My Beauty Best Teacher

Grant Brooke writing in the Huffington Post:

...in Nairobi I sat down for curbside soda with a local street vendor to chat politics and theology. Because of his liberal politics, I expected to hear a liberation theology, so I was surprised when he offered a simple prosperity Gospel message asserting, to paraphrase him, that God does not desire poverty for anyone, and that those who have faith can lift themselves from poverty. At its core, these beliefs are a statement of autonomy and upward mobility placed into theologized language.
This is a discovery I am not alone in. Peter Berger, father of American Sociology of Religion, went to South Africa and found the same core message as the Kenyan street vendor driving prosperity teaching there, leading him to pen a scathing sociological piece against the prosperity Gospel's opponents in The Wall Street Journal. And the late David Martin, of the London School of Economics, demonstrated in his comprehensive studies of Pentecostalism in Latin America that church-goers who believe in God-given prosperity are more autonomous, economically responsible, self-confident, and optimistic about life outcomes than their Mainline Protestant and Catholic counterparts. He called this belief "betterment" and argued that it bore itself out in greater chances for upward mobility into the emergent Latin American middle class. A belief in one's own prosperity, Martin suggests, is often a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Eliza Griswold at the Atlantic writes about Religion in Nigeria:

Prosperity Gospel is more a symptom than the disease,” Father Matthew Hassan Kukah, the Roman Catholic author of Religion, Politics and Power in Northern Nigeria, told me in his office above a Catholic church in the city of Kaduna, at the northern edge of the Middle Belt. To his mind, Nigerians’ resort to religion to achieve prosperity was a natural response to their corrupt political landscape and the absence of any civil government. “You can buy a car and insure it,” he continued. “You don’t need a priest to pray over the car, to bless your house to keep robbers away … Here, there’s no guarantee. God is being called upon to police a lot of areas of our lives.” This need for God’s protection isn’t only individual, but collective and political, given the collapse of the state...[continue reading]

In Kuweni Serious Njoki Ngumi writes:

Kenya is not just disgusting roads, bad mobile service providers that won’t let us send texts for free, prosperity-gospel preachers, ‘internationally-certified’ pseudo-universities giving poor quality education, HATEFUL POLITICIANS WHO FIGHT FOR THE NEWS CAMERAS AND PLAY GOLF TOGETHER ON WEEKENDS, narrow-minded mothers-in-law who frown upon marrying someone from another tribe, hospitals where they steal government supplies and sell them back to patients, KPLC publishing a power-rationing schedule then not sticking to it and the epidemic of married men and women with ‘mpango wa kando’.
Kenya is people. Individuals with a voice that can become a collective cry for change. Kenya is you. Kenya is me. Kenya is hating it, but getting up and saying you’ll try, grabbing your shovel to start the clean-up of the Crap Mountain, like all the inspiring people above have done and continue to do.

Chika Unigwe writing in the Guardian:

Image by dan mogford via Flickr

In a society where the pursuit of money takes precedence over everything, one can expect a decline in culture and in the quality of cultural production.Regrettably, this is going on. People are reading, but it's a different sort of literature: self-help books published mainly by evangelical pastors eager to win souls over to the gospel of prosperity. There is art on the street, but it is splashes of paint on trucks and buses, outsized drawings (usually religious, with a blonde Jesus). There is nothing of the grandeur and quality of Ife art in it...Perhaps this is too pessimistic. I was witness in Nigeria to the collective sense of hope in a people who, like the phoenix, keep rising from the ashes. There is a renaissance in Nigerian literature...