Melissa Hackman. Social Analysis. Volume 59, Issue 3, Autumn 2015.
I first met Hannes, the Pentecostal Afrikaans founder of Jericho Walls Ministries, in 2013 at his home in Cape Town’s northern suburbs. He showed me a world map with a pentagram drawn on it, and he instructed me to pay attention to its five points, one of which was in Cape Town. Hannes said that the Holy Spirit had “called him” to start a “spiritual mapping” ministry at the beginning of democracy to “reclaim Cape Town for Christ.” Spiritual mappers such as Hannes believed that the city was one of “Satan’s power bases.” Cape Town was seen as crucial because it was a “spiritual gate” to the rest of the nation and the African continent. ‘Spiritual mapping’ is a Christian term to describe a procedure involving the study, identification, and removal of what are called ‘territorial spirits’, that is, demons that occupy specific places. It is a transnational Pentecostal practice that is central to ‘spiritual warfare’, the belief that there is a ‘supernatural’ war taking place on earth in which Christians must actively fight. The South African spiritual mapping movement began in 1995 in Pretoria and soon spread nationally. Cape Town was plotted for the first time in 1997.
Spiritual mapping began in South Africa with the founding of democracy. The African National Congress (ANC) and majority black rule significantly altered the nation’s laws and social norms. Sindre Bangstad (2007: 37) explains that a shift “from a society based on the social imaginaries of moral conformity anchored in religious values” to secular democracy has led to a “politics of disappointment” for many conservative Muslims, Jews, and Christians. Many religious South Africans, including the Capetonian Pentecostals I met during fieldwork, felt disenfranchised by the ANC-drafted Constitution and laws. They were particularly disappointed by the end of censorship and the protection of ‘immoral’ activities such as polygamy, abortion, and same-sex sexual activity and relationships. Pentecostals disapproved of what they saw as the inferior policies of the secular nation and claimed that changes in the law and cultural life had brought about negative ‘otherworldly’ effects. As one Pentecostal put it: “Basically, in summary, the country is [now] in a spiritual mess.”
This article examines how Capetonian Pentecostals used spiritual mapping at the time of nascent democracy as a way to monitor and police what they understood as uncertain physical, moral, and spiritual boundaries. I argue that Pentecostals employed spiritual mapping discourses and practices to identify, plot, and oversee various groups they viewed as ‘dangerous’ religious and moral outsiders during a time of social and political upheaval. Pentecostals across racial groups felt that they could no longer depend on the government to enforce morality and that they needed to step in and take over this role. They said that the nation was under threat and presented themselves as the country’s new moral custodians, replacing the prior role of government. Pentecostals are now a large part of public life. Studies indicate that they comprise 10-20 percent of the nation’s urban population.
South African Pentecostals who participated in spiritual mapping did not seek to challenge the state directly. Instead, they used Pentecostal practices to resist democracy’s new legal and cultural norms of racial and social integration. These Pentecostals sought to discount and avoid the state and politics. This is similar to what Ruth Marshall (2009: 204) found in her work with Nigerian Pentecostals: “In its programmatic form, the Born-Again project does not refer to a revolution to create a new institutional order, found a constitution, or elaborate new laws. Rather, it represents itself as providing the conditions for the redemption of the religious and political traditions which were both promised in colonial and post-colonial rule, and ruined through it.” Pentecostalism offered alternative sources of affiliation, ‘moral’ community formation, and tools for living sanctified lives despite post-colonial problems. Although a global practice, spiritual mapping was unique in Cape Town because it was both a racialized and sexualized practice. Areas that were mapped as under ‘demonic workings’ were in areas where ‘coloureds’ and blacks lived during apartheid and still largely live today. Gay neighborhoods were also spiritually mapped. Spiritual cartography practices thus provided a way for Capetonian Pentecostals to spiritualize racism and homophobia and to draw and maintain emotional, social, and physical boundaries in order to identify people they considered to be spiritually ‘dangerous’ and polluting. Spiritual mapping was part of a larger body of spiritual warfare techniques. Many Pentecostals claimed that these techniques assisted them in establishing control over themselves and their environments, which they viewed as being under constant demonic attack.
Spiritual mapping was one example of South African responses to post-apartheid limitations. The practice was similar to other forms of non-governmental policing and punishment. Many South Africans felt materially unsupported and physically unprotected by the state, and they often bypassed or ignored it in trying to bring law and order to their neighborhoods. Private security firms, high fences, and gated communities with armed guards became a ubiquitous aspect of city and suburban living for those who could afford it (Lemanski 2004; Samara 2010). Vigilante justice, xenophobic violence, and people’s courts, in which community members judged and punished each other, were used by neighborhoods to monitor and police individuals who had transgressed physical and moral boundaries (Desai 2006; Jensen 2005; Sichone 2008). All these methods of monitoring and protecting boundaries shared with spiritual mapping the fact that they bypassed the state for moral and physical protection, duties that the ANC government was viewed as performing poorly. However, I never heard Pentecostals discuss their engagement in physically punitive actions during my fieldwork.
