This chapter focuses on campus religiosity at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, by exploring the connection between labour activism and spiritualities. It examines the convergence of prayer practices of Christianity, Islam and African traditional religion as political praxis. It considers the sacred space and some practices that allowed three ideologically distinct religions to stay simultaneously connected. The study relies on materials gathered from in-depth interviews, participant observation and media reports. It utilizes Welsch’s (1999) transculturality and FitzGerald’s (2012) prayer performance as frameworks to bring to light religious tolerance and harmonious relationships among the three religions on the campus. The study discovers that multi-religious prayers were largely ennobled by the protesting non-academic staff’s shared identity of transcultural values. The non-teaching staff unions of Nigerian universities comprise the Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities (SSANU), the Non-academic Staff Union of Educational and Associated Institutions (NASU) and the National Association of Academic Technologists (NAAT). The study concludes that the paradigm of traditional African religion, with its obsession with rituals and sometimes malicious purposes, may have a polemical purpose.
This paper analyzes the trajectories of West African students in Turkey over the last two decades. These study mobilities were initiated by the Turkish government's policy of internationalization, which allowed thousands of young people to leave for Ankara, Istanbul or Konya, making Turkey a new player on the global scene of educational exchanges. The students experienced in Turkey a society that was little open to the outside world, but also created cultural and economic exchanges with Africa. The analysis of their mobility thus helps to counterbalance the idea of the negative impact of the brain drain on their countries of origin.
The Islam Burkina Faso Collection presents itself as "an open access digital database containing over 2,900 archival documents, newspaper articles, Islamic publications of various forms, and photographs on Islam and Muslims in Burkina Faso since the 1960s. The site also indexes more than 250 bibliographical references of books, book chapters, book reviews, journal articles, dissertations, theses, and reports on the topic." Obviously, this is an impressive achievement, and the project launched in 2021 by Frédérick Madore will become an increasingly useful repository since travel in and to Burkina Faso has become more difficult. Specialists of Islam or print culture from Burkina Faso, West Africa, and beyond will now have access to this extremely valuable resource, provided that they have an Internet connection.
La gestion de la Covid-19 dans l'enseignement africain conduit à s'interroger sur la place des organisations internationales, de la communauté éducative et des autorités locales dans la construction d'un système éducatif résilient. Il ne s'agit pas seulement d'ajuster l'offre et la demande d'éducation, mais aussi de construire un système de gouvernance qui tire le meilleur profit des interventions de chaque partenaire, du local au mondial.
This Ph.D. thesis is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out amongst Muslims of Malian origin in Bouaké, Côte d'lvoire, between February 1993 and June 1995. The dissertation is concerned with the description of processes of identification in the context of urban life and international migration within West Africa. The investigation focused on these processes as they unfold in Islamic youth associations, female place-of-origin associations, madrasas (Islamic schools), and compound life. Marriage practices, the sociohistorical construction of age groups and gender, and the negotiation of differing worldviews are central to the analysis. In the thesis I argue that in the contemporary sociopolitical scene in Côte d'lvoire, Muslims of Malian origin identify with two ensembles of ethnic labels: the Dioula label and several identity labels tied to places of origin in Mali. However, for a number of young men and women, Islam, rather than ethnicity, plays a central role in their self-identity and their sense of belonging. This argument requires an examination of the respective influences of the life course and of patterns of social change in these processes of identification. In order to support this argument, I describe the politics of identity in Côte d'lvoire in the post-Houphouët-Boigny period, elements of social change over the past thirty years affecting Islamic institutions and the educational trajectories of young men and women, and the logic of marriage practices in an urban setting marked by ethnic heterogeneity. The empirical chapters of the thesis analyse versions of Islam produced within Islamic youth associations and the negotiation of conflicting worldviews in the life trajectories of Muslim women.
This study examines the origins and development of the community of Hamawi Sufis that formed around Yacouba Sylla in French West Africa beginning in 1929. Based on research in the French, Senegalese, Malian, Ivoirien and Mauritanian archives, as well as on an analysis of the oral traditions of the “Yacoubist” community itself, the study uses the group's past to shed light on several aspects of the history of French West Africa. It argues that Yacouba Sylla and his followers played important roles in the evolution of French Muslim policy in the 1930s, in the transformation of the economy of Côte d'Ivoire in the 1940s, and in the struggles over self-governance and independence in French West Africa in the 1950s. Many of Yacouba's early followers were former slaves and casted persons, and the dissertation raises questions about the cultural and social meanings of emancipation by interrogating common assumptions about the processes by which slavery came to an end in West Africa. In particular, it explores the social meanings and uses of memories of dependency among former slaves and casted persons, as well as among former masters, “freeborn” nobles and colonial analysts. The study fuses social and intellectual history, devoting equal attention to the ideational and spiritual aspects of the Yacoubists' religious beliefs, to the social and cultural contexts that made those beliefs meaningful, and to the questions of power that surrounded their representation. Finally, it highlights an underappreciated methodological point about the sources of African history. The practices of knowledge production in the colonial administration were such that African informants and political elites actively manipulated the creation of the “colonial library” in their efforts to appropriate the power of the state. Seen in this light, colonial archives reveal themselves to be largely “African” sources that can be read according to methodologies analogous to the analysis of oral traditions.
