The Pentecostal Political Imagination and the Downfall of Kenneth Kaunda

Kenneth Kaunda’s defeat in the Zambian elections of 1991 by trade union leader Frederick Chiluba replaced Zambia’s secular socialist ideology with Pentecostal Christianity as the state’s central moral doctrine. After taking office, Chiluba “cleansed” state house of evil and declared Zambia to be a Christian nation. This paper considers the growth of Pentecostalism in urban Zambia, as workers faced the decline of copper mining, retrenchments, structural adjustments, and the withdrawal of state welfare services. Previous studies have emphasized secular and materialist interests in the development of working class opposition to Kaunda’s regime, especially in the trade union movement. The ideology of oppositional urban civil society has not been considered in detail, however. Based on a close study of the Copperbelt Pentecostal Churches and Pentecostal influences in mainstream churches and in the Zambia trade union movement, this paper examines how Pentecostal Christianity contributed to the rise of an oppositional civil society and fomented the possibility of revolutionary social change, a Zambia cleansed of the evil spirit. Electoral victory over Kaunda and the symbolic cleansing of state house, often viewed as an eccentric act of the incoming President Chiluba, was in fact the outcome of the predominantly Pentecostal political theology of urban Zambians.