Capetonian Pentecostals were frightened of what they perceived as democracy’s material, physical, moral, and spiritual dangers. Since its inception in 1994, democracy has been plagued by upheaval despite promises of social and economic gains. As the nation celebrated its twentieth year of democracy in 2014, many South Africans believed that local and national governments were unable or unwilling to provide communities with the necessary physical and material support. Implementing the Growth, Employment, and Redistribution plan in 1996 led to the privatization of utilities such as water, electricity, and sanitation, which resulted in poor service delivery to impoverished areas (Dugard 2008; Miraftab 2004). Combined with the continuation of apartheidera structural inequalities, this neo-liberal reform led to a post-apartheid economic downturn. Although there is a rising educated black middle class in South Africa, the poor are becoming poorer, and the unemployment rate is one of the highest worldwide, ranging from 35 percent (Berkowitz 2013) to 45 percent (Campbell 2013). Most South Africans today feel physically unsafe as they face some of the highest levels of crime globally (Mthethwa 2008). The police have one of the lowest approval ratings of any government institution, at 47.9 percent (Wale 2013: 19). South Africa has some of the highest worldwide rates of sexual assault and rape in a country that is not at war (Moffett 2008), and Cape Town stands out for having the highest murder rates in the country (Lancaster 2013). Most of this crime is interpersonal and occurs in townships.
All these factors have contributed to growing disillusionment with the ANC government and “a politics of hope and despair, characterised by a repeating cycle of unrealisable political promises and citizen despair” (Wale 2013: 19). The democratic state often does not enforce the measures, guaranteed in the Constitution, for providing social services to at-risk populations, such as children, the disabled, and the poor (Johnson 2000; Murray 2008). Service delivery protests have become a part of national life and are evidence of disappointment with the government’s failure to fulfill its repeated promises to poor South Africans (Harrison 2013).
The state’s inability or unwillingness to provide for its citizens has led to the phenomenon of ‘apartheid nostalgia’ (Quinn 2002), in which South Africans across racial lines look back positively on the approach taken by the National Party (the principal ruling party during apartheid) toward crime prevention and the provision of jobs and services (Masango 2012). This nostalgia does not reflect a desire to return to apartheid rule; rather, it represents a wish for the ANC to fulfill its financial and structural promises (Mattes et al. 2000: 26-27). During my fieldwork, many Pentecostals expressed nostalgia not only for the National Party’s economic policies but also for its Christian nationalism, which I understood as a ‘moral nostalgia’ for apartheid. On the one hand, the majority of Capetonian Pentecostals condemned apartheid’s political disenfranchisement of non-whites. On the other hand, they looked back on apartheid-era morality—particularly, the cultural sanctions and legal punishments against same-sex and cross-racial sexual activity—in a positive light. These Pentecostals pointed to the National Party’s policing of ‘Christian decency’ as positive, especially the enforcement of the Immorality Act. This legislation heavily policed and punished interracial sex and homosexuality, both of which were seen as threats to the continued racial reproduction of whiteness and to the purity of the apartheid state (Elder 1995; Retief 1995). Many Pentecostals contrasted these policies of the National Party to the ‘sinfulness’ of the ANC’s actions, specifically, the preservation of ‘traditional’ or customary rights, which included polygamy; the protection of gays and lesbians in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights; the legalization of gay marriage and of abortion; and the end of censorship, which resulted in the wide availability of pornography.
I conducted participant observation and interviews with black, coloured, and white Pentecostal women and men in Cape Town in the summers of 2004 and 2005, from 2007 to 2008, and in 2013. I attended church services and Bible study groups and spent significant social time with Pentecostals—going to the movies, drinking countless cups of tea, and eating many meals together. I performed much of my fieldwork at the Church of the Reborn, a mid-sized Assemblies of God church that meets in a repurposed movie theatre. This church shares much in common with other Pentecostal churches in South Africa. A multi-racial congregation, it structures a large part of its followers’ social lives and devotes considerable time to ‘fighting’ Satan, of which spiritual mapping is a part (Anderson 2005; Badstuebner 2003; Ganiel 2007). In the analysis that follows, I examine the history of spiritual mapping and explore the politics of space in South Africa. I then address the specific reasons why Pentecostals considered Cape Town a ‘demonic stronghold’ and discuss ‘ancestral sin’ and ‘sexual sin’. I end by examining how Pentecostals use spiritual mapping in ‘prayer marches’ in order to ‘defeat’ what they see as Satan’s ‘hold’ over places.
