Saharan Visions of Jesus. Poetics of Muslim-to-Christian religious conversions

ended

xMy project aims to study the connections between Muslim-to-Christian religious conversions, the Saharan pastoral minorities (Tuareg, Berabish, Chaanba, Kunta) in Mali and in Niger and the post-conflict situation in Sahel through the unusual prism of oral poetry. The various Christian churches use television, radio, the mobile phone and the internet to spread their messages and thus increase their congregations. As a result, an impressive number of studies focuses on religious transformations and media, on the appropriation of technologies by religious groups or on popular arts and religions in Africa.3 But at present, qualitative research on the intersection of African Christianity and Saharan oral poetry, considered as the most relevant and prestigious nomadic art, is extremely limited. SAVIJU focuses on a cross-cutting object, Saharan Christian poetics, which presents the characteristic of not being traumatic, unlike the questions by which issues concerning Sahel are generally investigated (migration, humanitarian crises, jihadism etc.). SAVIJU aims at offering an alternative view of the recent conflict in Mali (2012-2015) by recounting events from the point of view of the Christian Tuareg persecuted populations, living as forced refugees in the capital cities of Niger and Mali. The challenge of this project is to write the “hidden histories” of Saharan Christians and to revise the common narrative of the Sahara as uniquely Islamic. The hypothesis that the project has set out to verify is that these conversions constitute a reaction to the jihadism to which the local populations have been subjected, not only because of the occupation of their lands and the forced application of Sharia law but also because of the effects it has had on every-day family-life.