*

Given the demands its still-booming economy, it’s doubtful whether China’s leadership, the fourth since Mao, vets every new film it produces. The country faces serious policy questions over what do about the yuan, the One-Child Policy, privileged education, and the radical stratification that has overtaken its officially classless society.

Three films I caught a few years ago at the Bangkok International Film Festival acknowledge the accomplishments of the elder generations of filmmakers, while boldly examining the One Child Generation. New themes such as euthanasia, cyber-sex, Christian evangelism, and homosexuality mark the new Chinese film’s passage into the twenty-first century. Underlying these films is an intense yearning for connection in an increasingly lonely world.

In The Park (2006), directed by 35-year-old Yin Lichuan, the unmarried daughter of a retired army officer confronts a problem facing many educated woman in the world – how to fulfill family obligations and find a suitable mate while pursuing a demanding career.

“You’re too proud,” her widower-father announces, after discovering her boyfriend is a jobless, would-be musician – and unsuitably younger. “I will only make a suggestion. You, of course, will have to make the final decision.”

The father, played by veteran actor Wang Deshun, heads for a traditional water-park to “kill two birds with one stone,” along with other local retirees who gather to exercise and find a mate for their solo offspring.

China’s One-Child Policy, initiated in 1974, resulted in what psychologists call “emotional over-investment” in their kids. Actress Li Jing gives a luminous performance as a 29-year-old TV producer whom the father “markets” to other oldster parents. (“She’s 28, still young!”) Self-absorbed by her inner conflicts, paralyzed by indecision, and chafing under her father’s benign authority, the daughter fights him over domestic trivialities loaded with historical meaning.

“Have some intestines. I cooked it with garlic this time,” he says to her over dinner in their old-fashioned apartment. “You loved it when you were a child.”

“I never liked intestines,” she insists, furious at last. “And I never liked garlic either!”

She sulkily refuses to eat. Her father’s efforts to find her a mate are also doomed to fail, of course. His chosen marriage-target is revealed in a public washroom to be a closeted homosexual. The unhappy revelation is a huge blow to the old man:

“I fought our country’s enemies!” he cries bitterly at the modern glitzy streets. The obvious, unspoken, and real question is: For what? – So that tattooed young men are free to embrace in public? – So that his beautiful daughter can live alone in her new condo?

“You don’t understand the world today,” she tells him with almost eerie resignation. And here is the film’s power – it’s apparent the heroine doesn’t understand this new world either. She only knows what it isn’t. She is fully aware that their shared history is over – but she is also unsure what this new world is all about, or where it’s going.

But she can’t admit this to her father; she knows it will scare him. With breathtaking economy the director Yin Lichuan tackles the central issue of modernity:

Who are we now?

A pickpocket steals the father’s identity card at the railway station, just when he is “about to go home.” It’s up to the daughter to rescue him from obliteration in a forgotten history – even when her own future is provisional, and unknowable.

{Spider Lilies}

At the other end of the spectrum, but equally sophisticated in its treatment of controversial social issues, is Raised from Dust (2006) directed by Gan Xiao Er. It shows us a rural Chinese Christian community facing disruption from one of China’s vast infrastructure projects.

Actress Hu Shuli plays the cheerful young wife of a miner dying of silicosis in the local clinic. She struggles to keep her daughter in primary school and pay for her husband’s treatment, labouring at an illegal construction site for a few yuan by day, and salvaging usable coal bits from refuse tips at night.

Forced to make a terrible choice between the past and future, the heroine pulls the oxygen tube from her husband’s blue lips, loads him on a bicycle cart, and wheels him home to die. The camera lets it happen in what feels like real time: His bare feet dangle out of the handmade box in the cold light of a new spring.

Their young daughter, unknowingly saved by her parents’ sacrifice, sings grace over the family soup bowl to the Chinglish tune of “Frère Jacques” – “Thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus, for the food, for the food,” in a final scene which combines pathos, surreal humour, and existential terror at once. The film’s Christian themes resonate with the earthy life of China’s rural poor, who still live on the knife-edge of hope and despair.

This is the world of cheap labour that moves China’s boom-economy, shown dispassionately, without moralizing. Raised from Dust, with actors who don’t appear to be acting and a director who doesn’t appear to be directing, transcends national concerns, and illuminates our common lot under globalization.

