In the Name of God Almighty: Scripture, Heritage, and the Authorship of Africa from Berlin to the New Scramble

Abstract. This essay reads African geopolitics from the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 to the present "new scramble" through the lens of Comparativity Complex Theory (CCT). It argues that the territorial state in Africa is a comparative artefact: a unit made comparable, and therefore governable, by a treaty that invoked God Almighty, extended "especial protection" to Christian missionaries, and measured African polities against a European standard of occupation. The same grammar of scripture and heritage organizes the contemporary contest. Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province reject the comparative state in the language of revelation; the Sahel juntas and their Alliance of Sahel States perform sovereignty as recovered heritage; Russia, China, Turkey, the Gulf, and American evangelicals each offer Africa a rival comparative frame; and Nigerian Pentecostal churches abroad show that the traffic runs both ways. Drawing on Bayart's concept of extraversion, the essay concludes that the decisive geopolitical question is not who extracts Africa's resources, but who authors the terms on which Africa is compared.

Keywords: geopolitics; Comparativity Complex Theory; extraversion; Berlin Conference; Sahel; scripturalization; religious soft power

Opening With a Prayer

The General Act of the Berlin Conference, signed on 26 February 1885 by the plenipotentiaries of fourteen powers, opens with a phrase that most readers skip on their way to the articles on navigation and occupation: "In the Name of God Almighty."¹ The skipping is itself instructive. A century of scholarship has taught us to read Berlin as a conference of merchants and chancelleries, a meeting about the Congo basin, the Niger, free trade, and the rules by which a coastline could be claimed. That reading is correct as far as it goes. It does not go far enough. The Act that set the procedural terms for the partition of a continent was framed as an act of worship, bound its signatories to favour religious institutions that would bring Africans "the blessings of civilization," and named "Christian missionaries" as the first category of persons deserving the protection of the powers.² The first international charter of modern African geopolitics was, in its grammar, a scriptural document.

This essay takes that grammar seriously. It advances a thesis that is deliberately contestable: African geopolitics, from Berlin to the present rush of Russian mercenaries, Chinese lenders, Turkish foundations, Gulf patrons, and American preachers, has been fought in the idiom of heritage and scripture, and the outside powers now competing on the continent are competing, above all, to author Africa's comparativity. By comparativity this study means what Comparativity Complex Theory (CCT) means by it: not the act of comparing one thing with another, but the relational, historical, and power-laden conditions that make things comparable in the first place.³ Nations and regions in Africa are not natural units awaiting comparison. They are comparative artefacts, produced when someone with power decided what Africa should be measured against. Whoever controls that decision controls a great deal more than a border.

The thesis runs against two established habits. The first is the materialist habit, which treats religion in geopolitics as ornament, a veil over the real business of minerals, bases, and loans. The second is the culturalist habit, which treats religion as an ancient substrate from which conflict simply erupts, as if the Sahel burned because Islam is old there. CCT rejects both. Human beings are culture-producing and domination-seeking; heritage is neither decoration nor destiny but an active instrument of power, and it morphs or it dies.⁴ What follows traces that morphing across four sites where the argument can be tested against evidence: the Berlin settlement and the states it produced; the scriptural rejection of those states by Boko Haram and its offshoots; the theatre of sovereignty in the Sahel since 2020; and the religious and financial diplomacy of the powers now crowding into the space France has vacated. The comparativist's obligation, here as elsewhere, is to dig past the surface explanation until one reaches the thresholds of discomfort, where the familiar categories stop working.

Berlin as Liturgy: Partition and the Protection of Missionaries

Historians have long disagreed about how much Berlin actually did. The collection edited by Stig Förster, Wolfgang Mommsen, and Ronald Robinson, still the fullest account, presents the conference as a knot of mixed motives in which economic interest, national rivalry, and missionary aspiration were tangled together, and in which the partition of the interior was more accelerated than decided.⁵ Matthew Craven has observed that international lawyers have granted the conference a symbolic weight that historians often doubt, and he argues that the divergence dissolves once the General Act is read as a regime governed by the systemic logic of free trade.⁶ Both correctives are valuable. Neither addresses the question this study puts to the document: what did the powers need to believe about Africa in order to make its coastline notifiable and its interior occupiable?

