Paper short abstract:

Baptists Christians in Harare are engaged in debate about the nature of freedom as a spiritual and ethical reality. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork to explore the political implications of their religious vision of freedom in a postcolonial city.

Paper long abstract:

Residents of Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, sometimes recount a familiar postcolonial experience of being ‘independent but not free’. Within this context, a group of Baptist Christians in the city are engaged in their own debates about the nature of freedom as a spiritual and ethical reality. Their religious account challenges a reigning liberal and Eurocentric view of freedom in some scholarship and public discourse, which presumes that freedom is the capacity to choose between alternatives.

Drawing on 15 months of fieldwork with a network of middle-class Baptist Christians, I argue that these believers adhere to a “normative freedom” as an alternative to classically liberal perspectives. I show how they develop these ideas through the urgency of their daily moral deliberations as religious practitioners, with important outcomes for their political lives.

Bringing recent work in the anthropological study of ethics into conversation with emerging reflections on freedom in African Studies, I show how religious visions of freedom intersect with current questions about experiences of postcolonial life. I propose that attending to this Zimbabwean Baptist account of spiritual freedom provides a key avenue for further theorising diverse conceptions of human freedoms and the attendant political implications.