Prologue: Whose Political Agenda?
The last issue which ROAPE devoted entirely to religion (‘Fundamentalism in Africa: Religion and Politics’, No. 52, 1991) reflected what its editors saw then as the principal area of concern, particularly Christian fundamentalism often sponsored by US evangelical churches. Global events since the devastation of the ‘twin towers’ in New York on 9 September 2001, the election and re-election to the American presidency of a ‘born again’ Christian,1 terrorist atrocities in Kenya and Tanzania and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, have altered the picture so radically that a revisit to the topic is now timely, if not overdue. In so doing it is appropriate also to update the terminology. ‘Fundamentalism’ has increasingly come to be seen as a problematic label, with a shift from its meaning of a dogmatism of belief that did not depart from literal interpretation of sacred texts. Concern today is not with religious belief per se, but faith as the basis for political activities and organisation, even if the rigidity of those beliefs adds intolerance to violent politics. This will be the focus of the current issue. In it we will tend to use the now more standard ‘Islamism’ and talk about Islamist movements rather than ‘Islamic fundamentalism’; likewise, rather than Christian fundamentalism we will talk about ideologies such as evangelism or Pentecostalism and in organisational terms concentrate on the familiar ‘Christian right’. There is also a contextual shift internal to Africa (and elsewhere globally) in the apparent burgeoning of religious bodies, of converts to new faiths and in the centrality of religious concerns, especially in politics – in turn reflected in the number of books, articles and conferences on these themes.2
The contemporary global backcloth is thus the starting point for looking at religion and politics in Africa. The Cold War has been replaced by a new global confrontation whose proponents couch their ideological stances in religious and indeed ‘fundamentalist’ terms. Bush's pronouncements lump together Afghanistan and Iraqi resistance, with phenomena like Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, and in August 2006 the alleged plot to blow up British planes, as sharing a common ‘totalitarian ideology’ and a desire to ‘attack free nations’. This view reflects that of a sizeable minority (40% in some polls) of US citizens who believe their country is faced with a single global conspiracy by Islamists to destroy their society. Both leaders and citizens define the core of that society in Christian terms and use religious shibboleths to urge resistance to this threat. Moreover, the practice of the 'war on terror’ has been one that has targeted Muslim societies and organisations, seeming to confirm the perceptions of most Muslims that the war is one against them. In August this year, Blair echoed Bush by stating in a major speech in the US that there was a ‘crusade’ in progress – seemingly mindless of the connotations of this term among Muslims. On the other side of the divide, there are clearly Islamist networks that are bent on a jihad against the US and the West more generally, to promote a political realm based on Islamist formulae, using religious slogans to justify the use of tactics of terror against non-implicated civilians and the slaughter or forced displacement of opponents and ‘infidels’.
Mahmood Mamdani, in his book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (reviewed in this issue), characterises the problem that such a world poses in these terms:
Both Bush and bin Laden employ a religious language, the language of good and evil, the language of no compromise: you are either with us or against us … The danger of bringing good and evil into politics cannot be underestimated … if the struggle against political enemies is defined as a struggle against evil, it will turn into a holy war. And in holy war, there can be no compromise. Evil cannot be converted; it must be eliminated.
The African Setting
Africa is not, of course, at the centre of this global clash but it has already been targetted in various ways as part of the protagonist's strategies, such as the bombing of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam with their massive human damage. For many years, US fundamentalists saw the cause of the South in the Sudan as a religious crusade, which they supported in war and now still support in peace. Several African governments have accepted the ‘for or against’ formula and have been clamouring to sign up to membership of the global coalition against terrorism – among them regimes that had earlier been seen as among the new (progressive) leaders. Both Eritrea and Ethiopia, for instance, have been vying to be the favoured base for US operations in the Middle East. Djibouti has in fact taken in troops from the US and Germany to add to the permanent French garrison, and US navy patrols operate along the Red Sea coast to interdict possible terrorists into Somalian territory. A huge web of US military staging posts has been sited across vast tracts of Africa to provide logistics for military action by the US in the Middle East and to pre-empt ‘terrorist’ incursions or explosions within the continent – these were well documented in the last ROAPE issue on North Africa (September, 2006). Most recently, statements attributed to Osama bin Laden refocused attention on Africa, especially the north-east. He sees what is happening in Darfur (see Briefing by Alex de Waal in this issue) as evidence that the West is waging a war against Islam (BBC News, 2006), a curious conclusion when it is African Muslims who are bearing the brunt of what may be ‘genocide’ and where in early September 2006 the Sudan government rejected UN peacekeeping forces. In assessing the impact of the ‘war on terror’ in Africa, one should not neglect what the US sees as one of its ‘successes’, using diplomatic means, backed by the threat of force – the conversion of the Sudan government from what the US officially recognised as a ‘state supporting terrorism’, deemed also to be an Islamist state, to something of an ally (at least in the same ambiguous way as Pakistan or Saudi Arabia).