The answer lies in the Act's comparative architecture. Article 34 required any power taking possession of African coastal territory, or declaring a protectorate there, to notify the other signatories. Article 35 obliged occupying powers to establish authority sufficient to protect existing rights and, as the case may be, freedom of trade and transit.⁷ These are procedural clauses, but procedure is where comparativity hides. Notification presupposes that the land in question is, legally speaking, available; effective occupation presupposes that whatever authority already existed there does not count as authority. The measuring rod was European, and the unit of measurement was the kind of state that Europe believed itself to possess. African polities that had governed, taxed, adjudicated, and prayed for centuries were rendered incomparable by definition, and the incomparable could be occupied.

Article 6 supplies the moral warrant. The powers bound themselves to watch over "the preservation of the native tribes," to suppress the slave trade, and to "protect and favour all religious, scientific or charitable institutions" that aimed at instructing Africans. The same article guaranteed freedom of conscience and religious toleration "to the natives, no less than to subjects and to foreigners."⁸ It is tempting to read that final guarantee as a humane residue in an otherwise predatory text. This study reads it differently. A guarantee of religious freedom to "natives" presupposes a taxonomy in which religion is a category Europe defines, missions are its approved vehicles, and indigenous practice appears, if at all, as something to be tolerated rather than recognized. Olódùmarè does not appear in the General Act; neither does the Qur'an, although the Ottoman sultan's plenipotentiary signed it. The only named religious actors are Christian missionaries, placed in the same sentence as "scientists and explorers," the three together constituting the vanguard of a civilization whose blessings were to be brought home to Africans.⁹

V. Y. Mudimbe gave us the vocabulary for what happened next. The "colonial library," in his account, was the body of missionary, anthropological, and administrative writing through which Africa was invented as an object of knowledge, a discourse that shaped not only how outsiders saw Africa but how Africans were taught to see themselves.¹⁰ Berlin was the diplomatic preface to that library. What the conference legalized, the library scripturalized: it turned a procedural claim into a canonical text about who Africans were and what they lacked.

The absence at Berlin is as eloquent as the presence. No African sovereign sat among the plenipotentiaries. The sultans, emirs, obas, and kings whose treaties with European agents were about to be converted into "protectorates" were spoken of, never spoken with. This is the structural condition that CCT calls the otherization of alterity: the other is not merely described as different but is removed from the room in which difference is defined. The General Act's preamble named the monarchs and presidents who wished to regulate "the development of trade and civilization in certain regions of Africa," and in that phrase the continent became a region of someone else's sentence.¹¹ It is a mistake, then, to imagine that the religious clauses of the Act were marginal to its political clauses. They were the same clause written twice. The political clauses said who could possess Africa; the religious clauses said why possession was a duty. Elsewhere this author has described scripturalization as the process by which something becomes "scripture," acquiring the authority to organize meaning and conduct.¹² The partition of Africa was scripturalized in exactly this sense. Its maps became sacred texts of a secular order, and like other sacred texts they were soon being interpreted by people who had not written them.

Maps That Pray: The State as Comparative Artefact

The strongest challenge to reading the African state as a colonial artefact comes from Jeffrey Herbst. In States and Power in Africa, Herbst argues that the central problem of African statecraft, before, during, and after colonial rule, has been the cost of broadcasting power across large territories with low population densities, and that the conditions African state-builders face long predate European penetration.¹³ It is a bold argument, and it rightly refuses the lazy assumption that colonialism explains everything. Herbst also shows how colonial boundaries, once drawn, were preserved by African leaders at independence because the boundaries secured their own authority.