Equally adept at examining moral authority in global society is 38-year-old Taiwanese director Zero Chou, 38. Her film Spider Lilies won the 2007 Teddy Best Feature Film at the Berlin Film Festival.

Spider Lilies (2006) explores international youth culture in Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, where, like everywhere, tattoos, computer sex, and film-going are not merely urban obsessions, but fundamental ways of connecting to the world’s frenetic currents. A teenage web-cam sex performer falls for a lesbian tattooist, in a plot that unites the hard facts of our depersonalized age with the soft truths of private fantasy.

“I am a phantom in your dream,” the heroine reminds the darkened audience beyond the screen, “And you, too, live in mine.”

We, of course, are the unseen watchers whom Chou addresses, the multiple layers of watching watchers in a surveillance-mad society. The electronic audience is the real protagonist of her film. And, as screenwriter Singing Chen takes pains to emphasize, we are hopelessly isolated despite myriad electronic connections.

“I have no choice but to live in a virtual world,” confesses the heroine, a lesbian tattooist played by a stark beauty, Isabella Leong, 18. A violent earthquake, which takes her father’s life and sunders the family, can be read as Taiwan’s political divergence from the Mainland, or as the seismic shock of the new technology; but either way it only finds its cure in an act of personal will:

“If you remember me,” says Jade, the teenage cyber-stripper, seducing the older girl, “And I remember you, then we are real.”

This is the special burden society puts on the individual. A cogent bit of dialogue is central to both the Taiwanese and Mainland films. In The Park, the heroine’s vegetarian boyfriend refuses to eat meat at a family dinner with the response, “When animals are killed, they release a special poison in the blood.” In Spider Lilies the heroine warns that the spider lily flower of the title is “permeated with a poison that makes one lose consciousness and memory.”

Is this a Chinese folk tradition?

Or is it a comment on our increasingly narcotic environment?

*

Interview with Director Zero Chou

Zero Chou, director of Spider Lilies, was born 1970 in Keeling, Taiwan. She studied philosophy at university and became a journalist before embarking on a film career, with five films to her credit.

Were you playing with the film audience, their voyeurism?

The moment a movie begins to play, it forms a relationship with the audience. I wanted Spider Lilies to hypnotize the audience right from the beginning, so that they give the film attention under such a state, and enter a world of non-realism.

Were you deliberately making people uncomfortable with their need to watch?

The interesting thing about voyeurism is the discovery of human nature. On the surface, you are looking at an object. But in fact, you are hearing your own heartbeat, and looking at your own nature.

The film has lines about poison affecting memory. Is this a traditional Chinese theme?

The “poison” from the spider lily flower is also a “cure.” It can help one lose memories, become crazy… but it is also a defence mechanism to protect yourself.

Was the earthquake in the film about the split of Taiwan from the Mainland?

No, Taiwan is region of earthquakes, a natural force. The earthquake symbolizes a rift, a break in memory. The human heart is fragile, it is afraid of breaking, but it needs breaking to cure itself.

Who is your favorite director?

Pedro Almodóvar. I identify with his colourful style. Who said art must be grey and depressing? I always wanted to rebel against that!

Chernobyl Stalker from Donald Weber on Vimeo.

The people most affected by the explosion of Reactor Number Four on the morning of April 26,1986, soon learned that the event known as Chernobyl was predicted by a feature film made seven years earlier. Stalker, by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, explored the limits of our technical power against the backdrop of a mysterious force that can only be approached on foot, by forest “stalkers” who have learned to accept its risky gifts.

Today, real stalkers live inside Chernobyl’s official 30-kilometre Exclusion Zone and secretly strip the dead city of its valuables.

This short film by Donald Weber documents their twilight existence as scavengers of our newest Lost Civilization. Our grand technical vision, the city as pure laboratory, quickly recedes into the hunting and gathering primitivism of a future stone age.

See Donald Weber’s Stalker photo essay.

ISTANBUL, TURKEY — Özgur, my barber, is underwhelmed. If the blue-jawed men reading magazines by the door are typical customers, then I present a modest challenge: an uneven, month-old beard (three or four smears of stubble, a lot of naked cheek) and ears entirely bereft of fuzz. A few quick strokes of the straight razor should do the trick. But Özgur is a Turkish barber and, true to his profession, he takes care: lather spread thick, a slow shave, hot towels, balm, a massage.

“Now you no shave three weeks,” he jokes, working the balm’s sting from my puttied face. I am very relaxed. When a flame jumps from his hand I barely register that my ears are about to be set alight. Hair I didn’t know I had whispers as it burns, briefly, before being patted out.

