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This article uses E. P. Thompson's last book – Witness against the Beast (1993) – as an occasion to claim oddity, peculiarity, and nonconformity as subjects of African history. Africa's historians have been engaged in an earnest effort to locate contemporary cultural life within the longue durée, but in fact there was much that was strange and eccentric. Here I focus on the reading habits and interpretive strategies that inspired nonconformity. Nonconformists read the Bible idiosyncratically, snipping bits of text out of the fabric of the book and using these slogans to launch heretical and odd ways of living. Over time, some of them sought to position themselves in narrative structures that could authenticate and legitimate their dissident religious activity. That entailed experimentation with voice, positionality, and addressivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the activism of militant Catholic African students in France in the 1950s. Largely left out of the historiography of the period, they developed a unique perspective on Africa's future, informed by their dual (and often fraught) identity as Africans and Catholics. They undertook a strident campaign to convince French Catholics and the Church hierarchy of the necessity of decolonization, trying to change the Church from the inside. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In a historiography that paints relations between chiefs and women as antagonistic, the history of the Nazaretha Church in Mtunzini, South Africa in the early twentieth century sheds light on conditions that allowed chiefs and women to find common ground. During the era of segregation, Mtunzini was, on one hand, subject to relatively less interference from white government officials, but, on the other, ravaged by social and economic change. In this context, the Nazaretha Church flourished thanks to the support of many chiefs and women. The religious community not only proposed new answers to related questions about health, healing, and morality, but it also afforded chiefs and women important social options amid rural decline and challenges to traditional authority. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, I focus on the historiography of Islam in West Africa while also reflecting upon and assessing existing scholarship in the broader field of the study of Islam in Africa. My position as an anthropologist who conducts historical research informs my perspective in evaluating the current state of the field and my suggestions for directions in which I think future research might move in order to advance our understanding of Islam and Muslim societies and the history of religious life in Africa more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article revisits the concept of islam noir (black Islam) crafted in the context of French rule of sub-Saharan Muslims. For the French colonial administration, islam noir connoted the idea of a degraded Islam tainted by animist practices and therefore different from the pure Islam practiced in Arab countries. This differentiation was a way to separate it from ‘Arab Islam’, which was considered a subversive model. This distinction was not entirely new for it had already a long history behind it. Arabic sources had often shown a high distrust of sub-Saharan Africans who converted to Islam; they never really enjoyed a status equal to that of Arab Muslims. After the end of colonial rule, the story still continues. The theme of a specific sub-Saharan Islam (African Islam) remained a convenient category that was used by scholars, regardless of old prejudices. In the latest period, some African intellectuals have also embraced this concept, conjoining it with the pride of blackness, as a kind of Islam de la négritude, while praising its orthodoxy. It is this long epistemological and taxonomical adventure of islam noir that is examined here. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The idea that mission Christianity played a pivotal role in the creation of modern African ethnic identities has become paradigmatic. Yet, the actual cultural and social processes that facilitated the widespread reception of specific ethnic identities have been under-researched. Suggesting that historians have overemphasised the role of Christian schooling and theology in ethnic identity formation, this article examines how the Anlo people of south-eastern Ghana came, over the twentieth century, to recognise themselves as part of the larger Ewe ethnic group. Although Christian missionaries were the first to conceive of ‘Ewe’ as a broad ethnic identity, a corpus of non-Christian ritual practices pioneered by inland Ewe slave women were crucial to many Anlos' embrace of Eweness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1918, Faith Tabernacle Congregation was established in southern colonial Ghana. This Philadelphia-based church flourished in the context of colonialism, cocoa, and witchcraft, spreading rapidly after the 1918–19 influenza pandemic. In this context, several healing cults also proliferated, but Faith Tabernacle was particularly successful because the church offered its members spiritual, social, and legal advantages. The church's leadership was typically comprised of young Christian capitalist men, whose literacy and letter writing enabled the establishment of an American church without any missionaries present. By 1926, when Faith Tabernacle began its decline, at least 177 branches had formed in southern Ghana, extending into Togo and Côte d'Ivoire, with over 4,400 members. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]