This study accepts the demographic observation and rejects the conclusion drawn from it. Low density is a fact; that it is a problem is a comparative judgment, and the standard against which it is judged is the European state that Berlin made normative. Precolonial polities across the savanna and forest managed sparse populations through overlapping sovereignties, tributary relations, spiritual jurisdictions, and mobile authority, precisely the forms that Articles 34 and 35 declared insufficient. Herbst's model measures African rulers by their capacity to do what the Westphalian state does. That is comparison. CCT asks the prior question: who decided that the Westphalian state would be the unit of comparison, and what heritage did that decision disqualify?

Robert Jackson and Carl Rosberg had already posed a version of the question in 1982. Many African states, they argued, persisted not because they possessed the empirical attributes of statehood but because the international order conferred juridical statehood upon them, recognizing sovereignty that did not correspond to effective control.¹⁴ Christopher Clapham extended the point, showing how rulers appropriated the conventions of sovereignty to reinforce their domestic control, even as the international environment grew less forgiving.¹⁵ Frederick Cooper's "gatekeeper state," a state strong at the point where the territory meets the outside world and weak within it, completes the picture.¹⁶ Together these accounts describe a state whose authority is borrowed from its comparability. It exists because other states agree to compare it with themselves.

Mahmood Mamdani supplies the internal half of the architecture. In Citizen and Subject he shows that late colonial rule produced a bifurcated power in which citizens were governed by civil law and subjects by "customary" authority organized along tribal lines, a decentralized despotism that outlived independence.¹⁷ Define and Rule sharpens the argument by tracing how colonial statecraft, from British India onward, abandoned the attempt to erase difference and turned instead to defining and managing it, making the native a political identity and tying access to land and power to tribal membership.¹⁸ Read through CCT, Mamdani's work shows that the colonial state was comparative in two directions at once. Outwardly it compared Africa with Europe and found Africa wanting; inwardly it compared Africans with one another, sorting them into tribes, customs, and religions whose boundaries it then enforced.

Mamdani's book is also, and this is less often noticed, a book about African authorship of comparativity. Its closing chapters turn to the Nigerian historian Yusuf Bala Usman, who contested the colonial historiography that had divided the north into fixed ethnic and religious compartments, and to Julius Nyerere, who grasped that the logic of the colonial state was legal and administrative and could therefore be dismantled by reform rather than by war.¹⁹ Both men understood that the colonial settlement survived through its categories. Both tried to replace those categories rather than merely to seize the offices they defined. Their example matters for the argument of this essay because it shows that the authorship of Africa's comparativity has never been a monopoly of outsiders. It has been contested from within, by historians, presidents, clerics, and prophets, and the contest continues.

Achille Mbembe warned against treating the colonial boundary as simply arbitrary. His essay on territoriality at "the edge of the world" describes African space in motion, with existing territorial frameworks being dismantled even as new enclosures appear.²⁰ The warning is apposite, because the argument of this essay is not that the maps were meaningless. They were intensely meaningful, in the way a creed is meaningful: they told people what community they belonged to, whom they were answerable to, and what they were not. And because they functioned like scripture, they could be contested in scriptural terms. That is what happened in northern Nigeria.

Extraversion Has Always Had a Liturgy

Before turning to the cases, one more piece of the argument must be in place. Jean-François Bayart's essay "Africa in the World: A History of Extraversion" remains the indispensable corrective to any account that pictures Africans as passive objects of foreign power. Bayart argues that African actors have long mobilized resources drawn from their relationship with the external environment, including under colonial rule, so that dependence itself became a strategy of power.²¹ Extraversion is not submission. It is the art of converting the outside into leverage inside.

The concept has been used mostly for economic and political resources: aid, loans, arms, recognition. This study extends it to heritage and scripture. African elites and movements have repeatedly drawn religious and civilizational resources from outside, whether a Protestant missionary education, a Salafi doctrine of reform, a Pentecostal prosperity gospel, or an Orthodox-inflected Russian discourse of "traditional values," and converted them into authority at home. Stephen Ellis and Gerrie ter Haar argued two decades ago that religious thought and political practice in Africa are fundamentally linked, and that one must understand religious meanings before one can judge their political significance.²² The corollary is that geopolitical influence in Africa is always partly religious influence, whether or not the external power intends it.

