Africa and Globalisation

It is sometimes argued by some scholars that Africa is marginalised in contemporary discussions and global developments. Paul Gifford (1998: 324) claims, for example, that

“afro-pessimism” is the dominant mood for Africans who have lost “self-confident” in the face of current global order. He insists that “Africa is in danger of being bypassed by the processes of globalisation” (Gifford 2001: 78). For Gifford, Africans are responding to global

“marginalisation of Africa” by “opting into exotic religions” by which he means pentecostalism and other non-African religions (p. 78). He sees African pentecostalism as primarily creating “links with the outside” for “Africans in the current plight” (p. 79). In Huntington’s (1996: 47) reckoning, African heritage does not amount to a distinctive civilisation comparable to either Asian or European civilisations. Castells (2000a: 19f;

2000c: 68f) argues that the delinking of Africa from what he calls “global information capitalism” has created “a fourth world” of poverty and suffering. Fredrick Cooper (2001:

207) writes that “Africa now appears to be part of the half of the globe that is not globalized”.

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The above picture of Africa is gloomy. But this is not the only image of the continent in the era of globalisation. There is another category of scholars who maintains that Africa and Africans are not altogether forgotten in the present scheme of things. For these scholars, Africans are adapting the resources available to them in creating access to global resources and goods. In various ways these scholars have tried to show that Africa has a long history of global connectivity. Terence Ranger (1993), for example, maintains that African traditional religions are inherently globalising even before any contact with outsiders. He further insists that within these religions are diverse elements that he characterised as “local” and “global”

which showed obvious tension. These elements play important roles in understanding the impact of globalisation in Africa.

Henroit (1998) identifies four patterns of globalisation in Africa. The first for him was the period of the slave trade during which many Africans were carried to the new world and formed a significant chain in the production of wealth for societies in the west. Certain western practices were also introduced into Africa during this period. The second period was during the era of colonialism when transportation and communication lines were established in Africa, agricultural and mineral resources from Africa were also exploited to feed the expanding industries and factories in the Western world while long lasting religious and cultural patterns were also introduced to Africa. It was during this period that African societies were forced into imperial and capitalist economic systems. He recognises the period of the “Cold War” as one of neo-colonialism in Africa which further embedded the continent into international politics through the influence of the Breton Woods institutes that created different types of Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP) for many African nations.

Henroit argues that these institutes created a free market system which became the dominant actor of globalisation. These market forces created the fourth pattern or globalisation. In the new political and economic arrangement, Africa experiences “minimal influence and maximum consequences” (Henroit 1998: 2). Through these four periods and patterns, Africa and her people have become increasingly embedded into global processes.

Greg Mills makes four observations in Poverty to Prosperity (2002) in relation of globalisation and Africa. Firstly, in the present dispensation, Africa’s economic situation has degenerated such that Africans are less well off today than three decades ago. Secondly, the internal diversity of Africa demands specific attention to specific countries. Thirdly, western engagement with Africa is marked by failure because of inappropriate policies and

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institutions. Fourthly, Africa is experiencing “global economic marginalisation”, though it has also received extraordinary attention from outside (Mills 2002: 232-233). He further observes that globalisation has its good sides and bad sides both of which must be taken into consideration in respect to Africa. On the good side of globalisation, Mills enumerates the opening up of economies, demands for transparency in official dealings, better governance that creates access to international markets which in turn break up local and expensive monopolies. On these counts, globalisation removes corruption and gives individuals access to the global economy. On the negative side, however, he enumerates the “pernicious transnational influence” such as crimes, drugs and corruption. For Mills, the good sides of globalisation do not uncritically include liberal, neo-liberal or free-market policies or “the current global policy regimes and institutional framework of the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO” (Mills 2002: 259). He recommends that Africans must develop their own specific policies and institutions which will facilitate the move from poverty to prosperity.

Paulinus Odozor (2000) in a paper titled “Emerging African Alternatives to Globalization”

argues that the Christian missionary movement has been a major and potent force for globalisation in Africa. According to him, “[t]he proliferation in Africa of various types of Christianity other than the ones which the European missionaries brought with them very early before [p]entecostalism caught on world-wide, was clearly a revolt from the overpowering globalising effects of the mainline Christian Churches”. He goes on to conceptualise the AICs in general and new religions in Nigeria in particular, as an attempt to localise a globalising religious impulse, and in so doing, the AICs put up postures of passive but effective resistance to globalisation. The AICs are, therefore, theorised as forms of African revolt, resistance and alternative to globalising religions. The administrative flexibility, organisational pragmatism and liturgical improvisation of the AICs are all alternative structures to multinational and globalising religions. As viable alternatives, these churches are increasingly globalising as they spread out to different parts of the world.

Through the activities of indigenously founded religious groups Africa is witnessing regeneration from below, a form of unofficial globalisation from the very bottom of society where members of these groups are encouraged and provided with the opportunity to participate in the remaking of their immediate social and economic environment. David Martin (2002: 151) argues that in Africa “economic life is likely to be furthered and enriched by the expansion of Pentecostalism”. Ruth Marshall (1991: 21) has earlier described how

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pentecostalism in Nigeria offers “powerful metaphors for new types of practice” and material resource that create autonomous spaces and challenge oppressive power monopolies, articulating “strategies to create, exercise and legitimate new power relations and new opportunities for survival”. These scholars are convinced that pentecostalism for many people is a viable alternative to globalisation, it is a way some people reshape in the search for global access, economic resource and political power.

There are very few case studies discussed in the discourse on religious globalisation. The approach of David Martin is a very broad overview of the spread and impact of pentecostalism in many third world societies such as Latin America, African and -East Asia.

Only a chapter of his book is devoted to African pentecostalism and here, only a few pages to the Nigerian context. Ruth Marshall-Fratani, who has done ethnographic field work in Nigeria in the early 1990s, focuses on the analysis of political engagement and rhetoric among pentecostal blocs such as the PFN. While these authors’ relevance to the present study is obvious, the views expressed by Odozor are directly relevant. In the discussion that comes up in chapter 7, it will be discussed whether Odozor’s perspective fit in with the data on RCCG, and if so, in what ways.