Becoming “business class”: educated youth and Pentecostal change in eastern Uganda

ABSTRACT

Our paper looks at the lives of educated young men in a Pentecostal church in eastern Uganda. The way young men conduct themselves, how they dress, how they speak in church, whether or not they are good with technology, help to define their claims to an educated identity. Youth leaders are valued for the liveliness they bring to church, for the ways they innovate in areas of praise and worship. At the same time, they are often criticised for the way they orient schemes and initiatives to their own advantage, for not being transparent and for ‘confusing’ others. We adapt Henrik Vigh’s concept of social navigation to show how educated young men become ‘political navigators’ in church. They mix ambitions for personal growth with their contributions to a modern, lively and dynamic church, and in so doing help to make it more ‘business class’.

KEYWORDS:

• Christianity
• education
• identity
• politics
• youth

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the people of Ngora for their patience and continued support. We are also grateful for comments received from Martin Lindhardt and participants at a University of East Anglia Research Seminar. All errors and omissions are our own. We would like to thank the support of CPAR Uganda and The Field Lab Uganda for their support at different points in the research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Pentecostalism has a long history in Uganda, with the PAG church having a presence in the east of the country since the 1930s. It is part of the Assemblies of God global family of churches, and was the result, in Uganda, of a partnership between missionaries from Germany and Canada and local Christians (Barrett, Kurian, and Johnson 2000, 765).

2. To calculate approximate US dollar figures in the article we took a five-year average from June 2018 to June 2023. The conversion rate was US$1 : Ush3,646.

3. As Pype observes Pentecostalism generates ‘zone of cultural production and creativity’ (346–7). This can be seen in the music styles within the church where the beat and melody of reggae – which can have associations in Uganda of drug use – gets repurposed for ‘born again’ messages (Pype finds something similarly surprising with the use of hip hop songs in Nigeria) (2015, 350).

4. As with earlier Protestant reform movements in Uganda, many younger Pentecostal Christians often understood their relationship to their faith as having an educated edge (Bruner 2017; Peterson 2012).

5. There is female representation at all levels of government, including positions reserved for women on the local council system and in parliament, and ‘women MPs’ elected for every district (around 130 districts at the time of writing) (Mwiine 2019).

6. This shift to a developmental focus did not result in a particular emphasis on what scholars elsewhere have termed the ‘prosperity Gospel’ – where it is God’s will for members to be healthy, wealthy and successful, often through miraculous changes. Instead preaching on economic and material matters tended towards an emphasis on hard work and aligned with government and NGO messages (Coleman 2000; Ukah 2005).

7. Ezra, from the study team, attended the first day of the crusade. Robert and Sarah joined for the remaining three days. Stella joined for the last two days of the crusade when it moved to Ngora market.

8. English takes on particular significance in the Teso region. The language otherwise spoken in the region, Ateso, is unrelated to the majority Bantu languages of central and western Uganda. So English, and the education system that underpins it, is the way people in the Teso region connect into Uganda’s wider economy and politics.

9. Ivan also worked hard – through his leadership of the choir at the crusade, his knowledge of keyboard playing, and his attempts at befriending those who appeared to be more educated – at maintaining an educated identity as well. That said, he was not as capable as Gilbert when it came to showing the sorts of behaviours people associated with formal education.

10. One of the reasons for this need to liveliness was the competitive nature of Pentecostal Christianity in the area. There were a number of other congregations in the area, and these also welcomed new recruits. There were branches of Christ Embassy and Pentecostal Revival Ministries in Ngora, also in the marketplace for the same sort of educated, youthful clientele that the Pentecostal Assemblies of God congregation at Ngora Central was wanting to attract and keep. On Pentecostalism as a ‘marketplace’ see Benyah 2020; Comaroff 2015.

11. Or the time when a small donation of 10,000 shillings ($2.70) was made to the choir for performing well one Sunday. The money was given to the wife of a youth leader who took it as payment for cookies she had already made, rather than using the 10,000 shillings to buy sugar and bread as the choir members had agreed. These small frustrations helped to detach younger church members from the idea that they could influence things.

12. The church was in competition with other Pentecostal churches in the area, and made a particular effort at welcoming new members. New arrivals to the area – such as Robert and Ezra from the study team – received considerable attention from other members of the church, who valued the addition of two educated young men to their ranks.

13. The ‘emyooga’ campaign of the national government of the early 2020s was designed to encourage young people in rural areas to set up savings groups. In the Ngora area this was dominated by Pentecostal youths who had organised themselves into leadership positions in a new youth SACCO (Savings and Credit Cooperative Society), which would be the place where youth savings groups would put their money for safekeeping.

Additional information

Funding

This article was supported by a British Academy mid-Career Fellowship [YF\190162].