Olufemi Vaughan's Religion and the Making of Nigeria shows how this worked across two centuries. The Sokoto jihad in the north and the Christian missionary enterprise in the southwest provided the social and ideological frameworks through which colonial Nigeria was assembled, and those frameworks structured the later contests over sharia, state power, and ultimately Boko Haram.²³ Nigeria, on this account, was not a secular container into which religions were poured. Religions made the container. The comparativity of Nigerian politics, north against south, Muslim against Christian, "indigene" against "settler," was built from religious heritage mobilized by people with access to external patrons.

Here the thesis meets its first serious objection. If Africans extravert, the materialist will say, then religion is merely one resource among many, and the real currency remains money and guns. The objection misreads what extraversion requires. To draw a resource from outside one must first make oneself comparable to the outside party, legible as a partner, an ally, a fellow believer, a victim, a frontline state. That legibility is manufactured in the idiom of heritage. A Sahelian junta seeking Russian support presents itself as heir to an anti-colonial struggle; a Nigerian government seeking Western counterterrorism aid presents its insurgency as a branch of global jihad; a Ugandan legislator seeking American evangelical allies presents his bill as the defence of the African family. In each case the resource flows only after the comparison has been authored. Extraversion has always had a liturgy.

Boko, Haram: Scripture Against the Comparative State

The movement known colloquially as Boko Haram, a Hausa phrase usually glossed as "Western education is forbidden," is the most violent refusal of the Berlin settlement in contemporary Africa, and it is a refusal articulated in scriptural terms. Alexander Thurston's history of the movement traces it from the preaching of Muhammad Yusuf in Maiduguri through its violent transformation after Yusuf was killed in police custody in 2009, drawing on Arabic and Hausa sources, and it insists on reading the group as a local movement with transnational links rather than as an import.²⁴ Thurston also shows that various actors, the Nigerian government among them, had vested interests in framing Boko Haram as the product of transnational jihadist influence.²⁵

That observation deserves more weight than it usually receives, because it is extraversion in its purest form. By presenting the insurgency as a franchise of global jihad, the Nigerian state made itself comparable to the United States, France, and the other powers of the "war on terror," and thereby eligible for their intelligence, their equipment, and their diplomatic indulgence. The insurgents, for their part, pursued the same comparability from the other side. The 2015 pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State, and the schism of 2016 in which the Islamic State recognized a rival leadership, producing what became the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), were moves in a contest over which transnational scriptural community the movement belonged to.²⁶ Both the state and its enemies sought to be authored from outside.

What did the movement reject? Not simply "the West," and not education as such. Its target was the comparative order in which Nigerian Muslims were measured against a secular, Western-derived standard of citizenship, schooling, and law, the order that Mamdani's bifurcated state and Vaughan's missionary frameworks had helped build. Roman Loimeier's study of Islamic reform in northern Nigeria and Ousmane Kane's study of the Izala movement show that the contest over who spoke for Islam in the north was, from the 1970s onward, inseparable from the contest for political influence, with reformists and Sufi brotherhoods competing for adherents, mosques, and access to the state.²⁷ Kane read the Izala movement as a distinct form of Muslim modernity rather than a regression, a reading that unsettles the Eurocentric assumption that reform and modernity must look like secularization.²⁸ Boko Haram emerged from, and then violently broke with, that reformist field.

The essays collected by Abdul Raufu Mustapha in Sects & Social Disorder map the dense landscape of Muslim identities in northern Nigeria and caution against treating any one of them as the essence of northern Islam.²⁹ That caution matters for geopolitics. When outside powers read Boko Haram as the authentic voice of Sahelian Islam, they commit the same error the Berlin powers committed when they read missionaries as the authentic voice of civilization: they mistake one faction's scripturalization for a region's heritage. The consequence is policy built on a false comparison. Military partnerships designed to defeat a "global" enemy repeatedly underestimated how local the grievances were, and how much the brutality of state forces fed the insurgency's claim that the secular state was itself an agent of injustice.

