Mediating (in)visibility and publicity in an African church in Ghent

Abstract

During the last decades, the number of sub-Saharan African migrants in European cities has risen fast. Nevertheless, their presence seems almost invisible, both in the literature on urban migration, where we can speak about a ‘a blind spot’, and in the city, where most Africans occupy highly interiorised spaces, often in peripheral locations. In order to expand our understanding of the materiality of sub-Saharan immigrant space, I discuss in this chapter one manifestation of African spatiality in Ghent (Belgium) more deeply: an African church located in an ordinary terraced house, and therefore, quite invisible within the urban fabric. The chapter’s focus is on the dialectics between visibility and invisibility in relation to African religious spatiality and public space. As this chapter will demonstrate, African presence and place-making in the city does not necessarily translate into political presence or actor-ness, but involves, rather, a complex and ongoing negotiation over degrees of (in)visibility and levels of publicity. In my analysis, I furthermore explain how, through Afro-Christian religious place-making, new collective worlds outside the urban regularity are created in European cities, forming alternative spaces of support and solidarity among African migrants and acting as an ‘arrival infrastructure’ for newcomers. By organising parallel networks of solidarity and forming important nodes of self-organisation, these churches partially fulfil the role of the local state, which may explain the reason why they are ‘tolerated’ and sometimes even deliberately remain unseen by the local authorit