The Sacred and the Secular in Race, Gender and Religion Since the 19th-Century Southern African Missionary and Colonial Epochs: A Decolonial Perspective

Abstract

The conceptualisations of the “sacred” and the “secular” are shaped by diverse entities in different epochs and spaces of society. Again, these conceptualisations often exhibit power dynamics, epistemic privileges, and the classification of people using the notions of human and non-human zones. In Africa, the historic intersectionality of the empire, mission, and conversion shaped, and continues to shape, the nuances of the sacred and secular in race, gender, and religion. Thus, this article used a desktop approach to analyse both the primary and secondary literature to explore the nuances of this phenomenon in this historic intersectionality and how its legacies continue to dominate the contemporary context. The preliminary findings showed that the historic missionary/colonial conceptualisations of the sacred and secular on race, gender, and religion remain the fulcrum of the contemporary narratives and their consequences. Thus, the article argues that decoloniality can serve as a lens in exploring this phenomenon and as an option to transform the current status quo.

1. Introduction

The juxtaposition of “the sacred” and “the secular” often happens in different discourses within global spaces and epochs. Accordingly, in Africa, in particular Southern Africa, the application of the sacred and the secular in race, gender, and religion often exhibits power dynamics, epistemic privileges, and overt and sometimes covert classifications of society using what Fanon (1963) and Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2013) call “the human and non-human zones”. This manifested in the encounters between the 19th-century missionary/colonial settlers and the Africans, where the coloniality of being, the coloniality of power, and the coloniality of knowledge were at play (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013, p. 11). In the same vein, this article argues that the legacies of these encounters continue to manifest in different contemporary Southern African discourses. However, the use of the term “secular” in this article should not be confused with secularisation. On the contrary, this term has often been used within missionary Christianity to juxtapose the Christian/godly, which was portrayed as sacred or that which is acceptable according to Western standards, and the un-Christian/ungodly, that which was seen as worldly/secular or things that fall outside the norm.

This is akin to what Michel Foucault calls the use of “biopower”, which is defined as a modern technology of power focused on managing, administering, and regulating life, shifting from the traditional sovereign right to “take life” to the power to “make live and to let die” (Foucault 1978). Again, this notion manifested and continues to manifest within the Southern African context in what Korieh and Njoku (2007, p. 2) call “the power that imposes rules on, as well as compels the obedience of, the colonised people”. Thus, in the Southern African context, the use of the sacred and the secular, borrowing from Butchart’s (1998), became the ‘theatres’ of power to manage and control the notions of race, gender, and religion in Africa. This was accomplished through discourses designed to manage, regulate, impose, and compel the obedience of the Africans by the empire and missionaries, whose fundamental aim was conversion and playing an active role in the subjugation of Africans. Thus, Asamoah et al. (2023, p. 6) argued that “They arrived unintentionally but naturally as carriers of both the Christian message and westernisation because they were too easily persuaded of the vast superiority of the European West”.

Therefore, this article uses the desktop research approach to analyse both the primary and secondary literature to explore the nuances of this phenomenon in the historic intersectional relationship of the empire, mission, and conversion, and how these legacies continue to dominate contemporary usage of the sacred and the secular in race, gender, and religion discourses within the Southern African context. Although the focus of this article is fundamentally on colonial/missionary encounters within the Southern African context since the 19th century, the discussion often overlaps with other missionary/colonial encounters elsewhere and the current contours within the African context.

Again, broad and general missionary encounters are used in this article, although the fundamental historic period and context that the article focusses on is unique to other missionary encounters elsewhere. This is because although there is uniqueness in different missionary encounters, the experiences of mission encounters, especially in the Global South, often resemble each other.

Furthermore, the article uses decoloniality theory as a lens to explore this phenomenon and to contribute to the discourse that seeks to transform the current status quo. To begin with, the next section sets the scene by highlighting the intersectionality of race, gender, and religion in the Southern African context. This is done to demonstrate how these elements interlink with the definition and application of the sacred and the secular in the context of this study.

2. The Intersectionality of Race, Gender and Religion

Several scholars have discussed the interlinking between race, gender, and religion in the global human experience. Among others, Sáenz-Rico de Santiago et al. (2022, p. 80) argue that intersectionality is a “paradigm that provides one of the best analytical vantage points for understanding exclusionary, unequal, and unfair actions”. Thus, intersectionality becomes a tool in a toolbox used in the process of analysing the ways in which the constructions of the sacred and the secular were designed to exclude and promote inequality between races, genders, and religions. It is, however, important to indicate that although intersectionality theory was first used by the African American attorney Kimberlé Crenshaw in her argument that African American women suffered because they were black (race), they were women (gender), and they were poor (class) (Crenshaw 1989), several scholars have since then used intersectionality and applied it to other identities and contexts, including religion, sexuality, disability, etc.

Thus, Meer and Müller (2017) argue that those various social identities, such as sexual orientation, gender, race, and class, interact and influence one another through interconnected oppressive systems. Thus, coloniality became an oppressive system that used the sacred and the secular to advance its agenda. In the same vein, Yee (2020, p. 11) maintains that intersectionality can be applied outside of race and gender “to include class, sexual orientation, nation, citizenship, immigration status, disability, and religion”. Thus, it can be argued that the sacred and secular in race, gender, and religion should also encompass other non-normative gender expressions and identities.

