Introduction - Why I Religiously Remap Africa

On Christmas Day 2009, the world woke up to the shocking news of an attempted suicide bombing attack on a Detroit-bound airliner. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, scion of a wealthy northern Nigerian family, attempted to blow up Northwestern Airlines Flight 253, en route from Amsterdam with some 290 aboard, with plastic explosives ensconced within the lining of his underwear. Thus was birthed the legend of the crotch bomber. The world was shocked, as one would imagine. Not just by the audacity and near success of the attempt, but by the origin of the bomber. In the general collective conscious, informed by the somewhat erroneous yet prevalent discourse on the Nigerian religious landscape, Nigerians were not meant to be attempting to blow up passenger airliners; they were rather expected to wage internecine battles with their geographically and religiously antipodal brethren, all within the bounded confines of the sovereign Nigerian state. So whence came this new phenomenon, that of an ultra-radicalized Muslim Nigerian, working in cahoots with Al Qaeda to foment mayhem in a land thousands of miles away from home, a land with which his home state shared generally good relations?

Assuming one were curious enough to attempt deconstructing this paradox, [s]he would have to step beyond the confines of the news to explore pertinent religious demographic data that could point to its origins. The path to enlightenment would commence with combined and parallel analyses of data sets, maps and research-led productions (books, journal articles, etc.); these in tandem with the popular accounts (the news) would create the conducive base fluid from which answers to the above paradox - and similar ones where applicable - could crystallize. In a world wracked by information overload, precipitated by the proliferation of enabling technologies including the internet, the art of patient enquiry inherent in this proposed approach is unappealing to many, perhaps with the exception of those favourably inclined in the face of targeted incentives. The resultant tendency is to rely on succinct[ly] integrated artefacts of knowledge reproduction to gain understanding: quickie enquirers snap up maps, abstracts, dated encyclopaedia entries and cut-and-paste mash-ups; they consume the information therein encoded, and terminate with understandings that are either truncated by virtue of oversimplification or outright inadequate for want of updates or redefinition. While this approach is not ideal, it is the norm; improving accuracy of understanding therefore has to happen within the confines of this norm to achieve maximum effect.

Of the succinct[ly] integrated artefacts - those here mentioned and not - I believe that the map stands out as the prime candidate for effectively - and with brevity - communicating proximately complete essence to the enquirer. One would be hard pressed to find another tool of knowledge reproduction that matches, much less exceeds, the map’s favourable attributes. Among other[s] [...], maps are aesthetically pleasing, inspire intuition, are accessible, terse enough to enable focused usage, global enough in scope to promote an image of the whole and compact enough for easy transmission of information and ideas. However the map is not without its flaws. Maps lie; they ought to by necessity. Because they are simplified, scaled models of the truth, they fail to capture the full import of any situation. Because they are delineated by humans, they fall victim to the biases and errors of cartographers. Yet with all these challenges, they remain arguably the most useful tools in gaining [deeper] understanding of phenomena, events, a people and their way of life, with a personally prescribed caveat that, where possible, collectives of mapped data - complementary, of the highest possible fidelity and within a manageably defined scope of accuracy - be employed rather than an individual map that assumes a plenipotentiary  persona. Some brevity must resultantly be sacrificed to allow for exploring a tapestry of inter-linked maps that make for greater reflection and understanding.

This caveat-prescribed approach is of the essence in mapping religious affiliation, for logic can - and is - trumped by faith in action, especially where faith is of the atypical radicalized ilk, as evinced by Mr. Abdulmutallab. Appreciating the emergence of radicalization and the ruptures it engenders require appreciating the diversity of parts that coalesce into the religious character of a society, the diversity of which speaks to other unrelated spheres of life within that polity. A deeper understanding of Nigeria’s complex religious environment, through a series of maps that accessibly capture and encode the numerical and anecdotal terrain over even a brief chronological snapshot of recent memory, would have lessened the world’s shock, and perhaps even enabled the development of anticipatory countermeasures.

Beyond speaking to radicalization, this new approach to religious mapping would show, for example, that the Christian-Islamic discourse in Nigeria is not one of mere antagonism along geographical lines, but also one of admittedly nascent syncretic engagement - via Chrislam - to foster the development of new shared identities, with implications for state security and [nation-]state building. Or that this syncretic evolution is not a unique oddity, but one mirroring similar efforts at fusing Christianity and Islam in Ghana (Zetahil), challenging the seemingly well-defined, preconceived religious adherence tropes suggested by simplified religious maps of Africa. Tropes that are further upturned by emergent ruptures: the reverse Christian missionization of the old metropole by African actors; the single-minded atavism of the African [Anglican] church in the debate on homosexuality within its ranks; the curious presence of indigenous converts to Judaism in Uganda and the polar [officially-enabled] total absence of Jews in Ethiopia; why Osama bin Laden would have settled in [Sunni-Muslim-and-comfortable-with-exported-radicalism] Sudan and not in [Shia-comfortable] Tanzania, with concomitant global security imputations.

If the imperative of discourse is to inform and sensitize towards broader yet deeper understanding, then complexity need not be avoided, but embraced and reinterpreted. If we are to understand the religious lives of Africa’s 1 billion denizens, and how these lives shape their immediate milieux, inter-state dialogue and the continent’s collective conversation with the wider, ever-globalizing world fraught with newly engendered challenges in the discourse and practice of wielding power, then this take on mapping by complementarily interpreting complexity is of paramount gravity. I choose to religiously remap Africa - pun intended - to proffer this approach as a useful alternative not just in this narrowly defined religious space, but in all spheres of human life that can be mapped. I religiously remap to point a way to effectively explicating the intricacies of humanity’s life ...

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The author has been influenced by the ideas of Monmonier and other similarly minded geographers in his conception of mapping the human space and its attributes.