This study does not romanticize the insurgents. Their violence against Muslims and Christians, against schoolchildren and scholars, is abominable. The point is analytical. Boko Haram is what happens when a population is told for a century that its heritage is incomparable, that is, not worth comparing, and a movement arises that accepts the verdict and inverts it, declaring the comparative state itself incomparable with God's law. Scripture here is not a mask over grievance. It is the medium in which the grievance becomes a claim to rule.

Liptako-Gourma and the Theatre of Sovereignty

If Boko Haram rejects the comparative state from below, the military regimes of the central Sahel have tried to reauthor it from above. The sequence is familiar but worth setting down with care. Mali's army seized power in August 2020 and again in May 2021; Burkina Faso experienced two coups in 2022, in January and September; and on 26 July 2023 the presidential guard in Niger overthrew President Mohamed Bazoum, installing General Abdourahamane Tiani at the head of the National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland.³⁰ France's military retreat followed the coups closely. The last detachment of Operation Barkhane left Mali on 15 August 2022, ending a nine-year deployment in which fifty-nine French soldiers had died.³¹ France formally ended its special forces operations in Burkina Faso in February 2023, after the junta gave it a month to leave.³² The last French troops left Niger in December 2023, the third expulsion from a Sahelian state in less than eighteen months.³³

On 16 September 2023 the three juntas signed the Liptako-Gourma Charter in Bamako, creating the Alliance of Sahel States; on 6 July 2024, meeting in Niamey, they adopted a treaty of confederation.³⁴ Having announced their departure from the Economic Community of West African States in January 2024, they formally left on 29 January 2025, a withdrawal that, as Human Rights Watch observed, also removed their citizens' access to the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice.³⁵

The name deserves attention. Liptako-Gourma designates the borderland where the three states meet, a region with its own long history of pastoral movement, Fulani and Songhai polities, and Islamic scholarship, and the zone where the jihadist insurgencies have been fiercest. To name a new alliance after a borderland rather than after a capital or a colonial federation is to make a heritage claim: that the true unit of Sahelian politics is the frontier Berlin's cartography marginalized. Whether or not the juntas intend the resonance, they are doing what CCT predicts political actors will do in a crisis of legitimacy. They are reaching for heritage, reshaping it, and presenting the reshaped heritage as recovered sovereignty.

The theatre of sovereignty requires an audience and a patron, and Russia has supplied both. Kimberly Marten notes that Moscow allowed its Soviet-era presence in Africa to atrophy after 1991 and has returned, in the last decade, through a combination of arms sales, political advisers, and private military companies.³⁶ In Mali, the Wagner Group fought alongside the army for more than three years after French and United Nations forces were pushed out. In June 2025 Wagner announced its withdrawal, declaring its mission complete, while the Kremlin-controlled Africa Corps, created after the failed mutiny of Wagner's founder in 2023, stayed on.³⁷ The change of label was significant. A privately branded instrument of deniable power was replaced by an openly state-directed one, and Russia's comparative claim upon the Sahel, as a power that had never colonized Africa and that shared its suspicion of Western moralism, could now be made in Moscow's own name.

Here the thesis must be defended against the most sympathetic reading of the juntas, which holds that they represent a genuine, if authoritarian, decolonization, the long-delayed completion of the sovereignty that 1960 promised. There is truth in that reading. The resentment of French military presence was real and widely shared, and Paris's claims of counterterrorist success sat poorly with a decade of expanding insurgency. But extraversion predicts that a rupture with one patron will be followed by attachment to another, and the evidence bears that out. The juntas did not exit the comparative order; they changed the power against which they wished to be compared. Sovereignty was performed as heritage, the heritage of anti-colonial struggle, while security was purchased as a service from a foreign state whose own record of civilian abuse accompanied its fighters. The loss of access to a regional human rights court, noted by Human Rights Watch, is a small but telling sign of what was traded away.