Spiritual Mapping
Spiritual mapping originated in the late 1980s and early 1990s in North American evangelical life. It is usually traced to the writings of theologian C. Peter Wagner and to the conservative evangelical Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California (Holvast 2009). Spiritual mapping was widely disseminated by the mid-1990s and early 2000s. Pentecostals throughout the world claimed that it was their duty to locate ‘demonic places’ and engage in spiritual warfare to reclaim these locations for God (Asamoah-Gyadu 2007; Robbins 2012; van Dijk 2007). Church members employed cartographic tools to control and ‘conquer’ places, a characteristic they shared with missionary and colonial predecessors (DeRogatis 2003; McClintock 1995). Spiritual mappers asserted that the practice was a key part of global efforts to ‘save’ souls, nations, and eventually the world. In her work on Pentecostalism in Haiti, Elizabeth McAlister (2012: 204-205) explains that Pentecostals saw unlimited rewards to freeing a place of territorial spirits: “[P]eople would be healed, crops would grow, social unrest and division would resolve, and the group or nation would finally experience abundance and prosperity.”
Pentecostals undertook spiritual mapping on a local, national, and global scale. They were actively involved in projects of claiming and ‘reconquering’ the world for Jesus Christ (Knibbe 2009). Ghanaian Pentecostals churches “were adding terms such as ‘international’, ‘global’ and ‘world’ to their names, thus promising a religiously inspired access to transnationalism” (van Dijk 2001: 221). In Sweden, charismatics believed they could spiritually intervene in global affairs, whereby “the world becomes an object to be owned, or at least controlled by the believer” (Coleman 2009: 199). Pentecostals also ‘battled’ demons on the national level. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pentecostals understood the nation’s problems through the lens of spiritual corruption. Katrien Pype (2009: 108) writes: “In Kinshasa’s political imagination, idioms of affliction and their occult origin are used to diagnose national politics and the experience of crisis … For Kinshasa’s born-again Christians, it is clear that Satan governs/governed the country and has bewitched the leaders.” Zambian Pentecostals sought to ‘protect’ their Christian-declared nation from the ‘corruption’ of ‘demonic’ homosexuality that they saw represented in the actions of Western institutions (e.g., the United Nations), which attempted to ‘force’ them to accept gay and lesbian rights (van Klinken 2013). This focus on Africa’s spiritual health led Christians around the world to pray for it in a form of “spiritualized nationalism” (Gonzalez 2008: 426).
Spiritual mappers would read landscapes for ‘principalities and powers’ (Asamoah-Gyadu 2007) in which Satan ‘ruled’ part of the human world and was always seeking overpowering influence. Pentecostals maintained that territorial spirits were present in places with a wide variety of ‘social scourges’, such as crime, drugs, gangs, non-Christian healers and faiths, and the absence of church growth and successful evangelism (Lampman 1999). Problems that many non-Christians would view as secular matters, for example, the efficacy of city services, were Pentecostalized and became evidence for the necessity of spiritual mapping. For example, Kevin O’Neill (2010: 95) writes about neo-Pentecostals in Guatemala City who thought that demons were inhabiting and destroying the city through political corruption and gang violence.
Mappers investigated the historical, cultural, economic, and political history of an area. This history included war, conquest, genocide, and political violence. Places that were considered ‘worldly’ and understood to ‘encourage sin’ (e.g., escort agencies and areas where prostitutes worked, gambling and sex shops, gay clubs, and race tracks) were also mapped. Non-Christian religions and where they met for worship; places marked as ‘occult’, a broad term Pentecostals use to indicate a diversity of groups and practices, such as the Free Masons, indigenous religious traditions, and healers (who are seen as witches); and meditation, martial art, and yoga centers—all these were also investigated (Van der Meer 2010).
Hannes, who was introduced at the beginning of this article, said that detailed spiritual maps were essential. Christians needed to know what specific types of demons were present in an area and where they were located because prayers had to be “strategic” and “targeted” to have the most impact. Spiritual mappers claimed that Cape Town’s geographical position at the tip of Africa and its history as one of the first colonized areas meant that it had ‘spiritual effects’ on the rest of the nation and the continent. The mappers believed that demons would become stronger over time and would then be able to reproduce, move upward, and ‘pollute’ other South African provinces and African nations.
Spiritual mappers claimed that the ‘sin’ in a geographical area would become accumulative, helping to ‘cement’ Satan’s power. Hannes related that the first spiritual mappers of the city were “discouraged” because they saw so many concurrent territorial spirits in the city center. The following categories were plotted in the spiritual map (that was created by Jericho Walls Ministries: the Queen of Heaven (also known as the Whore of Babylon and Jezebel), Freemasonry, water spirits, and war. In a close-up of the same map , which shows the city center around the House of Parliament, the local presidential office, and the Dutch East India Company’s Garden, mappers plotted a variety of overlapping ‘demonically possessed’ objects. These objects include statues of the city’s colonial founders (Cecil B. Rhodes and Sir George Grey), non-Pentecostal religious architecture (e.g., Dutch Reform Church seals), a statue of the Virgin Mary, the Anglican St. George’s Cathedral, and the Slave Lodge. Spiritual mappers assigned the last as having multiple layers of ‘possession’ because of its history. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Dutch East India Company’s slaves were held and sold at the Lodge, and it was also a colonial brothel (Trotter 2008). This history led spiritual mappers to characterize the Slave Lodge as a ‘root’ of the colonial and apartheid-era ‘sin’ of miscegenation.
