Since the end of the 1980s, an incontestable religious renewal has been observed on the continent of religiosity that is Africa. Until recently, religion did not constitute such a popular subject of research or investment. It was naturally integrated into its cultural environment and had no need to prove itself or to seduce. However, for the past two decades, it has revealed spectacular new characteristics.
The proliferation of churches
Firstly, there is a particular type of excitement that surrounds the religious, characterized by its strategic invasion of the city. Urban centres and, increasingly, capital cities have become the favoured sites of religious enterprises and the experimental space for their initiatives.
Some have remarked upon the emergence and proliferation of new groups and independent churches both within and on the periphery of traditional religious trends, with a stimulating effect regarding the latter. Established religions have had to develop new strategies to face this phenomenon of spiritual expansion. Contemporary religious dynamism manifests itself in the form of religious mutation in order for it to adapt to the new political, economic, and social environment. This massive social investment should be interpreted in this sense.
Finally, this religious novelty can be found in the birth of a new vocation: evangelizing missions. The “transnationalization”[1] of religious enterprises, a recent phenomenon, indicates the emergence of “missionary nations” and of a tangled religious flux of which the origins of the dominant networks originate in the English-speaking countries of West Africa and the Lusophone countries of East Africa.
This vast movement is accompanied by a media opening which facilitates the international circulation of religious products and agents, as well as their symbolic resources. A multitude of religious radio and television programs have been created to relay, night and day, evangelical sermons and meetings, prayers, and healings. CD-ROMs, audio and video cassettes are also sold in order to assure deeper understanding of these teachings.
This phenomenon is interpreted and valued in differing ways. Many consider it from a negative viewpoint. I wonder, however, if it cannot be seen differently, through a sociological and philosophical lens. This great religious ballet isn’t limited to Christianity. Two principal components merit highlighting: the first, exterior, encompasses this phenomenon; the second is an endogenous factor.
Importation of Churches
Let’s first discuss a certain contemporary religious dynamism which results from the intensification of globalization. The end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s marks the importation of independent Pentecostal and Charismatic[2] churches which came jointly from the United States and Brazil. Certain churches took hold in the English-speaking countries of West Africa, and, for the others, in the Lusophone countries of East Africa. Brazil exported its brand of Pentecostalism to its neighbours in Europe, Asia and Africa where it entered, naturally, through the Lusophone countries (Angola, Mozambique) then spread to South Africa, afterwards to eastern Africa (Kenya, Uganda), to equatorial Africa (Congo, Gabon), and, within the last ten years, to West Africa (Ivory Coast, Ghana).
The Pentecostalism which comes directly from the United States and Great Britain travels through the English-speaking countries (notably, in West Africa, Nigeria and Ghana) where it introduces and acclimates[3] itself before moving to neighbouring French-speaking countries[4].
Islamo-African domain
This is also the case of the “new Islam” that likes to think itself “pure” by claiming to carry out a return to its roots all the while conserving its image as an “African religion” by offering refuge to local identity through local brotherhoods and, through the marabouts, a solution to many problems. At the behest of new intellectual elites (new entrepreneurs or young preachers), in its reformist version, the Islamo-Africanist field has appropriated the most professional and mediatised forms of religious proselytism. However, the youth who studied for the most part in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, are trying to revive the wahabite influence. Is it the mission of these Islamic motherlands to turn Africa into a land of the “faithful”? Africa remains one of the preferred targets of the Saudian Da’wa[5].
The comparisons between forms of missionary proselytism and business strategies discernible/recognizable in the development of Islam and Christianity in Africa show that the war declared between the United States and the Arab world is taking an active form on African religious terrain. Islam’s revival and its clear progression south of the Sahara cannot be separated from the enthusiasm that reigns in the Born-Again Churches and the rising influence of the evangelical and Pentecostal neo-Christians.
The new prophets
Another visible aspect of religion’s globalization concerns the intensification of the international travels of healers and prophets (as well as their audience), creating regional, even worldwide networks between religious experts and their clientele. Ruth Marshall-Fratani and Didier Pecard (2002) cite two significant cases. The first is that of the Nigerian healer T.B. Joshua who welcomes to Nigeria the ailing from various European countries (but not solely), from the African Diaspora. The second is Kakou Severin, the “new school” Ivoirian prophet whose travels throughout Africa and the world continue to increase. We could also cite the example of South Africa’s Peter Petronus who believes he has been called to spread the gospel and calls for mass conversion. In a true scramble, African cities (Abidjan, Accra, Lagos, Douala, Lomé or Libreville) have become the land of missionaries and pastoral crusades of American, Brazilian, or Korean Pentecostal churches.
