Everyone agrees that the great shifts in the social geography of Christianity over the past half century have been the redistribution of demographic weight southward, and the inundation of the Christian south by Pentecostalism and its charismatic penumbra. However, most of the attention so far has been focused on Latin America, where the Catholic monopoly has collapsed in a welter of competition, rather than on Africa, where even more important developments are in train.
Whereas in 1900, Christians in sub-Saharan Africa were a small minority, they now number about one third of a billion, and the Pentecostal wave that took off in Latin America in the Sixties swept across Africa about a decade later. There is, of course, no monopoly in Africa outside the Islamic north, but there are major emplacements of Catholicism and mainstream Protestantism that feel their massive political influence threatened by born-again Christianity and its increasing emphasis on health and wealth. In a continent where the state is corrupt, weak, and often ethnically divided, the churches and associated NGOS constitute what there is of civil society and are the arbiters of the moral arena. Born-again charismatic Christians represent a new generation and can provide an alternative source of political legitimation, on occasion it must be said to the benefit of autocratic rulers.
Africa is not just a continent but a diaspora which through slavery includes Brazil and the Caribbean. If one traces the origins of Pentecostalism to the confluence of black and white revivalism in the United States, then what is going forward in Africa itself is as much a homecoming as a visitation from elsewhere. It is no wonder then that opinion is divided between those who trace a gospel of healing and prosperity to the United States and those who see it as characteristically African. Lots of Americans celebrate prosperity and clearly lots of Africans would like to.
There are similar conflicts of opinion over the origins of the Zionism often found in born-again Christianity. There are those like Paul Gifford who trace it to more immediate sources in the United States, whereas others point to long African roots, as well as to several centuries of Protestant philosemitism.
Clearly Pentecostalism is a terrain of ideological contestation, especially when it comes to what is to count as genuinely and authentically African. Nowadays, anthropologists tend to leave notions like authenticity to nationalist intelligentsias and other dealers in mythic genealogy, but there was a time when the African Independent Churches attracted the lion’s share of attention, in part because they were regarded as authentic and indigenous. But as John Peel’s classic study Aladura: A Religious Movement among the Yoruba (1968) and other studies in southern Africa showed, the frontiers between Independency and Pentecostalism were far from clearly marked.
Linguistically—African languages apart—the non-Islamic African world is Iberian, French, or Anglo-American, and up to quite recently these linguistic spheres had a fairly stable relationship with either Catholicism or mainstream Protestantism, the latter being largely confined to English-speaking countries once under British imperial aegis. However, the acceleration of global communication since the Sixties and the weakness of the nation as the primary source of identity and belonging, has seen a seepage of evangelical and charismatic Christianity into all the Latin cultures, from Brazil to Mozambique, and from Haiti to Congo and Benin. Evangelical Christianity now speaks French, Spanish, or Portuguese with a native accent, while at the same time extending the influence and range of what James Bennett has called “the Anglosphere.” Partly the spread of English is a matter of contiguity, so that Francophone Benin is infiltrated from Anglophone Ghana, or Lusophone Mozambique from neighboring Zimbabwe, but it also reflects a long-distance dissemination of messengers and messages. Ex-empires also strike back so that Brazilians (for example) missionize not only in Mozambique but in metropolitan Portugal and for that matter even in metropolitan Britain. You can find the Brazilian Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in Brixton or Finsbury Park.
Historically there has been a major difference between the early Catholic colonization from Spain and Portugal and British colonization. In those early colonizations the political and religious orders were transplanted as a unity, whereas by the time the British were involved they were quite distinct enterprises, sometimes collaborating, sometimes in conflict. The district officer, the missionary, and the merchant might well work together, but their interests and objectives were different. In Africa the consequence has been a voluntary, pluralistic, and fissiparous Christianity capable of nurturing the elites which supplanted the colonial regimes and of expanding rapidly in the postcolonial era. Though England itself might retain a church-state connection, what it exported to Africa (as also to North America) was a voluntaristic pluralism.
There is another major difference. Just as the missionaries represented a religion distinct from the political order so they also represented a social and cultural world uncoupled from the world of nature. Catholicism might retain some unity of society and nature, and be thought on that account less alien to African reality, but for evangelicalism nature had been disenchanted. Thus in enforcing two far-reaching distinctions, the religious from the political and the social from the natural, evangelicalism put asunder what Africans had joined together. No wonder black Pentecostalism so successfully puts them back together again.
