliberalism. Through an exploration of rural imaginings of power, it argues that nations and the grammars that underwrite them are made in and by their peripheries, which give 'the centre' shape.  Highlighting the intersections of mystical practices, religion, and politics-as-such on the Swahili Coast, the book contributes new perspectives to studies of the imagination, power, and religious transformation in Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the larger Islamic world.

Grounded in ethnographic and historiographic research and taking a cross-regional approach, this book explores the complex dynamics of similarity and difference, rapprochement and detachment, and divergence and competition between practitioners of Christianity, Islam, and African religious traditions.Across Africa, Muslims, Christians, and practitioners of African religious traditions live in shared settings, demarcating themselves in opposition to one another and at times engaging in violent conflicts, but also being entangled in complex ways and showing unexpected similarities and mutual cross-overs. However, while encounters and entanglements of African religious traditions with either Islam or Christianity have long been a central research issue, the configuration as a whole has barely been taken into account, even though Muslims, Christians, and practitioners of African religious traditions have long co-existed - and still co-exist - more or less peacefully in many settings in Africa. Building on recent interventions to move beyond the compartmentalization of the study of religion in Africa, this edited volume will spotlight why and how an integrated approach to Islam, Christianity, and African religious traditions is important. Bringing together stimulating case studies from Kenya, Nigeria, Zanzibar, Ghana, and Mozambique that offer new directions for ethnographic and historical research, the volume will not only shed light on an important phenomenon out there in the world - the long-overlooked ways in which Muslims, Christians and practitioners of African religious traditions interact with one another in various majority-minority configurations - but will also engage with a critical rethinking of the study of religion in Africa (and beyond).

Traces changing visions of mystical power and authority on the island of Pemba, whose people's reputed resistance to outside rule has shaped the national narratives of both Zanzibar and Tanzania.For two centuries, Pemba, the second largest island of Zanzibar, has been known by East Africans and outsiders alike as rich in dangerous knowledge. Despite Pembans' reputation for piety and deep Islamic knowledge,uchawi- 'mystical work and power', sometimes termed 'magic', 'witchcraft', or 'sorcery' - has long featured in diverse visions of their identity and as key to worldly power. Today, as traditional methods of securing agency are called into question and new ways proliferate, the mystical world is an intensely conflicted realm where the nature of power, ethical action, and reality itself is continually reframed. This luminous ethnography follows Pemban notions of invisible and worldly power through the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964, the trials of multiparty democracy, the rise of Islamic revival, and intensifying neoliberalism. Through an exploration of rural imaginings of power, it argues that nations and the grammars that underwrite them are made in and by their peripheries, which give 'the centre' shape.  Highlighting the intersections of mystical practices, religion, and politics-as-such on the Swahili Coast, the book contributes new perspectives to studies of the imagination, power, and religious transformation in Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the larger Islamic world.

Examines the historical, political, religious, and social dynamics of Muslim minority status in Uganda, and important themes of pre- and post-colonial political community, religion and national identity.Between 2012 and 2016 several Muslim clerics were murdered in Uganda: there is still no consensus as to who was responsible. In this book Joseph Kasule seeks to explain this by examining the colonial and postcolonial history of the Muslim minority and questions of Muslim identity within a non-Muslim state. Challenging prevalent scholarship that has homogenized Muslims' political identity, Kasule demonstrates that Muslim responses to power have been varied and multiple. Beginning with the pre-colonial political community in Buganda, and Muteesa I's attempted Islamization of the country using Islam as a centralizing ideology, the author discusses how the political status of Islam and Muslims in Uganda has been defined under successive regimes. Muteesa I's Islamization faltered when Christianity entered Buganda in the latter half of the 19th century, resulting in division between Muslim and Christian sections. The colonial period created a new type of political project that defined the Muslim question as one of representation, and Kasule discusses how this laid the foundation for a politics of Muslim containment within a predominantly Christian power. He examines contrasting urban-based Muslim organizations and rural expressions of Islam; tension between representative claims of Muslim leaderships within the demand for Muslim autonomy; and the rise of new reform groups. As these splits turned violent, 'new' Muslim 'publics' emerged around opposing centres of Muslim power which sought different resolutions to their minority situation.East Africa (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi): Makerere Institute of Social Research

Grounded in ethnographic and historiographic research and taking a cross-regional approach, this book explores the complex dynamics of similarity and difference, rapprochement and detachment, and divergence and competition between practitioners of Christianity, Islam, and African religious traditions.Across Africa, Muslims, Christians, and practitioners of African religious traditions live in shared settings, demarcating themselves in opposition to one another and at times engaging in violent conflicts, but also being entangled in complex ways and showing unexpected similarities and mutual cross-overs. However, while encounters and entanglements of African religious traditions with either Islam or Christianity have long been a central research issue, the configuration as a whole has barely been taken into account, even though Muslims, Christians, and practitioners of African religious traditions have long co-existed - and still co-exist - more or less peacefully in many settings in Africa. Building on recent interventions to move beyond the compartmentalization of the study of religion in Africa, this edited volume will spotlight why and how an integrated approach to Islam, Christianity, and African religious traditions is important. Bringing together stimulating case studies from Kenya, Nigeria, Zanzibar, Ghana, and Mozambique that offer new directions for ethnographic and historical research, the volume will not only shed light on an important phenomenon out there in the world - the long-overlooked ways in which Muslims, Christians and practitioners of African religious traditions interact with one another in various majority-minority configurations - but will also engage with a critical rethinking of the study of religion in Africa (and beyond).