Religion and Poverty: Pan-African Perspectives (review)

RELIGION Peter Paris, ed. Religion and Poverty: Pan-African Perspectives. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2009. xxiv + 360 pp. Notes. Contributors. Index. $89.95. Cloth. $24.95. Paper. According to the foreword by Jacob Olupona, this book represents a culmination of several Ford Foundation-sponsored seminars, lectures, and discussions held over the course of four years in South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, Jamaica, and the United States, where various academics of religion and society interrogated issues related to the causes of poverty and the intersection between poverty and religion among African peoples, with an attendant focus on "poverty alleviation." As suggested, too, in Esther Mombo's chapter, "Religion and Materiality: The Case of Poverty Alleviation," the inference is that "poverty eradication" is viewed as a distant ideal, and that food aid and other philanthropic antihunger organizations are forced to accept poverty alleviation as the only feasible goal, given the widening chasm under globalization and neocolonialism between the haves and have-nots in the world, particularly in Africa and the African diaspora. One does wonder, though, how, if organizations like the World Bank and the IMF advance antipoor policies like Structural Adjustment that in fact exacerbate poverty, the same organizations could be expected to alleviate poverty in "partnership with religious organizations, particularly churches" (xvii). A further question is "Why do religious traditions not demand the outright eradication of poverty as a sine qua non for ethical existence of their various adherents in the world?" Perhaps writers like Kossi Ayedze in the chapter "Poverty among African People and the Ambiguous Role of Christian Thought," who proposes a materially oriented Christian gospel that caters to both souls and bodies (208), make us realize that Christian theologians still struggle with the injunction of Jesus to surrender everything to the poor and live a materially and spiritually selfless life. But the question still remains: Why does poverty exist in the world and Africa in particular, to the point that the modest United Nations Millennium Development Goal of reducing poverty by half by 2015 is now viewed as unrealistic and unattainable? Religion and Poverty is a broad-based text that charts the historical roots of poverty in Africa and the diaspora through genocidal processes like the trade in enslaved Africans from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries (see Katie Cannon's chapter, "An Ethical Mapping of the Transatlantic Slave Trade," and Barbara Bailey's instructive discussion of the subjugation particularly of women, "Feminization of Poverty Across Pan African Societies: The Church's Response - Alleviative or Emancipatory?"). The book highlights the challenges of economic globalization, which champions the transnational spread of corporate capitalism at the expense of informal entrepreneurs, especially women, who foster the survival of millions of families, youth, and children in the underdeveloped world (see 'The Informal Economy and the Religion of Global Capital" by the South African theologian Takatso Mofokeng), and it also investigates the contradictions between such imported notions and indigenous African religiocultural understandings - as, for example, in Maasai practice - that decry poverty and require collective access to land that cannot be owned (see Elizabeth Amoah's "African Traditional Religion and the Concept of Poverty"). …