Markets of protection: religious rivalry, insecurity, and illegality in Cape Town’s urban fringes

ABSTRACT

This article explores the multiple links between Pentecostalism and the production of security in Cape Town’s isiXhosa-speaking townships and traces the ways in which Pentecostal churches have become embroiled with Cape Town’s criminal economies, illegality and violence. In these marginalised urban spaces, which are also territories of relegation, Pentecostal pastors compete with other spiritual specialists who lay claims to spiritual protection just like the state’s law-enforcement agencies over the meanings of crime and violence and legitimate ways to counter them. This competition thrives on the fact that physical harm and the associated states of victimhood are seen as resulting not only from criminal assaults but also from the congeries of spiritual forces that enable them. Simultaneously, there is mounting competition within the religious field and increasingly strenuous assertions of religious sovereignty vis-à-vis the secular state. I argue that all of these developments have contributed to Pentecostalism’s links with illegality. Importantly, capacities to wield spiritual power are as central for understanding the dynamics of the market of spiritual protection against risks as are accusations that those wielding them do so with malign intent. The ambivalent perceptions of Pentecostalism with regard to crime and protection against harm therefore echo those of witchcraft.

KEYWORDS:

• Security
• crime
• South Africa
• Pentecostalism
• social anthropology

Introduction

In recent years, South Africa has witnessed a rising tide of public debates about the complex involvements of religious groups, in particular Pentecostals, with illicit, illegal or even criminal practices and the country’s system of criminal justice and law enforcement. In October 2015, the so-called ‘Commission for the Rights of Cultural, Linguistic and Religious Communities’ (henceforth the CLR Rights Commission) – one of the six independent, constitutionally stipulated commissions meant to deepen democratic rights and participation – initiated an investigation into unusual religious practices it deemed legally problematic, harmful and partly criminal.¹ At the same time, some prominent and especially wealthy Pentecostal pastors began to build up their own security forces. While initially often consisting merely of a group of bodyguards, these forces became increasingly militarised, replete with firearms and heavy weaponry, and began to fashion themselves and operate as security actors in their own right.

In this article, I seek to unravel the complex social and religious dynamics behind these developments. My main argument is as follows. As Pentecostals are increasingly successful in promoting their discourses about the sources of the social ills befalling society and individual lives, they provide major categories through which to interpret adversities – of which crime is an important one – as well as the means to address and counter them. In doing so, they exacerbate existing forms of competition among those laying claims to protect people from adversity and to alleviate their material and spiritual insecurity. This competition takes place in markets of protection in which the meanings of crime, witchcraft and care are constantly being negotiated. Viewing at least some of the harm people endure as the work of the devil, they compete with secular law and law enforcement, private security providers and traditional healers. More importantly, for reasons I explore below, there is also increasingly harsh competition for followers, prestige, influence and money among the actors within the Pentecostal field. This competition has nourished new imbrications of the religious with the illegal, of the promise of salvation (Riesebrodt 2010) through violent means and paralegal (or ‘para-state’) sovereignty (Turner and Kirsch 2002). This has motivated religious virtuosi to offer spectacular, physically harmful ‘miracles’ and turned some churches into massive economic assets that its owners protect by violent means.

Competition over followers, suspicions that pastors draw on illicit, supernatural means in their efforts to turn people into followers and assertions of heavenly sovereignty have all contributed to producing a disjuncture between the secular law and the religious realm and the latter’s association with the criminal. Importantly, the capacity to wield spiritual power is as central to understanding the dynamics of the market of spiritual protection against risks as are accusations that those wielding them do so with malign intent. The ambivalent perceptions of Pentecostalism as both offering spiritual protection and being in cahoots with criminals therefore echo those of witchcraft.

Based on fieldwork carried out since 2010, I develop my narrative by marshalling a variety of sources, including participant observation of religious life in Cape Town’s township of Khayelitsha, interviews with pastors and commissioners, media releases, and governmental documents and reports. My analysis proceeds in two steps: in the first part, I discuss how religious groups, in particular Pentecostals, have become involved in illicit economies and crime, as well as describing the religious and economic rivalries that are behind that process. This section primarily draws on documents and archival sources produced by the CLR Rights Commission. In the second part, I focus on how Pentecostal pastors engage with crime and material and spiritual security in their daily lives. This section is based on ethnographic sources, in particular participant observation. While the first part is situated at the national level, the second part is placed in the urban context of Cape Town. While there are surely many structural features that make Cape Town a site that is distinct from South African society as a whole, this is not the case with regard to the dynamics around religion and crime. Violent struggles over succession and material assets and Pentecostals’ efforts to provide congregants with security against crime, as well as accusations that they use their spiritual power for illicit ends, are common in urban centres across the country.

The imbrications of Pentecostalism with illegality, illicit business and crime challenge some of the ways in which anthropologists have theorised the relationships between this religious tradition and the state as the legal sovereign and market economy. In particular, illuminating them requires a reconsideration of anthropological views of post-apartheid policing and security. Before I begin my analysis, I therefore briefly review the conceptual landscape of the anthropology of Pentecostalism and suggest links to security studies in order to situate my account.

