experiences that it had are useful as other African institutions that were estab-
lished later had similar experiences.
In Uganda, Makerere College began as a Technical College in 1922 and
became a University College affiliated to the University of London in 1949.
In 1970 it attained university status (Platvoet 1989: 109). Fourah Bay and
Makerere were to play significant roles in the growth of religious studies
in the region. The emergence of religious studies in sub-Saharan Africa is
noteworthy in that it had implications for the discipline in Britain. Following
the destruction of Fourah Bay during World War II, the Colonial Office in
Britain planned to have more tertiary institutions in Africa. This resulted
in the setting up of universities at Legon in the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and
at Ibadan in Nigeria. Consequently, the department of religious studies was
inaugurated at the University College of Ibadan in 1949 by J. W. Welch and
Geoffrey Parrinder (Hackett 1988: 37).
The setting up of the department of religious studies at Ibadan was a
milestone as Parrinder introduced African Traditional Religion (in the singular)
as an academic discipline. Other departments of religious studies were to emerge
in Nigerian universities, including at Nsukka, Jos, Lagos, Calabar, Ilorin, Ife,
Port Harcourt, and other centers. Writing in the 1990s, Jacob Olupona (1996a:
187) noted that of some thirty-five universities in Nigeria, departments of
religious studies existed in about twenty-five of them. The study of ATRs is
popular in most of these universities.
By the 1960s, with the wave of decolonization sweeping across Africa, many
African states had established national universities. These were meant to assist
in the project of national identity formation. It was envisaged that they would
help undo the colonial mentality that had promoted an inferiority complex
in many Africans. Departments of theology were renamed ‘departments of
religious studies’ to reflect the reality of religious pluralism in African countries.
In Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, the national leader, influenced the adoption of
the name, ‘department for the Study of Religions’ (Walls 2004: 211). This name
sounds better, as ‘religious studies’ remains closely linked to theology.
Anglophone West Africa emerged as a strategic region in the study of
religions in sub-Saharan Africa. As other reviews of religious studies in West
Africa have noted (Olupona 1996b; Adogame 2004), the discipline enjoys a
satisfactory profile. Nigeria, with its numerous universities, merits a more
detailed analysis than can be provided in this chapter (Hackett 1988; Olupona
1996a). Writing in the late 1980s, Peter McKenzie (1989: 101) noted that the
greatest development within the history of religions, not only in West Africa
but in Africa as a whole, was taking place in Nigeria. This most populous
black African country has produced some of the leading scholars in religious
studies in Africa. Although some of the scholars have moved to Europe and
North America, Nigeria continues to take the study of religions seriously.
Furthermore, some of the scholars who are still based in Nigeria have periodic
1111
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
1011
1
2
3111
4 5 6 7 8 9
20111
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
30111
1
2
3
4
35
6
7
8
9
40111
42222
3
411
SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA
107