Africa exports spirituality
This transnationalization of cultural groupings and religious networks does not proceed in a one-way direction because Africa also exports to the West a much appreciated African Christianity. Some African language messianic or prophetic churches based on doctrinal and practical syncretism, drawing from diverse Christian wells (Methodist, Evangelical, Pentecostal, Charismatic, Baptist) and integrating local cultural realities “sells” well in Europe and across the Atlantic. Among the most visible of those in the Northern countries, we can distinguish the communities issuing from the teachings of prophet William Wade Harris Wury, the Celestial Church of Christ, and the Pentecostal Church of Ghana. We can also point out the same situation in regards to the Senegalese Mourides on the Muslim side. We can point out too the increasing visibility of traditional religions which are choosing to become less complex, not hesitating to use modern means of communication and constructing an intellectual discourse, implanting themselves in urban centres even though we more often associate them with rural areas. The globalization of the spiritual, international circulation of cultural and symbolic resources and the connection to diverse networks does not only benefit Western missionary nations. Therefore, it is impossible to consider the contemporary religious situation in Africa without these interlacing stakes which do not solely concern African societies.
Religion’s metamorphosis
However, this does not invalidate but, rather, corrects the reasons usually given, such as poverty and resorting to the supernatural in order to find solutions to social problems that are, themselves, quite real. A certain Marxist religious sociology locates the origins of this renewed religiosity that we have been observing since the end of the 19th century in the existential troubles that result from the destructuring of states and the devaluation of the CFA franc which occurred in the 1990s. They also highlight the instigating role of pandemics and climatic deterioration which incite feelings of powerlessness. These socio-psychological reasons reinforce in the individual fatalistic feelings and intensify the need for religion. Several monographic studies exploring the causes of the populations’ infatuation list the reasons that cause them to become militants within religious institutions: unemployment, poverty, the search for professional well-being, miraculous healing, significant other, etc.
Nevertheless, that approach focuses on individual’s motivations even though it is difficult to ascertain what leads one interiorly towards the supernatural. If we follow this logic to its conclusion, we should say: Africa is poor, therefore Africa believes. While partly true, this reasoning does not sufficiently explain the contemporary religious revival since Africa is no poorer now than it was before. It is, in fact, the contrary. By underlining the fundamental role that the machinery/apparatus of belief and the high international stakes (socio-political, cultural and economic) that underlie their functioning, we avoid judging the believer’s engagement which is of a spiritual order. It is actually a matter of analysing that religiosity which is of a societal and institutional order.
This perspective allows us to better understand the metamorphoses of the religious brought about by this spiritual revival. In my mind, these changes conceal not only a religious, or spiritual wealth, but also a societal one. Confronted by a changing world, religion has integrated those changes into its identity, in its communication strategies and in its activities. Modern religion in modern Africa must take into account the new parameters in the relations between the individual and society. It is a matter of the people’s new expectations: aspirations of freedom, democratization of religious authority, the arrival of new theological products, and a new approach to the sacred, one that is more removed from the classic religious institutions. Remarkably, the new religious actors show themselves to be more apt to integrate these new aspects and to adopt the more advanced elements of modern civilization, even though religion is only believed capable of transmitting “traditions”. Guardian of the collective and social memory, religion is revealing itself to also be a history-maker.
By Etienne L. Damome (Afiavimag)
Translated by Portia Lewis
[1] The term transnationalization in regards to Africa corresponds to « an expansion of a religion outside of its original frontier possibly born of local syncretism, anchored in a certain territory notably by means of attachment to holy places and stamped by certain characteristics of its ethno-national identity such as the use of an ethnic langue made sacred”. cf. Mary A. et Fourchard L., « Réveils religieux et nations missionnaires », in Fourchard L., Mary A. et Otayek R., Entreprise religieuses transnationales en Afrique de l’Ouest, Ibadan/Paris IFRA-Karthala, 2005, (introduction).
[2] The Charismatic « culture » which calls on the immediate power of the Holy Spirit functions as a global culture. It uses Catholic intuition, neo-Protestant mobility as well as African prophetic churches, and tends to impose itself as absolute reference.
[3] Nigerian and Ghanian Pentecostal churches are good examples of this : after the initial period of local and national implantation (1950s-1970s), follows, since the 1980s, transnational, regional, continental or worldwide strategies depending on the imperatives of the particular denomination.
[4] See Entreprises religieuses transnationales en Afrique de l’Ouest, Fourchard L., Mary A. et Otayek R. (dir.), Ibadan-Paris, IFRA-Karthala, 2005, 537 p.
[5] Literally, “call to Islam”, somewhat equivalent to evangelization. It translates in any case to Islam’s expansionism.
