Explore the vast range of titles available.

Much attention has been paid to the growth of Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity in Uganda and the way it has shifted over the past decades from being a minority religion to influencing and shaping the Ugandan public and political spheres. Most of the literature, however, associates the Pentecostal-charismatic dynamic public action with its motivation to promote conservative Christian values, especially around issues of sexuality, HIV/AIDS, reproduction and family values. This article extends this literature by providing a fuller explanation for the reasons behind its public transformation and its relation to power, in particular its loyalty to and support for President Museveni. Drawing on participant observation and interviews conducted over several years, this article argues that along with theological and moral explanations, it is important to understand how local and contextual dynamics interplay. Indeed, the uncertainties and memories of the difficult origins of the Pentecostal-charismatic movement and the lack of legal recognition as fully registered churches, still impact on the present and motivate them to be catalytic socio-political actors in need of forging strong connections with centres of power in Museveni's Uganda.

Most of the literature on African independent churches (AICs) in South Africa has not paid much attention to their economic and developmental role. In contrast, this article will show how AICs are involved in important economic activities such as voluntary mutual benefit societies, savings clubs, stokvels (informal savings funds), and burial societies that control millions of South African rand. In light of firsthand empirical research, this article investigates these kinds of activities, and analyses independent churches' developmental role. This will allow us to better understand how these communities play a strong and supportive function among Africans in a deprived economic situation. In a period of socio-political transformation in South Africa, AICs are able to answer the needs of the people and their hunger to rebuild an identity. My major critique of classical research on AICs is the failure of the literature to address 'social change' in a theoretically adequate way, as something more than just descriptions of 'traditional' social structures away from interpretations of modernity.

Academics in high-income countries are increasingly launching development studies programmes through online distance learning to engage practitioner-students in low-income countries. Are such initiatives providing opportunities to critically tackle social injustice, or merely 'mirroring' relations of global inequality and re-entrenching imperial practices? Building on recent scholarship addressing efforts to 'decolonise development studies' and the complex power dynamics they encounter, we reflect on this question by analysing experiences of faculty and students in a United Kingdom-based online development studies programme, focusing particularly on perspectives of development practitioner-students working from Africa. We discuss barriers to social inclusivity - including the politics of language - that shaped participation dynamics in the programme as well as debates regarding critical development course content, rethinking possibilities for bridging counter-hegemonic development scholarship with practice-oriented approaches in a range of social contexts. Our analysis unpacks key tensions in addressing intertwined institutional and pedagogic dilemmas for an agenda towards decolonising online development studies, positioning decolonisation as a necessarily unsettling and contested process that calls for greater self-reflexivity.

Scholars continue to debate the issue of how African Independent Churches (AICs) relate to politics. Rather than evaluating AICs according to a literal, Eurocentric definition of politics, this article argues for a holistic interpretation of African Christianity that treats politics, like other aspects of the realities of religious communities, as integral to religious discourse. Drawing on a study - including participant-observation and interviews with leaders and ordinary members - of five independent churches in Jabulani (Soweto), the article shows that politics is not now, nor was it during the apartheid era, divorced from the religious sphere in the everyday lives of church members. It demonstrates that local religious communities vitally sustain broadly held popular expectations of obtaining the as yet unrealised benefits of social justice and full citizenship that were the promise of the liberation struggle. Space is thereby opened up to move beyond seeing politics exclusively in terms of direct opposition to or support for government policies and institutions, and to register the political nature of activities such as Sunday worship, group Bible study, and weekday evening prayer meetings.

This paper investigates the public role of mainline churches in post-apartheid South Africa and their interaction with the political discourse. The action of churches in the public sphere in the 1990s has been commonly defined as 'critical solidarity' and their voice was of support and alignment with the African National Congress ( anc ) position in the process of nation building. Through an analysis of political and religious discourse this paper aims to demonstrate that it is possible to identify a shift in the churches' action in the past five years, passing from a position of alignment and non-confrontation with the government to a situation of disengagement and critical opposition. This reshaped relationship highlights the internal and external difficulties of the anc in shifting from liberation to democracy. This is underscored by the generation of rhetoric and myth that preclude critical spaces, asserting the inalienable right of the anc to produce all political discourses.

