This book engages the existing polarized debate in which Africa’s religio-cultural traditions are viewed as militating against its development. Pitched between the desire for development and the apparent lack of any significant progress within the context of a globalized world, the study finds its expression within the ambit of indigenous religions and sustainable rural development. Using the Nankani of Northern Ghana as an example, the book illustrates how the religio-cultural traditions of Africans undergird both their thought processes and development. With an overview of the Nankani and their worldview, the study underscores how the African religio-cultural systems constitute a frame of thought that is influential to their analysis of contemporary practices and discourses. It observes that despite the centrality of this religious dimension, the apparent lack of genuine progress is not a product of their religio-cultural systems; but the inability of their external development partners to consider an input from the indigenous communities. At the core of this book, therefore, is the view that indigenous religions are a resource and not a barrier to sustainable rural development.

Mending the Broken Pieces is a unique investigation that transports the discourses on Africa’s indigenous religions and sustainable rural development through space and time to the cross roads of contemporary lived experiences. Predicated on various encounters and the processes of negotiation, the book has brought to the fore a people and their worldview and, more importantly, how that worldview undergirds their notions of sustainable development, gender as well as their engagement with any modern concept on theory and method, otherwise referred to as ‘wisdom and its encounter with actual life situations’.  As a product of the latter, this book posits that the current field-based methodologies were constructed from a particular perspective and for a particular audience. However, with the emergence of a new group of indigenous or native researchers, these old tools or approaches have become problematic, sometimes inadequate or even inappropriate; hence, the methodological innovations. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rose Mary Amenga-Etego (PhD) is a lecturer at the Department for the Study of Religions, University of Ghana. Dr. Amenga-Etego is a 2009 fellow of the American Council of Learned Society/ African Humanities Program (ACLS/AHP). She is currently an executive member of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians andAfrican Association for the Study of Religions (AASR).

SUBJECT CATEGORIES

Religion/AFRICA