I have been observing and analyzing religious trends in various parts of sub-Saharan Africa for several decades, with a particular focus on new religious movements, variously termed “minority religious groups,” “sects,” or “unconventional religious groups.” My years of living in southern Nigerian cities afforded me valuable insights into the workings of complex religious landscapes. As democratization, neoliberalism, media deregulation, and global religious activism increasingly change the stakes of coexistence between religious groups, and between such groups and the state, the management of Africa’s increasingly competitive religious public spheres has become a more compelling area of investigation. How do state and non-state agents act to facilitate or limit the public functioning and recognition of some or all religious organizations? How do the resources on which they draw, such as globally circulating ideas about “international religious freedom,” serve to frame what counts as (good or bad) religion? Which constitutional or statutory provisions are they informed or bound by in negotiating religious diversity? How much do local histories, politics, and demographics continue to influence the balancing of majoritarian and minoritarian religious interests?

In a recent article on “Regulating Religious Freedom in Africa” I explore the legal and non-legal strategies of keeping religious groups in check and note that African states frequently invoke limitations on religious practice and association in the name of public interest. Elsewhere I have also paid some attention to the growth of mass-mediated forms of religious expression in Africa and their capacity to open up new possibilities for religious communication, often providing increased visibility and audibility for minority religious groups. Yet this recent liberalization of the media sector across Africa also replicates or generates patterns of exclusion and discrimination through the granting of licenses, transmission power, broadcasting access, and program content.

The angle I will pursue here is the treatment of indigenous forms of African belief and practice in light of these post-colonial reconfigurations, or what Jean and John Comaroff term the Age of Millennial Capitalism. African traditional religions were particularly vulnerable during the earlier phases of Christian and Muslim missionary activity and colonization. The current dominance of Christianity and Islam is well evidenced by the Pew Forum project on religion in Africa. Indigenous religions are still largely perceived as pre-modern with ambiguous status as either religion or culture; they struggle for public recognition and equal treatment under the law. Moreover, they are hampered by being part of a generalized and heterogeneous category, with no clear designation or centralized leadership. This recalls some of the legal battles that American Indians faced in trying to prove that their traditions are “religious” so that they could enjoy constitutional protection, as Tisa Wenger discusses in her appositely titled book on the 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy, We Have a Religion.

So while it is Muslim-Christian relations in Africa that command current geopolitical attention, we should not overlook the fact that sub-Saharan Africa provides some of the most instructive examples of how indigenous religions are still religious freedom misfits. Kenyan legal scholar Makau Mutua has made the most forceful case that local forms of religious belief and practice have been subject to ongoing delegitimization by the state in collusion with missionary religions and post-colonial elites. He writes pointedly of a “constitutional silence” and an “absolute refusal to acknowledge the existence of African religions or cultures” in the country of his birth. Moreover, Mutua contends that the “liberal generic protection of religious freedoms,” with its guarantees of the right to manifest, propagate, and change one’s religion, favors mission-related religions and is ultimately inimical to indigenous African religions and lifestyles (Wole Soyinka makes similar arguments about the aggressivity of the so-called world religions in his latest book, Of Africa).

Furthermore, Mutua argues, limitations on religious freedom for reasons of “public morality” and “public health” target the elements of traditional religious practice that many colonial states found problematic, even abominable. Such fears and statutory tests perdure in modern times (see Enyinna S. Nwauche on Nigeria, E. K. Quashigah on Ghana). In his research on restrictions on religion worldwide from 2006-9, Brian Grim notes that, after Christians and Muslims, members of “tribal or folk” religious groups are the most commonly harassed group in Africa (in twenty-three countries). In sub-Saharan Africa, the harassment is generally linked to accusations of witchcraft, ritual sacrifice, and charlatanistic healing practices. Nigeria’s booming video-film market, known as Nollywood, has helped perpetuate negative stereotypes across Africa about traditional cultural practices. So, too, has the sensationalist media coverage in Africa and the diaspora of purported ritual abuse of African children suspected of witchcraft. Evangelical and Pentecostal movements generally lead the fray in demonizing indigenous religious and cultural practices.