Pentecostalism, sovereignty and the law

In many African countries, the rise of Pentecostalism has challenged postcolonial states and their visions of development and political order in multiple ways (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000). These challenges became visible in how Pentecostals rejected secular notions of the public sphere, began to forcefully articulate religious understandings of politics, and embarked on the political realm (Comaroff 2009; Meyer 1998a). Significantly, they imagine authority, community and personhood in ways that are radically different from those of liberal democratic theory. The latter envisages authority as democratic, community as civic, and sacred personhood as rooted in individual autonomy, anchored in legally enforceable human rights, and backed by global discourses about democracy, education and empowerment (Swidler 2013). Pentecostals, by contrast, view authority as mandated by God, community as chosen and personhood as achieved via conversion but eternally embattled and in need of protection against Satan and demonic forces.With their insistence on God’s sovereignty over earthly matters, their imagining of the social order is significantly at odds with the rule of secular law. Turner and Kirsch (2009) have therefore suggested that law and religion are ‘contested sovereignties’ (Turner and Kirsch 2009, 2) undergirded by divergent political theologies (Marshall 2010, 198). Critiquing the economic performance of postcolonial African states, but also particular liberal policies around gender, sexuality and health (Burchardt 2013, 2020), they began to promote their own visions of moral citizenship (Bompani and Valois 2017) and of morally purifying the public domain (Gusman 2009).

As many anthropologists have noted, these views of politics and the state are rooted in Pentecostalism’s particularly Manichean dualism, which divides the world into zones of light ruled by Jesus and zones of evil that are governed by Satan and the ‘powers of darkness’ (Meyer 1998b). Hence also Pentecostals’ notorious emphasis on enemies (Marshall 2010, 201; Obadare 2018, 141), on the need to ‘make a complete break with the past’ (Meyer 1999; Van Dijk 1998), which is viewed as sinful, and on temporal ruptures (Robbins 2003). At the same time, this Manichean dualism plays itself out in the numerous calls to ‘spiritual warfare’ in which Pentecostals marshal the power of the Holy Spirit to fight against the evil spirits and demons that embattle them and whose malign work is seen as being manifested in misfortunes of all kinds. As responses to perceptions of spiritual and moral decay (Adogame 2004), such calls to spiritual warfare often have polarising effects on communities, exacerbating political competition (Englund 2011) and fostering militaristic imaginations of religion (Marshall 2016, 95; Obadare 2018), and of salvation as by necessity violent (Van de Kamp 2016). Much of this violent rhetoric is engaged in efforts to grapple with people’s spiritual insecurities, including those arising from evil spirits. However, anthropologists have rarely inquired into the consequences of these religious conceptions for how Pentecostals imagine security, engage with the secular law and become entangled with crime.

These entanglements, as I will argue, have everything to do with how Pentecostals conceptualise wealth, and with the emerging and highly dynamic religious competition over followers – and their money and wealth. The relatively recent advancement of the prosperity gospel in South Africa (van Wyk 2014) and its emphasis on God’s plan for his followers’ material wealth has helped to popularise the notion of personal betterment through the career of a Pentecostal pastor. Such notions are especially attractive in the impoverished informal settlements of South Africa’s townships and the bleak prospects they offer for the economic futures of local youth and the many internal migrants arriving from the rural areas. As Comaroff and Comaroff (2000) have argued, Pentecostalism is part of an expansive realm of occult economies, which in many ways mimic, undermine but also reinforce the rise of neoliberal principles in African market economies.

While highly lucid, I suggest there is a need to take this analysis a step further by exploring how both the insistence on religious sovereignty and the adoption of neoliberal principles, in particular the refashioning of churches as sites of primitive accumulation (Loveman 2005), produce multiple encounters and entanglements of Pentecostals with crime. In order to conceptualise these encounters, it is also useful to draw connections to anthropological scholarship on post-apartheid policing. As many observers emphasise, policing has been characterised by a shift towards non-state and private security provision (Kirsch 2017; Minnaar, 2007), straddling the uneasy balance between law-maintaining and law-making violence (Hansen 2006, 315, 280). At the same time, there have been multiple efforts to counter crime via new CCTV technologies and the refurbishing of urban spaces and surfaces (Hentschel 2015). Importantly, in her work on policing in South Africa, Diphoorn (2016) shows how all categories such as state/non-state, public/private policing, or ‘security volunteering’ (Kirsch 2017, see also Super, 2016) are often blurred, or ‘twilighted’, in practice. As Diphoorn (Diphoorn 2016, 315) argued, ‘these are disciplinary, punitive and exclusionary practices that are performed in a twilight zone between state and non-state and are marked by uncertainty’. As I try to show in my subsequent analysis, such ‘twilighting’ is characteristic not only of the security assemblages that extend across post-apartheid urban landscapes but also of the notions of lawfulness and crime as they circulate between religious and secular realms of sovereignty and traverse divergent markets of protection. By markets of protection, I mean the exchange relationships between providers of protection and security – the police, Pentecostal pastors, traditional healers and others – and those seeking their services. In these markets, competition is shaped by divergent degrees of control over money and other material resources, and itself reshapes collective understandings of risk, crime and protection. I now turn to exploring how Pentecostal practices became targeted by state agencies and framed as harmful.