The Yorùbá concept of àṣẹ, the authority that makes things come to pass, offers a useful way of stating the problem. Sovereignty in the Westphalian sense is àṣẹ recognized by other states. The Sahelian juntas have sought àṣẹ from a new direction, but they have not escaped the structure in which àṣẹ is conferred from outside. That is the comparativity trap, and Berlin set it.

Thurston's comparative study of jihadists across North Africa and the Sahel adds a further complication. Reading the statements of commanders and clerics over three decades, he argues that jihadist groups behave as political actors embedded in local politics, bargaining, splitting, and adapting to the configurations of power around them rather than executing a fixed global script.³⁸ If that is correct, and the evidence he marshals is persuasive, then the counterterrorist frame that France brought to the Sahel was itself a false comparison, one that placed Sahelian insurgents in the same category as the transnational networks of the Middle East and designed its campaigns accordingly. The juntas inherited that frame and, with Russian assistance, intensified it. What neither Paris nor Bamako nor Moscow has been willing to concede is that the insurgencies are, among other things, arguments about heritage: about who governs the pastoral frontier, whose Islam is authentic, and whether a state built on Berlin's template can ever be legitimate there. Wars fought against an enemy one has misclassified tend to last a long time.

Loans, Mosques, and the Grammar of Brotherhood

The phrase "new scramble" entered scholarly usage with some hesitation. Roger Southall and Henning Melber titled their 2009 collection A New Scramble for Africa? with a question mark, and Pádraig Carmody's The New Scramble for Africa two years later dropped it.³⁹ The phrase is useful because it recalls Berlin; it is misleading if it implies that today's competitors want what the Berlin powers wanted. The difference is that no contemporary power claims territory. They claim, instead, the right to frame Africa's relationship to the world: to supply the comparison through which Africans are invited to understand their own development, faith, and future.

China's frame is the most consequential and the most misrepresented. Deborah Brautigam's The Dragon's Gift dismantled several durable myths about Chinese aid and argued that Beijing's motivations were broader and longer-term than Western commentary allowed, rooted in engagement that began with agricultural and infrastructure projects in the 1960s.⁴⁰ The data assembled at Boston University's Global Development Policy Center show 1,306 Chinese loan commitments worth about $182.28 billion to forty-nine African governments and seven regional borrowers between 2000 and 2023, concentrated in energy and transport. The same data show that 2023 was the first year since 2016 in which annual lending rose, to $4.61 billion across thirteen commitments, well below the peak years of the Belt and Road Initiative.⁴¹

What makes China's frame geopolitically distinctive is not the money but the comparison it offers. Beijing presents itself as a fellow developing country and former victim of imperialism, a peer rather than a tutor, and it attaches no conditions of governance or doctrine to its lending. This is a secular grammar, but it is not a grammar without heritage. It invites Africans to compare themselves with China's own trajectory, from humiliation to infrastructure, and it quietly displaces the scriptural comparativity of the missionary era with a developmentalist one in which the railway, the port, and the stadium stand where the mission church once stood. The displacement is real. It would be naïve to think it neutral.

Consider where the money has gone. Of the total recorded by the Boston University database, $62.72 billion went to energy and $52.65 billion to transport.⁴² Dams, power stations, highways, and railways are economic assets and, just as surely, monuments, the heritage of a future that the state wishes its citizens to inhabit. The colonial railway once carried the missionary and the district officer inland and carried the cash crop out; the Chinese-financed railway, inaugurated with ribbons and national anthems, carries a different comparison, one in which the African state measures itself against Shenzhen rather than Manchester. That comparison has undeniable attractions for governments that remember the conditionalities of structural adjustment. It also reproduces, in a new key, the old structure in which the standard of African achievement is set elsewhere. Comparativity has changed its capital without changing its grammar.

