One Sunday in September 2014 in a central Tanzanian town, I attended a Pentecostal service in the church of the Assemblies of God. After a first placid hour of thanksgiving when devotees could publicly share in Swahili their personal experiences of divine intervention and subsequent salvation, a guest pastor came on stage to preach. Before him sat a mixed crowd of inhabitants from the poverty-stricken region of Morogoro, the few better-off occupying the first rows on his right hand. What could the flashy-dressed Black Canadian have in common with this audience, I wondered. The answer came after one hour and a half of preaching in English with simultaneous translation in Swahili, punctuated with collective choir singing. An entranced audience of 500 hung at his lips as his initial dwelling on the verse Isaiah 6:1-8 ‘In the year Uzziah died I saw also the Lord sitting on a throne’ grew into a series of questions and answers in scholarly fashion. The dialogue eventually intensified into a commandment exhorting each to become an individual and take a decision, following the words of the subsequent verse: ‘Here am I. Send me!’ ‘Yes!’ all screamed in reply to his question whether ‘you will face the obstacle in your life’ and consider ‘every trouble as a blessing’; whether ‘you will pull God’s glory into your spirit’, which will fill ‘your business, your finances, and your family’—in this order of importance—because: ‘WHAT YOU START, GOD WILL FINISH.’

The capital letters flickering on a large screen came at the climax. Everyone visibly agreed that something special had taken place. The pastor called it God-work. Repeating his soulful afterthought ‘I got a feeling everything’s gonna be alright’, which died out in a whisper, he left the stage. The sensory experience was intended to affect each participant. Some cried and a few started to speak in tongues. All cheered. What started as God’s glory was subsequently translated by the second pastor into: ‘Jesus touching your lips, your money, your body, your face, your church, your family.’ All participants had as individual bodies merged into a relationship with the personified divinity known as Jesus. Their salvation had led them to enter into the Body of Christ. While imploring the ecstatic audience to now take that first step, and mimicking the physical act repeatedly, the pastor reassured that ‘God is obligated to finish the work’.

The work God will finish refers to prosperity, for which the higher salvation known as baptism with the Holy Spirit is a metaphor. But the obligation not even God Himself can escape, stems from the belief in the universe obeying a law. This law boils down to return on investment. Mwanga magic sacrificing a white body for prosperity adopts that simplex frame too, I have argued.

We cannot ignore the miracle happening daily, of American TV channels as well as a visiting pastor from Canada managing to speak the language of the Morogoro born-again. We are witnessing a new phase in Pentecostalism, whereby African ripples join the global wave of simplications sedimented into a fixed path.Footnote 1 The preacher incites us to face entropy and proposes as solution to pursue the path of God. Perhaps I am in no position to question his discourse, since it belongs to the religious sphere. Moreover, his entropology has a lot going for it, because at least it contains a solution. Only, he pictures one path, while you and I as outsiders can imagine as many paths as there are names of god. Those many religions each claiming their god and truth do not frustrate the pastor, for they confirm the stakes of his battle. Nor does he dislike scientists. Their knowledge presents no threat, poor as it is in intuition and segregated from the religious sphere.

Something else does obsess the pastor, and the reason why is intriguing for my argument. He hates medicine. Of course, there are reasons for denouncing clandestine occult practices often termed ‘magic’ that draw on the game of make-believe. But I say medicine to mean the totality of local practices applying knowledge about plant- and metaphor-based forces from the forest that adults were traditionally initiated in, and that some chosen by the spirits still become experts in. The Christian pastor recognizes the claim of vocation in priests and mystics. Yet, medicinal practice and spirit possession cults differ from monotheistic religions in admitting utter plurality. The pluralism of medicine, a supposed inferior belief, is what unsettles the Pentecostal, a monist.Footnote 2 Pluralism requires tolerance about the other’s difference which must stem from self-confidence. How could traditional medicine? The monists desperately wondered in my presence about Christians hiding their heretic medicine. Might it be mere ignorance? Or on the contrary ‘African science’ in a sphere separate from religion. The worst-case scenario would be that medicine partakes of the same sphere and approximates the experience of connection with an invisible influence. Could medicine beat them at being in touch with the real? The similarity of spirit beliefs is the source of irritation. What differentiates healer from preacher is the ability to shift frames, I will argue.

