Category: Africa

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Ambrose Kolawole Dada, Research Assistant, Media and Communication, Nelson Mandela University

In a widely viewed YouTube sermon called 3 Types of Keys, a preacher, dressed in a sky blue Italian suit, holds a microphone and speaks with great assurance about spiritual matters. Prophet Shepherd Bushiri is telling his audience that their financial struggles are not accidental.

He warns that business, marriage or social standing can easily crumble if believers don’t pay their tithes to the church every month – 10% of their earnings. This message is not presented as advice, but as divine instruction.

Bushiri is one of the most influential and controversial Pentecostal prophets to emerge from southern Africa in the digital age. As journalist Pumza Fihlani writes:

This is a man who says he has cured people of HIV, made the blind see, changed the fortunes of the impoverished and, on at least one occasion, appeared to walk on air.

The growth of African evangelical movements has often been associated with self-styled pastors taking advantage of Africans who are already vulnerable. Their lives are characterised by socioeconomic failures of government, inadequate healthcare systems, beliefs in supernatural forces, and corruption-driven inequalities.

In recent years, Bushiri has been involved in a series of legal battles – including charges of financial crimes and sexual assault – leading to his exit from South Africa to Malawi, where he was born.

His sermons continue to reach masses of worshippers online, with 794,000 subscribers on YouTube alone at the time of writing. He says he has two million registered congregants today.

As media and communication scholars who are interested in religious communication, we analysed what his sermons can tell us about why his online presence is so successful.

We found that, like other rhetoric (persuasive language, for example by politicians or advertisers), his YouTube sermons are carefully framed narratives that promote ideas about faith, authority and prosperity. They strengthen the pastor’s personal influence over his audience and, at the same time, build his brand.

Who is Shepherd Bushiri?

Bushiri – called Major 1 by his followers – is the founder of the Enlightened Christian Gathering Church. He rose to prominence in the 2010s through TV broadcasts and social media (he has 5.8 million followers on Facebook alone), presenting himself as a prophet with supernatural insight.

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Read more: The rise of African prophets: the unchecked power of the leaders of Pentecostal churches

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His ministry expanded rapidly across Africa and among Africans living overseas. Reports claim that Bushiri is one of the richest pastors in Africa. His ministry reflects what has been described as “prophetpreneurship” – the strategic blending of prophecy, charisma and business.

These descriptions raise interesting questions. How are prophetic authority and prosperity communicated to followers? And what role does digital media play in sustaining this influence?

Sermons as communication

To answer these questions, we turned to Bushiri’s YouTube sermons. Video-sharing platforms play a central role in African Christianity today. YouTube has the capacity to boost religious audiences. Sermons are watched on mobile devices, replayed repeatedly and shared across borders, often outside formal church spaces.

Rather than evaluating Bushiri’s teachings as “true” or “false”, our study focused on how his sermons communicate meaning. Sermons function as public communication. Like political speeches or advertising, they’re designed to persuade, inspire and guide behaviour.

We used Critical Discourse Analysis, a research method that examines language to uncover underlying messages about power, authority and values. This was supported by framing theory, which explains how speakers present issues through storylines. A frame is simply the angle through which a message is communicated.

Four dominant themes

The analysis identified four recurring frames in a selection of 10 of Bushiri’s YouTube sermons.

1. Paying to pray

It’s a human aspiration to want to prosper. In Bushiri’s 3 Types of Keys sermon, human prosperity is closely tied to financial giving, emphasising that God requires the “whole tithe”.

South African theologian Mookgo Solomon Kgatle argues this emphasis resembles a money cult. While the Bible has references to tithing, interpretation and context are crucial. When money is a condition for divine favour, faith risks becoming about moneymaking rather than spirituality.

2. Self-positioning

In the sermon Exposure to the Spiritual World, Bushiri claims:

The spirit of God is in your nostrils; if I can breathe on you, you will see the power of God.

This teaching seems rather simplistic, and shifts focus to the self-positioning of Bushiri as a super prophet whose very breath has spiritual power.

