Barbara Bompani

African Independent Churches in Post-Apartheid South Africa: New Political Interpretations*

Scholars continue to debate the issue of how African Independent Churches (AICs) relate to politics. Rather than evaluating AICs according to a literal, Eurocentric definition of politics, this article argues for a holistic interpretation of African Christianity that treats politics, like other aspects of the realities of religious communities, as integral to religious discourse. Drawing on a study – including participant-observation and interviews with leaders and ordinary members – of five independent churches in Jabulani (Soweto), the article shows that politics is not now, nor was it during the apartheid era, divorced from the religious sphere in the everyday lives of church members. It demonstrates that local religious communities vitally sustain broadly held popular expectations of obtaining the as yet unrealised benefits of social justice and full citizenship that were the promise of the liberation struggle. Space is thereby opened up to move beyond seeing politics exclusively in terms of direct opposition to or support for government policies and institutions, and to register the political nature of activities such as Sunday worship, group Bible study, and weekday evening prayer meetings.

Religion and Development from Below: Independent Christianity in South Africa

Most of the literature on African independent churches (AICs) in South Africa has not paid much attention to their economic and developmental role. In contrast, this article will show how AICs are involved in important economic activities such as voluntary mutual benefit societies, savings clubs, lending societies, stokvels (informal savings funds), and burial societies that control millions of South African rand. In light of firsthand empirical research, this article investigates these kinds of activities, and analyses independent churches’ developmental role. This will allow us to better understand how these communities play a strong and supportive function among Africans in a deprived economic situation. In a period of socio-political transformation in South Africa, AICs are able to answer the needs of the people and their hunger to rebuild an identity. My major critique of classical research on AICs is the failure of the literature to address ‘social change’ in a theoretically adequate way, as something more than just descriptions of ‘traditional’ social structures away from interpretations of modernity.

A “religious revolution”? Print media, sexuality, and religious discourse in Uganda

Recently, Uganda has made international headlines for the controversial Anti-homosexuality Bill and for a set of tight measures that have limited the freedom of sexual minorities. This article argues that Ugandas growth of Pentecostal-charismatic churches (PCCs) is playing a major role in influencing and defining the Ugandan public sphere, including (but not limited to) the ways in which sex and sexuality are conceptualized by and within Ugandas print media. This article suggests that the socially conservative nature of PCCs is highly influential in shaping the way print media write about sex and sexuality. This is because Pentecostal-charismatic (PC) constituencies constitute a considerable numerical market that print media cannot ignore. Second, PCs actively work toward influencing and shaping public policies, politics, and public spaces, like newspapers, that discuss and address public morality and decency in the country. As this article will show, within a highly “Pentecostalized” public sphere, alternative public discourses on sexuality are not allowed.

Sexualizing politics: the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, party-politics and the new political dispensation in Uganda

The internationally ‘famed’ Anti-Homosexuality Bill (AHB) represents an interesting and peculiar case through which to understand and unpack national political events, evolution within the ruling party and emerging power dynamics in Uganda. Amongst several coexisting interpretative discourses that explain the recent emergence of sexuality within politics in the country, this article provides an examination of the Museveni administration, the National Resistance Movement (NRM) and the political developments in relation to anti-gay feelings and the AHB. In fact, through a systematic and chronological analysis of events, discourses, public statements, newspaper articles and academic literature, the article reflects on the specific role that sexuality plays in the shaping activities of the NRM and its public representation and internal power dynamics. In doing so, the article identifies certain consistent themes and discursive frames concerning homosexuality that have emerged within the NRM and brings to light existing internal tensions as President Museveni attempts to hold onto power for yet another election in 2016.

Decolonising Online Development Studies?: Emancipatory Aspirations and Critical Reflections: A Case Study

Abstract Academics in high-income countries are increasingly launching development studies programmes through online distance learning to engage practitioner-students in low-income countries. Are such initiatives providing opportunities to critically tackle social injustice, or merely ‘mirroring’ relations of global inequality and re-entrenching imperial practices? Building on recent scholarship addressing efforts to ‘decolonise development studies’ and the complex power dynamics they encounter, we reflect on this question by analysing experiences of faculty and students in a United Kingdom-based online development studies programme, focusing particularly on perspectives of development practitioner-students working from Africa. We discuss barriers to social inclusivity – including the politics of language – that shaped participation dynamics in the programme as well as debates regarding critical development course content, rethinking possibilities for bridging counter-hegemonic development scholarship with practice-oriented approaches in a range of social contexts. Our analysis unpacks key tensions in addressing intertwined institutional and pedagogic dilemmas for an agenda towards decolonising online development studies, positioning decolonisation as a necessarily unsettling and contested process that calls for greater self-reflexivity.

‘It is Not a Shelter, it is a Church!’ Religious Organisations, the Public Sphere and Xenophobia in South Africa

This chapter explores a specific religious site, the Central Methodist Mission (CMM) in central Johannesburg. The church began to accommodate refugees, mostly from Zimbabwe, since 2004/2005, and the number of people staying at the church increased during and after the outbreaks of xenophobic violence that spread across South Africa in 2008. Passing from being simply a religious site, this institution became a sort of improvised ‘refugee camp’ hosting around 3,000 migrants and, in doing so, has become the site of much contestation and controversy at a local and national level. When Zimbabwean migrants turned to the church, this materially affected the running and organisation of the existing religious community as well as the religious site. This chapter investigates the way this overcrowded place became the only ‘safe’ alternative in a very adverse society, and it also illustrates that in light of this dynamic process following Apartheid, religion and religious institutions are re-emerging as public actors in South Africa.

Beyond Disciplinarity: Reflections on the Study of Religion in International Development

The increasing public role of religion in Sub-Saharan Africa and the consequent studies that are emerging on the topic, force us to rethink how to interpret, approach, categorize and understand religion in the public. The pervasiveness of religion, and the impossibility of simply inscribing it within a single discipline pushes us to reconsider our approaches, methodologies and theories. Focusing on the emergence of “Religion and Development” (RaD) as a sub-discipline within the discipline of Development Studies, the article will show how the creation of “focused transdisciplinarity”, embedded in critical social science, can be an answer to the need of engaging with the multilayered nature of religion without compromising rigor and while still benefiting from methodologies and theories developed within a defined discipline. The article argues that a “focused transdisciplinary approach” allows research to navigate complexity and engage with issues while constantly reminding us of the origins of the investigative process in which the study is conducted.

The Evolution of African Studies in The Uk

For whom do we research Africa and for what purpose? We, as scholars working outside of and within Africa on Africa-related research projects and teaching, should periodically return to this question in order to reflect on the challenges, opportunities and legitimacy of our own work. From colonial times in which constituent disciplines within African Studies were aiding dominant powers to grasp knowledge of local contexts to facilitate control, to the 60s and 70s when African Studies was called upon to produce new understandings of Africa in and for post-colonial times to more contemporary endeavours, African Studies presents different morphologies in each era and in each context. This short article reflects on the state of African Studies in the UK and more broadly in Europe in recent times, highlighting reconfigurations brought about by national and international challenges such as migration, European divisions, funding, institutions, networks and most recently, who produces knowledge about Africa and for whom.