Seeking my cultural bearings I’ve come to Üsküdar, a neighbourhood on Istanbul’s Asian shore, for a cheap haircut and a look at one of the city’s unheralded places of worship. I climb the streets past nail salons and discount furniture stores to Çinili Camii, the Tiled Mosque.

From the outside it’s not much. The courtyard is bare and weedy. A single minaret flanks the dome, which sits atop an ungainly modern extension. Of an age with the imperial mosques for which the city is famous, Çinili Camii is classical Ottoman architecture at its simplest.

Inside, however, the mosque is aswirl with flowers and Arabic calligraphy. Hand-painted Iznik tiles cover the walls and ceiling, a bequest, in 1640, of Mahpeyker Kösem, the wife of Sultan Ahmet I. Artisans in Western Anatolia developed Iznik pottery to meet the Ottoman court’s demand for Chinese porcelain. Using the materials available to them — glass, silica, clay, and tin — the potters married Islamic and Chinese styles, retaining the traditional emphasis on decorative symmetry while adopting the Ming palette of blues and turquoises. Rinsed with morning light, the tiles glow softly and the prayer hall feels serene, aquatic.

Today is Friday, Jumu’ah, and in a couple of hours the observant will fill Istanbul’s mosques. I cross the Bosporus to Sultanahmet, the seat of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires, to get a better look. As the ferry rounds the Golden Horn I can see the domes of Süleymaniye Camii surrounded by four soaring minarets. It is the last and grandest of the city’s imperial mosques, commissioned by Süleymaniye the Magnificent in the 16th century.

On the steps leading to the courtyard peddlers sell tespih, prayer beads strung 99 to a loop, one bead for each of Allah’s names. A boy and his father hawk birdseed. They advertise their packets with lovely trilling birdcalls that seem to confuse the nesting sparrows and annoy the crowds. Pigeons swarm the pavement.

Süleymaniye Camii attracts a large and varied congregation of students, labourers, and businesspeople. Some of the women wear hijabs; many have obviously donned scarves for the occasion. At the ablution taps a man washes his feet and talks on a cell phone — I can’t help but think about modern Turkey’s embrace of French-style secularism and wonder where the people here would locate themselves on the continuum between cultural and religious Islam.

A Turkish friend once told me that love of their city is Istanbulites’ true religion, one that reconciles Turkey’s apparent contradictions, its zealous secularism and liberal Islam. It’s an observation that resonates with the familiarity and truth of cliché. Eternally cosmopolitan and eternally great, Istanbul has embraced disparate cultures and cultural ideas for two thousand years.

At Nuruosmaniye Camii, a baroque mosque near the Grand Bazaar, I watch a shopkeeper devise a prayer mat from a piece of cardboard. Squaring it with the other mats, he joins the last row of men. He seems anxious. The imam begins the prayer. His words are languid, urgent. The men fall to their knees, their backs to the sky. They stand. They kneel again.

When the prayers are over, the shopkeeper hurries towards the gate. A man claps his shoulder and he’s ushered into conversation with friends, two of them, heavyset and greying where the shopkeeper is thin and dark. They tease him and he laughs. They laugh. He is helpless, happy. Together they wander off.

I’ve recorded the prayer. Listening to it as I write this, a few weeks later, its ordinariness strikes me as beautiful: the whoosh of two hundred people falling to their knees, the plaiting of birdsong and prayer, the falling away of footsteps and laughter as the crowd breaks.

A makeshift prayer mat.

Walk into a box store like Toys R Us or Costco and you will see that toys today constitute an overwrought universe, a shrink-wrapped house of affliction parallel to our own. The tall aisles are packed with violent pinks and piercing reds and hard, mean yellows, all clashing like brass cymbals. You are quickly overcome by their frantic urgency and charmless glitz.

The toys glare out at you from their blister packs and window boxes, demanding that you stroke their fireproof furry tummies to produce a negligible burp, or wiggle their horns to extract a tinny roar. They’re immune to feeling, hard packed as proof against shipping error, “shrinkage” and kiddy-traffic.

There are too many boxes. And besides, your kid wants the CheeDor or HyenaGor, and according to the geeky clerk you’ve finally managed to find, these were sold out months ago. Why? Cuz they dint makinuff, he mumbles through his wad of Extra gum as he restocks a 9-foot shelf of greenish Star Wars fighters.

