The entwined histories of Blacks and Indians defy easy explanation. From Black Lives Matter protests against Gandhi statues to Kamala Harris's historic election, this relationship--notwithstanding moments of common struggle--seethes with conflicts that reveal important lessons about race in the modern world. Shobana Shankar's groundbreaking intellectual history tackles the controversial question of how Africans and Indians see their differences. Drawing on archival and oral sources from seven countries, she traces how economic tensions surrounding the Indian diaspora in East and Southern Africa collided with the twentieth century's widening Indian networks in West Africa and the Black Atlantic. Decolonisation brought a reckoning with Euro-American racial hierarchies, as well as discord over caste, religion, sex and skin colour, simmering beneath the rhetoric of Afro-Indian solidarity. This book illuminates how postcolonial peoples remade race by reinvigorating cultural movements, from Pan-Africanism to popular devotionalism, in Africa, India and the United States. This new race consciousness was meant as a redemption from the moral dangers of economic rivalry. Yet rising wealth and nationalist amnesia now threaten this postcolonial ethos. Calls to dismantle statues, from Accra to Washington DC, are not merely symbolic. They seek to preserve dissenting histories, and the possibility of alternative futures.

"Shankar challenges the assumption, so common in the history of Western education and modernity, that the North is backward in both because it did not allegedly encourage the spread of education and Christianity...The book is very clear on religious co-existence, and also on the changes to Islamic culture. Thus, its conclusions open up new avenues to examine further the impact of Christianity on Islam and vice-versa." -American Historical ReviewWho Shall Enter Paradise? recounts in detail the history of Christian-Muslim engagement in a core area of sub-Saharan Africa's most populous nation, home to roughly equal numbers of Christians and Muslims. It is a region today beset by religious violence, in the course of which history has often been told in overly simplified or highly partisan terms. This book reexamines conversion and religious identification not as fixed phenomena, but as experiences shaped through cross-cultural encounters, experimentation, collaboration, protest, and sympathy. Shobana Shankar relates how Christian missions and African converts transformed religious practices and politics in Muslim Northern Nigeria during the colonial and early postcolonial periods. Although the British colonial authorities prohibited Christian evangelism in Muslim areas and circumscribed missionary activities, a combination of factors-including Mahdist insurrection, the abolition of slavery, migrant labor, and women's evangelism-brought new converts to the faith. By the 1930s, however, this organic growth of Christianity in the north had given way to an institutionalized culture based around medical facilities established in the Hausa emirates. The end of World War II brought an influx of demobilized soldiers, who integrated themselves into the local Christian communities and reinvigorated the practice of lay evangelism. In the era of independence, Muslim politicians consolidated their power by adopting many of the methods of missionaries and evangelists. In the process, many Christian men and formerly non-Muslim communities converted to Islam. A vital part of Northern Nigerian Christianity all but vanished, becoming a religion of "outsiders."

"Shankar challenges the assumption, so common in the history of Western education and modernity, that the North is backward in both because it did not allegedly encourage the spread of education and Christianity...The book is very clear on religious co-existence, and also on the changes to Islamic culture. Thus, its conclusions open up new avenues to examine further the impact of Christianity on Islam and vice-versa." -American Historical ReviewWho Shall Enter Paradise? recounts in detail the history of Christian-Muslim engagement in a core area of sub-Saharan Africa's most populous nation, home to roughly equal numbers of Christians and Muslims. It is a region today beset by religious violence, in the course of which history has often been told in overly simplified or highly partisan terms. This book reexamines conversion and religious identification not as fixed phenomena, but as experiences shaped through cross-cultural encounters, experimentation, collaboration, protest, and sympathy. Shobana Shankar relates how Christian missions and African converts transformed religious practices and politics in Muslim Northern Nigeria during the colonial and early postcolonial periods. Although the British colonial authorities prohibited Christian evangelism in Muslim areas and circumscribed missionary activities, a combination of factors-including Mahdist insurrection, the abolition of slavery, migrant labor, and women's evangelism-brought new converts to the faith. By the 1930s, however, this organic growth of Christianity in the north had given way to an institutionalized culture based around medical facilities established in the Hausa emirates. The end of World War II brought an influx of demobilized soldiers, who integrated themselves into the local Christian communities and reinvigorated the practice of lay evangelism. In the era of independence, Muslim politicians consolidated their power by adopting many of the methods of missionaries and evangelists. In the process, many Christian men and formerly non-Muslim communities converted to Islam. A vital part of Northern Nigerian Christianity all but vanished, becoming a religion of "outsiders."