Paper short abstract:

The case of Ugandan Old Believers tells tons about contemporary African religiosity and globalization in postcolonial societies. It is a manifestation of spiritual anti-globalism as a reaction on globalization, a sign of a spiritual turn that is taking place in Africa nowadays.

Paper long abstract:

The paper deals with a very recent phenomenon - the Orthodox Christian Old Believers in Uganda. Its analysis can help understand contemporary religiosity in Africa in the context of postcoloniality and globalization. We concentrate on the Ugandan Old-Believers' motivation for converting to this religion vs. knowledge of its doctrine. We show that their knowledge of the Old-Believer doctrine is poor. What brings most of these people to Old Believers is the search of the true faith associated with the original and hence correct way of performing Christian rites. For them, the true religion is not the true teaching, but rather the true complex of rituals. In this we see intricate interplay of the features typical for authentic African cultures and acquired by them in the course of interaction with the wider world. Our study of Old Believers in Uganda shows how both resistance and adaptation to globalist trends manifest themselves in the spiritual (religious) context in contemporary Africa, and how postcolonial religiosity can acquire clearly marked anti-globalist directionality while people attempt both to resist and adapt to globalization. This is a kind of spiritual anti-globalism. We consider the Ugandan Old Believers' search for an "original", "uncorrupted" faith as an essentially conservative response to the globalization processes in the postcolonial society, as one of many manifestations of a spiritual turn that is taking place in Africa nowadays.