On one of the last days of COP15, the United Nations climate change convention in Copenhagen last December (you know, the one that failed, the one that Naomi Klein called “the world’s biggest poker game”), I sat at a cafeteria table and propped up my legs on an empty chair. I was trying to check my email while also checking out French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, who was at the next table. The same day I noticed NDP leader Jack Layton. (He didn’t recognize me.) Later, I waited for my next interview subject at the entrance to the media room and there, in fire engine-red pants and with his unmistakeable squint, was Thom Yorke of Radiohead. He wasn’t there to perform, unless you considered his newest gig a kind of performance. Hundreds of delegates had been shut out of the overcrowded Bella Center, but Yorke had snagged a coveted press pass and was wandering around the convention centre. (Yorke didn’t recognize me, either.)

The gloss celebrity brings to world affairs and to journalism isn’t new, but it reappeared Monday with not one but two guest editors at the Globe and Mail. Bono – he who sees the world through yellow-coloured glasses – and Band Aid founder Bob Geldof breezed into Toronto over the weekend to helm the Globe’s special on Africa. The Globe’s website carried stories about their progress, and the visit seemed to eclipse the news itself.

I followed this on the Globe’s website and it appeared as if Bono and Geldof were there for about five hours or so. It’s like Mario Batali going into one of his kitchens and straightening a piece of grilled asparagus on a dish before sending it out.

This isn’t the first time Bono has taken up residence as guest editor of a publication. In 2006 he edited an issue of the Independent and he’s a regular op-end contributor to the New York Times. He worked with Graydon Carter on Vanity Fair’s July 2007 issue. His editor’s note (called “Message 2U”) was transparent about his goals, quoting former U.S. Treasurer secretary Robert Rubin:

We are serious about our stuff we will have to improve on two fronts: (1) communicating to America the scale of the problem, and (2) convincing America that the problem can be solved. He added the challenge that we would need the kinds of marketing budgets Nike and Gap have at their disposal.

(Bono went on to give a shout out to companies like Gap and Apple, who support his charities.) Considering he had already edited an edition of The Independent, doesn’t that make the Globe issue seem like a rehash? If you’re going to go gimmicky, shouldn’t it be your own gimmick?

That’s not really the point, of course. On the one hand it reaffirms Bonos self-appointed role as an advocate for Africa. On the other, it draws celebrity power to the slowly dying world of newspapers. As former Globe and Mail reporter Stephen Strauss reminded us: “It’s good for brand Globe and Mail.” Strauss thought the Monday issue was fair, but brought up a question that needs to be asked every time a celebrity takes part in such stunts (see a list of other celebrity guest editors below):

Does this work? Working here means does it benefit the interests of all concerned? Does this stunt make a difference to the mesh of idealism and self-interest that the editorship is about? In a much, much larger sense does anyone believe that the problems of Africa are going to be fundamentally addressed by a billion articles in a Canadian newspaper? The issue, and Ken Wiwa referenced this in his essay on the matter in the paper on Saturday, is that Africans themselves have to figure out a way to reconstitute their ways of life so that they can participate in and add to the wealth generating and technology-creating symphony of modern life.

That’s precisely what’s so irksome. One of the potential covers for Monday’s Globe and Mail that Bono put to a vote in the newsroom on included a prominent logo for his own NGO, One. Think about how it would appear if the CEO of a multinational company or a bank were guest editing the issue and splashed its logo across the front. (See the cover the Globe went with here.) Lea Zeltserman put it this way: “By putting celebrities in charge, the paper limits itself in its ability to engage with Africa and issues around foreign aid and development. Bono and Geldof are a part of that debate, and a newspaper’s responsibility is to examine their role critically, not help facilitate their work.”

As Toronto writer David Hayes, who wrote Power and Influence: The Globe and Mail and the News Revolution, noted, bold-faced names are tapped all the time to dictate the news. “Stephen Colbert guest edited Newsweek a couple of years ago and Wallpaper makes a habit of it. Guest editors over the past couple of years include Karl Lagerfeld, Philippe Starck, Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo and artist/sculptor Louise Bourgeois. Penelope Cruz just guest edited French Vogue last month. (I loved one ‘news’ report, which noted: ‘The Spanish actress has left the movie sets for several days to devote her attention to the new activity.’)” Hayes pointed out that Tina Brown recruited comedian Roseanne Barr to consult on an issue of the New Yorker. Was it a success? Hayes points out that Gawker quoted Brown on the subject of celeb guest editors: “They don’t know how to get it right, any more than I would know how to commission a bunch of songs. As an editing idea, it’s fraught with road kill.”

We journalists can be a little prickly when rock stars usurp their turf. So can activists. The Globe recruited Ory Okolloh, the blogger-lawyer behind Kenyan Pundit, to run globeandmail.com coverage on Monday. Okolloh commented in her editor’s note:

I’m sure they have the best of intentions, but the role of the African voice both in addressing our problems and the solutions to those problems is one that needs to remain at centre stage if the continent is to make progress. So while the paper edition might focus on what the world can do for Africa, my role as the guest editor will be to return to the question of what can Africans do for Africa and what are we doing for Africa (and indeed for the rest of the world) by highlighting different voices and stories from around the continent.

In the late 1980s, the people of northern Somalia rebelled against the government of General Mohammed Siad Barre. After four years of fighting, they separated from the rest of the country, forming the Republic of Somaliland.

The cost of their de facto independence was heavy. Tens of thousands of people were killed during the conflict, many during bombardments by the Somali Air Force. Half a million more fled across the Ethiopian border, settling in refugee camps. A struggle for control of the breakaway republic followed in the mid-1990s.

Rebuilding has been slow. The last camp was dismantled just a few years ago.

Today, as Somaliland thrives in the shadow of its troubled neighbours, the scope of the war’s psychological toll has only begun to register. As many as two-thirds of people over the age of 25 have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder in some form. Abuse of khat, a plant-based amphetamine chewed all over the Horn of Africa, complicates this and other mental health issues.

There are no psychiatrists in Somaliland.

The patients at Hargeisa Mental Health Unit receive professional treatment for only one month per year, when a Somali-Canadian psychiatrist returns to the country on holiday. He provides free treatment and diagnosis.

What follows are portraits from Somaliland’s only mental health hospital.

See also Separation Anxiety: Caring for civil war survivors in Somaliland’s only mental health hospital in The Walrus.

This won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s followed the rise of K’naan, M.I.A. and grime MCs like Tinchy Stryder, but there’s been some pretty exciting, forward-looking music coming out of the developing world and its diasporas over the past few years. Stuff like eight-bit Afrikaaner rave-rappers Die Antwoord.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Those are some inspired slow-mo shots of dude’s junk trying to escape his Dark Side of the Moon boxers.

Click here to view the embedded video.

London-based Afrikan Boy, whose flow on the M.I.A. track “Hussel” pretty much stole the show. He’s just released a video for his song “Lagos Town”.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And Malawian singer Esau Mwamwaya, whose collaborations with Radioclit are well-known by now. “Kamphopo,” his elaboration of an Architecture in Helsinki track, is one of my favourites.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Then there’s Logobi, an infectious combination of break-dancing, mime, and the kind of dance moves you see at Mbalax clubs in Dakar — a minimalist break-dance popular with the kids of French West African families in the suburbs of Paris. Here are a couple of clips of the Black Kitoko crew.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Check out BA contributor Tyler Stiem’s awesome essay on Liberia, “Goodbye, Babylon King”, in the current issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Time, in the Somali desert, exerts itself gently on the visitor. There’s little to mark its passage, such is the constancy of the light, so that the days seem at once eternal and evanescent. Which is to say the afternoon caught us by surprise. We’d spent the morning in the hills north of Hargeisa, filming a pair of doctors as they reminisced about the civil war. They were like joshing schoolboys, each trying to outdo the other with his stories of hasty amputations and midnight supply runs fraught with engine trouble. Who was the first to run for cover when the Somali Air Force strafed their makeshift field hospital? Who saw the worst cases of gangrene? It had been twenty years; they couldn’t agree.

The field hospital, what remained of it, spanned a few acres of thin, sun-washed forest — a string of vanishing footpaths, a few clearings. As we followed the two men, sidestepping acacia bushes and camel dung, I began to grasp the logic of the place. The clearings had been wards: here, beneath this tree, they had performed triage; there, at the foot of that tree, they’d buried the dead. They lingered over every detail, incredulous, luxuriating in dangers past from the safety of the present.

