ABSTRACT
This paper has as its main aim to reopen an old and intricate debate, the one on the relationships between religious and political movements in Africa south of the Sahara, and elsewhere in the Third World. It will take as a starting-point Audrey Wipper’s Rural Rebels: A Study of Two Protest Movements in Kenya (1977), which was praised by N. L. Smelser in the following words:
Professor Wipper’s study yields something of interest to everyone. The Africanist will find that the depth of her coverage brings to light a great deal of new historical material on a part of the world whose history is relatively untold. The methodologically-minded anthropologist will profit from her sensitive account of the difficulties in both the archive-retrieving and interviewing phases of her research, as well as the strategies by which she attempted to render these data more nearly representative and accurate. There is much in the study for the theoretically-minded as well. Early in the introductory chapter Professor Wipper lays out a number of past efforts to account for religious and political protest in colonial societies, and convincingly lays most of these to rest. . . . More important, she infuses her on-going discussion with reference to a variety of more serious theoretical formulations. (Smelser, 1977: pp. x-xi)
I entirely agree with Smelser’s first two points, but I am less inclined to follow him in his judgment of Wipper’s contributions to
the theory of religious-political protest movements. Wipper’s book does contain two very thorough and enlightening case studies of such movements, and, as far as I can see, she did get the facts and data on these movements right. However, part of the theoretical framework in which she tries to fit her cases is far from convincing, and her efforts to substantiate her general thesis lead her, in my opinion, to serious distortions of the historical facts and to a onesided interpretation of the movements under study.
