Second Coming Preprint

Second Coming, Successful Life and the Sweetness of Guinea: Evangelical Thoughts about the Future in Guinea-Bissau Abstract Hope, aspirations and drives to the future are the focus of a recent academic concern about the multiple ways in which people are thinking and producing their future in a time of great uncertainty. By exploring the peculiar ways in which Evangelical believers in Guinea-Bissau are engaged in thinking their future, this article aims to portrait Evangelical Christianity as a source of hopes, aspirations and visions of possible futures in contemporary Africa. Moreover, by comparing the program of cultural and social regeneration pursued by nationalists in the 1960s-70s, and the current Evangelical project of personal and collective redemption, I argue that Evangelical churches are promoting today a politics of hope that translates Amílcar Cabral’s legacy in their own terms. Finally, I show how, in front of the failure of nationalist narratives, Evangelical churches are fostering an emerging conceptualization of modernity as connectivity, underlying new dreams of a better future. Keywords: future; hope; aspirations; Guinea-Bissau; Evangelical Christianity; modernity Introduction I arrived in Bissau on 31 December 2012. On 12 April, a coup d’état - the third in the post-colonial history of Guinea-Bissau - had overturned the democratically elected government, installing a provisional administration. I spent New Year's Eve in a congregation of the Ministério de Amor pela Fé Internacional, a national Pentecostal denomination. The New Year worship began in the dark - as usual there was no electricity at night. Down the hall, a plexiglass pulpit was lit by a weak bulb, creating quite a charming effect. For the special occasion, the choir was led by a young singer who is well known in Guinean Evangelical1 circles. The concert started unplugged. Then, almost miraculously, the light appeared, and someone ran to crank up the amplifiers. After a long alternation between music and testimonies, finally the pastor reached the pulpit and took the floor. His message focused on the subject of time. ‘Whereas God is out of time’, he said, ‘We are controlled by time. But this is also a time that God gave us to be blessed and used by Him, a time that does not belong to us. This year, 2013, is a time that God has given us to be blessed, to be used by Him’. At the very beginning of 2013, time was one of the most recurrent issues in sermons and everyday conversations, together with the closely related topic of vision (vison in Kriol). I will return to this subject later. For the moment, it is sufficient to note that vison has to do with individual and collective aspirations, with dreams of a better life, with hopes and drives to the 1 future. All of these issues are the focus of a recent academic concern about the multiple and varying ways in which people are struggling to imagine and produce their future in a time of great uncertainty (Crapanzano 2003; Weiss 2004b; Miyazaki 2005; Miyazaki 2006; Guyer 2007; Cole 2010; Piot 2010; Moore 2011; Appadurai 2013). By exploring the peculiar ways in which Evangelical believers in Guinea-Bissau are engaged in imagining, thinking and producing their future, this article aims to show how religious faith, and namely African Evangelical Christianity, may constitute a way of giving shape to hopes, aspirations and visions of possible futures by channelling them into a specific moral discourse. In discussing these issues, I follow those scholars who described Evangelical and Pentecostal churches as central agents of optimism, hope and vitality in contemporary Africa, insofar as they promote a new orientation toward time that leave the past behind, focusing on self-transformation and active waiting of the world to come (Cole 2010; Piot 2010). Firstly, I will describe the specific and multiple visions of time circulating among Guinean Evangelical believers, associating them to particular historical circumstances, on the one hand, and peculiar ideas about future and hope whose origin can be traced back to Christian traditions, on the other. Secondly, I will compare the program of cultural and social regeneration promoted by Amílcar Cabral and the PAIGC2 in the 1960s-70s, and the project of personal and collective redemption currently pursued by Evangelical churches in Guinea-Bissau, highlighting similarities and differences. On this basis, I will argue that, in contemporary Guinea-Bissau, Evangelical churches are promoting a new politics of hope that translates Cabral’s legacy in their own terms. Finally, I will show how, in front of the failure of the nationalist narrative of modernization in contemporary Guinea-Bissau, Evangelical Guinean churches are fostering an emerging conceptualization of modernity as connectivity, which underlies new dreams of a better future. This article builds upon ethnographic research realized in Bissau at the beginning of 2013. The starting purpose of my fieldwork in the Guinean capital was to reconstruct a genealogy of the Evangelical movement in Guinea-Bissau through oral history. Nonetheless, while I was inquiring into the past of the local Evangelical community through the memories of Christian leaders, I became aware of the crucial importance of future in the discourses of most believers. The data which form the basis of this article consist of twenty-two recorded in-depth interviews with pastors, missionaries and leaders, as well as seven recorded sermons, collected during the religious services I attended in town3. In addition, since I was a guest of an Evangelical family, I had the opportunity to participate in their daily life, and to entertain several informal conversations with my guests and their kin and neighbours, both believers and non-believers. 