>> Edward Miner: On behalf
of the Library's African
and Middle Eastern Division,
I wish to welcome you
to this next talk in our
symposium, Religious Practices,
Transmission, and
Literacies in Africa,
the Middle East and
Central Asia.
I am Dr. Edward Miner, head
of the African Section.
For more than 60 years, the
African Section has served
as the focal point
for Africa-based
research collections
and services at the Library.
Within the division, it is one
of three sections including
the Hebraic and Near East
that provide access to research
collections of unmatched depth
and breadth documenting
the literatures, cultures,
and histories of regions
extending from the southern tip
of Africa to the Mediterranean
coast, across the Middle East
to Central Asia, and down
to the Indian Ocean islands.
The Library holds
rich collections
in major African languages such
as Hausa, Arabic, Muharraq,
Tigrinya, Somali,
Kiswahili, Malagasy and Zulu,
as well as hundreds of
lesser-known languages.
I'm pleased to present
to you today a research team
comprising Professor Jacques
Berlinerblau and
Bethania Michael.
Professor Berlinerblau is
currently the Rabbi Harold White
professor of Jewish Civilization
at the Edmund A. Walsh School
of Foreign Service at
Georgetown University.
Dr. Berlinerblau has
published on a wide variety
of issues ranging from
secularism to religion
and politics, to Jewish-American
fiction, to African-American
and Jewish-American relations,
to American higher education.
He has published 35 scholarly
articles and 10 books.
Bethania Michael is
a recent graduate
of Georgetown University's
master's program
in foreign service.
There, she studied global
politics and security
and obtained a certificate
in African Studies.
Michael graduated from
Georgetown University's School
of Foreign Service in 2019,
after majoring in regional
and comparative studies
with a concentration
on Africa and the Middle East.
Her research interests include
nationalism, governance,
migration, and security
in the horn of Africa.
Their talk is entitled,
Secular Africa?
Making Sense of the Interplay
Between Secular Constitutions
and Religious Citizens.
I give you now, starting
with Dr. Berlinerblau.
>> Jacques Berlinerblau: Hello
to all of you, and thank you
for watching our presentation
entitled Secular Africa?
Making Sense of the Interplay
Between Secular Constitutions
and Religious Citizens.
First, on behalf
of my colleagues,
I want to extend profound
thanks to Ed Miner,
Ahn Ji-ho [phonetic],
Monique Walton [phonetic]
and the entire dedicated staff
of the African/Middle
Eastern Studies Reading Room
of the Library of Congress.
We spent a glorious
month in their company
and they have spared us no
bibliographical kindness,
so thank you so much.
What you're about to hear are
the fruits of a collaboration
between three GU scholars
at very different
stages of their careers.
First, there is myself.
Next, there is Bethania
Michael, a graduate student
who will soon be
pursuing her doctorate.
And third, and astonishingly
please the undergraduate
Alexandre Lin.
You'll be seeing Alex's datasets
throughout this presentation,
and you'll be hearing from
Ms. Michael in a few minutes.
We are still working our way
through an immense trove of data
and archival materials that
we discovered in the Library
of Congress during the past
month, so the analysis you're
about to hear represents
kind of where we are today,
not precisely where we'll
be in a couple of weeks,
but we think we're
very, very close.
All right, then let's get going.
We started from a very curious
fact, that fact being the 28
of Africa's 54 nations possess
constitutions whose edicts
regarding proper relations
between government and religion
or religions, may be
described as secular.
I'll define the term secular
for with, but for now,
let's first look at this
map made, again, by Alex Lin
and you'll see some even more
amazing datasets created by him.
The dark blue refers
to constitutions
of African nation states
that are explicitly secular.
The red refers to a country
with an established religion
and hence a non-secular state.
Okay, I'm going to define
the term secular in a moment,
but I will say the following.
With the exception of
scholars of Africa,
the facts that we are
looking at today don't seem
to be very widely known.
Journalists and policy
analysts rarely comment
on the highly secular
nature of Africa
and even the phrase Secular
Africa sounds dissonant,
a quirky adjective-noun
uncoupling.
Yet the fact remains,
as you look at this map,
that 28 of these constitutions
are explicitly secular.