In these circumstances, an initiative in Africa to reject this subservient role, with its logic of adversarial political alliances, would be a strong building block in a global peace movement. What is needed, perhaps, is a new ‘non-aligned’ movement – non-aligned as regards religion-based political loyalties and international ties. Any such movement would have to be based on popular movements and not just an assembly of states. As such, it is not only the ‘extremist’ groups on each side which need to be gathered in but also those in the mainstream of the great variety of denominations and sects in the different faiths which are practised on the African continent. An effective policy response requires a wider understanding of the links between belief and action, religious adherence and socio-economic circumstance, and between faith organisations and politics within Africa as much as internationally.
In the present issue of the Review we ground this debate on religion and politics in Africa. The 1991 issue of the Review contained little on Islam, but the events of 9/11 and their repercussions on US foreign policy, together with ongoing conflict in Sudan, Somalia and religious tensions in Nigeria, Algeria, and Egypt – where divisions within Islam and their relationships with Christian groups are all festering – has altered that perception considerably. Religion in the politics of health has also emerged as an issue. In addressing the HIV/AIDS crisis, the responses of churches and Islamic communities has been central but ambiguous, with many Muslims seeing it as a ‘Christian’ disease and many Christians characterising it as the ‘wages of sin’ while at the same time proffering ‘miracle’ cures – particularly in new Pentecostalist and charismatic churches. The pandemic has provided the perfect vehicle for US Evangelical Christians, often originating in the Baptist south, to impose their own concepts of ‘family values’ and moral rules on US official policy aided by a like-minded President. Similarly, the traditional objection of the Roman Catholic church to artificial forms of contraception has been reaffirmed in its negative stance on condoms in preventing HIV.
Where we can agree with our predecessors in 1991 is, first, that ‘fundamentalism’, of whatever variety, must be seen not as an atavistic throwback but as ‘quintessentially modern … a complex, heterogeneous and often ambiguous response to events and processes – and above all to crises – in the contemporary world’. Second, that fundamentalist believers, whether Christian or Muslim, appear inevitably to be within the purview of right-wing politics (especially, as that issue pointed out, in gender relations). Third, in broadening the debate beyond ‘fundamentalism’ we are in agreement that ‘the politics of belief’ continues to be poorly understood and inadequately contextualised. We reiterate the view that the catchall term ‘fundamentalism’ is unhelpful, especially where the debate in Islam is more about attitudes towards Western values and the possibility of an Islamic state, whereas in Christianity a literal acceptance of the Bible is widely accepted in many countries by mainstream believers but with vastly different degrees of political involvement, and in all cases, including African Pentecostalism, expressing some engagement with modernity. Finally, the reactive link noted in that earlier issue between social conditions and religious revival or faith-based political action remains: in discussing new converts in apartheid South Africa, or amongst those negatively affected by Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs), the editors of issue 52 declared that:
these are people whose social and economic conditions of existence are substantially formed by their participation in capital and labour markets … religious beliefs are not simply ‘imposed’ but are generated and developed in the process of ‘appropriation and reconstruction’ of social and personal existence.
