ABSTRACT
Our aim in this chapter is to explore some of the ways in which religion is relevant for development in sub-Saharan Africa and the extent to which this has been accommodated within international development policy and practice, and with what consequences. As Bompani (2015: 102) writes, ‘the great majority of people in sub-Saharan Africa are deeply and actively religious and spirituality is integral in their understanding of the world’. While the majority belong to either Christianity or Islam, many still practise, often in coexistence with Christianity and Islam, forms of African religious beliefs (Pew Forum, 2010). However, not only do people’s religious beliefs shape their views about what is important to them and how they conceive of ‘development’, but faith-based organisations (FBOs) have been central to welfare and service delivery long before the emergence of the contemporary international development project in the post-Second World War era (Tomalin, 2013). This includes traditional mechanisms within different religions in Africa for helping those in need, as well as the European Christian missionaries who accompanied explorers and colonialists, often shaping and assisting their work. Missionaries have a long history of development work, with significant contributions to health, education and infrastructure provision (Gifford, 2009: 46). Indeed, Manji and O’Coill (2002: 568) have argued that the evolution of the role of development non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Africa ‘represents a continuity of the work of their precursors, the missionaries and voluntary organizations that cooperated in Europe’s colonization and control of Africa’ (see also Deacon and Tomalin, 2015). Thus, Christianity was of great importance for colonial development in Africa (and continues to be so to this day) in a variety of ways, and correspondingly appears to have played a role in creating the foundations for the modern development project – described by Manji and O’Coill (2002: 568) as ‘a vast institutional and disciplinary nexus of official agencies, practitioners, consultants, scholars and other miscellaneous “experts” producing and consuming knowledge about the “developing world”’.