The citizenry of Africa,
however, is deeply religious.
In 2020, an Afro Barometer poll
revealed that 9 in 10, or 95%,
of Africans identified
with a particular religion.
You see the graphic
up on the screen now.
The "Other" is most likely ATRs,
or African traditional
religions.
So few have considered the
broader implications of what we,
the three of us, consider
an important geopolitical
data point.
More than half of the countries
in the world's most youthful,
religious and likely soon to
be most populous continent are
in theory, wed to
formally secular structures
of governance.
Our goal today is first to
apprise you of the facts
and figures and operative
definitions regarding secularism
and secularisms in
Africa, and from there,
we want to ponder a
well-known conundrum.
Many putatively secular
states in Africa appear not,
I repeat not, to abide by
their own secular precepts
in their constitutions.
In other words, one would
expect a secular state
to not have mounting inter-
and intrareligious strife,
to not be subjected to
intense political pressure
from mass religious movements,
to not have government
officials speak publicly
about their faith convictions,
and to not explicitly use
theological ideas as the drivers
of public policy, but as we're
going to see, this happens
across Africa, its
secular states included.
To make sense of
this phenomenon,
we will probe the interplay
between colonialism's
deleterious afterlives,
and what is known to scholars
as state fragility, but first,
let's start with
the term secularism.
The term secularism, which I've
studied for my entire career,
is notoriously hard to pin down.
I once referred to it as
the most misunderstood -ism
in the global political lexicon.
A variety of different
conceptions
of what the term
means have emerged.
Though interestingly,
while the meaning
of secularism has generated
intense academic debate,
far less energy has been spent
defining the secular state,
which is a related
but distinct concept.
For our purposes, we propose
the following ideal type
of a constitutionally secular
state in the African context.
So we're going to get
very, very normative.
This is a typology by the way.
It contains 10 features,
and we note that not all
of them will be present in
the nation's under scrutiny.
So what do we mean when we speak
of a constitutionally
African state.
An African state
will be referred
to as constitutionally secular
when its constitution refers
to the nation as secular and/or
committed to the principle
of separation of
church and state.
These are the leading criteria
for defining a constitutionally
secular state.
Yet these two dimensions of
state secularity are complicated
and they need to be
carefully qualified.
Let's start with the
elusive term secular.
So countries like
India, France, Turkey,
along with our 28 African
nations, refer to themselves
as secular in their
constitutions.
Problematically, these texts
never elaborate upon what
secular or laique
in French or laiklik
in Turkish actually means,
and the scope of rights
and obligations that
it encompasses.
This omission creates
considerable confusion
and ongoing political tensions
within constitutionally
secular countries
because everyone is arguing
about what secular
actually entails.
In Cameroon, for example,
the scholar Charles Manga
Fombad wonders aloud,
what exactly does secular mean,
particularly in a situation
where neither the constitution
itself, nor any piece
of legislation defines the
concept, to which I say Amen,
absolutely, absolutely correct.
Eleven African constitutions,
as we shall see,
refer to their nations as
secular and also stipulate
that they abide by the principle
of separation of
church and state.
South Sudan, interestingly,
is unique in that it is
constitutionally separationist,
but not explicitly secular.
This coupling of secularism
with separationism,
necessitates clarification.
This is because -- please
note this everyone --
a secular state need not always
practice separationist policies.
Put differently -- and this
is widely misunderstood
in the United States --
separationism is a type
of political secularism,
but it's not the only type.
There are different models of
secularism like French laicite,
in which the state
explicitly controls religion.
Then in India, there's
a model which we refer
to as accommodationism.
Unlike laicite, or
separationism,
the accommodationist secular
model features a state
which endeavors in good faith to
accommodate or form partnerships
with religious groups.
Some accommodationist secular
states recognize the legitimacy
of religious courts and
law codes in certain areas
of personal and family law.
Now, as you all know, the
three of us spent a good month
in the salt mines of
the wonderful archives
of the Library of Congress,
and we found all sorts
of interesting things.
Here's something we found
from William Tolbert,
the former president of Liberia,
and let's read it out loud.
