We concentrate on the Ugandan Orthodox Old-Believers’ motivation for converting to this religion vs. knowledge of its doctrine. We show that their knowledge of the Old-Believer doctrine is very poor. What brings most of these people to Old Believers in adulthood is a search of the true faith associated with the original and hence correct way of performing Christian rites. In this, we see intricate interplay of the features typical for authentic African cultures and acquired by them in the course of interaction with the wider world in the process of postcolonial identities construction. Basing on our study of Old Believers in Uganda, we discuss how both resistance and adaptation to globalist trends manifest themselves in the spiritual (religious) context in contemporary Africa. By conversion, Africans are trying to create their identities as both authentic and modern. The story of Old Believers in Uganda shows one more new face of Christianity outside traditional Christendom. Their example shows how postcolonial religiosity can acquire clearly marked anti-globalist directionality while people attempt both to resist and adapt to globalization. This anti-globalism has nothing to do directly with world politics and economics: most Ugandan Old Believers are poorly educated people, peasants or representatives of urban lower class or lower middle class unversed in international and transnational affairs. This is a kind of spiritual anti-globalism. We emphasize the variability of spiritual responses to globalization: while most of those dissatisfied (even unconsciously) with “traditional” for Africa Christian denominations – Catholicism, Anglicanism, etc. – convert to pronouncedly renewed Pentecostal Churches, some, like Ugandan Old Believers, turn to a conservative “original”, “uncorrupted” faith. We consider it as one of many manifestations of a spiritual turn that is taking place in Africa nowadays at an intersection of the global, glocal, and postcolonial processes in people’s search of identities.
