Black African Neo/Pentecostal Political Subjectivity and/as Black Consciousness

ABSTRACT

This article explores the political implications of the intersection of African Political Theology and critical race discourse. Its main argument is that, African Neo/Pentecostal Political Theology highlights that moral and political subjectivity in the context of a necropolitical postcolonial Africa is a result of the intersection of a complex set of practices linked to oneself, others, the state, and G/god. Moreover, in its concern with political well-being, African Neo/Pentecostal Political Theology further highlights the black racial identity of its adherents as part of its ideological participation in the broader project of black emancipation. Such a centering of race not only de-abstracts African Political Theology and its Neo/Pentecostal subjects from their specific socio-political location of Africa, including all the implications of such a location. This centering is important to foreground also because it provides a different dimension through which to apprehend and comprehend the rise of Neo/Pentecostalism on the continent.

KEYWORDS:

• African Neo/Pentecostalism
• Black Consciousness
• black subjectivity
• Marshall
• Wariboko

Introduction

Drawing from my previous work, this article explores the political implications of African forms of Neo/Pentecostalism for not only African political theology (APT), but also political theology broadly.¹ In particular, the article expounds the argument that, what African Neo/Pentecostal political theology highlights is that political subjectivity in a necropolitical context of postcolonial Africa, is a result of the intersection of a complex set of concerns with oneself, others, the state, and the world. Moreover, in its concern with political well-being, African Neo/Pentecostal political theology highlights the black racial identity of its adherents as part of its ideological participation in the broader project of black self-emancipation and resisting global racism. In other words, the focus of this article is an examination of what I regard as an important concept for contemporary APT to consider, viz., religious political subjectivity and specifically its black, Neo/Pentecostal form.

In its examination, the chapter engages with a theoretical provocation regarding the value of African Neo/Pentecostalism as a form of political theology for contemporary black liberation discourses and, by extension, anti-racism discourses. I say provocation because I am really trying to unsettle some theoretical assumptions surrounding the intersection of religion and politics on the African continent that are taken for granted. In particular, and drawing on a critical engagement with the work of Nimi Wariboko, I argue that what the centering of blackness does is not only to de-abstract the African Neo/Pentecostal subjects from their specific socio-political location of Africa, including all the implications of such a location. Centering blackness in analyzing African Neo/Pentecostal discourse also allows us the opportunity to see continuity in the struggle for black emancipation pursued through a specifically Christian political theology.

This centering is important to foreground because it provides a different dimension through which to apprehend and comprehend the rise of Neo/Pentecostalism on the continent beyond a binary discourse that foregrounds it only as spiritual revolution on the one hand, or, on the other hand and worse, an unexamined neo-colonial duping of the masses by “men of God.” The pursuit of racial emancipation as part of what African Neo/Pentecostal political subjectivity offers black African political subjects in a continuously racist world, allows us to resist to some degree both the discourses of the supposed complete co-option of religion by politics in postcolonial Africa on the one hand, and the one that presupposes politics devoid of religion on the other.

Definitional proscriptions

In properly setting the parameters of my analysis, it is important to clarify what I mean by the terms Neo/Pentecostal and political subjectivity. Whilst a number of scholars make a distinction between Pentecostals and Neo-Pentecostals (referred to together as Neo/Pentecostals in this article), I concur with Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu’s definition of Neo/Pentecostalism. As he notes:

The third wave of Pentecostal Christianity currently enjoying enormous growth and influence in Ghana, as elsewhere in Africa, is the neo-Pentecostal movement. The expression “neo-Pentecostal” is used here as an umbrella term to encompass Pentecostal renewal phenomena associated with trans-denominational fellowships, prayer groups, ministries and independent churches, which came into existence or prominence from about the last three decades of the twentieth century.²

That is, while some scholars tend to read the two movements as separate, and Neo/Pentecostalism as an aberration of Pentecostalism, such a reading misses out on the continuity inherent within this religious tradition.

In terms of political subjectivity, I draw my definition of it from the work of a number of scholars. For example, whilst noting that political subjectivity “spans a vast conceptual space,” Jouni Häkli and Kirsi Kallio also propose that we think of political subjectivity “as a dynamism whereby the political subject arises from and is constituted by everyday political agency.”³ In other words, we have to define political subjectivity from an agentic perspective, whilst also paying attention to the power relations that inform such agency. To this end, “subjectivity is both the premise of and constraint to human political agency, thus forming its critical condition of possibility.”⁴ In terms of the article’s argument, we have to, then, take seriously that the good life in community (or the political) is informed by an agency that is not always antithetical to, but can also be in defense of the religious norm. This last observation is important as it foregrounds the argument that the primary mode of political subjectivity is claims making, and in the case of African Neo/Pentecostals engaged with in this article, the political claims-making is religious in orientation.

In fact, Kristine Krause and Katharina Schramm also affirm the claims-making aspect of political subjectivity when they note that, “It denotes how a single person or a group of actors is brought into a position to stake claims, to have a voice, and to be recognizable by authorities.”⁵ In other words, political subjectivity is “simultaneously about subjection to power, experiencing new agency and gaining recognition.”⁶ Although Krause and Schramm limit the question of authority to the formal institution of the state and political citizenship, what their discussion allows for is the engagement with the question of authority broadly by drawing emphasis on how the political subject desires to be addressed or recognized by an authority and how that recognition frames the sense of agency. In the case of black African political subjects, such recognition has been dwarfed in both the colonial and postcolonial contexts.