Capetonian spiritual mappers believed that this demonic stronghold negatively affected Parliament members and their decision making. Hannes said that the “ungodly” laws of the ANC-run government were evidence that the area’s “demonic covering” influenced policy makers. Donovan, a white Pentecostal and one of Cape Town’s early spiritual mappers, agreed, adding: “Our present government is also into the witchcraft of ancestry worship, so in terms of the occult everything revolves around Parliament.” Spiritual mappers such as Hannes and Donovan maintained that the nation’s moral, economic, and political future was at stake because of the effects of ‘possessed’ objects and places and ‘ancestral sins’, as later discussed.
The Politics of Space in South Africa
Although spiritual mapping is a transnational Pentecostal practice, it is distinct in South Africa because of the structural and geographical legacies of apartheid. Whites continue to hold the most wealth, and poor blacks and coloureds continue to live with less income and job security in townships. Contests over the same places are representative of larger debates about post-apartheid national ownership and belonging. South African Pentecostals believed that their country as a whole—and Cape Town in particular—was a place where histories of sin, idolatry, abuse, and ‘ancestral sins’ had resulted in economic, political, and moral failure during the rise of democracy. This contamination rhetoric was literal for Capetonian Pentecostals: demons were believed to occupy landscapes and significantly alter feelings and behaviors. As one Pentecostal white woman warned, “We’re all constantly under [demonic] attack.” The Pentecostals I knew saw the city as emblematic of a larger national breakdown in values following the foundation of democracy. Cape Town served as a symbol of the moral anxieties of the post-apartheid period. These Pentecostals said that they used spiritual mapping to police ambiguous boundaries and “protect” the city’s moral health and future.
Capetonian Pentecostals named two types of sin—’ancestral sin’ and ‘sexual sin’—that they believed were demonically based and took possession of people, who would then ‘infect’ places. People who practiced these sins were considered to be demonic interlopers. Pentecostals said that these groups ‘spiritually polluted’ the city, allowing it to become a ‘demonic stronghold’, a Christian term indicating a place with long-term demonic possession that became stronger over time and was difficult to eradicate. Satan’s demons were believed to encroach on places and to alter individual behavior. At the same time, any activities that Pentecostals designated as ‘sinful’ were said to add to the powers of demons, which became more entrenched in a place. Spiritual mappers claimed that once a ‘stronghold’ was established, it was difficult to remove because the ‘evil’ from sins accumulated and became ‘fixed’ in the landscape.
In order to understand how the racist policies of the apartheid state continue to affect post-apartheid daily life, one must understand the politics of space. Apartheid was a system of white supremacist domination that used geographical separation to isolate the races. The National Party government forcibly removed all coloured and black South Africans to townships after the passage of the Group Areas Act in 1950, which mandated that all places be racially homogeneous (Beinart and Dubow 1995). Cape Town was the most racially mixed city in the nation before World War II, but by 1985 it was the most segregated (Besteman 2008: 47). Whites were designated as the sole legal residents of the city center and suburbs, and coloureds and blacks were removed to the barren Cape Flats. Blacks were forced to move to townships such as Langa and Khayelitsha and coloureds to townships such as Lavender Hill and Mitchell’s Plain (Field 2001). Coloureds and blacks were legal outsiders whose movements were policed through violence and incarceration (Nxumalo 2001).
For many whites, the post-apartheid city is a spatial embodiment of their anxieties about losing control of the government and society. They feel disenfranchised and unsafe in democracy. Today, anyone who can afford the rent can live in formerly white-only neighborhoods. Traders can sell goods on the streets without fear of intimidation or arrest, which leads many whites to see downtown areas as chaotic and uncontrolled (Popke and Ballard 2004). Yet many black South Africans today point to Cape Town as a racist city, the “last bastion of white rule” (Polgreen 2012). White discussions of criminals, street traders, street children, and bergies (homeless people) “often serve as new ways to talk about old problems, interests, and conflicts” (Samara 2005: 220). These white South Africans attempt to veil racist views with words such as ‘order’, ‘safety’, and ‘security’ (Samara 2010: 646), while positioning themselves as the only legitimate moral residents of the city. White Pentecostals often employ the religious language of ‘ancestral sin’ and use practices such as spiritual mapping that reanimate racist ideas.
‘Ancestral Sins’
‘Ancestral sin’ is a Pentecostal term that denotes the idea that the actions of ancestors within a family, community, and place have long-term spiritual effects (Hackett 2003; Onyinah 2004). Capetonian Pentecostals across racial lines claimed that the beginning of democracy added moral and spiritual ‘weight’ to already pre-existing ‘generational iniquities’ and ‘ancestral sins’ in the city. They usually cited Numbers 14:18 in these discussions, which, in the Amplified Bible of 1987, reads: “The Lord is long-suffering and slow to anger, and abundant in mercy and loving-kindness, forgiving iniquity and transgression; but He will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, upon the third and fourth generation.” These Pentecostals employed terms such as ‘generational inequity’, ‘the sins of the fathers’, and ‘ancestral curses’ to discuss black and coloured communities. They said that sin was passed down through the generations unless someone ‘broke’ the chain of transmission through the born-again experience and spiritual warfare.