Notwithstanding the other usage of intersectionality elsewhere, this notion is used in this article to analyse the conceptualisation and the application of “the sacred” and “the secular” in race, gender, and religion within Southern Africa. Succinctly put, the terms “sacred” and “secular” are used in race, gender, and religion as deciding factors of what is acceptable or non-acceptable based on the prescriptions of the historic imperial regime. Again, this demonstrates the use of biopower in policies and discourses to enforce the subjugation of Africans by demanding that they change their beings (race and their understanding of gender), their ways of thinking and living, and their religions, which were deemed as un-Christian and, thus, often interpreted as worldly, as portrayed in the following Biblical passage of scripture (I John 2:15–17): “Do not love the world, or anything in the world, if anyone loves the world, the love of the father is not in them…” (NIV); thus, the world in this context is often associated with being secular as opposed to being sacred, and thus being Christian, as the missionaries were passionate regarding the distinction of the two (Kruithof 2021, p. 65). The next section presents a glimpse of the definitions of the sacred and the secular and how these two terms were applied since missionary/colonial times.

3. The Sacred and the Secular

The terms “sacred” and “secular” are complex phenomena that cannot be easily defined by a single and universal description. Notwithstanding this reality, the scope of this article could not accommodate a broader discussion on their etymologies, their historical backgrounds, and the diverse usage of these terms in different disciplines and contexts. Nevertheless, scholars such as Nielsen (2001) aptly provide a lengthy and critical discussion on the constructions of these terms and their distinction, which is sometimes simplistically seen as sacred merely meaning religious. On the other hand, secularity is sometimes misconstrued as profane or non-religious. So, the generic definition of these terms maintains that the concept of “sacred is an adjective defined as being connected with God or gods, considered holy, or highly respected and important” (The Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries 2026a). On the other hand, ‘secular’ describes attitudes, activities, or things not connected with spiritual or religious matters. It commonly refers to society, music, or education that is not controlled by, or based on, religion (The Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries 2026b).

Thus, the missionary covertly conceptualised the sacred and the secular in a similar way that distinguished the sacred as godly and the secular as ungodly. Again, although the terms secular and profane do not refer to the same thing, their usage in the context of missionary encounters and contemporary Christian spaces sometimes conveys the connotation that they refer to one and the same thing. This is because, although secular simply implies non-religious while profane often implies a disrespectful attitude towards the sacred, those who are considered secular are often misconstrued as being profane, and thus they are often marginalised and pushed to the peripheries. Again, the terms religious/religion and spiritual/spirituality are often used interchangeably in most cases, even though they have different meanings. Religion or being religious fundamentally refers to following an organised system of beliefs, whereas spirituality or being spiritual denotes a personal internal individual journey to connect with the sacred. The interchangeable usage of these terms often comes because of the closeness of religion and spirituality.

Accordingly, the sacred and the secular in this context were used to show a distinction between what Western epistemologies and religions considered to be godly, holy, and acceptable when compared to their African counterparts. This was done using the Western universalistic approach (Wumkes 2023) that undermined African ontologies and ways of knowing. In this way, the sacred was arguably presented by the missionaries with the notion of a monotheistic God, as something universal and closely associated with God and holiness. On the contrary, the secular was seen as anything relating to the world and being distant from God and holiness.

The Sacred and the Secular Within the Southern African Context

The use of the term ‘Africa’ in this article is not oblivious to the dangers of generalisations, which often portray the African continent and experiences as homogenous entities. Therefore, Anyanwu et al. (2025) maintain that there is always a serious challenge in the efforts to ignore Africa’s heterogeneous factors by stressing homogenous traits that portray Africans as one indigenous people with the same historic experience, culture, and traditions. Nevertheless, the reference to discourses in Southern Africa in this article is fundamentally based on those similar encounters of the empire, mission, and conversion which were arguably shared across different African contexts.

So, the focus here is on the similar nuances of the sacred and the secular that can be traced within Southern Africa. Thus, the assumption that Africa was worldly and, consequently, secular because it lacked religion and the knowledge of God was merely a misconception of African realities by outsiders. However, Wariboko (2022, p. 50) observed that: “There is no readily available distinction between religious and secular spheres in different African societies.” This is like what Wumkes (2023, p. 742) referred to as “Africana spirit-based epistemologies”. This understanding underpins the argument that religion (the sacred) permeated every aspect of African society, from birth to death. Again, this was also espoused by Mbiti (1969, p. 2) when positing, “Because traditional religion permeated all the departments of life, there is no formal distinction between the sacred and the secular, the religious and the non-religious, and between the spiritual and material areas of life.” Wherever the African is, there is his religion.

Thus, it can be deduced that Africans were not obsessed with the polarisation of the sacred and the secular in their views about race, gender, and religion because their entire beings were fundamentally interlinked with religion. In fact, this is akin to Akiwowo’s notion that the Western (Emphasis of the author) “Bivalent logic contrasts with what is found in many non-western faiths. The latter is a world of multivalence, not mutual exclusivity. The sky is not either blue or not blue, but it is in fact at the same time” (Adesina 2002, p. 105). Thus, for Africans it was not necessary to emphasise the distinction of the sacred and the secular since both coexisted inseparably. Indeed, the binaristic approach to religion and general social life emanates from what (Wumkes 2023, p. 740) calls “Eurocentric universalization of social categories”, which can be understood as the Western tendency of universalising human experiences, with the West considered as the epitome to emulate.

