Loud Pentecostal worship is part of the soundtrack of major African cities. From Johannesburg, South Africa, to Lagos, Nigeria, booming preaching and noisy worship echo through alleys, apartments, and street corners.
But in Blantyre, Malawi’s commercial capital, the noise of churches is noticeably absent.
Although located in one of the poorest countries in Africa and the world, Blantyre’s central business district is home to one of the largest concentrations of investment banks, hedge funds, insurance companies and of chic restaurants on the continent.
Banks like the National Bank of Malawi compete for space in the district with foreign giants like the Standard Bank Group (Africa’s richest by assets) and the towering Reserve Bank of Malawi. , the national equivalent of the Federal Reserve.
“It’s a Wall Street of the Southern African region. The city is just artificially too clean, too smart and designed for banks,” said Susan Mani, one of the few highly regulated mobile chefs who serve rice and chicken to suited bankers and hedge fund managers for a two-hour lunch window.
“The thinking of the city fathers is: ‘Do you want a loud, prayerful African church that beats drums in the basement when hedge fund investors from Singapore or Dubai gather in the boardroom? a bank at the top? »
City officials have made it clear their answer is no. While quieter Anglican and Adventist congregations dot Blantyre’s streets, noisy churches of African origin are unwanted. They face fines and possible expulsion from the district because of their traditional style of worship.
“It costs a lot to be caught leading a church where bass drums, loud prayers and the sound of thunderous sermons seep into the street,” said Dennis Labo, pastor of Zion Christian Church (ZCC Malawi), an African Pentecostal church with thousands of people. of followers across Malawi and neighboring African countries.
Labo was fined 370,000 kwacha (US$220) and ordered to move his congregation of 80 people from the avenue that houses the National Bank of Malawi, the country’s richest bank.
“The Blantyre City Council wants to present the city’s (central business district) as the epitome of a clean financial district, without… noisy churches and fruit sellers,” he said.
Pentecostal churches are not the only targets. Council member Gerald Lipikwe pointed out that any church, business, party or accommodation that exceeds noise thresholds in the central business district can face heavy fines, permit restrictions or removal.
Blantyre follows Rwanda’s harsh bureaucracy, which restricted African Pentecostal churches, forcing congregations to hold secret and silent services, mainly on Fridays after business hours.
“We dare to hold informal services when the bankers have left town,” Nisbert, an African evangelical pastor, told CT.
He avoids giving his last name because his church risks being evicted from Blantyre’s central business district. He is on his final warning after holding an all-night prayer meeting which disrupted a business meeting at the nearby Malawi Stock Exchange.
Restrictions on African worship also harm church growth, pastors say. In a country where three-quarters are Christian, evangelical and Pentecostal churches are eager to attract young black bankers who can afford to tithe generously.
Blantyre was the colonial capital of Malawi, the seat of banks, universities, hospitals and government offices. In 1975, a decade after the end of British rule, the Malawi government gradually moved its offices to its current capital, Lilongwe, a new city built from the bush.
But the banks never left the old capital, Labo said. Even today, a presidential palace remains in Blantyre.
The place where extravagant profits from sugarcane and tobacco were raked in by British colonial plantation owners still remains the “financial city of Malawi,” according to John Tembo, an independent financial historian who has lived in Blantyre for 50 years.
The city’s hostility toward noisy congregations — code for “native African churches” — is unfair, Tembo said. Many members of the political and banking elite tend to frequent Anglican and Baptist parishes, considered “posh” and “civilized”.
“Churches of European/American heritage like the Adventists and Anglicans have large outlets and hold services,” Tembo said, pointing to a sprawling Adventist hospital along the alley of posh hotels in downtown Blantyre. “The so-called ‘civilized’ European churches in the Blantyre business district have invested in high-end hospitals, so they are tolerated.”
Pentecostal or evangelical churches are often unregistered and informal, so the city does not levy taxes on them.
The history of Malawi’s churches is colorful, varied and synonymous with the colonial takeover of the territory once called Nyasaland. When Scottish missionary David Livingstone arrived at Lake Malawi (then Nyasa) in 1859, he founded the country’s first missionary church. Anglican missionaries like Edward Steere followed, as did Dutch Reformed missionaries and, later, the Catholic Church.
Anglican rule helped solidify the British crown’s 1891 colonial takeover of the country. Africans who converted to the faith largely joined the Anglican Church because it built the most schools, hospitals and colleges in Malawi.
Closely followed by the Adventists, the Dutch Reformed and the Catholics. There were not many independent African churches in Malawi when the country defeated colonial rule in 1964 or in the decades that followed. But as a sense of independence and access to education grew in Malawi in the 1980s, so did the spirit and confidence to establish churches of African descent.
A number of African-led churches have mushroomed in Malawi – Zion Christians, Pentecostals and Evangelicals – many of which blend traditional African ancestral beliefs with the Christian ethos. Because of class differences, they almost never united or cooperated with believers in the ancient European and American churches.
However, the only meeting point was when followers of the newer African churches attended Anglican or Catholic primary schools and urgent care clinics. In poor postcolonial Malawi, Western-founded churches continued to provide education, health care, and relief.
In the early 2000s, a Pentecostal Christian revival began to sweep across Africa. As African economies were hit by World Bank-imposed austerity, dubious African “prophets” like Shepherd Bushiri in Malawi and TB Joshua in Nigeria began dazzling millions of poor African believers with promises of miracles and prosperity. instant wealth.
Millions of black Malawians were conquered and began to leave their legacy of colonial and older African churches to the charismatic “miracle” prophets. For the country’s poor believers, the promise of instant wealth and miraculous breakthrough holds considerable appeal.
Mani, the lunch seller, says restrictions and stigma around African churches reflect underlying anti-poor attitudes in a country where inequality is extreme. Oxfam America claims that just 10 percent of the population consumes 22 times more resources than the poorest Malawians.
“This is a dangerous inequality,” Pastor Labo said. “Just a few meters from the central banking district of Blantyre, you will find the most chaotic slums where the real citizens, the majority of Blantyre residents, live and pray loudly. »