South Africa is one of the optimal places to explore current debates over the status of traditional African religion(s) in a modern post-colonial state. The radical transformation from apartheid to democracy generated a wealth of public debates, policy initiatives, and scholarship on matters pertaining to discrimination and self-determination. On the face of it, traditional forms of religious belief and practice appear to be almost nonexistent (0.3%), according to the country’s 2001 census. Nearly 80% of the population identify as Christian. But as the contributors (mainly legal experts) to a most valuable 2011 book, Traditional African Religions in South African Law, underscore, the defining and classifying of these religions is still a live issue. These contributors discuss a number of recent legal cases that have tested the even-handed treatment of traditional religions under the new constitutional protections for religious freedom. The conflation of traditional religion and culture, and an emphasis on communal identity, proved problematic in some human rights cases, as exemplified in the public outcry and lawsuit (the Smit case, 2009) over a ritual bull slaughtering in a revived Zulu First Fruits Festival. While the case brought by animal rights activists was eventually dismissed for want of factual evidence, Christa Rautenbach argues that demonstrating that the festival was “religious” and not “cultural” in nature (despite the interdependency in practice of religion and culture) would have afforded greater protection from the judiciary. Similarly, Jewel Amoah and Tom Bennett note the surprising lack of reference to religious beliefs in legislative efforts to reform the laws of African customary marriage. They see this as ongoing evidence of the way that indigenous African religions are being treated as “incidents of African culture,” and the effect of this in depriving practitioners of the legal deference shown to other religious communities.

Another critical and contentious issue, ably discussed by Nelson Tebbe, is the outlawing of witchcraft by the government and human rights organizations. While the practice of naming witches may be permitted under free speech and religious freedom, so too limits on the practice may be allowed because of its often violent consequences. This has resulted in backlash from South Africa’s pagan and Wiccan communities, such as the South African Pagan Rights Alliance. Furthermore, the problems of trying witches in state courts and allowing religious experts to give evidence would compromise constitutional prohibitions on government involvement in religious affairs.

Because of her background in politics, broadcasting, and higher education, Nokuzola Mndende, one of the leading advocates of African traditional religion (ATR) in South Africa today, is highly critical of the ways her religious heritage continues to be misrepresented or underrepresented by media organizations. As conveyed by the title of her 2009 book, Tears of Distress: Voices of Denied Spirituality in a Democratic South Africa, she finds it problematic that traditional religion is often represented in the public sphere by “white reverend gentlemen,” African Christian converts, and syncretistic diviners, or that it only gains legitimacy as an appendage to Abrahamic religions or as a secularized form of traditional healing. Mndende therefore calls for “affirmative action” by the South African government to redress the fate of “disadvantaged religious communities.” It remains to be seen if the proposed South African Charter of Religious Rights and Freedoms (in whose drafting Mndende has participated) will provide any such benefits.

Marleen de Witte’s insightful work on the neo-traditionalist Afrikania Mission in Ghana also addresses the challenges facing such revivalist political-religious movements as they seek to be modern and African. These local struggles are bound up in decades of subjugating encounters with missionaries, colonialists, and scholars (whether of anthropology or comparative religion). Witte provides a rich discussion of how Afrikania seeks to negotiate the new media opportunities and constraints, knowing that how it represents its “traditions” and “spiritual power” to the predominantly (Pentecostal) Christian Ghanaian public is critical to its survival as the principal face of ATR in Ghana. She argues that this overly intellectualist focus on “representation” comes at the expense of the shrine practitioners’ practices and concerns. Some of the latter feel that traditions of secrecy have been sacrificed in the quest to produce a modernized, “world religion.” Furthermore, Witte describes Afrikania’s position as “difficult and ambiguous” as it seeks to defend “superstitious” religious practices, such as libation, as part of its nationalist heritage project, even when these run afoul of “universal” human rights norms embedded in the Ghanaian constitution.

