Liz Walker (Letters, Aug 29) asks why Africa is so poor and points to several factors which may provide the answer.

But she omitted to mention one of the greatest causes of misery in African society: Religion.

One man who identified the enormous harm done to Africans by religion was Tai Solarin, a Nigerian who established a secular school in Nigeria called the Mayflower.

He excluded all religion from his highly-successful private school and went on to produce some of the best-educated and dynamic people in the country.

Solarin, who died in 1994, once said: "To get young Africans weaned from their almost congenital reliance on fate, they must be educated to stand on their own feet.

"The worst bane of Africans is a chronic dependence on the deity to solve all their earthly problems. Give everybody an education for self-reliance, and we will vie with the best nations everywhere."

But the damage done to Africans by Christianity pales into significance when compared to the intellectual stagnation, lack of initiative, and the complete absence of human rights which are so much a feature of countries governed by the laws of Islam.

-Barry Duke, editor, The Freethinker Magazine, Viaduct Road, Brighton