Conversely, everything was seen through religious lenses. Therefore, the binary approach to the sacred and secular in race, gender, and religion is fundamentally not an African construct. However, this bipolarisation is part of the historic and hegemonic missionary/colonial epochs and their legacies that are, however, traceable within contemporary African societies. In the same vein, Kanyoro (2001, p. 36) asserts that “In the African indigenous thought system, culture and religion are not distinct from each other.” So, the polarisation of the sacred and secular is a product of the advent of missionary/colonial enterprise and the imperialist agenda in Africa. Again, these polarisation tendencies continue to be used, and not only for the determination of what is sacred and what is secular; however, they are also used within contemporary African contexts as marginalising and oppressive tools to decide which practices in society are deemed to be Christian and un-Christian, which one are seen as good or bad, and, again, which one are considered to be right and wrong. Furthermore, by using polarisations, some practices are portrayed as civilised while others as uncivilised (Platvoet and Van Rinsum 2003, p. 3). The next section presents the advent of the missionary, colonial, and imperial administrators who contributed to the polarisation of the sacred and the secular in race, gender, and religion rhetorics in Africa.

4. The Missionary, Colonial, and Imperial Agendas

The interlinking between the Christianisation, colonisation, imperialism, and civilisation agendas played a critical role in the definition of “the sacred” and “the secular” in race, gender, and religion in Southern Africa. This intersectionality manifested in different missionary/colonial encounters that were marked by the ideology that Africans needed to be converted from darkness to the light of salvation. These missionaries came from different countries in Europe and North America. Serving as an example of the prominent figures of the missionary regime was David Livingstone (1813–1873). Livingstone was a Scottish missionary linked to the London Missionary Society (LMS), and he “believed that the African could be rescued from ‘darkness’–that he could be Christianised and perhaps civilised” (Brantlinger 1985, p. 178). The use of the term “darkness” in past and current European discourse to [mis]construe the condition of Africans can be traced, amongst others, in some Christian hymnody composed by the 19th-century European missionaries when they introduced Christianity in Africa. Amongst others, the Sotho hymn found in the Difela tsa Sione hymnbook goes “Jehova, Modimo wa Iseraele, u re faladitse lefifing la pele, Retaba hakaakang ha re u khumamela; Kajeno re batho, re tseba ho rapela” (Difela tsa Sione 2026), loosely translated in English as, Jehovah, God of Israel, you have rescued us from the former darkness. How joyful we are when we kneel before you; today we are [true] people, we know how to pray, amongst others, exemplifies these tendencies. So, converted Africans could now be seen as true people since they have seen the light of salvation.

Thus, the rescuing from former darkness, from the missionaries’ perspective, came as a declaration of African religions as demonic and in need of the light of God, as Kebede (2004, p. 36) opines that “the more missionaries relegated African religions, superstition, and witchcraft, the higher, they thought, the place of Christianity became”. Thus, according to Kruithof (2021, p. 66), “Many studies on Christian missions have shown that the civilization and development of indigenous communities were an important aim of mission organisations, as it was understood that converts ought to become ‘cultivated Christians’”. Thus, the desire to convert the natives into cultivated Christians highlights how the converts and their religions were perceived, using the sacred and the secular as the barometers. Indeed, both the imperialists and the missionaries saw Africa as a dark continent that needed to be saved from its darkness. Accordingly, the missionaries and the colonialists saw themselves as agents of light. This was to be accomplished through Christianisation, civilisation, and conversion of the heathens (Masuku 2023; Brantlinger 1985).

So, the missionary/colonial agents deemed it fit to first cast suspicions on the African race by declaring the black race as lesser compared to their white counterparts. On the issue of gender, they emphasised the subordination of women and the headship of men, and they also discredited African understanding of non-normative genders, thus declaring Africa’s understanding and use of gender as deviant and unholy. Furthermore, when it comes to religion, they deemed African religions, spiritualities, and traditional African medicines of healing, with their spiritual overtones, as demonic and denounced them as evil (Asamoah-Gyadu 2014). Therefore, the missionaries worked in tandem with the colonial masters from their countries to ensure the Christianisation, conversion, civilisation, and salvation of the natives. Again, this intersectional relationship was marked by an inseparable bond that made it difficult to distinguish between the Christianisation and the civilising activities (Dube 2022, p. 74). This is because the missionaries who brought the gospel to Africa also brought their Western cultures as part of the gospel package. In this way, mission and the empire worked together to achieve their intertwined agendas in Africa. Masuku (2023, p. 1) defined this intertwined relationship when opining that “Missionaries went forth with the idea of changing others, their interaction entailed bids for influence and power and were therefore intrinsically political”. Therefore, against the backdrop of Masuku’s argument, the empire was obsessed with imperialism and the civilising of the Africans, whilst the missionaries were committed to converting Africans from what was perceived as secular non-religious practices to the sacred Christian religion. A brief overview of these individual players in this relationship follows in the next section.

