Sacred violence and spirited resistance: on war and religion in African history

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper surveys the relationship between warfare and religion in precolonial Africa, with a particular focus on Eastern Africa, including the Great Lakes region and the Ethiopian Highlands. It is argued that religion played a central role in the legitimization of violence as well as in its memorialization. In the Great Lakes region of East Africa, warfare involved spiritual observance as well as sanction, and in general the evidence suggests that religion involved the exercise of restraint in violence. However the irruption of external dynamics – specifically the introduction of new religions – involved heightened levels of violence in the late nineteenth century and beyond. Reinvigorated and repurposed cosmologies, moreover, often underpinned anticolonial resistance. In the case of Ethiopia, deep-rooted Abrahamic faiths facilitated greater levels of violence and a steady expansion in the scale and scope of the war, compared to local cosmologies further south. Ethiopian state-building projects involved warfare sanctioned by God against an array of non-believers.