Transformation of African Religious Landscape in the 20th and Beginning of the 21st Century

The paper demonstrates the main finding of the research examining the transformation of Africa’s religious geospace and its constituent geospaces of the region’s largest faith groups in the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries. In aim of analyzing this process the methodology has been developed. It allowed us to conduct a comprehensive assessment of the religions’ geospaces changes. It examines their territorial structure inertia, the degree of their territorial concentration, direction and speed of their demographic centers’ movement. Established that the religious space of a territory as a combination of the geospaces of individual religions which interact with each other, can undergo transformation that appears in two multidirectional processes. They are manifested in expansion and compression of religious geospaces, generally separated in time by a state of rest-the stage of territorial stabilization. The transformation of the religious space of African countries was due to the changes of the religious structure types, which are defined on the bases of the share of the replaced religion in the model of religious competition. The revealed geographic pattern of these changes indicates the centrifugal multi-focal nature of the Africa’s religious space transformation. Having emerged in an initial territorial cell Christianity and Islam spread within the neighboring territorial cells, determining the nature of the ethnic religions’ geospace compression-firstly contiguous and then fragmented. The active interaction of Christianity and Islam’s geospaces in Africa de facto began only after 1990. It arose mainly within the countries of the Sudan-Sahel belt, before that their territorial expansion had occurred independently of each other.

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