By Toyin Falola
Historically, the relationship between faith and Africa has hardly ever been a clear, black-and-white one. The daily decisions taken were greatly shaped by the rhythms of planting and harvesting as well as the spiritual beliefs of the people gathered in the village squares under the baobab trees. Conversely, whether similar ideas were presented in mosques or courts, they may have maintained hierarchies just as readily as they could have inspired group togetherness. The conflict between a set of traits handed down through the generations, and the demands of an age fast approaching globalization will help one to grasp how values may either push or inhibit Africa’s progress. Looking back over the history of the continent helps one to see how complex power systems first developed their roots in ancient cosmovisions. Eventually, though, colonial aspirations appropriated those ideas and turned them into tools for both resistance and control alternately.
Long before the flags of colonial powers were hoisted atop administrative buildings, African villages kept sophisticated moral ecosystems. Apart from recognizing the way the morning sun was rising, the customs of relatives whose names indicated morality and discipline would have been deeply etched in the memory of a young individual living in a community in central Nigeria. These customs did not develop in a vacuum. Pre-colonial institutions, including chieftaincies, religious orders, and councils of elders, were means of conflict resolution, resource allocation, and ceremonializing of societal obligations. These establishments worked like a loom piecing together the strands of history. If one romanticized that age, one would be missing the point since spiritual power might be equally demanding as they were kind. A king may call a taboo upon a commoner who disobeyed norms; nevertheless, clerics might also offer absolution should the system itself reveal indications of malfunction. These hundreds of years-old systems carried not just the seeds of emancipation but also the capacity to inflict tyranny.
When foreign missionaries arrived in Africa, they did more than only evangelize the continent. Their teachings changed the basic moral code; sometimes, they were given with real empathy but were all too often supported by imperial ambition. A chapel built by the seaside evolved from a place of prayer to a symbol of Western modernism as well. It was a debate whereby biblical songs had greater weight than regional proverbs somehow. Still, these new religions also provided gathering grounds for anti-colonial campfires, which seems counterintuitive. Should young Congolese Christians find inspiration in their faith after a midday service, they could decide to translate those books into remarks denouncing exploitative rubber concessions. By means of integrating Christian liturgies with the customs of their ancestors, societies were able to create syncretic faiths that might have been unthinkable a generation previously. Still, by doing this, they also become more easily accessible to fledgling political economies. The same hymns denouncing foreign oppression remained silent when it came to local despotism or the financial interests of urban elites turning megachurches into profitable enterprises.
This shift from indigenous to forced forms of piety leads one to a great irony: something that was once a defense mechanism against all-encompassing authority has now become a technique for establishing it. A colonial government would not unusually rely on the approval of a cleric to justify the seizure of lands. This was carried out to call God’s will before the seizure. Furthermore, difficult to overlook is the employment of moral discourse by post-independence rising leaders to hide their totalitarian objectives. A 1960s leader could preach unity under the banner of spiritual rebirth as his troops suppressed rivals under the cover of dark streetlamps. Long-serving safe havens for those seeking comfort, churches and mosques find themselves entwined into political systems, exchanging moral authority for financial benefit.
To gain a sense of the speed at which the changes happened, one could just examine how fast late 1990s urban teenagers exchanged their traditional charms for cell phones. In metropolitan regions, modern gospel performances and television debates on which preacher yelled the loudest have supplanted the classic melodies once employed to distill several degrees of moral education. Thanks to the spread of digital networks, young people in Africa were able to connect themselves with movements active elsewhere. A trip to Lagos today could expose a young person searching through sermons from a South African preacher or sharing memes with friends in Nairobi on what “true” African values even mean. These are both events happening in Nigeria. Sometimes, this global conversation offers chances that allow societies to assess imported paradigms of success. Conversely, it often aggravates already existing divisions by labeling younger residents as “sellouts” and presenting those who follow local customs as “backward.”
The conflict between “communal responsibility” and “individual advancement” has defined Africa’s approach to negotiating its destiny. The debate on whether the system should be given top priorityâtraditional elders’ councils or market-driven boards of governorsâwill have a major influence on many different fields, including electoral reform and climate policy. Here, in the interstitial areas, a new moral agency free from ties to colonial legacies or mindless devotion to primordial rites may yet develop. This is the ground on which this new moral agency might flourish. People from all across the continentâincluding artists, activists, and intellectualsâare experimenting with hybrid paradigms that mix equity with adaptation in an attempt to advance. They argue that a change based on inherited values, but simultaneously subject to critique and reinventions, will appear to be more resilient than any effort requiring the erasing of the past.
