In his brilliant little book about global income distribution, The Haves and the Have Nots (2011), the World Bank economist Branko Milanovic claims that sub-Saharan Africa is really the Fourth World. It displays a lethal combination of bottom-of-the-table average income with a degree of income inequality only exceeded in Latin America, and certainly higher than the rump of the white colonial élite could account for. In more than one contemporary African state, poverty and inequality have been intensified by the rapaciousness of post-independence black élites and the failure of the postcolonial project.

All this should worry us, not only because Africa was shaped by Western colonialism but because we are, everyone, our brothers' keeper in this age of economic and geopolitical interdependence. While India and Brazil prosper, sub-Saharan Africa remains stubbornly impoverished half a century after the end of colonial rule, ravaged by recurrent famine, civil wars, "ethnic cleansing," and every variety of civil distress regularly requiring humanitarian assistance from the international community. Yet even describing Africa as a "problem" is like treading on eggshells. Parts of the global South as well as a section of the Western intelligentsia see colonialism and neoliberal capitalism as the cause of all Africa's ills. Drawing attention to African cultural distinctiveness can be misconstrued as racist, and criticism from the West is easily dismissed as a smokescreen for Western guilt.

At the same time, as we have been repeatedly reminded in the last two decades, the center of gravity of Christianity has shifted decisively to the global South even as aggressive forms of Islam have been on the rise. And Africa is also the epicenter of the global AIDS pandemic. The four books under review here consider these overlapping realities from diverse perspectives.

Well-meaning people sometimes assume that if you could just remove grinding poverty and political oppression, human nature everywhere would look just like us contemporary Westerners. Certainly, neither the imago Dei nor original sin is the exclusive property of any race, gender, or nation, but it does not follow that people are essentially all alike. As we have found to our cost in Iraq and Afghanistan, and may be about to learn again in the wake of the Arab Spring, we are not all identical under the skin. We are formed by cultures that go down to the bone, and so different that we too often misread what people from other places take for granted and value most. "Postcolonial discourse," that minatory challenge to the imperialist assumptions of the West, adds a further complication, even when it is not misused to protect indigenous leaders from legitimate condemnation. It holds that the "colonial encounter" between the West and the Rest changed both parties with consequences that have been built into modernity itself. According to this argument, supposed opposites such as "primitive/civilized" or "religion/superstition" are really definitions reflecting the unequal power of the parties to the colonial encounter. So we should beware of assuming that everything in Africa that looks different from the West is "backward," "primitive," or "undeveloped" rather than being a variety of "modernity" distinct from our own.

Despite these elephant traps, it is impossible not to notice that all four of these books underline just how radically Other sub-Saharan Africa is, including its versions of Christianity and assumptions about selfhood.

Next to South Africa, Botswana is the least corrupt and most economically successful African state. It has nationalized its diamond mines and used the profits to fund welfare, including, since 2002, universal provision of anti-retroviral medicines for HIV/AIDS sufferers. Saturday Is for Funerals by Unity Dow and Max Essex, Death in a Church of Life: Moral Passion during Botswana's Time of AIDS by Frederick Klaits, and Holy Hustlers, Schism and Prophecy: Apostolic Reformation in Botswana by Richard Werbner are about Botswana at the height of the AIDS pandemic, and reveal aspects not immediately recognisable from the "African idyll" of the popular novels of Alexander McCall Smith. In spite of its political and economic virtues, Botswana has been more devastated by AIDS than any other African country, even South Africa and Zimbabwe, whose governments long denied the reality of the disease. The very different analyses of Dow and Essex, Klaits, and Werbner go some way towards explaining why the AIDS tragedy hit Botswana so hard. Funerals in Africa, edited by Michael Jindra and Joël Noret, is a rich collection of essays on funeral practices in different parts of sub-Saharan Africa, including Zimbabwe, Kenya, Ghana, the Cameroonian grasslands, Benin, and Burkina Faso. Untimely death and poverty run through all these texts, but so also does the power and persistence of a distinctive African religious sensibility.

