We cannot talk about the prophetic in African Christianity without referring to the history of Christian religious innovation in Africa from the early decades of the 20th century. More than half a century has passed since the first monographs on African Christian prophetism were published. The initial publications came from the likes of Christian G. Baëta, John D.Y. Peel, Adrian Hastings, Robert Wyllie, David Barrett, Marie-Louise Martin, Bengt G.M. Sundkler, Harold W. Turner, David A. Shank and Richard Burgess.1 Some major studies such as Paul Breidenbach’s classic doctoral work on Ghana’s Church of the Twelve Apostles never got published as a whole. Several others like Lamin Sanneh, John S. Pobee, Frieder Ludwig, Benjamin Ray and Ogbu U. Kalu also wrote extensively on these movements in book chapters and articles.
There are more others – a mix of indigenous scholarship, missionary tomes, and Africanist writings – that wrestled with the rise of prophetic Christianity as a very seismic development in African Christianity beginning from the first decade of the twentieth century. The prophetic element was only the most dramatic and prominent part of developments that sought to bring the biblical material alive in ways that had not been experienced in the ecclesiology of Western mission Christianity. In the second half of the twentieth century, two monumental, edited volumes, emerged on Christianity in Africa. The first of these was Christianity in Tropical Africa and the second was Christianity in Independent Africa. In both volumes the independent church movement received attention as constituting religious game change in Christianity in Africa. Ogbu U. Kalu built on these efforts with the edited volume, African Christianity, It’s an African Story, making a trilogy that acknowledged the role of independent Christianity in redefining a faith that was inherited from missionary endeavors.
The three publications had much to say about Africa’s independent church movements, which incidentally, emerged within the same period that the oft talked about Azusa Street revival of 1906 occurred in Los Angeles under the black preacher, William J. Seymour. Africans first encountered the experience of the Holy Spirit as an ecclesiological reality through the charismatic revivals of the independent church movement.
The ministries of African charismatic figures of the early 20th century were oriented towards the biblical phenomenon of the prophetic, and the related issue of divine or faith healing, sometimes even to the neglect of the use of bio-medical resources. The developments have been interrogated in religious studies, theology, and the sociology and psychology of religion showing how important these churches have been in the African public sphere.
When one adds to the select publications listed above, the many essays that have appeared in journals on the independent church movements, especially in the Journal of Religion in Africa, then one gets an idea of how important these forms of religious innovation in Africa constituted an important epoch in African Christianity. In other words, the emergence of Africa as a major heartland of Christianity in the 20th century cannot be explained apart from the rise of prophetic movements. This is what led Andrew F. Walls to observe that in the current century what happens in African Christianity was going to determine the whole shape of world Christianity Christian theology.2
Whether named as African independent/initiated/instituted churches (AIC s), prophetic-healing churches, the Aladura, Zionist, or Spiritual churches, the AIC s remain some of the most intensively researched and studied, but also bastardized indigenous forms of Christian expressions across Africa. Scholars have found in these churches what the average African Christian considers important in faith. This lies not in fine and theologically systematic liturgical collects and prayers, but in the experiential encounters with the Holy Spirit in ways that spoke to indigenous religious sensibilities. At the heart of early 20th century Christian religious innovation in Africa, and which has straddled developments through the 21st century is prophecy, the prophetic, and its role in personal and communal life. Prophecy in the African Christian context is at the bottom a means of diagnosis of deep-seated physical, psycho-social, spiritual, and emotional difficulties for which Africans seek answers from the supernatural realm.
For those encouraged by the Christian evangelical of the Western missionary type to turn their backs on traditional resources of supernatural succour through the demonization of local religious cultures, it was disappointing that mission agencies did not possess the antidote to those mystical problems emerging out of say, witchcraft. Witchcraft fears were dismissed as psychological delusions and a figment of the superstitious African imagination by those accustomed to framing the Christian experience within a Western missionary mindset. In the face of some very critical rebuffs of the early independent church movements as occultic and aberrations of biblical Christianity, scholars have affirmed them as major innovations in the attempt to let Christianity speak to African situations and respond to questions that Africans bring to Jesus Christ.
