The Outsiders Dvd

Book Review

Richard Werbner is Emeritus Professor in African Anthropology at the University of Manchester. Holy Hustlers is his latest study focusing on the charismatic Christian reformation in Botswana as exemplified by the Eloyi, an Apostolic faith-healing church in Gaborone. Werbner is famous in Botswana for his Reasonable Radicals and Citizenship in Botswana (2001) a public anthropology of Kalanga elites. An earlier book on Zimbabwe, Tears of the Dead: the social biography of an African family (1992) also was quite controversial.

Werbner is fluent in Setswana and Kalanga. He loves languages and the hidden meanings that lie in words, the different levels of reality that are revealed as one probes deeper into a culture and a complex situation. He becomes excited at discovering their subtitles and delights in paradoxes. He was in Gaborone in June showing the DVD that accompanies his book and discussing it with the various audiences.

What Werbner has written about and captured in his 53-minute DVD that is also being distributed by the Royal Anthropological Institute in London, is transparent, out in the open, and there is nothing secret about it. Yet it is very controversial both in Botswana and elsewhere. He followed various healing sessions over nine months.

He is keenly aware of the ambiguity, the uncertainty of meaning, in what he has written about and captured in the footage. His approach was one of "non-preconception". He was open to learn and trust what he was observing and recording.  His is a new view of faith healing in practice. 

What has made this combined work more controversial is that the Eloyi has been caught up in conflict, schism, and legal attacks. The conflicts often involve a loss of faith in the process of healing by the prophets. They also can be generational. The young prophets have come from unusual backgrounds and outsiders may view them as "charlatans", uneducated dropouts, opportunists who are in it for the material advantages, prestige and power, and the way they are perceived by women as attractive. It is this latter that has led to issues of paternity and allegations of fornication with underage girls.  The younger generation has been open to innovation that the older generation has not fully accepted. One such example was the creation of a membership form, including a [photograph, marked by a stamp of the church, and with each member having their own file.

Covert Affairs -- "The Outsiders" -- 7/12/11 - DVD Talk Forum

Although they didn't explain how Jai & Co. got the motorcycles (which didn't bother me), they did explain the rest. Annie and Reva didn't go back to Poland, as that was where Annie thought the secret police would first be looking. So, she did the more unexpected thing and went to the Ukraine. As Annie said in the show, when they jumped into the river and crossed, they were in the Ukraine where Jai & Co. picked them up. At the end of the episode Annie was asking Augie how he knew to send Jai to the Ukraine border, and Augie said that he knew Annie and she will always do the unexpected, which he anticipated.

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