Funerals in Africa is a panorama of the African culture of death. African cultures are exceedingly various, but they all experience the living and the dead as ambiguously and powerfully intertwined in a way that has no real parallels in the contemporary West, where such beliefs have little more than a faint "folk" resonance or a playful echo in popular culture. African funeral rituals seriously attempt to control relations between the living and the dead, especially through the role of ancestors, while sickness and misfortune are widely understood as the consequence of getting these relations wrong. Funeral rituals have long been a staple of anthropological research, but this volume marks a watershed in bringing together historians and anthropologists who treat them as mirrors of social, economic and cultural change rather than as embodiments of immemorial and unchanging "traditional" practice.

For the editors, Michael Jindra and Joël Noret, mortuary rites are important communal events that reveal what matters most to people and communities. They express and often remake status relationships and individual identities; they mediate relations between the rural and the urban, and tensions and rapprochements between traditional practices and the world religions. New technologies transform them: refrigeration and mortuary buildings make it possible to delay the disposal of dead bodies, while mass photography and cinematography introduce new democratic forms of memorialization. The prevalence of wars, civil wars, and pandemics, especially the recent AIDS crisis, has vastly increased the incidence of death in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, especially among the young, and is reshaping its social significance.

Terence Ranger begins his masterly essay on the history of funerals in Bulawayo, the second city of Zimbabwe, with a sly and pertinent anecdote. When he read a paper on this research at an American university, he was informed by a professor of African literature that Zimbabweans had been "crushed under the heel of colonialism" and forced to bury their dead in soulless municipal cemeteries: Africans are victims. Ranger and the other contributors show otherwise. The theme of this book is how Africans actively make and remake their culture, not least through their funeral rituals, in the face of colonial edicts and of social change of many kinds, engaging in a subtle choreography of continuity and change.

In pre-colonial Africa methods of disposing of the dead and the rituals that accompanied it varied from one ethnic group and region to another. As recently as the 1920s the Kikuyu and the Meru of Kenya, described by Yvan Droz and Mark Lamont, placed the bodies of all but the most important men in the forests to be disposed of by hyenas and other predators. In other cases, such as the Ndebele in Bulawayo described by Terence Ranger, or the Ga of Accra discussed by Jonathan Roberts, the ideal was to be buried on family land in the village from which they originated. Among the Kikuyu and the Meru only a small élite of powerful men in traditional leadership roles became ancestors and received burial rites. To qualify for these rites a man had to achieve a fully completed life, dying a normal death in old age, having fathered children and fulfilled his social duties. Women, with very few exceptions, people who died violently, and all with "incomplete" lives, including the childless or children, warranted only limited death rituals. Lamont argues that "personhood is linked with burial" among the Meru, and according to several of these accounts, full selfhood is recognized only at the end of a life that has met all the social requirements. A "bad death" and a truncated life signal incomplete personhood.

African cultures responded creatively to the pressures colonial regimes exerted for "modern" rules of hygiene in the handling of the dead, and for universal burial—until the height of the AIDS pandemic no African would consider cremation. Mark Lamont describes how a group of young Methodists among the Meru in the 1930s recast their traditional notions of death pollution in terms of modern hygiene. (As we shall see below, something similar is happening with the medical discourse about AIDS.) Lamont explains how a court case in the early 1930s served to make burial popular instead of feared when evidence of burial on land subsequently settled by white colonials was accepted as proof of Meru possession. Once burial on one's own land became common, graves were more likely to be maintained as a focus for memorialization.

Terence Ranger's critic was half-right about the unpopularity of the municipal cemetery. As Ranger shows, the Ndebele living in Bulawayo originally preferred to repatriate their dead to their villages of origin, but later generations came to regard Bulawayo as their "origin" and devised methods of dignifying death in the city, buying their own plots of land or colonizing and caring for a particular quarter of the cemetery. They also made increasing use of the "Independent" African Churches that grew up in the 1920s and '30s whose rituals combined "traditional" and Christian elements.