“At night, when the MiGs were gone, this place became a city of light,” the big doctor marvelled. “Cooking fires under every tree. What a sight it was.” His nickname was Bergeel — Camel Liver — on account of his father’s dark complexion. The Somalis love teasing nicknames. The other doctor, the thin one, pried a broken ampoule from the dirt. He coughed and spat. “The children played in the dark while we worked,” he said, scraping at it with his thumbnail. “It was a great relief to hear their laughter.”

Bergeel grasped his forearm. “Remember the old man who used to count the cries of the hyenas?”

The thin doctor laughed. “Every night he said to us, ‘If it is an odd number, we are going to be okay.’ And if there were ten cries, he always heard eleven, even when nobody else could — but we believed him!” The memories of terror and uncertainty were yielding to a pleasurable romanticism, for the doctors’ stories ended happily: they’d fled to the West, reinvented themselves. This last-minute excursion into the desert was going to be our little documentary’s piece de resistance. Now it was time to move on.

And so we found ourselves rattling across plains grey and vast towards the Ethiopian border. One hundred and forty kilometres separate Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland, and Jijiga, the capital of the Ogaden — Somali Ethiopia — but the cities are a world apart. Somaliland broke away from Somalia during the civil war, in 1991, abandoning the irredentist dream of Greater Somalia (an ethnic mega-state comprised of Somalia, Somaliland, Djibouti, and swaths of Ethiopian and Kenyan desert) in favour of realpolitik. Hargeisa, a bombed-out ghost town fifteen years ago, was now thriving. Across the border, though, there was trouble. The Ogadenis were fighting their own, doomed war of secession. Recently the Ogaden National Liberation Front had stepped up its guerrilla campaign against the Ethiopian government, provoking vicious reprisals, and a mantle of military paranoia had settled over the region. I anticipated our passage to Jijiga with grim curiosity.

*

“You are beautiful, no matter what they saaay,” sang the taxi driver, trying to make eye contact with the girl in the backseat. He divided his attention between the girl, the road, and the treats arrayed in his lap: khat, a half-litre of Sprite, a packet of cigarettes. His name was Abdurahman. He was young and spoke English with a North American accent. The girl didn’t look up. Abdurahman pretended to receive a text message. “Words can’t bri-ing me down,” he mumbled. Abdurahman had grown up in the refugee camps across the border and, later, in Canada. He was taking classes at the vocational college in Hargeisa and driving his uncle’s taxi for something to do. Recognizing a missed opportunity, he asked us how much we would’ve paid him to be our translator. I suspected he was what locals would call a dhaqanelis: ‘a person without culture.’ It was an epithet usually reserved for diaspora Somalilanders who’d run afoul of their parents (or worse, the law) and been dispatched here for cultural rehabilitation.

Villages accumulated along the road, a human sediment deposited by the recent flood of cross-border commerce. There were rumours Ethiopia would be the first to recognize Somaliland’s claim to independence. But Hargeisa always buzzed with talk of impending statehood: A visit from a Canadian official two years earlier occasioned feverish speculation that the West would throw its weight behind the aspiring republic. Nothing ever materialized. And so the Ethiopians remained Somaliland’s closest ally and primary trading partner, even as they oppressed the Ogadenis and occupied Mogadishu. Horn of Africa politics were nothing if not complicated.

To the north, rubbly fields yielded to pasture land, erupting into mangy hillocks as the landscape emptied out. Cloudshadow streaked the grass like errant cue-strokes on an old billiard table. When a young shepherd dared to steer his flock down the middle of the highway — by now a loose curl of tracks sketched across the green expanse — Abdurahman lost his temper. He stomped the brakes, whipped the door open, grabbed the boy, and kicked him roundly in the ass. The shepherd threw a hurt look over his shoulder as he ran limping after his sheep. One of the stragglers received a brutal kick of its own.

“Boy,” Abdurahman said. A cruel appraisal. We drove on. The amphetamine effect rolled in on euphoric waves and every so often he seemed newly awake to the world and the possibilities it presented. He savoured everything: the traffic, the sun, even the rancour of his slow-burning argument with a man in the back. When the man thumped the driver’s seat with his fist, Abdurahman only grinned and disagreed more loudly. Another glimpse, perhaps, of his erstwhile delinquency. He described the Internet business he would someday run, back in Ottawa, and the places he would travel. At one point he tried to steer with his knees, the better to defoliate the khat, but another curve in the road sent us briefly, terrifyingly, into the other lane. Experiment over.

Abdurahman had been living in Hargeisa for nearly a year: “It’s amazing, man. They know you’re not a local just by the way you walk down the street. The dudes here have a different kind of swagger, you know? But I love this place, it’s like a second home to me, know what I’m saying?” I wasn’t convinced. He seemed adrift, beset by a deep, undefined hunger that manifested itself physically: in the haggard youthfulness of his face, which pulled at the cheekbones and bibbed around the eyes, in the open parentheses of his bony shoulders. His clothes, probably new and certainly fashionable when he’d arrived, at least by the standards of local kids, looked outmoded, carelessly worn. Abdurahman radiated an aura of anxiety, exhaustion, false cheer. I thought he might be the loneliest person we’d met. Perhaps it was the khat, and this was what acculturation looked like. After all, half the men in Somaliland looked strung-out and underfed by two in the afternoon.

Born a decade earlier, he would’ve sought his fortunes with the Somali National Movement, a teenage guerrilla fighter like the ones we’d met in the dried-out settlements beyond the capital. These were young men who’d settled into middle age by their early thirties, contented, uncurious men for whom the stretch of desert they’d wrested from the once-mighty dictatorship of Siad Barre and could now call their own was world enough. One veteran, an engineer at the water sanitation plant in Gadabiley, had shown me the jagged stump of his arm. He was haunted, still, by the ghost of his hand, which sometimes curled into an invisible fist, but the sacrifice, he explained, squinting at my translated question, had been worth it. “We are free,” he said, “and that is enough.” (The thin doctor admitted he’d performed the amputation: “You can see the tools we used were not made for people.”)

Another veteran bore a shrapnel scar that bloomed, caramel-coloured, around his misshapen bicep. Half the muscle was gone and what remained squirmed up his arm like a vine. He’d been at the front line on the outskirts of the capital when his unit was strafed by MiGs. By the time he saw a doctor, the wound was badly infected and the muscle had to be cut away. It was strange, he said, but he’d seldom dreamed about the war, even during combat.

Almost to a person, the Somalilanders we’d met believed statehood was their right and their future. Demographics played a role in this. The older generation recalled the postcolonial fever-dream that had unified Somaliland and Somalia in the early sixties with a certain nostalgia, but for most people the civil war was the defining moment of their lives. It helped, too, that Somalilanders belonged overwhelmingly to a single, persecuted clan — the Isaaq. They had suffered the most under Barre and been the first to rise up against him. But we met others (Issa, Gadabursi, Darod) who shared their sense of grievance and their optimism. The beginnings of a national identity, one that might some day supercede clan, had been forged in the crucible of war. It was a rare thing in Africa and boded well, I thought, for the future of the breakaway republic.

I asked Abdurahman what he remembered of the fighting. “I remember the camp where I lived with my family. I remember having fun because there was no school, and I remember my uncle going away to fight against Siad Barre. My father and my brothers went to Jijiga and they bought scrap metal. The Ogadenis, they looted our empty houses and sold them back to us, piece by piece. It’s weird, but those were happy days.”

No one wanted to talk about the crisis in the Ogaden. Somalilanders regarded the ONLF as a band of dreamers and criminals, but towards the Ogadenis they felt an estranged kinship. They owed them nothing but they didn’t feel right about the way they were being made to suffer, either. In Ethiopia itself, the Ogaden wasn’t — couldn’t be — talked about. At an airport bar in Addis Ababa I’d met a relief worker headed back to Jijiga. I was reckless with my questions: What kind of work was he doing there? Had he seen evidence of a scorched-earth campaign? He smiled. The situation was not good, he said. Then he stubbed out his cigarette and excused himself.

*

The mood was light as the taxi pulled into the border town of Wachaale. We’d arrived in time for a football match between local teams. The khat vendors had locked up their stalls and a moneychanger was bagging huge, filthy bricks of currency in a plastic sheet. The roads were gutted, the day’s rain filled the potholes. A yellow froth scummed the puddles. But the pitch, around which a crowd began to form, was striking: a neat white grid laid over manicured grass. The players, too, in their immaculate kits, green and black, red and gold. I wanted to stay for the game but we had too far to go.