Transnationally, Pentecostals believed they needed to cast out ‘ancestral spirits’ and these spirits’ disastrous effects on individual and community success. Malevolent spirits were linked to the local (Krause 2014). Pentecostals in Telefolmin, Papua New Guinea, burned ancestral bones and the ruins of their community’s spirit house because they were convinced that their prosperity was being blocked by ‘demonic’ traditional objects (Jorgensen 2005). Adherents of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in Brazil attended weekly deliverance services to cast out Afro-Brazilian spirits they said caused poverty and violence (Oosterbaan 2011). Like other Pentecostals around the world, Capetonian Pentecostals reinscribed the ancestors and indigenous religions as ‘evil’ and believed that they needed to ‘battle’ these forces through spiritual warfare.
African Pentecostals often pointed to indigenous sacred places, rituals, and beliefs as demonic and as the root of ‘ancestral sins’, which they said have left long-standing ‘demonic footprints’ in the natural landscape that continue to have spiritually polluting effects and influence over people today. Charles Piot (2012: 114) found that Pentecostals in Togo linked Satan to underdeveloped rural villages that followed indigenous traditions, while cities were associated with salvation and modernity. Simon Coleman and Katrin Maier (2013) saw a similar dynamic in Nigeria, although Nigerian Pentecostals complicated the urban and rural split. Rurality was tainted by indigenous ‘witchcraft’, yet it was free of the ‘worldly’ temptations of cities. Many Pentecostals viewed urban areas as dangerous because they offered numerous opportunities to participate in ‘sinful’ activities (van Dijk 2007). Similarly, my informants frequently listed Cape Town alongside Amsterdam and San Francisco as ‘dens of iniquity’.
The black Pentecostals I knew were most likely to blame what they sometimes referred to as ‘traditional’ and other times as ‘ancestral’ practices, people, and places for ‘welcoming’ demons into townships and allowing them to become entrenched in their communities. Black Capetonian Pentecostals mapped areas where indigenous practitioners worked and lived and where rituals such as initiation occurred. They claimed that traditional healers left lasting ‘legacies’ in places that continued to have material consequences, such as violence and unemployment. One afternoon I visited Joshua, a Xhosa Church of the Reborn staff member, at his home in the township of Khayelitsha. He took me to Lookout Hill to see the Cape Flats. In the distance I saw an isolated camp that almost blended into the landscape. Its small structures were far away from any other buildings and under the cover of trees. I asked Joshua about it, and he said that it was an initiation camp for Xhosa boys who could not make it back to their family’s homes in the rural Eastern Cape for rituals and circumcision. He lamented that the camp was near his home because it “left negative spiritual imprints.”
Joshua, like other black Pentecostals, read the landscape for demonic signs and directly connected them to social and economic effects such as high rates of interpersonal violence and joblessness in Khayelitsha. The initiation camp was part of his spiritual map of the Cape Flats. Joshua felt that the initiation camp and other ‘traditional’ practices kept him and others from making social and material progress in the ‘new’ South Africa. He lamented that some members of his community, through their spiritual actions, were keeping the rest from being able to achieve the promises of better and more stable lives in democracy. ‘Saved’ men like Joshua believed that ‘traditional’ practices provided demons with more power, and that they needed to be ‘vigilant’ to protect their homes and neighborhoods from a ‘demonic siege’. Black Pentecostals responded to the insecurities of democracy in their communities by pointing to ancestral practitioners as dangerous moral outsiders who harmed the community and kept it from flourishing.
Capetonian Pentecostals also spiritually mapped coloured townships in the Cape Flats, such as Mitchells Plain and the Bo-Kaap, a predominately coloured Muslim neighborhood in central Cape Town, as possessed. These Pentecostals believed that the coloured community had high rates of ‘ancestral sin’ because of the perceived moral ambiguity of their ancestry. White and coloured Pentecostals frequently said that Cape Town was possessed by a ‘sexual spirit’ that was linked to histories of interracial and same-sex sexual activity in the coloured community. However, black Pentecostals rarely brought up sex or sexuality as a reason why the city was a ‘demonic stronghold’. I think they were less likely to position the coloured community as biologically or spiritually inferior, as many coloureds and whites did, because this designation was similar to how blacks were constructed during colonialism and apartheid.
Cape Town has the nation’s largest coloured community, and many Capetonian Pentecostals saw their presence as a key factor in the city’s ‘demonic possession’. The term ‘coloured’ refers to people with mixed-race ancestry. The 2011 census found that coloured people made up 8.9 percent of the nation (Statistics South Africa 2012a: 4), but they were 43.2 percent of Cape Town’s population (Statistics South Africa 2012b: 11). Many South Africans still hold racist apartheid-era ideas of the coloured community as being deviant, lacking culture, and representing the product of ‘illicit’ sexual relationships between white men and black women. Mohamed Adhikari (2005: 24-25) explains that racial mixing is still popularly understood to have led to “the combined or even exaggerated weaknesses of their progenitors and for the positive qualities to be diluted or lost altogether … because their white ‘blood’ pulls them in one direction and their black ‘blood’ pulls them in another.” This idea is shared by South African Pentecostals, 70 percent of whom “regard inter-race marriage as a form of sin” (Schlemmer 2008: 40). Many Pentecostals in Cape Town agreed and claimed that a mixed racial heritage also had negative spiritual effects.
