Jean Comaroff

Being invited to respond to the rich deliberations occasioned by this extraordinary conference at the source of the Nile River was at once a privilege and a penance. The discussion was probing, thoughtful and sometimes spiritedly argumentative, displaying the particular passion so often invoked when we confront the role of religion in the world. Religion of all kinds seems uniquely capable of eliciting both vehement conflict and fervent forgiveness. Indeed, among the 10 themes I identified in my vain effort to do justice to the varied papers presented at this gathering, the first concerned what Scott Appleby has termed “the ambivalence of the sacred.” Religion has an uncommon ability to spur humankind to make both war and peace.

Wherein lies this animating force? This was the second broad issue I identified in the ebb and flow of debate. The question was voiced most directly by Gerrie ter Haar, but examined also by John Mary Waliggo, Deusdedit Nkurunziza and Lawrence Kanyike in their presentations. Religion, like politics, is directed toward the mediation of power – power of a particular kind. Stemming (in the words of sociologist Max Weber) from “otherworldly” rather than “this-worldly” sources, this force wields an authority different from that of temporal power.

The extent to which the actual domains of religion and politics are separable in the world, and whether they are locked in struggle or mutual reinforcement, varies across time and place (a subject explored for contemporary sub-Saharan Africa by Robert Dowd). The distinction of religion from politics, of the sacred from the secular, has been crucial to the rise of modern democratic society – although the liberal ideal holds that, as separate powers, they should remain in constructive dialogue. For religions are widely held to be uniquely capable of speaking truth to temporal power, just as secular government can curb the excesses of sectarian belief. True, most of the bloody, high-tech wars that have scourged the earth this past century have claimed divine justification of some sort, and there are countless recent examples in which belief joins in unholy alliance with imperial ambition. At the same time, our era has seen ever bolder, more humane efforts to devise techniques of peacemaking. These methods are often initiated by religious leaders, many of them African. This returns us to the paradoxical power of the sacred as productive force in the world.

In Africa there is growing evidence that the modernist ideal of accommodation between religion and politics is undergoing significant change. This was the fourth theme I gleaned from our discussions. Most postcolonial nation-states have been consistently undermined, first by the legacies of colonialism, then by the impact of structural adjustment, privatization and governance through non-governmental organizations. In the process, states have increasingly withdrawn from the provision of public services and employment. Religious institutions have expanded to fill the breach. Often, as speakers like Amy Stambach made plain, they do this with the aid of outside capital and authority. Speaking through popular media, revitalized movements promise intensely spiritual, immediate forms of empowerment, offering novel sources of truth, education and citizenship amidst civic disintegration. Under such conditions, the margins between the sacred and the secular undergo a shift. As religious organizations take on more state-like functions, states seem increasingly willing to ally themselves with religious interests. Ritual authorities raise ever-stronger challenges to the sovereignty of secular law, a matter on which speakers such as Abasi Kiyimba and Penda Mbow had animatedly differing opinions. These debates recall conflicts in other places, such as the fight over whether French Muslim girls could wear the hijab to public school.

There is a troubling tendency, as this last example suggests, for conflicts over religious and civil rights to become manifest in struggles over the bodies of women, the latter serving both as metaphors and vehicles for communal morality. This was a fifth theme emerging from the conference. As George Piwang-Jalobo reminded us, women remain distressingly frequent victims of civil violence, perhaps precisely because they embody the hope of future life. They also tend to be the most immediate object for reformers of all kinds, from those who seek to subject domestic relations to the rule of Sharia, to those who argue over the matters of female circumcision or intervention in reproduction in the time of AIDS. But because they were sometimes valued by African tradition as sources of life beyond political strife, Adam arap Chepkwony argued, women might be the appropriate agents for new kinds of reconciliation. Indeed, this echoes a range of innovative movements from Ireland to Sri Lanka, in which mothers have raised the banner of peace-making.

In all this – and this is my sixth theme – we find evidence of the intensified impact on local African life of religious forces of world-wide scale, forces at once cultural and material. Of course, the continent has long been the target of long-distance proselytizers, Christian and Muslim. What is novel about current enterprises is both their source (they stem as much from the South and East as the North and West) and their methods (they rely heavily on electronic media). These media, as Rosalind Hackett, Asonzeh Ukah and Nokuzola Mndende showed, are significantly reshaping cultures of divinity across the continent by means of evangelical radio and TV, Pentecostal videos, Muslim cassettes and the like. New circuits of communication forge de-territorialized networks and faith-based diasporas, providing a portable vernacular for those who migrate in search of opportunities.

My seventh theme picks up on another dimension of this trans-local reality: global neo-liberalism. The latter is similar to other world-wide systems, such as colonialism and Cold War internationalism; but also differs in several respects relevant to our concerns here. In particular, neo-liberalism has led to a downsizing of the governance of nation-states (especially post-colonial states). It has also limited these states’ capacities to control violence and the rule of law within their borders.

Above all, the triumph of neo-liberal ideology has introduced what some have termed “Market Fundamentalism,” a faith in the salvific power of the profit motive. I have already remarked on the impact of liberalization on the relation of religion to politics in Africa. A further implication of this creed, as several commentators at the conference noted, has been the increasing tendency of religious organizations to assume the form of businesses - to hold out the promise of worldly prosperity as a return on faith, to engage in a wide range of “fee for service” enterprises, and generally to “privatize” the millennium.

An additional consequence of the neo-liberal turn has been a widening of the gulf between rich and poor, and the advent of a generation born to chronic unemployment. At the same time, ever-greater appeals to consumerism, directed above all at youth, exist alongside a stark awareness among many of their exclusion from prosperity. My ninth theme relates to the increasing salience of movements that deploy age-old, revitalizing techniques to address new patterns of marginalization and civic collapse. What seems notable about the grassroots revivalism discussed by several contributions to this conference (e.g. Grace Wamue, Koen Vlassenroot, and James Smith) is the extent to which its participants seek to recover “traditional” forms of ritual power in the effort to counter current political and economic malaise – especially the inability of many young men to build viable futures. Here religious revitalization shades into the violence of militias, into ritualized and sometimes brutal quests to recover a sense of belonging, power and purpose.

The most embracing theme propelling our wide-ranging discussion over the three days we spent alongside the Nile was the impetus to recapture a space of dialogue and a mode of action that turns the paradox of the sacred to the pursuit of the good. The impetus is to strive for the seemingly impossible, reaching across differences of culture and history to a shared imperative. We must recognize our frailties and our fractiousness, yet reach for the infinite in our will to make peace.

Jean Comaroff is Bernard E. & Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, USA. She has published widely in the areas of cultural anthropology and African studies.