Therefore, to speak of political subjectivity is also to speak of the desire to be free to choose. That is, the attainment of the good life in community rests on overcoming restrictions that inhibit one’s capacity to realize it in practice; i.e., the articulation of political subjectivity. Understood in this expansive way, we can concur with Lisa Blackman and company, when they observe that, “In this understanding subjectivity is always here and active; it is a force for making worlds … and it is exactly these qualities of subjectivity that make it an active agent of social, political and cultural analysis and transformation.”⁷ Consequently, the relation between agency, authority, and power is important to keep in mind as we think about how to relate Black African Neo/Pentecostal discursive practices to that of Black Consciousness as a mode of challenging global racist authority.

In terms of the analytical concern of this article, the expansive notion of political subjectivity articulated above provides further impetus for the observation that, African Neo/Pentecostal Theology highlights that political subjectivity should not presuppose a secular ”modern” subject, but take it as given that the religious modern subject is capable of articulating the political in terms commensurate with both religion and politics. Both Ruth Marshall and Wariboko have demonstrated the importance of the African Neo/Pentecostal subject in the context of Nigerian postcolonial politics. To that end, I outline some of their main arguments below before proffering a critique of their limitations, including how we can expand on their work in positive ways.

Marshall, Wariboko, and African Neo/Pentecostal political subjectivity

Marshall

In her now foundational essay on Pentecostalism in Nigeria, Marshall defends a reading of Pentecostalism that situates it within a broader religious context of a concern with “moral uncertainty and mastery in an uncertain world,” including Pentecostalism’s displacement of “the moral relativism of secular modes of political action and thought.”⁸ From her perspective, Pentecostalism presupposes a political subject at the vanguard of a supposed “bid for the re-instantiation of sovereignty that could be interpreted as underwriting a reconstruction of politics on theocratic lines,” including expressing “a politics of exception and exclusion, in which the identification of ‘satanic’ enemies is at the heart of its political onto-theology.”⁹

Additionally, as she further argues, and worthy to be quoted at length:

However, on closer inspection, it is not certain that either the figure of divine sovereignty or the friend/enemy division that it expresses mirror that of our theologico-political tradition, or even Carl Schmitt’s decisionism pressed into the service of shoring up state power under his apocalyptic vision of the chaos from below. Pentecostalism’s antinomianism tendencies, the importance of sole fides, and an embodied, charismatic, and experiential faith means that its engagement, particularly in the context of post-colonial anarchic and authoritarian exception, is not one of a theocratic re-foundation. And the first enemy to be identified is the enemy within the self. As I argue in my larger work, it is first and foremost a religion of the subject, not a religion of the law.¹⁰

In other words, Marshall utilizes subjectivity as interior and primarily concerned with self-government that has little bearing beyond the Pentecostal subject themselves. For this reason, she sees Pentecostal Political Theology as highly ambivalent in the context of the aleatory and only coincidentally concerned with the “logics of our global political economy.”¹¹ For this reason, at least in her view, “Pentecostalism fails to instantiate or institutionalize the connection between power and (religious) law, between authority and obedience,” failing to “lead to the creation of a unified community or identity” or leading to “any theocratic political project.”¹²

Nevertheless, this is not to say that the focus on the self has no implications beyond the self. In fact, according to Marshall,

Pentecostalism’s radical success has as much to do with its reconceptualization of the moral and political order, representing a vision of citizenship in which the moral government of the self is linked to the power to influence the conduct of others.¹³

That said, the power to influence is, nonetheless, undermined by the observation that “access to knowledge and spiritual power is represented as being free, open, and public” and, in this way, “Pentecostal doctrine remains attached to the anti-institutional model of the ‘body of Christ’ as embodied in the form of the fellowship.”¹⁴ Meaning, there can be no monopolization of religious authority by virtue of position and, therefore, by default, no authority to recognize in the sense of proper interpretation, except by veridiction. What this means in terms of political praxis (and in contradistinction to my definition of political subjectivity) is that,

the effects of truth that are produced … do not principally depend upon recognition, as in Butler’s theory of subject-formation, but rather on experiences of interiority … where the accent is placed on processes of subjectivation and the forms of relationship that the self elaborates with the self.¹⁵

Therefore, for Marshall, the unstable ground of Pentecostal subjectivity produced through the foregrounding of interiority means that, “an attempt to develop authoritarian forms of pastoral power [is] constantly undermined, and thus, in turn, contributes to the ongoing fragmentation of the community.”¹⁶

In this sense, there can be no singular theocratic vision (or political theology) because “the blurring of the experiences of faith and works, interrupts the dialectic between the enactment of faith and obedience to prescriptions that would consolidate trust among men.”¹⁷ The lack of trust in this world inherent within this particular form of Pentecostalism limits its ability to institute a notion of authority and obedience that goes beyond interior veridiction and can, therefore, be a ground for collective obedience. As such, despite having all the potential for promoting the core ideals of democracy, the reliance on verisimilitude rather than ecclesiastical or state authority as representative of divine sovereignty, undermines any project of securing a stable “connection between righteousness and authority, between a new mode of self-government and the government of others.”¹⁸ While convincing and original in the context of which Marshall first articulated these arguments, they have reached their explanatory limits in the current milieu within which African Neo/Pentecostalism finds itself enmeshed in the politics of new crises that are demanding a less interior form of religious subjectivity.

