From Rap to Evangelization. Transnational Speech and Life Course of a Bishop in Ouagadougou

The story of Bishop MC Claver is rather uncommon. The son of the first President of independant Burkina Faso, he was also one of the pioneers of hip-hop music in 1990s Western Africa, while he was living in Abidjan. Settled in Ouagadougou in the early 2000s, at the moment of the Ivorian “crisis” and of the return of Burkinabe migrants to Ivory Coast, he worked to promote both rap music and a form of neo-Pentecostalism which had originated in the coastal lands. This transition from hip-hop to his ministery, far from being contradictory, is supported by the bishop’s mobilities, the links between rap and pastoral performances as well as by the urban and globalised references that are common to both hip-hop and neo-Pentecostalism.