Religion before the Commission

As mentioned above, around 2014 the CLR Rights Commission had become aware through media reporting, social media commentary and direct complaints lodged with it of a range of practices that appeared deeply problematic and even appalling to liberal sections of the public. Pastor Lethebo Rabalago, leader of the Mount Zion General Assembly, posted a photo on Facebook, which showed a large loudspeaker on top of a person lying face-up on the ground. In another photo, he was sitting on the loudspeaker while the person remained underneath. Finally, in 2016, he was photographed spraying the insecticide ‘Doom’ into the faces of his followers, claiming that the chemical had a healing effect on them, and earning him the public label of the ‘Doom pastor’. Another pastor, Prophet Daniel from the Rabboni Ministries in Tshwane, instructed members of his congregation to drink petrol. In 2014, images posted on the church’s Facebook page also showed his followers, apparently caught in a state of spiritual possession, crawling across a meadow near the church building and eating grass.

In 2014, one of Lesogo Daniel’s disciple’s, Penuel Mnguni, started his own church called the ‘End Times Disciples Ministry’ and also made his way into public discussions through a series of scandalous events. In 2015, Facebook images showed the prophet feeding stones to his followers, claiming that he had turned them into bread. During the same year, other images appeared in which he fed his congregants live snakes and rats, which, or so they claimed, had been turned into chocolate. Widely called the ‘snake pastor’, residents chased Mnguni out of Soshanguve township north of Tshwane, where his church was located. In fact, in July 2015, activists from the radical left party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), had interrupted one of Mnguni’s church services when they became aware of him feeding snakes to a congregant, vandalising and finally burning down the tent in which the service was taking place.² EFF activists told the press that, by bringing mice and small lizards to the service, they had intervened in it in order to make the prophet eat these animals. Doing so, he could lead by example. They also called the police to the spot. While Mnguni was accused of animal cruelty, these charges were later withdrawn, as the police failed to find any evidence for them. As the immediate results of religious competition, all of these practices were meant to produce evidence of these pastors’ ability to perform fantastic miracles.

Following these incidents, the leaders of the mainline churches felt compelled to comment on these developments in public. Thus, for instance, the general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, Bishop Malusi Mpumlwana, told the BBC: ‘There are people who are trying to make money off the desperation of people, and that is exactly why you need some sort of mechanism for serving a standard on how churches are run’.³ It was in this context of public outrage that the CLR Rights Commission decided to initiate a full-fledged investigation under the name ‘Investigation into the commercialization of religion and abuse of people’s beliefs’. Between October 2015 and March 2016, the commission held hearings in all nine provinces of South Africa to which religious leaders and representatives from all religious traditions present in the country were summoned. Significantly, they were not merely invited but in fact issued with a summons, in other words, a legal order obliging them to report to the Commission, which was delivered to them by the sheriff of the court. They were also obliged to hand in a series of documents on their internal organisation and operations, as well as bank statements.

While most religious leaders complied, pastors from several Pentecostal churches, as well as the Zion Christian Church, publicly attacked the Commission as having been sent by Satan and issued threats, including death threats, against the Commission’s members (Tandwa 2015). Some pastors such as Samuel Radebe failed to report altogether. Others, such as Prophet Mboro, initially collaborated with the Commission but turned increasingly hostile after being reprimanded for not producing the required financial documents. Still other Pentecostal leaders, by contrast, showed up at the hearings accompanied by their own heavily armed security teams. While state security forces told them that no armed private security was admitted into the buildings where the hearings were taking place, some armed groups did enter by force, intent on intimidating the commissioners. In a personal interview conducted in September 2018, David Luka Mosoma, commissioner and deputy chairperson of the commission, recalled:

And of course, threats were provided, against personal safety in many forms, because these guys would come here, with their guns, some of them with heavy security and so forth. […] And there is Bishop or Pastor Radebe who refused to appear before us and who eventually sent his henchman to deposit the letter in which he threatened to kill the chairperson and he had been arrested and found guilty [and is] now serving [a] three-year sentence in jail.

These incidents are significant not only because they point to the increasing militarisation of Pentecostalism and the way Pentecostal pastors have begun to use violent means to police their own affairs, and more importantly to protect their financial assets and modes of operation. They also reveal the ways in which competition over the means to achieve salvation has led to a proliferation of harmful practices in which harm is inflicted upon the followers to demonstrate to those involved and potential future followers that they cannot be harmed because their pastors protect them. Intent on boosting the charisma, prestige and religious capital of the pastors, most of these ‘unusual religious practices’ are meant to demonstrate their effectiveness in offering spiritual protection, be it via prayers, blessings, the laying on of hands, or anointed waters and other blessed substances. I will return to this point below.

