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Why do people pray for health in West Africa?

Why do people pray for health in West Africa?

Ryan Schram

Mills 169 (A26)

ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au

23 February 2015

Available at http://anthro.rschram.org/2667/7

Readings

Omenyo, Cephas. 2011. “New Wine in an Old Wine Bottle?: Charismatic Healing in the Mainline Churches in Ghana.” In Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing, edited by Candy Gunther Brown, 231–50. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Meyer, Birgit. 1998. “‘Make a Complete Break with the Past.’ Memory and Post-Colonial Modernity in Ghanaian Pentecostalist Discourse.” Journal of Religion in Africa 28 (3): 316–49. doi:10.2307/1581573.

Jorgensen, Dan. 2005. “Third Wave Evangelism and the Politics of the Global in Papua New Guinea: Spiritual Warfare and the Recreation of Place in Telefolmin.” Oceania 75 (4): 444–61.

Werbner, Richard. 2011. Holy Hustlers, Schism, and Prophecy: Apostolic Reformation in Botswana. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.

Other media

Banerjee, Neela. 2007. “A Midnight Service Helps African Immigrants Combat Demons.” The New York Times, December 18, sec. National. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/us/18witchcraft.html.

This week's topic

This week we are talking about Christianity in Africa. There is a lot there.

  • Saint Augustine, for instance, is the first African saint.
  • Then there's Naomi Haynes's observations from Zambia.
  • Did you know that some African priests have been taking sabbaticals in US churches because there are so few priests there?
  • And when the Episcopal Church in the US chose to ordain a gay bishop, some dioceses opposed to this decided to join a new fellowship of Anglicans in which they would be supervised by African spiritual leaders.
  • Albert Schweitzer, a man whose name is synonymous with humanitarianism, was a medical missionary in Gabon.
  • Of course he wasn't the first. When European powers started carving up Africa into colonies, they also brought their own religions, and missionaries encouraged people to join by offering schools and medicine.

So, yeah, it's a big topic. Let's narrow it down.

A narrow topic

  • Given that European imperialism has led to so many changes, and continues to be so important to contemporary societies, we can focus on European Christianity in postcolonial African societies.

Within this topic, though, there is also a lot of diversity. There are:

  • the so-called mainline churches, derived from missionary churches, e.g. Omenyo's cases.
  • African Independent Churches, usually founded by local leaders, e.g. “apostolic” churches in Zimbabwe studied by Matthew Engelke.
  • Pentecostal-charismatic churches, e.g. Nsofu in Zambia, or the people described by Meyer.

So, what do you want to understand?

What questions do you want to ask about any one of these churches?

Write some down now.

Asking questions

Aristotle had some advice for his students about asking questions:

Not every problem, nor every thesis, should be examined, but only one which might puzzle one of those who need argument, not punishment or perception. For people who are puzzled to know whether one ought to honour the gods and love one’s parents or not need punishment, while those who are puzzled to know whether snow is white or not need perception. The subjects should not border too closely upon the sphere of demonstration, nor yet be too far removed from it; for the former cases admit of no doubt, while the latter involve difficulties too great for the art of the trainer. (Aristotle, Topics, Book I, Part 11)

Take a minute to think about this passage and try to get down the main idea here in your own, more contemporary language.

The three types of questions

Aristotle says there are three types of questions. Let's come up with examples of each kind.

  • Type I: Factual questions
  • Type II: Belief questions
  • Type III: Research questions, or why questions

Do I know what rhetorical means?? Do I know what rhetorical means!??

A question someone might want to ask is this:

How did African Independent Churches resist the cultural domination by colonial powers in Ghana?

Another one could be:

How do Pentecostal churches encourage people to see themselves as rational individuals?

Are these questions “research questions”?

Explaining African Christianity and its diversity

Here are some key terms I'd like us to think about:

  • Domination, especially colonial domination
  • Globalization
  • Syncretism

But I'd also like us to take a critical approach to these. Just because we can label something does not mean we really know what it is. Meyer says that when you look at African Christianity, take nothing for granted. Just as soon as you think you understand it, it changes!

