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The renegotiation of relationships of dependency within households and families in which Muslim teachings became implicated took place amid the consolidation of the political practice that is termed ‘republican’, and was similarly low key. Differences in the way men and women related to the sphere of commerce existed before the colonial period in Southeast Tanzania. Muslim teachings could be readily evoked to argue for changes that affected women. The villagers' views of religious change are discussed. Funerary practices common among non-Muslims have come to be redefined as Muslim. In addition, the chapter presents the problems surrounding healing and dealing with witchcraft. The development of witchcraft cleansing in Southeast Tanzania shows the resilience of pre-existing ways of addressing misfortune. Witchcraft cleansing constituted a significant field of religious practice, whose dynamics cannot be reduced to the concurrent spread of Islam. Furthermore, the chapter reports the survival and decline of sacrifice.

This chapter explores how a network of religious congregations emerged in nineteenth-century Bahia and examines their social interactions. Until recently, the history of African religious practices in nineteenth-century Bahia was a topic little explored outside the work of Nina Rodrigues, Pierre Verger, and João José Reis. Fortunately, the past decade has seen increasing interest in preabolition Candomblé, and at last a more systematic effort to examine the topic is developing. Police records, including correspondence, housed in the Arquivo Público do Estado da Bahia (Bahian State Public Archive) and the newspapers of the time constitute the principal documentary sources; sources for the first half of the nineteenth century are still scarce, however, while those for the second half are more numerous and consistent.

This chapter explores the ways a range of African spiritual practices became the lynchpins in a sacred insurgent geography of 1844. This cultural architecture, particularly through amulets and rituals, proved useful to slave organizers as they encouraged awareness and support for the bourgeoning movement. This chapter considers how the cultural infrastructure of West and Central Africa—primarily its religious cosmologies and expressive cultures—provided a vehicle and a language for rural black people to access rebellious ideas and articulate a revolutionary agenda. In doing so, these practices became instrumental in connecting people to the idea of insurgency in the rural areas.

Chapter 10 presents a rainbow theory of eight stages of African marriage development. The theory is constructed within the framework of the Africentric paradigm and proposes that a rainbow of roles and expectations, challenges/tasks, tensions, joys and crises, conflicts, strengths, and opportunities constitute and determine the psychology and experience of the typical marital pair in Africa, from the mate selection stage to the last stage of marital life. Contributing such a theory was deemed necessary as a practical effort to respond to the current demand for the decolonization of scholarship in African universities. The chapter argues that one important way that African scholars could break away from the spells of colonialism and neo-colonialism and the current limitation of overdependence on foreign-based theories in the study of psychology is to generate home-based theories endogenously sourced from their African practice and experience.