Catching the Holy Ghost: Mass Conversion and the Africanization of Christianity in East Africa

Leslie Whitmire, georgia state university

This paper analyzes the impact of missionary Christianity in Acholiland, Uganda by focusing on conversion among the Luo as a borderland society straddling the borders of the Congo-DRC, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and South Sudan. Applying Lindsey Scorgie’s borderland analytic framework to this period contextualizes the differences in the experience of mass conversion in a peripheral society like the Acholi in juxtaposition with larger political indigenous societies in Uganda, namely Buganda. Comparative analysis of these experiences reveals how missionaries, indigenous Africans, and the British colonial administration utilized missionary Christianity to create a unified political identity in support of the burgeoning state of Uganda in larger polities like Buganda while inadvertently encouraging anti-state sentiments in smaller societies like Acholi. The differences in the conversion experience in Uganda’s metropole and the Acholi borderland society influenced the transition into a denominational, independent state that privileged Christians with proximity to state institutions and “othered” peripheral societies, resulting in the contentious relationship between citizens in central and southern regions and those in northern region in independent Uganda. Mass conversion in Acholi strengthened their connection to the Luo diaspora and other borderland societies during the first half of the twentieth century, and in doing so, they established an Africanized Christianity shaped by their spiritual lens of the world.

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 Presented in Session 201. Religious Transformation, Community Formation, and Social Change