WASHINGTON–“Notoriously religious.”
That is religious scholar John Mbiti’s description of Africans in his classic book, “African Religions and Philosophy.” A survey released Thursday by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life backs up the predominant role of religion in the lives of sub-Saharan Africans.
In all of the 19 sub-Saharan African countries where surveys were conducted from December 2008 to April 2009, at least 69 percent of respondents said religion is very important in their lives.
That means religiosity is higher in the region between the southern border of the Sahara Desert and the Cape of Good Hope than in any other place in the world. An earlier Pew study reported that 57 percent of respondents in the United States said religion is very important. The Unites States is the most religious of the industrialized nations, but it still does not compare to religiosity in sub-Saharan Africa.
“On a continent wide basis, sub-Saharan Africa comes out as the most religious place on Earth,” said Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
It appears Mbiti was not exaggerating.
According to the survey, 98 percent of respondents in Senegal say religion is very important, followed by 93 percent in Mali. The lowest percentage is in Botswana, 69 percent.
“That begins to paint a picture of how religious sub-Saharan Africans are,” Lugo said.
The study, funded by a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts and the John Templeton Foundation, is part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures Project. More than 25,000 sub-Saharan Africans responded to face-to-face questions in more than 60 languages to share thoughts on the role of religion in their lives.
While the study confirms that Africans are, indeed, morally conservative and religiously pious, researchers explored several issues to gauge attitudes on a variety of topics, including religious tolerance, polygamy, the role of women in society, and political and economic satisfaction.
Islam and Christianity dominate as the most popular religions in the region. That was not the case a little over a century ago.
According to the report, in 1900, Muslims and Christians were the minority. Traditional beliefs were widely held. These indigenous religions are based on oral traditions, myths, rituals, shrines and artistic symbolism. Western anthropologists often label traditional African spirituality as animism, paganism, ancestor or superstition.
But for the past 100 years, indigenous spirituality has been diluted as the messages of Islam and Christianity spread throughout the African continent.
The study reports that the number of Christians in sub-Saharan Africa grew faster than the number of Muslims, from 7 million in 1900 to 470 million. Twenty percent of Christians worldwide are sub-Saharan African. While a majority of African Muslims are from the northern region of the continent, nearly 234 million live below the Sahara Desert.
However, traditional beliefs have not disappeared. The report finds that traditional religious beliefs are often incorporated into Islam and Christianity. A number of sub-Saharan Africans believe in witchcraft, evil spirits, reincarnation and other elements of traditional African spirituality. More than half of the people surveyed in Tanzania, Mali, Senegal and South Africa believe that sacrifices to ancestors or spirits can protect them from harm.
These indigenous beliefs co-exist alongside either Islam or Christianity.
Mary Dhavale, a Tanzanian native who now resides in Atlanta, describes herself as a “righteous child of Jehovah God” and drives two hours every Sunday to fellowship at a Pentecostal church. She said her grandfather was a traditional healer.
“You may call him a witch doctor, but he did good things for the people,” Dhavale said.
Dhavale’s grandfather also attended Catholic services for most of his life. She said her grandfather concocted herbal drinks and crafted charms to ward evil spirits or to expose petty crimes in the neighborhood.
“If your child is sick or if your car is spoiled, people would go to my grandfather and find out who did it,” Dhavale said.
This merging of religious practices is not uncommon.
Sulayman Nyang, a professor at Howard University’s African Studies Department, said by honoring traditional religious practices, sub-Saharan Africans are able to maintain their African identity and strengthen ethnic unity.
However, Nyang said indigenous religions are not practiced in a pure form and are instead blended into Islam or Christianity because sub-Saharan Africans want to maintain their “dignity.”
“Here you have Africans who want to be accepted into the new world of modernity,” Nyang said.
In this modern world of religious diversity, denominations reflect a variety of beliefs even within Islam and Christianity. According to the Pew survey, most sub-Saharan African Muslims are Sunni. Other denominations within Islam in the region include Ahmadiyya and a mystical sect known as, Sufism.
Within Christianity, Catholicism dominates in Guinea Bissau, Rwanda and Cameroon. In Liberia, South Africa, Zambia, Kenya, Nigeria, and Botswana, most Christians are Protestantism.
Lugo of the Pew center points out that it is the passionate evangelism of the Pentecostal gospel that is rapidly spreading in sub-Saharan Africa.
“Casting out of the devil or evil spirits, high degree of apocalyptic expectations, the health and wealth ‘prosperity gospel’ is the new Christian phenomenon of the Pentecostalism in sub-Saharan Africa,” Lugo said.
What is becoming known as the “prosperity gospel” teaches followers that God will bless the righteous with material wealth.
That’s what Emanuel Haile teaches his predominantly Ethiopian congregation at an evangelical church in the Washington.
“If you obey God and his work, he will prosper you,” said the assistant pastor, who was born in Ethiopia.
The 19 countries represented in the survey comprise 75 percent of the population of sub-Saharan Africa. The countries are: Botswana, Cameroon, Chad, Djibouti, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea Bissau, Kenya, Liberia, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.