So that virtues and morality may
be inculcated among students,
I direct that the Holy
Bible, the Holy Quran,
and other such religious
codes of conduct
as would be compatible
with our national culture,
to be introduced and made
required subjects to be taught
in all public schools, freedom
of religion being granted to all
in their choice of
religious study,
in keeping with our
constitution.
Liberia is one of our
high-performing secular states,
so this is the accommodationist
model and it serves to remind us
of something we'll get
back to in a moment.
Secularism is not the enemy
or the antithesis of religion.
Okay, so the French laique
and Indian accommodationist
frameworks, which we just saw
in Liberia, demonstrate
that there can be secularism
without separationism.
Another problem is the phrase
separation of church and state.
I don't want to linger on
this too much, but it's sort
of become an empty signifier
in global political discourse.
Many people speak about
it without really thinking
about what it means
and how it is achieved.
Here's the problem with
separation, as I understand it.
How precisely is a state, whose
citizens are mostly believers
of some sort, whose
government employees
and elected officials are
mostly people of faith,
whose culture is steeped
in centuries of religion
or religions, how precisely
are those things supposed
to erect a wall or impenetrable
boundary between government
and religious citizens?
Once again, Professor Fombad
is prescient when he observes
that the concept of
separation of religion
and state is quite artificial,
because it is incapable
of easy implementation,
or logical achievement.
With that said, let's
return to our typology.
In addition to being
secular and/or separationist,
a constitutionally
secular state may, three,
articulate that there is no
establishment of religion
or a favorite religion, four,
claim that all religious
citizens possess equal rights,
five -- very important -- grants
freedom of religious conscience
to all citizens, six, grants
free exercise of religion to all
of its citizens subject
to the law.
So you must obey a public order
and laws of public morality
and then you get
your free exercise.
I mention that because that is
omitted from the Bill of Rights
in the American Constitution,
a stunning
and very unusual omission
in the Constitution
of the United States.
Seven, a secular
constitution maintains
that laws are the unique
purview of the state itself
as the ultimate legal
authority in the land.
This has implications for
federalist models in Africa,
and my colleague, Ms.
Michael will speak about that.
Eight, a secular constitution
stipulates limitations
on its own authority and power
vis a vis the religious actors
that it governs.
This is very, very important
in the African context.
I refer to this as
internal constraint,
as in a state must have
constraints on itself.
So how does a state
put a braking mechanism
on its own word and
thought-defining power?
How about a functioning
judiciary?
How about a multiparty system?
How about free and
fair elections?
How about an open
and free press?
So internal constraint is
another major component
of a constitutionally
secular state, which brings us
to more robust or maximalist
conceptions of secular states.
Let's go to nine.
Some secular states,
but not all in Africa,
have what are known
as party bans.
Party bans are witnessed in
some Latin American countries
such as Mexico, and articulated
in numerous African
constitutions.
Ergo, political parties
affiliated
with religion are prohibited.
A constitutionally secular state
might also prohibit religions
from involving themselves
in the affairs of the state
and vice versa, as we see in
the constitution of the Republic
of Congo and Ethiopia.
All right, everyone, so that's
our 10-point scoring system.
In a moment we'll share with
you how various African nations
fared, but before we do that,
let's look at the unambiguously
non-constitutionally secular
states in Africa.
Once again, this is the
work of Alexander Lin,
who put this lovely
chart together for us.
All of these states proclaim
a state religion and hence,
violate the principle of
disestablishment, which is part
of the definition of a
constitutionally secular state.
A nation with an establishment
of religion will in theory,
be unable to remain completely
neutral in its dealings
with all religious groups
under its jurisdiction.
One of the most pressing
political questions in states
with religious establishments
concerns the rights
of religious minorities,
be they Copts
in Egypt or Muslims in Zambia.
If protection of the
safety and rights
of religious minorities is among
political secularism's great
deliverable, then we,
as we are about to see,
not all secular African
states succeed in this regard.
Two, we should recall
that within countries
with religious establishment,
such as the ones we're looking
at here, there will
often be citizens
who prefer disestablishment.
All right, this is a
really important point.
I refer to these folks
as secular nationalists.