A key shift that has contributed toward a greater connection between righteousness and authority that draws from a specifically Neo/Pentecostal religious tradition (thus institutionalizing Neo/Pentecostal political subjectivity) is the de-abstraction of the Neo/Pentecostal subject from a generic religious subject to a specifically black, African Neo/Pentecostal subject. The effect of which has been a growth of the affirmative politics of the miraculous and its instantiation as the new political order in which the black African political subject is not only central, but chosenly so. Unlike Marshall’s reading of spiritual warfare as destabalizing, I aver that by placing spiritual warfare at the center of its political subjectivity, the African Neo/Pentecostal subject engages the problem of enmity differently. Whereas religious election has traditionally been used to set apart black physical bodies as those that can be destroyed and/or sacrificed in pursuit of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, the new elect of God make such subjectivity of election open to all as long as they choose to be part of the new community. That is, election is a discourse which Africans have previously seen used against them in the colonial, post-colonial, and neo-colonial unequal power relations. As such, its reclamation as part of a politics of not only spiritual liberation, but also political liberation for the black African subject is important for APT.

In this new discourse of the reclamation of election as providing the means for political subjectivity, African individuals (in community) can claim G/god’s favor as their own and demonstrate such favor via a material abundance previously limited to the “west” through the asymmetry of colonial capitalism and imperial Christianity.¹⁹ A limitation that has found further continuity in the company of post-colonial elites who have conspired with religious authority in the exercise of state sovereignty. In particular, by drawing on a politics of recognition that does not rely on a traditional statist discourse of belonging (such as bordered citizenship) the African Neo/Pentecostal subject is able to declare their humanity differently. That is, not primarily through a rights discourse or discourse of authenticity, but through a discourse of born-again Christian election (recognition) that carries meaning beyond simply the self of Marshall and projects itself as a universal ethico-political order.

Wariboko

The political implications of such an understanding of enmity and sovereignty, including election, should be obvious enough. However, let me further clarify by drawing on the work of Wariboko. Wariboko has argued through the case of Nigeria that the reclamation of blackness through the revision of the notion of election can be mapped via a shift “from spirituality that focuses on the purity of the body to spirituality that focuses on the purity of the body politic.”²⁰ In particular, as he notes: “Nigerian Pentecostals are claiming that their nation has been specially chosen by God to prepare the world for the Second Coming of Christ and to draw the black race into economic development.”²¹ This particular understanding of chosenness promoted by the Pentecostals in Nigeria is not simply one of pursuing election for the sake of individual purity. It is, as Waribiko argues, of the view that God “has opened the structure of hope and expectation of the future to the black race as whole.”²²

This argument introduces race as an important element through which to think Neo/Pentecostalism, which is something that Marshall elides in her discussion of Pentecostal political subjectivity despite the context within which she writes. In my view, this represents a particular orientation in the work cited above that was specifically concerned with making Pentecostalism intelligible in the register of political theology. Hence, her focus is limited to explaining how Nigerian Pentecostals are part of a global phenomenon, but only in so far as they fit its general order of pursuing personal purity despite the necropolitical context that she addresses as central. To that end, the fact of blackness as a racial category is absent in her analysis and this is where Wariboko’s work pushes Marshall a bit further by foregrounding the question of blackness. Moreover, Wariboko’s argument is one that is very familiar in the North American context within which various scholars have linked the intersection of Pentecostalism and the politics of African-American anti-racism.

To a large extent, Wariboko agrees with Marshall in that he observes how, “In its early and very conservative days, Nigerian Pentecostalism greatly focused on the human body, its intake and output, and its coverings” as signs of self-care and the pursuit of individual purity.²³ However, he goes a step further, and specifically drawing on a Foucauldian analytical framework, by proposing that there is a taxonomy to the forms of protocols of the body politic in Nigerian Pentecostalism that move, first from the disciplinary mode outlined above. This first form is “focused on the body, the technology of the self, [and] the disciplinary order of the body.”²⁴ The second mode is regulatory, drawing on the idea that “Pentecostal spirituality is a power-knowledge that is applied to the whole population” and “is now concerned not only with ‘bodies and what bodies do,’ but also with the land and the gross collective product and fortune of the land (social body).”²⁵ The third mode, which he calls sovereignty, is one that “will not reduce political power to the unity of one potentate or a central controlling authority … even if it aids the founding of a political community.”²⁶ In some sense, Wariboko echoes Marshall to some degree, but with the distinction that Pentecostal sovereignty will be acceptable “under the rubric of controlling the aleatory events that threaten the destiny of the nation or God’s mandate for the black race to prepare the earth for Jesus Christ’s second coming.”²⁷

