African Migrants & Pentecostal World-Making in South Africa

Abstract

This dissertation examines the intersections between African migrant journeys and Pentecostal Christianity in contemporary South Africa. We live in a world ever more in motion, with more international migrants and refugees crossing borders than ever before. At the same time, rising xenophobic discontent, a retreat into the nostalgia of the bounded nation-state, and rise of ethnonationalism across the world makes lives for mobile populations increasingly precarious. Pentecostal and charismatic churches, which have flourished across the global south in recent decades (e.g. Anderson, 2013; Coleman & Hackett, 2015), I suggest, are critical institutions and channels to which migrants “connect” and move “below the radar” of states and the international regulatory system. Through a multi-sited ethnography of churches along the Voortrekker Corridor, a key urban artery and ‘hub’ of migrant life in Cape Town, my research makes a few important interventions. Firstly, it shows how Pentecostal and charismatic churches are “world-making” places for African migrants – i.e. they are ‘enclaving’ institutions that seek to encompass wider processes of social, economic, political, and domestic life. Church is not solely a place to find religious belonging, but also to network, to get immigration assistance or material support, to find a romantic partner, and much more. Secondly, it looks to South Africa as an “aspirational in-between” for African migrants; it is, at once, the Euro-America of the African continent (the multi-cultural, economically vibrant, cosmopolitan nation in which dreams can be made real) and, at the same time, a stepping-stone in the longer journey to the global north. Hence, my research also rethinks common south-to-north migration routes by taking a turn to the south and looking to the rising prevalence of south-to-south-(to-north) migrations. To reach Euro-America, many first travel south. And Pentecostal and charismatic religious networks, I suggest, are a key thread that weaves these complex mobilities together.