In its report, the Commission produced a long list of illegal practices ranging from administrative or regulatory offences to infringements of constitutional rights. Thus, they found various church leaders to be guilty of tax avoidance, the illegal and unethical advertisement of religious healing services, misuse of the visa application system, the flouting of banking rules, the uncontrolled movement of cash in and out of the country, the operation of churches as businesses, and leaders’ properties, purchased through the congregation’s money (CLR Rights Commission 2017, 32). In the eyes of the commissioners, all of this pointed to the commercialisation of religion. They also lamented the mushrooming of religious institutions, the lack of good governance structures and the lack of a religious peer-review mechanism that would provide for the adherence to some basic rules within the religious field (CLR Rights Commission 2017, 33).

Throughout the period of the hearings, as well as afterwards, the Commission’s investigation was highly contested. Similarly, when the Commission presented its report and recommendations in 2018, responses from the religious field were largely negative, if not downright hostile. My analysis of the report suggests that the Commission deployed three problem-spaces, all of which point to religious competition. First was the unregulated entrance and recruitment into the religious field: the commissioners lamented that ‘anybody can call himself a pastor today’ and bemoaned the increasing messiness of the religious field, or what we might call the ‘disembedding’ of religious authority. Second was commercialisation: the commissioners highlighted the fact that religion should not be a business for profit but ‘a domain in which prayers offer comfort’. Third, the report produced a notion of vulnerability, as it was those lacking education and economic opportunities in particular who became the victims of predator pastors.⁴ In legal terms, harmful religious practices were mainly problematic because those damaged engaged in them voluntarily.

Significantly, in 2017 already, the CLR Rights Commission had entered into a new round of comflicts, this time involving the flamboyant, self-styled Malawian prophet Bushiri, who is claimed to be one of the wealthiest men in southern Africa and one of the richest prophets in the world (see van Wyk 2020, 40). In 2017, a man charged Bushiri of falsely accusing his mother of using witchcraft to keep his wife barren and later also accused the prophet’s bodyguards of intimidation, assault and death threats. However, the police’s efforts to interrogate Bushiri on the matter in Tshwane’s Sheraton Hotel ended in an armed three-hour standoff and the police finally fleeing from the site.⁵ Just a year later, Bushiri and his Enlightened Christian Gathering Church made even more widely publicised headlines when on 28 December 2018 three people were killed and 17 injured in a stampede at the Tshwane Events Centre, where the church was holding its gatherings. Surprised by a thunderstorm, congregants had rushed into the building in a panic. While the police were only alerted of the incident the following day, church members had already taken the three dead bodies to a private mortuary. This in turn enraged the families of the deceased, who enlisted the support of the civil-society umbrella organisation SANCO and organised a protest at the entrance to the church. Culminating in a week of violent clashes, Bushiri’s followers used these protests to assert the holiness of their prophet and the supremacy of God against the ‘sons of vipers’ and ‘agents of Satan’, as they called their opponents.⁶ At this stage, there was no need for them to enter into a conflict with the secular state authorities, as the police arrested three SANCO members and injured several others when opening fire against the protesters.

However, further clashes between the church and state authorities seemed imminent, given that the church describes itself as a ‘theocracy governed by God in heaven [… | thus granting the prophet absolute authority and powering all matters regarding church dogma, doctrine, and governance’.⁷ Recall that this is precisely what the CLR Rights Commission had been contesting in its 2018 report. And indeed, on 1 February 2019 South Africa’s Directorate for Priority Investigations arrested Bushiri and his wife and charged them with money-laundering, organised crime and fraud involving irregularities of no less than US$ 1.1 million. As van Wyk’s (2020) discussion showed, much of the ensuing controversy pitted those who saw Bushiri as a ruthless religious racketeer preying on poor and uneducated South Africans against his supporters for whom the opposition to Bushiri was animated by jealousy. Cast in this discursive frame, the controversy obviously drew on the idiom of witchcraft in which accusations of the envy of miraculous, seemingly inexplicable wealth is the single most prominent theme (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000; Jensen and Buur 2004, 194; for a classic statement, see Wilson 1951).

Importantly, these South African debates echo those found in other parts of Africa. As Lauterbach (2019, 134) argued,

In many African contexts, accusations of fakery in the religious field are about how wealth is accumulated and redistributed, and fakery and exploitation are issues that are often discussed in relation to the prosperity gospel. Prosperity churches are accused of exploiting the poor, their pastors are accused of being fake pastors, and they are seen as hindering social development.

In addition, Lindhard (Lindhardt 2014, 153) suggested it is often not the association of religious services with money and the accumulation of wealth that ordinary people view as problematic. Rather, he argues that there are legitimate and illegitimate ways of material accumulation in religious contexts.