He looks greenish himself in the jittery store-lights. Working in a toy store, and he’s exhausted. A toy store is anything but fun.

Why are toys such hard work today? Why are kids involved in endless schoolyard Ponzi schemes with their Pokemon cards, trading scores and codes from Lego’s Baraka at recess as if were so much black market currency? What are China’s endless pastel boxcars doing here anyway? Full of action figures bound for suburban box-stores the year round — toys that roar and bleep and refuse to budge from blister packs that will cut your hand badly if you’re not careful? And that’s the real thing.

(“These counterfeits are dangerous,” says a cop whose team has just seized another shipment of fakes from Hong Kong, “They’ve got lead in them.”)

I hold just such an Action Figure in my hand. It is my son’s battery-operated grey camel robot from Star Wars. It’s called Hoth, with guns where its eyes and mouth should be, and a little white starship trooper hiding in his plastic trap-door hump. For Game Theorists, this is closed toy as opposed to an open toy, like Barbie.

Barbie belongs to the old world of dolls—and teddy bears, bats and balls, red wagons, cowboy guns — the kit of the child-narrator, who scripts his own story. Hoth is a closed toy, part of an Operating System external to a player’s life. Hoth’s O/S is free of child’s rule in two ways.

First, Hoth belong to a collection; and as the Star Wars catalogue itself smugly reminds us, “No collection is complete!” without the rest of the collection. This promise of completion is never delivered, because these toy manufacturers sell incompleteness.

Why should they? The real money’s in need. The catalogue begins by seducing kids with coy offers of role deception:

“Your friends will think you are… a gaming mastermind — but only you will know for sure (we won’t tell).”

So secondly, Hoth isn’t really a toy at all, but a component, part of a System; and it’s the System who allows the kid to pretend he’s a warrior or gaming mastermind — not the toy.

No, the toy is beside the point. The player quickly understands this, too. He or she understands by age eight that action figures in blister packs are of necessity always incomplete, even when freshly purchased and still boxed. And that his purchase completes nothing but a provisional entry into an anxious system of commercial craving.

Is this stuff any different from the imported silks that threatened ancient Rome with bankruptcy? Or the costly teas that wrenched the British Empire apart? The Chinese have always specialized in providing the West with its pretty addictions; this thrill is more profound and dangerous. It’s a metaphysical hit.

For if the player’s position relative to this unknowable System is vague and subservient, the toy continually reminds the child that he himself is incomplete, too. Hoth requires batteries: a wire plugged into his anus connects him to a power pack, external yet essential. The routinized, jerky movements that follow deny Descartes, disprove Aquinas.

Free will in the West? Forget it. Unlike the wind-up robot of a generation ago, Hoth’s got no autonomy, no place to go. Press On, and he agitates humpily around his grey lump.

The third part of this toy-system, and more important than the camelbot or the anus-battery, is the stand — complete with a moon crater and embedded footprints.

This device keeps the player out of the loop, distancing him as the spectator who “won’t believe the incredible detail!” Even if the kid tries, his attempt is frustrated. The little warrior can’t stand up by himself; he keeps falling down unless his gun his positioned straight over his head, as if surrendering. The player soon learns it’s better to leave the little fellow where he is, lying on his back like a foetus, inside his camel hump.

Some warrior!

The message in the Blister Pack is that futility and powerlessness attaches to any purchaser who attempts to add narrative elements to the program envisioned by the System. This futility quickly makes itself known to every young player, no matter how imaginative. The toy figure arrests and frustrates efforts to produce alternative scripts, refusing them under the totalitarian motto, Resistance is futile, and proving it in his fumbling. His ineptitude (and that of his parents’) is caused by ignorance of the codes of animatism. Arresting the action is the job of action figures.

Why should this cheapo plastic stuff be so important today? The meta-life of objects is now widely felt to be growing out of control: objects have a complete life of their own. What are Edward Burtynsky’s photos of Machine China, but shots of Ground Zero where the old world of artifacts is dematerialized into a bar-coded chimera?

[Edward Burtynsky: Manufacturing #17, Deda Chicken Processing Plant, Jilin Province]

Our anxiety about the secret life of globalization is anxiety about the death of the organic world. Our familiar world is losing its parts.

