Introduction

Urban migration scholarship in Africa has long been guided by assumptions of secular modernity, framing cities as spaces governed primarily through formal institutions, economic rationality, and bureaucratic regulation. Within this paradigm, religion and spirituality are often treated as peripheral to the urban experience: residual cultural elements that are destined to fade with modernization. The city, in this narrative, is conceived as the locus of state rationality and capitalist order, while “tradition” is relegated to the rural or the archaic. Yet, such a view has become increasingly untenable in light of ethnographic evidence across the continent showing that spiritual forces, ritual economies, and invisible infrastructures continue to shape everyday urban life and political authority (Geschiere, 1997; Comaroff and Comaroff, 1999; De Boeck and Plissart, 2014). The growing body of work on occult economies, Pentecostal modernities, and religious spatialities suggests that African cities are not becoming secular; they are becoming differently enchanted (Geschiere, 1997; Meyer, 2015; Mbembe and Nuttall, 2004).

Despite this turn toward acknowledging spiritual vitality in urban spaces, the intersection between migration, spirituality, and placemaking remains under-theorized. Most studies of African urban migration continue to prioritize economic integration, housing markets, informal labor, or legal citizenship (Bhanye, 2023; Bakewell, 2013; Landau, 2008; De Haas et al., 2019). While these dimensions are undeniably important, they obscure the extent to which migrants also mobilize religious and ritual repertoires to materialize claims to space and authority. For displaced or stateless populations, the invisible world of spirits, ancestors, and ritual obligations may offer more reliable mechanisms of belonging and governance than the state itself (Nyamnjoh, 2006; Geschiere, 2013). The neglect of these dimensions reproduces a “secular illusion”: an epistemological bias that treats spirituality as symbolic rather than structural, and belief as an individual psychological domain rather than a collective political infrastructure (Mbembe, 2001).

This paper intervenes in that gap by examining how displaced Malawian migrants (herein referred to as Lydiatians) in Zimbabwe’s peri-urban frontier of Lydiate mobilize spiritual infrastructures, especially the Nyau tradition, witchcraft idioms, and Pentecostal networks, to make and defend place in conditions of exclusion. Lydiate, situated on the edge of Norton town, represents a paradigmatic case of what can be termed a rough frontier: a zone where formal state authority, property rights, and citizenship are fragile, and where governance is enacted through improvisation, negotiation, and often fear (Nyamwanza and Dzingirai, 2020). For descendants of Malawian farmworkers expelled during Zimbabwe’s Fast Track Land Reform Programme (Moyo, 2000; Daimon, 2015), formal tenure and political inclusion remain elusive. Lacking recognized citizenship and legal claim to land, these migrants turn to invisible infrastructures, the authority of ancestral spirits, ritual performances of the Nyau society, and the deterrent power of witchcraft to establish territorial control and moral legitimacy. In doing so, they create what this paper conceptualizes as spiritual placemaking: the use of ritualized and spiritual practices as technologies of spatial governance, through which migrants transform precarious land into recognized and protected social territory.

The argument builds on emerging debates about the materiality of the spiritual in African urban life. Scholars like Geschiere (1997) and the Comaroff and Comaroff (1999) have shown that occult and religious practices are not antithetical to modernity but are produced by it, providing moral and political languages for navigating neoliberal uncertainty. Similarly, Nyamnjoh’s (2016, 2020) work on incompleteness and conviviality offers a powerful lens for understanding how migrants forge social and spatial presence through flexible, hybrid, and spiritually grounded strategies of inclusion. These insights suggest that spirituality is not merely a coping mechanism for marginality but a generative infrastructure through which people claim visibility, protection, and permanence in volatile urban environments. Focusing on Lydiate, this paper contributes to these debates by demonstrating that the Nyau tradition, often dismissed as “witchcraft” or “cultic” practice, functions as a performative system of governance, mediating land claims, disciplining community behavior, and producing authority in the absence of the state.