Religious competition and the lure of miracles

In South Africa, the fact that Bushiri was Malawian, and thus a foreigner, acquired an increasingly prominent role in the public debates. A set of overlapping developments have occurred in South African Pentecostalism over the last decade, all of which pivot on the presence of foreign pastors and prophets, mainly those hailing from Brazil, Nigeria and other African countries. In 2015, during a conversation with a group of pastors in Town Two, a relatively established section of Khayelitsha in which much of my fieldwork concentrates, several of them suggested that pastors had been acquiring an increasingly negative reputation. One of them told me: ‘We pastors have a bad name now. People look down on us because of what all these mushroom pastors do’. Salomon, another pastor, argued: ‘Yes, this is all because of these mushroom pastors, yes, plenty of that. There are still more of them. They say they are making miracles. But they are ripping people off’.⁸ There was a clear sense that foreign pastors were partly responsible for their own loss of prestige as well.

The label ‘mushroom pastors’ indexes what earlier I have called the ‘disembedding’ of religious authority and the incessant entry of new competitors into the field. As the subsequent conversation revealed, pastors felt that these new competitors did not shy away from promising the most spectacular miracles in order to attract adherents. As Salomon continued ‘Yes, but they don’t preach the word of God. They say: “There is a witch next to your house. And that witch is going to kill you. And you must be protected. Yes. And you won’t be blessed if you do not give […]”. You need to go to someone, who will borrow you the money, because you want to impress the pastor’.

In the eyes of these pastors, all of whom were poor, worked in several jobs in order to feed their families and barely made enough money to get by, the creeping advance of the prosperity gospel appeared to be closely related to the presence, in Khayelitsha and elsewhere, of pastors from abroad. Invariably, these pastors appeared to be wealthier than those of Xhosa origin like themselves. Importantly, they also suspected that Nigerian and Congolese pastors were collaborating with Cape Town’s criminal gangs. These pastors, or so they assumed, provided blessings and spiritual protection for gangsters so that they would not be harmed during their operations but be successful in them.⁹ In return, the gangs shared their loot with these pastors, which allowed them to buy cars, expensive clothes and other consumer items. It was this collaboration that in their eyes explained these pastors’ wealth, to which, to a certain extent, they also aspired. Largely wrung from rumour, hearsay and conjecture as these stories appeared, I hasten to add that I have not been able corroborate any of them. While belief in the protective agency of anointed objects, reliance on blessings and the use of divination and other services offered by sangomas among criminal gangs is widespread, there is no evidence that pastors of foreign origin play a special role in this.

Such notions of ‘threats from the outside’, with their undeniable xenophobic overtones, were also echoed in the discourses of the CLR Rights Commission. In our interview, for instance, the deputy chairman suggested:

Those are harmful practices, in our view, religious practices which have only become endemic and prevalent in South Africa because of our openness to abuse. We have accommodated many people coming from different parts of the world with different practices, and they are using this as a laboratory of experimentation. And they are using our people as objects of experiment in this regard.

The rise of the prosperity gospel, the increasing reliance on miracles and sacrifices on the part of religious virtuosi and their followers that stimulated new magic economies, the concomitant deepening of religious competition and the increasing public perception of Pentecostalism as a source of spectacular wealth all played into the ways in which religion became deeply ensnarled with illegal practices.

These entanglements reached new heights when, on 11 July 2020, five people were killed in the headquarters of the International Pentecostal Holiness Church in Zuurbekom, outside Johannesburg. An armed ‘splinter group’ violently entered the premises, set alight a car with four people inside it, shot randomly inside the church building and held large numbers of people hostage until the security forces ended the attack. According to the church leadership, this was just one in a series of attempts by the group to literally capture the headquarters and take over the church, which has an estimated membership of three million. The fights go back to the death of church leader Glayton Modise in 2016, following which struggles over his succession involved the attackers and Modise’s sons. Ever since, nine people have been killed in violent assaults. While surely spectacular and perhaps unique, I suggest that these events illuminate some of the broader dynamics underlying religious life in South Africa and the way it has become embroiled with its criminal economies.¹⁰

Church schisms and struggles over succession are extremely common in South African Pentecostalism and in fact are one of its constitutive features (Burchardt, 2017). As a highly decentralised part of South Africa’s religious field, Pentecostal churches are usually run by pastors who attract followers with their charismatic gifts, such as their alleged capacity to mobilise the power of the Holy Spirit to produce miracles. In a system where positions of authority are not acquired via formal theological qualifications, but through socially validated ‘callings’, it is the theological idea of spiritual gifts that allows religious contenders to rise to prominence. These are men who, after being called by the Holy Spirit to serve God, at some point feel they have ‘matured in the faith’, meaning they are able to open their own ministry and do so by taking part of the flock with them. In my research, time and again I have seen pastors struggling with secession and losing parts of their membership.

Importantly, while for pastors members mean money, most churches are very small and do not have liquid assets. As a result, they rarely incite the fantasies of predators, and conflicts related to schisms remain low key. This is clearly different in churches of the size of the International Pentecostal Holiness Church, which has been able to grow more or less constantly throughout the almost 60 years of its existence. It seems clear that the larger the churches, the more likely they are to be seen as a rent to be secured in moments of succession or schism, as a prize to be seized and capitalised on. In addition, if church leaders are well-known businessmen such as Modise, it is also not unlikely that they use church bank accounts for the purposes of money-laundering and tax evasion. Many of my interlocutors in Khayelitsha speculated that it was actually that kind of money that the killers of Zuurbekom were after, and that Modise had failed to shift his riches into a different depot before he died.