4.1. The Empire

Although the extensive historical background of the role of the empire in the mission endeavours in Africa is critical, the scope of this article can only accommodate a brief discussion on the subject. Arguably, the British Empire was the dominant force during the 18th and 19th centuries’ missionary endeavours in Africa. According to Porter (1992, p. 371), “The period 1780–1914 is well known for the expansion of Britain’s territorial empire in India, other parts of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.” The British expansion came with the exertion of biopower, dominion, and the superiority complex that undermined the cultures, cosmologies, religions, and epistemologies of the natives. The empire accomplished this by extending its power and influence through Christianisation, colonisation, use of military force, and conversion. Hence, contrary to the argument that the history of the British empire can be written without much attention to mission and the history of mission can be written without considering the empire (Etherington 2005, p. 3), the history of the sacred and the secular in the dominating narratives on race, gender, and religion in Africa cannot be written without the reference to the role played by the missionaries and the empire.

Notably, the missionaries became the forerunners and pathfinders for the imperialists’ agenda through their conversion crusade and campaigns in Africa (Korieh and Njoku 2007, p. 5). However, this led to the blurring of the dividing line between the church and the government. So, the conceptualisation of the sacred and the secular was influenced by the expectations and dictations of the empire. Scholarly evidence shows that both mission and the empire worked together in the venture to convert Africans (Dube 2022; Harries and Maxwell 2012). Thus, Christianity gained a label of being “an agent of imperialism” because of the crucial role it played in establishing and maintaining the political, cultural, and economic domination of the empire (Korieh and Njoku 2007, p. 5). This manifested in the intertwined roles of the empire and mission in the constructions of “the holy” (sacred) and the “unholy” (secular) and in their venture to Christianise, convert, and civilise the Africans. Thus, the missionaries used cultural conversion, education, health, and serving as the forerunners of the colonialists, as Viera (2007, p. 256) notes that “Conversion and education or training went hand in hand”. On the other hand, the empire used military subjugation, infrastructure, finance, and administrative control against the natives (Asafa 2015).

4.2. Colonisation and Coloniality

There is a close link between colonisation and coloniality. Whilst the former can be defined as the historical act of the settlers when they invaded territories, coloniality denotes the process of the enduring legacy of colonisation which, according to Bertolt (2018, p. 2), is “a set of paradigms of domination and regulation of the life of the colonised introduced during the construction of European hegemony around the world since the fifteenth century”. This definition encapsulates the essence of the colonisation project in Africa, which was aimed at the domination and reconstruction of the natives. The goal was to transform the Africans by making them question their existence and making them desire to be like the European settlers. This was accomplished by using “The coloniality of being”, which questioned and objectified Africans. According to Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2013, p. 11), this was the ‘objectification’/‘thingification’/‘commodification’ of Africans. This also displayed the use of biopower as a surveillance mechanism used to control the Africans, as Foucault (1978) defined the use of biopower.

Thus, biopower was anchored in the coloniality of power to be able to develop skewed conceptualisations of the sacred and secular in race, gender, and religion. The aim of these conceptualisations was to create power imbalances between Western and African races, genders, and religions. Again, this, according to Ndlovu-Gatsheni, constitutes the asymmetrical and modern power structures (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013, p. 11). Furthermore, these power structures relied on the coloniality of knowledge to ensure that African black bodies, women, non-normative genders, and African religions, cosmologies, and epistemologies were pushed to the peripheries and undermined by the notion of universal and hegemonic Eurocentric knowledge systems (Wumkes 2023). Again, this coloniality of knowledge is critical in teasing out epistemological issues and politics of knowledge generation, as well as questions of who generates which knowledge and for what purpose (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013, p. 11). So, the emphasis on the distinction between the sacred and secular was created by outsiders to disregard African epistemologies and cultures.

4.3. Missions

The mission agencies in Africa made negative contributions to the continent that cannot be easily overlooked. Amongst prominent missionaries were Dr Johannes van der Kemp (1747–1811), Dr John Philip (1775–1851), and Robert Moffat (1795–1883), who translated the English Bible into Setswana. On the other hand, the London Missionary Society (LMS) was one of the active missionary societies of the time (Cooper 2002). The negative contribution of the missionaries emanated from their paradoxical roles of preaching the gospel whilst actively contributing to the colonisation processes. Therefore, Cooper (2002, p. 50) argued that “missionaries stand as complex, fascinating figures within the ambiguity of the colonising process.” For the historian, reconciling missionaries’ paramount religiosity with their contributions to imperialism makes for a challenging task. Although this article makes an argument about the intersectionality of the empire, mission, and conversion, the inclusion of the empire does not necessarily mean that all the missionaries who came to Africa were originally from England or had any relationship with the empire.

On the contrary, some missionaries came from countries in North America, and others came from other European countries such as Germany, France, Portugal, and Switzerland. However, even though that is the case, this article still emphasises the common influence of the empire on missionaries in general and their interlinking with the colonial administrators and the settlers. In the same vein, Kruithof (2021, p. 62) maintains that “the main strategies of the Emmanuel and Mennonite missionaries were preaching, providing education and healthcare, and boosting local economic development”. However, there was a paradigm shift around the mid-nineteenth century initiated by the changing social role of the missionaries from England. These missionaries were transformed from being religious eccentrics to being the representatives of the empire (Harries and Maxwell 2012). Thus, their religious responsibilities were obscured by their commitment to the expectations of the empire. This has led to the conclusion that missionaries “have been part of a grant scheme by the white colonialists to, in some way, sedate or blindfold Africans with religion while the colonialists were busy colonising African territories” (Dube 2022, p. 74). Indeed, missionaries, and therefore missions, played a critical role in the conceptualisation of “the sacred” and “the secular” in Africa.