Precedents
The study of religion in Africa has generally been the domain of social anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, theologians and (usually Christian) missionaries. At times the analysis comes from the secular academic world and at other times from scholars within a particular faith denomination, with the distinction often not easy to discern from a casual reading. Frequently this is because of the hegemonic cultural perspective of the Western academy which not only dominates the field but, as Maia Green shows in this issue, implicitly tends to regard religious forms outside the West as an inferior or exotic ‘other’. The appearance of a critical political economy of religion is rare and yet its absence is surprising, given the many ways in which religion enters processes of class formation and which in its institutional forms frequently contributes to capital accumulation and competition for control over resources. Religion has also provided a major source of ideological support, both for right-wing capitalistic, and often autocratic, regimes, but at other times for local oppositional groups.
A political economy view of religion was exemplified in several of the classic works on the analysis of the emergence of capitalism in Europe, with landmarks including Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism), Durkheim (Elementary Forms of the Religious Life; The Division of Labour in Society) and E. P. Thompson (The Role of Methodism in The Making of the English Working Class). The history of Europe is replete with examples of overtly religious conflict, frequently disguising an underlying contest for land, or struggles to define national or sub-national identity. In Africa there have been similar struggles, often refracted through colonial rule and postcolonial settlements. Here is Fanon, for example:
religion splits up the people into different spiritual communities, all of them kept up and stiffened by colonialism and its instruments … sometimes American Protestantism transplants its anti-Catholic prejudices into African soil, and keeps up tribal rivalries through religion (The Wretched of the Earth, 1961:129).
Variety of Religions in Africa
It is useful to be reminded of the extensive variety of religious beliefs and groupings that are found in the continent today, partly as a warning against ill-considered generalisation and partly to highlight their degree of social breadth and depth. We have Islam with its various sects and oppositional parties across the Mahgreb, the countries of the Sahel, great parts of the Horn, and down much of the East African coast. Pockets exist elsewhere, including the Malay descendants in the Cape (having significant regional political influence) and amongst small trading communities throughout the continent. These are a reminder of the historical role of indentured labour, merchants and traders in the introduction of faiths such as Islam and Hinduism. Interestingly, that early source of inspiration for ‘negritude’ and pan-Africanism, E. W. Blyden, believed, as long ago as 1888, that:
the influence of Islam in Central and West Africa has been upon the whole, of a most salutary character. As an eliminatory and subversive agency, it has displaced or unsettled nothing as good as itself (Blyden, 1888 cited in Mudimbe, 1988).
There are clear materialist reasons why a religious revival may be underway, whether in additional converts or in transfers from older churches. On the one hand, there is the economic insecurity at household level of those adversely affected by structural adjustment, and who find solidarity and emotional support through organised religion; on the other hand, there are those who through, for example, ‘prosperity gospel’ seek moral approval for what they have gained or what they hope to achieve. Each is the product of a persistent and aggressive globalising capitalism and its wider parameters.
A Political Economy of Religion?
For many readers it may seem that Marx, in a few words, says all that is required for a political economy of religion:
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.
Engels also anticipated much later writing in his observation that the English bourgeoisie promoted religious creeds in order to defuse the revolutionary potential of ‘materialism and free thought’ that had affected mainland Europe in the mid-19th century. It was from this tradition that Gramsci emerged in the 1920s with a view of religion as a key component in the formation of ideological hegemony in the emergence of capitalism. The following extract summarises much that is of relevance to the relationship between religion and power in Africa today:
(The) problem is that of preserving the ideological unity of the entire social bloc which that ideological unity serves to cement. The strength of religions … has lain, and still lies, in the fact that they feel very strongly the need for the doctrinal unity of the whole mass of the faithful and strive to ensure that the higher intellectual stratum does not get separated from the lower (Gramsci, 1971:328)
around these assumptions revolve the ethics, and the cultural, political and economic values which are summarized, synthesized and transmitted in bourgeois education. All of us who are ‘educated’ are the products (the victims?) of this education, whether we come from English- or French- or Portuguese-speaking Africa (Babu, 1981:133).