Secular nationalists
can be found
in many non-secular countries,
such as the ones
up on your screen.
One thinks of Christian
clergy in Zambia,
who opposed its transition to a
Christian nation and the 1990s.
See Professor Gifford.
Christians in the Sahel
who feared Islamization,
see Professor Thurston.
Muslim secularists in
Tunisia, see Professor Haynes.
Sufis in Senegal, see
Professor Lohmeyer [phonetic],
or the Roman Catholic Church
in Eritrea confronting
post 1993-guerrilla leaders
with reasoned arguments of how
religiosity was not inimical
to secularism, Professors
Keller and Iyob.
The point to recall is
that within a constitutionally
non-secular state,
there may be individual
and collective actors
who prefer secular governance.
A further point to recall, and
I can't emphasize this enough,
is that these secularists will
usually be religious people,
secular and religious
are not antonyms,
and insofar as secularism
is distinct from atheism,
researchers should approach
their subject matter mindful
that secularists in Africa
can be Christian, Muslim,
practitioners of African
traditional religions,
and so forth.
Their preference and politics
should be considered a
legitimate object of
scrutiny in the academic study
of African secularists.
With that said, let's get
to what we like to refer
to as the bad boy
or the bad girl.
This is our scoring of the
remaining 44 countries in Africa
on a 13-point scale, 10
criteria, which you saw,
and here you see Alexander
Lin's work in all of its glory.
We divide the group into
two broad categories,
explicitly secular
and/or separationist.
That accounts for 24
countries in blue.
We'll be happy to share
our materials with you
when they're published
in a few months.
And ambiguous, those are
countries not in blue.
What you're looking at are
the top 10 and the bottom 10.
The bottom 10 may contain
some secular provisions,
usually guarantees
of free exercise,
but never invoke
secularism or separationism.
For ease of reference, we offer
this table which ranks nations
in terms of the 10
criteria adumbrated above.
So let's look at the top 10.
A score of 13 would represent
the most constitutionally
secular nation imaginable.
Ethiopia scores a 12.
Madagascar scores a 12.
Cape Verde, 11.
Liberia, 11.
Really, really quite
interesting.
The reader is reminded, however,
that this scoring
is solely based
on the words found
in the constitution.
What we are advancing is a
purely theoretical metric.
The relation or lack thereof of
the words in these constitutions
to realities on the ground
will preoccupy us in a moment.
So as we look at this table,
let's think about the
peculiarity that gives rise
to what we are about to explore.
As indicated above,
there is a difference
between the constitutional
secularity of a given nation
and the actual secularity
witnessed on the ground.
While a constitution might
claim that a country abides
by the principle of
separation of church and state,
empirical reality might
suggest completely otherwise.
In fact, numerous Africanists
have made this very observation
about the difference
between theory and practice,
and here are some of those that
we're going to cite momentarily.
This must be carefully
considered in the study
of national and regional
secularisms in Africa,
as well as any continentwide
analysis.
So some quick examples,
writing in the Oxford Handbook
of Secularism, the late
Bafour Takyi pointed
out that although few African
countries have established state
religions, religious ideals
and organizations
have often been used
to achieve political goals
in many African countries,
thus negating the whole argument
about a strict separation
between church and state.
Separation of church and
state, Takyi concluded,
exists in many parts of Africa,
only in the area of rhetoric.
MHA Bolaji remarks, at
the level of governance,
secularism has remained
mostly ambiguous,
lacking practical policies to
actualize the secularist agenda.
Ruth Iyob wondered
aloud if secularism
in Africa even exists
both as a social norm
and a legal principle.
These considerations led her
to ask whether secularism
was a quote, legal fiction
or a necessary myth in the
nation-building project.
Our interest now consists
of understanding why
the discrepancy exists
between constitutional
secularism
and the actual practice of
secularity on the ground
in many secular African
countries.
Why is it that many governments
and citizens in Africa fail
to abide by the secular
standards
of their own constitutions?
This is an exceedingly
complicated question.
It encompasses 28
different countries,
as well as numerous
political regimes, religions,
ethnic groups, language
families, and so forth.