Accordingly, by bringing together the traditional Pentecostal concern with holiness and its associated practices and behaviors, alongside the evangelical focus on winning souls, certain Neo/Pentecostal preachers believe themselves to be ushering “Nigerians and the whole of the black race into spiritual and technological superiority or at least world respectability.”²⁸ However, unlike the traditional conceptions of sovereignty that reduce political power only to a central controlling authority (such as the state or an absolute monarch), the black African Neo/Pentecostal form of sovereignty works via the production and reproduction of positive virtues and normalization of chosenness (race consciousness) and anti-racist justice as the modes through which to institute juridical sovereignty. They do so by claiming the call for black chosenness as the fulfillment of God’s mandate. In some ways, the fulfillment of the mandate does point to the unstable nature of such political subjectivity in line with Marshall’s argument. However, unlike Marshall, Wariboko does not see the instability posed by the primary concern with self-government as precluding the possibility of carving out a new form of the political. This is largely because of the fact that race is central to this project of reimagining the political in terms that “carve a new space of equality for a new reality of kinship.”²⁹

Whilst overstating the case of superiority, Wariboko, nonetheless, highlights an important shift in how the pursuit of the practice of holiness (also identified by Marshall as central to Pentecostal theology) is being extended beyond the self. In this extension beyond the self, this shift highlights that holiness, and by extension elections, is addressed to the nation and the black race, thus transforming “the weight of suffering and racism into the weight of God-given destiny.”³⁰ In rethinking both the theological reach of purity as not simply personal and the racial identity of blackness as not negative, black, African Neo/Pentecostals are drawing on a particular language of nationalism as liberatory and identity politics as emancipatory. Thus, highlighting purity/holiness as the pursuit of “dignified recognition in the world … nurtured within the discourse of spirituality.”³¹ Such a view challenges the assumption that Neo/Pentecostalism’s concern with self-regulation does not extend beyond the self and only provides for an unstable ground for politics.

In fact, it becomes clear that given the weight that black Africans bear in terms of racism, slavery, colonialism, and poverty – all of which feed into “the devaluation and degradation of their racial identity” the world over – race becomes the ground on which a stable political project is built without compromising the primacy of self-government.³² Granted, as Wariboko also avers, that as positive such a project of black self-affirmation may be, its reliance on a register of the universal truth of Neo/Pentecostalism, including its invocation of differential inclusion, is problematic for democratic politics in general. That is,

With an intense focus on quickly achieving the racial destiny of evangelizing the world and lifting the fortunes of the black race, it is quite conceivable to see a threat to and subversion of destiny as coming from some fifth column or enemies from within. The social body must purify itself of the pollution of some internal elements. When the passage of time becomes so filled with significance and the danger of slipping from God’s mandate, there is often a call for sacrifice, for draconian measures.³³

Although admitting that this claim is not necessarily a declaration of the inevitable as such, Wariboko’s admonition points to both the realpolitik and ideological implications of Neo/Pentecostal African political subjectivity as a politics of difference. By reading the identity politics of African Neo/Pentecostalism as less negotiable since its concern with a particular end drives its impetus, Wariboko limits the agentic capacity of individuals to negotiate the tension for themselves. In a sense, the religious character of the project of African Neo/Pentecostal subjectivity remains an exercise in dogmatic religion, and there goes the potential to think religion differently.

However, I challenge this reneging tendency in Wariboko and the refusal tendency in Marshall (to racialize African Neo/Pentecostal theology), by reiterating that I see African Neo/Pentecostal subjectivity as promoting a specifically nuanced politics that is most appropriate for the post-colonial context. In particular, I put forward that, a fruitful reading of black African Neo/Pentecostal political subjectivity is one that contextualizes it within a broad history of black emancipation on the continent, including the broad negative history of Africa as a place of lack and absence. To which not only African religious traditions have responded with discourses of life and productivity, but also political ideological orientations and intellectual traditions such as Negritude, Pan-Africanism, and African Renaissance amongst others.

This is not to deny the important work that the scholarship which links Pentecostal Christian citizenship with state regeneration in Africa has done for reconceptualizing politics and the political in postcolonial Africa. In particular, Barbara Bompani and Carline Valois’ edited book, Christian Citizens and the Moral Regeneration of the African State, is of great import in this regard.³⁴ In particular, the articles by Asamoah-Gyadu on Ghana and Gregory Deacon on Kenya in this book, highlight saliently the ways in which the notion of responsible citizenship is tied to material prosperity and discourses of the nation as exclusively defined by one’s citizenship status as a Pentecostal Christian.³⁵ Indeed, using the scholarship on Pentecostal Charismatic citizenship can prove useful for supporting my argument regarding the preponderance of an African Neo/Pentecostal subjectivity that is laying claim to a new notion of the political that draws from a specifically religious register.

However, as Mahmood Mamdani has argued, the bifurcated ways in which the concept of citizenship comes into the African context via the colonial legacy should give us cause for pause.³⁶ We should be especially wary of positively reinscribing the concept of Christian citizenship as it is also ingrained within the same colonial logic that separates those who are contracted by the state from those who are excluded from its citizenship. Moreover, the notion of citizenship is tied up with other limitations that make it difficult to capture the ideological value of subjectivity. For example, we can note the apparent contradiction “between the promise of equality entailed in citizenship and the practical inequality” that limits the capacity of citizenship (Christian or otherwise) to be liberatory.³⁷

Furthermore, even though providing an avenue through which claims-making and recognition are possible, citizens are subject to an official relationship between the individual and the state.³⁸ Thus limited in their performative capacity to encompass a broader notion of belonging that is more than simply about rights and territorialized belonging (even in the notion of the global citizen). Here, the issue of the recognition of the black African political subject demands a political register that goes beyond these limited notions of citizenship. This is because we are now in the territory of norms, where recognition and claims-making are not simply about the politics of difference, but also about the recognition of all in the community of humanity. In this sense, a focus on Christian citizenship takes away from the openness of political subjectivity that I am proposing and provides for a broader reconceptualization of not only the political, but also how the religious grounds this specific form of black political subjectivity through a concern with racial emancipation.