Africanists have underestimated the cultural war plaguing the continent since decolonization. An ambivalent discourse about traditional healing has at times reigned among Christianized Africans, pairing hatred with unrealistic admiration. During a brief field-visit in Uganda in September 2013 an Acholi diviner told me in an unrecorded interview that she and all healers around Kitgum were the first victims of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA)’s murderous campaign. How could the LRA, with its Christian founder Kony possessed by spirits, ideologically oppose the spirit-based medicinal traditions of the uneducated? The LRA chose the most violent method to attain an objective that Pentecostalists adhere to as well, to purify Uganda from witchcraft. Pentecostalists differ from other Christians in that their services take traditional belief seriously. For them the existence of witches cannot be doubted.Footnote 3 By proclaiming to exterminate witchcraft, Pentecostal churches do not eradicate the belief in witchcraft. They reinforce it. Witchcraft’s reality becomes stronger with every witch the preachers claim to have converted.

A motif staged during church services is the redemptive testimony of new adherents. Ideally the sins confessed are those of a witch, like in the BBC documentary on a Ugandan pastor claiming to have performed over sixty child sacrifices as a healer before he became a Christian.Footnote 4 So focused the Charismatic Christians are on the moral status of thoughts that they treat witch and healer as interchangeable figures. They do not experience the opposition between two frames: those of magic and bewitchment, the first a duel (the combat between magic and counter-magic) and the second a fear (about the invisible hold of a witch). Healing systems with precolonial roots play on the shift between the two frames, as argued in “Chapter Seven: The Oracle and the Real” and “Chapter Eight: Healer or King”. A third frame of divination reveals the identity of the witch, not in a tribunal but in a ritual. In the Pentecostalist understanding, however, there is only one world, God’s kingdom, about which the Bible informs us. So, the idea that beliefs would be generated by a particular frame of experience is heresy. In this emotional take on truth originates the remarkable conflation which we noted above, between combating the belief in witchcraft and combating the witch, the latter often interchangeably called witch-doctor, the witch’s opposite, adding to the confusion. Time and again the conflation surfaces in media reports on superstition in Africa and in public statements of international organizations: witches—by which the speaker has a kind of wicca practitioner in mind—are ‘persecuted’ and, in the same breath, witches (now meaning witch-doctors) fool ‘gullible clients’ into superstitious magic. Throughout the scientific literature too, I have encountered the conflation. Scientists conflate frames if they disregard experiences in their account of events.

More interestingly, the misunderstanding struck me among Pentecostal church members of a rural town near the village where I lived south of Lake Victoria. By coincidence, during the first year of fieldwork on healing rituals, I had witnessed a contest. It was an experiment the significance of which I could not have gathered at the time. In 1995, still before the second big wave of literature on Pentecostalism in Africa, two evangelical pastors had come to the healer’s compound where I stayed. In my presence, they persuaded the healer named Solile, famous for his treatment of mayabu mental illness, to let them perform an exorcism on one of his patients in order to prove that the Word of God outdid Solile’s heathen method. Sudden healing would indeed be a miracle in the eyes of the Sukuma healer, who is used to long-term treatments, including ingestion of soothing concoctions, medicinal massages twice daily and regular monitoring of spirit support through divination, so that after about two years the patients suffering from mayabu bewitchment, the symptoms of depression receding, can return home. The exorcist scene directed by the pastors and witnessed by me from a distance should be summed up in the following terms: loud and atrocious admonishments of the patient, repeated references to the devil, panic in the patient leading to a fit, and a bewildered ethnographer barely three months in the field now harshly confronted with the ambivalence of participatory observation. Just before leaving for Solile’s place, I had been visited at home by a Tanzanian civil servant and member of the Seventh day Adventist’s church warning me about going to the village where ‘the thing called witchcraft’ reigns. Unlike some of my friends, the civil servant said, he took the danger seriously. In retrospect, the irritation I felt at being pressured by him had to do with his experience of witchcraft seeming to me a travesty. Looking down on Solile and his patients, he had no clue of the multi-layered experience that they communicated about and that I would not have been prepared for either, had I stayed around the town’s educated few.Footnote 5 Cultural colonization, the rewriting of African history in Western terms? I heeded the warning of my promotor René Devisch, who had worked among Yaka healers, also speaking a Bantu language but 3000 miles to the west.Footnote 6