We said goodbye to Abdurahman (he tried to sell me his iPod, settled for my email address) and hired a wheelbarrow-boy to port our equipment across the border. The Ethiopian customs officer was an elegant man in his thirties, better dressed, in his shirt and tie, than he probably needed to be, managing a provincial outpost like this one. Pasted to the filing cabinet behind his desk was a photo of two little girls, their hair in plaits, giggling.

“Why did you go to Somaliland?”

“We were making a tourist video,” said Sean, hopefully.

“Moment.” The customs officer stepped into the back room.

From my seat against the wall I watched him consult with a man who lay curled around a bowl of steaming wat on the floor. The soles of his feet were cracked. I stepped outside. Past the low wooden houses, with their bare, churned-up gardens, a pack of ruderal children chased a soccer ball. Locals wandered in no man’s land.

We left Wachaale in the dark. Inside the bus the women held their children close and the men pretended to sleep. There had been a fight for the last seats: Everyone was anxious to move on. Outside a storm was gathering. Bean fields swished under a hard, crystalline sky. Then: a roadblock, manned by Ethiopian soldiers. They were fit, well-equipped, their expressions grim. We stepped off the bus into wind. Distant clouds drifted across the sky like a smack of luminous jellyfish, aswim in spectral light. Lightning tentacled from their blackening underbellies.

The women lined up first, documents in hand, and they were searched while the men looked on in silence. The soldier tasked with the pat-downs was careful, almost deferential. Old and young, slender and stooped, the women cut austere figures. Their dresses — flickering yellows, reds, turquoises, purples — bled into the dusk, a mess of colour expressing what their inscrutable faces did not. They were a pageant of ghosts. I was taken aback by their beauty. So, I think, was the soldier. As they climbed back onto the bus they were apparitions become flesh once again: mothers nursing bug-eyed infants, old women minding arithritic joints.

The men were frisked and shoved. A soldier climbed atop the bus and made the conductor pick through the luggage. They were on the lookout for arms coming across the border to supply the ONLF. “This is yours?” the soldier yelled down at us, tugging at one of our bags. Sean nodded. The soldier gestured for the key. He rooted through toiletries, clothes, notebooks. I was glad of the stock footage we’d recorded.

Half an hour later the storm was upon us. I watched my reflection float just beyond the window, disfigured by the rain. People were falling asleep. I thought about my wife, how in the heat of the Toronto summer we drag a mattress downstairs and sleep on the floor. Our own little island. The hiss of summer rain and the relief it brings. The sound of her feet peeling from the hardwood as she rises, an hour before I do, to wash and dress for work. It was the first time I’d thought of home in awhile.

*

The sky flinched and there it was: the second roadblock. A man with dreadlocks and a kerchief wrapped around his face boarded the bus while another guarded the door. These weren’t soldiers. If their masks didn’t give them away, their equipment did. A ragged satchel and an old Kalashnikov hung from the man’s back, their crisscrossed straps burrowing into his chest.

“What is this?” Sean whispered. There wasn’t the same alienated calm inside the bus this time.

“Nothing,” I hissed. “Don’t talk.” I hoped we’d be leaving the checkpoint with our cameras and tapes.

The man strode down the aisle, stopping halfway to loosen the kerchief. Something caught his attention (his own disembodied face, suddenly strange?) and he stared out the window. His long fingers caressed a seatback. He was a little younger than Abdurahman, about twenty, and in that instant reminded me of him. The same yearning look, the fuzziness around the edges. But it passed when he shook his reverie, and anyway the comparison was probably fanciful: there was a look of real impoverishment to him. He was counting us with his eyes.

The man spoke to the conductor in hushed Somali and the conductor handed over a wad of bills. I guessed now that such contingencies accounted for the higher nighttime fare. The man stepped off the bus and we pulled away. For awhile no one spoke. Then a cellphone flared in someone’s hand, illuminating a row of weary faces. Somali faces. A murmur issued from the broken silence and drifted through the bus. Rain struck the roof and settled into a thrum. Again the small talk dissolved into silence. In the distance I could see Jijiga, a smear of light along an invisible horizon. In the foreground, another roadblock.

Originally published in Descant, Issue 145, Summer 2009

“Are you writing your prayer request?” I looked up from my note-scribbling to take in the pretty young woman in camouflage trucker hat, reflective sunglasses, rolled-up jeans and canvas trainers grinning at me. Most everyone around her was either writing on scraps of paper, or, having already done so, were standing in place, arms pitched heavenward, hip-swaying and shuddering to the exhortations of the junior pastor in front of the stage. He stamped the concrete and shouted “Die! Die! Die demons!” as some of his congregants jitter-bugged vigorously, as though trying to shake a shroud of dust. A few stood solemn, waiting for a breeze to lift them.

“No, I’m just taking some notes,” I told the woman.

“Well, please enjoy the service. May I have a piece of paper?”

I pulled one from my notebook.

“Can I ask you what you’re praying for?”

“By the grace of God,” she said, “I’m hoping I will get a visa to visit relatives in London.”

It wasn’t an unusual request. Most people were happy to share their deepest-held wishes with me: a passport or visa, money, a job, protection from witchcraft, a cure for whatever ails their bodies. They jotted down their requests, sealed them in white envelopes, and tossed them onstage. There they accumulated for more than half an hour, until a guest preacher arrived. He began by grabbing a handful and holding them aloft. “Your miracle awaits you… Today your world will change!” The paper mountain catalogue of human desires that surrounded him was eventually gathered into sacs and removed.

This was only the set-up for the regular Thursday morning service at Action Faith Chapel, one of Accra’s most prominent self-styled charismatic churches. A cataclysm of emotion at first swell. Hundreds more would yet stream into the hanger-like auditorium, packing the main floor, mezzanine and upper terraces, until the congregation was past a thousand strong. Befitting Pentecostal orthodoxy, there were no crosses or other iconography. Just a billboard-sized banner behind the stage announcing “Theme Divine Acceleration.”

For over three hours, sermons that promised healing and prosperity alternated with cloying gospel power ballads, gyrating high-life shuffles, and feverish incantations that descended into glossolalia. Early on, the preacher introduced a woman in a traditional Ashanti print blouse. She was Linda Wendy Asante, the recent mother of three “miracle” babies. Only after seven years of daily prayer had she been able to conceive.

Later, I spotted my new acquaintance, the girl in the trucker hat and reflective sunglasses, now at the lip of the stage and in full frenzied grip of the moment. She was performing what appeared to be stomach crunches while standing upright, a kind of spiritual calisthenics. I was reminded of another Pentecostal service I had witnessed elsewhere, in Guatemala City, in another full auditorium. A young man engaged in a similarly furious ab-busting exercise while a Casio keyboard-led band droned on and the preacher exhorted the assembly to give up drink, give up adultery, give up their sinning. The trappings were different—the music, the atmosphere, the preacher’s emphasis on social ills—but the ecstasies palpably the same.

During one of the ballads I invited Asante, the thirty-seven-year-old miracle mother, outside to talk. We chatted about her triplets. She had prayed for two but was blessed with three; although she had taken fertility drugs, her pregnancy, coming after so many years was surely God’s reward for her patience and faith.

Asante was raised a Catholic, but was born-again in high school. As an adult she joined Action Faith, where she now led a small prayer group. “In Catholic Church we didn’t even clap, we used to stand there sanctimoniously and listen to the preacher. Here, the people jump around, we rejoice, we have revelations. It’s a personal encounter with God.”

Feeling a little Jesuit, I wondered aloud about how the church’s talk of money and success fits into the Bible’s message?

“Here, we are always taught that God does not want us to be the tail,” she said. “He wants us to be the head. You don’t have to be the underdog. We should be at the forefront of society, in politics or business. A church of this nature has to mix-up with society, encourage its people to be educated, get involved with politics so one day we will be able to change this dying world.”

*

God has long been global. Go almost anywhere in the world, the furthest you can get from the beaten track and chances are good you will find Christian missionaries—say two college-age Mormon boys in whitey-white short-sleeved shirts with nameplates glinting in the tropical sun, or hear stories from locals about those evangelicals from the Dallas-based Summer Institute of Linguistics who preceded them.