Churches, including the Catholic Church, have always acted as development nodes in East Africa. Based on first-hand research, this article aims to offer an analysis on Christian churches in development work and to show the way churches become vehicles for new ideas and practices in contemporary Kenya. In particular this paper examines the role churches have played in promoting new types of agricultural technologies, including precursors of biotechnologies. Focussing on the Catholic Diocese in Embu District, Kenya, and its work in promoting and disseminating the use of tissue culture banana technologies, this article shows how, within the contested and political discourse around biotechnology, the church negotiated their own ethical and theological system and their more pragmatic work as a proper 'secular' development organization.

This chapter explores the dynamic relationship between different Christian churches and the African National Congress across time. It highlights the importance of understanding the interconnective and evolving relations between religion and party politics in a country in which religion plays a major role in shaping society and visions for the future. Evangelical Christianity, in the case of South Africa especially in the form of Pentecostal-charismatic churches and African Independent Churches, remained distant from politics and public engagement with political parties and political movements during Apartheid and in the first democratic era. Mainline churches, after the huge effort of participating into the democratisation process of several African countries in the 1990s and challenged by the growth of evangelical Christianity, have struggled to redefine a clear political theology of action in more times. An honourable exception being the extremely active Catholic Church in the Democratic Republic of Congo during the build-up and running of the national elections in December 2019.

For the last three decades, Uganda has been one of the fastest growing economies in Africa. Globally praised as an 'African success story' and heavily backed by international financial institutions, development agencies and bilateral donors, the country has become an exemplar of economic and political reform for those who espouse a neoliberal model of development. The neoliberal policies and the resulting restructuring of the country have been accompanied by narratives of progress, prosperity, and modernisation and justified in the name of development. But this self-celebratory narrative, which is critiqued by many in Uganda, masks the disruptive social impact of these reforms and silences the complex and persistent crises resulting from neoliberal transformations. Bringing together a range of leading scholars on the country, this collection represents a timely contribution to the debate around the 'New Uganda', one which confronts the often sanitized and largely depoliticized accounts of the Museveni government and its proponents. Harnessing a wealth of empirical materials, the contributors offer a critical, multi-disciplinary analysis of the unprecedented political, socio-economic, cultural and ecological transformations brought about by neoliberal capitalist restructuring since the 1980s. The result is the most comprehensive collective study to date of a neoliberal market society in contemporary Africa, offering crucial insights for other countries in the global South

Since the end of Apartheid in South Africa, African Independent Churches (AICs) have grown rapidly. In the past, work on AICs in South Africa has been purely anthropological or theological. The thesis uniquely places socio-political and economic factors at the core of the analysis of this phenomenon. This research embeds detailed narratives of religious life in township AICs within the broader dynamics of political transition in the post-Apartheid era, and in the subsequent reshaping of civil society and its relationship to the state. The thesis describes several AICs in Soweto, and places them within the broader contexts and concerns of politics, economic realities, the search for new identities in post-Apartheid South Africa, and above all the need for tangible socio-economic development. The classical view of the growth andpopularity of AICs has been to focus on their role in granting people protection and fortification against the powers of evil. This research also shows how AICs are involved in important economic activities such as voluntary mutual benefit societies, savings clubs, lending societies, stokvels (informed savings funds) and burial societies that control millions of South African Rand. The thesis highlights how these societies play a strong and supportive role among blacks in a deprived economic situation and that this role is stronger than in other churches. These mutual aid societies have both socio-economic and socio-religious functions. In a period of socio-political transformation in South Africa, AICs were able to answer the needs of the people and their hunger to rebuild an identity. The major critique of classical research on AICs has been its inability to address ‘social change’ in a theoretically adequate way, as something more than just descriptions of ‘traditional’ social structures. By investigating and developing a theoretical framework pertinent to the emergenceof AICs in South Africa this research has demonstrated the significance of different understandings of ‘modernity’ and how AICs develop and articulate their own visions of this. AICs have usually been evaluated in terms of their relationship with the past and with tradition, as black churches linked to African traditional rituals and aloof from Western ideas of development and modernity. However, this work elaborates on a possible avenue of escape from the modernity-tradition dilemma by understanding that the churches, by continually negotiating a path between modernity and tradition, are creating their own vision of what is modern in the post-colonial context by seeking answers to issues of poverty, democracy, instability and inclusion. It is possible to argue that when religious belief motivates people to action, its relation to politics becomes most evident. Most of the people interviewed defined their religious community as a network of solidarity to fight for their proper social rights.