Arriving with theology and textbooks, missionaries were sure the lessons of the Bible would be able to cross cultural boundaries. The first challenge they encountered, though, was translating such lessons into languages sometimes devoid of concrete analogies for abstract concepts like “salvation” or “original sin.” Translation of the scriptures meant bending local idioms to fit a foreign logic, which produced a theology that occasionally seemed more of a puzzle than an extension of real experience. Still, when doors opened for education and basic medical treatment, a new class of African intelligences emerged. These students were baptized into Western-style knowledge as well as Christian doctrine. The graduates under question fell into an odd middle ground. They studied geometry and anatomy during the day and spoke about ways to balance Christian orthodoxy with ancestral practices late at night.
Colonial governments heavily relied on this newly developed moral authority throughout this same time frame. A colonial magistrate who lacked a deep awareness of the local customs would call upon a well-respected preacher to assist in passing laws criminalizing specific forms of land use. By acting this way, the governor made clear that breaking the recently passed legislation was not only a criminal but also a sinful deed. For some areas of what is now Ghana, for example, chiefs who battled indirection authority were labeled as heathens, and their ancestral statutes were dismissed as relics. Their subjects were caught between their fealty to traditional leaders and their fear of the state’s vengeance; therefore, they had to negotiate a difficult minefield of contradictory moral claims.
On the other hand, local community prophets offered a different viewpoint. They taught redemption, but they also preached emancipationâwhich might be political or spiritual, depending on the times. Migrants arranged themselves into congregations in South Africa’s goldfields, and the leaders of these groups utilized the concept of Pharaoh’s incarceration to draw attention to the harshness of mining contracts. These meetings were more than simply a chance to sing hymns; they were venues where employees planned small acts of sabotage, debated the most recent news, and ready appeals to missionary groups in order to seek retribution. Colonial officials responded with instructions to forbid the individual, therefore transforming a place of worship into a place of subversion when a prophetic voice from one church dared to criticize my proprietors by name.
Notwithstanding this, it is hard to overlook the reality that certain local elites deliberately embraced Christian ideas to justify their objectives. A politician in Nigeria during colonial control used Sunday sermons to accuse his rival as sinners, and he combined these denounces with political slogans. His enemies responded by charging him with using the pulpit for personal gain, citing the petroleum concessions he had made and the bonds he had developed with foreign capitalists. Church congregations and churches themselves split along lines reminiscent of those of recently established political parties. With the Bible serving as both the screenplay and the stage, a theatre of power performance quickly evolved from what was once an attempt to inject spiritual codes.
Colonial courts transcended the religious environment in which they found themselves by using Christian moral frameworks in the adjudication of property conflicts and succession concerns. Inspired by the spirits of the dead, a missionary who subsequently became a magistrate in East Africa decided in the past whereby a widow’s bond should not replace the rights approved by the church for his blood family to her late husband. The way in which imported moralities may compromise society’s safety nets was highlighted by the fact that this verdict led to the ejection of women from land that had been in their possession for many centuries. Conversely, the same court system might also offer remedies in circumstances where local power brokers used custom law to evict tenant farmers. In this manner, colonial legal systems sometimes acted as a veneer of objectivity, one that exposed flaws in societies that had earlier resolved issues by oral debates under elder councils. Stated differently, they exposed the division these communities had been experiencing.
Convert in rural regions were grappling with issues outside of what was taught while this was under progress. What consequences does this have for the established taboos, given their forefathers advised against marrying outside of particular clans, but missionaries maintained all souls are equal? Though they were celebrated in mission schools, young converts who opted not to engage in infant naming ceremonies suffered social marginalization at home. This conflict showed up daily: a woman may make jollof rice for Sunday fellowship and find out later on that the elderly villagers had thought her cooking tools were unclean. These conflicts forced a generation of thinkers to reconsider the basic basis of their moral worlds, therefore combining a sense of alienation with a drive for advancement.