But God wasn’t supposed to be this global, not still. Just twenty years ago, the academics were insisting that as societies became more modern, they would necessarily grow more secular. Secularization theory, the prevailing orthodoxy when I was studying sociology of religion at university, argued that religious observance would decline, religious institutions and symbols would lose their dominance, and religion, in general, would drop out of public life. In his seminal 1967 book on the subject, The Sacred Canopy, sociologist Peter Berger argued that “the modern West has produced an increasing number of individuals who look upon the world and their own lives without the benefit of religious interpretations.” He identified industrial capitalism as “the original ‘carrier’ of secularization,” adding that these “secularizing forces had spread worldwide alongside westernization and modernization.”

While secularization theory appears to hold true in Western Europe, Australia, and perhaps Canada, these places are exceptions. In most of the world, religion is playing an ever more prominent role both within countries and as a vehicle for outreach across borders. Islamism, for instance, is challenging the flagging promise of pan-Arabism as a motivating collective identity, its array of rival sects and sub-movements proactively addressing peoples’ spiritual, social, and material needs where the state lacks the capacity or will. Post-Soviet Russia is experiencing a resurgence of indigenous, mystically inclined Orthodox Christianity that compliments its resurgent nationalism, while India’s Hindu nationalists have risen to become part of the governing establishment in the past decade. The Roman Catholic Church has boosted its numbers in Africa twenty-fold since 1980. Societies are demonstrating that they can absorb many aspects of modernity and outside influence while reserving a powerful role for religion in public life.

Only a decade after The Sacred Canopy was published, Berger himself began to realize that the empirical evidence no longer supported secularization theory. During a lecture in 2006, he said, “We don’t live in an age of secularity; we live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity.” Religion, as much or more than anything else in our lives, had been overwhelmingly globalized. Some observers explain this about-face as a reaction to the failure of various secular ideologies—Marxism, Freudianism, market liberalism—to meaningfully improve peoples’ lives. But it’s misleading to speak of religiosity as simply reactionary. Just as, in sociologist Max Weber’s famous account, Protestantism’s moral values of self-denial and rational planning in pursuit of moral goods had a unique, inadvertent fluency with capitalism prior to the twentieth century, today’s most successful religious movements demonstrate an inborn capacity for reconciling themselves with the uncertainties of contemporary life.

Berger attributes their persistence primarily to pluralism, mass migration, travel, and the ubiquity of communication technologies: “Everybody talks to everybody else,” he says, “and as everybody talks to everybody else, a highly pluralistic situation is enhanced by technology, and people begin to influence each other.” Modernity is all about the move from a society predicated on fate to one based on choice; from a society in which one’s religion is inherited and taken for granted to one in which we can pick our affiliations. In the resulting marketplace of faiths, one particularly demonstrative, individualized and telegenic religion—Pentecostalism—is proving itself singularly well positioned to compete.

A 2006 survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life called “renewalist movements”—an umbrella term that includes Pentecostals, evangelicals, and mainline Protestants and Catholics with an interest in charismatic-style worship—the fastest-growing religious population in the world, accounting for one-quarter of the world’s two billion Christians. Thirty years ago, they made up just six percent. The phenomenon is most evident in the developing world of Africa and Latin America, whether in the form of cramped storefront churches, carnivalesque redemption camps, or gleaming new mega-churches. The world’s largest Catholic nation, for example, is growing less Catholic by the day; Brazilian Catholics are leaving the church, and when they do so they’re more likely to join Pentecostal congregations than to abandon religious worship in general.

One of the singular features about this expansion is that, unlike in Weber’s day, it isn’t being directed from above, by imperial powers or centralized churches in the northern hemisphere, but from initiatives within developing countries such as Nigeria, Brazil, Guatemala and Ghana. The Ghanaian spin on Pentecostalism takes full advantage of modernity while reaching into its own past for a little spiritual frisson. As the country has modernized in the past twenty years—its democracy becoming more entrenched, its society more transparent—Pentecostal leaders have in their own way helped nudge it along. The preachers may disparage the sexual and cultural mores attendant to modernity, but they nevertheless conceive of themselves as smoothly modern. Their success is predicated upon their savvy uptake of new technologies, from text messaging to the Internet; their promotion of education; their aptitude for marketing and business; and their obsession with theories of organizational bureaucracy and competitive advantage. But for all these sophisticated overlays, the core of the religion’s appeal remains its capacity to connect people with a deep, enduring substratum of primal spirituality and the hidden ecstasies of human experience. In the process, they are rewriting what it means to be modern in Africa.

*

Travel along any major street in Accra: the hand-painted placards for its bewildering array of churches are as prominent, maybe more so, as those advertising any other good or service, from hair extensions to used tires and wash basins. (Many of which use the Lord in their advertising: Anointed Hands Fashion, Father’s Blessing Ventures, God is Good Furniture Works.) The places of worship themselves—some as slight as timber-framed hovels, home to so-called “one-man churches” and prophets, others arena-scaled “chapels” like Action Faith—variously boast of miracles, prophecy, healing or prosperity as though communicating their divine mission was as much a means of brand differentiation.

Much of my time shuttling between Accra’s churches in trotros and taxis was spent in the company of slim, twenty-five-year-old Albert Successful, a loquacious and hustling young evangelical clad in a crisp white, wide-collared dress shirt, sports jacket, pointy Italian shoes, and an unfortunate belt bearing a large Dolce & Gabbana logo at the buckle. I was introduced to Albert by Girish Daswani, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto who has focused much of his research on Ghanaian Pentecostalism. “He represents some of the main reasons why someone would become Pentecostal,” Daswani told me. “It helps him deal with his fears, his marginalization, the obstacles he faces. And it feeds his aspiration for something better.”

As I learned through Daswani, Albert was born Albert Atta Gyimah to a poor farming family in arid west-central Ghana. When he was still quite young, a spiritualist preacher foretold that he would enjoy a rich, prosperous life and one day lead his family. Rather than feeling blessed by the news, his stepmother grew envious and suspicious of his powers, worrying over the future status of her own, preferred kin. Albert suspected her of consulting a local fetish priest and using witchcraft to cause him physical discomfort. “I was so sick; I believed she was trying to kill me,” he said as we sat, stuck in one of Accra’s endless traffic jams.

Later, after Albert’s twin sister died under peculiar circumstances, his father accused him of invoking the spirits that killed her. He ceased paying Albert’s school fees, threw him out of the house, and revealed that they weren’t biologically related. Albert had by then already converted to Pentecostalism, but, cut off from both sides of the family and denied his inheritance, he embraced the feverish intensity of multi-day prayer camps, disposing himself toward their promises of wealth, travel abroad, and personal transformation through an intimate relationship with God.

He eventually migrated to Accra, and there he took his new name—an act that represented a conscious break with his troubled past and enabled him, along with prayer and worship, to conceive a new, liberating narrative for himself. He tried out several congregations before joining the Church of Pentecost and immersing himself in its social network, which helped clothe, shelter, and feed him. The Bible provided him with symbols and stories that sustained his goals—he identified especially with Joseph of the Old Testament, whose jealous brothers sold him into slavery. And just as Joseph overcame his plight, rising to the rank of Pharaoh’s viceroy, so, too, would Albert Successful.

On a return visit to Action Faith, Albert gamely chatted up various church officials while I waited to speak with its second-in-command, Bishop James Saah. I lingered at a bookstall lined with self-improvement paperbacks, the most thumbed-over and prominent of which were dedicated to the topic of God and the wealth he wants us to enjoy. The leading counsellor in the field appeared to be one Isaac Giwa, prolific author of Provoking Your Harvest; Be a Super Achiever; Million Dollar Generating Habit$; and my personal favourite, Get Ready . . . Money Cometh, whose cover teased prospective readers with a fluttering pile of American dollar bills.

Although some Ghanaian assemblies, including Albert’s Church of Pentecost, oppose the open commercialization of Pentecostalism, preachers like Saah embrace the marketplace with entrepreneurial flair. They know they’ve helped create a souk of competing creeds, and insist that their canniness hardly diminishes the integrity of their faith. They are merely making religion relevant. And the competition forces them to innovate. “The question is always, how can we immediately connect the gospel to people’s lives?” explained Saah. “We tailor our message to the needs of day-to-day life. We can take the gospel into peoples’ marriages and relationships, but we can also apply it to their work, money problems, and businesses. This is where we bridge the gap.”