A brief history: Some of the first Christians were African

  • St Philip and the Ethiopian official: “Look, here is water. What can stand in the way of my being baptized?” (Acts 8:36)
  • Coptic Christians
  • St Augustine

A brief history: European Christian and racism

  • European intellectual history is plagued by its reliance on Biblical chronology, or the belief that you can figure out history from the Bible.
  • In this chronology, African peoples were the descendants of Ham, who had been marked by God.
  • Europeans used the Bible (as history) to imagine that non-Western people were separated from God's plan for humanity, and it was up to European colonial powers to bring the Gospel to the “heathens.”
  • Many missionaries also did think that they were simply carrying out the same work as the Apostles, St Patrick, and the Irish missionaries to England. Were they being humble? Or just giving each other high fives for being humble? To be honest, I'm not really sure.

A brief history: On a mission from God

  • The first missions from Europe to the African continent were Portuguese. As with their ventures into other regions, they wanted to spread Christianity, for its own sake, and for reasons of establishing a common language with other people for purposes of cooperation and trade.
  • It was not until the 19th century when European Protestant missions came. In this case they were working in the shadow of colonialism. they established schools and missions to minister to people to alter their culture and to, in their minds, improve them.
  • 19th century missions in Africa were motivated by religious revivals in Europe and elsewhere.

A brief history: Beatrice Kimpa Vita

  • The introduction of Christianity into African societies was never simply a one-directional movement. Even when the Portuguese came to the Kongo Kingdom (on the eastern coast of present-day Dem Rep Congo and Angola, south of the Congo River), a female convert to Christianity, Beatrice Kimpa Vita, received a vision that inspired her to start her own church.
  • In her early life, Vita was trained as a medium. She said that St Anthony possessed her and allowed her to travel to heaven to speak directly with God.
  • Her prophecy told her to unite all Kongo people under a new king, to destroy all idols, including the missionaries' icons. She said that Jesus, Mary and St Francis were all born in Kongo.
  • With the support of the Portuguese monks, the king ordered her tried as a witch and heretic and she was burned at the stake in 1706.

A brief history: John of the wilderness

  • In the 1930s in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), a man named Shoniwa was having headaches. Then suddenly he had a vision one night that he was a John the Baptist for Africans. He went into the bush for 40 nights, and took the name Johane Masowe (John of the Wilderness).
  • He began to preach to rural communities of his new message from God. Give up witchcraft and magic. Stop adultery and stealing. Polygamy is OK.
  • And, he said, we don't need the Bible. Africans, he preached, did not have books until the whites came. God will speak to Africans purely through direct revelation.
  • And rather than simply learning the lessons of the Bible from teachers, they would live their faith in their own communities. This small movement in the colonial period drew people from many different cultural groups, and has today led to a large number of very prominent churches in southern Africa, called apostolic churches (see Engelke 2007).

Pentecostal churches in Africa

Pentecostalism came to African societies relatively early in its history. One good example is the Christ Apostolic Church of Nigeria, founded in 1918.

In these churches, believers became born-again Christians. They received the gifts of the Holy Spirit, including the gift of healing.

Are Pentecostal and Independent churches different?

Independent Pentecostal
founded by African converts introduced from abroad
syncretic reject traditions
rural urban
resist cultural domination “progressive”, “modernist”

But Birgit Meyer (2004) argues that actually there's a lot of crossover. They only look different.

Why do foreign observers use these classifications if they are so fuzzy?

In a 2004 review article on Pentecostalism in Africa, Meyer argues that the distinction between Independent and Pentecostal churches really has more to do with the theories that outside observers use to understand African religion.

In the middle of the 20th century, people were interested in the impact of colonialism on indigenous African societies. Some interpretations of this centered one of these two concepts

  • African societies find ways to resist colonial domination.
  • African religious practices will mix indigenous and foreign elements, also known as syncretism.

In more recent years, people have moved to theories of globalization as new explanation.

  • African religion is a form of “alternative modernity”
  • Pentecostal Christianity allows people to participate in global, transnational identities.

Meyer argues that all of these religious types, Independent and Pentecostal, are really just variations on a theme. The concepts scholars bring to them to understand are different.

References

Engelke, Matthew. 2007. A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.

Meyer, Birgit. 2004. “Christianity in Africa: From African Independent to Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches.” Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (1): 447–74. doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.143835.

A guide to the unit

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