Browsing by Author "Nyoka, Ayanda"
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- ItemA phenomenological meaning of testifying about suffering within an African Pentecostal church context : exploring narratives of black South African women's lived experience(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2022-04-04) Nyoka, Ayanda; Thesnaar, C. H.; Wale, Kim; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Theology. Dept. of Practical Theology and Missiology.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Discourse on collective trauma and healing in post-conflict contexts have largely focused on the role of victims’ testimonies within Truth Commissions. It has not extended far enough into the role of testimony within religious spaces where ordinary people, especially in African societies commonly engage in the practice of testifying about their ongoing suffering. This study aims through a hermeneutical phenomenological approach to explore what it means to testify about suffering within the religious context of African Pentecostal churches. It explores the narratives of black South African women who have a lived experience of this phenomenon. It departs from a broad definition of suffering and thus explores diverse lived experiences of suffering through which the meaning of the phenomenon is explored. Narrative data were collected using semi-structured interviews and analysed with thematic analysis. Interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives are used to make sense of participants’ meanings of the phenomenon. These include psychoanalytic theory of trauma and witnessing, postcolonial-feminist trauma perspectives, and theological perspectives on Pentecostal testimony and theologies of healing. The study is framed around the overarching research question: How do black South African women within an African Pentecostal church context experience testifying about their suffering? Three sub-research questions guided the exploration of this overarching question: 1) How do participants make sense of their suffering? 2) Why do they testify about their suffering? 3) How do they experience testifying about their suffering and what shifts (if any) are experienced in the process of testifying? The findings indicated that the nature of suffering that participants testify about encompass sufferings that are typically associated with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and with insidious, continuous trauma arising from multiple intersecting systems of oppression. Participants’ Pentecostal Christian beliefs about spiritual oppression were also shown to shape meanings about the nature of their suffering. Participants’ motivations for testifying varied but common among them was the need for God’s intervention enacted through the prayers of the faith community. Participants’ meanings showed that personal transformations are experienced in testifying about suffering. The findings indicated that these shifts were attributed to psychoanalytic dynamics and theologies of healing notably prayer and discernment and their interaction especially in narratives of gender-based violence. These findings call for radical theologies of healing that move beyond a psycho-spiritual orientation in Pentecostal testimony in order to respond to the continuous nature of suffering embedded in multiple, intersecting structures of oppression.