During my fieldwork, many Pentecostals said that coloured South Africans have more ‘ancestral sins’ than other groups to overcome. Adrian, a Pentecostal coloured man, believed that the “sins of the ancestors” influence how people act today. He reported that a high-ranking government social worker said that the highest rates of childhood sexual abuse in the country were among the coloured community in the Cape Flats. Adrian said that he was not surprised because he knew, as a coloured man, “we’ve got our white ancestors to deal with and our black ancestors’ issues … there’s a lot of superstition.” He felt that black cultures left a heavy “spiritual burden” in the coloured community. For Adrian, the “harmful spiritual inheritance” of coloureds was higher than it was for others with less racial and spiritual mixing.
Adrian believed that coloureds’ greater harmful inheritance led to additional social problems on the Cape Flats, including alcoholism, gangsterism, and sexual violence. He saw himself as morally superior and free from the personal legacies of ‘ancestral curses’ because he had broken the chain of transmission through the born-again experience. Adrian felt that his salvation allowed him to become transformed into a ‘warrior’ for God on behalf of his community. Spiritual mapping was a way for him to identify types of people he saw as morally dangerous and the places where they lived or socialized, which he would plot on a map for later spiritual warfare work. Spiritual mapping was also a means to distance himself from his community and to avoid contact with non-Christians.
Most of the white Pentecostals I knew did not view their communities as having ‘ancestral sins’. They believed that this was the reason they were more prosperous in the post-apartheid period. Many of them explicitly linked the legacy of slavery in the Cape and sexual relations between different races to negative ‘spiritual effects’ for coloureds. At dinner one night, Liesl, an Afrikaans Pentecostal woman, said that there seemed to be much more incest in coloured than in white communities because “the sins of the father are passed down through generations. And there is an epidemic of sexual and relational problems in places like the Cape Flats. Morality isn’t high up on their agenda as a community.” She added that “ancestral sin invited demons” to become physically tied to coloured people and to the townships where most still live. Liesl was just one of the many white Christians I came to know who veiled racist and homophobic language and ideas within discourses of Christian morality. However, I never heard a white South African Christian reflect on how the purported ‘sins’ of the same Afrikaner forefathers also left ‘spiritual legacies’ in their own communities. White Pentecostals like Liesl, who were nostalgic for apartheid’s Christian nationalism and enforcement of segregated space, gave new impetus to racist ideas through Pentecostal practices such as spiritual mapping. These white Pentecostals had anxiety about integration and attempted to use religious discourses to mask it. They employed spiritual mapping as a way to resist and separate themselves from the ‘new’ South Africa and to revive apartheid-era ideas on racial differences as ‘natural’.
Through religious beliefs like ‘ancestral sins’ and spiritual mapping, Capetonian Pentecostals addressed the uncertainties of democracy. Black Pentecostals had to deal with ‘traditional practices’, and coloured Pentecostals with interracial sex and relationships. They associated these factors with poverty, violence, unemployment, and the broken promises of the ANC, which in turn provided demons with more ‘power’ to ‘claim’ spatial territories. White Pentecostals, however, only pointed outward when discussing ‘ancestral sins’, seeing their own communities as spiritually pure and superior. In a post-apartheid landscape in which most poor black and coloured Capetonians still live in townships and whites live in cities (although some areas in the city center and suburbs have become more integrated), spiritual mapping becomes a racialized practice because what Pentecostals consider to be ‘demonic workings’ and ‘spiritual strongholds’ occur in places that are still largely segregated by race. I next discuss how many Capetonian Pentecostals believe that democracy’s protection of gay rights has made the city even more spiritually ‘dangerous’.
‘Sexual Sin’
Capetonian Pentecostals also blamed gay people and communities for the city’s ‘spiritual possession’. Most Pentecostals regard gayness as a sin and believe that it is spiritually ‘dangerous’. For a large number of South Africans, homosexuality threatens the sustainability of heterosexual patriarchy and what is often coded as ‘tradition’. Graeme Reid (2008: 84) explains: “Gays embody the fears and anxieties of rapid social change and exemplify the fault lines of a Constitution in which individual rights are paramount and where custom and tradition have been accommodated only uncomfortably.” Gays and lesbians are symbolic of larger tensions in democracy about who should be accepted as part of the body politic of the new nation.
