Say specific figures, like my net worth is $600 billion by the age of 45 years.
Philemon Otieno
Philemon had spent his childhood and youth close to a small market centre that was a short boda-boda ride from Chabera. His father died when Philemon was still young, and he grew up in poverty, running around in torn clothes and barely having enough food to eat. According to his narrative, his elder brother Brian one day had a vision of a British woman called Hannah who would come to Kenya to help local orphans. To reach a spiritual breakthrough, the two brothers kneeled on the bare soil every evening, directed their sight toward the United Kingdom, and prayed that Hannah would soon arrive. After an arduous time of praying, a young British woman who was keen on helping the world’s poor was spotted in the area. Brian contacted the philanthropist and told her that he knew her name was Hannah and that God had sent her. The woman, whose name was Bettina but whom her father had called Hannah when she was young, interpreted the encounter as a sign of God’s will, and inspired and financially assisted Brian in establishing his own church around Katito. Philemon thus did not encounter Pentecostalism in Nairobi, where he was an active member of a Pentecostal church for which he organized student and youth group meetings and services. He had instead been drawn into a charismatic form of Christianity by his brother, one of Kenya’s many ‘church founder-owner-leaders’ (Gifford 2009: 154) who emerged in multitudes after the ‘liberalization of the religious field’ in the 1990s (Gez and Droz 2020: 164). Like many others, Brian had transformed his church into a successful business by disseminating a ‘theological message that appeals to new followers’ in order ‘to attract financial investments, and redistribute them within a specific community’ (Gomez-Perez and Jourde 2020: 9).
Soon after Philemon sat down at our table in The Branch, one of Nairobi’s restaurants serving traditional Luo food to financially better-off customers, I realized that his plans for economic success were also influenced by globally circulating recipes of religious self-help culture.
1 While the role of religion for self-help culture has been ‘muted’ (McGee 2005: 5) in Anglo-Saxon discourse, the reverse seems to be true for the discussion of the prosperity gospel in sub-Saharan Africa. Few scholars have talked about the craze for religious and non-religious self-help literature in Africa (McGee 2012, and Boyd 2018). Being 30 minutes late to our meeting, he apologized, ordered
dawa (Kiswahili, ‘hot lemon with ginger and honey’) and some
samosa (Kiswahili, ‘fried pastry with a filling such as minced meat or potatoes’), and began telling me about his plan to visit Europe to fundraise for one of his projects in Homa Bay County. As Philemon kept teasing me with repetitive references to the lack of economic spirit of my friends Samuel and Arthur, whom he diagnosed as following a dangerous ‘philosophy of poverty’, I mentioned the chips business I had started with Samuel and how it had failed (see chapter 2). Philemon congratulated me and started to praise the benefits of failure. He, so the story went, had experienced the demise of no less than fourteen businesses. ‘It is necessary to bounce back from failure,’ he assured me, taking out a thick red notebook that contained seventeen business plans, which he called ‘pipes’ that he planned to ‘tap into’. These investment plans built upon each other in terms of the capital required to implement them and became increasingly ambitious. His more modest business plans entailed the creation of women’s groups around Chabera that would produce handmade soap bars and the sale of his own books and other merchandise that he actively advertised during church meetings (see also Bielo 2007: 316). More ambitious projects included a social media app that would take over the role of Facebook, YouTube, and WhatsApp across all of Africa and interplanetary missions to Mars, where his company would harvest rare minerals.
Describing his business ideas, Philemon tossed around extremely ambitious figures. One billion subscribers for his social media app, book sales in the hundreds of thousands, and billions of US dollars made by mining minerals on Mars. These figures had not been chosen randomly but were grounded in careful financial calculations based on detailed observations that Philemon then scaled up (see Schmidt 2017b). On one occasion when I went to meet him at a corner in Pipeline and took him to my house, he commented on the estate’s high population density. If he could convince every fourth person to buy one of his books, he would sell tens of thousands of copies. He used this figure to scale up his calculations to include the whole of Nairobi, the whole of Kenya, and finally the whole of Africa, thereby jumping seamlessly from an estate to a continent without acknowledging the problem of shifting between these levels. Such visionary quantifications were a part of a wider set of practices that causally linked mental visualization with material manifestation and relied upon what Micki McGee called ‘classic American self-improvement: the power of mind over matter’ (2005: 60). Quoting from chaper 13 of the Book of Genesis, ‘lift up your eyes and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward, for all the land that you see I will give to you and to your offspring forever’ (13: 14–18), Philemon concluded that ‘what the eye of the mind can’t see, the physical eye also cannot.’
