Religious leadership gave African anti-colonial resistance its numbers, morale, and discipline

Evidence

Terence Ranger, though not entirely comfortable with the “supra-rational” elements to which we have attended, thought such movements “eminently utilitarian”: … The religious leaders were able to oppose to this a morale which for the moment was as confident, if not more so, based upon their supposed ability to shape the world; and they were able to oppose to modern weapons the one great advantage that the Africans possessed, that of numbers. In no other way could the African peoples of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries … have offered a challenge to the Europeans. Moreover the so-called “superstitious” injunctions of the religious leaders not only served the purpose of creating a sense of the new society but also ensured the minimum of discipline essential in movements such as these. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 826

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels Weber’s religious-charisma analysis and echoes the reader’s earlier material on the supra-rational in Black political movements.