Powerfully playing into these dynamics is the fact that in South Africa, religion is viewed more and more as a market by both pastors and believers (Van Wyk 2014). Pentecostalism has become something like a lucrative profession, inspiring the fantasies of spiritually inspired men, and sometimes women, to make a living or even wealth by becoming pastors. This has massively increased the competition in a now crowded field of actors who claim to protect their followers against misfortune and evil spirits, the forces seen as blocking their road to a life of abundance. Fuelling rivalries among competitors, churches such as the Brazilian Universal Church of the Kingdom of God work to popularise the so-called ‘Gospel of Prosperity’, which promises miracles and wealth in exchange for personal ‘sacrifices’. As we have seen, poor pastors in the country’s townships have grown increasing wary of this, as well as of the rise of new and in their eyes illegitimate competitors with no spiritual credentials.

Spiritual protection in a world of urban risks

I now turn to exploring how Pentecostals understand and conceptualise urban risks and insecurities and the ways in which they seek to offer spiritual protection against them. Among many others, Jensen and Buur (2004, 194) have suggested that communal forms of policing draw their legitimacy from the fact that they ‘represent and protected those people [who are] ignored by the state and ravaged by criminals’, and usually do so by drawing on the authority of ‘proper channels’ (Jensen and Buur 2004, 195) such as chiefs, elders and sangomas (traditional healers). As much anthropological research has shown, an important element of their work is to identify the causes and culprits of those adversities that are understood to be rooted in witchcraft by resorting to the means exclusively available to them (the consultation of spirits etc.). Developing an elaborate argument on post-apartheid witchcraft violence, Comaroff and Comaroff (2000) have suggested that the conundrum inhering in its policing resides in the peculiar entanglements of legal universalism and cultural relativism in South Africa’s constitutional order. And in this context, the very effort to police, persecute and protect people against crime, viewed as rooted in witchcraft, becomes itself criminal as it rests on an epistemology that is at odds with legal universalism: those killing accused witches felt they were protecting witchcraft’s victims, whereas the state protected the witch. I argue that, to some extent, the entanglements of Pentecostalism with the illegal follow a similar logic, occurring as they do in the efforts to protect people against adversities viewed as being rooted in evil and brought by Satan and his demons (Burchardt 2017). At the same time, the capacities of Pentecostal virtuosi to effect things in the world with the help of the Holy Spirit are always caught up in a double-bind: they enable spiritual protection but can also be used to contrive and engineer the very events against which one needs to be protected.

A few years after he had heard his first calling, Mandla sat down in a small garage in the township of Khayelitsha and prayed. In 2009, he had heard the voice of God telling him that he had plans for him to become a pastor and to serve the people by fighting evil. Responding to this call, Mandla resigned from his job and began to concentrate on his spiritual pathway in order to mature in his faith. However, the efforts to move up in his church, called ‘Heroes of Faith Ministry’, were frustrated by inter-church animosities. And similarly, attempts to kickstart his own ministry and to secure an income for himself with the help of God failed badly. He lost his job and his house and depended on the financial help of some of his spiritual brothers. Yet now, as he sat in the garage, a voice told him that people would come to him to seek his help and ask him to pray for them, people who were sick in their bodies, people who had lost their jobs, and many others. After praying and fasting for another 9 days, the same voice told Mandla that now he was going to be tested and told him to leave the garage.

As he came out, Mandla found himself in the middle of a gang fight involving around 10 young men armed with guns and machetes. ‘These boys were killing each other’, he later told me, ‘and I said to God, what can I do? We can’t watch these guys kill themselves like this. I said to God, I need you for this intervention’. Mandla embarked on his mission, began talking to the fighting kids, inquired about the reasons that led to the fighting and sought to calm their heated minds and bodies. Everything else that was relayed to me about this incident through residents and other pastors living in the area pretty much echoed public discourses and resonated with pedagogical tropes about youth crime in South Africa and elsewhere in the world. Mandla himself suggested: ‘I saw that they needed guidance, so I gave them guidance. Because after school they have nothing to do, and once they get into the gangs and are out of school, they are out forever. We need to keep them busy, we need to offer football and netball and such things’. However, what stood at the beginning of the episode was a divine intervention: it was the test that God had planned for Mandla, to be recognised by the residents as a man of God. While the real effects of such religiously inspired interventions into local violence and who is to be credited for it are always matters of debate, this incident did earn Mandla some temporary fame as the man who stopped gangsterism in Town Two.

