African religious landscape fragmented - and unavoidable
By Paritosh Bansal
On a Friday morning in March, the coalition air-dropped fliers on Fallujah, Iraq, to intimidate insurgents. The postcard-sized flier had two green eyes, cut out from a Marine Corps poster. The text read, “The eyes of the coalition are watching you.”
“As a force protection strategy, this was so counterproductive,” said Pauletta Otis, senior fellow in religion and international affairs at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, recounting the incident. “Green eyes are divine eyes. It’s a symbol of the djinn.”
Days later, American contractors were pulled from their cars, shot, burned, dragged through the streets and strung up on a bridge. Images of their murders shocked the world.
“Now, I will not say that that caused it,” Otis said, “but I can say that it was an ignorant thing to do without listening to people on the ground.”
Otis was joined by Rosalind I.J. Hackett, professor at the University of Tennessee, on a panel for the Western Knight Center, addressing the topic of “Religion and International Security: The Challenge of Sub-Saharan Africa.”
Otis said conventional war was a thing of the past. “Eighty-five percent of all Marine Corps missions in the last 10 years have been non-conventional. We have Marine Corps forces or Special Forces in almost every country in Africa doing something; none of them are conventional warfare.”
She gave the example of a major who had served in Uganda. She said she had two pictures of the woman. “In the first one, she has an AK-47 in her hand. She’s standing there tough.” In the second picture, she is “surrounded by 15 to 18 orphans and former child soldiers that she has helped.”
“This is the real face of the security engagement in Africa and much of the rest of the world,” she said.
Soldiers had to be prepared to interact on a “one-on-one, micro-level” with people in these countries, she said. But often there is little information about the religious landscape in these countries.
“Learning the Quran is not very helpful for military forces,” she said. “What’s more helpful are the codes, the particular ethnic beliefs on the ground level that make a difference to them at an individual level on a daily basis.”
Otis, who also teaches a class on religion and violence to military personnel, said the difficulty of handling this diversity in Africa is compounded by the failure of the state and the political structure, weak economies, poverty, unprofessional armies, mercenaries and unending conflict.
In Africa, understanding religion is particularly challenging because there are 50 countries and between 6,000 and 7,000 syncretic forms of religion, she said. People now pick and choose the concepts they like, she said, and customs and religious traditions have a strong local flavor.
“The traditional means of social control are under attack,” Otis said. “Traditional churches, mosques and synagogues are under threat because people say ‘You cannot tell me what to do because my religion is between me and my maker.’”
“The governments of Sub-Saharan Africa have a very difficult time with this. And our military forces have a very difficult time working with them,” Otis said.
Future engagement in Africa is unavoidable, she said, noting almost all conflicts in Africa are petroleum related. “We will in the future depend on Africa for over 25 percent of our oil imports. We are in Chad because there is a new pipeline there.”
“We better know a lot more about the local culture,” Otis said. “Religion gives most people, or many people, a reason for life, a reason for dying, a reason for killing and often to give their own life to be killed.
“At the base of all life and death decisions is usually a value statement or transcendental statement about life.”
Hackett, who said she lived in Nigeria in the 70s and the early 80s, turned the attention to the role of the local media in Africa.
“I am talking about media as weapons of mass destruction,” she said, referring to “small-scale media that don’t get on the radar screen.”
“That is where the hate speech is. That is where most of the damage is being done,” she said. It has become simpler for anyone to produce propaganda and hate literature. “People are empowered to proselytize as if there is no tomorrow.”
Hackett said that most African leaders would have the world believe that there was a perfect state of religious freedom in their country.
“It’s a lie,” she said. “They are fighting over the increasingly competitive, mass-mediated public sphere.”
Religious conflict was primarily in terms of Muslims and Christians, although there were intra-religion conflicts as well as discrimination against minority religious groups. “Perhaps the most persecuted of all are the followers and practitioners of the traditional African religion.”
Hackett blamed the rise of biased media in Africa on deregulation and privatization over the last 10 years. State-run newspapers and radio have been displaced by a wave of privatized media, she said, and added that the results were proving “negative in terms of issues of religious tolerance and pluralism.”
The media scene is getting competitive, but Africa is still not an equitable, free market. “Partisan and enclave-oriented media” that have sprung up don’t want to invite people from other religions for social dialogues.
The problem is especially acute in Nigeria, where Muslims and Christians are equally divided. “They are not learning about each other,” she said, and therefore stereotypes that circulate are not being challenged.
In fact, the media have been directly responsible for inciting violence. Hackett gave the example of the riots during the Miss World pageant in 2002, when a Christian journalist wrote about the Prophet Mohammed in a way that incited a wave of outrage.
Hackett said the media could play a role in furthering conversation between different traditions, but that was not happening in Africa.
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