Christianity and Public Culture in Africa

4: The Implications of Reproductive Politics for Religious Competition in Niger

89 f O U R The Implications of Reproductive Politics for Religious Competition in Niger b A r b A r A m . C o o P e r “ f E RT I l I T Y D I f f E R E N C E S by religion in West Africa, when they occur,” Jennifer Johnson-Hanks writes,“are neither a stable effect of the muslim religion nor a straightforward consequence of economics but, rather, the result of an interaction between the two. We must conclude that social context and national politics mediate the association between religious affiliation and reproductive practice.”1 in her thoughtprovoking comparative statistical analysis of fertility and mortality rates by religion across West Africa, Johnson-Hanks goes on to argue that fertility patterns have less to do with religion directly than with the effects of belonging to a minority, the members of which are systematically disadvantaged economically. She convincingly demonstrates that when education and residence are taken into account, it is not clear that muslims have the high fertility rates so often attributed to them in polemics about the rise of fundamentalism, muslim male unemployment , and the coming anarchy. on the other hand, in national contexts in which muslims are an economically disadvantaged minority, their “demographic metabolism” is more rapid than that of the majority population: both fertility and mortality rates are relatively high. JohnsonHanks argues that “reproductive rates are social products, are the result of a variety of forms of cultural practice, and are deeply embedded in local politics.”2 there is, she notes, “no single, coherent muslim reproductive pattern: the real story is local.”3 90 bARbARA M. COOPER fertility patterns are highly local and must be interpreted in the light of national contexts, community networks, and perceptions of relative well-being. Although Johnson-Hanks does not herself address the issue of the media, her analysis invites attention to the perceptions of religious populations in the same nation relative to one another in the domain of reproduction and to how those perceptions may affect a variety of practices touching on fertility. While her analysis focuses on majority and minority muslim populations, i will here pursue musings on her insights in the slightly different, but obviously related, context of the Christian minority in muslim-majority niger. Arjun Appadurai has recently argued that competitive dynamics between majority and minority populations within national political contexts, in a shifting global media environment that simultaneously empowers minorities and promotes ambivalence on the part of national governments, have provoked increasingly volatile and violent interactions as a result of what he terms the “fear of small numbers.”4 in some of my own earlier work i have tried to come to terms with the very disturbing instances of violence toward Christians and bori spirit mediums —enacted in particular on the bodies of vulnerable single women— in a dense media environment and in the context of profound feelings of impotence on the part of nigériens as a result of state decline and external economic intrusion.5 As Appadurai so aptly notes, given the systemic compromise of national economic sovereignty that is built into the logic of globalization, and given the increasing strain this puts on states to behave as trustees of the interests of a territorially defined and confined “people,” minorities are the major site for displacing the anxieties of many states about their own minority or marginality (real or imagined) in a world of a few megastates, of unruly economic flows and compromised sovereignties. minorities, in a word, are metaphors and reminders of the betrayal of the classical national project.6 eliza griswold, in a recent article in Atlantic Monthly, offers an example of precisely this kind of logic at work in the context of nigeria. the controversial but influential episcopal archbishop Peter Akinola comments to griswold that what people in the West don’t understand is “that what islam failed to accomplish by the sword in the eighth century , it’s trying to do by immigration so that muslims become citizens 91 the implications of reproductive Politics and demand their rights. A muslim man has four wives; the wives have four or five children each.this is how they turned Christians into a minority in north Africa.”7 note here the slippage from religious group, to demographic group, to electoral group. the backdrop for demographic anxiety is a fear of being eventually outnumbered in a...