David Chidester has long claimed that the “inventory” of religious elements that have come to characterize African traditional religion (belief in God, veneration of ancestors, sacrifice, initiation, divination, and healing rituals) are products of “colonial containment” and “Christian theological appropriations.” This recalls Birgit Meyer’s observation that Protestant missionaries in colonial Ghana attempted to “lock” people up in their own culture to prevent the development of syncretistic beliefs that might threaten the colonialist and nationalist project. In his latest book on the wild and surprising religious creativity of South Africa, Chidester discusses how, under the post-apartheid national motto, “Unity in Diversity,” political leaders have drawn on indigenous religion as a national resource, whether as the spiritual dimension of heritage projects or through rituals at key national and international events, such as the World Cup in 2010. Chidester also considers how traditional religion finds its way into religious tourism, school syllabi, global Zulu spirituality, New Age neo-shamanism, and traditional sovereignty. Facilitated by South Africa’s new democratic dispensation, these “transactions,” as he terms them, are often contested by those seeking to protect their sense of religious integrity, whether African traditionalists or devout Christians.

While the government of South Sudan is taking encouraging steps to include traditional religions in its new political dispensation, as noted by Noah Salomon in an earlier posting, the reality is that only one African state, the People’s Republic of Benin, officially recognizes traditional religion in its constitution, granting it a national public holiday. In Nigeria, the International Congress of Traditional Religion and Culture has advocated (unsuccessfully) for similar state recognition. This may account for why some movements such as Godianism—a traditional religious expression of Nigerian nationalism at the dawn of independence, now known as the Global Faith Ministries of Chiism—reinvent themselves as modern and family- and heritage-oriented. Cultural tourism, especially if it receives the UNESCO World Heritage imprimatur, is a way to attract state support for traditional religious festivals, as evidenced by the internationally renowned Osun festival in Nigeria’s Osun State. Another strategy is for traditional religious practitioners, especially healers, to create associations that promote their interests in the public sphere. The Zimbabwean National Traditional Healers Association (ZINATHA) and OrisaWorld, a global association to promote Yoruba religion, are cases in point. The latter is a vivid example of the strategic role that diasporic communities can play in the promotion and protection of traditional religious practices in their home countries. We should not neglect to mention the capacity of academic publications to legitimate the category of traditional religions for wider audiences, from the landmark works of John Mbiti beginning in 1969 through to recent texts such as Orisa Devotion as World Religion. Ugandan scholar Okot p’Bitek had already signaled the delegitmating power of the Western scholarly lens in his 1970 classic, African Religions in Western Scholarship.

While indigeneity is arguably more strategic than ethnicity in protecting the rights of traditional African religions, the indigenous rights option as a tool for social and political mobilization turns out to be a less viable alternative. In the view of Dorothy Hodgson, the criteria in Africa for deciding who is indigenous are far “murkier” than those used to identify first peoples of the Americas. A la Cultural Survival, indigeneity tends to be used to refer to those with distinctive lifestyles, such as pastoralists and hunter-gatherers. In contrast, others would claim that all Africans are indigenous.

Moreover, Ronald Niezen’s trenchant discussion of the ambiguity and paradoxes surrounding the concept of “indigenous religion” leaves us in no doubt about the effects of human rights activism and public and popular mediations of human difference in a globalizing era (see also Rights and the Politics of Recognition in Africa). Recent moves to grant institutional, protective space to indigenous expressions of “spirituality” not only essentialize and objectify traditional forms of belief and practice but also translate and recast them to appeal to cultural outsiders who formally or informally adjudge these rights claims.

Despite the undermining of African states by neoliberal policies and unreliable governance, the national level remains strategic for thrashing out respect for what du Plessis terms a “jurisprudence of difference.” The interpretation of the relationship between religion and culture is currently more consequential for traditional African religions than individualized notions of religious freedom in relation to a secular state. That notwithstanding, the local and global debates over what counts as “African,” “traditional,” “indigenous,” “religious,” and “freedom” are all grist for the religious freedom analytical mill.