Instead, I propose that we draw on the seemingly unlikely ally of Black Consciousness Thought as informing some of the ways in which to read the articulation of an African Neo/Pentecostal political subjectivity in the contemporary context. I argue that the concern of both African Neo/Pentecostalism and Black Consciousness thought with the recuperation of an affirmative politics of blackness (recognition) informs how both these discourses come together in the broader project of critiquing the global humanist project in its failure to address the plight of black Africans in particular. That is, a turn to religious discourse as the ground from which to claim political recognition is useful on two counts. First, it allows for useful analysis of the continuity of the role of religion in discourses of black emancipation on the continent that do not end with post-colonial statehood/citizenship. Second, it challenges the limited ways in which the African Neo/Pentecostal subject as political is sometimes abstracted from the global context of black racism, including how black African Neo/Pentecostals are actually responding to this global racism in their reclamation of the language of election and prosperity.

Indeed, as one of the reviewers of the article observed, it is arguable that the article's argument relativizes the entirety of African Neo-Pentecostalism to the South African context and this might be misleading since race is an essential category in South Africa, but not in West Africa or East Africa. However, the claim of the article is precisely that we must engage in an improvisational reading of race in Africa to be able to go beyond the assumption that only South Africa is preoccupied with race. I believe that Wariboko is essential in this sense as a Nigerian scholar trying to recenter race in a context where it is deemed non-essential when it is essential. That is, if one goes back to how the rise of African Initiated/Independent Churches on the continent is linked directly to forms of African nationalisms across the continent, then it should be clear that race has always mattered not only in South Africa, but also West Africa and East Africa. Indeed, scholars such as Birgit Meyer, JDY Peel, and Lamin Sanneh, amongst others, and have produced work focused on the Black Consciousness initiatives of AICs.³⁹

Emancipatory Black Consciousness thought and black theology

I draw my definition of Black Consciousness from the South African Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) of the late 1960s–late 1970s. What the Black Consciousness philosophy of the BCM articulates and promotes is a distinct departure from the alienation from self that afflicts the being of the oppressed black people of South Africa. In particular, the BCM promotes departure from the non-racial struggle of the 1950s and 1960s, whose guiding principle is enshrined in the Freedom Charter (1955) and its promotion of non-racialism and integration.⁴⁰ Instead, Black Consciousness argues that black people should no longer accept being judged according to white values and norms. This means that they must psychologically liberate themselves from the slave mentality created by institutionalized racism and white liberalism in particular.

In essence, Black Consciousness is about adopting a particular attitude toward life as a black person. Specifically, it seeks to eliminate the alienation from self that afflicted the being of the oppressed black people of South Africa. It seeks to free the mind of the oppressed from an appropriative and hegemonic white consciousness. As Biko observes:

I feel that the Black people of the world, in choosing to reject the legacy of colonialism and white domination and to build around themselves the their own values, standards and outlook to life, have at last established a solid base for meaningful cooperation amongst themselves in the larger battle of the Third World against the rich nations.⁴¹

Moreover, in linking Black Consciousness to theology in particular, Biko further notes that Black Consciousness

takes cognizance of the deliberateness of God’s plan in creating black people black. It seeks to infuse the black community with a new-found pride in themselves, their efforts, their value systems, their culture, their religion and their outlook on life.⁴²

In particular, Black Consciousness reinvigorates the inherent agency of black people that has been thwarted by apartheid and places black people at the center of their own liberation narrative.⁴³ Therefore, what is powerful about Black Consciousness is that it centers the possibility for change within the subjectivity of the oppressed person, and not within the South African political economy (state) or the supposed goodness of the liberal system (ethics). That is, unlike the primarily inferior race-based construction of identity that typifies apartheid and racist logic, Black Consciousness defines black on the basis of political and socio-economic factors. In the Black Consciousness philosophy black people are “defined as those who are by law or tradition, discriminated against, politically oppressed, economically exploited and socially degraded and who identify themselves as a unit in the struggle for their emancipation.”⁴⁴

Furthermore, in a society where black people are referred to as “non-whites,” Black Consciousness gives the oppressed their own separate identity that has itself as a point of reference. It then infuses this self-driven identity with pride that enables black people of South Africa to assert, along with Frantz Fanon, that they are not a potentiality of someone else, but they are whole as they are.⁴⁵ The obvious question that follows naturally then is: What is the specific form of liberation that black African Neo/Pentecostals political subjectivity takes; and how is this specific form of political subjectivity linked to the project of black liberation in general, and Black Consciousness in particular?

