Since the late 1980s, new types of Muslim leaders and young disciples have been emerging throughout Senegal. Using their own multimedia tools and transnational networks, these religious groups - notably Sufi groups (Muridiyya and Tidjaniyya) but also Sunni Islamist movements - have proven their capacity of self-governance.

Muslim communities in Senegal have always maintained close ties with both State authorities and the population, a phenomenon referred to as the "brotherhood-based Republic" (Bayart). So-called "marabouts of youth" such as Mustapha Sy and Modou Kara Mbacké became popular in the 1990s among youth opposing the traditional collusion between religious leaders and politicians. Involved in politics, this new movement has been increasingly challenging the Establishment thanks to their ability to navigate through different spheres and values.

In this religious dynamic, youth and women have most visibly and profoundly changed Dakar's urban landscapes. Their bodies transform urban spaces on a daily basis through collective prayers, religious ceremonies, conferences or political meetings organized on the streets. In addition, their networks as well as their use of new technologies of information and communication (TIC) shape the way in which citizens organize their life. Religious media devices (radio, television, mobile applications…) as well as information networks change the perception of Muslim groups, which today have become true business entrepreneurs.

Based on participatory observations conducted from 2005, this paper focuses on the various uses of urban spaces by different Muslim groups and individuals, their inter-relations, and the (re)creation of new spheres of communication.

Studies of migrant churches in South Africa have focused more on churches themselves than the daily lives of church members beyond the social surveillance and immediate influence of the church. Using Forward in Faith Ministries International (FIFMI) as my focal point, a Pentecostal church found in more than 100 countries globally, this paper focuses on the capacity of Zimbabwean migrant churches in South Africa to reach into and shape migrant congregants' daily lives through ideologies, doctrines and practices. I wish to find out how a church that has very specific social and theological structures, practices, ideologies regarding socialisation inculcate these values among its members in everyday situations where they are confronted with economic challenges and high levels of social diversity. What potential contradictions in beliefs and ideological definitions of belonging are created by the congregants as they negotiate their identity as members of FIFMI and as people who are part of a broader social, political and economic environment beyond the church setting? Is it possible that the congregants may find ways to be superficial and convivial with non-congregants in order to get along with them? I use qualitative data to argue that while they hear the message of the church about the polluting world, in real life, the members arrange their lives and make pragmatic decisions by themselves. Through this experience outside the church, they arrive at a kind of ethics of conviviality as a way to carve out social relations with people who are not members of the church.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, cinema became a popular pastime in major urban centres throughout Ghana. This presentation examines cinema as an influential force in shaping urban religious experience in Ghana following Independence in 1957. In Accra, Kumasi and Tamale, cinema was caught between shifting segmentations and distributions of populations in rapidly growing cities, with majority Muslim communities living in segregated Zongo neighbourhoods in town centres, while Christian communities developed outside city centres. Lebanese and Sindhi cinema owners and film distributors were careful to cater to emerging communities developing on religious lines: cinemas nearby majority Muslim Zongo neighbourhoods screened Hindi films, including Albela (1951), Aan (1952) and Mother India (1957), that featured Islamicate iconography and key words borrowed from Urdu's Perso-Arabic lexicon (Dwyer 2006; Kesavan 1994). In contrast, cinemas surrounding majority Christian communities played biblical epics, such as Samson and Delilah (1949) and The Ten Commandments (1956), and other stories concerning Christianity, including The Sound of Music (1965). Exploring early urban cinema viewership in post-colonial Ghana reveals a multiplicity of urban communities "thinking religiously about and around film" (Wright 2007). Cinematic experiences, songs and stories encouraged shared recreational dimensions to religious experience in the city for both Muslim and Christian communities. As such, cinema became a significant factor in the development of urban religious community culture in Ghana's early post-colonial urban spaces.

This paper addresses the gradual unmaking of the ritual cohabitation between Christian (Catholic) and 'traditional' lineage funerary rites in southern Benin in the last two decades. Until the 1990s, beyond Muslim and Christian (of Evangelical, Pentecostal or Prophetic inspiration) minorities advocating 'radical' breaks with the world of 'tradition', the scene of funerals has been largely dominated in southern Benin by either lineage rites or a form of historical compromise between the traditionalist ritual specialists and the Catholic Church. This involved Church tolerance for the successive performance at funerals of both Christian (Catholic) service and lineage 'traditional' rites. Triggered by both evolutions of the religious landscape and by growing social cleavages deploying subsequently along religious lines, this historical compromise has been increasingly questioned in the last decades. Urban settings have been at the forefront of this evolution. In Abomey, a historical bastion of 'tradition' where I have been regularly conducting fieldwork for fifteen years, it became openly contested from 2010 onwards. Here, the development and increasing social salience of Christianity in town has recently paved the way for an evolution of the possible religious expressions at funerals, and led the Catholic Church to renegotiate its historical compromise with the (now declining) social world of "tradition".