A Reply: The Church Of Pentecost – A System Of Female Suppression

On Wednesday, September 20, 2017, I was scanning through online to get my church’s (The Church of Pentecost) theme song for the year. I chanced upon an article with the above caption that seeks to create the impression that women are suppressed in The Church of Pentecost.

I find the article not only disingenuous, but also explicitly wrong in capturing gender relations in the church as a site for power contestation. To understand male-female relations in the church, one risks drawing a hasty conclusion or jumping the gun if one fails to historicise gender relations in Akan areas, where the church was birthed. Important of note is the fact that the church does not necessarily have an airtight theology that enjoins gender segregation among the congregation. If there is gender segregation in sitting arrangement, it is more of cultural expression than theological rationality.

The Church of Pentecost was birthed in an Akan society where there was, at face value, division of labour based on one’s sex. In a very typical Akan society, females have roles that are very peculiar to them, while men also have theirs. Sometimes the roles overlap, since these roles are socially constructed. And because the roles are socially constructed, they are subject to change, depending on prevailing socio-cultural conditions.

This also means that it would be wrong to universalise and essentialise gender relations in Akan societies. It will equally be wrong to assume that gender relation among Akan people is neatly caste in iron frozen in time. From the point of view of history, the Akan society, like many societies in Africa, was contextually not known for suppressing the ‘right’ of females. Contextually in the sense that if cultural normative practices were taken out of their context, we get a very skewed and obliterated perception about a cultural practice, and consequently damn it, as the early European missionaries and anthropologists did.

One of the strongest reasons of the colonial enterprise was the alleged duty on the shoulders of Europeans to ‘civilise’ Africans. The Europeans assumed the divine duty to bring civilisation, however they defined it, to Africans, who allegedly had their sense of right and wrong dimmed by barbarity. And to rationalise this onerous adventure, the Europeans had to caste African culture in a very negative light. Their approach was similar to the proverbial expression, ‘Give the dog a bad name, in order to have it hanged.’

If the Europeans succeeded in demonising and blacklisting African cultures, then they would have enough justification and excuse to bring their so-called civilisation to Africans. In the area of gender relations, certain cultural practices, such as Dipo, Bragoro, Widowhood rite, and Female Genital Cutting were presented in a very negative light to pave way for European so-called civilisation mission, which was borrowed from the title of Rudyard Kipling’s poem, ‘White Man’s Burden’.

As part of the Whiteman’s burden, cultural practices that offended the sensitivities of Europeans were to be suppressed. Colonial anthropologists provided the intellectual and theoretical framework for the liberation of African women, which, as I have indicated, was part of European civilising mission. While my interest is not to romanticise or pacify the conscience of the Akan for some of the excesses that were done in the name of culture, I must state that the cultural practices that were considered evil and needed criminalisation had their internal logic, if contextualized within the broader framework of Akan cosmogony. Suffice it to say that some of these cultural practices would have been reformed, as knowledge increased. For example, among some Akan, it was believed that it was the woman who was capable of killing her husband.

This is vividly captured in the Akan name for husband, which is mekuno. This is a contraction of the expression, ‘I am able to kill him.’ The matrilineal structure of most Akan society made the wife the prime suspect in the event of the death of her husband. Widowhood rite was, therefore, religiously followed to clear the woman or implicate her of such suspicion.

Today, thanks to modern science, postmortem/autopsy has helped us to save our mothers from the troubles of being subjected to sometimes very grotesque religious rituals. In some Akan areas, widowhood rites are still performed, but in most cases, these rites have lost their sting. My mom voluntarily subjected herself to widowhood rite, following the burial of my father in 2009. Though it was presented to her as a choice, she was not expected to say no to the ritual.

Considering the fact that The Church of Pentecost was birthed in an Akan cultural milieu, there was a clear case of engagement between culture and Christianity, and obviously, Akan notions about women, and women/men relationship found expression in the church. It is, therefore, right that as an indigenous church, the Akan logic of gender relation was carried into the church. This is obviously not strange or aberration, considering the posture of the early church on the functions of females in the church.

This had some degree of biblical support, as some of the leaders invoked some texts in the Bible to rationalise gender relation in the church. Indeed, one must add that the colonial enterprise itself was predicated on the Victorian concept of womanhood. It is for that reason that the colonial enterprise was largely a male’s venture. And the few women who followed the European merchants and mercenaries came to provide domestic service to the men. This was expressed in the kind of education that was provided women and men in Akan areas, and by extension the colonies. The colonial education in Gold Coast, which the missionaries pioneered, trained men and women for different functions. Men were trained as administrators, while women were trained as domestic workers.

The missionaries created a binary of the private and public spaces, which had a very thin demarcation in pre-colonial Akan areas. For instance, men and women worked in the open space as farmers. Men and women could participate in political discussions. Men and women participated in warfare, though women had special roles as morale givers, and may usually not feature in the frontlines of battles. What the coloniser, including the missionaries, succeeded in doing was to create a cultural matrix of domesticity, where women were confined to the private space. Lands that were cultivated by both men and women were given only to men.

In some areas, it was alleged that most women had to use some forms of spirituality to coerce men to give them land to farm on. Also, concentrating development in some areas meant that men had to travel to urban areas to find job, and since colonial labour policies favoured men more then women, women were left at home to perform both expressive and instrumental responsibilities.

Just like any of the legacies of colonialism, segregation against women survived the colonial period, and has found expression in postcolonial Ghana. Today, the same Europeans who created an atmosphere of domesticity for women are the very same people who are screaming all over that African women are collectively being suppressed. Hypocrisy of the highest order! Mr. Kwabena Brako-Powers, the author of the article, has bought into this unfounded allegations leveled against Africans and by extension The Church of Pentecost. Obviously, for now, The Church of Pentecost does not ordain females as pastors and apostles. But that is not the same as saying that women do not perform important roles in the church. In fact, we have the women’s wing that is very instrumental in church organisation. Women are given the platform to preach.

Women work at the higher domains of power in the church. Women are indirectly represented at the Executive Council level, which is the highest decision-making body of the church. I used the qualifier ‘indirectly’, because women national leaders have the opportunity to contribute to broader discussions at the national executive levels through their male national heads.

The author touches on very peripheral subjects like women and men both not dancing together and sitting together. Here, I think the author was quite in a rush to push forward his unfettered feminist agenda. If he had broadened the scope of his visit to the various assemblies of The Church of Pentecost, he would have revised his knowledge on so-called gender segregation in the church.

I belong to the Maamobi English Assembly of The Church of Pentecost, and there, there is an admixture of both men and women in sitting position and dancing. To state it bluntly, gender segregation is not uniform in the church. Right from my days at PENSA-UCC to the English Assembly at Maamobi, I have not experienced any gender segregation.

The Church of Pentecost is a progressive church that has introduced lots of changes and (re)forms that do not have direct soteriological effect to bring in everyone to the cross of Christ. The establishment of Pentecost International Worship Centers and English Assemblies across the globe has increased the church’s adaptability to changing cultural paradigms, without watering down the sanctity of theology.

Satyagraha
Charles Prempeh
African University College of Communications, Accra