| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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Past and Present Academic Context
Very little has been written on interreligious encounters and dialogue among ATR, Christianity, and Islam in Africa. The majority of existing literary accounts of interreligious encounters are of those between Christianity and Islam, and between Christianity and ATR.
McKenzie’s book Inter-Religious Encounters in West Africa is one of the very few works that addressed interfaith interactions among all three belief systems under study. It examined one of the earliest interreligious encounters among ATR, Christianity, and Islam in West Africa.
Although the book records interreligious interactions that occurred several centuries ago, its contribution is a foundational resource for this study and for the general spectrum of interfaith encounter and dialogue. It gave comprehensive accounts of the exclusivist and flexible approaches of a conservative African Christian, Ajayi Crowther—who later became an Anglican priest and eventually a bishop—in interreligious encounters, mainly in Sierra Leone and some regions of Nigeria. ATR, Islam, and Christianity were ‘linked together by Crowther for good or ill—since it was clear that in the lives of the people as a whole they were also inextricably interwoven’ (1976, 46).
Although Crowther was born into a multireligious society, he could not withstand the existence of non-Christian religious traditions. This makes it hard to consider some of his methods of interreligious encounters as a paradigm for today’s interfaith relation and cooperation, but we can certainly learn from them.
Sanneh’s 1983 book West African Christianity is another work on early interreligious encounters among ATR, Islam, and Christianity. Chapter 4 of the book provided an early history of the coming and expansion of Christianity, especially Protestant Christianity, into West Africa in the nineteenth century through Sierra Leone, which was the chosen location for the Nova Scotians, the Maroons, and the Recaptives (i.e., slaves that were recaptured and freed), including Ajayi Crowther. These groups later came to be known as the Settlers.