We're not going to offer
you a comprehensive list
of explanatory variables
accounting
for what we call
constitutional non-compliance.
What we will do is advance a few
general frameworks for thinking
about why it might be that
constitutional non-compliance,
that is not obeying
the secular strictures
of one's constitution,
might be present
in various African nations.
In order for us to do
that, we need a scholar
of African political systems,
and this is where I want
to hand off the presentation
to my colleague Ms.
Bethania Michael.
Bethania?
>> Bethania Michael: Thank
you, Professor Berlinerblau.
So Professor just mentioned
and posed an important question
about why we see an
apparent disconnect
between secular constitutions
and the political realities
of many African nations.
Throughout our study
of African secularisms,
we came up with four ways
of tackling the problem
of constitutional non-compliance
and better understanding it.
That is to say, we focused on
four types of explanations.
The first involved
governance patterns.
The second involved
citizenry, the third linkages
between governments and
citizens, and the fourth,
much broader, was classified
under the explanation
of macrolevel structural
factors.
But all of our explanations
start from the same place,
with the violent
experience of colonialism
and its destabilization
of African polities.
So the first period of African
constitutionalism is widely
traced back to the 1950s
and '60s, and this period
of constitutionalism
demonstrated
that the continent's
post-colonial period,
rather than marking a
fresh start, in fact,
involved much institutional
and terminological carryover.
Perhaps the most
biting assessment
of constitutions during this
period describes them as, quote,
the product of people
who are ready to sign off
on almost anything in
order to put an end
to colonialism, end quote.
So we follow mainstream
scholars who cast a critical eye
on independence, because far
from there being a sharp rupture
between the colonial
and postcolonial period,
there was a lot of carryover.
This, of course, had
direct implications
on African secularisms.
In addition to modern
state boundaries
or nation-state boundaries --
and you look at a map
of the continent will
show you the result
of these inherited legacies --
colonial legacies also
manifested themselves
in the secular verbiage
of African constitutions
and an embrace of political
secularism by African leaders.
So our data demonstrates --
we have Alex Lin's
map here again --
the majority of the
countries we classify
as explicitly secular were
former French colonies,
bearing out previous
observations in literature
about how Francophone
and Lusophone African
nations adopted laicite.
So while a regional breakdown
of these key events is beyond
the scope of our research,
we attempt to better understand
constitutional non-compliance
by tying in this
history with studies
of contemporary state fragility
in Africa, and we'll get
to state fragility soon,
but first, once we bear
in mind how the colonial
experience spawned fragile
states, we can try
and understand secular
non-compliance
through the aforementioned
four optics.
One analytical approach,
evaluate citizen compliance
with African constitutions.
On the one hand, academics
such as James Howard
Smith argued that, quote,
religion in Africa was never
relegated even superficially
to a space outside
politics and current events
or to benign places of
public worship, unquote.
So put differently, for
Smith, there was no tradition
or culture of secularism
in Africa, and no precedent
for keeping religion out of
the public and private sphere,
but existing literature
on the relationship
between religious actors
and governments in the Sahel
for example, paints a
slightly different picture.
It explains how these actors,
together with the state,
redefined the contours of
secularism by wielding it
to shape their ongoing
relationship.
This approach sees citizens as
rational and strategic actors
who navigate secularism in
order to achieve their goals.
Again, it is difficult to
survey all of these interactions
on a country-by-country
or even regional basis,
but speaking broadly, one could
surmise that, for a variety
of reasons, African citizens
are reluctant to buy in,
or unable to buy in
or internalize secular
constitutional edicts.
This can in turn result
in anti-secular behaviors,
including public rituals,
public proselytization
and heightened contestations
over public space.
In keeping with our conversation
of how the relationship
between state and religious
actors is uniquely dynamic
on the continent,
another outcome may be
that these citizens
mobilize for political goals
through their faith
and on the basis
of their own religious
convictions.
So there we have it.
Our first explanation
focused on citizens
as resisting the secularism
in their constitutions,
but now we turn to another
possibility, that governments
and not citizens are
responsible primarily
for secular non-compliance.
Another more top-down way
of engaging the question
of constitutional non-compliance
vis a vis secularism,
is to focus on enduring
government shortcomings born
of colonialism.
