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  • Worlds of Power: Religious Thought and Political Practice in Africa
  • Robert M. Baum
Worlds of Power: Religious Thought and Political Practice in Africa. By Stephen Ellis and Gerrie Ter Haar. Oxford University Press, 2004. 263 pages. $19.95.

This book examines the relationship between religion, politics, and power in sub-Saharan Africa. Its authors can draw on a wealth of experience in African affairs-Ellis primarily from the political and historical aspect and Ter Haar primarily in the areas of religious studies and human rights. This is an ambitious book, attempting to draw on materials from Mauritania and Senegal in the northwest to South Africa. They tend to focus primarily on a select number of [End Page 561] countries, most notably Liberia, Ghana, Benin, Togo, Nigeria, both Congos, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda. In order to gain insight into popular religious and political movements, they rely heavily on widely disseminated pamphlets and the power of rumors, often referred to as "radio trottoir" (the sidewalk radio). Throughout the work, however, they are careful to draw parallels between what they describe in Africa and other parts of the world. They argue convincingly that in much of Africa there is a growing sense of the pervasiveness of evil, as they encounter the difficulties of political instability, corruption, economic stagnation, AIDS, and a host of other problems.

Ellis and Ter Haar avoid the pitfalls of other scholars who focus almost exclusively on the role of religious institutions in the political life of newly independent African countries when writing about religion and politics in Africa. Rather, the authors' concern is with religious beliefs and their relationship to social movements. They are also concerned with the lack of attention to religious ideas in the works of modernization theorists, anthropologists, and political scientists. Their insistence on the oral qualities of most African social systems being a source of innovation and flexibility is a welcome contrast with so many external commentators who discuss traditional societies (146). Thus in several respects, Ellis and Ter Haar promise a study that is dramatically different than those who have written on this topic in the past.

Their concept of religion borrows heavily from E. B. Tylor's description of religion as a belief in spiritual beings. They go beyond Tylor, however, by focusing on the power that these beings exert in spheres that are identified in Western thought as separate, the political and the religious, but which are much more intimately linked in African conceptualizations. In their discussion of pre-colonial African political systems, they describe the emphasis on personal forms of rule, rather than bureaucratic structures, and the wide distribution of what anthropologists have often referred to as "stateless societies." Their use of I. M. Lewis's theories about gender and spirit possession, with its focus on the relative deprivation of women, could have been enriched by more recent scholarship on the subject by Janice Boddy, who analyzes the way in which women create alternative systems of discourse in these predominantly female environments.

Their reliance on religious and political pamphlets provides the reader with vivid examples of new religious movements and communication styles within Africa. Reports of Jesus visiting Nairobi and of dramatic conversions of traditional priests into Christian preachers provide a rich texture of African religious life. More attention could have been given to the relationship of such religious leaders and their followers to the political life of their countries or regions.

It is in their heavy reliance on rumors, however, that this work suffers its greatest weakness. The endless repetition of what many would consider gossip, of which African ruler was said to perform acts of human sacrifice or purchased human body parts for rituals, with virtually no substantiating evidence, presents a deeply disturbing image of African religions that reinforces long-standing stereotypes. Are these alleged rituals and the power that they promise so much more important than the ethical imperatives that they bring or do not bring to their conduct in affairs of state? Are there other types of rituals, while [End Page 562] less sensational and less likely to make it to Radio Trottoir, which show African rulers performing rain rituals as they...

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