&nbsp; <p>This project studies the interface between a prophetic movement, agrarian conditions and gender by studying the Kyangyang, a massive yet understudied prophetic movement, mostly unknown to the scientific community apart from the monograph by historian of religions I. Callewaert (2000), who only looks at its theological and religious aspects, and the partial mention of it by de Jong (1987), who only looks at the psychiatric aspects. We intend to use our previous knowledge on the region and on Balanta (Sarr&oacute; 2009; Temudo 2009) to complement the scant literature on Balanta ethnography (Handem 1986; van der Drift 2000; Lundy 2009) but, most especially, to say something new about what E. Ardener called &lsquo;the prophetic voice' (Ardener 1988) screaming out of Africa.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>The literature on African religious movements similar to the one studied in this project is enormous. In colonial times, prophetic movements were common across the continent, and they drew the attention of researchers since the days when G. Balandier (1953) saw in the emergence of prophetism and millenarianism instances of popular resistance to colonial penetration. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, African prophetic and revivalist movements were systematically studied by scholars with the intention to build a body of theoretical work on the relationship between colonial oppression and religious innovation (e.g. Lanternari 1960; Barrett 1968). Monographs such as J. Peel's Aladura (Peel 1968), J. Fernandez's Bwiti (1982) or W. MacGaffey's Modern Kongo Prophets (1983) showed us different ways in which Africans enduring harsh colonial rule used their prophetic imagination to create their own space. </p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>A problem with the study of innovation in Africa was its tendency to see religion as a liberatory practice or a result of the modernisation of African societies. The importance of religion is unmistakable in many of the essays in the volume on protest and power in sub-Saharan Africa edited by R. Rotberg and A. Mazrui (1970) or, more recently, in the review of sources on rural protest written by A. Isaacman (1990). Yet this tendency does not account for the fact that although in colonial times religious movements were mushrooming across the continent, the African religious imagination is proving equally inventive now that we are no longer living in the colonial situation: this led authors to look for alternative interpretations. T. Ranger and I. Kimambo (1972) edited a collection in which the authors argued that African religion in general had to be studied historically and, more importantly, that it would be methodologically na&iuml;ve to assume that only under direct colonialism did Africans think of rebellion or protest; accordingly they offered a wider picture of revolutionary action through religion, beyond the purely anti-colonial aspect of it. W. de Craemer, J. Vansina and R. Fox (1976) wrote a seminal article arguing that the manifestations known as African religious movements, which according to most anthropologists at the time were typical of the colonial situation, were not as new as such views assumed. There was good evidence that socio-religious movements of the kind described existed in pre-colonial times too. Ten years later, T. Ranger (1986) wrote a thorough, if now a bit dated, review of perspectives. In the 1990s, the most innovative study on prophetism in West Africa, and one that inspired much of our own previous work on these phenomena, was the thorough study on the role of prophetism in the making of C&ocirc;te d'Ivoire by J. P. Dozon (1995).</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>The study of gender, which in our study is going to bring together agriculture and prophetism, is today also a leading theme in the study of agriculture in rural Africa, as well as in that of African religion. Works such as M. Silberschmidt's or&nbsp; D. Perry's on the feminization of labour in a time of &lsquo;crisis of masculinity' (Silberschmidt 2001; Perry 2005); works such as D. Berliner's on the &lsquo;feminization' of customary religion among Bulongic, or that of T. Sanders on the importance of gender in maintaining raining shrines in Tanzania (Berliner 2005; Sanders 2008), show that the position of women is not only very prominently taken into account by Africanist scholars of, respectively, agriculture and religion, but also that this position is changing in a very rapid way, although this is hardly a new point; it was thoroughly explored by the (then) innovative series of articles on the role of women in new religious movements in Africa edited by B. Jules-Rosette (1979), as well as by the various studies -very relevant to us - on female prophetesses such as A. Roberts' on Alice Lenshina (Roberts 1970), J. Thornton's on Dona Beatrice Kimpa Vita (Thornton 1998), H. Behrend's on Alice Lankwena (Behrend 1999) or R. Baum's on Alinesitue (Baum 2001). Our research is innovative in that, unlike the studies just cited, we are crossing the literature and debates on women in agriculture with the literature and debates on women in religion, showing that a plural perspective can help us understand better the interconnection between gender relations, religion, and agriculture without neglecting or minimizing any of the elements. By trying to look at agrarian communities from several points of views and looking for unusual interconnections, we are following the ethno-agronomical research of other specialists of the Upper Guinea Coast and of West Africa, and especially that of P. Richards and his collaborators (e.g. Richards 2007; Chaveau and Richards 2008), a school with which we work in very close collaboration.</p>