The role of conversion to Christianity or Islam was important in these adaptations. The impact of the world religions goes back at least to the 19th century, and contemporary scholarship shows Africans themselves as the effective evangelists. Islam and Christianity promised an afterlife for all, a doctrine that proved very attractive, especially to women, as no-one wanted to become part of the mass of undifferentiated and dangerous spirits that menace the living and are enlisted for occult rituals. Even so, all the essays illustrate the incorporation of traditional practices and understandings into Christian and even Muslim death rituals. The chapter by Katrin Langewiesche on Burkino Faso, for example, shows it is common to involve both "traditional" and Christian or Muslim officials in a funeral, while the primary religious identity of the dead person is often a strategic choice made by the family for political or status reasons.

As Jan Vansina puts it, the "traditional" and the "Christian" are both "moving targets": "What once looked in the abstract like a wholly unbridgeable gap between two incompatible systems has dissolved into many small adjustments of nuance and preference." The expectation of going to a Christian heaven is combined with the idea of joining the ancestors and being able to intervene in the lives of the living. Ancestors have been partly transformed into angel-like benefactors watching over their family members. Funerals have become a way of celebrating the dead rather than controlling or communicating with them. The Celestial Church of Christ in Benin, one of the "white robe" offshoots of the Aladura movement, fiercely condemns traditional practices, yet Joël Noret shows its liturgies are a bricolage of traditional African and Christian elements, not least the preoccupation with combating occult harm and the importance of visions. Noret highlights the continuities in the structure of the funeral, particularly the long vigil over the dead body culminating in a ritual to ensure the soul's successful dispatch to heaven rather than to the spirit world of the ancestors.

Marleen de Witte, in her fascinating chapter on Asante funerals, shows how bodies are cosmetically treated and dressed in elaborate finery kept for the funeral display. They are photographed, and those who come to pay their respects are filmed, providing evidence about who fulfilled their duty and also acting as modern equivalents of older memorials to the dead such as the Akan terracotta heads from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The display of wealth on the body as it lies in state expresses the honor of the deceased and suggests the older concept of a fulfilled life has been supplemented or perhaps superseded by modern versions of secular status achievement.

Two developments from the last decades of the 20th century are strikingly illustrated in Michael Jindra's chapter on the Cameroonian grasslands: the growing size, lavishness, and cost of funerals; and their increased numbers and frequency in a time of AIDS. Feasting, entertaining and housing large numbers, sometimes for several days, can plunge the bereaved family into serious debt even where the costs are spread among a wide kin group or partly defrayed through funeral associations or by a member of the élite connected to the family. Jindra and Noret conclude that "burying beyond one's means" has in many places become the implicit social rule: some development economists even see the practice as a serious drain on the African economy. It would seem the spiritual and social imperatives expressed in the ritual management of death are more significant than the economically ruinous effects of the practice.

The continuities between the pre-colonial and the modern African approach to death are very evident, though mourning has been shortened and simplified and burial practices now largely occur under Christian or Muslim auspices. The fear of pollution is still powerful and associated with potential misfortune, and ancestors are still very important. The editors claim that witchcraft has declined, yet anthropologists currently working, for example, in Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, and the Congo find it flourishing, especially where social and economic conditions create widespread insecurity—what Ruth Marshall, writing about postcolonial Nigeria, calls "the ordeal of everyday life" (Political Spiritualities, 2009). Jonathan Roberts' chapter describes witchcraft among the Ga in Accra, where graveyards are a source of the polluted relics used in occult curses. Fetish interment mimics the funeral, burying miniature coffins containing fragments from old graves, such as body wrappings, alongside physical scraps from the intended victim, usually nail clippings, hair, or clothing.

The pandemic has clearly affected the African culture of death in the last few decades. In 2006, of 39 million people globally living with HIV/AIDS, two-thirds were in sub-Saharan Africa, though from that date both the incidence and the death rate began to fall, thanks to the increasingly effective provision of anti-retroviral drugs mainly and, though this is more contested, perhaps to changes in sexual behavior and a rise in the practice of male circumcision. The World Health Organization estimates that these measures have averted more than two million African deaths since 1995. Botswana, however, was the site of a general rather than a concentrated (and therefore more readily contained) epidemic. In 2005, a third of all pregnant women in Botswana were HIV positive and in 2009 one in three adults was suffering from HIV/AIDS. The three books on Botswana take us deeper into this issue.

