But I was frustrated by what seems to be our incapacity to escape our own mental traditions - the casts of mind that always seem to come into play when we imagine Africa. Nowhere were these more in evidence than in the report's discussion of the role of religion in African social life. On the one hand, it justly draws attention to the significance of religions in enriching social relations, creating accountability and empowering local people.
On the other hand, the report seems to be impressed by religion chiefly because of its potential usefulness as a tool for economic development. We are told that religion succeeds where the state fails, that faith leaders have a significant role to play in shaping social attitudes, that religion can be a model for the state and that it commands the kind of loyalty and energy that was given to nationalist causes during and just after Africa's struggles for independence.
To regard religion in Africa in these terms is to put their religion where our politics should be. Our error begins with the place in our imaginations that we force Africa to occupy. We are subject to "African exceptionalism": a sense that Africa is so different, so impossible to organise, that any undertaking is practically pointless. It is the sense that African people are unruly as citizens and irresponsible as politicians and bureaucrats. Africa's state is always behind. We never perceive it as leading the way. Economically and politically, Africa is held back, not yet caught up. Exceptionalism heightens the temptation to look at the continent as a problem or an illness.
The diagnostic gaze makes us disinclined to see things as a whole. We are always looking first to locate and to isolate the problems, and then to find isolable solutions, whether they be social institutions or practices (eg religion) or medical treatments (eg vaccines). The search is to find the one thing that will be the remedy, which must be generalisable and preferably patentable. We manage the process, control the outcome, and have no longer-term obligation to share the condition.
There is a risk in seizing on religion as a remedy for the problems of the nation state. The risk is of the return of the 19th-century idea of "primitive mentality": the idea that "they" are less rational than "we" are. The view that religion maintains the social fabric credits institutions instead of people. It shifts our attention from intellect to emotions, from analysis to belief. Isolating religion from the broader web of social life directs our attention away from the larger political and economic processes in Africa, but which are also happening outside it and which include what is happening to us.
Africa is maintained in the world economy as a kind of frontier. In this sense, Africa is our future. Far from being behind, it lies before us. The contradictions between profitable production and social protection are nowhere more visible than there. What happens in Africa happens violently, more vividly and rapidly than here, but where that change leads is also where we are headed. The logic of the marketplace seems unassailable in its entry into the politics of public services. In Britain, recent decades have seen the persistent advance of privatisation in areas formerly held in the public interest. Religion has the benefit of not being about profit or profitability. In the context of religion's redistributive logic, cost and benefit are perhaps more equitably balanced. When we see things in this way we are in a better position to compare like with like, and the results can be enlightening.
Emphasising the role of religion in enhancing development keeps our thinking about Africa in the mode of the charitable donor, whose key question is: are these poor the deserving? Religion is a way in which we help ourselves to the idea that the answer is "yes", but without burdening our selves with the larger political project that confronts us whether inside Africa or out. If Africa is no exception, it becomes evident that this larger project is nothing less than assuring the capacity of democracy itself to stand up to the better regulation of international corporate interests.
So the issue is not whether we place our faith in their faith, but whether we have faith in our own democratic processes. Historically, the most significant changes to democratic institutions have been in response to pressures coming up from the streets. The Commission for Africa, events such as Live 8 and campaigns such as Make Poverty History are encouraging public interest in the redeployment of public money to mitigate the effects on Africa of the structural violence of international development and globalisation. When we think that what is happening in Africa is also happening here, though less conspicuously, our common interests are made plain.
It has been clear for some time that we are in a moment of significant change. With the end of the Soviet Union has come the sense that socialism can no longer provide the logic for a redistributive social justice. The left has no popular language for systematic criticism of the free-market fundamentalism that, via Washington's foreign policy, has appropriated democracy as an idea. An argument based on the premise of shared sacrifice has to begin somewhere. So the debate about religion and money in Africa is an argument worth having even if one is on the other side.
· Christopher Davis is a lecturer in anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies. She is speaking at a British Museum debate on Africa, sponsored by the Guardian, on Wednesday at 8pm. For tickets call 020 7323 8181
cd3@soas.ac.uk