So let's talk about
now what scholars refer
to as state fragility, which
we understand is encompassing a
variety of characteristics,
including an inability of states
to improve state legitimacy and
capacity, to control corruption,
to strengthen governmental,
bureaucratic
and judicial institutions,
to provide public resources,
and to invest in robust nation
and state-building programs,
among other features.
This is what a functioning
state should provide,
and this is what
fragile states lack,
so these shortcomings
contribute to ongoing gaps
between constitutional writ
and empirical realities.
In a nutshell, we and many
others argue that colonialism
and its aftereffects stagnated
state building in Africa,
leading to a seemingly
cyclical state of fragility.
While we're no fatalists,
we do note that the scholar
Zachary Elkins, in his study
of the term evasions, or
the pattern of term evasions
in Latin America, use the
term noncompliance cycle
to define what he calls a,
quote, troubling feedback loop
of institutional weakness.
And so we marry this
literature on state fragility
to illustrate the
similar difficulty
of ensuring constitutional
compliance in the face
of Africa's difficult legacies,
all of which have a direct
bearing on a country's abilities
to honor secular
constitutional provisions.
Third, we offer the nexus
between governance and citizens
as a crucial analytical
framework
for understanding
constitutional non-compliance.
We rely heavily on the
seminal article Colonialism
and the Two Publics in Africa
by the late scholar Peter Ekeh,
in order to understand how the
colonial experience has impacted
contemporary African politics,
and of course interactions
between African citizens
and African leaders.
His nuanced contribution
points to failed interactions
between different segments
of African political systems.
It shows how tensions
between pre-
and post-colonial institutions
stunted the integration
of different structural levels
in typical African polities.
Specifically, Ekeh concludes
that Africa's colonial
legacy includes the existence
of two structurally
disintegrated African publics,
each with different moral
linkages to the private realm.
These include what he called
an amoral civic public
and a primordial public.
The civic public is a direct
vestige of colonialism,
including structures such as
the military and the police.
And in the primordial public
individuals are primarily
occupied with fulfilling
moral obligations to benefit
and sustain a primordial
public of which
that individual is a member.
So the implication is that such
a citizen feels less strongly
obliged to sustain and maintain
comparable linkages towards
the commonweal.
The citizen of a
country operating
under a federalist model may
be a good example of this
where there are tensions between
their allegiance to a federal
or local government as opposed
to a ruling coalition
or government.
So the simultaneous,
albeit disconnected,
existence of these elites
results in a confused populace
that doesn't necessarily look
to the government for cues
as to proper civic behavior.
Through Ekeh's framework,
we can see how colonial legacies
sometimes negatively impacted
the ability of current
African leaders
to share the same
moral inclinations,
rise above clientelist interests
or care about the needs
of a more diverse
body of citizens.
The result is little investment
in increasing government
legitimacy,
and this might help account
for why citizens evince the
aforementioned unawareness
or disinterest towards
secular stipulations.
But there are ways African
governments have overcome the
problem so capably defined
or identified by Ekeh.
Africanists and scholars
of constitutional law
have supported the idea
that constitutional reforms
and the public's involvement
in the development
of constitutions can
increase the endurance
of governing principles.
In keeping with our Sahelian
theme, Mali, for example,
which scored a 7.5 on
our secularism index,
demonstrates how inclusive
dialogue during a country's
constitution-writing process can
help strengthen the legitimacy
of the government
and this was the case
for Mali during the drafting
of its 1992 constitution.
So the active role of citizens
in civil society organizations
throughout the development
of Mali's constitution, arguably
safeguarded the country's
democratic transition
and rule of law.
Lastly, we observed the impact
of structural factors beyond
the control of citizens
and governments on
weak compliance
with secular provisions.
We think sociologically
here, and thus, we don't seek
to blame African
nations and individuals
for secular non-compliance,
so we look at a variety
of possible macrostructural
variables and kind of answering
or unpuzzling our question.
For instance, existing
literature demonstrates
that longer periods of
statehood are positively linked
with increased stability
and development.
It would follow then
that higher rates
of stability would
foster greater legitimacy
and compliance.
