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Modes of Binding, Moments of Bonding 199

members, now quite some of them attend services and are officially reg-
istered members. They are attracted to Afrikania by an urge to also have
a church to go to on Sundays, by the organizational protection Afrikania
offers, or by the recognition Afrikania gives them even if they have not
attained full status by traditional religious laws. With such a diffuse
membership, Afrikania hardly forms a religious community, even more
so because most of its activities are directed more at an outside public
than at its own members.
A last group of people attracted by Afrikania, again on different
grounds, are those patronizing its spiritual consultation and healing ser-
vice. Interestingly, almost all of them are Christians and come to Afrikania
secretly. They form a clientele in similar ways as the people who are
attracted to charismatic-Pentecostal healing services. In fact, they are part
of one and the same group of people seeking spiritual answers to life’s chal-
lenges: health problems, infertility, business/money, travel/visa, marriage,
and other thisworldly concerns. Unlike the members—and there is hardly
any overlap between this clientele and Afrikania’s membership—these cli-
ents do not share Afrikania’s goal of publicly promoting ATR or its mili-
tant public discourse against Christianity. On the contrary, many of them
will, in other contexts, participate in the widespread denunciation of tra-
ditional religion and its practitioners. Instead, what draws them to
Afrikania, in secret, is a conviction that life’s problems have spiritual causes
and demand spiritual solutions that Christianity cannot offer, a strong
“belief” in the power of African spirits. They could go to any other shrine
or spiritual healer, and many Christians indeed do so, but for many others
the “civilized” outlook of Afrikania lowers the mental barrier just enough
to make the step.

Between the Public and the Priests

We have seen that Afrikania attracts both people who share its politically
motivated, anti-Christian discourse (as members) and people who seek

spiritual solutions for their problems (as clients). Afrikania’s relationship to
the shrine priest(esse)s and devotees it claims to represent and aims to
mobilize, however, remains thoroughly problematic, even though a num-
ber of them have joined Afrikania. A major gap separates the intellectual-
ist, Christian-derived reformation of Afrikan Traditional Religion that
Afrikania brings to the attention of the general public and the everyday
spiritual practices and concerns of traditional religious practitioners. In
other words, Afrikania’s modes of constituting religious bonding clash