The power of bugota, medicine, depends on the semantic kinship of metaphorical ingredients with cultural elements. The kinship turns the ingredients into ‘entrances’, shingila. The spitting cobra I disposed of one night at the storage room was a lost opportunity I was told afterward, a much appreciated ‘entrance’ for protective medicine, and so it was gone the next morning. A little piece of skin would suffice as additive in a concoction to keep any jealous neighbors at bay that might secretly persecute owners of filled store rooms. Like the Western observer, Pentecostal pastors treat magic, bewitchment, divination, ritual sacrifice and spirit possession as belonging to one sphere, that of ‘the occult’. In their words, these are the works of the devil. Among Sukuma-speaking farmers, however, each of these practices evokes its own frame of experience, whose shift for instance from persecution to protection the participant feels. The palette of experiential frames comprises exchanging with the world (via magic), feeling intruded by it (in bewitchment), identifying its hidden causes (through divination), expelling the intruder (via exorcism), harnessing the power of externality (through sacrifice) or being in synchrony with the outside world (in spirit possession). The frames recur in other spheres of exchange too. But Pentecostalists subsume the frames under one sphere, the occult, which moreover looks irritatingly much like religion. Sukuma healers with their plural frames have been losing terrain fast in comparison to Pentecostalism. The reason was not defeat in a fair battle. The colonizers, with their indirect rule, imported religions and science, double-crossed initiatory medicine in the colony’s cultural war, relegating it to a thing of the past. Afterward came globalization and the homogenizing pressure of simplex society ending experiential plurality lest it slow down communication.

I deeply enjoyed Solile’s reaction of scorn against his preaching visitors, not only after but also before their session of ‘spiritual healing’. His scorn was telling in that he as a pluralist wanted to give them a chance but never really believed in their miracle cure, its monism and denial of the diviner’s real. The exhorting cries of the exorcists while brandishing the Bible contrasted sharply with the long-term methodic approach of Sukuma medicinal traditions. Pentecostal healing is rather impervious to the biographically rooted meanings obtained by the patient from the therapeutic rituals, divinatory sessions, historically thickened medicines, collective routines of application to the body, and the regularly monitored communications as well as strategic dealings with the spirits. All these practices form a meaningful whole integrating therapy in the rest of life.

No better place to experience the excesses of global processes than in Africa’s buzzling semi-urban neighborhoods. The Pentecostal attack launched against the devil by those visiting pastors is telling of the simplication they submitted the local beliefs to, an experiential atrophy they must have sensed. The pastors do not biographically specify the witch. A demon possessing the speaker-in-tongues, any variant on Satan will do as the cause of trouble. I could not think of a clearer opposite than Solile’s patients evolving via divination and ritual to picture witchcraft first as morally justified retaliations and later on as a-moral attacks to be dealt with in a medicinal battle. The history of the family clan and various guiding spirits contributes to empowering the self.Footnote 7 In Christianity, it is always the same spirit we are to experience—not an ancestral spirit attached to the history of the clan or locality. Pentecostalism could be seen as syncretic with medicinal traditions by managing to interweave the believer’s personal path of salvation with the one Spirit, through a relationship that evolves,Footnote 8 but it does not permit the biographically unique embodiment by a cult spirit. While individualizing subjectivities, globalized religions paradoxically standardize experiences. Reproducing the supernatural of public discourse from African schools, NGO’s and churches, they robbed the spirits of a history and a name.

Benin, 1994. One year before my Tanzanian research the bonesetter in a Bariba village had showed me the medicinal plants with which he treated the patient’s leg to speed up the healing process. As important he said, and he pointed to a chicken tied to a post in the patient’s room, is the bird’s broken paw. The patient will watch it from day to day getting better. The patient with broken bone will muster courage from the slow but almost sure spectacle of healing, a restoring of life in the chick’s paw. The patient is in touch with the source of production, healing. The sterile hospital ward conveys a different message, designed to facilitate predictable decisions and simplicate moral choices. Is the Pentecostalist law of prosperity, committing God himself, an experientially sterile simplex? Or do the pastor’s followers shift frame in touch with life, as exuded by the energy of their services?