It is precisely these major differences that John Peel presents as the context of his magisterial study, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. Peel’s new book is the result of many years of work on evangelical mission by the Church Missionary Society in what is now Nigeria. He gives us an account of a mission to a major people, which provided them with the narrative for their ethnic self-understanding, within what is today one of Africa’s two major sub-Saharan powers. Though the detailed documentation and complex analysis is mostly concentrated on the period from the 1820s to the 1890s, we are also taken up to the emergence of the Pentecostals and “born agains” since the Seventies.
Prior to the 1890s the Yoruba were not under British control, and the key agents of mission were the Africans themselves. What ensued reflected Yoruba needs as much as missionary intentions, so that mission was not some one-sided transmission of the moral economy of liberal capitalism in the imperial marketplace but a genuine encounter between a lively indigenous religion and a world religion. Hence redemption did not imply double-entry bookkeeping or vice versa. Here Peel contends against the kind of interpretation associated with J. and J. L. Comaroff and effects a major revision in our understanding.
In one sense the Yoruba were encountering broader horizons consonant with universal monotheism, whether Christian or Islamic. However, the main stumbling block was not the notion of a “High God” but cults of ancestors intimately related to a cycle of death and new birth. “Heaven” lay in the woman’s womb, whence emerged the next generation, while for the missionaries heaven was an eternal destiny opened up by regeneration and grace. The Yoruba sought health, wealth, and protection from evil here and now, whereas they were being offered a Physician of the soul who required the pure sacrifice of a good and faithful heart. Neither the inwardness of sin nor the “moral gyroscope” of conscience made much sense. Spirit meant access to life and power rather than the struggle between the spirit of holiness and the affections of the flesh.
Where missionary and Yoruba came together most easily was in the practice of instant prayer.
For the Yoruba, religion was embedded in the immediate reciprocities of family, friendship, and community, and so they responded sympathetically to the Ten Commandments. The transvaluation of values in the Sermon on the Mount was much less easily available, while the Christian ethic of peace and forgiveness ran counter to all the criteria appropriate to “a man of standing” and a warrior. Christianity was seen as a woman’s religion in a way Islam was not. Moreover, Islam proceeded from external ritual conformities to inward spiritual governance, whereas Christianity worked from inner to outer. Defilement comes from within. Above all, the crucial category of power was articulated quite differently among the ritual specialists of the Yoruba as compared with the understanding of the missionaries. For the ritual specialist power lay in a secret pragmatic wisdom to be paid for, not in free access to the open Book—and to the primer of literacy. As always Bible and Dictionary went together.
In the initial decades Christianity made very modest progress, partly because the criteria of membership were strict and required a repudiation of the deeply embedded practices of polygamy and slavery. The various Yoruba polities, intermittently warring with each other, might seek a missionary as a kind of ambassador for the ways of the white man, and for his power, but reception varied according to a cost-benefit analysis of likely cultural enhancements and useful alliances. Later the centripetal suction of political power, progress, education, and trade stimulated a wider takeup of Christianity and slackening of criteria. By that time those who came were no longer mainly marginal males, whether slaves or young migrants. (To begin with, women were too locked into the hierarchy of male power and too identified with the service of the ancestral cults and reproduction of the genealogy to convert.) Paradoxically, missionaries often found their message popular for motives to do with participation in power.
As the Yoruba made the Judeo-Christian narrative their own, above all through black agents, it gave them a new self-consciousness over against racism and subordination. Educated Christians, for example in the ymca, pressed forward with the Bible in the vulgar tongue and a Yoruba-based hymnody. A cultural nationalism emerged for which the great black Christian, Samuel Crowther, was a proto-Yoruba and the Rev. Samuel Johnson’s History of the Yoruba became the charter of a people’s history.
The prime objective of that history was the pursuit of more Christian “enlightenment,” not less, and the tools for that lay in forward-looking concepts of time and of change working within the mind and soul as the key to a better future. In bringing the Yoruba story up to the present, Peel shows how even the work of a major post-Christian intellectual, Wole Soyinka, is saturated with Christianity.
John Peel belongs to the younger of a couple of generations of distinguished British Africanists working in the twilight of colonial rule and through post-colonial times, which include Thomas Hodgkin, Michael Crowder, Terence Ranger, and the late Adrian Hastings. David Maxwell, who (with Ingrid Lawrie) edited Christianity and the African Imagination: Essays in Honour of Adrian Hastings, belongs to a new generation. Maxwell took over from Hastings as editor of The Journal of Religion in Africa, and his seminal work on Zimbabwe marks an extension of scholarly attention to the advance of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. Others with a similar interest are Birgit Meyer and Ruth Marshall-Fratani, working on Ghana and Nigeria respectively.