In the interest of
time, however,
we'll focus on three
additional variables today.
We begin with the
mundane possibility
that amidst the tumult
of forming a new nation,
deliberations on
secularism were not a heavy
constitutional priority.
In this scenario, emergent
secular African nations were
more focused on a welter of
nation-building imperatives,
including the provision of
public goods and services
and foreign policy,
but perhaps not
on the complexities
of secularism.
This is another possibility
requiring exploration
on a country-by-country
or regional basis.
Additionally, we move
beyond the domestic to look
at larger global factors.
Turning back to state
fragility now,
we posit that governments find
it difficult to ensure adherence
to secular precepts in light
of factors including crippling
structural adjustment programs
and the rise of international
finance institutions.
We quote the famous
economist Thandika Mkandawire
who wrote that, quote,
the jaundiced view
of the Bretton Woods
institutions toward the state
has allowed policies
and practices
that have stripped
state structures
to their bare bones, unquote.
So in other words, international
finance institutions encourage
the increasingly minimal role
that African states played
in enacting economic reforms,
which had a damaging effect
on their ability to
manage their own economies.
So we can see the kind
of ongoing importance
of increased state
capacity in our analysis.
Notable ruptures within the
international system provide
another possibility for
understanding our problematic.
This is a broad subject, but
we say the September 11 attacks
and Ethiopia's subsequent
conscription into the global war
on terror is one
notable example.
The Ethiopian People's
Revolutionary Democratic Front
or the EPRDF's involvement
in these broader efforts
at the time allowed
the ruling coalition
to easily abrogate
its responsibility
to uphold the principle
of non-interference,
and the result was
blatant interferences
in the internal affairs of
Ethiopia's Muslim community
through the use of
government-aligned bodies,
including the Ethiopian
Islamic Affairs Supreme Council,
and there's a rich kind of
set of literature on this.
Ultimately, these actions
contravened the non-interference
statute of Ethiopian
constitution, which stated
that state and religion
are separate,
there shall be no state
religion, and interestingly,
the state shall not
interfere in religious matters
and religion shall not
interfere in the state affairs.
So to review, we have now looked
at four different optics
explaining the puzzle
of constitutional compliance
in Africa, but we're left
with many questions
for future research.
We need to know more about
how the secular provisions
in African constitutions
got there.
This will require archival
research reading memoirs
of constitutional
drafters and other forms
of historical research in
order to understand the nature
of deliberations around
secular issues during the period
of decolonization and after,
but more than anything else,
we need to answer crucial policy
questions surrounding whether
African nations actually
need secular governance,
and the extent to which it
would secure peace, stability
and development, in addition
to what the secularism
should look like.
We see our study as a
theoretical stepping stone
to answering these
crucial questions.
Last, we thought it would
be interesting to close
with a quote without comment
we found in the Library,
reflecting one of the ways in
which African leaders thought
about church or mosque
state issues.
It's a quote by Hastings Kamuzu
Banda, the former president
of Malawi, in his speech
to the St. Michael's
and All Angels Church in 1976.
So it reads, yes, I believe
in cooperation between church
and state, religious
leaders, political leaders
if at all they understand their
business, are all serving God,
working for God in their
different in separate ways.
Therefore, there is no need
for strife and friction
between state and church.
We are all servants of God.
Those of us who are political
leaders, and those of us
who are religious leaders,
must serve our people
as God would want us
to serve our people.
We must use our position
as government ministers
and religious ministers in
the interest of the people
and that way to the
glory of God.
God is in heaven.
Jesus Christ is in heaven.
The Holy Spirit is in heaven.
So with that, we thank you.
We want to reiterate our thanks
to the entire wonderful staff
of the African and Middle
Eastern Studies Reading Room
at the --
>> Edward Miner: Professor
Berlinerblau, Ms. Michael,
thank you very much for that
exceedingly incisive analysis
of secularism and
secular non-compliance,
constitutional secular
non-compliance across Africa.
Your explication of Peter Ekeh's
model of overlapping civic
and primordial African publics
makes me wonder how one would go
about researching
these in the archives.
You all spent a great
deal of time going
through the African pamphlet
collection, miscellaneous first
and second-wave era ephemera.