Certainly, missionaries embodied a binaristic approach in their conceptualisation of the sacred and the secular. This was entrenched in the emphasis on the good and the evil often used to discredit the Africans and their practices. Thus, Kruithof (2021, p. 65) opined that “Missionaries actively produced boundaries between the religious sphere and other societal domains in their everyday work”. Lamentably, it was exclusively Christianity and Western ways of life that were regarded as religious or sacred; thus, they were supposed to be emulated by the Africans. Consequently, the binaries of the sacred and secular, black and white, men and women, civilised and barbaric, Christian and unchristian, etc., emerged and gained popularity. However, it was always the African practices that were perceived and portrayed in negative terms and needing conversion.

4.4. Conversion and Civilisation

The missionaries’ urge to convert and to civilise the Africans manifested concurrently during the missionary/colonial era. Both these phenomena were informed by the perceptions that Africans and their religions were in the dark; they were immoral, uncivilised, secular, and barbaric. According to Galgalo (2012, p. 14), “Most of the earlier missionaries operated from a theological framework that advocated total conversion of the African person from heathenism to Christianity.” In the same vein, these perceptions were exemplified, amongst others, by Burton’s earlier account when referring to the inferiority of Africans by claiming the following:

He is inferior to the active-minded and objective Europeans and to the subjective and reflective Asiatics. He partakes largely of the worst characteristics of the lower Oriental types -stagnation of mind, indolence of body, moral deficiency, superstition, and childish passion (Burton 1860, p. 326).

Against the backdrop of Burton’s assertion, most missionaries saw Africans as inferior and as having moral deficiency. This was the same assumption for women, persons identifying with non-normative genders, and African religious practices. Therefore, black African bodies then became docile, as they were seen as less than their white counterparts. This can also be traced in Burton’s statement, referring to Africans as “indolence of bodies” (Burton 1860, p. 326). However, this was not the only reason for the Westerners to think that conversion was the solution for the Africans. According to Brantlinger (1985, p. 178):

Livingstone also advocated the “opening up” of Africa by “commerce and Christianity.” He had more respect for Africans than most explorer sand missionaries, though he still viewed them as “children” and “savages.” Occasionally he even expressed doubt that a European presence in Africa would be beneficial, but he also believed that the African was “benighted” and that the European was the bearer of the “light” of civilization and true religion.

Therefore, conversion according to the missionaries was going to open a way for commerce and Christianity in Africa. Again, Livingstone, just like the other missionaries, was convinced that Africans were children and deficient in understanding. According to Masuku (2023, p. 1), “Missionaries went forth with the idea of changing others; their interaction entailed bids for influence and power and was therefore intrinsically political”. So, the missionaries forced Africans to come out from their perceived darkness by accepting Christianity as the only way of being religious. This is because Africans were seen as tabula rasa (clean slates), with no knowledge of God, as Galgalo (2012, p. 14) argued that “Although this was done with the best of intentions, it involved [an] uncritical assumption that the African person religiously speaking is an empty vessel, ready to be filled with Christian content”. Accordingly, the Westerners saw conversion as the remedy that could bring Africans closer to God. Consequently, the empire, mission, colonisation, conversion, and civilisation dominated the understanding of the sacred and the secular in race, gender, and religion in Africa.

5. Race, Gender, and Religion in Southern Africa

The discourses on the sacredness and secularisation of race, gender, and religion in Southern Africa carry Christian and biblical rhetoric. These discourses display nuances that support the stance of the imperial and colonial projects. This emanates from the dominance and hegemonic position of Christianity since the advent of the missionaries in Africa. These aspects will be discussed further in the coming sections that discuss race, gender, and religion separately. During the missionary/colonial epochs, missionaries and churches were the primary custodians of knowledge and teaching communities about the sacred and the secular. This was done at the expense of African epistemologies and cosmologies. However, Mackenzie argues that this is a simplistic assessment of the role of missionaries in educating the nations (Mackenzie 1993, p. 45). He further argued that “Such views have cumulatively created ‘mythologies’ of missionary education which characterise mission schooling as, for example, an agency of negative and even destructive value systems” (Mackenzie 1993, p. 45).

However, evidence shows that the close relationship between the missionaries and the empire, and its negative effects, cannot be denied. Thus, discourses about race, gender, and religion included formal Biblical teachings and lessons taught by missionaries. Conversely, these discourses carry a similar pattern in the contemporary milieu. However, now these discourses also include written and spoken communications happening on formal and informal platforms. Platforms such as mass media, social media, informal discussions, and conversations from ordinary members of the church and society, traditional leaders, politicians, governments, church leaders, laymen, and pastors preaching from the pulpit, all of which form part of the rhetoric defining what is sacred and what is secular.

