Pluralizing the Study of Religion in Africa: Guru Maharaj Ji’s Divine Love Mission in Southwest Nigeria

Abstract Plurality is integral to African multifaith societies, where religious practitioners draw on, combine, and move between divergent religious traditions. Yet anthropology has only recently begun to engage seriously with pluriform religious formations. The Divine Love Mission was founded in 1980 by Guru Maharaj Ji in southwest Nigeria and blends elements of Yorùbá cosmology, Hinduism, and Rastafarianism, while rejecting the ‘imperialist religions’ of Christianity and Islam. Through an ethnographic case study I challenge dominant approaches that conceptualise religions as mutually exclusive. I propose instead an epistemological and methodological framework grounded in ‘pluriversity’, inspired by Mbembe (2016) and Mignolo (2018), which takes entanglement and multiplicity as foundational. Because pluriversity resonates with African religious understandings of the coexistence of multiple ways of being and seeing the world, it offers a more accurate lens for analysing lived religion in plural settings and provides a framework for comparison across such settings in Africa and beyond.