We once believed that Technology opposed Nature, that technology offered us hope of controlling the bad weather of history. It turns out that technology is exactly like weather. It, too, is subject to fits of pique and catastrophe — as system crashes, software glitches, and chronic metal fatigue constantly remind us. The causes remain mysterious long after power is restored. The lights go on again, but we are still in the dark.

Artists seized on the issue in the 19^th Century. The German painter Max Klinger did a series on the misadventures of a lady’s lost glove in 1881. In 1909 the Italian futurist and artist Filippo Tomasso Marinetti coined the phrase “animatic” for his view that inanimate things are alive. As the output of box-store stuff continues to mount, we can only experience it referentially, and passively. Forget capitalists: nobody today really controls the means of production.

[Max Klinger, "Ein Handschuh" (A Glove), 1881]

The jumble of forever-incomplete toy “sets” littering the bedrooms of generations of children, never mind the slightly-defective printers and monitors and TVs littering landfill sites. My experience, like that of my child’s, is denied by the System that is deliberately creating a junkyard of the landscape. Here’s a summary of just the past year, which I suggest is more important than God in its proofs of a terrible new metaphysic:

1. A week after I bought it, the $175 Panasonic portable phone slipped to the vinyl floor and died without visible injury.

2. Two weeks after my new $2500 PC system was installed by a “geek pro,” it fried itself in the middle of the night – sparks, smoke and everything.

3. The new “digital” answering machine gives such lo-res audio that it takes us multiple Repeats to figure out who called

4. The camcorder began erasing family videos as it played them.

5. The SLR camera freezes on nice days, but never when I take it back to the camera store; a new wireless mouse died at three weeks; the DVD portable player at one month.

I could go on, but whenever you do complain you get a clerk’s recorded answer: more consumption. Toys such as Hoth are here to teach us about this inhuman new world, about the fritzing and frying and freezing.

Don’t blame China for this defective stuff, for its glitches of mass production.

Take comfort from the toys, who offer their symbolic condolences for our loss of the World. The organic world we once knew can longer compete with the coded reality that produces this unending flow of immaculate novelty. Coming to terms with its triumph — the triumph of the arrested image over narrative will — is now a rite of passage for us all.

Carpet Culture from Donald Weber on Vimeo.

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

Photos by Steve Wilson

1. Can an object have properties before we experience it? The ice on the Red River will support your body weight, if you haven’t had any breakfast that morning and if you don’t move a muscle once you’ve stepped on it. Stay absolutely still as the cracks spread. Don’t wink an eyelid. Hope the plunging cold of another Prairie nightfall will increase its thickness enough so you can ease off it, ever so gently…

2. Does the world have a cause? Lake ice presents us with a paradox:  it reflects everything in its nothingness like a 1000-carat cubist lollipop, but can it reflect its own nothingness, too? Hmmm… This chunk of gemology came from a pristine bay in Lake Winnipeg, a perfect gift for a hard-to-please Ice Queen who wants her world on a stick.

3. The mind only thinks in terms of causality. Crud ice is what they get at Portage and Main in downtown Winnipeg. The cement-like residue of frozen brown gunk sits on the curbs long after the robins return. It freezes and thaws and cracks the pavement and makes potholes and saves every tossed cigarette of winter like a rare pearl. We thought we avoided it, driving slowly, gingerly, through the city, but we still got a flat tire before lunch. Steve is shown paying it back.

4. Morality requires truly autonomous acts. Under green ice is where you find the desirable game fish of Canada – the walleye, called greenbacks on Lake Winnipeg. Stu McKay, the mysteriously black-masked outfitter of Cats on the Red, calls them “the epitome of a good eater.” He drops a sonar device into his hole just to watch fish hover by his bait.  Watching them doesn’t make them bite more, he admits, but at least it gives him something to do. We took turns posing with our solo catch of the trip, then tossed it back for its next photo-session. When my turn came I promptly stepped into an unmarked ice-hole and experienced the thrill of blue jean ice for the day.

5. The only possible argument in support of the existence of God: Is a blonde, with the ice-blue eyes.  Michelle Gunnarfson, 21, works as café hostess at the environmentally perfect Hecla Oasis Inn. She’s a descendant of Viking Icelanders who settled Hecla Island in the 1870’s and survived smallpox epidemics, floods, blizzards – the usual pioneer opera. Michelle moved back to Hecla in 2007 and now wins staring contests with wolves and male tourists. The guy on the left? Who cares?