The theoretical tradition of Marx and Gramsci (and of others including Weber and Durkheim) is essentially drawn from the Christian-capitalism experience of Western Europe, though in Marx's lexicon it may also apply to other modes of production. Can it be generalised to other contexts? Is it meaningful to talk of Islam, or African traditional religion, as ‘the opium of the people’, given all which that entails in a political economy sense, bearing in mind that the ‘people’ Marx was referring to were an industrial proletariat? Is there an alternative ‘political economy’ within other cultures? These are questions too deep to investigate in an editorial review, but we may note, if we keep with the Western materialist position, that expansion of Islam in Africa went hand in hand with hierarchical, and essentially class-based, political structures headed by Caliphs, Sultans, and Emirs, or traditional chiefs and rulers. Many of the traditional religions of Africa also have special rituals and roles for chiefs, kings and their courts, or buttress councils of elders, almost invariably composed of senior males who hold power over land and labour in their villages and clans. In all such cases, religious belief is closely intertwined with the operation of a local political hegemony in such a way as to support a privileged male elite.
Yet in addressing the political aspects of Islam through a contortion of postmodernist anti-orientalism, and what Al-Azmeh calls ‘re-orientalisation of orientals’, it is frequently denied that Western tools of analysis have relevance. It is worth quoting Al-Azmeh's rebuttal at length:
The ‘return’ to Islam is in fact to a place newly created. Its different components are generated from romantic and vitalist ideological elements in the repertoire of universally available political ideas, no matter how much the rhetoric of ‘identity’ and of authenticity may deny this; they are crafted out of a social material which requires for its understanding not an ethnology of pre-colonial Arcadia but a sociology of structural marginality and of elite competition, a social psychology of middle- and upper-class youthful radicals in situations of normative schizophrenia and structural closure, and last but not least, a sociology of subcultures and cults. In short the understanding of Islamic political phenomena requires the normal equipment of the social and human sciences, not their denial (Al-Azmeh, 2003).
In addition to endorsing or otherwise engaging with a dominant ideology, religious organisations are themselves an organic part of that same materialist base which the ideology legitimises. Taking the growth of new Christian churches in Africa, it is clear that in order to preserve both their longer term legitimacy in the population at large and their financial sustainability the most effective churches also need to build up a mass membership. Requiring a material basis, they become business organisations, purchasing property and land, employing labour, even establishing universities, a process which adds to their legitimacy in political circles and civil society at large (for example the Redeemed Church in Nigeria discussed by Obadare in this issue). When this is combined with the mushrooming of a variety of smaller evangelical and Pentecostalist churches throughout the Christian parts of the continent then the phenomenon becomes an important element of capital accumulation, with an array of small to medium sized businesses not only sucking in donations which are then distributed amongst an elite who become key players in an emergent bourgeoisie, but also affecting the local economy through the construction of church buildings, purchase of uniforms, holy artefacts, demand for taxi services and so on. In many instances, churches are the largest wholly locally financed organisations in a community, exceeding the capital of most surrounding businesses other than those of multinational corporations. They may also be partially financed from evangelical faith groups in the US and Europe which, when combined with interchange between pastors, ensures that they remain linked to a global evangelical network and its ideological apologetics. A parallel Muslim example is described in Cruise O'Brien's work on Sufi brotherhoods in Senegal, reviewed here, and in the contemporary funding of religious establishments in Africa by Saudi and Gulf patrons.
Each country has its own specificity deriving from its colonial determinants, its precolonial history and its post-colonial economic and political patterns of social control. The Pentecostalist churches appear to be at their strongest in the most stable societies, where the environment for an emerging bourgeoisie is conducive and which encourages those who are persuaded by the promises of ‘prosperity gospel’. Martin (2002) has also pointed out that organisationally they are extremely diffuse, that they have parallels with the rise of Methodism in England where there were no corporate political ambitions, and that they consist of an extensive variety of independent charismatically led groups where the primary reason for membership is personal salvation hopefully accompanied by material reward. On the other hand, E. P. Thompson reminds us of the role of religious non-conformity in the formation of the working class in Britain, from which many members of the early Labour Party and Trades Unions were drawn, though this must be qualified by Weber's thesis that such groups both crystallised bourgeois ambitions and allowed them a spiritual hold over the workers – enjoining them to live frugally and look for rewards in the next life (again with some parallels in Hasu's paper in this issue). A class analysis of new Christian religious groups in Africa may reveal their importance in the emergence of a distinctly bourgeois politics (see papers on Tanzania and Nigeria in this issue), and although the different history of Islamic opposition makes a class analysis less straightforward, the compromises which the Muslim Brotherhood have had to make to gain influence in Egypt and Sudan, as shown by Zahid and Medley in this issue, are revealing of incipient class identities. Thus in any attempt to understand the role of religion in support of or in resistance to social change, it cannot in itself be an irreducible explanatory variable. It is either acting as a medium or idiom through which other social, economic and political actors have chosen to operate or it is a belief like others which are derived from social conditions and ambitions.