Vignettes: speaking from the pew of blackness

To further illustrate my point, let me draw attention to three vignettes. The first refers to Mensa Otabil, a Ghanaian theologian and senior pastor of Christ Temple, a ministry of the International Central Gospel Church of which he is also the founder and General Overseer. The ICGC is headquartered in Accra, Ghana, with a network that has local assemblies in parts of Africa, Europe, the United States, and Canada. His ministerial work has centered on issues relevant to Africa, and he has been referred to by some as a Pan-Africanist theologian. Speaking in August 2020 at the Greater Works event organized by his church in Accra, Otabil notes that the black race has been in the dark since the time of the slave trade and even though all the countries have gained independence from their colonial masters, they’ve been unable to achieve their dreams. However, according to him, God never made a mistake creating the Black race as perceived by many. I quote:

I’m a full believer in Africa and its destiny. I’m a full believer in the Black race and the dark skin and the purpose of which God made us dark and put us on this continent. I’m a full believer that God does not make mistakes.⁴⁶

In fact, this is an argument which he defended already in 1992 in his book Beyond the Rivers of Ethiopia which lays the foundations for a Pan-African Pentecostal Liberation Theology.⁴⁷ At the Greater Works event, he adds, “Even South Africa that we thought was going to show the way is marching in the night. Sometimes as an African, you look at yourself and say, will this march ever end? Will we live to see our hope become a reality? Will we get out of the mess and the darkness?” His answer: “We’ve been marching for long as Africa but I know one morning, just in time, delivery system will be handed to us and suddenly there will be a change in the story.”⁴⁸

Otabil is not alone in promoting such a message of optimism for the rise of Africa. Our second vignette is a message by Bishop Dr RC Madzinge of the Christian Worship Centre in Tshwane, South Africa on how God Loves Africa.⁴⁹ In this message, the key point made is that Africa has always been important to God and God’s plan of salvation. Therefore, whatever the world’s negative view of the continent and its people might be, it is not one with which Africans should concern themselves. Instead, Bishop Madzinge argues that Africans should embrace the great destiny that is due to them.

Third, and last, we can note how various leaders of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), which was founded in Nigeria in 1952 and currently led by Pastor Enoch Adejare Adeboye, a former mathematics professor, have established parishes in more than 90 countries, including China, Pakistan, Turkey, Europe, and North America. A key message that drives their missionary zeal is best captured by the church’s motto in the Sanctuary that Afe Adogame has reflected on, which reads: “Missionaries to a dead Europe.”⁵⁰ In fact, when the RCCG first made entry into Floyd, Texas, Pastor Ajibike Akinkoye, a former language and literature professor who has taught in Nigeria and at the University of Texas at Dallas, said church leaders knew there would be some hype and hysteria about the project. He said he'd been told the Ku Klux Klan is still active in the area. His response: “They may not welcome us, but we are not afraid of them … In fact, maybe God sent us there so we can bring them to the Lord … to chase them out of the darkness and to bring them into the marvellous light of God.”⁵¹ That is, for RCCG, the fact that black Africans are taking the gospel to the western world is not a mistake, but an act of God that positions the missionaries as nothing less than the fulfillment of a divine plan.

While it’s possible to read these vignettes through a limited theological context that proscribes them to the realm of concern only with comforting a despondent people, or a concern with a core principle of evangelizing specifically to Africans, I want to propose that we go beyond such a view to be able to see more. To do this I return to Wariboko, who gives force to the vignettes shared earlier by proposing that, the attention paid to

race-oriented (or counter-racist) theology is not only moving Pentecostals and their bodies into action and the reconstruction of what it means to be black, but is also constructing human bodies and collectives via disciplines, regulations, and normalization that are central to sovereignty (altersovereignty) as a biopolitical project.⁵²

Specifically, and drawing on a Foucauldian analytical framework that goes from discipline to regulation to sovereignty, Wariboko notes that, “long deprived, degraded, neglected” the black Pentecostal body in Nigeria (as a collective) is beginning to engage identity politics in the “project of divine chosenness and national liberation.”⁵³ This much is true of the three leaders presented above. For all of them, black Africans deserve better than how they are treated globally because they are central to the salvation of the world.

Moreover, the call for black chosenness as the fulfillment of God’s mandate, through the current ways in which black African Neo/Pentecostals are grounding race as central to the project of reimagining the political in terms of the fulfillment of the kingdom of God cannot but demand a politics beyond the self. As noted already, Wariboko limits the agentic capacity of individuals to negotiate the tension for themselves and, thus, confines the potential for political subjectivity gleaned through taking black religious identity politics seriously as ground for a new form of the political for the post-colonial context.

In my view, and although drawing from a specific theological language of Christianity, African Neo/Pentecostals articulate a similar discourse to Black Consciousness of self-emancipation, including challenging the inherent assumption of traditional western Christianity as the fulfillment of white history and manifest destiny. In this sense, it is defensible to say that when black African Neo/Pentecostals are proclaiming the chosenness of the black race to usher in the Second Coming, they are doing so with the understanding that challenges a limited reading of not only the political, but also the religious. In particular, they draw “from a long history of Christian resistance by black post-missionary Christians to the hegemony and control of the church by European missionaries”⁵⁴ That is, the option for many black liberation movements across the continent has not been to turn their backs on Christianity but to re-interpret this religious tradition and its practices through the perspective of the black experience by asserting independence and proclaiming leadership by black leaders and engaging the freedom to reimagine Christian practices within the context of African cultures and rituals.