Cape Town has been designated the national and continental ‘gay capital’ because of its apartheid-era history of “proto-gay neighborhoods” (Gevisser 1995: 27) and its post-apartheid marketing. For Capetonian Pentecostals, a longstanding (even if marginal) gay community added to the ‘demonic spiritual inheritance’ of the city. Pentecostals who plotted places where gays and lesbians lived and socialized were part of larger negative public discourses on homosexuality and how it had contaminated the nation. Cape Town had the longest-running ex-gay ministry on the African continent, Healing Revelation Ministries (HRM). Ex-gays (a self-referential term) believed homosexuality could be healed through Christian salvation, deliverance (i.e., exorcism), long-term religious counseling, and Christian support. The American founder of HRM said that he felt “called by the Holy Spirit” to come to Cape Town because it was “in the belly of the beast” (pers. comm.), meaning that he understood it as a large ‘demonic stronghold’. Capetonian Pentecostals positioned themselves as part of ‘God’s army’, ‘fighting’ in a ‘war’ to reclaim the nation from democracy’s ‘sexual indecency’ and from its ‘sinful’ laws and their ‘spiritual effects’.
Pentecostals believed that the way a city began and who ‘founded’ it had dramatic effects on contemporary behaviors. (8) They claimed that a place’s ‘spiritual history’ influenced subsequent generations, and a major piece of Cape Town’s ‘spiritual history’ was linked to imperialism. Tristan, a white ex-gay Pentecostal leader, said that the “culture of sailors” was significant because they “ran away” from their lives in Europe to “[sexually] misbehave.” Tristan’s wife Bianca added that soldiers had similar “lifestyles” and made analogous sexual choices. The couple believed that both groups contributed to the city’s “[spiritual] possession” because of their sexual encounters with prostitutes, many of whom were not white, and with one another. Similarly, a few white HRM members independently mentioned that Cecil B. Rhodes contributed to Cape Town’s ‘homosexual spiritual covering’. Rhodes, one of the founders of the Cape colony during the latter part of the nineteenth century, was widely believed to be gay (Aldrich 2003: 92; Epprecht 2004: 104). HRM members mentioned the presence of the Rhodes Memorial on Devil’s Peak, which is part of a mountain range that dwarfs the area and looks down upon the city. They understood the memorial to be an ‘idol’ that contributed to the city’s ‘homosexual possession’. Ex-gay Pentecostals believed that ‘idols’ like the Rhodes statue directly contributed to the intensity of their ‘sinful’ sexual desires.
Capetonian Pentecostals claimed that secular democracy made Satan stronger because ‘sinful’ activities and lifestyles were now legal and socially acceptable. When I asked Tristan if he thought Cape Town was possessed, he answered with a yell—”Yes!” He added that “the spirit of homosexuality” has lived in the city since its “beginnings” and continues to grow and influence people today. He recounted his experiences at LifeLine, a free national crisis management phone service, as proof. Tristan said that the organization had performed a city-by-city comparison to see whether there were differences in the volume of calls and the nature of problems between metropolitan areas. Cape Town stood out, he said, because “it was all very sexual, like 80-90 percent of the calls were sexually related. Rape and child abuse and homosexuality and unfaithfulness in marriage—it was all sex, sex, sex.” He compared this trend to Johannesburg, where he said callers primarily complained about emotional problems within marriages, and Port Elizabeth, where callers asked for assistance with the “occult.” (9)
Tristan supported the idea that Cape Town was a homosexual ‘demonic stronghold’, claiming that the evidence did not indicate that this was a nationwide problem. He and other ex-gays maintained that the city caused a larger number of ‘sexual falls’, that is, sexual contact with other men. Almost all the ex-gays I knew asserted that it was harder for them to remain abstinent in Cape Town than it was for ex-gays in other cities with gay neighborhoods, such as Johannesburg and Durban. They saw themselves as more ‘vulnerable’ to spiritual contamination because they claimed that their same-sex desires were partly influenced by demonic interference. A few even said that they felt a ‘spiritual weight’ when they drove into the city. Ex-gay men used the language of ‘demonic temptations’ and ‘spiritual pressure’ to articulate their belief that ‘sinful’ sexual desires were impacted by demons who controlled the city. Tristan quipped: “If you want to deal with your sexual brokenness, come to Cape Town and [laughter] be exposed to it all. You can stand it in Cape Town, you can anywhere, y’know?”
Ex-gays used spiritual maps to avoid ‘possessed’ locations. Maps were physical and cognitive, and they evolved over time. Ex-gays noted the locations where they felt ‘tempted’ and passed on that information to each other in casual conversations or support groups or during counseling sessions. HRM’s offices were inside the Church of the Reborn, which was in the gay neighborhood of Sea Point. Nearby were gay bars, sex shops where pornography could easily be purchased, and an area where male prostitutes walked at night. Ex-gay men frequently used the same language as the ministry’s founder, saying that they were “in the belly of the beast,” and had to monitor and alter their behavior accordingly. To avoid what they saw as ‘temptations’, they went out in groups to get coffee or lunch, and they tried not to be in the vicinity at night unless they were inside the church itself. Below, I discuss how spiritual mapping assisted them as they ‘fought’ in a ‘battle’ for the future of their city and nation.