Sitting in Philemon’s living room a few weeks later with Samuel and Arthur, Philemon mentioned the ‘300 challenges task’ he had recently introduced to his mentees. Rushing to his bedroom, he came back with two thick notebooks. One was a regular diary, the other one contained 300 goals and aims that he planned to achieve. After opening the diary, he took out and held up a cheque for five million KSh (roughly 50,000 US$) and told us that the cheque reminded him to ‘work restfully’ to assure that he would achieve his goal for the month of November: making a profit of five million KSh. Being impatient and curious about the ‘300 challenges task’, Arthur asked Philemon about it, which prompted him to open the other notebook. He started to read: ‘Reach happiness, build a house with eighteen bedrooms and 22 toilets, own fourteen jets, build skyscrapers all over Africa….’ Before Philemon could continue to engage in self-help culture’s ‘pleasurable pornography of possibilities’ (McGee 2005: 159), Samuel and Arthur burst into laughter and told Philemon that he was insane to think that any of these were possible, to which Philemon responded calmly that his ‘intentions are like prayers. I do not believe in worrying about reaching these goals. I work restfully, and things will come.’
For economic plans, consumerist desires, and personal dreams to materialize in the future, economic actors, according to Philemon, had to define them clearly by visualizing and, if possible, quantifying them. Rather than creating pressure, carefully laying out these projects and plans helped Philemon to ‘work restfully’. While Samuel and Arthur almost succumbed to the pressure caused by their own and their rural relatives’ expectations, Philemon appeared to thrive when his expectations were as ambitious as possible. Believing with certainty in the power of what self-help author and pastor Chris Atemo (whose texts Philemon was well acquainted with) called ‘God’s gift’, just like he and Brian had done until the British philanthropist had heard their prayers, Philemon’s approach ‘replaced an ascetic, self-disciplined work ethic with a vision of natural ease and plenitude, making way for a consumer culture bolstered by fantasies of boundless abundance’ (McGee 2005: 63). Because God had already planted his gift in Philemon, questioning his ability to mine minerals on Mars was equivalent to questioning a natural fact. Just as cubs become lions – one of Philemon’s favorite metaphors – he would become Africa’s Elon Musk.
Focusing on the importance Philemon ascribed to the ways in which actors planned, visualized, and quantified their future success helps to illuminate what he alluded to when he equated intentions with prayers. By intending to achieve something great, Philemon, in a practice-oriented way but comparable to praying, was ‘acting upon sacred beings’ (Mauss 2003: 56), in this case on God’s gift inside of him. According to Atemo, God’s gift constituted an actor’s ‘capital’ (2018b: 13) that ultimately remained in God’s ownership. Each person was responsible for discovering theirs by engaging in a repetitive cycle of trial and error that Atemo called ‘enterprise’ (ibid.), which was what Philemon had alluded to when he had mentioned his fourteen failed business attempts. In as much as Philemon expected to get a response from God by praying, such as a sign or some advice, the repetitive ‘embrace of the simple intention’ (Scherz 2014: 133) to become successful was thus a way to call God’s gift to materialize. If he were to fail again, he just needed to start afresh, finding new ways of intending to be successful.
2 Philemon’s ideas not only resembled concepts from the US-American New Thought movement (see Hutchinson 2014), but also ideas I encountered while working at Maendeleo (see introduction). In recent years, topics such as the economic potential of aspirations, the need to become self-efficacious, or the power of a positive mind-set, have become important in debates among behavioural economists, actors from the development aid sector, and economic psychologists (see, for instance, Genicot and Ray 2020, Haushofer and Fehr 2014, Wuepper and Lybbert 2017).While sharing the Pentecostal idea that God wants all humans to be wealthy (Bialecki 2008, Haynes 2012, Van Dijk 2010), Philemon had created a form of prosperity gospel that freed individuals from external pressure and allowed them to ‘work restfully’. In contrast to Samuel, for instance, who had the clear goal of becoming a successful lawyer, Philemon did not know how he would be successful. He just knew that he had to plan, visualize, and quantify his enterprises in detail, expect further failures, and continue to believe that one of his plans would align with the potential God had planted in him as a sacred gift. By allowing Philemon to, again and again, postpone the fulfillment of the expectation of success to a future point, when God’s gift would blossom, his prosperity gospel made him and his mentees resilient to pressure.