In other words, contrary to the view that Neo-Pentecostal Christianity completely disavows African cultures and that its principal mass appeal is a complete break from the past (which includes African religion, some aspects of African cultures, and some Christian denominations, like AICs that inculturate African cultures into their liturgies), I am arguing that Neo-Pentecostal black subjectivity foregrounds improvisational constructions of African and Christianity that are practically not in line with the narrative of a complete break, even while this might be the supposed ideal. In fact, Naar M’fundisi-Holloway has convincingly demonstrated how the interface between Pentecostalism and African traditional religions in Africa should be read as a cyclical movement of antagonism, negotiation, compromise, and incorporation. Where one can read the use of certain rituals in the Pentecostal churches in Africa through the lens of the Christianization of African spiritualities in terms of the use of things such as oils and other amulets that pastors claim are washed in the blood of Jesus.⁵⁵ In that sense, what the contemporary African Neo/Pentecostals are doing in fusing the discourse of racial liberation with African spiritual liberation is nothing new, but has taken on a different form under changed conditions.

Arguably, then, as “a theology which deals with the questions of which are vital to particular people in a particular situation,” the Black Consciousness form of Neo/Pentecostalism can be seen in how Otabil and Adeboye specifically foreground the focus on the black self as central to their theological work.⁵⁶ It is not a theology of superiority, but of difference read positively. That is, African Neo/Pentecostalism’s definition of liberation is not limited to the spiritual sense of freedom from personal sin, but also accounts for the broader structural contexts within which such personal sin arise. This is what Biko means when he says, Black Theology “shifts the emphasis from petty sins to major sins in a society, thereby ceasing to teach the people to ‘suffer peacefully.’”⁵⁷ As a theology informed by a desire for self-determination, at least in the form of the vignettes provided earlier in the article, African Neo/Pentecostalism provides the black African Christian with the means to transcend all forms of oppressions (spiritual and material).

Therefore, for example, the Neo/Pentecostal concern with prosperity, for example, should not be read only at the register of neoliberal accumulation (an argument that I have also made in relation to the South African context of the rise of Black Conservatism) (2023 forthcoming). The desire for material well-being should also be understood in terms of transcending socio-economic oppression and doing so by not relying only on the state as the provider, but on the ethics of working on the self and relying on God to provide the means, including special favor of which the cited pastors speak in this particular moment in history. Indeed, it can be argued that one of Black Consciousness’ achievements is the introduction of the “black subject” as a meaningful agent in the thinking and execution of liberation. In particular, Black Consciousness reinvigorates the inherent agency of black people that had been thwarted by apartheid and places black people at the center of their own liberation narrative. From this perspective, it is arguable that when black African Neo/Pentecostals are proclaiming the chosenness of the black race to usher in the Second Coming, they are doing so with the understanding that challenges a limited reading of not only the political, but also the religious.

That is, despite foregrounding individual personal salvation, contemporary Neo/Pentecostalism in Africa does not simply set aside the material questions. Instead, just as “a theological articulation of Black consciousness in the religious realm became one of the many projects of conscientization” through Black Theology, African Neo/Pentecostalism functions today as an extension of this conscientization through the registers of self-care and the care of others who are “Black like Me.”⁵⁸ Consequently, in the context of post-colonial Sub-Saharan Africa, the rise of Neo/Pentecostal churches should not only be read through the various limited lenses that have been put forth in much scholarship. These range from a focus on the links between Neo/Pentecostalism and propping up of a neoliberal order; to analyses that critique the Neo/Pentecostals as an aberration of some pure form of Pentecostalism; as well as the continued reading of Neo/Pentecostalism as a solipsistic individual journey of personal salvation devoid of public engagement or meaning beyond evangelizing. In reading black African Neo/Pentecostal political subjectivity through the lens of race, and specifically in linking to Black Consciousness, I am proposing that we expand the repertoires of meaning associated with the rise of Neo/Pentecostalism in twenty-first century Africa.

Conclusion

In essence, as I have argued throughout this article, what the centering of race does is not only to de-abstract the African Neo/Pentecostal subjects from their specific socio-political location of Africa, including all the implications of such a location. Centering race also allows us the opportunity to see continuity in the struggle for black emancipation pursued through a specifically Christian political theology. This second form of centering is important to foreground because it provides a different dimension through which to apprehend and comprehend the rise of Neo/Pentecostalism on the continent beyond simply a discourse of spiritual revolution. The pursuit of racial emancipation as part of what African Neo/Pentecostal political subjectivity offers black African political subjects in a continuously racist world, allows to resist to some degree the discourse of the supposed co-option of religion by politics in postcolonial Africa. Moreover, it allows us the opportunity to make positive links between the politics of Africa rising, affirmative race ascription, and the centrality of religion to black Africans in ways that go beyond the limited arguments of authenticity and assimilation.

