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By Nicky Armstrong
Solomon Mugera, the BBC’s Africa editor began by describing the balance where Islam and Christianity collide as ‘a delicate pendulum’. For the past seven years award-winning journalist and poet Eliza Griswold has travelled 9,000 miles along this line of collision known as the Tenth Parallel, meeting the people living on this divide between North and South, hot and wet, Muslim and Christian; observing how religion plays into their daily lives and why it is a cause of conflict. Starting West in East Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya and then across the Indian Ocean to Indonesia and the Philippines.
Griswold recounted stories of people she had met – speaking of Dr Hawa Adbi a soviet trained gynecologist in Somalia who turned her small family run farm into a refugee camp for 100,000 people.
“She has run this camp for the past 20 years, and just last week, al-Shabaab, the militant group in Somalia came and took part of her land and took thousands of children to rally in the name of al-Qaeda to show that these children supported [them]. Dr Abdi is right now trying to wrestle with holding onto what used to be her own family farm”
Griswold’s study has followed the journey of religion, the routes of Christianity and how Islam has spread further south in Africa. On the reason for conflict Griswold talked of many interrelated factors that must be bought to bear regarding religious conflict.
“I didn’t find one single so called religious conflict that didn’t have a worldly or secular trigger, not one, whether that was a fight over land, oil, water, a political election or even chocolate”
The loss of identity through religion being forced upon people has fractured its routes, radicalising it and twisting it into a form or power often being used politically, turning democracy and politics into a ‘numbers game’.
“National identity was superimposed by a colonial administrator and it never made any sense, so what other forms of identity do make sense? Well it means nothing to be a Nigerian because the nation means very little; nation means even less if you think that government is embezzling between 4 – 8 billion dollars a year, so government is corrupt, not just absent and you have to survive against your government[….] the way in which people ensured their right to mutual survival was through identity”
Griswold ended the event by commenting on the idea of collective identity and how this could affect the future for religion and conflict
“What does it feel like to be more than one person at one time and to wear those identities lightly”
Watch the whole event here:
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Join us to discuss Africa's fault line with New York Times bestseller
From Senegal in the West to Somalia in the East runs a fault line, ‘the knife edge where Islam and Christianity meet’. This area of land separates the continent’s 400 million Muslims from its 500 million Christians.
In her New York Times bestseller The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam, award-winning journalist and poet Eliza Griswold spent seven years exploring the relationship between religion and conflict along this circle of latitude 10 degrees north of the equator.
Religious beliefs are deep rooted and in areas such as Northern Nigeria this fault line has seen violent clashes between Muslims and Christians. But many believe this fault line presents a chance to develop peace and prosperity between faiths.
Join us to discuss Africa’s fault line with:
Eliza Griswold, award-winning journalist, poet and author of New York Times Bestselling and 2011 Anthony J. Lukas prize winning The Tenth Parallel. She is currently senior fellow at the New America Foundation and former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. She reports on religion, conflict and human rights. Her reportage and poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Harpers, The New Republic, among many others.
Chaired by Solomon Mugera, the BBC’s Africa Editor.
Picture Credit: Seamus Murphy
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