Volume 34 - Article 3 | Pages 63–108  

Counting Souls: Towards an historical demography of Africa

By Sarah Walters

Abstract

Background: Little is known about even the relatively recent demographic history of Africa, because of the lack of data. Elsewhere, historical demographic trends have been reconstructed by applying family reconstitution to church records. Such data also exist throughout Africa from the late 19th century. For the Counting Souls Project, nearly one million records from the oldest Catholic parishes in East and Central Africa have been digitised. These data are currently being processed into a relational database. The aim of this paper is to describe their potential for demographic reconstruction in the region, and to outline how their provenance defines the analytical approach.

Results: Empirically, religion is correlated with population patterns in contemporary Africa, and, historically, reproduction and family formation were central to Christian mission in the region. Measuring change using sources created by agents of change raises questions of epistemology, causation, and selection bias. This paper describes how these concerns are balanced by missionary determination to follow the intimate lives of their parishioners, to monitor their ‘souls’, and to measure their morality, fidelity, and faith. This intimate recording means that the African parish registers, together with related sources such as missionary diaries and letters and oral histories, describe qualitatively and quantitatively what happens to individual agency (reproductive decision-making) when the moral hegemony shifts (via evangelisation and colonisation), and how the two interact in a reciprocal process of change.

Conclusions: Reconstructing long-term demographic trends using parish registers in Africa is therefore more than simply generating rates and testing their reliability. It is a bigger description of how ‘decision rules’ are structured and re-structured, unpicking the cognitive seam between individual and culture by exploring dynamic micro-interactions between reproduction, honour, hope, and modernity over the long term. With such a mixed-methods approach, parish registers offer real potential for historical demography in Africa.

Author's Affiliation

• Sarah Walters - London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, United Kingdom EMAIL

Most recent similar articles in Demographic Research

Transitions to adulthood in men and women in rural Malawi in the 21st century using sequence analysis: Some evidence of delay
Volume 51 - Article 14    | Keywords: Africa, Health and Demographic Surveillance System, longitudinal analysis, Malawi, sequence analysis, transition to adulthood

Climate change and health transitions: Evidence from Antananarivo, Madagascar
Volume 51 - Article 6    | Keywords: climate change, health transition, historical demography, infectious diseases, mortality

Variations in male height during the epidemiological transition in Italy: A cointegration approach
Volume 48 - Article 7    | Keywords: cointegration analysis, early life conditions, height, historical demography, infant survival, time series

Exploring the mortality advantage of Jewish neighbourhoods in mid-19th century Amsterdam
Volume 46 - Article 25    | Keywords: 19th century, Amsterdam, cause-specific mortality, historical demography, inequality, Jewish neighborhoods

Divergent trends in lifespan variation during mortality crises
Volume 46 - Article 11    | Keywords: historical demography, lifespan variation, mortality, mortality crises