Ibrahim Abraham - Race, Class and Christianity in South Africa

This book would not have been possible without the indulgence of dozens of South Africans who shared their experiences and beliefs: pastors, church musicians, side-hustling evangelists, activists, baristas, lecturers, and many others. This book's findings emerge from the Academy of Finland project The Morality of Success Among the Emerging Black Middle Class in South Africa (Project no. 294988), with some insights also gained from the earlier Academy of Finland project Youth Music and the Construction of Social Subjectivities and Communities in Post-apartheid South Africa (Project no. 265976). Tuulikki Pietil oversaw both projects at the University of Helsinki, and I am particularly grateful for her support, along with all my former colleagues in the discipline of social and cultural anthropology where I was a postdoctoral fellow between 2013 and 2018. I am similarly grateful to Will Christie and my other colleagues in the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University (ANU) where, since leaving Helsinki in October 2018, I have been the Hans Mol Research Fellow in Religion and the Social Sciences, including a period as Convener of the Herbert and Valmae Freilich Project for the Study of Bigotry. I have learned a great deal from my research students Bjrn Sjdin at Helsinki and Shuhan Liu at ANU, from my co-lecturer Heikki Wilenius at Helsinki, from members of ANU's diverse African studies network, and from Bernard Doherty at Charles Sturt University, Master of the Occult, my co-editor at the Journal for the Academic Study of Religion. Finally, I am grateful for the support of Leanne Hinves, Helena Hurd, and Matthew Shobbrook at Routledge. An earlier version of was published and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License as Sincere Performance in Pentecostal Megachurch Music by MDPI in Religions volume 9, issue 6.

The usual caveat applies: my scholarly sins are my own.

The South African rand (ZAR) is a volatile currency that responds to economic and political events, most dramatically the surprise sacking of Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene in December 2015. Since Nene and I share a favorite Indian restaurant, Bukhara on Church Street in central Cape Townor at least according to one of Bukhara's waiters we doI took his sacking personally. The rand's value also fell heavily in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Outside of these periods of extreme volatility, the rand usually fell within about ten percent of the values indicated below between 2015 and 2020:

Contemporary international publications on South Africa usually begin by acknowledging that while race (sometimes race) is a nonsense, its language lives on in the post-apartheid era..

Nevertheless, in official and ordinary discourse white refers to people recognized by apartheid authorities as being of exclusively European ancestry, along with those who litigated their way to whiteness, such as Lebanese Christians (Yazbek 2016). Conversely, black refers to those who were not recognized as white, nominally including Lebanese Muslims, whose religion sometimes marked them as Malays (Gencolu 2015). Black breaks down into three smaller subcategories, African, Indian, and coloured. As this book focuses on Cape Town, a city with a coloured population around forty percent, nuances within black identity are more pertinent than in proximate studies focused on Johannesburg. African refers to members of South Africa's Bantu language-speaking nations, of which the amaXhosa are the most prominent in Cape Town. Bantu is