Lumumbashi, 2014. The three of us are in a taxi on our way to the University of Lubumbashi in eastern Congo, as we have been doing every morning for the past six days. My two intellectual friends, brought up in this city, hence both Lushois, earnestly discuss the value of Pentecostalist belief, as they have been doing in my presence for the past six days. One a Catholic for his whole life, the other turned a born-again since a couple of years, both agree on the attraction of Pentecostalist belief for its emphasis on sensory experience and on collective experience, le concret et la solidarité. ‘At last the convert can take the gospel literally!’ L’évangile est vrai, pas du symbolisme. Away with Catholic ambiguity, saying one thing (the symbol from heaven) and doing another (the act on Earth).

‘Pentecostal clarity is what I appreciate as well’, the taxi driver interjects joining in at our surprise. ‘I like the deliverance by the Holy Spirit (Délivrance avec le saint Esprit) which comprises deliverance from demonic possession (possession demoniaque).’ ‘Or from family ties’ (liens familiaux), he adds a euphemism for jealousy and witchcraft following unmet obligations between kin. ‘Catholic services do not address these preoccupations of their adherents. Nothing is really felt in those services. But the differences are small’, he appends.

Escapism and business in a precarious economy is what the plenty Congolese makeshift churches offer at the rate of about one per street. The taxi driver’s income depends on the fluctuation of the dollar rate and oil price as well as on the city’s participation in the global economy. Just as I attempt to classify his job as an embodiment of local-global entanglement for which the Pentecostal sphere caters with a monist frame (the prosperity gospel), he surprisingly unpacks his pragmatic take on religion. He and his wife have become Pentecostals while their children stay Catholic and go to good Catholic schools. They are frame-shifters.

An important reason for the distinct approach to children, the cabdriver explains, is the sin that concerns adults only. ‘Treating sins is an individual thing for Catholics, to be settled between you and God, whereas among Pentecostalists it is collective.’Footnote 9 During the sermon, everybody in the audience feels saved. It is an experience unknown to the colonial Church. The ceremony of speaking-in-tongues, when some are chosen by the holy spirit, is an arrival of the real permitting to experience collective reason. The release for the group reminds my collaborator and me of the purification rites with white kaolin among Chokwe and Lamba groups outside Lubumbashi. The collective dimension of Pentecostal services narrows the distance with the precolonial past, which Catholic practices tended to magnify. Such services must be in high demand, I reason, now that diviners have to work in hiding for individual clients due to the law prohibiting their profession. We keep our thoughts silent. Looking at me and my Catholic doctoral student, the taxi driver stresses a Pentecostalist prohibition: ‘Traditions are forbidden.’ Tout ce qui est coutume est interdit. He must have overheard us talking about the ritual of the Chokwe chief we interviewed. I am confused again. Is this dogmatism or a shift of frame?

Ceremonial deliverance in a church resembles traditional rites of purification. Yet, what the participants have to be purified of is their traditions. The destruction of amulets and fetishes by the pastor is a famous sight on Pentecostal TV. I had appreciated the system of autonomy in Sukuma valleys, ensured by a medicinal ‘democracy’ subjecting commoner and chief, noble elder and poor elderly lady to the same source of production, a battle between concocted energies of the same kind. Was that denounced in Charismatic churches, or not understood? As I could observe in various field visits since 2012 in the context of Tanzanian university exchange, the researchers belonging to a Charismatic church, who formed the majority, refused to enter the compounds of traditional healers, despite the researchers’ specialization in community outreach and their awareness of the informal influence of those healers in the community. For them, unlike 20 years ago, healers are not competitors on the same market of belief. The Pentecostal frame trails in its shadow a denial of frame, which is how I define simplications turning simplex. Frames such as medicinal cosmologies are classified as demonic. What could undermine the classification? Frameshift could. That brought me back to the healers in the village.

Solile mastered the game of healing better than the pastors. For a still more advanced level of frameshift he referred me to a spirit cult, the Chwezi, initiating members into ancient knowledge. The Chwezi novice wears a bracelet, ngalike, meaning mind-shift. The initiation explores a variety of mindsets, all equally shades of life. In the four case-studies, football, elections, hip hop and Pentecostalism, the organized ‘real’ and frameshift stalled the eventual return to the dominant frame. Is that a limitation? After the match the spectators return to simplex society. Presidential elections are a brief moment of ‘anti-structure’.Footnote 10 The Bongo Flava song welcomes the fans back after challenging them. The Charismatic church awaits the flock of parents that dropped off their kids at the Catholic mission. But the initiated of the Chwezi cult feel driven by destiny. They use in daily life the palette of frames they were trained into. Their dynamic keeps the simplex at bay.