5.1. Race

The binaries of the sacred and the secular upheld by the missionaries reinforced the notions of the superior and the inferior. This manifested in the ways in which the white and black races were perceived, especially in the southern parts of Africa. For instance, in countries like South Africa, the superiority complex of whiteness manifested during both the colonial and apartheid eras. During these two epochs, Blacks were seen as inferior to their white counterparts. Indeed, missionaries portrayed Whiteness as superior to Blackness by disapproving of and demonising black cultures, religions, languages, traditional practices, and worldviews. Thus, it can be deduced that the sacredness of Westerners was thought to originate from their whiteness and their intelligence. On the other hand, “Africans were seen as brutes, who required the direction and control of superior white Europeans” (Meisenhelder 2003, p. 109). This happened, among other reasons, due to the pseudo-science of the early 19th century that claimed certain races had smaller brains than Europeans (Tobias 1970). In the same vein, (Lynn 2006, p. 2) argues that “Race differences in intelligence began to be analyzed scientifically in the middle years of the nineteenth century” However, the analysis can still be traceable in contemporary society as a manifestation of white supremacy.

An interesting missionary report sent by Raney to his country embodied this notion of white supremacy. Raney mentioned in his report that “These people are as mean a race as one can imagine, bound by the sins of lying, idleness and drunkenness, and with little or no natural affection even for their own flesh and blood” (Dube 2022, pp. 81–82). The reference to Blacks as “this people” by Raney carries the connotations of “us” and “them”, with the implication that Westerners are better than Africans. This is arguably another form of “othering” and the coloniality of being that undermined African bodies.

In the same vein, Meisenhelder (2003, p. 103) further demonstrated this coloniality when asserting that “The African other possessed two moments, a present being that was black and sinful and a potential being that could accept Christianity and become ‘whitened’ and ‘virtuous’”. Consequently, Africans were seen as the sinful “other” who needed to be converted to Christianity and to Western ways of life. Indeed, blackness was equated to barbarism and whiteness to holiness (sacred). Another reason for this view gaining popularity was that both the missionaries and the colonialists had an image of the lascivious Blacks who had unbridled sexual desires. In the same vein, Meisenhelder (2003, p. 105) further captured this ideology when asserting that:

The African other was constituted as possessing a human body, mind, and soul but its body was less evolved, a skin that was black, a mind that was primitive, and a soul darkened by sin. The African other became a brute ruled by bodily passion rather than Christian discipline. Europeans came to see Africans as primitive human beings whose lives were savage and included such sinful practices as polygamy, exaggerated sexuality, human sacrifice, cannibalism, and paganism.

Against the backdrop of Meisenhelder’s assertion, the missionary/colonial enterprise saw a need to present a model of morality that Black people were supposed to emulate. This meant that Blacks were supposed to look up to Whites and learn from them how the sacred was supposed to be lived. Succinctly put, this narrative perpetuated the notion that the West and its cultures and religions were the epitome of the sacred to be emulated by the Global South in their venture to seek enlightenment of the dark continent (Dube 2022, p. 74). Therefore, black African bodies became a place of contestation, as Césaire (1972, p. 42) argued that colonisation = “thingification”. So being black was objectified, and, as Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2013, p. 11) sees it, it was the questioning of African humanity and their objectification. However, this category placed Africans within the non-human zone that is also sometimes referred to as the “zone of sub-humanity” (Maldonado-Torres 2016, p. 16). Therefore, the objectification and thingification of black African bodies that led to their classification as secular were presented through the coloniality of being, thus placing black Africans in the zone of non-beings. However, secular categorisations were also used in the issues of gender.

5.2. Gender

Gender issues, including the conceptualisation and application of the notions of the sacred and the secular in Africa, were modelled and continued in Western heteropatriarchal and heteronormative terms. This means that what is seen as sacred, holy, or acceptable in gender issues must be in favour of men and those identifying with heterosexuality in society. This ideology counteracts what Wumkes (2023, p. 737) calls the pluriverse that stands “In contrast to the universalist paradigm of “modernity/coloniality”. Thus, women and people identifying with other non-normative genders, such as gender non-conformity, gender fluidity, genderqueer and transgender, among others, are pushed to the margins of society based on the universality of coloniality and the resistance of a pluriversality in society. Thus, their existence and being are considered ungodly, of the world, and simplistically as secular. This is what other scholars such as Maria Lugones and Breny Mendoza referred to as “the coloniality of gender and power” that reinforces the hegemonic binaries of man and woman, the unquestionable position of heterosexuality, and the imposition of gender hierarchies in society (Lugones 2013; Mendoza 2015). This is akin to what Oyěwùmí (1997, p. 152) calls “the inferiorization of females”, which contradicts the pre-colonial Yoruba seniority system by emphasising the hierarchy of the sexes in which the female sex is always deemed as inferior and subordinate to the male sex (Oyěwùmí 1997, p. 153). The same tendency can also be extended to the inferiorization of non-normative gender identities, where people identifying with these genders are regarded as less human.

Although the term “the coloniality of gender” was coined to address issues within the Latin American context, its nuances are visible in the conceptualisations of “the sacred” and “the secular” in gender discourses in Southern Africa (Bertolt 2018). For instance, churches in Africa taught and still teach about the hierarchy of Christ as the head of the church, God as the head of Christ, and, in turn, men the as the heads of women (I Corinthians 11:3). In the same vein, Gage (2018, p. 11) argued that Christianity tended somewhat from its foundation to restrict the liberty woman enjoyed under the old civilization. Succinctly put, Christianity took away the freedom women used to enjoy before its inception in Africa.

