This is one of the most intriguing topics to me: why and how subjugated peoples embrace and then perpetuate the ideologies of those who dominate/d over them, instead of subverting or rejecting those dominating and often sadistic ideologies. It's something I'm studying in university as well. Here's an interesting paper on the topic of, specifically, the situation in Africa:
As Professor Daniel Mangera notes, the cultural genocide of Africa began in the seventh-eighth century AD, when the Arabs forced Islam and slave trade on Africans. The Arabs were followed by their arch rivals, the Europeans, in the 15th century. Under the pretext of checkmating Arabic slave trade and saving African heathens, the Europeans introduced Christianity to the continent. Professor Mangera further points out that Africa's indigenous religions, unlike their Christian and Islamic counterparts, were not proselytizing and never led Africans to use force to convert or impose their beliefs on others. According to another African scholar, Professor Ali Mazrui, of the three principal religious legacies of Africa - indigenous, Islamic and Christian - the most tolerant is the indigenous tradition.
Africa did not have religious wars prior to the introduction of Christianity and Islam. This is because indigenous African religions (and therefore cultures) were neither universalistic - seeking to conquer the whole of the human race - nor competitive - in bitter rivalry against other creeds. The grand designs of Christianity and Islam, the two most universalistic religions in the world, have always been to convert the entire world according to their images. The crusades and jihads that tore apart Europe and other areas of the world for centuries testify to the incredible thirst for conquest and domination that has characterized both the Christian and Islamic creeds. For instance, the Bible's Old Testament prods Christians to embark on imperialistic conquests of other nations and even to incite racist sentiments in the following lines: When the Lord your God brings you into the land which you are entering to occupy and drives out many nations before you (...), when the Lord delivers them into your power and you defeat them, you must put them to death (...). (...) you must not intermarry with them, neither giving your daughters to their sons nor taking their daughters for your sons. (Old Testament, Deuteronomy, 7: 1-3) Africans, unlike the Arabs and Europeans, developed community religions that left so much freedom of association to individuals that most of the religious practices remained community-based, familial or even individual, and did not, in most cases, expand beyond village, ethnic or tribal constituencies. When they did expand, indigenous African religions did so, more in the form of borrowings than of cultural impositions.
Sadly, Africans abandoned their tolerant tradition and instead embraced religions of intolerance that now turn them against one another. Africans abandoned their own gods and embraced false gods. They bought into the nonsense peddled by European missionaries that their religions were heathenish and that they did not know God until the Europeans introduced the concept to them! Regrettably, the deadly religious clashes in Nigeria, the Christian-Islamic war in Sudan, the North-South schism that led to the civil war in the Ivory Coast, plus numerous other religion inspired conflicts in Africa today, are damning testimony to the fact that Africans have now integrated the cultural aggression and intolerance characteristic of Western and Arab holy warriors and missionaries.
Full text here:
Religious Intolerance in Africa
Topic: 75% of muslim converts leave Islam