Survey: A quarter of Africans worry about future religious conflict; Nigeria, Rwanda top list

Africans worried about future religious conflict

LAGOS, Nigeria — More than a quarter of people in sub-Saharan Africa worry about future conflict along religious lines, though concerns in Rwanda and Nigeria are even higher, according to a new survey on religious attitudes released Thursday.

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which conducted the survey, however, found that unemployment, crime and corruption are of greater concern to Africans than future religious conflict.

But the survey found that in Nigeria and Rwanda — countries that have suffered from vicious sectarian conflict — 58 percent in each country fear future bloodshed.

The survey, which involved interviewing 25,000 people in 19 sub-Saharan African countries, found that in many cases fear of religious conflict were tied to fears of ethnic conflict.

“For many in Africa religion and ethnicity are very closely connected in that basically they see the two working together in terms of their concern about violence,” said Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Acting Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan echoed those views in a BBC interview late Tuesday when he was asked what his government is doing about violence in central Nigeria, where more than 500 people have been killed this year.

Jonathan said that people indigenous to the central Nigerian city of Jos and its surrounding region are mainly Christians and feel that people who have migrated there from other parts of Nigeria dominate commerce. Some of those people are Muslims and when the two groups fight, it assumes “religious connotations.”

“So if anything touches a settler who is a Muslim it will be interpreted as if they are attacking the Muslims,” Jonathan told the BBC. “And if the settlers that are Muslims touch the indigenous population that are Christians it will be interpreted as the Christians are being attacked.”

In January, 300 people, most of them Muslims, were killed in Jos and its surrounding villages. In March, more than 200 people were killed in what are predominantly Christian villages in the same area.

That violence, though fractured across religious lines, often has more to do with local politics, economics and rights to grazing lands.

The survey also found that in 17 of the 19 countries covered, 40 percent of respondents were concerned about religious extremism, particularly within their own faith.

Less than a quarter of them believed that large numbers of Muslims support extremist groups like al-Qaida. In most cases, researchers found that Christians and Muslims held similar views on the level of support for al-Qaida. But in Ghana, the survey found that Muslims are three times more likely to say fellow Muslims support al-Qaida than Christians.

The group conducted the survey, titled “Tolerance and Tension: Islam and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa,” between December 2008 and April 2009.

The organization conducted the survey because sub-Saharan Africa is “the most important meeting place between Christianity and Islam anywhere in the world, so if we are going to probe issues of inter-religious understanding and inter-religious engagement, this is a good place as any to begin,” said Lugo.

On the Net:

Survey report will be available at: www.pewforum.org