Saturday Is for Funerals, by Unity Dow and Max Essex, is an imaginative handbook primarily aimed at African readers. It shows that the pessimistic early projections about the effects of the pandemic are being averted in Botswana. Unity Dow, a judge of the Interim Constitutional Court of Kenya, grew up in Botswana; Max Essex, Lasker Professor of Health Sciences at Harvard University, has worked in Botswana and elsewhere on the AIDS epidemic since the early 1980s, when it first appeared in the U.S. The authors share each chapter, with Dow, who is also a novelist, telling the story of a Botswana AIDS victim while Essex explains the medical issues it illustrates and provides the subtitle for each chapter: "Diagnosis," "Sexual Transmission," "AIDS in Children," "Evil Spirits and HIV as the Cause of AIDS," and so on. The stories are touching, and many of them are about people connected to Unity Dow's family or encountered in her work: like the medieval murals showing the dance of death sweeping up kings and bishops alongside peasants, these stories show that this latter-day plague respects neither prosperity nor status.

Anti-retroviral drugs have been universally available in Botswana since 2002, provided through government initiative in association with NGOs, notably the Gates Foundation, and today often distributed in clinics sited on church premises. Many of the case studies recounted in this book are designed to combat fatalistic attitudes to the disease, though they also illustrate how easily cultural assumptions and fear get in the way of people seeking medical help. Dow and Essex take great care not to pit antiretroviral medicine crudely against "traditional" appeals to ancestral intervention or Christian prayer and healing rituals as rival "cures"; rather, they encourage the sick not to use religious ritual alone without also seeking medical help. One story concerns a colleague of Judge Dow working as a traditional healer while getting more and more sick herself. The judge persuaded her to accept antiretroviral treatment by convincing her that even if she was suffering through the malevolence of evil spirits, the ancestors would not want her to deny herself effective modern medicine. Max Essex comments: "As the true cause of AIDS, the human immunodeficiency virus seems even more clever than the evil spirits. It is far too small to see but has 10,000 letters in its genetic code and a unique way to parasitize human immune cells." That knock-down piece of scientific rhetoric may be less persuasive in Africa than a Western doctor might hope, as the two other books on Botswana illustrate.

Death in a Church of Life: Moral Passion during Botswana's Time of AIDS by Frederick Klaits and Holy Hustlers, Schism and Prophecy: Apostolic Reformation in Botswana by Richard Werbner take us more profoundly into the cultural nexus of the poor in the slums of Gaborone, the capital city of Botswana, as the context of the AIDS crisis. Both are studies of small, family-based African Initiated Christian churches at the end of the 1990s, when the pandemic was at its height and before any effective medical treatment was available. People were understandably reluctant to be tested for the HIV virus since a positive result was a death sentence and a source of moral shame. Klaits directly addresses the church's response to the devastations of the pandemic, while Werbner focuses on the role of a new group of young urban "hustler" prophets who conduct dramatic healing diagnoses and counter-witchcraft rituals. Both books are distinguished additions to the anthropology of Africa, and Werbner's use of video—the book comes with a dvd showing the prophets at work—is a welcome enrichment of fieldwork methodology.

The slum settlement in old Gaborone which is the main focus of both books consists of a honeycomb of "yards," usually containing several dwellings. Many of the "landlords" of these yards are older women, now prominent citizens of the area, some of whom originally made their money in prostitution in the earlier years of the settlement. The population exists on the insecure margins of a capitalist urban economy, with the men employed, if they are lucky, in unpredictable and often short-term jobs, often within the "informal" economy, or away in the South African mines for months or years at a time. Werbner's "holy hustlers" come out of the ranks of unemployed streetwise youth among the Gaborone poor, some of them recent migrants from surrounding villages. Women have very little choice apart from prostitution or the shebeens (beer bars), other than informal dependence on men for gifts of money or goods. Klaits explains that the traditional system of arranged marriage had broken down under the impact of colonialism and Christian missions, but strict monogamy, preached by the missions in a continent where polygamy was the mark of traditional high status, did not really take hold except as an ideal in the churches. Klaits quotes from Isaac Schapera's classic fieldwork from the 1940s to illustrate the pattern of early sexual activity before marriage, with the acquiescence of the family, and, importantly, the understanding of sexual relations as a cause rather than a consequence of feelings of love.