Therefore, African women theologians, amongst others, adopted the intersectionality theory to argue that Black African women, because their liberty was taken away from them, suffer triple or more oppressions and marginalisations. In their adaptation of the intersectionality theory, African women theologians argue that African black women suffer because of their race, their gender, their class, and their religion; however, amid their suffering, they continue to embrace religion while dealing with their marginality and oppression. Hence, this adds the element of religion to the application of the intersectionality theory by African women theologians (Kobo 2018). This ideology is supported by the religiosity of Africans, which forms part of all aspects of their lives.

Again, this is also because the usage of the term “gender” in African discourses is affected by what constitutes “the sacred” and “the secular”. This is often the case in the perception that the hegemonic binary of man and woman is the only “sacred”, i.e., God’s approved usage of gender. Therefore, this ideology demonises the non-normative genders by rendering them as “secular”, abnormal, unnatural, and deviant. However, this was not the case in the pre-colonial African context, where the binary of man and woman was not fundamentally emphasised. This is not to argue that the notion of man and woman was not embraced by Africans. On the contrary, although Africans recognised the man–woman usage of “gender”, they also, on the other hand, recognised genderlessness and gender plurality (Achebe 2013, p. 277).

This was also manifested in the African concepts of deities, stories, songs, folklore, art, oral history, and myth (Olali 2022, p. 324). In the same vein, Oyěwùmí (1997, p. 140) argues:

In traditional Yoruba religion, anasex distinctions did not play any part, whether in the world of humans or in that of the gods. Like other African religions, Yoruba religion had three pillars. First, there was Olodumare (God—the Supreme Being). Olodumare did not have a gender identity, and it is doubtful that s/he was perceived as a human being before the advent of Christianity and Islam in Yorubaland. Second, the orisa (gods) were the manifestations of the attributes of the supreme being and were regarded as his/her messengers to humans.

Thus, just like in the Yoruba culture, as Oyěwùmí observed, it was also the case in most African communities where, in some cases, the Supreme Being was portrayed as a man or woman, whilst in other cases as a genderless being or a being possessing both genders (Taringa 2004). This is akin to what Adesina (2002, p. 106) calls the “Akiwowo’s paradigm”, which is contrary to the “Aristotelian binary logic” in that it acknowledges the manifestation of mutually inclusive identities when confronting issue of class, ethnicity, religion, and gender by taking them as alternative identities; this is contrary to the European epistemology sometimes called the Aristotelian logic that pervades discourses and is based on mutual exclusivity, not allowing for mutuality, overlap, and nuance (Adesina 2002, p. 106). Furthermore, Adesina explains this when opining “Rather it is in their inter-penetration and mutual embeddedness that we understand real, lived existence as multi-layered, contradictory and context-situated (rather than the postmodernist imagined identities). We are not ‘either’/’or’; we are often many things embedded in one” (Adesina 2002, p. 106). Thus, the differences between man and woman were not used to secure any particular gender a better social standing in society.

Again, in their reference to men and women, Africans recognised women as having an equal role to play in the community. So, most African communities were led by matriarchies, as exemplified by several histories of women rulers, such as Queen Modjadji (also known as the rain queen) of the Lobedu people in South Africa (Moagi and Mtombeni 2024). Thus, Africans had no opposition to women serving as leaders in their communities. However, the view that women were evil and lesser than men, hence (secular) men were good and supreme (sacred), was promoted in society.

This notion was entrenched in the early Jewish and Christian narrative of Adam and Eve that accused Eve of having led Adam to fall into sin (Parks 2024). On the other hand, the discrediting of non-native genders was embedded in the notion that the heterosexual, Christian, white, and male God was against all other gender expressions and identities aside from heterosexuality; thus, the binaries of heterosexuality and homosexuality, cisgender and transgender, etc., gained popularity (Freire 2025). Accordingly, only the binary approach of man and woman was regarded as sacred, while other non-normative genders were seen as evil and secular. This notion still exists in most African countries where gender non-normativity is looked upon with disdain. Furthermore, the God presented by missionaries was also a monotheistic God who declared all other gods and religions, including African religions, to be evil and demonic.

5.3. Religion

The Christian God was presented to the Africans as a monotheistic God who did not want any other gods to be worshipped. Again, Africans were thought to have no religion (God) before the missionaries came to Africa (Galgalo 2012, p. 14). Thus, amongst others, the permeability of African religions is arguably a counter-narrative challenging the ideology that the West possessed God, and therefore was sacred, whilst Africa was godless (secular). This ideology was rooted in the perceived inferiority of Africans, who could not have been fathomed to have had an idea or knowledge of God before the coming of the missionaries to their continent. Therefore, Igboin (2022, p. 3) opined:

The early Western missionaries, anthropologists and colonialists did not find any signs or elements of ‘religion’ in Africa, because for them, religion was a sophisticated, philosophical and ideological concept and practice that credulous Africans were incapable of conceptualising and comprehending, let alone possessing. They thought that Africans had no concept of God and no religious worship because to have belief in God would automatically lead to the act and experience of worship of God.

The missionaries held conflicting perspectives regarding the existence of God in Africa before their arrival. However, the fundamental stance of the missionaries was that they were the bearers of the true religion that Africans were supposed to embrace to be able to come out of the dark religions to the light of salvation (Brantlinger 1985, p. 178). Therefore, one view claimed that there was no religion in Africa before the coming of the missionaries. However, this was disputed by Aguwa (2007, pp. 128–29), who opined that:

Religion was important in the African indigenous society. Its force permeated every aspect of life and institutions. Individuals became religious merely by being born into such a religious milieu. Religious ideas are evident in the native myths, folklores, traditions, beliefs, institutions and relationships in such a way that no sharp division could be made between the sacred mission and the secular. The traditional religion informed and regulated individual and communal ethics as well as the entire social values system.