This sort of prosperity preaching isn’t unique to Ghana. In impoverished African countries with few clear routes for upward mobility, little in the way of state services to address social ills like alcoholism or spousal abuse, and complex kinship systems that place onerous financial stress on those who achieve even modest success, the church promotes itself as one of the few ladders to wealth and happiness that is accessible to all. The first time I witnessed Saah onstage at Action Faith, he was talking up the prosperity angle, but with this warning: “God wants you to have success, but having success also means you will have more enemies.”

Saah earned a master’s in leadership and governance from a Ghanaian business school, and gives leadership seminars almost as often as he preaches. For him, many of the “secular principles” that engender success in the business world are present in the Bible if you read it correctly. He likes retelling the Old Testament story of David and Goliath, for example, as a lesson in competitive advantage. “When I studied strategic management,” he said, “I could see the building blocks and benchmarks of a successful organization. Strategic advantage, core competency, critical factors, treasury—all the things we don’t normally apply to life I applied to the word of God. It was a hit.”

Indeed, much of the Pentecostal movement’s success is attributable to internal dynamics that would impress any corporation. Pentecostals may believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, but during services there is a far greater focus on personal experience than on doctrine, which makes it highly adaptive to local culture. And, to use the vernacular of the market, there are few barriers to entry—anyone can open a charismatic church, and almost anyone can train to be a preacher. (Catholic priests, by contrast, are in far shorter supply, due to the required years of study and commitment to celibacy.) The fact that many of the churches’ organizations are decentralized also helps. Action Faith boasts more than a hundred affiliated or “sister” chapels, including diasporic congregations in Europe and North America, but oversight from headquarters is modest, leaving each preacher to run his own show. Last, there is the movement’s singular intensity of belief. According to the Pew Forum study, revivalists insist more strongly than other Christians that God plays a decisive role in daily life through miracles and revelations. They are more likely to believe in the coming rapture or End-Times, making them the most avid of proselytizers.

While on my way to meet Bishop Saah, I had noticed his face on a billboard that advertised an upcoming self-help conference promising lessons in personal success and management. Half the keynote speakers were business leaders, the other half leading preachers like Saah. Such events are evidence of another evolution in Pentecostalism’s character: it isn’t just attracting huge numbers of the poor from dispossessed neighbourhoods, but increasingly the aspiring middle classes, elites, and even political figures. Few of the poor could afford the conference’s entrance fees.

Officially, the preachers in Ghana do not endorse specific candidates for political office, or presidential contenders, although they possess the powers of persuasion to help sway the vote among their congregations. In advance of any election, leading candidates will make a point of being seen visiting at several major churches. Saah, always savvy, was honest about what’s really going on, and the prestige such visits confer in return.

“We use [the politicians’ visits] to our advantage, do you get my drift? These are some of the fine details. It helps both sides. You rub my back, I rub yours.”

*

Modern Pentecostalism begins humbly, out of a low-ceilinged converted stable in a working-class precinct of Los Angeles. It’s here on Azusa Street, in 1906, that a one-eyed, peripatetic black preacher from Texas named William J. Seymour relocates his worship services after the family’s home he’s staying at, and its front yard, can no longer accommodate the crowd he draws.

Seymour has already demonstrated that he can speak in tongues and invoke the Holy Spirit for baptisms, but once he settles in at the Azusa Street Mission, word really starts to spread. His face scarred from a bout with smallpox, the thirty-five-year-old preaches in the round, interacting directly with those gathered, spitting fire from the pulpit (two crates nailed together) or huddling in fervent prayer behind it. Slain in the spirit, worshippers jerk, foot-stomp, moan, and holler to their own measure, expressing the presence of the Holy Spirit in the most individual ways. It’s reported some burst out in languages—Russian, Chinese, Hebrew—they’ve never heard before. Others tremble and collapse from the weight of possession. One woman is suddenly gifted with a talent for playing the piano, although she’s never touched one before. This raucous, primitive capitulation to the spirit is libidinous, electric, untamed—fired up by insurgent, spontaneous currents of song, the original punk rock.

Seymour invites his flock to share their own revelations and visions of the apocalypse, of great cities falling, of capitalism run amok. The numbers grow from the dozens into the hundreds, then thousands, with three services a day. Contemptuous outsiders, whether secular or mainstream Christian, deride the goings-on at Azusa Street as disgraceful, pagan, even “the last vomit of Satan.” Seymour’s movement is too populist and, in its own way, too egalitarian for Theodore Roosevelt’s segregated America. The nascent church, already predicated on a style of worship found only in black congregations at that time, welcomes all. In addition to African-Americans come poor whites, Hispanics, and Asians. An evangelical writer observing Azusa Street reports, “The color line was washed away in the blood of Jesus.” Seymour even encourages women into the pulpit, and they turn out to be among Azusa’s most formidable preachers.

The original mission lasts only three years—its earliest days coinciding with the earthquake that levelled half of San Francisco (an event that only enhances worshippers’ certainty the End-Times are at hand). But other evangelicals take notice of the movement’s uniquely raw, compelling power. What few at the time fathom, though, is that Seymour, who dies broke in 1922, has stumbled upon the most potent template for Christianity in the twenty-first century.

By the 1980s, Pentecostalism has gone from a maligned and marginal curiosity on the fringes of American culture—associated with snake handlers and holy rollers—to, if not widespread respectability, at least a potent national force and a key player in the culture wars. It has also acquired a somewhat suburban character, boasting extravagant mega-churches and rock concert spectacles. Celebrity pastors like Robert Schuller advise presidents Reagan through Clinton. But Pentecostalism in the U.S. is rarely articulated widely with the sort of belly-fire and anarchic spirit once found on Azusa Street. That torch has passed abroad.

The money generated by American churches in the 1980s enabled them to go international, to preach more aggressively and with greater sophistication than ever before, their reach penetrating still farther with the proliferation of television and video recorders. During this time, many of Ghana’s current big-time preachers were born again, developing their enthusiasm for evangelization while studying at university campuses. They soon began pursuing missionary work in rural areas, starting their own churches or fellowships, and adapting the gospel to local realities.

“There was Pentecostalism before, but in the ’80s a new wave of the spirit dawned in this nation,” one preacher in Accra told me, “a wildfire that swept up the youth. Students were praying together everywhere—in classrooms, in the forest, on the grass. For some, the fire was so strong in them they said they couldn’t cope. The rest of us just ran with the fire, and have carried it until today.”

*

Sometimes Albert Successful takes the stage to preach at his church. One day over instant coffee, I asked him what went through his head when he was preaching. “At first, I read from something I’ve written down on paper,” he said. “I want people to understand clearly what I’ve come to tell them. But while I’m presenting what’s on the paper, in my mind I’m communicating with God. As I’m preaching, I feel this intuition. It falls upon me. I can even focus on a person, and God tells me what they’re going through, and what I should say to them.

“You also have to impart some fun and energy, because not everyone there is happy. Some are going through a lot of stress. What you are doing can bring some kind of happiness into their souls.”

Albert Successful had yet to live up to his new name, but he was winning the struggle to overcome his origins. His circumstances were better now than when he first arrived in Accra, jobless, friendless, hungry, and shabbily clothed. Through his new church, he had received financial support to go back to school; the father of a church friend got him a part-time job; and he worked as a prayer assistant to one of its prophets. Once, a church member gave him an unexpected gift of 300 cedis ($250). “What he gave me was going to solve some big problems in my life,” Albert told me. “It would help me buy things and pay for more school. So I went home, put the money down, and I kneeled down and prayed to God. I said, ‘God, I have nothing to offer you other than my worship.’ Whoever comes into our lives, God has channelled that person to be there.”

The core message of Pentecostal conversion, as Professor Daswani points out, “is a personal and spiritual transformation that promises an enhanced agency in the world.” Although limited in means, Albert carried himself politely, but with the force of a man climbing above his station through sheer will. Nothing seemed outside his horizon of possibility. Pentecostal messaging gave him helpful guides and reinforcements for going forward. “It gives you a new cultural paradigm for positive change,” says Daswani, “with structured goals and ways of achieving them.

“The global reach of these churches, through the Ghanaian diaspora, which often posts their services on YouTube, allows worshippers’ imaginations to hook onto the possibility of going abroad. People give testimonies about how a pastor has helped them get their visa or solve their financial problems through prayer and consultation. Prophecies of future wealth, success, travel are a part of what churches do, and members participate in these prayer performances, making these prophetic outcomes ‘real’ through their very commitment to change.”

