The Kenyan John Mbiti, an Anglican priest, theologian, and academic, died on October 5 at the age of eighty-seven. He led the reappraisal of traditional African religions that sees them as equal to other world religions. He argued that traditional African religions were specifically congruent with Christianity, and that Christianity was more than Europe.

The arrest and subsequent disappearance of Mubarak Bala, an avowed atheist from a prominent Muslim family, illustrates the fragility of human rights and the rule of law when an individual directly challenges the norms of conservative society in Nigeria.

Members of the Islamic State in West Africa (ISWA), a faction of Boko Haram, recently executed eleven hostages on camera. The video, released to a Nigerian Journalist on December 26, alleged that all the hostages executed were Christians, and that their murders were in retaliation for the killing of Abubakar al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, by U.S. forces in October. It is ISWA that has identified them as Christians, but the identities of the eleven murdered have not been released.