Therefore, Africans had the knowledge of a Supreme Being, as some African languages, songs, and stories have a reference to a higher Being. However, this Supreme Being was revered through appeasing the ancestors and was sometimes monotheistic and polytheistic at other times (Afaor 2022). In the same vein, some missionaries held a view that did not deny the existence of God or religion in pre-colonial Africa.

However, their presentation of African religions was marked with twisted narratives. These narratives acknowledged the existence of the knowledge of God (sacred) during the pre-colonial times but labelled the experience of God in Africa before their arrival with condescending terms. Among other scholars, Platvoet and Van Rinsum (2003, p. 3) aptly captured this practice when asserting that the labels that were used to refer to African religions included ‘savage fetishism’, ‘primitive animism’, ‘totemism’, ‘ridiculous superstition’, ‘conjuring magic’, ‘black magic’, ‘paganism’, ‘idolatry’, ‘false gods’, ‘satanic entities’, ‘polytheism’, etc. It is such terms, amongst others, that rendered the conceptualisation of the sacred and the secular in African religions as the coloniality of knowledge. In the same vein, Asamoah et al. (2023, p. 6) argue that “The Christian missionaries disregarded African cultures and traditions which they perceived to be demonic or devilish, superstitious and foolish”. This coloniality undermined African religiosity and African knowledge systems, as Hutton and Cappellini (2022, p. 155) opined that “knowledge circulates within a ‘credibility economy’ (Fricker 2013), determining who knows.” However, this equates to the epistemic privileging of Western thought that must be challenged to the core.

6. Transforming the Norm

The move to challenge and transform the historic and the status quo of the sacred and the secular in race, gender, and religion can be achieved through what Wumkes (2023, p. 741) calls “A move toward pluriversality and a greater degree of intercultural understanding and cooperation must move beyond a secular vs. religious dichotomy, which necessarily places diverse realities into an overarching Eurocentric and universalistic conceptual framework”. Therefore, the move calls for the adoption of decoloniality as an option for bringing transformation. This can symbolise a turn from the epistemic privileges of the West. However, this move does not discredit Western forms of knowledge; on the contrary, it places the African knowledge systems on the same pedestal as the rest of the other knowledge systems elsewhere. Again, the turn also acknowledges the sacredness of African epistemologies and religions. This means that the hierarchies of race, gender, and religion must be dealt with by challenging the hegemonic position of Western thought. Furthermore, this move will also mean that both Western and African races, women, men and other non-normative genders, and Christianity and African traditional religions are seen as equal parts of the African experience. This can be done by Africans liberating themselves from the oppressive connotations of the sacred and the secular operating within African discourses. This is like what Mignolo (2012, pp. 25–26) referred to as “the liberation of our thinking from sacralised texts”. These texts are not only written but are also traceable in the use of the sacred and secular in race, gender, and religion in Africa.

Therefore, the move will again be an act of decolonisation, though resorting to border thinking, delinking, and epistemic disobedience. As Mignolo (2013, p. 141) puts it, “There is no other way of knowing, doing and being decolonially than simultaneously engaging in border thinking, delinking and epistemic disobedience.” Africans need to stand on the border by refusing to take one side of the narrative presented in race, gender, and religion discourses. This can happen by discarding the negative contribution of missions in Africa. This means a deliberate rejection of the binarism and superiority promulgated by Western thought. This will again place the Global South, in particular Southern Africa, as an equal player in the conceptualisation and application of what is sacred and what is secular. Consequently, this will address historic and present narratives using Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s coloniality of power, the coloniality of knowledge, and the coloniality of being (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013, p. 11) as lenses to analyse and challenge the norm. Therefore, this task calls for a move to action, not just a lamentation of past and present injustices.

7. Conclusions

This article argued that the conceptualisations of the “sacred” and the “secular” are shaped by diverse entities in different contexts that often exhibit power dynamics, epistemic privileges, and the classification of people using the notions of human–non-human zones. Accordingly, the article further argued that in Africa, the historic intersectionality of the empire, mission, and conversion shaped and continues to shape the nuances of the sacred and secular in the intersectionality of race, gender, and religion discourses. These nuances present a hierarchy of knowledge systems and the binary tendencies that see Africans as lesser human beings, women as lesser than men, non-normative genders as deviant, and African religions as barbaric. The solution to the African condition presented by the missionary/colonial enterprise was conversion and civilisation. The missionary/colonial project saw Africa as a dark continent that needed the light of salvation. Thus, finally, a move to challenge the history and the status quo of the sacred and the secular in race, gender, and religion discourses was presented as an imperative for Africans in their venture to liberate themselves from the oppressive connotations of the sacred and the secular operating within African discourses. In this way, “the liberation of our thinking from sacralised texts will become a process of transformation”. However, it was also argued that this challenging of the epistemic privileges of the West does not discredit Western forms of knowledge; on the contrary, it places African knowledge systems on the same pedestal as other knowledge systems by acknowledging the sacred and the secular in both Western and African epistemologies and religious rhetorics.