Pentecostal and Development Imaginaries in West Africa

Abstract

It would be hard to overestimate the significance of the new Pentecostal churches in the post-Cold War cultural life of Ghana and Togo, especially among the middle classes in the capital cities.1 In Accra and Lomé alone, there are hundreds of new charismatic churches, some with room to seat thousands of people. On Sundays, the city is dead and the churches, large open-air buildings with booming sound systems, are filled with smartly dressed congregants. Many partake during the week as well — in daily prayer meetings, in Friday ‘all-nights’, in counselling sessions — and, periodically, in ‘conferences’ and ‘seminars’ with visiting pastors, in ‘crusades’ to heal the sick and win converts, in ‘deliverance’ sessions to exorcise demons. If you visit the University of Ghana at six in the morning on a school day, you’ll find the soccer pitch filled with thousands of students praying and speaking in tongues. Board a plane in Accra or Lagos and you’ll bear witness to collective prayers before take-off and landing. Spend New Year’s Eve in Lomé and you’ll find a larger, more spirited crowd in the churches than at a nightclub or private party. One such New Year’s service I attended at the Assemblies of God in 2009–2010 — a service held in the street to accommodate the overflow crowd — started at 10 pm and ended at 3 am, punctuated by a Times Square-like celebration at midnight that featured wild dancing and open-armed exhortation of the Holy Spirit.