2 Future, hope and aspirations Since the 1990s, the end of the Cold War, the global spread of neoliberal policies and the emergence of the so-called ‘globalization’ coincided with the demise of the great twentieth-century narratives about the world to come, as well as with and the emergence of new desires and expectations. In this time of rapid change, enhanced connections, acute inequities and large-scale human movements, recent contributions in social and cultural theory have witnessed a tension between the spreading of insecurity and radical uncertainty in contemporary world, on the one hand, and the emergence of multiple forms of future-making and future-thinking, on the other. More generally, many scholars have been concerned with the rise of new hopes, aspirations and imaginations of possible futures in today’s world, suggesting the emergence of a new paradigm (Crapanzano 2003; Weiss 2004b; Miyazaki 2005; Miyazaki 2006; Guyer 2007; Cole 2010; Piot 2010; Moore 2011; Appadurai 2013). In anthropology, several important contributions have recently advocated a shift from an enduring concern with persistence, stability, and fixity, to a focus on potentiality, transformation and anticipation in social life (Moore 2011; Appadurai 2013). These authors have stressed how, as far as the discipline has been preoccupied with the logics of reproduction, memory and tradition, it has largely neglected the many ways in which human groups have shaped and anticipated the future, leaving the task of a systematic analysis of future-making to other disciplines, such as economics, environmental sciences, design, architecture and planning (Appadurai 2013). However, as pointed out by Henrietta Moore, ‘we may be haunted by our pasts, but human social life is equally lived in a relentless forward gear’ (Moore 2011:1). That is why, ‘instead of reading culture backwards, looking at it in the past tense’, Moore proposed to ‘examine how it is deployed as a means for dealing with the alterity of the future, with the not-yet’ (Moore 2011:13). Furthermore, by focusing on hopes, desires and satisfactions as human possibilities, she emphasized ‘the radical potentialities of human agency and human subjectivity, their essential openness […] to new ways of being’ (Moore 2011:22). In a similar vein, Arjun Appadurai (2013) presented a manifesto for an anthropology of the future, suggesting to examine the future as a cultural construction that takes variable forms, according to historical circumstances. Among the human preoccupations that shape ‘the future as a cultural fact’, Appadurai payed special attention to the ‘capacity to aspire’, understood as a social and collective capacity, which though universally distributed takes shape in many different ways, manifesting itself in local systems of value, meaning and dissent. Central to the idea of aspiration are the various ways in which different groups of people, relative to their society, produce particular ideas of ‘good life’, that is, what people hope to achieve under the circumstances of having an 3 unsatisfactory present. In his view, examining cultures through the logic of reproduction supports the idea that social groups are generally satisfied with the state of affairs in which they find themselves. Conversely, a broader understanding of cultural systems should also take into consideration the ‘politics of hope’ through which any society or group can imagine a change in their lives (Appadurai 2013:293). Basing their analysis on the African continent, Brad Weiss and others (Weiss 2004b) explored the ways in which the future is produced in radically uncertain settings. As pointed out by Weiss, in the latter half of the twentieth century the implementation of neo-liberal reforms in African countries has led to unprecedented changes and historically specific formations. Indeed, a number of factors connected to neo-global processes - including the declining sovereignty of governments, the contraction of the public sector, the flourishing of unregulated markets and the polarization of wealth and poverty, with its corollary of crime outbreaks, armed conflicts and anxieties about ‘occult economies’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999) - have contributed to the emergence of an expanding sense of crisis in contemporary Africa (Weiss 2004a). In Weiss’s view, what characterises this new age is a radicalization of the contrast between inclusion and exclusion in the global world.

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