Scholars have noted that such practices, common among new prophetic churches, can oversimplify or misrepresent spiritual truths. Despite their emotional appeal, these teachings risk misleading followers by elevating a prophet’s opinion over the scripture and established Christian tradition.

3. Building the brand

Self-branding is common in business, but in religious contexts it can be intensified. Bushiri repeatedly presents himself as a channel of divine blessings, with what he calls his “contract-winning touch”.

He recounts testimonies from international visitors who said, “Papa touched me and the contract came.” He claims that when he touches someone, he leaves a spiritual “substance” on them.

This framing encourages dependency on him. Personal contact is a drawcard for those seeking jobs or “healing” from illness.

4. Media strategy

Digital media has allowed more people to have access to more religious content, but it also raises ethical concerns. Scholars have argued that media-mediated spiritual encounters can blur the line between what’s real and what’s a performance.

In The Perfect Will of God, Bushiri claims that physical distance does not limit spiritual connection. He claims he can anoint people through the screen.

Televised images of new prophet church leaders are often carefully constructed to project success and extraordinary spiritual power, reinforcing their authority. Bushiri, for example, once made headlines for apparently raising a man from the dead.

The role of YouTube

Digital platforms intensify these frames. On YouTube, sermons can be consumed privately, without immediate discussion or challenge from a physical faith community. Emotional moments – prophecies, miracles and dramatic testimonies – are rewarded by likes and comments, and can be enhanced by controversies.

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Read more: God in Nigeria: the country’s novelists help us understand the complexity of Christianity

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Followers affirm their faith and loyalty in a video’s comments. Over time, this creates a sense of a global spiritual community centred on a single individual.

Digital religion is not only about spreading faith. It is also about expanding influence and, in some cases, monetising belief.

Why this matters

Religion plays a vital role in African societies, offering hope, identity and belonging. But religion, like all forms of communication, is not neutral. It is designed to achieve particular aims. Recognising this does not mean dismissing faith; it means engaging with it critically and responsibly.

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Read more: Jesus chatbots are on the rise. A philosopher puts them to the test

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For audiences navigating online spaces, learning to recognise persuasive strategies, religious or otherwise, is increasingly important.

Understanding how religious messages are framed can help believers make informed choices and encourage healthier forms of accountability in religious leadership.

– Prophets and profits: the art of the sell in Shepherd Bushiri’s YouTube sermons
– https://theconversation.com/prophets-and-profits-the-art-of-the-sell-in-shepherd-bushiris-youtube-sermons-276277

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Joshua Kumbani, Postdoctoral fellow, University of Tübingen

Rock art is widespread across southern Africa and includes a wide range of depictions such as human figures, animals, dots, handprints, and other painted or engraved imagery on rock surfaces. The rock art tradition of paintings was made by San hunter gatherers over thousands of years.

The first dance scenes in southern African rock art were documented 100 years ago. But there’s been some confusion as to whether certain scenes could indeed be interpreted as a dance.

Dance can be simply defined as intentional and organised bodily movement. It also functions as an expression of mood and a form of nonverbal communication. In southern African cultures, dance is also performed during moments of celebration and in ritual contexts. Sometimes dancers go into a trance.

Scholars in the past have interpreted the dances in San rock art as ritual dances, mainly trance dances. But ethnography (the study of living people) points to the fact that San communities also danced for leisure and entertainment. Hence the need to systematically examine and categorise dancing scenes in the rock art.

We are archaeologists with a special interest in sound and music in rock art. In a recent study, we examined selected dancing scenes in rock art from four of South Africa’s provinces: the Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape and the Western Cape. The aim was to categorise the different types of dances depicted and to explore whether all dancing scenes represent ritual performances or whether some might reflect entertainment or leisure activities.

We concluded that some of the performances depicted were likely undertaken for leisure and enjoyment rather than ritual purposes.

We hope that our study provides a way to categorise dancing scenes in San rock art. This framework can be refined and expanded by future researchers working in music archaeology, the study of sound and its effects, or the iconographic analysis of musical instruments and dance imagery (working out what the images mean). This kind of research also helps people appreciate their music heritage from the past.