Finally, it is important to remember that in addition to the formal organised religions and their various sects there continues throughout the continent a pervasive belief across all social classes in some form or another of traditional religion. This is associated with a vast unrecorded informal economy of payments to soothsayers, diviners, faith healers, shamans, and practitioners of magic and witchcraft. These too, have been adjusting their patterns of organisation in response to social and economic change (Moore & Sanders, 2001), and to the impact on the ground of structural adjustment, leading to an expansion of what has been termed ‘occult economies’ (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1999) often involving illicit trade in body parts. Here we have at its most everyday human interactive level examples of the commodification of belief in the role of primitive accumulation. This may be direct or indirect, as Caroline Ifeka shows in this issue, where one response to externally or internally induced disruption of economic security is legitimised socially in terms of the fetishisation of guns and occult beliefs. The outcome, especially amongst disaffected and unemployed youth in environments like the Niger delta, is often violent, raising links with Richard's paper on the RUF and also the more general issue of the relationship between religion and violent conflict, to which we now turn.
Religion & Conflict
Is there a link between the observations that across Africa religious belief is widespread, almost universal, and that many parts of the continent have been, and continue to be, marked by violent internal conflict since independence regardless of whether the setting is Christian, Muslim or animist? Can religion itself, in either institutional or ideological form, be a primary causal factor or is it only ever part of a complex mix of socially constructed ingredients which at particular conjunctures break out into civil conflict? There is no doubt that there are forms of belief which directly prompt violent behaviour which can lead to the destabilisation of secular states. Millenarian Christians, for instance, who believe that the second coming of Christ will follow an apocalyptic war between believers and non-believers, centred in the Middle East, and requiring the conversion of Jews, provides an alarming example. Believers then see themselves as instructed by God to accelerate the coming of this apocalypse, or Armageddon, by political means. Likewise, Islamists will frequently claim that only a ‘jihad of the sword’ will bring an Islamic state, using (as Christians do with the Bible) the Qur'an selectively to support their views. Finally, as already mentioned, there are the numerous smaller groups such as the LRA (and corresponding militias in Sierra Leone and Liberia) where a religious or magical immunity is believed by the perpetrators of violence to protect them from violence in return. There is also a more widely experienced fear of witchcraft, arising from belief in the manipulation of supernatural powers, which can lead to intermittent upsurges of witch hunts and the frequently controversial suppression by state authorities at local or national level.
In Africa the majority of conflicts have occurred within, rather than between, states, and the religious dimension is often expressed through differences between sects or denominations within a major faith, and only seldom between faiths (which is one reason, amongst many, why the ‘clash of civilizations’ arguments of Huntington oversimplify the nature of religious difference). Obvious examples of the former have been in Algeria, Sudan and Somalia, or in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa (where the Dutch Reformed Church and South African Council of Churches were on opposing sides). Conversely, different faiths have been on opposing sides in Sudan again and in the Biafran war where the Christian Igbos felt themselves to be under assault from the Islamic North (Kastfelt, 2005:3-4). In some conflicts the religious element has been indirect, as in Rwanda and Burundi where, first, Catholic missions were instrumental in defining ‘tribal’ differences between Tutsi and Hutu and in promoting the elevation of Tutsi to positions of authority during the colonial period, and second, in the subsequent inaction of church leaders during the slaughter of the 1990s which was construed as approval by Hutu killers (Longman, 2005). The complexity of the links between religion and conflict are exposed in the recent history of Southern Sudan where it has been argued that at the same time that SPLA militarism was a secularising force, there was also an acceleration in conversion to Christianity (though in multifarious sects) amongst the southern population at large. This can be seen as an important element in defining an oppositional local identity in the face of the Islamic central government (Hutchinson, 2005; Wheeler, 2005 – both in Kastfelt, reviewed in this issue). In these various ways religion can provide a vocabulary or discursive way whereby people not only make sense of conflicts that are not usually generated by differences in belief but add an interpretation that may fuel the conflict.