As David Shank has argued, these prophets did not appear essentially as opponents of the White Western missions but indeed rather as authentic African efforts to take to their own people “a de-westernized, African appropriated Christian message in contrast to that of institutional missions.”3 One of those who led the revival, Prophet Garrick Sokari Braide of the Niger Delta was denounced in a 1916 London Times article as leading a “dangerous cult” that works on the emotional side of the native mind, and which movement must be crushed before it takes a political turn.4 The prophets denounced the worship of local idols and in their ministries, demonstrated the power of God to heal and deliver from the demonic by invoking the name of Jesus and the cleansing power of the Holy Spirit. It is instructive for the purposes of this book on prophetic Christianity that Braide’s emphases on healings and prophecies demonstrated “the Pentecostal nature of his ministry.”5
The encounter between Western mission Christianity in Africa and indigenous religious cultures led to very traumatic situations, in which a people, accustomed to finding solutions to their problems within traditional religious contexts were suddenly told that those realms belonged to abonsam, the devil.6 The fallout from this trauma was the schizophrenic phenomenon in which people stayed in the church but then resorted to consulting traditional shrines and diviners when in crises. They went in search of solutions to problems which they considered were beyond the capability of ordinary native herbalists and Western therapeutic resources. The independent church prophets provided alternatives to traditional divinations by setting up sacred places of prayer where supplicants wrestled with God for different breakthroughs in the quagmires of life. Christian G. Baëta thus served us well when he described the Spiritual churches as engaged in “a prodigious struggle to prove the reality of spiritual things in general and the biblical promises in Africa.”7
The names associated with the rise of the Spiritual churches from the beginning of the 20th century are well-known: William Wadé Harris, Garrick Sokari Braide, Simon Kimbangu, Isaiah Shembe, Joseph Babalola, and many others. That two of these, Harris and Braide, were nicknamed “Black Elijah” and “Elijah II” respectively, revealed much about the charismatic, fiery, and confrontational nature of the movements they led. Their efforts as itinerant prophets led to the rise of the independent church movement whose spirituality, although maligned from mainline church pulpits and persecuted by colonial authorities, proved so popular that it led to emulative action from their critics – the historic mission denominations.
The rise of charismatic renewal groups within Africa’s historic mission denominations was a reactionary move to stem the tide of members drifting from these pioneers of the Christian evangel in Africa into the new Spiritual churches. Most importantly, there is a direct connection between the establishment of the AIC s and the prophetic tradition that has emerged within modern Pentecostalism. In the contemporary era, prophetic ministries are now a mediatized and digitalized phenomenon in which impartations of anointing come through the power of cyberspace. This is what Ogbu Kalu had to say about the work of the prophets in relation to the rise of modern Pentecostalism:
These prophets tilled the soil on which modern Pentecostalism thrives. They were closer to the grain of African culture in their responses to the gospel and so felt the resonance between the charismatic indigenous worldviews and the equally charismatic biblical worldview. In 1910, the year that European missionary leaders gathered in a conference on The Mound, Edinburgh, to map the future of mission in Africa and the rest of the world, Wade Harris trekked from Grebo Island through the Ivory Coast to the Gold Coast baptizing, healing, teaching new choruses, and charismatizing the religious landscape. The charismatic fire that he lit became more important for the future of Christianity in Africa than the grand Edinburgh Conference of 1910 that shut out African voices.8
The pioneering prophets of early 20th century Christian religious innovation in Africa embodied the charismatic side of ministry in both its Pauline and Weberian senses. They were charismatic and demonstrated certain extraordinary religious capacities especially in the areas of exorcism, healing, and the reversal of curses. Each of them had a highly valued public profile as a person of supernatural power and demonstrated this by securing dramatic conversions of people to Christianity. They confronted the custodians of traditional shrines and sometimes set the instruments of their trade ablaze to demonstrate the superior power of God. Their ministries also affected the social order with claims that businesses in alcoholic beverages and tobacco dwindled to the consternation of the representatives of the various colonial governments, due to falls in revenue from these businesses.
In virtually every case, when the historic mission denominations set up committees to study why their members were patronizing the services of these “unschooled ordinary men/women,” the responses were the same. The new prophetic movements were offering a form of Christian spirituality that centered on the reinvention of the biblical ministry of the prophetic and dealing with issues that spoke to the spiritual emptiness that people felt in the more established denominations. They diagnosed ill health and life’s misfortunes in terms of the activities of supernatural evil and prescribed divinely revealed remedies to them in a way that spoke directly to African religious sensibilities.
One of the first studies on these churches was Baëta’s Prophetism in Ghana. In that seminal work, he made a prediction that has proven “prophetic” in the current ongoing religious innovations in African Christian independency, including within both classical and contemporary Pentecostal churches. Baëta’s words are worth quoting in full:
[Prophetism] appears to me to be a perennial phenomenon of African life, and the basic operative element in it seems to be personal in character. Whether in relation to or independently of events or developments in society, the individual endowed with a striking personality and the ability to impose his own will on others, believing himself, and believed by others to be a special agent of some supernatural being or force, will emerge from time to time and secure a following. Powers traditionally accredited to such persons, of healing, revealing hidden things, predicting the future, cursing, and blessing effectually, etc., will be attributed to him whether he claims them or not. Such things as … inward illumination, a sense of divine vocation, spontaneous enthusiasm … are facts of life and have their effects on African society.9
In a sense, the current volume provides concrete evidence of the realization of the prophetic prediction from Baëta. Christian charismatic prophetism has reemerged within contemporary African Christianity and in churches and in the media, this has become the commonest expression of spirituality in Africa. There are new writings from Daniel Nii Aboagye Aryeh and J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu on the reinvention of prophetism in contemporary Pentecostal practices and spirituality. Several of us who write as theologians and scholars of African Christianity including Paul Gifford, Ogbu Kalu, and several others, have pointed to the enduring significance of prophetism in Africa. Additionally, there are many graduate level research projects on the nature of the prophetic in contemporary African Christianity and this is indicative of the prophetic nature of the statement in Baëta’s Prophetism in Ghana as quoted above.
