Animating Performances: Prayers and African Popular Pleasures

This article posits that prayer is one of the popular activities that produce pleasure and animate social life in African societies. Focusing on a genre of prayer called "spiritual warfare" (also called "violent" or "deliverance") prayers, this article explores how the creativity infused into performing prayer enlivens both the art and the society that witnesses it. While prayer remains a spiritual activity, its social performance requires some aesthetic competence and innovations to be vivacious and pleasurable, retaining its animating quality despite its ubiquity. In a culture where leisure activities can be either lacking or entirely unaffordable, activities like prayer are ways in which society derives its pleasures. The moral authorities that package prayer, whether as commodities, spectacles, or sacred exercise, are all too aware of this aspect of its functions. As prayer is expressed in every aspect of life and does not always require a closed-off space, this article argues that, though a sacred activity, its banalization calls for it to be viewed as more than the "other" of secular performances.