Most people still have family ties to the rural village, and the theory is that a man should buy land and build a house for his parents in his village of origin before he marries. Many never achieve this, but most men postpone marriage until their forties, and before this time will usually have had children with several partners. Klaits explains the widespread habit of having multiple, simultaneous sexual partners as the consequence of late marriage and economic necessity, especially for women. Setswana people believe sexual relationships should involve a fair exchange in which men do not just get pleasurable sex but are cared for by their partners, while women, too, get pleasure and receive care in the form of the material necessities of life. Both sexes tend to want children while they are young—as we saw in Funerals in Africa, both men and women are considered incomplete until they have children. The moral value Setswana people place on the mutual exchange involved in sexual relations is not present in casual one-night-stands or habitual promiscuity where there is no ongoing mutual care. Such casual sex, in which condoms are used, is considered shameful. Klaits shows how difficult it is for people to believe that using a condom to control HIV infection, as the medical campaign recommends, is "safe" or "responsible" since for them a condom is evidence of lack of trust and commitment, a sign of selfishness or promiscuity.

Death in a Church of Life is almost unbearably poignant. Klaits studied the Baitshepi church, a "church of the spirit" in the Old Naledi settlement in Gaborone. He formed a close, warm relationship with its leader and moral powerhouse, a woman prophet, MmaMaipelo, whose co-operation enabled him to chart the church's responses to the devastation AIDS was wreaking on its small and close-knit congregation. MmaMaipelo had been a brewer of beer which she sold in her yard—a "shebeen queen"—before she experienced the prophetic vision that led her to found the church. She and her husband, a former miner, acted as the heads of the church family and their immediate ancestors were transformed into the guardian angels of the church.

MmaMaipelo herself refused to engage with the medical discourse about HIV/AIDS, but she nevertheless encouraged believers to seek modern medical treatment—other diseases of poverty such as tuberculosis were also rife—though she was adamant that only God really heals even if he does so through medicines. MmaMaipelo equally refused to countenance or "believe in" witchcraft explanations of AIDS sickness. Moreover, she did all she could to prevent her congregation rejecting AIDS sufferers on the assumption that their "promiscuity" must be the cause of the illness. Instead she preached and prayed about the need to love and care for the sick. She encouraged families to acknowledge their duty to their sick members and to the orphans. The urgent question was not, "Why is he/she ill?" but "Whose child is this?" When families did not or could not care for the dying or for the bereaved, the church stepped in. MmaMaipelo took a number of infected young people into her own yard and declared herself and RraMaipelo their "spiritual parents." This was the heart of the "moral passion" that fired Klaits' admiration, an insistence on the connectedness and mutual obligation of these African Christians amid the carnage of a disease that was destroying families and communities as well as individual lives. The little congregation took on the considerable burden of feeding, housing, and caring for all its sick, even those who returned home from elsewhere to die, and set up a burial club to help with funeral expenses.

The rituals of the church centered on cleansing water, extempore prayer, and collective singing. One dying young woman explained to Klaits that MmaMaipelo had revealed the voice was the seat of the soul: this was why she did not want to be remembered through the feeble voice he recorded while she was very sick, but by her former strong singing. Every member had his or her own special hymn, and in the healing ritual of the church they are passed around the congregation to express love and care for a sick member, to ward off despair and spiritually energize the sufferer. MmaMaipelo saw it as a Christian's duty to banish "jealousy" in all dealings with the sick, a term that encompassed resentment, self-righteousness, conflict, and condemnation. While a person was still alive, everyone should express only hope and trust in God, but after death the priority was to "give up" the dead to God and concentrate on caring for the living. Klaits is not blind to the way the women, many of them young and sick themselves, had to shoulder most of the burden of care—he calls it the "domestication of inequality." But the great achievement of the Baitshepi church was to hold a community together in mutual love in conditions where it would have been easier for individuals to turn their backs on the dying. His own love for MmaMaipelo suffuses the book, which he dedicated to her memory (she died in 2006).

