I am God’s dog, as you probably already know. With 2025 AD coming to a close, and God still in a state of divine rest, I have time to sniff around and find out how some of the people who peddle His name are faring; what they are doing to keep themselves relevant. The showmen who do Pentecostal-styled services are, of course, very much in the limelight, as I suppose they want to be. The latest twist in their enterprise seems to be the introduction of a White man. Yes, White men.
You see, demons are a very big thing with African Pentecostal pastors and their African followers. In this respect, they are exactly like our witch doctors. A pastor or a witch doctor is usually only taken seriously if he is believed to have the power to exorcise demons or command them to perform special tasks, sometimes rather dark tasks. Because of this, it is routine for pastors to encourage or engineer conditions at their prayers in which the devotees behave as if possessed by evil spirits, presenting symptoms rather like those that schizophrenic and epileptic patients might present during severe attacks.
The pastor then intervenes to drive out the demons and normalise the devotee’s condition. The details may differ, but the witch doctor essentially simulates the same format. And Africans have shown that they are very good at this, wherever their church or shrine may be located. Indeed, the pastor sometimes exaggerates, driving exactly the same demons from exactly the same patients/believers several times every week; sometimes daily, when it comes to fanatics who go to church every day.
Are these demons so stubborn that they can always return as soon as they are driven off?
Well, good at the job as the African pastors may have become, there seems to be a trend to introduce (or maybe reintroduce) Americans and Europeans as even more powerful exorcists. That can happen. Witch doctors from distant places like Pemba and Zanzibar are also often believed to have more spiritual and magical power than our local practitioners.
As we approach 2026, we look back at the 2024 and 2025 footage and see visiting White pastors driving demons from many of our local pastors. Perhaps the cleansing was even overdue. Before Pentecostal spiritualists set up their biwempe (makeshift) churches wherever they saw a potential following, we had got used to Christian worship as cool highly ordered reflective events. You could call it ‘dull’. The Pentecostals tapped into the kind of pleasurable excitement associated with theatre and nightclubs and made their worship emotionally different. Call it ‘lively’.
The madness in the sessions involving active spirits – whether of demons being driven off or the Holy Spirit coming down – had that element, no matter how many calls and conversations with God your pastor may claim to have been blessed with. But like with all such excitement, it can wear off. And with over-repetition, a sense of hollowness creeps in.
It gets harder to convince the smarter followers that the local pastor has sufficient power to deal with demons, or even whether there are real demons to be driven off in the first place, let alone persuade them that pleasant miracles will happen to them because the pastor has smeared them with olive oil and he has been screaming all over the room. The trend of visiting Western pastors cleansing our pastors must, therefore, be viewed as a positive development, since it shows that the latter acknowledge they need correction. That is, if the demons won’t come back.