A Missing Link: African Christian Resonances in the Rise of Indian Muslim and Hindu Missions

Abstract

This essay explores how West Africa became a landscape of religious exchange, creativity and synthesis connecting Africa and South Asia. It follows the lead of Afe Adogame and Jim Spickard, who argue that ‘Africa is not merely a passive recipient of global pressures. It is also a site of religious creativity that has had considerable effect on the outside world. The growth and global influence of the three religious heritages of sub-Saharan Africa – indigenous religions, Christianity and Islam – needs to be understood against the backdrop of mutual influence and exchange at various historical epochs’ ( Adogame and Spickhard 2010 : 2—3). To explore such transformations, I draw on the cases of the Ahmadiyya Muslim missionary movement in Ghana and Nigeria and Hinduism in Ghana. The Ahmadiyya began as a mission to correct Christianity's influence on West Africans, but was transformed by African influence on South Asians into a pluralistic knowledge-seeking movement. In a similar vein, Africans reshaped Hinduism away from cultural isolationism and worldly attachments of the Indian-diaspora Africa towards a spiritual ethic of racial integration and devotionalism that Africans and Indians now share. I conclude by reflecting on how African modes of religious interrelationality – influenced by the historical trajectories of Christianity on the African continent – have been crucial in the polycentrism that world Christianity scholars have revealed.