The implications of Klaits' ethnography are taken further by Richard Werbner in Holy Hustlers, Schism and Prophecy: Apostolic Reformation in Botswana. Werbner studied a group of young prophets that arose alongside the complex hierarchy of leadership in an Apostolic church, the Eloyi Christian Church, in the first decade of the 21st century. Archbishop Jakobo Boitshepelo founded Eloyi in 1955 and made his power base the rural village where he was born. The church now has several thousand members and branches all over Botswana and in parts of South Africa, but Werbner's book concentrates on the Gaborone branch that became the stamping ground of the young prophets. He concentrates on their role in the schism that occurred when one of the founder's sons broke away to form the Conollius (Cornelius) Church in the city slum.

Werbner's book is a subtle piece of ethnography that ranges widely over the aesthetics of prophetic practices, emphasizing the masculinity and "street smarts" of the young hustlers, the rituals of diagnosis and healing among both the prophets and the hierarchy of the church, and charting the mechanisms of power and influence and the processes that led to schism. The most striking parts of the book, and the dvd, are concerned with the prophets' ecstatic ritual dance, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and with the way they experience directly and intensely the suffering of those who come for diagnosis and healing. They become "sniffer dogs," literally sniffing out the witchcraft that is causing the sickness, infertility, or other misfortune. They track the material spoor of occult curses, and may destroy or ravage rooms, homes, halls, shops, or church buildings that have been "bewitched," clambering all over them, tearing up possible hiding places and making a heap of the occult materials that prove the existence of the curse at the end of their search.

The most significant aspect of Werbner's analysis reflects on Klaits' ethnography as well as his own. It concerns African assumptions about "the self." Klaits' woman prophet was able to bind her congregation together in moral passion for mutual good because she was working with a distinctive African idea of the self that is a far cry from American assumptions about individual autonomy and unlimited self-fashioning. Werbner, like the Dutch anthropologist Rijk van Dijk, argues that the African self is fundamentally experienced as relational and inextricably enmeshed in a field of influences that include ancestors, living persons, and spiritual forces. The term of art that expresses this is "dividuality." It is because the self is "dividual" that Werbner's "holy hustlers" can zero in on the pain of others, and why in witchcraft curses, nail clippings or substances that have touched a body carry its essence.

Werbner sees the re-incorporation of divination into the Eloyi and Conollius Church by the young prophets as a reaction against the emphasis that earlier generations of African Christians put on purifying the faith of all "traditional" elements. It is a facet of the re-appropriation of African-ness in African religious life. He believes that in the longue durée from a preChristian past, the "encompassing" cultural feature of sub-Saharan Africa is "dividuality" and the relational rather than the autonomous self. We will never comprehend African religion, or even African politics, until we grasp this. It might help us to start regarding our own culture and our own brands of Christianity through Other eyes rather than taking for granted their universal normative validity. We may deplore witchcraft as a form of "superstition," but on the other hand, how many of us Western individualists could have achieved what Mma-Maipelo did?

Bernice Martin is emeritus reader in sociology, University of London.

Books discussed in this essay:

Funerals in Africa: Explorations of a Social Phenomenon, edited by Michael Jindra and Joël Noret (Berghahn, 2011).

Saturday Is for Funerals, by Unity Dow and Max Essex (Harvard Univ. Press, 2010).

Death in a Church of Life: Moral Passion during Botswana's Time of AIDS, by Frederick Klaits (Univ. of California Press, 2010).

Holy Hustlers, Schism and Prophecy: Apostolic Reformation in Botswana, by Richard Werbner (Univ. of California Press, 2011). Includes dvd.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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