Deft as this is, there remains a certain ambiguity surrounding any such search for aspects of supposedly universal phenomena. His case studies have a sky-world and gods, and so do meet normal criteria for a religion, bearing within them an engagement with an Eliadean encompassing “non-ordinary reality.” But I have investigated another preconquest situation that appears not to. It is from one of the places Bellah does not write about, southern Africa. For South Africa in early times, I did not need religion in reconstructing how agropastoralists lived and how they apparently saw themselves living.

To rephrase: in the cases Bellah examines, the Carib- and Navajo-speakers and desert aboriginal Australians, it is the gods or spirits and an “other world” that allow us to easily attribute religion to them. But what to do in other cases? Bellah correctly refuses to call “religious” the basic (totemic) phenomena Émile Durkheim examined in Australia and repudiates the notion of a universal, primordial monotheism. Yet he is not so interested in the question of when religion is, or is not, and he recognizes religion in his argument, in fact, by many different criteria.

In southern Africa, ancestors were chiefs and other fathers in the past, whose presence had registered in men’s collective actions and fates. The personal movements of ancestors occurred in “greatness,” bogologolo, a space equally similar to Western “history” as it is comparable to the Dreaming of the Walbiri that Bellah discusses. It is problematic to see religion in it. For one thing, at first, in missionaries’ accounts, the notion of having an old religion was absent in South Africa. Only after basic translations were accomplished and rehearsed in rituals (in church), did the old religion appear as a concept. It therefore began its life as a disjointed series of improbable beliefs, customs, and rites, immediately preceding Christianity or Islam, their corrected versions.

To make this point in tangible form, consider the distance between two phrases, both originating in the same Sechuana words. The first is a phrase people heard from early missionaries, some version of the following: “The chief’s (or the ancestor’s) people will be gathered and their production made fertile and they will have a lovely settlement.” These words meant just that, and might be said in various circumstances, most straightforward, some metaphorical. After the old deployment of patriarchal terms connected to power and to ancestral chiefs uniting men was ended, however, leaving behind the Christians’ use of the same vocabulary, the above phrase became, “God’s people will be saved and dwell in a millennial kingdom on earth (or go to paradise after death).” The same phrase in a different context, so a different meaning: that shift defined the creation of religion in South Africa.

Missionaries had only local concepts and locutions in which to express themselves, and they had difficulties because they did not know the language right away, and because they had not yet enlisted Africans in group behaviors and rituals that would create their world. The vocabulary they wanted to use was already heavily trafficked, and had to do with past chiefs, fatherhood, ancestry, and larger forms of subordination with immediate import; it motivated men and women to endure hardship or go to war. Ancestors and chiefs of the past and in the present formed a latticework of possible affiliations, some of which were activated, and some of which were allowed to die over time. A communal ethos, a common body of oral lore, offered people (married men especially) a set of strategic choices, and in turn conditioned public memory. The life of this ethos blocked Christianity’s way.

Missionaries well grasped the necessity of constructing the sacred realm with existing terms, choosing underused words that might more easily take new meanings. Missionary Robert Moffat protested that he was frustrated because African people had no spiritual realm and were instead utter pragmatists, trusting only of what they could see with their own eyes. There were real forces binding people to the communities they lived in, under which they used the word ancestor (modimo); but no one, single [M]odimo (“God” in the missionaries’ lexicons) governed the world. Yet this was what Modimo was said to be! Thus its introduction as a concept used by Christians required their nullification of its meaning in ordinary interactions. From then on, ancestor and God diverged, two branches from a single concept and word.

The history of this working-out of religion and not-religion, insofar as we know it, unfolded from the later half of the nineteenth century, not before. It was only then that ordinary black peasants in the middle of South Africa midwived the religious domain among themselves, and the process was (in-line with Paul Feyerabend’s argument in Against Method) not instantaneous. After about 1840 one could adopt a new faith and meaningfully protest that one’s loyalty to a chief would continue; after 1880 one could preach as an Anglican and be a Sotho even during wartime (never before); after 1915, one could for the first time be a Christian and Zulu at the same time.

