Abstract
This chapter provides a background to the different perspectives in this volume on the relationship between the Pentecostal and the political in Africa. It outlines the various views, arguments, and investigations that the individual chapters bring to the underlying questions: What are the current and most pertinent features of African Pentecostalism and Pentecostalism in Africa? What are the antecedents for the establishment, proliferation, and legitimization of the Pentecostal movement in Africa? How does Pentecostalism intervene in specific social and political issues, such as secularism, citizenship, endemic poverty, development challenges, ascension to power; and in primordial and political identity questions, including ethnicity and race issues, gender and womanist politics, ecumenism and interfaith relationships, party politics, political participation; and other facets of politics and society in Africa? Conversely, in what ways do the state and the peculiar nature of politics in Africa modulate the Pentecostal movement? Can Pentecostalism be regarded as an alternative vision or as a compromised acquiescence to the political order in Africa? What theoretical frameworks and paradigms can we deploy to make sense of these questions, and what new hypotheses might we propose for explaining the intersections of Pentecostalism with politics in Africa?
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- 1.
Ogbu Kalu, African Pentecostalism: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
- 2.
Ruth Marshall, Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
- 3.
Nimi Wariboko, Nigerian Pentecostalism. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2014.
- 4.
Marshall, Political Spiritualities, 2.
- 5.
Marcel Etienne, “Public Space and Political Autonomy in Early Greek Cities,” in Marcel Hénaff and Tracy B. Strong (eds.), Public Space and Democracy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, 43.
- 6.
Olufemi Taiwo, How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010, 5.
- 7.
Ibid.
- 8.
Ibid., 6.
- 9.
Valentin Mudimbe, Parables and Fables: Exegesis, Textuality, and Politics in Central Africa. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991, 6.
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
Ibid.
- 12.
Ibid., 7.
- 13.
Abiola Irele, “Introduction,” in Paulin Hountondji (ed.), African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, second edition. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996, 15, 17.
- 14.
Hountondji, African Philosophy, 34.
- 15.
Mudimbe, Parables and Fables, 3.
- 16.
Katherine Verdery, cited by J.D.Y. Peel, already makes the argument that a similar incorporation into the global capitalist economy provides a strong context for reconciling the religious experience of both types of societies. See Peel, Christianity, Islam, and Orisa Religion: Three Traditions in Comparison and Interaction. California: University of California Press, 2016, 90.
- 17.
Peel, Christianity, Islam, and Orisa Religion, 90.
- 18.
See Joshua B. Forrest, “Nationalism in Postcolonial States,” in Lowell W. Barrington (ed.), After Independence: Making and Protecting the Nation in Postcolonial and Postcommunist States. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006, 33–44.
- 19.
Ibid., 97–98.
- 20.
Ogbu Kalu, African Pentecostalism: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
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Afolayan, A., Yacob-Haliso, O., Falola, T. (2018). Introduction: The Pentecostal and the Political in Africa. In: Afolayan, A., Yacob-Haliso, O., Falola, T. (eds) Pentecostalism and Politics in Africa. African Histories and Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74911-2_1
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