Ausländer!: Pentecostalism As Social Capital Network For Ghanaians in Vienna

Abstract

GHANA STUDIES / Volume 11 ISSN 1536-5514 / E-ISSN 2333-7168© 2010 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 77 AUSLÄNDER!: PENTECOSTALISM AS SOCIAL CAPITAL NETWORK FOR GHANAIANS IN VIENNA MICHAEL PERRY KWEKU OKYEREFO Introduction The general perception held by many Africans in Austria is that black Africans especially are more likely to be stopped and checked by the police for the appropriate documents. Some Africans even feel they are watched keenly by security agents, as black Africans are suspected to engage in the drug trade. This perception is often enforced by the media when a black African is arrested in connection with the drug menace. It results in stigmatization and discrimination. This experience is consistent with the familiar “demonological accounts of Western political leaders and journalists, which tend to focus too simplistically on the activities of Third World drug-­ barons” accounts, “organized around some powerful and long-­ standing myths about ‘foreigners,’ ‘aliens,’ and corruption” (Taylor 1992: 181, 183). The social atmosphere in which African migrants seek to live their lives in Austria is thereby polluted, making real their experience of “otherness” in a foreign land. Indeed, reviewing Gerrie Ter Haar’s Halfway to Paradise: African Christians in Europe, Roswith Gerloff admits that Africans do encounter “the full impact of European racism,” or at least “a fundamental prejudice which excludes peoples and fixes them, in particular those of dark colour, to a perceived “otherness,” a legacy both of slavery and colonialism” (Gerloff 2000: 507). The term Ausländer in Austria brings this “otherness” to the fore. Literally translated, it means “foreigner” (outsider, alien), the typical appellation for immigrants in Austria. On face value Ausländer is a generic term for people who hail from outside a territory (country) as against Inländer (those who hail from within), i.e., Staatsbürger, meaning citizens. However , my hunch is that Ausländer is effectively labelling that applies to all 78 Ghana Studies • volume 11 • 2010 foreigners, including immigrants from Turkey or the former Yugoslavia for example, but with a qualitative difference, the deeper the skin colour the more severe the othering. In the light of Gerloff s observation, then, Ausl änder has a specific disparaging meaning regarding a person of colour (of which the black African immigrant is the most obvious), based on location stereotypes. This paper argues that religion is an effective coping mechanism in the social context of rejection typical of the experience of African immigrants as Ausländer, in Austria. The kind of religion in question is Pentecostalism, which derives its name from the Pentecostal experience in the Acts of the Apostles. The term is, thus, used for Pentecostal/Charismatic churches that emphasize the influence of the Holy Spirit on individuals and the endowment of charismata or gifts of the Spirit on members. The research corpus on Pentecostalism suggests that this brand of Christianity is mainly an urban phenomenon with “a very international outlook” (Asamoah-Gyedu 2005: 1). In Ghana, for example, its recurring emphasis on prosperity gospel or success (Gifford 2004: 44–82) is attractive to the young, professional, upwardly-mobile class mostly based in the urban areas. Thus, the success of this type of Christianity seems constantly fuelled by a mix of both spiritual and material messages, seeking ultimately to be inserted into a global socio-economic order. Pentecostalism, thus, assumes a transnational character , which should be of interest to global migration. The growing literature on Ghanaian migration relates to the management of migration, remittances from migration, return migration, brain drain, and diaspora linkages (Manuh 2005). On the one hand these themes are interconnected in the migration nexus, depicting the high complexity of a phenomenon which, according to Aderanti Adepoju, is “historically a way of life” in the West African Sub-region. This is manifested in different patterns of migration: an “intra-West African migration; intra-African migration or brain circulation; and migration to the countries of the North, the so-called brain drain” (Adepoju 2005: 24). On the other hand, the various themes in the migration discourse point to specific aspects of social Okyerefo • Ausländer! 79 interaction, which they variously interrogate. Thus, one could focus on networks that migrant workers...