In his introduction, Maxwell takes as his text Adrian Hastings’ view that the heart of the matter has lain in grassroots Christianity, involving a lively syncretism in village or township, and spread by evangelist, or by independent prophet, or by Catholic catechist. As among the Yoruba, so also more generally, this was above all a black advance, offering empowerment in dealing with health, wealth, and protection from evil and providing a fluid medium responsive to African needs, in particular the needs of young men, women, and migrants. The Bible, prayer, and baptism were central, along with healing, deliverance, miracle, and pilgrimage. If these were the marks of African Christianity throughout, then the recent appeal of Pentecostalism is hardly surprising.
Of course, Christianity preceded colonialism just as it succeeded it. Hastings’ great study, The Church in Africa 1450-1950 (1994), rightly took its history back to the 15th century, thereby disengaging the longue durée of Christianity as a world religion from the quite recent history of global capitalism. It is appropriate, therefore, that the initial essay in the volume goes back to the extraordinary Portuguese mission of the Congo over five centuries ago, while the essay by Andrew Walls analyses the dialogue (as conducted by Samuel Crowther) with another longue durée, that of Islam.
At least two of the other essays deal with the complexities of power in the more modern history, above all the attempted mobilization of the state behind a nationalist ideology and the rivalry of ethnic groups in conflict over dominance of the state. That has meant that churches have been involved in both the national and the ethnic agendas, as well as crossing borders and pressing a universalist agenda. In Buganda in the late 19th century there was a tripartite struggle for power among Muslims, Catholics, and Protestants which led to a kind of partition. Some of the ambiguities inherent in such struggles come out in the way early martyrs for Christianity in Buganda can either be viewed from a nationalist perspective as cooperating with foreign oppression, or as standing up to local autocracy. In a similar way one cannot wholly disentangle the poignant martyrdom of Archbishop Luwum at the hands of the dictator Idi Amin from the ethnic interests of Luwum’s own people and from attempts to bring back Milton Obote as president. There is no pure position.
What is absolutely clear from all these essays is the speed with which the spiritual revolution of Christianity was absorbed into an African folk idiom, with the persistent counterpoint of mainstream Christianity with Pentecostalism and African Independency. Terence Ranger’s chapter on Zimbabwe shows how in the interwar years popular African Christianity picked up motifs from the popular and folk Christianity of Europe and North America, and how native visionaries and independent prophets took over the missionary task through a continued experience of baptism and the world of the Bible. Something of this potent mix comes over in the way the American Methodist Church looked back to the revival campgrounds of the United States and then in 1918 set in motion an African Pentecost later to be picked up in the 1930s by Johana Masowe and his Apostolic movement, wandering craftsmen engaged in continuous rituals of repentance, exorcism, and protection against witchcraft. Ranger also shows how Christianity in Zimbabwe created a new sacred geography, reorganizing and claiming the landscape.
This is a story which Maxwell carries forward through his account of the history of what eventually became ZAOGA, the Zimbabwe Assemblies of God Africa. ZAOGA initiated an expansive transnational movement under the charismatic autocracy of Ezekiel Guti and its easy transcendence of borders reflected both earlier widespread regional cults and the freedom of migration available throughout British Africa. What began among the poor in the major centers of population expanded into several neighboring countries, and even into Mozambique. Though in Mozambique there was resistance both from Catholics and Marxists, the Marxist government of Frelimo, installed in 1975, recognized well enough the value of a faith supporting the integrity of the family and resisting the disintegrations of alcohol and violence.
The core of ZAOGA’s activity lay in prayer for the sick and deliverance from demons, though after independence in 1980 and the civil wars it increasingly resembled the global movement of born-again Christianity, with many American contacts. In dealing with American contacts ZAOGA stressed black pride, nationalism, and autonomy, while at the same time milking the association for all it was worth. It also promoted a doctrine of talents directed against “the Spirit of Poverty” that was eagerly taken up, especially by women operating as penny capitalists.
Matthew Schoffeleers pushes forward the analysis of the progress of Pentecostalism in the district of Nsanje, in the southernmost part of Malawi, but in relation to one of the many neo-traditionalist movements known as The Church of the Ancestors. Characteristically, neo-traditional movements seem to arise among illiterates threatened by the end of the old order of the elders, or else (as in the case of Afrikania in Ghana, discussed in another chapter by Samuel Gyanfosu) among well-educated cultural nationalists.