Although being born again marks a defining break with the past in a personal sense, Pentecostalism also appeals to Ghanaians in part because it accepts that the realm of ancestor spirits and witchcraft actually exists. It’s an accommodation you will not often find in Latin American Pentecostalism, but will in South Korea, for example, which has its own indigenous custom of shamanism. In Ghana, active engagement with the spirits expresses a uniquely African struggle to reconcile deeply felt cultural traditions with what is perceived to be contemporary life. As Daswani observes, “Ghanaians are continuously engaged with the spirits they’re supposedly trying to leave behind. The ancestors, spirits, and traditions—which commonly have both positive and negative attributes—become associated with an African past and the power of the devil. In the Christian context, it’s seen as the reason why people are unable to move forward, become advanced or successful in life. Pentecostalism promises to liberate them from the world of the spirits and allow them to become modern.”

Without the Church of Pentecost, I can’t imagine how Albert, a farm boy chucked out of his family with no money to pay for school, would have made such an enterprising, upwardly mobile life for himself in the big city. There he was in his snazzy shoes, dreaming he was Joseph—dreaming, with a fair shot that it might happen, that he would preach abroad, even visit the Holy Land. He almost made it to Malaysia once on a student exchange, but a middleman in Botswana bilked him out of his money. He remained undeterred. “When I close my eyes, I see heaven opening,” he told me. “When I open my eyes, I just see the world.”

*

The battalion of drums had been thundering for a half-hour past midnight before Nana Abas, the fetish priest, made his appearance in the drizzling rain of the courtyard. As the percussionists, mostly the priest’s twenty-something protégés, relentlessly tapped out what felt like a morse code to the ancestors, Abas performed a foot-kicking dance-shuffle, adding the flourish of occasional dervish-like whirls that exposed the lycra boxer-briefs beneath his robe. An attendant tossed baby powder at him; he caught a gust of it from the air and smeared it on his face. White particles hung in the flourescent lamps like snow.

Adiyapu, I heard someone say, the name of the spirit Abas was channeling. He who hates greed, the spirit with whom the gluttonous must reckon. “You eat and eat and he makes you vomit it out.” Abas/Adiyapu danced and twirled non-stop for more than forty-five minutes, and when he finally stopped he regarded the crowd imperiously through the mist: “We’re not going anywhere tonight until we hear the good news from the spirits.”

A low-slung, four-square compound with offices and sleeping quarters, the Black and White Powers Shrine clings onto a hilltop overlooking suburban Kumasi, capital of the Ashanti and Ghana’s second city. The shrine is Abas’s creation: a complex dedicated to the revival of traditional African religion. In Ghanaian ancestor worship there is a pantheon of “dwarf spirits”, each possessing a particular character and moral purpose. After Abas had shrugged off Adiyapu, he left the courtyard briefly and returned in new robes, this time resembling a white hospital gown and smock, red medical crosses embroidered at the ankles. Ah, Boafu! The “helper” spirit, feminine and temperamental. Again Abas danced, more gently it seemed, but Boafu clearly was temperamental because she soon became grumpy about the lack of involvement from the crowd and departed after only ten minutes. Offege arrived next—a trickster type, jovial, drunken in demeanor. He likes to play with humans, maybe likes money even more, but if you offend him he will leave. (Abas claims this spirit nearly killed him once and stole some money to teach him a lesson.) Offege walked into the crowd, mugging and cracking jokes. Those still awake bowed and handed him cedis.

The crowd of about a hundred, many of them clad in kente robes, was seated on plastic chairs, sheltered from the rain under two canopies erected in the centre of the courtyard. Having been to a few Pentecostal services already, I was surprised at how placid this group was, more audience than congregation; they clapped and chanted along occasionally, but seemed more inclined to nap, which several did; only one statuesque, middle-aged woman got interactive, evidently possessed herself as she shuffled timidly toward Abas then mimicked his bone-liquid dance. Soon, she was wracked by some invisible arrow and collapsed to the ground, expired.

Nearing three o’clock in the morning, Abas snapped out of his trance. No dramatic transition—just a sudden, banal shift in composure. Time for consultations and prayer, it was announced. The listless assembly suddenly turned alert; was this, not the drumming or possessions, what they had really come for? To beggar the indulgence of the spirits? Shrugging off their past-my-bedtime stupor, they herded themselves as though a single animal colony into a line that ended just outside the courtyard, in front of the round white hut where Abas conducted one-on-one consultations.

As at Action Faith, I took a straw poll. A woman in line behind me answered “Travel!”: she needed to travel for her schooling. There were also money problems and ailments; a man demonstrated how much his back hurt whenever he budged just so. The only thing missing was the prayer envelopes.

Charismatic preachers frequently inveigh against the traditional worshippers as diabolical and idolatrous, practitioners of witchcraft, whether from the pulpit or in the media. Traditional fetish priests like Abas, meanwhile, insist that many of Africa’s social problems are a result of abandoning its own gods and taking up the white man’s. “If we are not listening to our ancestors and spirits, we are not listening to God,” he told me on another occasion. “If we don’t go back to our own traditions we will always be struggling. If you dream at night you can’t dream in another’s language. We must commit to our own religion to prosper.”

While Abas took donations from worshippers to fund the shrine, it was supported mostly out of his own pocket—made possible by his substantial plantation holdings and small businesses. He knew the traditionalist could hardly compete with the money-raising prowess of the charismatics. “It’s a marketplace,” he said. “They are selling god to get money, because they don’t have any work apart from the church. I built this shrine myself, with my hands, my money. This is not a business.”

Despite the animosity between the rival camps, I came away from the Black and White Powers Shrine struck by how much they had in common. There was the obvious focus on petitioning God and wish fulfillment that seemed to most interest a lot of worshippers. There was the language of self-empowerment and prosperity. But most of all, Pentecostalism’s unique emphasis on the Holy Spirit—the feature that separates it from evangelicals and other charismatics—and its power to enter ordinary lives, grafts easily onto a culture whose imagination is already rich with spirits. They only transference is from the many to the one.

The truth is that many Ghanaians move comfortably between both worlds, a fact the traditionalists are more willing to admit. (So, too, do some preachers: while I was in Ghana one was revealed to have been visiting a fetish priest in order to enhance his “powers”; the fetish priest out-ed the preacher in the media when he did not repay a loan.) I suspected at least some of those slumbering through Abas’s spirit-possessions, especially those husbands elbowed awake by their wives, would be again struggling to stay awake in church a few hours later.

[Ed. note: photo essay on the Black & White Powers Shrine]

*

Bishop Charles Agyin-Asare led me past a maquette of the new campus his Word Miracle Church was constructing, before welcoming me into his office and declaring that he was a “Third World preacher.” He was referring not to his status at home, but to the opportunities his nationality and skin colour have created for WMC elsewhere in the world. In the past four years, he has staged crusades in Bahrain, India, Nigeria’s Muslim north, and most recently Karachi, Pakistan, where he claims he drew the biggest crowds of all his foreign visits. Fifty thousand people, the women and girls spanning the colour spectrum in their saris and head scarves, showed up for the first night’s crusade at the YMCA grounds. When local authorities revoked permission for further large gatherings because of security concerns, organizers invited him to continue his preaching at the handful of churches around the city. An article Agyin-Asare published about the excursion claims a woman was healed of paralysis, a club-footed boy began to walk, and twelve “deaf and dumb mutes” were cured.

“We can more easily go to places where people haven’t heard the gospel,” Agyin-Asare told me, “especially Muslim or Hindu nations that seem to be closed to Christians. Surprisingly, they change the laws for me. They have to. You don’t just hold an open-air crusade in Pakistan, but they let me. I don’t know how it happens, but it happens. Of course, we don’t call them ‘crusades’ in Pakistan; we call them a ‘Miracle Healing Signs and Wonders Festival.’ We focus on healing, because that’s the proof Jesus rose from the dead—and he’s able to perform now the same miracles he did before he died. If we’re going to present Jesus [to Muslims], we’re going to present a living Jesus.”

“It’s just dawned on us,” added Bishop Hansel Adjei Frimpong, one of Agyin-Asare’s deputy preachers. “People in Asia will accept an African preacher, a black person, someone from the Third World who maybe understands their poor circumstances. They’re not as afraid or suspicious—there’s less baggage than there would be with a white preacher from the West.”