6. Is it in our interest to accept a hypothetical? Shower ice can be found in Central Canada wherever there’s a stiff breeze. Here, Oz tourist Sue Hess shows top form as another cascade smacks her right in the face. She was enjoying the scenery during a Via Rail train trip from Winnipeg through the taiga to Churchill, in a long and futile search for the Northern Lights. “Outback with blizzards” was her only comment.

7. Know what ought to be done. Meat Ice is what they feed sled dogs in Churchill, after they give it forty whacks with a sharp ax. Don’t ever tease Chimo by grabbing his pink brick. Chains have been known to snap like twigs. What are you going to do when he comes at you dancing on two legs like Kid Chocolate with a steel muzzle?

8. Space and time are not concepts. Space and time are what surrounds this land of ours, one centimetre from Churchill. The man riding into the blue yonder is musher Charlie Lundy, 57, at the start of a 40-mile training run with his 10 sled dogs, for the Hudson Bay Quest race. The glow in the sky is qubuq, an Inuit word (western Arctic) for the reflected light on the horizon of sea-ice. Another word for it is polar bear country.

9. Resist dogmatic slumber! Tired of ice is what you get on your windshield when you return, limping in frozen jeans and smelling of raw fish, to your crystallized car with the flat tire. Tomorrow you can go snow-shoeing on apu ice, Inuit for the sharp crust covering the northern Prairie. Apu will support you if you use snowshoes properly, and won’t if you don’t. In the meantime you can use your cubist ice to chill whatever drink they decide to bring you, and brood about what you could have said to Miss Blue Eyes.

Okay, here’s the assignment — myself and a stylist, plus a little help from Vova the fixer, drive around rural, western Ukraine in an Opel, purposely avoiding the big cities, sticking to the back roads, looking for “real” people to be our models. In the trunk of the car, thousands of dollars worth of high fashion from Europe and New York. Change in the car, you look great! Try to get real people in real situations wearing absolutely modern clothing. And that’s our Ukrainian road trip.

[Click on first image to begin slideshow]

“Omigod, that is a freaking grenade. Holy fuck – explosion! Excuse my language here on the air.” That was Corrine McDermid narrating blurry but revealing live footage of a face-off between police and protesters at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, in September 2008. Police with smoke bombs, pepper spray, tear gas and protective gear had come to a head with activists. The activists advanced and cat-called the barricade of police who, like silent black-clad action figures, fired clouds of coloured smoke into the crowd, chasing the people farther and farther from the convention hall.

Corrine McDermid was one of a group of passionate volunteers armed with camcorders and cell phones to document the conflict for what was then a new non-profit media start-up called the Uptake. Footage fed to the Uptake’s command central was streamed over the Internet; even if the reporters were arrested or had their equipment confiscated, the dramatic, unvarnished stories would reach the world. The Uptake had, unlike other media organizations, predicted how action-packed the demonstrations outside the RNC would be, so it was ready with trained volunteers on the ground to tape the dramatic events unfold in real-time, expletives in all. “When things started happening on streets, which no one fully expected, we were ready to go live with it,” the Uptake’s founder and executive director Jason Barnett later said. The Uptake was founded because, as executive director Jason Barnett explained later, there was an opportunity to provide footage that no one else would have.

It was citizen journalism at its newest and rawest – a classic example of a nimble group of camera-wielding documentarians infiltrating areas traditional media either couldn’t access or didn’t have the resources to cover. But the Uptake was more than just gathering and training ad hoc journalists and media-savvy youth. Its triumph at the RNC was a preview of how rapid response coverage of major events is dramatically changing how stories are covered and who is covering them.

Those were early days, when the role of citizen journalists was fairly straightforward: buy cameras and cell phones, give them to a bunch of eager, hyper-connected, mostly young volunteers and see what they gather. Over the 16 months since Corrine McDermid’s coverage of the RNC showdown, the Uptake has evolved to become a much more complex model of a new media structure, one where the divisions between legacy media, social media, Twitter, traditional reporting and civic society has pretty much been obliterated. The Uptake also represents how diverse multi-platform groups are redefining relationships between traditional news, citizen journalist groups and a more nebulous, broader and influential group of what you might call activist-journalists.

