Africa is a Country

The latest issue of the centrist US-based opinion magazine, The Atlantic, has a long piece on religious politics in Nigeria. The piece which spans some fourteen pages contains some good reporting, but the writer against her better judgment and caution from Nigerian interlocutors (the Anglican Archbishop of Kaduna for example: ‘But we all know that, scratch the surface and it’s got nothing to do with religion. It’s power.’) can’t drop the ready-made clash of civilizations frame:

Here, then, is the truth behind what Samuel Huntington famously calls religion’s bloody’ geographic border: outbreaks of violence result not simply from a clash between two powerful religious monoliths, but from tensions at the most vulnerable edges where they meet — zones of desperation and official neglect where faith becomes a rallying cry in the struggle for land, water, and work.

The Atlantic website has been slow to update so the story is not up yet (they also promise an interview with the reporter Eliza Griswold), but you can see a slideshow with audio of photographs by Seamus Murphy whose images accompany the piece.