For most of the 20th century, Nsanje had an easygoing mixed religious economy, but in the 1970s the situation polarized with the rapid growth of African-led spirit churches. These took over from earlier and largely female possession cults brought by migrants from Mozambique, and they drained members away from the mainstream evangelical church—though less so from the Catholics. Overall, Christian influence increased, with the new churches mainly appealing to modestly educated, mobile and aspiring people, and the mission churches retaining the loyalty of the middle class.
Kenya, in particular the Kikuyu, as discussed by John Lonsdale, also demonstrates the decisive say exercised by Africans even in the heyday of mission and colonialism. In the background were three shadow establishments, Catholic, Anglican, and Presbyterian, and by the interwar years a felt need for revival was further fueled by the conflict between new readings of the Bible following the 1926 Kikuyu translation of the New Testament and the way rural capitalism played havoc with the old reciprocities of wealth and poverty. As the economic crisis deepened from 1929 on, so the independent churches began to grow.
By 1950 the Christian repertoire was widely enough disseminated to provide the common currency of political imagination for all Kikuyu leaders, just as it had done for the Yoruba. So the Mau Mau rebellion was not really pagan-inspired but rather raised its voice through hymnody and the story of Egyptian oppression and Israelite Exodus. Jomo Kenyatta himself as the first leader after independence was both a traditional “big man,” ruthless with opposition, a Moses figure, and a Mediator on the model of the Epistle to the Hebrews. For those in the established churches, the Old Testament confirmed the link between prosperity and probity, and such churches engaged closely with the new government through their major role in education and development, though they were also relieved—all too briefly—by the new leadership of Daniel arap Moi.
Once again, the conditions which destroyed a traditional link through land and property between the dead and the unborn opened the way for charismatic churches. Often these were American influenced and preached a gospel of prosperity in social conditions that palpably manifested the activity of the Devil. Many churches met in tiny buildings where the poor might express their apprehension about the destruction of the moral nexus of work and reward. At the same time, the mainstream churches pleaded with the state for justice and equity.
Overall, we have a picture of two kinds of appropriation of Pentecost: a large-scale charismatic Christianity led by frequent flyers and faxers using all the resources of the media in reaching out to modern global reality, and the tiny shacks of the little people in search of security, and ranged behind strong boundaries in dualistic confrontation with the Devil. Both kinds were transnational in scope, responsive to everyday local needs and crucial in the construction of identity. Yet, as Maxwell reminds us, the historic churches throughout sub-Saharan Africa remained very influential through their contribution to health and education, and more indirectly through the massive work of the NGOS, whether religious or secular. In Maxwell’s view, Christianity as a whole had by the end of the second millennium escaped missionary control and the associations of colonialism to become “the corner-stone of African society and culture.”
Transnationalism and the transcendence of the nation state by global and regional faiths on the move provide the main themes of Between Babel and Pentecost, edited by Ruth Marshall-Fratani and André Corten. For them nations no longer define the main modes of identification and community formation, while their rhetoric of development has given place to a luxuriant religious imagination rooted in everyday crises enabling people to rescript their lives and “inscribe” themselves within global modernity.
Pentecostalism both stabilizes the confusing global flux and puts down roots in local realities. It is the quintessential “glocalism.” While being plainly a version of orthodox Christianity it is flexible in its use of the Bible which, like Victorian evangelicalism, it mingles with self-help discourses. What it offers is not so much doctrine as a rupture with the corruptions of the past and a rapturous transformation of the self. Again, like Victorian religion, it shows believers how to deal with the dominant currency of money, both in its seductiveness and in its potential uses. Though led by males, it opens up new worlds and new roles for women, and subjects the male to domestic disciplines.
All these themes come out with particular clarity in Ruth Marshall-Fratani’s article on Nigeria, which links us back to John Peel. She writes of materialism under moral control and a new identity offered by media narratives. As the old resources of community have become unreliable, the born again bind themselves to each other in a new focus of loyalty.
Out of so rich a range of texts and themes, including Latin American instances, one or two themes are specially germane: the expansion of Pentecostalism into the Francophone African sphere discussed by Hurbon and Mayraique in Haiti and Benin respectively, and the transnational diasporas discussed by Freston and Van Dijk.
