Challenges with the Vow of Religious Poverty in Contemporary Africa

Abstract

The arrival of Christianity in Africa inaugurated a new form of life gen-erally classed as religious life which included the volitional profession of the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience that had no obvious antecedents in African traditional religions. Much discussion about the confrontation between the values of religious life and African traditional values has centred on the vow of chastity and celi-bacy. In this article, I discuss issues relating to the profession of the vow of poverty. The profession of the vow of poverty seems to raise an immediate contradiction in many Af-rican contexts. Firstly, traditionally, it was not desirable to profess to be poor. Secondly, the empirical condition is such that professed religious in many African countries are not regarded as ‘actually poor’.