The complexity of the links between religion and violence is also highlighted by recent experience in Somalia, where the establishment of control over Mogadishu by the forces of the United Islamic Courts (UIC) in June 2006 appeared to have introduced an element of stability in that city. What is interesting here is both the US involvement behind the scenes in support of the ‘warlord’ faction which was defeated, but also how, as a process, the originally clan-based polity of Somalia has become transformed into a faith-based one with shari'a at its centre. The earlier establishment of shari'a courts in Mogadishu was usually reported in the West as Islamic opportunism arising out of the conflict and civil disorder, and indeed as being part of that disorder in Western eyes, thus way confirming an association between Islam and violence. But another interpretation is that the gradual spread of the Islamic courts was the result of community pressure to fill a constitutional vacuum, using coercive means only where necessary. The degree to which such local pressures prevail, in contrast to a more aggressive Islamism seeking to reject both secularism and US-sponsored ‘westernisation’, will be found in the ease with which compromise is reached between the UIC and the Western-supported Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in forming some sort of national coalition government (unresolved at time of going to press). The Somali case also provides an example of how ‘the pot can be stirred’ by the political interests of neighbouring states, producing a goulash in which the religious ingredient takes on a sharper focus. The complex situation of Somalia is explored further in the Briefings section of this issue in an extract from a recent report by the International Crisis Group (see also Samatar in issue 109).
There can be little doubt that the prolonged conflict between the Muslim north and Christian south of Sudan, together with central in-fighting between Islamists and secularists, has contributed substantially to the economic neglect of other communities such as the Beja in Eastern Sudan (see Pantuliano in this issue and John Young in No. 109). The little known unrest in the east is again an example of conflict within a wholly Muslim community, and of the inability of such a major institutionalised faith to prevent it.
The Secular State
Secularism may be defined as:
a refusal to believe that nature and history are governed by external, supernatural forces and a refusal to be guided by religion in political, social, educational, moral, economic and other matters (Yared, 2002:9)
One is in those predominantly Muslim states where the demands of Islamists for their interpretation of shari'a law to prevail throughout state and governmental activities is a clear rejection of secularism. The outcome, in countries like Algeria, Tunisia, Sudan, Somalia, Senegal and areas such as Northern Nigeria, depends on the strength of complex alliances between traditionalists wary of Westernisation and younger members of extremist groups. We have already referred to Al-Azmeh's concept of the ‘re-orientalisation of orientals’ in respect to the second of these. With regard to the conservatism of established Islam and its resistance to a wider secularism we can readily see parallels in the history of the medieval church in Europe. Lest this be dismissed as culturally and historically irrelevant, let us quote Fu'ad Zakariya:
The Middle Ages are not only a period in time but they are also a state of mind, capable of reemerging in many societies and at different times … Many characteristics of this state of mind are present in our contemporary Islamic societies. This means that the reasons which pushed Europe in the direction of secularism are cropping up in our present Islamic world, and it means too that the widespread idea that secularism is the result of specifically European conditions in a certain stage of its development is baseless (Zakariya, 1989).
religion has the power given it by God, and the world has the power given it by man, and both the spiritual and the temporal cooperate for what is right and good, but each is independent of the other (cited in Yared, 2002:40).
