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The counterpart of populist Islam in the slums of Latin America and much of sub-Saharan Africa is Pentecostalism. Christianity, of course, is now, in its majority, a non-Western religion (two-thirds of its adherents live outside Europe and North America), and Pentecostalism is its most dynamic missionary in cities of poverty. Indeed the historical specificity of Pentecostalism is that it is the first major world religion to have grown up almost entirely in the soil of the modern urban slum. With roots in early ecstatic Methodism and African-American spirituality, Pentecostalism "awoke" when the Holy Ghost gave the gift of tongues to participants in an interracial prayer marathon in a poor neighbourhood of Los Angeles (Azusa Street) in 1906. Unified around spirit baptism, miracle healing, charismata and a premillennial belief in a coming world war of capital and labour, early American Pentecostalism -- as religious historians have repeatedly noted -- originated as a ‘prophetic democracy’ whose rural and urban constituencies overlapped, respectively, with those of Populism and the IWW. Indeed, like Wobbly organizers, its early missionaries to Latin America and Africa ‘lived often in extreme poverty, going out with little or no money, seldom knowing where they would spend the night, or how they would get their next meal.’ They also yielded nothing to the IWW in their vehement denunciations of the injustices of industrial capitalism and its inevitable destruction.
Edward Blyden: his prophetic vision
The African Contribution to Humanity
Africa's Spiritual Triumph: comfort ye my people
South Africa's bumpy miracle: the journey goes on
'Zion' pentecostalism: Anglo-American & African brushfire
Darfur: a genocide we can stop
African Prophetic ChurchesJohn Ferguson throws a deeper light [not verbatim] During the twentieth century, extending back into the nineteenth, the whole of Africa has seen the emergence of independent indigenous gospel churches. Almost a brushfire movement, these evangelical "awakenings" have erupted at times almost unpredictably -- and as it were to the consternation of more establishment-style Euro-centric denominationalism, with their stuffy dignity, their scholarly rigidity. The indigenous movement cared not at all whether the white theologians approved or nit-picked. The "move of the Spirit" had a force all its own. Often, accompanying the revivalist fervor, a charismatic, eloquent prophetic leader has risen into prominence. Such was William Wade Harris of Liberia, with his white gown and turban, the great evangelist of the Ivory Coast. Such was Garrick Braid of the Niger Delta with his great healing powers, or Joseph Babalola of Ilesha in Nigeria, a visionary of genius. Such was Simon Kimbangu of Zaire (Congo), healer and pacifist, who spent thirty years in a Belgian jail. Such was Alice Lenshina of Zambia, who believed that she herself had been resurrected from the dead, and given a new bible by angels, who insisted on strict morality, and was apolitical. Such was Isaiah Shembe, visionary, healer, ascetic and exorcist, who established the new community of Ama Nazareth outside Durban. Many of these churches, and many smaller groups and sects, are marked by ecstatic worship, fostered by drumming and expressed through dancing, speaking in tongues, and the like. Dreams and visions play an important part in such groups as the Cherubim and Seraphim; it was said of Alice Lenshina's Lumpa church that 'dream and taboo were the two front doors through which Christians went back to the African past.' Prayer is important, as in the Aladura churches of west Africa; and it involves congregational participation and is sometimes itself associated with a dissociation of the conscious senses. |
