Ivory Coast

Ivory Coast is divided roughly evenly between a Muslim north and a Christian south, with traditional religion practised across both, frequently by the same people who identify as Muslim or Christian. The northern Islam belongs to the Dyula trading network and the wider Mande Muslim world of the Sahel; the southern Christianity is a colonial mission product, Catholic in the main, with a large and growing evangelical and Pentecostal sector in Abidjan.

That division became lethal because it was mapped onto a question about citizenship. The doctrine of Ivoirite, advanced in the 1990s, distinguished authentic Ivorians from those of northern or immigrant descent, and since northerners are largely Muslim and often bear names shared with Burkinabe and Malian migrants, a dispute about nationality functioned as a dispute about religion. The conflicts of 2002 and of 2010 to 2011 ran along that line, and mosques and churches were both attacked.

The country holds two religious monuments of international note, and they are opposites. The Basilica of Our Lady of Peace at Yamoussoukro, built by President Felix Houphouet Boigny in his home village and consecrated by John Paul II in 1990, is the largest church in the world by floor area, modelled on Saint Peter's and built in a town of modest size at a cost that was intensely controversial. The Harrist Church, by contrast, was founded on nothing but a preacher walking along the coast.

Reconciliation efforts since 2011 have included joint work by the Catholic bishops, the Higher Council of Imams and the evangelical federation, and the balance of political power has shifted toward inclusion of the north.

William Wade Harris was a Grebo man from Liberia, a Methodist teacher and Episcopal catechist who had been imprisoned after involvement in a political dispute. In prison, by his own account, he received a visitation from the angel Gabriel instructing him to preach, and on release he walked east into the Ivory Coast in 1913 wearing a white robe and carrying a bamboo cross, a Bible, a bowl and a calabash rattle.

Over roughly two years he moved along the lagoon coast and into the western Gold Coast, and the numbers baptised are estimated in the low hundreds of thousands. It was the first mass movement of conversion in West Africa led by an African, and it happened in territory where European missions had worked for decades with very little result.

His message was short and unusually practical. Abandon the old power objects and burn them; observe Sunday; take one wife rather than several, though he did not require existing wives to be put away; and wait for the teachers with the book who would come. He did not build an institution, take money or claim an office, and he told converts to go to the churches when they arrived. When Methodist missionaries did arrive some years later they found tens of thousands of people waiting for them, and much of the subsequent Methodist strength in the country derives directly from that.

The French expelled him in 1915, suspecting political intent, and he died in Liberia in 1929.

The Harrist Church was organised formally after his death by followers who preferred to keep his practice rather than join a mission church. It remains an independent Ivorian church, one of the few African founded churches of that generation still functioning under its original discipline.