Turkey and the Gulf states have chosen a more openly religious grammar. Federico Donelli describes Turkey's sub-Saharan engagement as a distinctive "Ankara consensus," combining trade, humanitarian aid, education, and religious diplomacy, and distinguishes it from the approaches of other external actors.⁴³ The most visible monument of that approach in West Africa is the Ghana National Mosque complex at Kanda in Accra, inaugurated on 16 July 2021. Built by the Turkish Hüdayi Foundation with the support of the Turkish government at a reported cost of $10 million, it seats fifteen thousand worshippers and is modelled on the Sultan Ahmed, or Blue, Mosque of Istanbul.⁴⁴ The architectural choice is a heritage argument in stone. Ghanaian Islam, whose own architectural tradition includes the earthen Sudano-Sahelian mosques of the north, receives a national mosque that reproduces Ottoman imperial form. The Ottoman Empire signed the General Act of Berlin as a minor party; its successor state now returns to Africa offering its own classical heritage as the image of Muslim modernity.

The Gulf's religious diplomacy has a longer history and a more contested reputation, and this study refrains from the easy narrative in which Saudi money simply manufactured Salafism in Africa. Kane's and Loimeier's work shows that African reformists were active agents who drew on transnational networks for their own purposes, extraverting doctrine as others extraverted capital.⁴⁵ The geopolitical point stands nonetheless. Turkish mosques and Gulf-funded scholarships, like Chinese stadiums, are instruments for authoring comparativity. They supply the standard against which African Muslims are invited to measure the authenticity of their own practice, and in doing so they compete with one another, and with Sufi brotherhoods, national governments, and jihadist movements, for the right to say what African Islam is.

Pulpits Across Oceans: Sexuality, Pentecost, and Soft Power

The contest over comparativity is sharpest where it touches the body. In Uganda, Parliament passed the Anti-Homosexuality Act in March 2023, and it came into force in May of that year. The law prescribes the death penalty for "aggravated homosexuality" and up to twenty years' imprisonment for the "promotion" of homosexuality. On 3 April 2024 the Constitutional Court upheld most of the Act, striking down three provisions concerning health care, the renting of premises, and a duty to report.⁴⁶ Western governments and human rights organizations condemned the law as an assault on universal rights; its Ugandan defenders presented it as a defence of African heritage against a foreign imposition.

The irony, which Kapya Kaoma documented well before the 2023 law, is that the "African" position had been shaped in part by American conservative religious actors. His 2009 report for Political Research Associates traced how United States evangelicals and allied renewal movements cultivated African church leaders, both to enlist them in the doctrinal struggles of American mainline denominations and to promote criminalizing legislation in Africa. It singled out a March 2009 seminar in Kampala in which American anti-gay activists took part, and which was followed by meetings with Ugandan legislators.⁴⁷ Kaoma's findings have themselves been contested, and African agency in the Ugandan legislation should not be dissolved into American influence. But the pattern is unmistakable: a law presented as the defence of African heritage against the West was built in part from materials supplied by the West.

In an earlier study this author argued that the expectation that Africa must adjust its understandings of gender and sexuality to fit the outside world is paternalistic, and that the claim that sexualities outside the "normal" were importations to Africa tends to perpetuate the subjugation of African peoples' own sexual diversity and innovation.⁴⁸ The Ugandan case shows both halves of that argument operating geopolitically. Western donors compare Uganda with a universal standard of rights that has its own genealogy in Euro-American history; American evangelicals compare Uganda with an imagined biblical Africa that is purer than a secularizing America; Ugandan legislators compare their law with a precolonial heritage from which sexual diversity has been edited out. Every party claims to speak for Africa. None is content to let Africa's own archive of gender and sexuality, its myths, its ritual roles, its languages, set the terms.

