Missions, States, and European Expansion in Africa


Book Description

Missions, States, and European Expansion in Africa aims to explore the ways Christianity and colonialism acted as hegemonic or counter hegemonic forces in the making of African societies. As Western interventionist forces, Christianity and colonialism were crucial in establishing and maintaining political, cultural, and economic domination. Indeed, both elements of Africa’s encounter with the West played pivotal roles in shaping African societies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This volume uses a wide range of perspectives to address the intersection between missions, evangelism, and colonial expansion across Africa. The contributors address several issues, including missionary collaboration with the colonizing effort of European powers; disagreements between missionaries and colonizing agents; the ways in which missionaries and colonial officials used language, imagery, and European epistemology to legitimize relations of inequality with Africans; and the ways in which both groups collaborated to transform African societies. Thus, Missions, States, and European Expansion in Africa transcends the narrow boundaries that often separate the role of these two elements of European encounter to argue that missionary endeavours and official colonial actions could all be conceptualized as hegemonic institutions, in which both pursued the same civilizing mission, even if they adopted different strategies in their encounter with African societies.




Nigeria – Politics, Religion, Pentecostal-Charismatic Power and Challenges


Book Description

Nigeria presents an enthralling case study for understanding developing architypes in interreligious encounters in Africa. The global community needs a cultural understanding and sensitivity for productive engagement with the Arab and non-Arab Muslim world. The Nigeria religious exigencies provide a requisite intelligence into the challenges facing a global community seeking to foster peace. Without a domain of tolerance, love, equity and justice, Nigeria will continually be immured by pessimism, parochialism, cynicism and mutual suspicion. Despite being the largest economy in Africa and the most populous Black country, Nigeria demonstrates incessantly an uncommon fault-line between Christianity and Islam. The significance of this goes beyond the borders of Nigeria but has become a global showcase anywhere the two religions exist contemporaneously. Nigeria is the nexus between west and central Africa. Rooted in the dusty Sahel of the north, the savannah plains, the rich rainforests of the Atlantic coast, the rocky hills of the West, and the oil-filled swamps of the Delta. Nigeria is the beauty, sound, vision, passion and the soul of the African continent. In Nigeria, the Nigeria Pentecostal-Charismatic Movement possesses a distinctive flair that demands a holistic understanding of the movement’s historical, cultural, fundamental and religious dimensions in a multifarious religious landscape. The disquisition of the movement’s political cognizance, identity, power, authority, theology, popular culture, ethics and missiological impact in northern Nigeria presents a fine embroidery of their trials, frustrations and challenges, but inveterate in faith, hope and love that opens up innovative panoramas of peaceful dialogical prospects and coexistence between Christians and Muslims in northern Nigeria. In Nigeria - Politics, Religion, Pentecostal-Charismatic Power and Challenges, Akintayo Emmanuel reconnoiters the complex missiological hindrances challenging the Nigerian Pentecostal-Charismatic Movement. Their contextual missional landslide disheveled with complicated paradoxes in the way the Christian majority have responded to Muslims in northern Nigeria is anatomized. The Nigerian Pentecostal-Charismatic Movement’s puissance to solve some of Nigeria political, ideological, cultural and spiritual dimensions of crisis and sectarian violence is achievable if the movement can mitigate her missiological hindrances. The responses of Nigerian Pentecostal-Charismatic Movement to Nigeria’s socio-political and ethno-religious complexities can construct a great future for the soul of Nigeria. They do not only have the capacity to provide the Christian alternatives to Nigeria’s peculiarities, they can also stimulate Nigeria’s deification among other nations by continuing to disentangle from unscrupulousness and atrociousness embedded within—a reproach and opprobrium to any people.




Reverse Mission: the Dialectics of the Nigerian Religioscape


Book Description

It is obvious that Pentecostalism according to this work is a force to reckon with in the contemporary Christianity. No doubt it has created permanent positive and negative impact on the mainline churches therefore; religious landscape cannot be the same again. Now that some (Pentecostals) are returning to the mainline churches, it shows either that the initial intention has selfish tendencies or that there are some terms of liturgy, faith experiences, and theology in the mainline that cannot be compromised. There is need to articulate a model of Church that will explicate theologically, and ecclesiology, the reality of the Christian faith in the contemporary society, capable of making the encounter between God and humanity an experimental reality. I humbly appreciate this piece and recommend it for publishing. The Rt. Revd. Dr. J. Akin Atere, Bishop, Diocese of Awori & Old Testament Scholar




Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa


Book Description

This comprehensive reference volume covers every country in Sub-Saharan Africa, offering reliable demographic information and original interpretative essays by indigenous scholars and practitioners. It maps patterns of growth and decline, assesses major traditions and movements, analyses key themes and examines current trends. Key Features: Profiles of Christianity in every country in Sub-Saharan Africa including clearly presented statistical and demographic information; Analyses of leading features and current trends written by indigenous scholars; Essays examining each of the major Christian traditions (Anglicans, Independents, Orthodox, Protestants, Roman Catholics, Evangelicals, Pentecostals/ Charismatics); Essays exploring key themes such as faith and culture, worship and spirituality, theology, social and political engagement, mission and evangelism, religious freedom, inter-faith relations, slavery, anthropology of evil, and migration.




Who Shall Enter Paradise?


Book Description

Who Shall Enter Paradise? recounts in detail the history of Christian-Muslim engagement in a core area of sub-Saharan Africa’s most populous nation, home to roughly equal numbers of Christians and Muslims. It is a region today beset by religious violence, in the course of which history has often been told in overly simplified or highly partisan terms. This book reexamines conversion and religious identification not as fixed phenomena, but as experiences shaped through cross-cultural encounters, experimentation, collaboration, protest, and sympathy. Shobana Shankar relates how Christian missions and African converts transformed religious practices and politics in Muslim Northern Nigeria during the colonial and early postcolonial periods. Although the British colonial authorities prohibited Christian evangelism in Muslim areas and circumscribed missionary activities, a combination of factors—including Mahdist insurrection, the abolition of slavery, migrant labor, and women’s evangelism—brought new converts to the faith. By the 1930s, however, this organic growth of Christianity in the north had given way to an institutionalized culture based around medical facilities established in the Hausa emirates. The end of World War II brought an influx of demobilized soldiers, who integrated themselves into the local Christian communities and reinvigorated the practice of lay evangelism. In the era of independence, Muslim politicians consolidated their power by adopting many of the methods of missionaries and evangelists. In the process, many Christian men and formerly non-Muslim communities converted to Islam. A vital part of Northern Nigerian Christianity all but vanished, becoming a religion of “outsiders.”




Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions


Book Description

"The book also features cross-references throughout, a bibliography accompanying each entry, an elaborate appendix listing biographies according to particular categories of interest, and a comprehensive index."--BOOK JACKET.







Society, Schools and Progress in Nigeria


Book Description

Society, Schools and Progress in Nigeria is one of a mutually supporting series of books on SOCIETY, SCHOOLS AND PROGRESS in a number of important countries or regions. Nigeria makes a good field of study for several reasons. As Africans, the Nigerians are closely scrutinized by neighbors throughout the huge continent. A hitherto underdeveloped people, they are helping to lead the rapid development of more than 2000 million people who have until now been in a similar position. Inevitably, therefore, their use and modification of previously unquestioned instruments of education seem likely to bring challenges (perhaps enlightenment) to educators everywhere. The book opens with an overview of Nigeria and its people. This is followed by separate chapters on the development of modern education in the country from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, administration, the school system, family influences, and background social forces. The series is intended to serve students of sociology, government and politics, as well as education.