Religious Movements and Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

It is important to make clear from the beginning what this review will cover and what it will not. Its focus will be on “traditional” and Christian religious movements in the last hundred years. By movements are meant widespread and grassroots adherence to religious ideas, symbols and rituals, sometimes brief in duration, sometimes long-lasting; sometimes lacking and sometimes acquiring formal organizational structures. The review will deal, therefore, with questions of “popular conciousness” rather than with the development of formal theologies. It will not review the literature on African Islam nor have much to say about religious movements and politics in pre-colonial Africa. Both these, of course, are major omissions, not only leaving out topics which are of great importance in themselves but also depriving analysis of modern traditional and Christian movements of an invaluable comparative and historical context. To seek to cover them also in one review, however, would be to risk a mere listing. It seems more useful to develop an argument on the past, present, and future direction of work on the interaction of religious movements and politics by focusing on a limited, but nevertheless still huge, topic and period.