Just as in Ghana, Agyin-Asare is careful to calibrate the Pentecostal message to local sensibilities, hence the less controversial focus on healing in Pakistan, and little emphasis on biblical texts, parables, or explicit conversions. When addressing the crowds in Karachi, Agyin-Asare even wore a shalwar kameez rather than the fine suits or pastor’s collar he normally sports in Accra.

Other Pentecostal churches in Ghana and Nigeria have also discovered the power of the Third World preacher, and have made tailoring their message an important part of the process. As Bishop Saah told me, “When it comes to raising pioneering churches, we need to look at local cultural differences. The gospel is the same, but there are certain realities we have to work with—parts of the world where idolatry, heathenism, paganism, mysticism have deep cultural roots. Like in India. You have to study historical trends, how you can bring their culture to the gospel. You don’t just go there and start preaching to be accepted. It’s like hitting your head against the wall.”

The fact that African preachers like Agyin-Asare are making inroads overseas reflects the shifting dynamic of global religion, as its power base and momentum tilt from north to south. In recent years, this emerging reality has played out most noticeably within the Anglican Communion, the world’s third largest affiliation of Christians, as it struggles with an internal rift over the ordination of non-celibate homosexuals and same-sex marriage. More than half of all Anglicans are now in sub-Saharan Africa, while numbers in Great Britain and North America continue to decline. The decision by some liberal dioceses in Canada and the U.S. to ordain gays and lesbians, and bless same-sex unions, has provoked bitter opposition among theologically conservative African bishops who are now at the demographic centre of Anglicanism. American Episcopalian churches that have broken with their liberal compatriots are now under the oversight of Nigerian Bishops.

As much as Ghana’s Pentecostal explosion seems part of a larger narrative of religion and globalization, understanding its dynamics here, and wherever else Pentecostalism has taken root, eventually calls into question much of what we think we know about globalization. Latin American and African Pentecostal churches may have initially received their inspiration and tutelage from American evangelicals, but they are now entirely homegrown phenomenon, and they are in turn re-exporting it abroad again. These charismatic churches are global, yes, but they are far from homogeneous, rather they are intensely local; context matters. Something they understand when taking their message elsewhere.

“The flows are all over the place,” says Peter Beyer, a professor of Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa. “There are connections between these movements in Africa and Latin America, they will recognize what they are doing is the same thing, yet Pentecostalism is not an organized movement. It has a lot of little organizations, and some large ones like the Assemblies of God, but it’s by and large just a movement. Like this episodic awareness that ‘We’re all involved in the same thing, a movement of the spirit that is global. But what we actually do locally, we decide.’”

Sociologists like Beyer have a term to describe this dynamic: “Globalization doesn’t happen; ‘glocalization’ is the only thing that happens. If you ask where does globalization happen, it always has to happen somewhere local, where there’s a give and take. A bird has to have a nest.

“For the Africans, Pentecostalism isn’t exactly new. It’s like they realize, ‘Hey, we invented this; this is just old-time stuff, our way of being religious, and it’s being recovered.’ This isn’t just an African Christianity. This is, for many Africans, Christianity, period. And now they’re returning the favour by proselytizing in other non-Western countries.”

*

As an aspiring preacher, Albert understood the need for what Bishop Saah described as “a little local flavour” wherever the gospel is taken. When we last met, I described to him some of the differences, and indeed contradictions, I’d witnessed in Pentecostal messaging in Ghana and elsewhere. He cut me off. “When you look at the words Jesus spoke, sometimes they are contradictory and you can be confused,” he said. “But look at the particular environment, and what kind of situation [the people he addressed] were going through, and the kind of message they deserved. Wherever Jesus goes, he gives them the message they need to hear at that particular time.”

In Ghana, that message may be about to shift once more. Despite Pentecostalism’s apparent success, its influence in society, its network of diasporic churches (including those in North America and the UK), and crusades in Asia, some members of the country’s evangelical leadership are concerned that the movement has grown complacent and is unprepared for the challenges it now faces. That it is in danger of overestimating its strength.

“The fire is diminishing,” said Bishop Frimpong. “It’s difficult to tell if evangelism is still experiencing real growth, or if what we have is the recycling of believers going from one church to another. Maybe it looks like the church has grown, but perhaps it has only stolen new members from smaller churches.”

Frimpong was also troubled by the spread of Islam across the country. Until now, there’s been little friction between Ghana’s Christians and Muslims (in nearby Nigeria, it’s a different story). But migration from Ghana’s poorer, predominantly Muslim north to the more populated south, where job prospects are marginally better, is making the prospect of direct confrontation more likely. Mosques are now appearing in places where there were previously none, and preachers worry that Muslims are having better success at converting traditional worshippers or nominal Christians. And just as the explosion of Ghana’s charismatic churches in the ’80s was inspired by visiting American preachers, many of the new mosques are receiving financial support from patrons in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Some Pentecostal leaders referred me to Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations as though it were a local primer.

“We need to devise new strategies to make our gospel appealing to those unconverted; otherwise, we may be surprised. While we feel big and comfortable, we might lose our focus on the people who are waiting to hear the gospel. In a few years, this growth in Islam could catch up to us. The interest is already there, especially in rural areas that have poverty.”

Frimpong worried that demographics could also be working against the charismatics. In many parts of Ghana, polygamy remains a common traditional practice—one that Muslims permit but evangelicals do not, which can make conversions to Christianity more challenging. “The Muslim man, he can marry more women than a Christian man, having two, three, or four wives. A wife to convert, and they’re all having bigger families. How do we as a church react to that?”

I was reminded then of a familiar Ghanaian colloquialism that Bishop Saah used during his lecture to me about competitive advantage: “If you’re not careful, some small boy will come along and steal your shine.”

In business, so it goes, and in matters of God.

Originally published in The Walrus

Ada Aden Hussein lives in the Mental Health Ward of Hargeisa Hospital, where she has worked for five years as an attendant. Ada took the job so she could take care of her daughter, who suffers from bipolar disorder, and her granddaughter. Hargeisa, Somalia. 2007.

Akaiyu, twenty-one, on a visit to a health clinic. Her infant son needed medicine for an eye infection. Her people, the Turkana, are nomads who migrate across the arid plains of northern Kenya in search of water and pasture. Akaiyu belongs to one of the settled communities near the Sudanese border. 2008.

Agness Nyirandibanzi lives on a government reserve in the hills above Gisenyi, Rwanda. Her people, the Twa, face discrimination because of their short stature, which distinguishes them from other Rwandans. They were murdered in great numbers during the 1994 genocide — a tragedy sometimes overlooked in historical accounts. The government moved Agness’s community from their forest home because it was designated as part of a national park. 2009.

Name unknown, a resident of Conneh Internally Displaced Persons Camp near Kakata, Liberia. The camp took its name from warlord Sekou Conneh. His rebels forced many of the people here to flee their homes during the civil war. 2005.

While in Ghana researching my article on African Pentecostalism now in The Walrus, I also spent time observing and interviewing people involved in African traditional spirit worship. In particular, I visited the Black and White Powers Shrine in Kumasi several times, and spoke with its founder and fetish priest, Nana Abas.

Gallery of images from Black and White Powers Shrine (Kumasi, Ghana)

(*Click on any image above to begin slideshow)

*
An earlier draft of the article included a section on the resurgence of African traditional religion as a parallel phenomenon to Pentecostalism’s spectacular growth, in part because they’re both competing in the same marketplace of faiths, but also to illustrate how Ghana’s culture of spirit possession and “witchcraft” has influenced Pentecostalism; as I mention the Pentecostals don’t at all deny that “witchcraft” is real and affects peoples’ lives, and they offer the process of being born again as protection against its malignant power.

A low-slung, four-square compound with offices and sleeping quarters, the Black and White Powers Shrine clings onto a hilltop scenically overlooking the suburbs of Kumasi, capital of the Ashanti and Ghana’s second city. The shrine is Abas’s creation; a complex dedicated to the revival of traditional African religion. In Ghanaian ancestor worship there is a pantheon of “dwarf spirits”, each possessing a particular character and moral purpose. The night photographs were taken during an all-night festival at the shrine, during which Abas was possessed by a sequence of spirits, dancing and adopting their different personalities whenever he interacted with the crowd.