What African Christian prophetic action has missed is the dimension of biblical prophecy that deals with the issues of social justice. This is a major limitation that remains unaccounted for in the literature on African prophetism. Postcolonial Africa has experienced some of the worst political regimes in the history of governance and yet, with all their spiritual impact on people and church life, there is very little to celebrate in using prophetic action to challenge corrupt regimes, military brutalities, and the siphoning of Africa’s resources by those holding public office. Some of these rich and powerful individuals even resort to the courts of powerful prophetic figures for prayerful protection and reciprocate such questionable spiritual protection with material and financial donations in “seed-sowing” religious observances in the ministries of these prophets.
Despite its powers of revitalization, several prophetic figures have also engaged in very scandalous behavior ranging from delivering self-serving prophecies in patronage of high-profile public figures to financial mismanagement and sexual abuses. In other words, the scholarship on prophetic activity would need to pay attention to the downsides of the phenomenon in the same way that we encounter in Ezekiel 34. Here, God chastises the shepherds of Israel for exploiting the sheep rather than provide the sort of divinely inspired pastoral care that protects God’s people from harm. The African context is one in which holding people of religious power to account can prove extremely difficult. For all its contributions to the dynamism of Christianity in Africa, we create an imbalance at the heart of this religious phenomenon by not paying attention to the ways in which it damages the reputation of Christianity in the public sphere.
Conclusion
What defines African revitalization movements is their very dynamic understanding of the Holy Spirit. The leader of a revitalization movement is usually first and foremost a charismatic person who has encountered the Spirit of God in transformative ways that were alien to understandings of the Spirit in the historic mission denominations. Thus the Spirit of God was seen not simply in terms of something to be confessed in a creed but as the power of God at work – either in direct action or empowering people to speak in tongues, healing, or bring revelations to others. Herein lies the importance of the prophetic in African Christian revitalization then and now.
In the pneumatology of African revitalization movements the Godhead is envisaged as present and powerful through the Holy Spirit, who reveals the will of God and the destiny of the individual, guides through dangers, and fills men and women with new powers of prophecy, utterance, prayer and healing. This could be said to be in keeping with the biblical material as shown by Christopher J.H. Wright:
Power, then, is effective action, making a difference, influencing events, changing the way things are or will be. It is not surprising, then, that the Spirit of God in the Old Testament is commonly linked with power, for the biblical God is nothing if not effective in action in bringing about change! … The Spirit of God is God’s power at work – either in direction action or in empowering people to do what God wants to be done.10
That the AIC s were from the outset popularly referred to “Spiritual” churches is very instructive. They were so called precisely because of the keen emphasis that they placed on the activity of the Holy Spirit and the integration and normalization of charismatic renewal experiences in Christian worship. In a sense African revitalization movements made a distinction between “I believe in the Holy Spirit” and “I have experienced the Holy Spirit.” One was continuous with the other because belief in the Holy Spirit, it was expected, would manifest in the same acts of power that he was associated with in Scripture. The reemergence of the prophetic within contemporary Pentecostalism in Africa says something about the growth of these types of churches on the continent and why World Christianity can no longer be discussed without reference to the rise of Africa as a new heartland of the faith.
Bibliography
Christian G. Baëta, Prophetism in Ghana: A Study of Some Spiritual Churches (London: SCM, 1962); John D.Y. Peel, Aladura: A New Religious Movement Among the Yoruba (Oxford: Oxford University Press); Marie-Louise Martin, Simon Kimbangu: An African Prophet and His Church; Bengt G.M. Sundkler, Bantu Prophets of South Africa; Harold W. Turner, Religious Innovation in Africa: Essays on New Religious Movements (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1979); Robert Wyllie; Paul Breidenbach; David B. Barrett; David Shank, Harris: The Black Elijah of West Africa (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994); Richard Burgess, Nigeria’s Christian Revolution: The Civil War and its Pentecostal Progeny, 1967–2006 (Carlisle, Cumbria, UK: Regnum, 2008).
Andrew F. Walls, “Africa’s Place …” in Religious Pluralism in Africa: Essays in Honor of C.G. Baëta, John S. Pobee ed. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1976).
David A. Shank, Prophet Harris: The ‘Black Elijah’ of West Africa, Abridged by Jocelyn Murray (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994), xi.
Chinonyerem Chijioke Ekebuisi, The Life and Ministry of Prophet Garrick Sokari Braide: Elijah the Second of Niger Delta, Nigeria c. 1882–1918 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015), 4.
Ekebuisi, Braide, 38.
Birgit Meyer, Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity Among the Ewe in Ghana (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).
Baëta, Prophetism in Ghana, 53.
Ogbu U. Kalu, African Pentecostalism: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), x.
Baëta, Prophetism in Ghana, 6–7.
Christopher J.H. Wright, Knowing the Holy Spirit through the Old Testament (Downers Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 2006), 36.