African faith and practice...
by David and Tim Bayly on April 15, 2010 - 5:56am
(Tim) Although the Pew Research Center has surely missed something in the translation, here's a fascinating 331 page survey on Sub-Saharan African views on religion and morality. (Or, here's the Executive Summary.)
In "Ten things we have learnt about Africa," the BBC reports: polygamy is alive and well, although there's a notable gap between belief and practice. Concerning sodomy, Africans aren't interested in R2K's separation of church and state: they're agin it, by a healthy 98% in several countries (including Zambia). Christians are overwhelmingly opposed to divorce while, in some countries, the majority of Muslims think it's OK. About 40% of Africans believe in witchcraft and visit traditional healers...
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Comments
Very interesting. The Exec summary, at least, is misleading because it just talks about "Africans". Thus, I'm not surprised that Christians generally aren't much worried about Moslems, because in most African countries where Christians live, there *aren't* any Moslems to speak of. In Nigeria, where there are lots of both Christians and Moslems, the Moslems are killing Christians in large numbers. In South Africa and Zambia, on the other hand, Moslems are as much an exotic curiosity as in America. Extremist Christians are more of a problem than Moslems, because there *are* no Moslems.
Basically to agree with Eric. In Zambia, there are only a few mosques and not so many Muslims. My kids go to school with a number of the children from Muslim families in our town.
One of the MTW execs sent me an email a few years ago about an internet rumor. The rumor said that 120 Muslims were converted in Zambia. I wrote him that I'd check it out but that I doubted it. The Zambian Christian leaders with whom I spoke scoffed at it. They said, if two Muslims in Zambia were converted it would be front-page news.
Now, I don't know the exact stats, but I always thought there was a sizable population of Muslims in South Africa. There are a lot in Malawi and so many of the Muslims in Zambia are in the eastern portion of the country, near Malawi. There are also a lot in Tanzania and Kenya; not so many in Zim and Botswana.
According to Wikipedia, there is a number of South African Muslims, but they are mostly within the Indian and Malay communities, and go back some hundreds of years.
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