Studies of Religion in Africa – serie

The role of Africans in the growth and process of Christianity in South Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In particular the book provides an insight into the role of writing and literacy in the church founded by the South African prophet, Isaiah Shembe, in 1910.The book provides a substantial, contextualising introduction which includes discussion of the church’s history and its position in contemporary South Africa, and weaves in discussion of the topics of literacy and modernity. The book then moves to the three documents, presented in their language of composition, Zulu and in an English translation. The three ‘books’, each from Shembe’s Nazareth Baptist Church, provide the reader with a fascinating insight into the growth and organisation of one of southern Africa’s most influential African Churches, and into the use and interpretation of the Bible by the church’s founder, Isaiah Shembe, and by church members. Central to the writings is the complex presence of Shembe, present both through his own words in the first book and, in the second book, through the memory of Meshack Hadebe, a member of the church in the 1920’s and 1930’s. The extracts in the third book provide a glimpse of the church’s hymnal and the unique religious poetry of the hymns, authored by Shembe.

The cumulative implications for Africans of the neoliberal processes (market speculation, shifts in sites of production, new modes of consumption, redefinition of the relation between states and their citizenry) cannot be reduced to single parameters. Three themes are central: the neoliberal production of personhood, the crises of youth and the moral panic in which so many of the wider reforms are registered in experience. With contributions on marriage payments, Muslim saints, popular theatre, homosexuality, ritual haunts, domestic reproduction, masculine fantasy, poetic justice, spirit possession and corruption.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

In this book, Eric Montgomery and Christian Vannier provide an ethnographically informed text on the cultural meanings and practices surrounding the gods and metaphysics of Vodu, as they relate to daily life in an ethnic Ewe fishing community on the coast of southern Togo. The authors approach this spirit possession and medicinal order through "shrine ethnography," understanding shrines as parts of sacred landscapes that are ecological, economic, political, and social. Giving voice to practitioners and situating shrines and Vodu itself into the history and political economy of the region make this text pertinent to the social changes and global relevance of Millennial Africa.

In Jesus for Zanzibar: Narratives of Pentecostal (Non-)Belonging, Islam, and Nation Hans Olsson offers an ethnographic account of the lived experience and socio-political significance of newly arriving Pentecostal Christians in the Muslim majority setting of Zanzibar. This work analyzes how a disputed political partnership between Zanzibar and Mainland Tanzania intersects with the construction of religious identities.Undertaken at a time of political tensions, the case study of Zanzibar’s largest Pentecostal church, the City Christian Center, outlines religious belonging as relationally filtered in-between experiences of social insecurity, altered minority / majority positions, and spiritual powers. Hans Olsson shows that Pentecostal Christianity, as a signifier of (un)wanted social change, exemplifies contested processes of becoming in Zanzibar that capitalizes on, and creates meaning out of, religious difference and ambient political tensions.

In Locating Politics in Ethiopia's Irreecha Ritual Serawit Bekele Debele gives an account of politics and political processes in contemporary Ethiopia as manifested in the annual ritual performance. Mobilizing various sources such as archives, oral accounts, conversations, videos, newspapers, and personal observations, Debele critically analyses political processes and how they are experienced, made sense of and articulated across generational, educational, religious, gender and ethnic differences as well as political persuasions. Moreover, she engages Irreecha in relation to the hugely contested meaning making processes attached to the Thanksgiving ritual which has now become an integral part of Oromo national identity.

The present volume sets Swahili religious tracts available in Kenya and Tanzania in their context. The book starts with an overview of tracts in Swahili from the 19th century to the present day, an examination of Swahili as a religious language, and an introduction to Swahili versions of the Bible and Qurʾān. Chesworth then introduces the range of tracts currently available, examining eight in detail. In particular he considers how they present scripture in order to promote their own faith, Islam or Christianity, whilst denigrating the ‘other’. Finally, the volume discusses the impact from modern media on these tracts.