Talal Asad has shown how problematic colonialism makes the whole project of describing what people “believe,” as has Greg Dening. Among archaeologists, the category of cultic or religious (as is well known) is conveniently large, good for grouping together objects whose functions are mysterious. On slender evidence (it seems to me) whole lost societies are imagined to have operated as religious centers. It has often been much the same in ethnographies of African and Polynesian societies (on which archaeologists draw), wherein opaque chains of reference or ritual are grouped together as religion. My view is they may be better positioned within the realms of ideology, politics, and art. The danger in factoring in “religion” to political explanations of preconquest societies is that scholars sometimes imagine that their own lack of knowledge was a native opacity, and so a source of indigenous occult power. The sign of their ignorance slips somehow into the evidence pile.

And the possibilities, at least in those first days, were seemingly endless. Some stressed continuity with the past, riffing off the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM, the former southern rebel movement, then political party, and the current government of South Sudan) secretary general Pagan Amum’s comments at the independence ceremony when he lowered the old Sudanese flag for the last time—in preparation for the raising of the South Sudanese flag—telling the crowd that he would not be handing it over to Khartoum in a gesture of good riddance, but rather would hold on to it in the soon to be formed national archive, in memory of the shared history, the shared struggle, and indeed the shared future that northerners and southerners have and would continue to experience together. Others imagined a cleaner break. One bilingual sign held high at the independence ceremonies read, “From this day our identity is southern and African and not Arab and Islamic. We are not the worst of Arabs, but rather the best of Africans” (the sign was, I should note, in both Arabic, from which I translate, and choppy English, held up at an ceremony largely conducted in Arabic, still the de facto lingua franca of South Sudan despite official efforts to switch to English, and thus belying the difficulties inherent in making such a clean break overnight). The discursive historical reality of independence, of sharp bold-lines on the map, was matched in intensity by the sociological reality of entanglement (by choice and by force), of blurry lines. North and South could not be so easily disaggregated.

The tension between a model that stressed continuity with the past and one that proposed a break with what was certainly a painful history plagued Muslim South Sudanese perhaps most of all. Muslim South Sudanese, who make up a significant portion of the population, are individuals whose very identity challenges the distinct categories for which “clean break” models of partition strive. Islam came primarily from the North (from which the South was now separating), tying together families, trade routes, and pilgrimage networks, despite aggressive British colonial efforts to stop its spread. These links were not so easily sundered. While many non-Muslim South Sudanese had assumed that Islam was a political identity, somehow tied to the North, and imagined mass-apostasy coinciding with southern independence, South Sudanese Muslims insisted that to be southern and Muslim was not a contradiction in terms. Continuity with a past in which southern Muslims suffered discrimination in the North for being southerners and in the South for being Muslims at a time of rebellion against (at least in part) state-driven Islamization, did not seem like a good option. (I should note, though, that this latter discrimination was by no means universal: Muslims were part and parcel of the SPLM throughout the war.) Though the sentiment certainly was not universal, the vast majority of Muslims with whom I spoke in the summer of 2011 favored southern independence, a clean break from the North, and were actively debating how Muslim identity had changed under the new political arrangements they’d entered (South Sudanese Muslims had gone from being part of what demographers call a national majority, to being a “minority group” literally over night, and without traveling anywhere). The nature of “South Sudanese Islam” was being renegotiated, but most seemed to agree that the particular cultural stamp of the North would have to be transcended if the name of Islam was to wash out the stain of its bad reputation acquired during the war and flourish in the new state.

