When the Prophet Returns to the City to Bring Peace: The “return of the religious” to the Test of an African Field. The Case of the Tokoist Church in Angola
The concept of the “return of religion”, which is often mobilized from the paradigm of secularization and impregnated with its normative vision, has never been tested from below to verify its operationality. Starting from the case of a prophetic church in Angola, the Tokoist Church, and the return of its prophet into the post-war political scene, this work proposes to deconstruct the ethnocentric and methodological biases and to make the concept of the return of religion an operative notion. To do so, it puts forward a perspective that rejects any causal relationship between religion and modernity, and focuses on the historicity of religion, on the heterogeneous forms of spiritual and institutional authority and on everyday practices. Finally, the interweaving of the return of religion and the end of the war allows us to understand the reconfiguration of power relations in Angola.