This argument is obviously provocative for many reasons, but I would invite us to imagine what improvisational prowess such rethinking of Neo/Pentecostalism as part of the long tradition of Black Emancipatory Politics does for our scholarship on religion in Africa. First, I believe that it challenges the various limited lenses that have been put forth in much scholarship. These range from a focus on the links between Neo/Pentecostalism and propping up of a neoliberal order; to analyses that critique the Neo/Pentecostals as an aberration of some pure form of Pentecostalism; as well as the continued reading of Neo/Pentecostalism as a solipsistic individual journey of personal salvation devoid of public engagement or meaning beyond evangelizing.

Second, in reading black African Neo/Pentecostal political subjectivity through the lens of race, and specifically in linking it to Black Consciousness, I believe that we are better able to expand the repertoires of meaning associated with the rise of Neo/Pentecostalism in twenty-first century Africa. In particular, as I have argued, what the centering of race in the Neo/Pentecostal project does is to allow us the opportunity to see continuity in the struggle for black emancipation pursued through a specifically Christian political theology. Third, and consequently, what such form of centering does is to provide a different dimension through which to apprehend and comprehend the rise of Neo/Pentecostalism on the continent beyond simply a discourse of internal spiritual revolution. The pursuit of racial emancipation as part of what African Neo/Pentecostal political subjectivity offers black African political subjects in a continuously racist world, also allows us to resist to some degree the temptation of the discourse of the supposed co-option of religion by politics in postcolonial Africa.

It does so by compelling us to make positive links between the politics of Africa rising, affirmative race ascription, and the centrality of religion to black Africans in ways that go beyond the limited arguments that reduce black liberation narratives to the binary discourses of pure authenticity or compromised assimilation – as Mbembe has noted elaborately elsewhere.⁵⁹ Instead, we are asked to take seriously the improvisational nature of post-colonial Africa, including its rich repertoire of political subjectivity that is informed by a concern with not only material but also spiritual emancipation.⁶⁰ Thus bringing black Africans from the periphery into the center of a new political order in pursuit of a reimagined humanism in line with the article’s view of a political subjectivity that claims, provides, and shares with others the good life in community of humanity through a Neo/Pentecostal praxis.

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Funding

This work was supported by MIASA and Villanova University.

Notes on contributors

Siphiwe Ignatius Dube

Siphiwe Dube is a Senior Lecturer and former HoD in the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is an author of numerous interdisciplinary articles and book chapters (and also supervises) on a range of topics covering African politics and religion, decoloniality, feminisms, post-colonial literature, race, religion and masculinities, religion and identity politics, religion and popular culture, and transitional justice.

Notes

1 Dube, ”A Foray into (Study of?).”

2 Asamoah-Gyadu, African Charismatics: Current Developments, 26.

3 Häkli and Kallio, “On Becoming Political,” 58.

4 Ibid., 65.

5 Krause and Schramm, “Thinking Through Political Subjectivity,” 115.

6 Ibid.

7 Blackman et al., “Creating Subjectivities,” 16.

8 Marshall, “The Sovereignty of Miracles,” 199.

9 Ibid., 200.

10 Ibid., 201.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid., 208.

14 Ibid., 209.

15 Ibid., 213.

16 Ibid., 216.

17 Ibid., 218.

18 Ibid., 210.

19 On colonial capitalism, see: Ake, “The Class Struggle”; Ake, “Contradictions of the Colonial Economy”; Amin, “Underdevelopment and Dependence in Black Africa”; Amin, “Understanding the Political Economy”; Mafeje, Science, Ideology and Development.

20 Wariboko, “Pentecostal Theology as a Discursive Site,” 417.

21 Ibid., 419.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid., 420.

24 Ibid. 428.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid., 429.

28 Ibid., 421.

29 Ibid., 426.

30 Ibid., 422.

31 Ibid., 424.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid., 430.

34 Bompani and Valois, Christian Citizens and the Moral Regeneration.

35 Asamoah-Gyadu, “Heavenly Commonwealth and Earthly Good”; Deacon, “‘I Will Make You into a Great Nation, and I will Bless You’.”

36 Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa.

37 Krause and Schramm, “Thinking Through,” 124.

38 Ibid., 125.

39 Meyer, “Christianity in Africa”; Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making; Sanneh, “Prelude to African Christian Independency.”

40 “The Freedom Charter.”

41 Biko, “White Racism and Black Consciousness,” 10.

42 Biko, “The Definition of Black Consciousness,” 3.

43 “The Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa.”

44 Ibid.

45 Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness”; “The Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa.”

46 Otabil, “Africa Has Been in Darkness.”

47 Otabil, Beyond the Rivers of Ethiopia.

48 Otabil, “Africa has been in darkness.”

49 Madzinge, “God Loves Africa.”

50 “African Church plans ‘Christian Disneyland.’”

51 Ibid.

52 Wariboko, “Pentecostal Theology,” 420.

53 Ibid., 420; 421.

54 Pityana, “Black Consciousness, Black Theology, Student Activism,” 11.

55 M’fundisi-Holloway, “When Pentecostalism Meets African Indigenous Religions.”

56 Ngakane, “The Challenge of Black Theology to Present S.A.”

57 Biko, “The Church as Seen by a Young Layman,” 2, 42.

58 Mofokeng, “Following the Trail of Suffering,” 21–34.

59 Mbembé, “Provisional Notes on the Postcolony”; Mbembé, “African Modes of Self-Writing.”

60 See, for example: Dube, “Decolonising the Theologico-Political Problem.”