Religion, Media, and Marginality in Modern Africa ed. by Felicitas Becker, Joel Cabrita, and Marie Rodet (review)

The intention of the editors—all three of them Africanists—is to highlight how marginalized groups use both "old" and new media to either reach out or close off avenues of communication with others. They claim that this is particularly true in the development of "niche audiences and diverse, competing religious claims" (2). This point is made in several ways throughout the volume. For example, author David Gordon notes that the spread of literacy through missionaries in northern Zambia has created a homogenized elite class, while local "tin trunk" literacy has spread through clerks, traders, and artisans. These two groups value different sorts of media: the "elite" value open sources of information like autobiographies, novels, pamphlets, and newspapers, while the "homespun scholars" prefer handwritten diaries, letters, and religious liturgies. In their comprehensive introduction, editors Felicitas Becker and Joel Cabrita emphasize that different groups have different strategies and end goals. This seems to be the overarching theme of the book.

Another theme is that there are many reading, listening, and watching "publics" in Africa. The audiences for the various forms of media are both diverse and specific. In some of these cases, media, such as radio, has served an anticolonial agenda, promoting democracy at times, as in the case of anticolonial broadcasting in south-Saharan Africa (11). At other times, media has promoted the goals of the government. Political activists have also used a variety of types of media to subvert nation-states, utilizing independent radio, mobile phones, cassette tapes, and the internet. Some lesser-known religious voices and women religious leaders have used these media in order to be heard—for example, the use of social media during the Arab Spring in Egypt (11) and the use of mobile phones by female entrepreneurs in Nairobi to break into the largely male-dominated economy (13).

The editors broadly define media to include all manner of communication—from texts like scriptures, to newspapers, to radio, audiotapes, DVDs, television, social media, and emails. They also analyze the role photography plays in the life of religious congregations and there are two essays on this topic. One, by Heike Behrend, covers Muslim dis-courses on photography in Kenya; the other, by Asonzeh Ukah, discusses photographs as constructing urban piety in Nigeria. Ukah focuses on how religious subjects represent themselves within their religious practice (112). In these cases, photography was used to document and communicate the life of the community. The editors are very clear that they do not want to privilege one type of media over another, nor imply that one type of media empowers while another disempowers. They claim, "no single media form is capable, on its own, of instigating social change. Instead, change in Africa—as elsewhere in the world—occurs through interlocking technical, social, political, cultural, and economic process" (18).

The volume soundly rejects the secularization thesis in African society, with contributors negotiating the difficult terrain between the sacred and the secular in public life. Each chapter addresses some aspect of African religions, but authors do not necessarily use the same definition of "religion." While all of the groups examined—from Islam to the Shembe Church—engage in some sort of religious practice, adherents might not subscribe to a comprehensive definition of religion. The editors admit that this is problematic; at the same time, however, they observe that religious studies scholars often discuss groups phenomenologically rather than theoretically (25). They feel that trying to formulate a single definition for practices that already exist may be arbitrary. The editors also admit that the religions covered in this volume on African religions are limited by their specializations in Southern African Christianity, East African Islam, and West-African postslavery societies. This explains why there is minimal coverage of indigenous African religions in the volume.

The essays are divided into three sections. The first section, "Engagements with State Power in the Colonial Period and Beyond," examines...