Religion and African Civil Wars

Abstract

This volume contains an introduction and seven case studies by anthropologists, historians, and theologians. The papers were originally presented at a 1999 conference on “Religion and Social Upheaval in Africa” in Denmark. As a result, some of the papers are somewhat out-of-date, although the questions they raise are, sadly, just as relevant as ever to the continent’s current situation. As Niels Kastfelt points out in his introductory essay, the authors reject any approach that seeks to understand African civil conflicts in terms of a “New Barbarism,” an irrational manifestation of “tribal” or religious atavism. This strategy, which is perhaps most typical of journalistic accounts but also finds some support among academics, clearly constitutes an obstacle toward any meaningful comprehension of the phenomena in question. In a similar vein, they equally reject any notion of a “conflict of civilizations” or that African civil wars can be explained in terms of the incompatible religious values of Christianity, Islam, and indigenous African religions. Rather, their papers provide a detailed account of the local context in a historical perspective by focusing on the political, economic, and explicitly religious phenomena. Indeed, the lines of cleavage in many of these cases are not defined in religious terms. As a result, the nature of the relationships between “religion” and the civil wars in question are so disparate that the volume does not quite hang together. For example, René Devisch’s paper on Kinshasa is not really about civil war, but rather about the effects of the collapse of state authority and the formal economy, both of which unleashed rampant violence in the city but also led to the emergence of independent Christian healing communes as a sort of refuge ...