Plunder hell, to populate heaven : the extractive and the insertive in the Ghanaian Pentecostal diaspora

This paper examines the tension between professed individuality and performed dividuality in the Pentecostal ideology of the African diaspora in the Netherlands. The central notion of the paper is that in diasporic movement and its representation in Pentecostalism, technologies of the self are located in movement and provide an account of direction, of why and where boundaries and porosity are more closed in some instances than in others. Individuality and dividuality, belonging and citizenship, should be turned from nouns into verbs, while the ideologies that prescribe direction should be analysed in terms of their capacity to move, transfer, extract or insert. The paper is based on research among the Pentecostal churches that have emerged in the Ghanaian migrant community in The Hague since 1989, in particular the House of Truth Gospel Church International (a pseudonym)