As colonial control evolved into more advanced degrees of sophistication, infrastructure projects greatly changed moral terrain. New roads were built out of the sacred woods, and trains split old burial sites in half. Something that has always been off-limits according to spiritual traditions became front-page news as soon as officials started flaunting the financial advantages. A Gold Coast teacher would show kids how the railway would cut the time it would take to travel, but they might struggle to explain why it would destroy the baobab tree their grandparents had used for vision searches. Community customs progressively become less important. Funeral rites were moved into church rooms from their open fields past. The fact that they were not invited to events funded by the state diminished the functions of ritual experts.
Still, even as colonial forces were tearing down established systems, they inadvertently spawned civic groups laying the groundwork for movements following independence. Churches hosted the meetings; graduates with a mission education were employed to serve as clerks and translators. First, political associations were established in metropolitan areas, and they often took shape reminiscent of church committees. These systems comprised secretaries, chairpersons, and appointed treasurers. This gave political mobilization a ritual almost entirely religious. Hymns from a given era became party songs as one era came to an end. Part of that subversive alchemy, the ideas that had formerly supported colonial power, were turned around to subvert it.
The moral authority had already been destroyed into a rainbow of groups as soon as the dawn of independence arrived. Nationalist leaders invoked faith to inspire their people, but they were unable to even come close to uniting a population divided by religious ties, tribal affiliations, and differing ideas of what it meant to be decent. A joyful speech might include a reference to former missionaries to underline the importance of togetherness, but it might be seen with suspicion by populations that remember land grabs executed under the direction of those same missionaries. Inspired by decades of syncretism, grassroots preachers started challenging political elites, presenting themselves as arbiters of authenticity lost under the direction of colonial authority.
Once Africa acquired its freedom, its leaders faced a broad spectrum of development challenges. These difficulties coupled moral standards acquired from both pre-colonial pasts and colonial legacies with economic needs. Celebrations honoring the country’s freedom carried above national flags a banner of faith. To inspire the people, politicians brought up the idea of spiritual unification. Actually, however, these leaders usually struggled to match their moral declarations with the reality of government. Early Ghanaian regimes, for example, announced a return to African values while also mostly depending on foreign advisers for economic plans. This was the reality even though Ghana was a recently independent country. Academics and activists began to show a slow-growing mistrust as they questioned whether calling on ancient values without significant transformation amounted to little more than a rhetorical flourish. Religiously based schools were fast spreading over the continent while this was underway. Missionary organizations and recently established colleges controlled by the church made academic courses combining Western teaching with moral education available. In addition to religious courses, students sought their education in mathematics and literature, believing that integrity and dedication were prerequisites for responsible citizenship. Many who had graduated from these institutions thereafter engaged in public service in Nigeria. They carried with them the belief that moral discipline resulting from faith could help to stop corruption. But when economic crises and corruption challenged such values, faith-based education occasionally seemed inadequate on its own to solve structural flaws.
At the grassroots level, the churches remained rather significant in the civic life of the society. Particularly among urban young seeking both community and prospects, Pentecostal churches were able to attract a sizable number of members. Their offerings throughout their sessions were a mix of passionate worship and pragmatic lessons on entrepreneurship and personal responsibility. Attending a vibrant megachurch can give a young entrepreneur in Nairobi not just the chance to feel spiritual fulfillment but also links to business mentoring initiatives and microfinance ventures. Driven by religious ideas, these networks offered chances for social mobility that government institutions usually neglected. Conversely, they sparked debates on the commodification of religious activities. Critics claimed that pastors displaying their ownership of luxury cars and private jets was undermining the basic values of humility and service. Congratulation found themselves in a situation where they had to balance the prospect of material success with the anxiety avarice that had entered into sacrosanct realms.
Religious leaders had to modify their messages to fit the pressing concerns of their listeners. In many presentations, for example, the moral question of climate change was raised. Pastors in East Africa focused on a theological need: the idea of soil stewardship in places where drought threatened human survival. They promoted farming practices that honored modern conservation techniques as well as conventional wisdom. In cooperative rituals, community members in the Ugandan rainforest blessed newly built water collecting systems under the direction of indigenous ritual specialists and church officials. Some conservation projects sought to limit access to holy groves in order to serve environmental protection, which ran counter to communities that considered such groves as vital spiritual sites. These alliances, meantime, sometimes displayed conflicting objectives. To effectively negotiate such paradoxes, flexible leadershipâmore especially, leadership that could establish a vision of growth appreciative of tradition while also being sensitive to ecological realityâwas needed.