On the other hand, the notion of a clean break that sought to define South Sudan as explicitly non-Muslim (whether or not it was thereby “Christian” was a topic of debate, to which I will return below) and non-Arab made South Sudanese Muslims worry that the “New Sudan” imagined by John Garang, which was to embrace Sudanese of all religions and ethnicities, was quickly taking on an ethnically and religiously exclusive color. Muslim communities feared persecution in the new state after decades of civil war in which Islamization, if not Islam, was portrayed as a prime adversary to southern flourishing. The uneven (but active) banning of headscarfs in southern public schools after the signing of the 2005 peace agreement, which reverted control of the South to southerners, led to protests in at least one major Muslim center I visited (the city of Malakal) and the founding of a Muslim girls school there. The banning of religious political organizations forwarded by the new Advisor to the Presidency on Religious Affairs was taken by many Muslims to be directed at Islam, as Christian majority parties (under secular names) were certainly plentiful. Such incidents further raised suspicion that the equality and secularism that the new government was promising was a coded way of promoting “tyranny of the majority” and a state from which Muslim communities would be marginalized. The southern state’s resistance to a quota system (in which a certain amount of ministries or parliamentary seats would be given to Muslims qua Muslims), under the logic of blindness to religious identity, led to a short-lived but significant armed rebellion in Northern Bahr al-Ghazzal—active during the time I was in South Sudan, but now quelled—demanding 30 percent representation for Muslims in the new government.

The desire to “politically transform difference into sameness,” as Saba Mahmood has put it, has certainly been at the top of the state’s agenda in its quest to establish something called a South Sudanese citizen out of the dizzyingly diverse cultures, languages, and religions that make up the demographic landscape. What that “sameness” was to consist in, and what degree of diversity was still possible in spite of it, was a primary object of debate. My recent research—part of a multi-site project on religious minorities in Sudan and South Sudan following partition, conducted by Centre d’Ètudes et de Documentation Èconomique, Juridique et Sociale (CEDEJ) and the University of Khartoum—explores the mechanics of nation-building in South Sudan with particular attention to the fate of Muslim minorities following independence. Through field research in the national capital of Juba and the northern (South Sudanese) city of Malakal, I hope to understand what it means to be constituted as a religious minority under the regime of international religious freedom at the very moment in which this resignification—from “southerners” practicing Islam to a South Sudanese minority community of believers with a specific retinue of national rights and duties—takes place.

In a nation where neither tribes, nor regions, nor even individual families are traditionally divided on the basis of religion, how will South Sudan’s adoption of internationalist languages of religious freedom, and the concomitant constituting of Muslims as a distinct demographic, affect the existing social fabric in which it is easy to find households containing Muslims, Christians, and adherents of local traditions under the same roof? While there certainly have been Muslim communities across the South for some time, I was surprised to find that the vast majority of Muslim leaders did not emerge from those communities but were converts. Why have these “new Muslims” taken on such a prominent role in the organizational structures of the emergent Muslim minority? What makes them, rather than the entrenched Muslim communities, so much more suitable for the formation of a Muslim civil society that the state seems to both fear and demand?

Such individuals live in households that are extremely diverse (a father who follows the Prophet Ngundeng, a Christian Mother, and Muslim son is not at all uncommon) and one wonders how (or perhaps if) this status quo will be interrupted by the emergent notion of confessional community that is being forwarded by Muslim organizations and state demographers alike. I came to recognize early in my research that, though old established Muslim neighborhoods existed, the bulk of my work was being done not with Muslim communities, but rather with Muslim individuals and the associations they had joined. Most of these Muslims seemed to experience religion as a mode of being that did not necessitate the discarding of other modes of belonging (tribe, family, social class, etc.). Indeed, even the associational spaces themselves (Muslim councils and organizations, mosques, etc.) were not as restricted as one might assume. For example, at the Islamic Council for South Sudan office in Malakal, a good portion of the young men hanging out in the inner courtyard were in fact Christians and followers of traditional faiths: this space was by no means restricted as a Muslim gathering place. The modern state’s voracious appetite for categorization, and that of those who have been stamped by its logic, may have trouble coming to terms with the lack of neat lines demanded by international regimes of religious freedom in order to dole out their goods (protection from persecution, the development of networks with global “communities of faith,” etc.), neat lines drawn on a map wherein what constitutes religion and religious belonging are far more settled than they are on the ground.

