Abundant Life and Basic Needs : African Religions as a Resource for Sustainable Development, with Special Reference to Shona Religion

Dissertation, Universität Rostock, 2017

In Africa, religion shows no sign of disappearing or diminishing as development theorists have generally supposed. Africans have certain religious values which are sources of inspiration and strength. If incorporated, they can greatly contribute to development initiatives in their planning, implementation and monitoring stages. The book shows that Euro-Western development practitioners excluded consideration of the religious dimension in formulating development policies towards Africa resulted in failure of their development strategies. Furthermore, the book emphasized that once indigenous African religion is rehabilitated as an important concept and variable in the understanding and implementation of social change and progress, development strategies will be assured to be successful. Therefore, the incorporation of religion(s) of the indigenous peoples should be given the desired attention. Moreover, to buttress the importance of religion(s) of the indigenous peoples of Africa, the book presents African Shona Religion’s voice in this discourse by using the indigenous Shona peoples, who live in Harare Province, in Seke Communal Area of Zimbabwe, as a case study for the sake of accuracy and critical analysis on the topic. Hence, despite its suffering from stereotyping, Shona religion continues to play a critical role in the life of the Zimbabweans.