The traffic is not one-way. Nigerian Pentecostalism has become one of the most successful exports of religious heritage in the modern world. Ruth Marshall argued that the Pentecostal explosion in Nigeria was itself a mode of political transformation, a "political spirituality" through which millions reimagined citizenship and salvation together.⁴⁹ Ogbu Kalu's history situated this movement within a longer African Christian story rather than treating it as an American franchise.⁵⁰ Asonzeh Ukah's study of the Redeemed Christian Church of God traced its doctrinal and ritual transformations and its extraordinary expansion from Nigeria into congregations across dozens of countries.⁵¹ Afe Adogame's work on the African Christian diaspora documents how African-led churches in Europe and North America maintain transnational links with their home churches and reshape the religious landscapes of their host societies.⁵²

Is this soft power? Joseph Nye defined soft power as the ability to obtain preferred outcomes through attraction rather than coercion or payment.⁵³ Nigerian megachurches abroad plainly exercise attraction, and they carry a Nigerian idiom of prayer, prophecy, and prosperity into London, Houston, and beyond. Yet they are not instruments of the Nigerian state, which has neither directed nor capitalized on them in any systematic way. They are better understood as extraversion reversed: African religious heritage converted into authority abroad, and then reconverted into prestige, finance, and political access at home. In CCT's terms, they have learned to author comparativity rather than merely receive it, presenting Africa as the new centre of world Christianity against which a secularized West is found wanting. That inversion is a genuine achievement. It is also a warning that the capacity to author comparativity does not guarantee that the comparison will be just.

Toward a Heritage Security Reading of the New Scramble

What, then, is at stake in the new scramble? The materialist answer, cobalt, lithium, oil, ports, bases, is not wrong, but it is incomplete in a way that has practical consequences. Policies designed around resources and security alone will continue to misread the Sahel, northern Nigeria, and the Great Lakes, because they will continue to treat religion and heritage as noise. This study has argued that they are the signal. Every external power on the continent today comes bearing a comparison: France its republican universalism and its counterterrorist record; Russia its anti-colonial pedigree and its "traditional values"; China its developmental biography; Turkey its Ottoman heritage; the Gulf its custodianship of the holy cities; American evangelicals their family and their Bible. African actors accept, reject, and rework these comparisons, and the reworking is where power is made.

The framework this author has called Heritage Security Intelligence (HSI) proposes that heritage be analysed as a domain of security in its own right, one in which threats and resources are identified by attending to how communities mobilize their pasts. A security analyst who understands why a junta names its alliance after Liptako-Gourma, why a Turkish foundation builds a replica of the Blue Mosque in Accra, or why a Ugandan legislator describes an American-shaped law as African heritage, will predict more and misjudge less than one who counts only soldiers and loans. The ongoing book project Soldiering Scriptures, still in progress, pursues this line through the militarization of sacred texts across the continent.⁵⁴ Its premise is the premise of this essay: that in Africa, scripture has been soldiering since Berlin, and soldiers have been scripturalizing since independence.

A final objection deserves an answer. If everything is comparativity, the critic may ask, is there any way out? Mudimbe's archaeology of the colonial library, Mbembe's anatomy of the postcolony, and Quijano's account of the coloniality of power all describe systems that reproduce themselves after formal empire ends.⁵⁵ CCT does not promise escape. It promises visibility. Once the comparative architecture is seen, it can be contested on its own terms, and heritage, which morphs or dies, can be made to morph in directions that serve those who inherit it. Ọ̀rúnmìlà, in the Ifá tradition, is the witness of destiny, the one present when each destiny was chosen. The geopolitical question for Africa is who will stand as witness to its destiny now, and whether Africans will insist on being their own.

Berlin began with a prayer. The new scramble has no single conference and no single prayer, but it has many pulpits, and each preaches a different Africa. The work of the comparativist is to read those sermons against one another, to identify the power in each, and to refuse every invitation to mistake a foreign comparison for a native heritage, or a native heritage for a fixed one. Until African states, movements, and scholars author the terms of their own comparativity, the scramble will not be new. It will be Berlin, extended.