In contemporary Northern Nigeria we have examples of campaigns to desecularise existing constitutions by using state assemblies to establish subsidiary courts based on shari'a law. In other instances, the initial formation of a new constitution can be seriously affected by religious lobbying (e.g. Sudan after 1989). This pattern is not confined to Islam The present state constitution of Israel is the result of a compromise between secular Zionists and Ultra-Orthodox Jews who retained influence over the rights of women, marriage, schools, and the view that Israel is a holy land uniquely given to Jews by God, with all the implications for national boundaries and settlements that are so familiar today. These sorts of dangers need to be anticipated in those African countries where a new constitution will have to be negotiated after present conflicts are resolved: Somalia, DR Congo, Western Sahara, Sudan, Côte d'Ivoire. In all such cases the political undercurrents are concisely summarised by Zubaida in reference to shari'a:
The quest for the shari'a is multifaceted: social protesters seek justice from corrupt regimes in its terms, clerics seek to restore their authority by imposing it, conservatives seek patriarchal virtues in its commandments, nationalists see it as a marker of authenticity and identity, and those same corrupt rulers seek legitimacy in adopting it. In practice it is an ideological project which has highly variable manifestations in the politics and legal systems of different countries … (Zubaida, 2003:6)
This leads to the second of the two threats mentioned above where, even under a secular constitution, there are sufficiently large numbers of extreme believers in a given community to elect, or otherwise bring to power, a government or head of state who questions secularism and where other constitutional checks and balances are compromised by neo-patrimonialism. The US under Bush comes to mind, and the way 'Christian Right’ views on gay rights, abortion, female priests, and definitions of the family have in recent years influenced US domestic and foreign policy. More critically for global stability is the influence of these same religious bodies on American Middle East policy (and its knock-on effects in North Africa and the Horn) where belief in ‘end-time theology’, Armaggedon and the second coming of Christ have made the US Christian Right in many respects a more influential pro-Israel lobby than Jewish Zionists. In this case is it really belief that is the driving force? Or is it a set of beliefs that are being piggy-backed by the same old military-industrial complex that drove US foreign policy during the Cold War?
In Africa such overt examples of religious lobbying have been confined mainly to Islamic constituencies, most notably in the electoral successes of the NIF in 1980s Sudan (discussed by Zahid and Medley in this issue). There have also been numerous informal cases where Christian adherents have had significant influence on government leadership despite a nominally secular state (see Obadare on Nigeria in this issue, and past examples which have included the Dutch Reformed Church in apartheid South Africa and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in Haile Selassie's Ethiopia). This is not to gainsay the frequent progressive oppositional role which religion can play (individual clerics in Nigeria; the mainstream churches in Kenya) in challenging local inequality and corruption; it is rather to emphasise that the secularism of the secular state cannot be taken for granted. The example of the US also illustrates the fallacy of the so-called ‘secularisation thesis’ (Durkheim) in which religious belief and organised faith movements are expected to diminish as economic growth (or ‘modernisation’) proceeds. Across Africa religious activity expressed as membership of churches and mosques appears to be at universally high levels quite regardless of divergent economic growth rates and standards of living. The potential, therefore, for a regime to adopt religious clothing in order to legitimise its programmes (and repressions) or for a particular faith group to hijack government leaders, is an ever-present threat to the secular position of the state.
The presence of a secular state, in itself, is also no guarantee that religious divisions within civil society cannot be destabilising, as witnessed in the examples of Northern Ireland in the UK or in Algeria, Nigeria and Tunisia where the distributive policies of the state have been so highly inequitable (either in fact or perception) with regard to marginalised communities and ethnic groups that they provide fertile ground for recruitment to extremist oppositional movements claiming a faith-based authority. The state may also respond by defining the causes of unrest as religious extremism, and hence the problem of the instigators, rather than socioeconomic and the problem of the government in power. Repression, such as that of the Derg in Ethiopia or the apartheid state in South Africa – both at least nominally secular – had the effect of turning people towards religion, paradoxically creating openings for the subsequent expansion of Pentecostalist and other charismatic churches.
Conclusion
In summary, religion in Africa is like the spiritual world which it claims to represent. It is ubiquitous and immanent; it is both amorphous and specific; it can be all things to all people; it contains both good and evil; and, like the air we breathe, it is so commonplace throughout all levels of society that we – especially political economists and political analysts – often fail to notice it and underestimate its significance. Yet, as belief, it is the motivator of all kinds of acts, the ex post justifier of others and a major contributor to the construction of conservative ideologies. In its many institutional forms it carries, as a social creation, the ambitions and self-preservative characteristics of all institutions; it often accrues wealth and serves as a conduit into government for its leaders. It is prone to schism and conflict as a consequence of the exclusive world views constructed by its ideologues. And while the search for meaning in life is a common human characteristic, the answers are also those of human thought which cannot be divorced from our experiences as social beings. The very fact that Western Christianity today is based upon a formulaic creed that dates from a gathering of bishops in Nicaea in 325AD, which was followed by major schisms, demonstrates how even the largest faith systems are at heart social constructions and should be analysed as such. It is precisely for this reason that the distinction between the secular and religious takes on political significance and where the need for a secular state to safeguard universal freedom of thought, speech and lifestyle becomes essential.