Were you able to identify
in those kinds of documents,
evidence of different publics in
the sense that Ekeh speaks of?
>> Bethania Michael: Yeah,
it was really a wonderful
opportunity to come back
to the reading room
after years and look
at the vast pamphlet collection.
I think what made it appropriate
for answering this question was
of mitigating, you know,
overlapping publics in Africa,
was the sheer breadth of the
materials that it contained.
You had your speeches,
pamphlets put
up by various political groups,
writings by local civil society
organizations, and together,
all of these materials
painted a more nuanced picture
of what competing visions
for what the political fabric
of a given country
looked like and the extent
to which state actors
or religious actors work
together harmoniously.
And, yeah, at the end
of the presentation,
we mentioned the speech
by President Banda --
I think Malawi scored
a five on our index --
which gave us somewhat of
a taste of the difficulties
of managing all of these
actors and ensuring compliance.
So overall, I think we're able
to understand governance-related
conundrums through some
of the speeches that
we came across.
And additionally,
the three of us --
it didn't make it to the slides,
but we flagged the speech
from 1974 by Kenneth Kaunda,
and it was given in Lusaka,
and in it, he essentially
stated that the government
and the church were both crucial
sources of moral authority
and supremacy, so we did see
the sort of work or lack of work
to manage or balance
different publics and actors
through the materials and really
look forward to applying them
to our article as we
continue to work on it.
>> Edward Miner: This might be
for you, Professor Berlinerblau.
You've referenced the
coming demographic surge
of youth in Africa.
What do you think the sheer
youthfulness of Africa in 2022
and going forwards
portends for the future
of African constitutions?
And in a comparative sense,
how has this variable affected
constitutional secularism
in other parts of the world?
>> Jacques Berlinerblau:
Great, thank you.
What an interesting question.
One thing I always tell my
students is there are three
or four arenas of
combat for secularism,
and one of them is education.
So the way to approach
your question is to do it
on a country-by-country
basis, or if we're looking
at primordial publics, to
look at it at a regional basis
within a country that might
have a particular ethnicity
or linguistic group, and ask
yourself the following question.
Who is in charge
of the education?
So if we want to prognosticate
whether secularism has a future
in a given African
country in 30, 40 years,
we're going to have to
look at those institutions
that are inculcating
morals and values.
This is a very complicated
question
because sometimes let's say a
Roman Catholic school system can
be very secular, if only because
Roman Catholics might be the
minority in that part of the
country, so they advocate
for a secular state simply
because of their small numbers.
So I would approach your
question, without getting
into the specifics of a
given country, by reiterating
that when we see people in
Ireland, in the United States,
and various African countries
engaging in pitched battles
over who will control
the curriculum
of the national educational
system,
they are having a de facto fight
about the future of the country.
So I'm not trying to
evade your question.
I'm just saying, it's
purely a question
of how people are educated
and who rested the control
of those institutions that will
form citizens in the future.
>> Edward Miner: Thank you very
much, Professor and Ms. Michael.
Do you have any final thoughts
you'd like to leave us with?
>> Jacques Berlinerblau: Thania?
>> Bethania Michael: I
guess on that last question,
I'd add that the kind of
youthfulness of the continent
as you put it leads to
some optimism that the kind
of participatory
constitution-making that we want
to see in the future
is on the horizon just
because we're seeing
kind of a rise
of bottom-up movements
primarily led by youth,
and to end on an
optimistic note.
I think that's important
to note in thinking
about Africa's future, and thank
you all so much for your time.
>> Jacques Berlinerblau: Sorry,
and I'll add there's a lot
of literature that's extremely
critical of secularism
in Western democracies.
I was heartened to see many
professional scholars of Africa,
many of whom, most of whom
were African themselves,
glimpsing the possibilities
of a functioning secularism.
As I noted, there are
many types of secularism.
Some are beastly, some are
benign, but I was encouraged
to see leading scholars arguing
that certain countries might
benefit from secularism
or compliance to secular
norms in their constitution.
>> Edward Miner: Thanks
so much to both of you
for this very revealing
presentation.
Wish you a good day.