“You shall be a global citizen of
supernatural power!” the Nigerian pastor promised his congregants. “No matter
where you are in your life this morning, there is divine increase and expansion
coming up”. The crowd cheered him on, and the band started playing praise songs
over his voice. Soon everyone was dancing. The scene could have been from a
Sunday service in Nigeria but for the demographics: A high number of young men betrayed that this
was a migrant church.
In China because “Europe is closed”
The church was one of dozens African-run
churches in the Southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, a center for Chinese production
and export of manufactured goods. Nigerians have lived there since the mid-1990s.
“Europe is closed,” some said to explain how they had ended up in China, a less
desirable but more accessible alternative. Some Nigerians have made handsome
money through exporting goods, providing logistics services, and helping people
back home make purchases in China. However, many migrants lacked the capital
and connections to succeed as entrepreneurs. They had come to China in the hope
of finding employment, but discovered that there were no such opportunities.
Arriving in China on a business visas,
Nigerian would-be factory workers soon faced a difficult choice: Return home
before their visas expired or remain in China undocumented. If opting for the
latter, they risked incarceration,
fines, and repatriation when stopped by the police. Yet they travelled for long distances to
church on Sundays―by taxi if their
funds allowed, but more commonly on public buses. What
made these trips worthwhile? This question inspired my chapter in Hope and Uncertainty in Contemporary African Migration.
Immediate production of wealth
The topic of hope has been approached from
two angles in the literature on African and migrant Pentecostalism. The first
documents the ways in which religious engagement helps people to realize their
migration projects. Pentecostal networks and theology have an instrumental
value, these studies emphasize: They help people find ways to migrate and
facilitate life abroad. Churches act as stabilizing forces that narrow the gaps
between expectations and realities.
The second approach to hope and
Pentecostalism takes rupture as its starting point. This scholarship refers to
how individual desires for material wealth are intense but largely frustrated
in Africa today. Charismatic pastors promise that prosperity is imminent for
those who believe. Pentecostal churches emphasize immediate experience with
God’s presence. Services are understood as unique events with performative
power: They declare poverty dead and fortunes a fact of the present in the
lives of the congregants.
Hope as method
As my ethnographic fieldwork in the
Nigerian church proceeded, the weekly services started to feel repetitive. Every
Sunday, a strong momentum was created to break with past misfortunes and pronounce
that the desires that had inspired Nigerians to come to China were fulfilled.
Yet, when I met people outside of church, nothing had improved: They were still
hiding from the police and leaving phone calls from home unanswered because
they had no money to send. I assessed the church services based their
effectiveness in helping migrants attain their goals, and found them lacking. A
reorientation was necessary to retain an open attitude. Here, I found Hirokazu Miyazaki’s (2006) The method of hope useful.
Miyazaki’s work points towards ways of
studying discontinuity and maintaining the prospective orientation of hope. “The
newness and freshness of the prospective moment that defines the moment as
hopeful is lost as soon as hope is approached as the end point of a process,”
he writes (p. 8). Instead of treating
hope as a subject of knowledge, Miyazaki proposes hope as method for comprehending a future-oriented way of being in the
world. Hopeful moments are ways of generating self-knowledge. Hope as method allows
us to study Pentecostal practices on their own terms: The churches’ fantastic
promises of wealth can be approached as a reality still in a state of not-yet.
Prophesies can be appreciated for the social momentum that they produce rather
than their efficacy.
Unconstrained hope
as an ideal
In the moral universe promulgated by Nigerian
churches in Guangzhou, unconstrained hopes and desires for astonishing success
were valued more highly than realistic aspirations for incremental
improvements. The congregants understood bold prayer requests as signs of
strong belief in God’s power.
African migrants passed the time by
relaying stories about people who resolved tough problems in spectacular ways.
Their accounts described audacious escapes from difficult situations that
involved the police, customs officers, or immigration officials. Such
narratives were also incorporated into the church services. For example, one
pastor told the story of a migrant in China whose visa application was rejected
by the British Embassy. The applicant had wept and said that he had no more
hope left. The pastor had declared that the visa would be granted. Accompanied
by cheers from the congregants, he described how the visa application
eventually was successful:
The visa officer
said ‘Why are you here?’ The man then replied ‘God said you must give me [a] visa’.
The woman looked at him. ‘God has said I must give you [a] visa?’ she asked. He
replied ‘Yes’. And then the woman told him ‘Come and collect your visa
tomorrow!’ And he went and got the visa.
Similarly, migrants provided testimonies
about being saved from deportation through supernatural intervention. A man became
invisible when the police did passport checks in a trading mall. A woman was
captured by the police, showed signs of violent illness, was released by scared
police officers, and immediately recovered her health.
Generic promises of wealth and success made
in plenary took on more concrete expressions as they were interpreted by the
congregants. For example, a Kenyan woman, who lived from hand to mouth as a
guide for visiting traders, planned to tap into global capital flows by buying
vast amounts of land outside Nairobi and growing fresh strawberries to be
airlifted to Europe. A Nigerian church member envisaged building schools that
would serve as models for a better education system in his home country. These aspirations
were maintained long after it was clear that life in China offered few
opportunities to realize them.