One wonders what particular iteration “religious freedom” will take in South Sudan. The Transitional Constitution of South Sudan nowhere mentions “Freedom of Religion” but rather offers a very specific retinue of “religious rights” (Article 23). On the ground, the new government has not been shy about managing and taxonomizing religions, minority and majority—policing the line that divides religion and state, and even religious orthodoxy itself. Government offices registered “Faith Based Organizations” and often rejected applications of, for example, “Christian” organizations “if the constitution of a particular group is not lining up with the Biblical chapters or verses,” as one Inspector in the Bureau of Religious Affairs put it to me. This effort formed part of a program to protect the nation from what he called “cults,” although which groups would qualify as Christian and Muslim and which as “cults” was still in flux during the time I was there. One wonders if these inspectors’ interest in doctrinal purity might indeed be a coming to life of Beth Hurd’s notion that the prevailing “foreclosure on religion without belief” by international regimes of religious freedom “leave little room for dissenters and doubters on the margins of or just outside…‘faith communities’….[for] it endows hierarchical authorities with the power to represent and pronounce on what is or is not religious belief deserving of special protection or sanction.”

I do not wish to come to premature conclusions about what form “religious freedom” will take in South Sudan. I was there in the early days of the formation of this new state and the situation was still very much in flux. The intelligence and good will of the government servants I met—who had often left comfortable lives abroad to suffer much risk and hardship in service of building a new Sudan—suggests to me that a bright future is certainly not out of reach. The new state of South Sudan promised (and in its early days certainly has achieved) a very different approach to the relationship between religion and politics from that of the Sudan southerners had lived under until July 9, in which the central government in Khartoum had attempted to craft an “Islamic state.” However, the variety of secularism to be instantiated in the new state, particularly in a context in which voices calling for a Christian nation were still very loud, was still up in the air. As I walked the streets of Juba, listening to the new national anthem played over and over (“Oh God, we praise and glorify you, for your grace on South Sudan”), I wondered not only where Muslims would figure into the imaginings of this new nation, but where all the “African traditional religions” (or “ATRs,” as government officials called the variety of ancestor veneration, spirit, and divination practices extent in South Sudan) would figure into the national image. While there was an explicit attempt to give time to Muslim and Christian prayer in official fora, such as at the independence ceremony when a Christian benediction as well as verses from the Qur’an were recited, symbols of these traditional practices were not present at the podium. The official party line seems to be that ATRs should be represented within the state, constituted as distinct faith communities (“diin”s, as expressed in my Arabic-language interviews with government officials), minorities on the same footing as Islam and under the shadow of the dominant Christian faith. However, scholars of South Sudan (affirmed by a personal communication with Dr. Cherry Leonardi) point out that to think of such “traditional” practices as distinct confessions does not represent the reality of South Sudanese who may identify as Christians and at the same time see no contradiction in maintaining these rites and rituals. One wonders, then, what the state’s attempt to constitute such practices as discrete “religions” (and distinctly not part of what it means to be Christian) will have on those engaged in such practices, and whether it will make this kind of lived hybridity between Christianity and other modes of approaching the divine less sustainable, thus rendering Christianity and ATRs as much more polar forms of identity than they are currently. Nevertheless, it is unclear whether an official Council of Traditional Religions, constructed to represent ATRs, will indeed be forthcoming, as some officials promised me it would, for indeed others assured me that traditional religions had no place in South Sudan’s future, being relics of a past that Christianity had superseded.

The seal of the new Bureau of Religious Affairs (at right) expresses graphically what the national ideal may come to be: a large cross at the center, with a smaller hilaal (representing Islam) and a spear (representing “traditional religions”) at either side, indicating, it seems, a Christian-majority state in which other “religions,” safely construed and confined as minorities, would be protected. What exactly will have been freed through this arrangement, and what this freedom will entail for the newfound minorities and majorities, is yet to be determined.