*

To witness the new relationships between magazines, bloggers, activists, advocacy non-profit groups and outfits like the Uptake, fast forward to December 2009 in Copenhagen for an even bigger media event than the Republican National Convention: COP15, the United Nations climate change talks. Climate change issues gathered steam throughout 2009 and COP15 turned into one of the biggest international political stories of the year. For 10 days, an estimated 3,000 accredited media and countless numbers of unaccredited bloggers and NGO delegates gathered to report on high-stakes negotiations within Copenhagen’s sprawling Bella Center – not to mention the escalating action on city streets.

The alliances that formed between NGOs and citizen journalist groups like the Uptake, not to mention publications such as the Nation, Grist and Mother Jones, reveal how journalists are working with the groups they once reported on. These partnerships are as intertwined and intricate as a circuit board on the UN-issued Sony Ericsson phones so many of the press and delegates loaned for the 10 days in Denmark. The Uptake, for instance, is part U.S.-based The Media Consortium, a coalition of members that include Salon, Mother Jones and the Nation.

Such alliances are mutually beneficial. News outlets don’t have the resources they once did, especially for international and investigative reporting. Then there are independent journalists who find themselves as lone correspondents with no editorial backup or multimedia support. NGOs, meanwhile, have the mass mobilization to spread large amounts of information quickly.

The Uptake, which received a third of its proposed non-profit funding for the story, could only send four people to Copenhagen: its executive director, executive producer, a writer-turned-impromptu videographer and a one-time CBS reporter now working at a public relations firm. When it came to COP15, “the idea was to go in with a unified voice with traditional media,” says the Uptake’s Barnett.

Other media groups faced similar financial challenges and many sent only one reporter or no reporters, relying instead on delegates who were attending for other reasons – for instance, with advocacy groups like Tcktcktck and 350.org (the latter fronted by journalist-turned-activist Bill McKibben). The establishment – Reuters, BBC and Agence France-Presse, for starters – might have been cloistered in rented white offices at the Bella Center, but plenty of others such as the Nation, Grist, Mother Jones, Guardian columnist and No Logo author Naomi Klein, shared resources with both the Uptake and the very NGOs they were covering. The Uptake provided video footage both to Tcktcktck and Klein, offering tech support to the former and reporting resources to the latter, while posting footage from a high-profile figure (Klein) with other high-profile figures (such as the head of Greenpeace International and Nigerian poet and activist Nnimmo Bassey) on its own site.

“Traditional approaches and tools are becoming obsolete and the interaction between reporters and their audiences has become both more dynamic and more perplexing,” Ivor Shapiro, a professor at the Ryerson School of Journalism, in Toronto, wrote in an editorial for the Canadian Journalism Project. “Verification, that so-called ‘essence’ of journalism, sometimes seems to have morphed from a standard to a question. Conventions surrounding social media and crowdsourcing are in flux, and the relationships between payers and pipers may be wild-westishly chaotic for a while to come.”

Roles also shifted with individuals. A contributing editor and blogger for Good, for instance, divided his time between blogging for the magazine’s website and working as a campaigner for Adopt-a-Negotiator, a youth-driven group that sent international youth to bird-dog government negotiators in attempts to influence environmental policy. Richard Graves, a 20-something television producer who founded the Fired Up Media and Project Survival Media, a citizen journalist program that trains environmental campaigners around the globe to tell local stories of climate change, was hired by NGO Tcktcktck to lead its media offerings (his official title is blogger and online campaigner). Working 18-hour days and looking exhausted by day three of the 10-day convention, Graves wore his activist hat (a term he dislikes) to cross-post Tcktcktck pieces on Huffington Post. Then, switching to his journalist cap, he wrote a feature on for Grist. When he got back to his home in Washington, he said he would go through all the images and footage gathered as part of his Tcktcktck gig and tease out of it an episode of Link TV’s online series Earth Focus.

*

By now, you might wish you had a degree in cartography to map the connections between these journalists and campaigners. But there is, in fact, a geographic center to the activist-journalist relationships formed in downtown Copenhagen. In mid December, that geographic center could be found in the Huset, an expansive bunker-style café that Tcktcktck commandeered during COP15 as a home for independent media and bloggers who didn’t have official press accreditation to the convention center or who simply need a wired, collaborative workspace. (NGO delegates could access the convention center, but they couldn’t get inside the media center like Reuters, the New York Times and other print and broadcast groups.) Dubbed the Fresh Air Center, organizers described it as a “rapid response digital media hub.”

