Reviewed by Moses Biney, Department of Sociology
Religious Plurality in Africa: Coexistence, Conviviality, Conflict, edited by Marloes Janson, Kai Kresse, Benedikt Pontzen, and Hassan Mwakimako, argues for a fundamentally new way of studying religion in Africa. Any honest comparative study, the editors contend, must place Islam, Christianity, and African religious traditions on equal terms within a single frame. Central to this argument is an intervention in terminology. The editors reject the label “African Traditional Religion” as a category that not only flattens diverse traditions into a single mass but also imposes a Western Protestant conception of religion onto contexts where many African languages have no equivalent for the word “religion.” In its place, they propose “African religious traditions,” acknowledging the diversity, dynamism, and historical depth that the old label obscured.
Through eight ethnographic and historiographic case studies from Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Mozambique, and Zanzibar, the volume maps how practitioners of different traditions live together — borrowing, competing, crossing religious boundaries, and always defining themselves in relation to their religious others. The editors argue that such plurality is not an anomaly but the normal condition of African social life. People cross religious boundaries with remarkable ease, particularly when seeking healing and wellbeing. The Swahili expression that “medicine does not have a religion” captures this well. The volume does not shy away from conflict but complicates its location. Tensions are often as pronounced within communities as between them, particularly around interfaith marriage, where converts and those from mixed backgrounds face suspicion and exclusion. The book’s emphasis on practice and lived experience over belief and institutional membership goes a long way toward addressing the challenge of comparing traditions as structurally different as congregational Islam and Christianity and the more diffuse forms of African religious traditions. This is a timely volume that scholars and general readers interested in religion in Africa will find engaging and useful.
Marloes Janson, Kai Kresse, Benedikt Pontzen, and Hassan Mwakimako, Religious (eds) Plurality in Africa: Coexistence, Conviviality, Conflict. James Currey, 2024.