Sources and categories

Our article examined selected dancing scenes through a literature review and by consulting the African Rock Art Digital Archive database curated by the Rock Art Research Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand.

We consulted foundational works on rock art by pioneers George Stow and Dorothea Bleek (1930), and by more recent scholars such as Patricia Vinnicombe and David Lewis-Williams. Ethnographic accounts by Lorna Marshall (1969, 1976), Richard Katz (1982) and Megan Biesele (1993) of dance among San communities in the Kalahari (Botswana) and Nyae Nyae (Namibia) regions further informed our analysis.

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Read more: An enigmatic theme in San rock paintings is finally unlocked

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We identified three broad categories of dances in the ethnographic records: ritual dances, circumstantial dances, and entertainment dances. Some circumstantial dances were performed to celebrate a successful hunt, while entertainment dances included those celebrating a newlywed couple, as well as dances done simply for fun and games by boys and girls.

We therefore argue that dancing scenes in the archaeological record should be examined critically: not all of them depict rituals.

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Read more: What archaeology tells us about the music and sounds made by Africa’s ancestors

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Six points of identification

To systematically identify dancing scenes, we applied six analytical attributes:

• body postures, including bent figures, outstretched arms and flexed legs

• paraphernalia held by dancers, such as sticks, rattles or headgear

• interaction between dancers

• evidence of synchrony (moving in unison)

• direction of movement

• the gender of the figures represented.

In the following section, we provide examples of different kinds of dances in rock art and suggest how they may be interpreted on the basis of ethnographic information.

Ritual dances

Our study identified several ritual dances depicted in the rock art, including the trance or medicine dance. (An example is the Attakwas Kloof dance image above, from a site in the Klein Karoo in the Western Cape.) This is one of the most widespread dances among San communities. It is a communal healing practice in which medicine men, believed to possess healing powers, treat the sick through touch and dispel harmful spirits or misfortune.

During the trance dance, men dance while women sing and clap in accompaniment. Some of the male dancers serve as healers. The dancers move in a circular pattern, stamping their feet until a shallow furrow forms on the ground. Prolonged dancing induces an altered state of consciousness, during which healers may fall or collapse as they enter trance.

In South Africa, several forms of trance dance are depicted in the rock art. These scenes typically show clapping female figures accompanying male dancers, who are often shown bending forward. In some images, however, the clapping figures are absent, and only the dancers are represented.

Ethnographic accounts (for example, Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, 1911: 190) note that leg rattles are commonly used during trance dances to produce a sharp, rhythmic vibration, yet these rattles are not frequently depicted in the rock art. A notable exception comes from the Halstone site in the Eastern Cape (above), where several dancers are shown wearing leg rattles. Some figures balance on dancing sticks and appear to be in an altered state of consciousness, or in a trance.

Female initiation rituals that are accompanied by eland dances, performed during the first menstruation rite, also appear in the rock art.

The women mimic the moves of the female eland, a spiritually important animal. These dances are performed only by women, usually in a secluded space. The dancers move in a circle while bending forward, and the ceremony celebrates a girl’s first menstruation. This interpretation is supported by ethnographic research conducted among San communities in Botswana and Namibia by anthropologists such as Marshall and Biesele.

Other ritual dances depicted in the rock art include boys’ initiation ceremonies, commonly known as the Tshoma. This dance marks the transition from boyhood to manhood and is performed exclusively by males. The ethnographic accounts mentioned above indicate that these ceremonies take place in secluded areas away from the main camp.

We identified some other dance scenes at G3 Site II (Vinnicombe 1976) (below) as possibly circumstantial or leisure dances and we suggested that this could have well been the case for the performance depicted at Witsieshoek (bottom).

It is likely that, because of their non-ritual nature, circumstantial or leisure dances – which ethnographic literature suggests were very common – were only rarely depicted in paintings.

– Dance scenes in South African rock art: a closer look at ritual, music and movement
– https://theconversation.com/dance-scenes-in-south-african-rock-art-a-closer-look-at-ritual-music-and-movement-275489