Outfitted with a few desktop computers and dozens of electrical outlets, it quickly became command-central for hundreds of bloggers whose scattered sticker-plastered MacBooks and camera gear across workstations and café tables. An enormous flat-screen TV near the bar streamed live footage – courtesy of the Uptake – from the very convention center that many bloggers couldn’t access. Every night at 7 p.m., Tcktcktck hosted live events (sponsored by the UN Foundation), including a talk with Amy Goodman of the daily radio-TV show Democracy Now! Correspondents spoke by Skype with colleagues back home, photographers uploaded hundred of images from demonstrations, press conferences and other events and bloggers typed madly in multitudes of languages.

One night, Graves wandered around stiff and semi-catatonic after spending 14 hours with a three-person team editing thousands of images from a 10,000-plus person march from the parliament to the Bella Center. Boxes from I Love Pizza were haphazardly stacked on the tables and half-empty pints of beer were propped next to laptops. “It was created for people who wanted to get involved, who care about the issue, but are sometimes locked out of process,” Graves said. “You need professional accreditation from NGO even to get in door [at COP15]. We wanted to give a way for independent journalists who might not be recognized by UN, which has incredibly stringent rules for online journalists. This is too important an issue to be kept out of public site.”

*

To get a sense of the scope of coverage and the strange, intertwined relationships, you had to cover not only the official negotiations, but also the action in the streets. Naomi Klein had predicted that COP15 would be the Seattle of its generation, as contentious as the WTO protests in 1999. In Copenhagen, the Uptake was ready with its small team to watch the scene unfold. On a crisp Saturday afternoon, the Uptake’s Jacob Wheeler and Rick Fuentes walked alongside a mostly peacefully stream of demonstrators. The Politi – reportedly half of the total police force in Denmark – followed in step. Conspicuous among the crowd were the hundreds of ad hoc reporters with serious-looking digital SLRs slung around their necks.

After pushing through the thousands of people packed into the main square, Wheeler and Fuentes emerged at the head of the march. Tiny Canon high-def camera and microphone in his ungloved hands, Wheeler was cheerfully ready for anything. Though he’s a professional writer, his camera duties were new (the Uptake program mentors amateur reporters, but funding restrictions meant they couldn’t bring citizen journalists along. Wheeler, who lived in Denmark, offered an informed perspective to the street coverage). “When I write I have to be specific,” he said. “Today I’m not being specific. I just want a panoramic of what’s happening.” Like everyone else, he was hoping to get shots that would drive people to the Uptake’s website.

Groups of marchers filtered by, many in matching costumes like a four or five guys dressed in oversized white onesies and sagging diapers. There were people in polar bear hoods and others in T-shirts promoting their causes pulled over winter coats. A large contingent of indigenous groups led the pack. Many in the crowd carried signs with slogans such as “There is no Planet B” and “Nature Doesn’t Compromise.” Wheeler caught it all on tape, sometimes running up to interview people, other times panning the crowd. He didn’t have to edit it into a cohesive narrative; that wasn’t the point. He was mainly there to roll tape, let the crowd speak.

A couple hours into the march, Wheeler passed a woman with bleached blond hair, pink tights and a bouquet of fake flowers cruising along on roller-skates just ahead of a police van at the front of the crowd. She turned out to be a kind of citizen journalist herself, producing video footage for her “TV station,” which turned out to be a channel on YouTube that she created with her boyfriend. Fascinated, Wheeler shot several minutes of tape as the woman spoke in English mixed with Spanish and Danish about covering refugee camps. “Those are nice flowers,” he told her at one point. The woman smiled and showed a microphone hidden in the bouquet. “That was great!” he said after breaking away.

Wheeler checked in with Barnett by cell phone throughout the afternoon. Earlier, his partner Fuentes had “disengaged” and headed back to a rented apartment to upload footage from the first few hours. Wheeler kept going. On one call, Barnett passed on a lead from Twitter that Danish model-turned-photographer Helena Christensen was at the front of the march. Wheeler asked a few Danes directing foot traffic, but they didn’t know where Christensen might be. Queries with a local TV crew didn’t turn up anything, either. An interview would have been a small coup for he day, possibly driving more people to the site – where they’d discover other, deeper stories, such as Klein’s interview with Nnimmo Bassey. But it didn’t matter. When Wheeler finished the night, not far from the convention center where climate change negotiators were sequestered, he had hours of footage of an event that was dominating world media. He’d go back, upload the footage for all the media partners – Mother Jones, the Nation, Tcktcktck – to access and filter into the networks buzzing throughout the city and beyond.