Chronicity, Women’s Suffering, and Prayer: a Budding Prayer Group’s Response to Chronic Developmental Crises in Zimbabwe

Abstract

Abstract This paper uses textual analysis of an audio note that circulated on WhatsApp in 2018 presenting the founder of a rapidly growing predominantly women-only Zimbabwean prayer group. The audio note’s content is taken as an emergent ethnography exposing emic views of women’s lived realities. The analysis uses notions of ‘chronicity’, (Vigh 2008, 10–15) and ‘women’s suffering’ (Cole 2012, 384–6) to ground the audio note’s content in Zimbabwe’s prolonged socioeconomic and political crises. Chronic crises produce unique social actions (Vigh 2008), such as popular religious practices and theologies (Miller-McLemore 2018). The group prefers do-it-yourself (DIY) prayers which demand constant environmental and self-assessment, and comparing with peers. The group’s construction of women’s suffering as anathema to ideal Pentecostal personhoods discussed in four themes discernible from the audio note is revealing (Harnisch 2000). Techniques of DIY prayers echo the feminist notion that ‘the personal is political’. Thus, the group potentially contributes to gender transformation.