On the political level, the junction of faith and power kept interacting in a number of nuanced ways. Presidents and prime ministers aggressively sought religious endorsement initiatives to support their legitimacy. Representatives of different denominations would often pray for the aim of securing election success during campaign rallies. Pastors in Kenya formed a coalition that helped behind the scenes in the peace deal negotiations after disputed elections. They used their shared values to help to lower tensions among different groups. Political players sometimes turned faith into a weapon to isolate their rivals while this was in progress. In some parts of West Africa, candidates claimed that their rivals had “unorthodox” beliefs, a veiled charge meant to discredit their legitimacy. Voters were unsure about which claims they should believe in trying to balance their civic obligations with a fog of sensationalized rhetoric. When moral authority merged with political ambition, this junction of politics and piety exposed that, although vital for social cohesiveness, religious institutions might as well be used as tools for divisive agendas. This was the situation even though societal cohesiveness depended on religious institutions.
Social entrepreneurs evolved as a third force in the framework of this changing terrain. Often young, these people have a great awareness of technology and use internet platforms to develop ideas of an Africa whose ideals include both innovation and legacy. They are also social conscience. Two people who had recently graduated from university started a business in Accra that connected craftspeople with customers. The company pushed the application as a means of corporate business, helping to preserve a cultural legacy. Their marketing tactics included slick animations celebrating workmanship using indigenous proverbs with global impact. These proverbs complemented the animations. Their case was that if communities merged traditional knowledge with modern technologies, they might maintain their own identities while nevertheless completely engaging in world markets. These kinds of events raised awareness of a more general aim: to establish control over the way Africa’s moral compass should guide its involvement with transformation.
These businessmen, however, also battled philosophical questions over the authenticity of their products. Did the e-commerce platform curators unwittingly promote preconceptions in the process of pushing a stylized interpretation of tradition to appeal to the tastes of people from different countries? Should these cultural emblems turn into clickable goods on a global market, would it be feasible for communities to claim their sovereignty over them? The rise of significant moral issues has changed discussions on intellectual property and cultural borrowing. Advocates of public policy responded by engaging in lobbying campaigns to create legal systems acknowledging the shared ownership of traditional knowledge and ensuring equitable compensation for practitioners. Legislation drafted in Senegal by a coalition requiring that a specific amount of the income generated from some cultural exports be returned to the local custodians. These advocates raised moral arguments on their behalf based on justice and reciprocity, therefore redefining the idea of cultural preservation as an economic right rather than a simple question of nostalgia.
In the framework of these changes, a new generation of scholars and artists began redefining what it meant to have faith and values in a society progressively becoming more globalized. Lusophone Africa’s writers of novels looked at how faith left its legacy in postcolonial societies. These writers spun stories in which people struggled ethically as they came upon modernity. Afro-futurist stories were the focus of a film festival held in Johannesburg. Short films depicting projected African spiritualities existing with modern technology ran across the event. Poets in Lagos planned spoken-word performances whereby they questioned the part religious institutions play in social movements. They urged the viewers to investigate whether radical solidarity might be achieved with religion instead of only passive comfort. These artistic efforts gave peeks into the ways in which values may transcend the inherited paradigms by acting as laboratories in which moral ideas floated, collided, and reconfigured themselves.
There are still challenges to conquer, notwithstanding these positive developments. Regarding many various forms of governance systems, corruption is a persistent issue, and faith-based standards of behavior have struggled to fully manage it. The same religious members who advocate integrity have been involved in embezzlement scandals in other countries, therefore erasing public confidence in them. Moreover, ideological conflicts have sometimes led to society fragmentation. Communities unclear of which moral vision to embrace may occasionally withdraw into their own identities, therefore fostering the possibility of conflict.
That said, the fundamental narrative is not one of hopelessness. Growing numbers of individuals on the continent are seeing that values are dynamic dialogues rather than rigid prescriptions. At community forums, the elderly, the young, and the religious leaders of rural Mali come together to talk about how to manage collective land in the face of the difficulties climate change is presenting. Urban areas such as Dakar and Kigali host monthly meetings of interfaith councils. These sessions are meant to provide policy proposals covering a range of topics, including labor rights and sexual violence. By means of these discussions within the framework of shared histories of struggle and resilience, participants stress that transformation depends on communal responsibility.
- This is excerpt of the lecture delivered on June 11, 2025, by Prof Falola at Pentecost University, Accra, Ghana
