This paper surveys the relationship between warfare and religion in precolonial Africa, with a particular focus on eastern Africa, including the Great Lakes region and the Ethiopian Highlands. It is argued that religion played a central role in the legitimization of violence as well as in its memorialization. In the case of Ethiopia, deep-rooted Abrahamic faiths facilitated greater levels of violence and a steady expansion in the scale and scope of war, compared to local cosmologies further south. But in the latter region, too, the irruption of external dynamics – specifically the introduction of new religions – likewise involved heightened levels of violence in the late nineteenth century and beyond.