Abas began by channeling Adiyapu, He who hates greed, the spirit with whom the gluttonous must reckon. “You eat and eat and he makes you vomit it out.” Abas/Adiyapu danced and twirled non-stop for more than forty-five minutes, and when he finally stopped he regarded the crowd imperiously through a mist of light rain and talcum that had been tossed about him by a trio of attendants: “We’re not going anywhere tonight until we hear the good news from the spirits.”

After shrugging off Adiyapu, Abas left the courtyard briefly and returned in new robes, this time resembling a white hospital gown and smock, red medical crosses embroidered at the ankles. This is Boafu, I’m told. The “helper” spirit, feminine and temperamental. Again Abas danced, more gently it seemed, but Boafu clearly was temperamental because she soon became grumpy about the lack of involvement from the crowd and departed after only ten minutes. Offege arrived next—a trickster type, jovial, drunken in demeanor. He likes to play with humans, maybe likes money even more, but if you offend him he will leave. (Abas claims this spirit nearly killed him once and stole some money to teach him a lesson.) Offege walked into the crowd, mugging and cracking jokes. People handed him money.

Charismatic preachers frequently inveigh against the traditional worshippers as diabolical and idolatrous, practitioners of witchcraft, whether from the pulpit or in the media. Traditional fetish priests like Abas, meanwhile, insist that many of Africa’s social problems are a result of abandoning its own gods and taking up the white man’s. “If we are not listening to our ancestors and spirits, we are not listening to God,” he told me on another occasion, after a Sunday morning service (the daytime photos). “If we don’t go back to our own traditions we will always be struggling. If you dream at night you can’t dream in another’s language. We must commit to our own religion to prosper.”

While Abas took donations from worshippers to fund the shrine, it was supported mostly out of his own pocket—made possible by his substantial plantation holdings and small businesses. He knew the traditionalist could hardly compete with the money-raising prowess of the Pentacostals.  “It’s a marketplace,” he said. “They are selling god to get money, because they don’t have any work apart from the church. I built this shrine myself, with my hands, my money. This is not a business.”

Despite the harsh words exchanged by the Pentecostals and traditionalists, I came away from the shrine struck by how much they had in common. Among both, there is a glaring focus on petitioning God and wish fulfillment. There’s the language of self-empowerment and prosperity. But most importantly, Pentecostalism’s unique emphasis on the Holy Spirit—the feature that separates it from evangelicals and other charismatics—and its supposed power to enter ordinary lives, grafts easily onto a culture whose imagination is already rich with spirits. They only transference is from the many to the one.

The reality is that many Ghanaians move comfortably between both worlds, a fact the traditionalists are more willing to admit than the Pentecostals. Occasionally the two worlds clashing play out in newspaper scandals; while I was in Ghana it was revealed that a preacher in Accra had secretly been visiting a fetish priest in order to enhance his “powers”; the fetish priest out-ed the preacher in the media because the preacher was refusing to pay back money he had borrowed.

More from the China-Africa symposium at IU: The general outlook of most speakers is reservedly optimistic about the prospects of China’s engagements in Africa. If the last fifty years of Western-sponsored development on the continent have borne so little fruit—and in the case of France’s coddling of psychopathic tyrants, some very rotten fruit—why not grant the Chinese some goodwill as they expand Africa’s meek infrastructure and industrial capacity. Yes, China is presently helping shield and support genocidal leaders such as Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir. But these are early days yet. And no other power seems as willing or able to step up to the task as China is.

The comments echoed what I heard from many African activists at a conference on mining, environment and society in Accra last summer. They’d already witnessed enough of the bad from Western governments and corporations. China was Africa’s second opportunity. They were not blind to China’s abuses and put little stock in its rhetoric of developing nation brotherhood. But they liked some of what they heard so far about agreements China had signed with Zambia and Angola. China doesn’t impose conditionalities like the IMF. Meanwhile, it’s committing staggering amounts of money to build much needed roads and facilities. And there is also the sense that Africa can learn from China’s own economic take-off.

The success of these investments will depend on how well African governments do their job. How proactive they are at defending their own citizens’ interests, rather than their own bank accounts or China’s investments. They will need to demonstrate foresight, technocratic competence and savvy when negotiating deals. It’s questionable whether many governments on the continent have the capacity or honesty to do so.

On this, Howard French, the former New York Times bureau in both Africa and China, had an interesting proposal. He recounted a recent meeting with Robert Rubin, Secretary of the Treasury under Clinton and until January was a Director at Citigroup. Rubin, who is now “hiding out” at the Council on Foreign Relations, asked French what he thought was the most effective/least costly thing the U.S. could do for Africa.

French suggested initiatives to enhance civil society in Africa, such as university exchanges and training, anything that might equip its future leaders with the tools they need to challenge power. China tends to work government-to-government; strengthening the so called “Third Sector” in Africa is a means of creating accountability.

This, French said, is where China will likely bloody its nose eventually in Africa. When civil society in Africa challenges China to live up to its promises of development and rhetoric of brotherhood. “How will that encounter change the equation?” Will China just walk away if the engagement no longer serves its self-interest or is too troublesome? Will it play one neighbour against another for a better deal? Or will it affect an ethical component to its foreign policy?

French finished up with a potentially grim, dystopian scenario. It’s 2050. With 2 billion people, Africa’s population has doubled in 40 years and its mineral resource wealth is mostly depleted. Who knows what the impact of climate change will be then. What then if China’s efforts, this “second opportunity”, ultimately fail to help produce prosperous states?

(Photo: Chinese boss hollerin’ at his ditch diggers in Kabwe, Zambia)

Presently at Indiana University in Bloomington, attending an academic symposium on China’s rapidly expanding investments in Africa, and the implications it will have for the continent’s long-term development.

I am also buying buckets of fireworks. Or seriously considering it. Indiana has some of the laxest fireworks laws in America, which I suppose makes it an apt place to host a symposium about China (where fireworks were invented). In 2006, the state legalized the home use of exploding firecrackers and rockets with minimal restrictions. A local newspaper complains that the new law has “turned almost every summer night into Independence Day.” I didn’t know this in advance, but figured something was up when we crossed the Michigan-Indiana state line and were welcomed by a half-dozen fireworks warehouse emporiums, and the exuberantly-phrased roadside billboards advertising their never-ending array of celebratory combustibles.

Beyond the state-line fireworks stores, the other first impression Indiana makes is that it smells like poo. There are lots of farms, at least in the flatter north end of the state.

As for the symposium: the most revealing and entertaining presentation thus far has come from Wenren Jiang, a political science professor from the University of Alberta. What sets Jiang’s research apart is that he focuses not only on the official, state-level engagements between China and African governments (often involving Chinese state-owned enterprises), but also the mostly overlooked small and medium-sized Chinese entrepreneurs operating in Africa without state support.

Jiang’s presentation was based on research done in the Katanga region of southeastern Congo, paying particular attention to the sudden proliferation of copper smelters there 3-4 years ago, when copper was going for a handsome $9,000 US per tonne on world markets. The western media’s perception of China’s involvement in Africa, has mostly been a) skeptical, and b) focused on the state’s direct or indirect involvement. The story Jiang told was a “Wild West” scenario where independent Chinese investors went in, hastily threw together smelters, bought raw materials from freelancing locals (as opposed to establishing their own mines like Western companies in the area) and paid bribes to local bigwigs when necessary. Generally, they had little contact with Chinese officials in the country. The Chinese ambassador in Kinshasa told Jiang these dudes “only call when they’re in trouble.”

Relations between the entrepreneurs and local employees were strained. The smelters were frequently robbed, sometimes by their own staff. Safety and environmental regulations were either non-existent or unenforced. And the Chinese made little effort to understand the local culture or language. Not much after the would-be copper barons arrived, however, copper prices plummeted; first to $6,000 per tonne, and they’re now in the neighborhood of $3,000. Suffice it to say the Chinese are gone, and left little behind but unpaid wages, derelict smelter compounds, and a rising tide of crime. (But the region still has copper, plus cobalt, uranium, and diamonds—which is why some fear the resource wars currently happening in northeastern Congo, at the Ugandan frontier, could spread southward.)

Jiang’s point being that, contrary to the way we’ve framed our understanding of China’s involvement in Africa as  state managed, there’s a growing contingent of non-state, market-driven Chinese actors who are making their own deals, and in some cases, their own rules. For these players, diplomacy and south-south economic ties mean little. All that matters to them is the global market.

This article in the Asia Times by Jiang references his research around Lubumbashi, the capital of Katanga province.