Crime and gang-related violence are central elements within a broader ecology of fear that residents of Cape Town’s township are suffering and that shape township life on a more or less permanent basis. Violent assault, burglary, rape and other forms of sexual assault are extremely common experiences, as are unnatural deaths from such crimes. In 2015, just a week before I arrived to Town Two for fieldwork, the 18-year-old younger brother of one of my key informants was stabbed to death and his dead body was placed at the doorsteps of his mother’s house in the darkness of the night. He had never been involved in gang life, and the only thing the family was ever able to know was that ‘it was the gangsters’.

As Mandla’s story suggests, violent crime and gangsterism occupy central places in the discourses and imaginations of Pentecostal pastors in Khayelitsha. In one conversation, he resolutely argued ‘People here are suffering because they are poor, they have no money, no jobs. But all those things come from crime. They are also poor because of crime’. During particularly fierce periods of gang violence, pastors have engaged in vigilantism to keep gangsters away from their areas. But it seems that there are none of the sustained forms of religious vigilantism that we find elsewhere in Africa and beyond.¹¹ As I kept on inquiring into Mandla’s and other pastors’ efforts to confront gangsterism, it also become increasingly clear that the social work approach described above – ‘keeping youth from the street by keeping them busy’ – was of limited significance to them.

Central to how Pentecostals imagined crime and security, instead, were the practices of spiritual protection with which they sought to counter adversities and urban risks of all sorts. In their eyes, urban risks crop up whenever malign intentions are wrought through the work of Satan and demons and manifested in human harm: people becoming victims of violent assault and crime, bodies being injured in car accidents, corrupted through drug and alcohol addiction and rape, minds tormented through bad dreams. Importantly, as an aspect of what I call urban risks, among township dwellers, crime is imagined, made sense of and countered through three distinct yet interlocking idioms: the secular idiom of law enforcement centred on the police and the criminal justice system as its main protagonists; the idiom of witchcraft with sangomas or traditional healers at its centre; and the idiom of Pentecostalism in which adversities are caused by evil.

In Pentecostal discourse, evil, as spiritually caused and socially manifested, is understood through a range of associations. In another conversation about gangsterism that took place in the backyard of his home, pastor Msele told me:

Sometimes gangsterism just takes over, with the young boys, as young as 11 or 13, they are especially furious. Our challenge is that there is a lot of witchcraft, gangsterism and drug abuse. In our churches, sometime people come drunk, then they are killing each other. But we pray for them.

Endorsing him, Salomon suggested: ‘We pray against the spirit of witchcraft! We pray against the spirit of gangsterism! We pray against the spirit of alcoholism and drug abuse!’ And as he exclaimed these words, his voice suddenly swelled, reaching a dramatic pitch upon which others in the group joined him and spontaneously uttered enthusiastic prayers intent on fighting these spirits. Getting up from their chairs and raising their hands in the air, they used the occasion to make the Holy Spirit present through their prayers and to protect residents and their followers from Satan’s work. After about five minutes, several rounds of ‘amen’ soothed their voices, and we sat down again. Such situations testify to the ways associations between Satan’s work, drugs and crime are collectively validated.

In many stories that pastors told me, people became gangsters because they drank and took drugs – or vice versa – and they could be abused for witchcraft precisely for that reason, because they found themselves in bodily states that allow them to be easily turned into puppets in some evil plot. At the same time, Pentecostals were also aware of the spiritual power of their opponents – for instance, sangomas – which they clearly recognised. In one instance, I was told that there were actually pastors who solicited the services of sangomas in order to enrich themselves. Some pastors presumably mandated a sangoma to manipulate their own followers to make greater financial sacrifices to them by offering money and other material assets such as their cars – a practice my interlocutors saw as clearly criminal. In another famous story, an aspiring Nigerian pastor followed the advice of a fellow Nigerian diviner and placed a pig’s head under the threshold to his church. He was told that worms inhabiting the rotten head represented the followers that would flock to his congregation. Such stories surely reveal the tremendous ambivalence inhering in spiritual power and spiritual protection.

Importantly, spiritual protection refers not only to human lives to be defended against harm but also to places. This is evident in the ways in which Pentecostals offer prayers at certain sites that are in their view sinful (e.g. sites of street prostitution, alcohol consumption etc.) and therefore in need of prayers, that is, at specific urban sites they view as risky, spiritually uncanny and morally dangerous. In addition, the role of space is also evident in how pastors describe what made them move into a particular urban area in setting up their ministries. Pastors told me that they prayed to God to ‘set their footsteps’ and ‘direct them to the right place and the right people’. One pastor told me: ‘I just can’t go anywhere and just preach. God must direct me, show me the place, show me the people. Because sometimes you might go to a place and you find out, God never send me here. And God is never gonna show up! And it’s a waste time!’ Some places are thus more ‘prepared’ than others for divine intervention out of God’s volition.

However, pastors’ particular relationships with crime also stemmed from the fact that many of them worked as part-time security guards for private security firms. As such, they were especially pressured to maintain maximum distance from criminals in order to avoid accusations that they were using their spiritual powers for illicit purposes. Strikingly, through their job experiences, they had particular proclivities to construe their spiritual work as pastors in analogy with their professional work as security guards: in both cases their job was about place-protective practices. Mirroring the accusations of others that the pastors deployed their spiritual gifts for illicit purposes, it was clear that prayers and blessings were the most powerful means to support their own work of protecting places against crime.