Prayer Marches
Besides helping people to avoid areas that they saw as spiritually ‘dangerous’, spiritual mapping also empowered many Pentecostals to ‘conquer’ areas they believed were demonically possessed. One key technique was to perform what Christians refer to as ‘prayer marches’. This involves self-designated ‘prayer warriors’ walking together into a place they designate as a ‘spiritual stronghold’ and performing acts of spiritual warfare en masse. Prayer marches could include fasting, speaking in tongues, deliverance, boisterous singing, public prayers, and “walking around demonic spots rebuking the devil and his army” (McAlister 2012: 204). The London branch of the Congolese-based Kimbanguist church had a brass band that marched in secular parades because it “allows them to ‘spread God’s vibe’, to conquer more sonic and spiritual territories” and to reclaim for God areas mapped as “sinful” (Garbin 2012: 435). In Knoxville, Tennessee, evangelicals held a “Month of Prayer” that included a “March for Jesus” to facilitate an “agenda of exorcizing, sacralizing, and reanimating the city” (Elisha 2013: 328). Pentecostals see these activities as essential pieces of winning back areas they consider to be under Satan’s control.
In 2008, HRM organized a prayer march to take place during Cape Town’s Gay Pride Parade in order to ‘battle’ the parade’s ‘demonic’ purpose and to ‘reclaim’ the area for its ‘rightful’ owner—God. A group of volunteers met at the
Church of the Reborn before the parade began. They laid hands on each other and prayed out loud for “the blood of Jesus” to protect them from any possible demonic interference. A small ‘intercession team’ remained at the church to pray continuously for the rest of the group, which was made up of 20 black, white, and coloured men and women, most of whom were in their late teens and twenties. The church group walked the entire parade route, performing spiritual warfare by ‘rebuking Satan’ and his ‘hold’ over the area.
Although these ‘prayer warriors’ had spiritually ‘protected’ themselves, the ex-gay men who participated in the prayer walk, and saw themselves as the most spiritually vulnerable, claimed afterward to be “demonically contaminated.” Many reported feeling “tempted” because they had walked through gay neighborhoods and had been in close proximity to thousands of gays and lesbians. Hugh, an ex-gay coloured man, felt under “extreme attack” from Satan beginning on the evening after the outreach event. He explained that he started having “explicit [gay] sex dreams” after a period of calm nights that had lasted several months. Instead of seeing these dreams through the framework of sexual attraction, he believed that the closeness to “demonic” gays and lesbians had “weakened” his will power.
Alwyn, an ex-gay Afrikaans man, also felt “vulnerable” after the Gay Pride Parade and struggled with the urge to masturbate, waking up in the middle of the night to “fight off” his same-sex desires. He explained: “I grabbed my Bible from my bedside table and went into intense spiritual warfare, rebuking Satan and his demons and calling on Jesus and the Holy Spirit to protect and cleanse me.” These ex-gay Pentecostals understood their increased same-sex desires through the language and framework of spiritual mapping, in which the sins embodied in a particular place could affect and alter their thoughts and desires. Like many other Pentecostals around the world, they used spiritual mapping to uncover and police areas they saw as being under demonic control. They attempted to spiritually ‘cast out’ outsiders in order to ‘reclaim’ these areas for Christ.
Conclusion
Spiritual mapping is a transnational Pentecostal practice that was unique in Cape Town during the beginning of South Africa’s democracy because it was both racialized and sexualized. Capetonian Pentecostals noted where blacks, coloureds, and gays and lesbians gathered, worked, and lived and marked these areas as ‘demonic strongholds’. The geographic and material legacies of apartheid affected what Pentecostals considered to be the key physical, moral, and spiritual hazards in their communities. Many of these legacies were categorized under the Pentecostal concept of ‘ancestral sins’, in which the actions of family and community members are understood to have long-lasting spiritual effects. The Pentecostals I worked with said they fought demons that occupied people and places and interfered with the flow of the Gospel and God’s Kingdom. They maintained that they needed to map the city to protect themselves from demonic contamination and possession. As part of a larger boundary analysis and maintenance project, South African spiritual mapping was a way to reclaim for Christ places that Christians viewed as morally suspect.
Capetonian Pentecostals were disappointed with secular democracy, particularly its liberal laws that protected customary law, religious freedom, and gay and lesbian rights. This disappointment led many of them to embrace a moral politics of nostalgia that attempted to distance itself from racism at the same time that it lauded the National Party’s Christian morality. Pentecostals claimed to be non-racist, yet they reinscribed coloureds and blacks as morally inferior through the use of concepts such as ‘ancestral curses’ and ‘sexual sin’. Altering their religious language and practice to adjust to shifting geographies of belonging and morality, they mapped Cape Town in line with the cultural and social changes brought on by democracy, while drawing on the legacies of apartheid. Capetonian Pentecostal spiritual mapping was employed in the post-apartheid period to identify uncertain moral and spatial territories in order to control and ‘conquer’ them.