Teaching About Religion, Peacebuilding and Development in Africa

Abstract

If teaching about peacebuilding and development is taken as crucial in the academic field of Religious Studies at university level, this teaching needs to simultaneously engage students in a critical analysis of the intersection between religion, on the one hand, and social, political and economic conflicts, on the other hand. The purpose of this contribution will be to argue this thesis with reference to critical issues regarding gender and ethnicity, illustrated by means of examples from Africa that have been taught in Religious Studies at the University of South Africa. The first problem requires students to weigh the arguments of cultural relativists and human rights activists on rituals of female circumcision/female genital mutilation. Students compare the argument of Martha Nussbaum on capabilities with the argument of a selection of anthropologists who support the relativist view so that students may formulate their own position. The second problem deals with witchcraft accusations, mostly of marginalized elderly women, and human rights interventions as part of development programmes. The focus here is the development project led by Gerrie ter Haar with a number of anthropologists and intellectuals from the Netherlands and South Africa. Students are again to consider this analysis of a problem and the proposed solutions in order to argue their own stance. Lastly, students need to engage with the problem of exclusionary collectivities by reading Peter Geschiere’s nuanced historical and critical analysis of the changing role of funerary rituals in postcolonial Cameroon, and considering his comparison of the problem of inclusive and exclusionary groups with the Netherlands and France, the Ivory Coast and Botswana, and xenophobic outbursts in South Africa. Students need to reflect on and argue a position on the extent to which inclusive cultural, ethnic and national collectivities in human rights discourses and policies might assist in addressing this problem of hierarchies and exclusions. At issue is a rethinking of interventions in university curricula to promote peace and development in contexts of conflict—issues that are illustrated by means of examples from the teaching of critical Religious Studies at a university in South Africa that may contribute to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 16 and its targets.