From a spatial perspective, I suggest that practices of spiritual protection interlace the material geography of urban risk and marginality, the spiritual geography of witchcraft and the moral geography of Pentecostalism into a web of specifically qualified sites, a network of networks in which each site acquires particular phenomenological qualities. And it is through these geographical imaginations that urban space becomes a spiritual battleground (see also Adeboye 2012; Ukah 2016). Who is to prevail in these battles, however, is not always clear.

Conclusions

In this article, I have explored the variegated mechanisms that shape competition in Cape Town’s markets of protection and the ways in which religious rivalry has led to new entanglements between religious actors and illegality, as well as producing new uncertainties about the sources, adequate forms of protection against crime and its very manifestations. In doing so, I also analysed the religious ideas and practices by means of which urban order is constituted and contested. My ethnography of the entwinings of Pentecostalism, crime and law enforcement provides several lessons in this regard. First, in empirical terms, there is a shift in public concerns from witchcraft-related violence towards religious violence that appears to be closely related to its increase. Revisiting Comaroff’s and Comaroff (2000) analysis of law and social order in the postcolony, I suggest that the basic fault lines, and chiefly the disjunctures, between legal universalism and cultural relativism that shaped the discussion of witchcraft are very similar to those shaping current debates about Pentecostal violence, and that there are strong echoes between the two. The work of the CLR Rights Commission was fundamentally about defining the boundaries of legitimate religion, which it did by weighing fundamental liberal freedoms and adjudicating the ways in which certain Pentecostal practices infringed upon them. Importantly, the Commission did not propose an abstract notion of rights but a ‘sociologically thick’ one, with its persistent emphasis on how poverty, education and social position shape the ways people become victims of religious entrepreneurs. Second, the fact that the police even had trouble providing security to the commissioners who were tasked with investigating illegal religious practices reveals the extent to which certain religious actors have become part of the public order of violence. This process is aided by the concentration of capital and the ability of wealthy pastors and churches to develop their own security forces, as well as by the legitimacy they enjoy in the eyes of large numbers of followers. This legitimacy must be seen against the backdrop of the waning power of the ANC in commanding public support for state institutions. Just days after investigations against Bushiri’s financial transactions had been opened, high-level representatives of the ANC visited the church and curried favour with its prophet.

Third, the social order of the religious field is increasingly shaped by the ways in which violence has become an element of religious competition, violence that is fashioned as necessary to fight other violence (the violence of the devil, of Satan, of evil spirits and so on) and to protect people against material and spiritual insecurities. At the same time, as we have seen in the case of the International Pentecostal Holiness Church, pastors are themselves the victims of crime, armed robberies and looting. Despite the spiritual efforts to protect themselves and others against crime, they are held up at gunpoint while criminals forage among their houses and pillage their churches and community centres.

When pastors come under attack from gangsters in Cape Town and manage to clarify the situation, they often call together and assemble their neighbours in order to respond, follow the gangsters and beat them up if they can. They do call the police and check whether they can afford the services of private security for one purpose or another. Even Pentecostal pastors, who are among the most important religious virtuosi in Cape Town’s townships, thus follow routinised protocols that are no different from those of ordinary citizens. In conversations, when talking about crime they actually shifted effortlessly between religious and secular idioms, recognising, albeit rarely explicitly, that prayers might not be enough to keep criminals, evil and Satan at bay. Therefore, crime itself has a particular secularising effect. Or, to put it more precisely, while the understanding of crime through the idiom of spiritual protection against misfortune and evil imbues policing with a sacred dimension, the obvious failures to provide protection by spiritual means alone motivate people to seek protection from elsewhere, thereby drawing religious practices into the realm of ordinary urbanism and into secular domains.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Kgatle, (2017) has offered a theological analysis of the Commission’s work.

2. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-33846897.

3. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-33846897.

4. Significantly, such criticisms are now also voiced within the Pentecostal field: see, for instance, Kgatle and Anderson (2020).

5. https://www.news24.com/news24/southafrica/news/police-flee-from-pastors-bodyguards-20170729.

6. See van Wyk (2020) for a detailed analysis of this case.

7. See https://www.ecgchurch.org/about-us.

8. All names that appear in this article, except that of David Luca Mosoma, are pseudonyms used to protect the identity of my informants.

9. There are echoes here of Meyer’s description of how Ghanaian politicians consult religious virtuosi and seek spiritual support in their efforts to stay in power (Meyer 1998b, 16).

10. Accusations of the theft of church properties have also been reported in other African countries, such as Cameroon. See, for instance, https://www.dw.com/en/cameroons-pentecostal-churches-under-fire/a-43070272.

11. The case of the Islamic vigilant group PAGAD (People against Gangsterism and Drugs), active during the 1990s, is the most prominent exception. See Bangstad (2005).