All the above characteristics of religion are widely manifested across Africa, in both peace and conflict, and although it is impossible to do more than touch on aspects of their political meaning and significance in a single journal issue, the papers, briefings and reviews which follow do provide a cross section which represents, particularly in Nigeria, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Egypt, Somalia and Ethiopia the range of experience and problematic that is relevant to the wider political economy of religion in Africa. We begin with an important paper by Maia Green on the problems of sociological, anthropological (and by association, political and economic) analysis of religion in Africa by the largely Western academy, in a discussion which alerts us to the need for continued, critical reflection on method and interpretation. The two papers by Obadare and by Hasu address different aspects of recent Pentecostalism, the former in its capacity to serve as a high level networking facility for the political elite in Nigeria, and the latter in highlighting the links between ‘prosperity gospel’ and the creation of an ideology which condones primitive capitalist accumulation, with the emotive use of biblical imagery. These take place mainly in stable societies. Paul Richards, in a development of his previous work, applies a Durkheimian approach to an understanding of those elements of religious belief and practice which appear to hold together youth rebel groups (such as the RUF in Sierra Leone) which thrive in highly unstable political environments, while Caroline Ifeka draws our attention to the intricate connections (what she terms a ‘double articulation’) between the challenge to state authority by disaffected youth militias and their appropriation of traditional spirit beliefs to provide legitimacy, again in Nigeria though not untypical of West Africa as a whole. Religiously based political parties tend to be more common in Islamic than in Christian societies but Zahid and Medley show, with examples of the Muslim Brotherhood from Egypt and Sudan, that splits often appear between those faithful to the ideology and those who favour pragmatic compromise, both locally and internationally (with the West).
The penultimate article is by Pantuliano on the conflict in eastern Sudan. The regional and international dimensions of this conflict were covered by John Young in issue 109 but its internal dimensions, rooted in the political economy of marginalisation, and prospects for peace, are explored here. In the Briefings section we include important papers on the recent political changes in Somalia which can only be indicative of an ongoing crisis at the time of going to press, but which will be followed in subsequent issues. Other Briefings include humanism in Africa, liberation theology in Nigeria, and are followed by a number of book reviews on the impact of religion in Africa.
This Editorial opened with a prologue on the international context of a contemporary world in which the political and economic ambitions of major Western powers are disguised as a ‘clash of civilisations’ where the agenda is increasingly being driven by extremist believers on each side. The government and a majority of the population of the US believe that their country has the economic and military power not only to contain this global conflict in the medium term but ultimately to come out as winner, a belief which many, including George W. Bush, appear to accept as divinely ordained. As we have seen, these international fractures affect Africa in many ways: through movement of Islamic militants across boundaries from the Middle East, Christian evangelical missions from the US, the readily available propaganda from each side on the internet, and the chain of US military bases sited strategically across Africa. In the meantime, in the vast majority of villages, towns and cities across the African continent, thousands of ordinary people attend a variety of churches and sects with conscientious regularity and faithfulness, but in a context of social and economic change which is generating new formations of class and identity. What this issue of the Review has done is to provide a snapshot of some key aspects of this process. There are significant gaps which time and space have prevented us from filling, such as the links between religion, civil society and the state in South Africa, an assessment of the role of Catholicism in Lusophone Africa, a measure of the real impact of foreign evangelising, and analysis of the most likely longer term outcomes in currently unstable situations like Sudan, Somalia and DR Congo. In ROAPE we aim to stand back and take the longer, secular, view, based on a radical critical analysis focusing on the central issues of political praxis, class, social conflict, economic contestation and exploitation, in what are often volatile historical processes. We shall continue to cast a critical eye in future issues of the Review on how religious beliefs impinge on and are manipulated by these social variables. We invite others of like mind to contribute to our cumulative understanding of the political ramifications in Africa of the ubiquitous, ambiguous and frequently inharmonious phenomenon of religious belief.