Alan Tacca
By Alan Tacca
A randomly chosen mid-morning or mid-afternoon, on a working day, is an interesting time to watch a Pentecostal /Born Again prayer performance.
Be fair. Do not go to an upstart’s papyrus shack in a slum back street. And do not go to the very big churches owned and operated by aging rich ‘celebs’.
Go to an average outfit in reasonably decent surroundings.
There are hundreds of such churches in Kira Municipality alone. A few days ago, I stopped at one and marvelled at the sanity of the worshippers.
From 50 metres away, you could feel the thunder from the church shaking the ground.
The church is a large high-roofed building made of concrete bricks.
The doorways are huge and open. I enter and watch.
The big black loudspeakers are driven by disco-grade hardware, delivering an alternation of voice and music.
The volume is unbearable. In two rooms adjacent to the church, four and five-year infants are in class. The teachers are struggling to be heard. The area is otherwise a residential neighbourhood.
In the church, the woman/pastor screaming in the mic just a few feet from the loudspeakers is not troubled at all.
A man, probably a sound equipment attendant, stands by.
I shift focus to the congregation.
It is approaching 4pm, and in this large chamber on Tuesday, the congregation is exactly two women!
One was roaming about, zombie-like, her arms and closed eyes raised skyward. She was muttering very rapidly.
The other woman was seated on the floor, one of her legs stretched out. She was doing something that seems to be a trend. She was bobbing her head violently.
There is a condition called the ‘nodding disease’ in northern Uganda, perhaps linked to some nervous/mental trauma or disorder. Has the disease inspired the Pentecostal nodding trend?
In many primitive religions, mental disorientation is often associated with the presence of spirits, good or evil, and it is sometimes induced by administering mind-altering drugs.
A manipulative use of intense rhythmic sound and light can also induce the desired mental distortion in the subject.
This is part of the theatre where the Pentecostal and the witchdoctor meet – and also clash. Going ‘zonto’ is regarded as going higher. You may even begin to speak in ‘tongues’.
Your pastor is imitating the witchdoctor, but every day he preaches that he is doing the opposite of what the witchdoctor does.
Citing the case of Bunyoro traditionists who volunteered to ritually dedicate 2021 presidential candidate Joseph Kabuleta, a Munyoro, to their tribal spirits, a bunch of Impact FM Pentecostal pastors recently mockingly dismissed the power of African spirits.
But Kabuleta, a fervent Pentecostal, was under the spell of Pastor/Prophet Elvis Mbonye. Pictured literally kissing Mbonye’s feet, Kabuleta must have prayed to Jesus for the presidency.
This is history: Neither the Bunyoro spirits nor Jesus delivered what Kabuleta wanted.
Not for the first time, when President Museveni recently opined that African traditionists (he loosely referred to them as ‘abalogo’) should be tolerated, I suspect it is because he observes the overlapping features in different belief systems without sentimentality.
The Pentecostal pastors he infuriates (or who pretend to be infuriated) when he is in that mode just do not understand (or do not want their followers to understand) the ancient origins of their own faith.
They need more education, or scholarship; just like the witchdoctors. Then they will be more inclined to tolerate witchdoctors as fellow spiritualists. They could even sit together at the Inter-Religious Council, plotting how to milk Uganda’s helpless taxpayers.
Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.
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