Ramon Sarró

The Generation Game: Football among the Baga of Guinea

Since 1989 the Baga people of Guinea, West Africa, have celebrated an annual football tournament that they like to compare to the masquerades performed in the old days (that is, when the old people of today were young men and women). This tournament proves to be one of the best occasions to assess the dynamics of intergenerational competition. While football is indeed a ‘new’ thing, a modern activity for young people away from their elders, the elders behind it are increasingly taking control of the situation and are not letting it be just a youth activity. By revitalising ritual activities long since disappeared and by reinforcing age structures mediated by the demands of the elites in Conakry (the capital city) the elders are indeed ‘domesticating modernity’ and using football matches as a context to retain the power youth were in principle trying to escape from.

Religious Pluralism and the Limits of Ecumenism in Mbanza Kongo, Angola

Ecumenism has been a constant effort of many Christian agents in war-torn Angola ever since the 1960s, and certainly in the reconciliation initiatives that have taken place since the end of the war in 2002. Today, ecumenism is a structuring concept in the new law of religious freedom, which stipulates that, in order for religions to be legal, they must belong to an ‘Ecumenical Platform’. Yet, in the northern parts of Angola, Bakongo people remember too well how strongly allied Christianity has been with oppressive forms of power since the arrival of Diogo Cão five centuries ago, and especially since the martyrdom of Kimpa Vita in 1706. The local cosmology and an acute sense of historical resentment have created a strong resistance to any form of Christian ecumenism, especially among the thousands of exiled Bakongo who are returning to the country from the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, where they explored their Kongo, rather than their Portuguese, roots. Thanks to these returnees, Kongo religious institutions, some officially banned by Angolan laws, are being visibly revitalised and spread among local people to whom Christianity and ecumenism have little to offer beyond memories of suffering and oppression. How far grassroots ecumenism may be possible among these Kongo religious institutions remains uncertain.

African Christians in Europe: introduction

Th e academic study of African Christian communities in Europe has proliferated since the groundbreaking work of people like Roswith Gerloff (1992), Gerrie ter Haar (1998, 1999) and Afe Adogame (1998). African churches, more than groups from Latin America or Asia, seem to draw the academic attention, especially within the disciplines of religious studies and cultural anthropology. Th e burgeoning of these churches as well as their liturgical exuberance might be the rationale for this focus on African churches. Initial research was mainly ethnographical, focusing on thick descriptions of these new phenomena. In recent years the paradigms of transnationalism, of reverse mission, of recognition, and of geography, locality and place have served as analytical foci in the study of these groups. Th is issue consists of six contributions that focus on theoretical issues in the study of African Christian communities in Europe. Ramon Sarro and Joana Santos in their article on the Kimbanguist Church in Portugal show how the notion of ‘return’ characterizes the life of the Kimbanguists in Lisbon and demonstrate that there is a link between this notion of return and the growing respect for the contributions of the wife of Simon Kimbangu in the Kimbanguist Church. Nienke Pruiksma discusses the limited usefulness of territorial notions of context in situations of migration. Taking her starting point in a case-study of the Celestial Church of Christ in Amsterdam she argues that in circumstances of migration,