In Haiti (as also in Jamaica) Pentecostalism is the most expansive form of Christianity, so that in Port-au-Prince it attracts perhaps four in ten. As so often it is a spiritual migration accompanying the trek to the city peripheries, and it appeals in particular to small traders and shopowners, particularly in the informal economy. When the repressive controls of the family break down and both the economic and symbolic orders are deregulated, and when little can be hoped from politics, the church provides the one space where equality and participation are possible and the pains of everyday can be assuaged by healing, deliverance, and mutual care. The past stands for disorder and subordination, whereas Pentecost signals divine recognition, and Voodoo as part of that past is assimilated to the idioms of spiritual warfare. That gives rise to a misidentification among some scholars present also in work on Latin America, whereby Pentecostalism is seen as the old religion in disguise.
In Benin there is a background of Islam as well as of Catholicism and Methodism, and Pentecostalism expands among peddlers and shopkeepers in the pullulating sites of urban social change. Though political liberalization a decade ago offered increased scope for evangelism, the promises of amelioration failed to materialize, and people found themselves embroiled in continual economic crisis. In Benin one finds the usual contrast between small and humble churches pursuing survival in the suburbs and the larger enterprises of the more prosperous born agains. Born-again Christianity opens on to the modern world, equipped with synthesizers and contemporary music, screens and videos, radio and television ministries, open-air preachments and large-scale rallies. It wears suits and ties and turns increasingly to the use of English, which it finds more religiously evocative than French.
The diasporas discussed by Freston and Van Dijk are part of transnational modernity, in the former instance Brazilian missions in Lusophone and Anglophone Africa, and in the latter instance a Ghanaian diaspora in northern Europe. One in eight of Ghanaians now live abroad, and whereas at home there is a “Christianity fever” expressed (for example) in week-long Prayer Camps where people solicit deliverance from the hauntings of the past, in the churches of the European diaspora the emphasis is rather on maintaining social relationships with the home base.
What all three of these books imply is a major revision of our understanding—respecting and acknowledging the centrality of African creativity and agency in the appropriation of Christianity. There is perhaps some partial division of roles in that the mainstream churches engage directly and sometimes critically with the state through their vast contribution to health, education, and development, while Pentecostals either carry forward the transnational perspectives of an expansive middle class and aspirants to a better life, or shore up the hopes of the poor faced by economic crisis.
Arguably, what Methodism was with respect to the Industrial Revolution in the north of England and the American frontier, Pentecostalism is in the developing world. Indeed in Africa, historic evangelical and Pentecostal activity remain in counterpoint with each other, especially as mainstream churches increasingly adopt charismatic styles. The fact that religion in the developing world should so often take this voluntary and pluralistic form bears on an old debate in British labor history, as to whether the master narrative of the political future was rooted in Methodism or Marx, or to broaden that out, whether the master narrative of modernity runs along the trajectory of 1789 and 1917 or the trajectory of the English and American revolutions of 1642-49, 1688, and 1776. Since 1989 it looks increasingly as if the latter is the case, and the big story as espoused so often by the Western intelligentsia of the emptying out of religion into politics (or mere secularity) is not coming to pass.
For André Corten in Between Babel and Pentecost, Pentecostalism and its imaginaire represent an implicit politics rather than the Protestant economic spirit in its pneumatic form, but one can at least pose the question whether these developments—economic, political, and cultural—are not stirrings in the direction of the kind of civil society and economic spirit characterizing “the Anglosphere.” If it all seems slow and contradictory, one has to remember just how many different elements had to come together in the North Atlantic over several centuries reaching back in England to developments in the late Middle Ages, for an imperfect democracy to emerge. The authoritarian and nepotistic potentials of Pentecostalism notwithstanding, participation and pluralism must be positive. It is true there are worrying instances in Zambia and Ghana, where (as Paul Gifford suggests) national and Christian identity may be proclaimed together—there are, after all, American and English models for that too—but overall the transnational is promoted in company with a riotous pluralism.
In the case of the Islamic alternative, the transnational is promoted in company with a form of integral unity. The striking contrast between an evangelical, Pentecostal (and indeed Catholic) Christianity operating transnationally for the most part in the voluntary sector, and an Islamic transnationalism pressing for a unity of state, community, and culture, is big with implications for the future. What Islam has tolerated historically are communities of religions of the Book, not pluralism, and now the tendencies are all to increased homogeneity.
David Martin is emeritus professor of sociology at the London School of Economics and honorary professor of religious studies at Lancaster University. He is the author most recently of Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish (Blackwell).
Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