Beyond challenging secular biases in urban theory, this analysis also rethinks the political language of citizenship and belonging. Following Aihwa Ong’s (1999) notion of graduated sovereignty, the paper argues that Malawian migrants in Zimbabwe inhabit a condition of partial recognition, where formal enfranchisement does not translate into substantive citizenship. Their marginality is sustained not simply through law but through the spatial politics of exclusion that define Zimbabwe’s peri-urban zones (Bhanye et al., 2024; Muzondidya, 2007). In response, the Nyau tradition and related spiritual practices provide alternative pathways to recognition, what I term spiritual citizenship. This form of citizenship derives not from state documentation but from participation in ritual systems that confer legitimacy, fear, and respect within local social orders. Through public processions, ancestral invocations, and symbolic control of land, Nyau practitioners convert spiritual authority into territorial power, transforming marginal squatter settlements into spiritually protected zones.

The Lydiate case thus compels a broader theoretical reconsideration of how placemaking operates in African urban margins. Rather than viewing informal settlements as spaces of lawlessness or deprivation, this paper approaches them as sites of complex spiritual and political innovation. Here, the invisible: spirits, rituals, and cosmological hierarchies, constitutes the architecture of governance. Understanding these dynamics requires a departure from dichotomies of modern/traditional or secular/religious, and an appreciation of “the occult infrastructures of the everyday city” (De Boeck, 2015).

The paper proceeds in six sections. Following this introduction, “Conceptual framework” situates the argument within existing theoretical debates on spiritual infrastructures, placemaking, and migrant authority. “Methodology” outlines the ethnographic methodology and field context. “Lydiate: the peri-urban frontier” to “Witchcraft as defensive placemaking” present and discuss the findings, examining how Nyau rituals, witchcraft practices, and Pentecostal churches each function as competing but intertwined infrastructures of spiritual placemaking. The final section concludes by advancing the concept of spiritual placemaking as an analytical framework for understanding urban governance, belonging, and survival in Africa’s peri-urban frontiers.

Conceptual framework

Placemaking and authority

Placemaking in African urban contexts extends far beyond the physical act of building dwellings or claiming land; it encompasses the social, moral, and spiritual processes through which individuals and communities render space meaningful and authoritative. AbdouMaliq Simone’s (2004) concept of people as infrastructure offers a foundational lens for understanding how urban residents in conditions of precarity creatively mobilize social relations, moral obligations, and affective ties to produce functional urban systems in the absence of formal institutions. Simone demonstrates that African cities operate through “constellations of provisional alignments” (2004), where governance is relational, improvised, and often invisible to formal planning regimes. While Simone foregrounds the social and economic dimensions of these networks, subsequent scholars have extended his insights to include the spiritual and cosmological (De Boeck, 2015; Mbembe and Nuttall, 2004). In peri-urban Zimbabwe, Nyau rituals, witchcraft practices, and Pentecostal affiliations constitute precisely such infrastructures, performative and spiritual assemblages through which migrants create both moral and territorial order.

Placemaking thus emerges not simply as a material practice but as a political and cosmological process. Aihwa Ong’s (1999) work on flexible citizenship is instructive here: she argues that citizenship and belonging are not fixed legal statuses but fluid practices negotiated through multiple institutions, moral regimes, and affective attachments. Migrants in precarious contexts “make place” by weaving together overlapping forms of recognition and legitimacy, religious, kin-based, spiritual, and bureaucratic, depending on what is locally accessible and politically viable. Similarly, Nyamnjoh (2016) advances the notion of incompleteness to describe African social life as perpetually in motion, marked by porous boundaries and the constant negotiation of belonging. In his later work, Nyamnjoh (2020) situates this incompleteness as a productive condition through which people sustain conviviality and co-existence, even amid structural inequalities.

Graduated sovereignty and incomplete citizenship

Ong’s (1999) concept of graduated sovereignty provides a critical vocabulary for understanding how the modern state produces hierarchies of citizenship, allowing certain populations to enjoy full rights while others remain in conditions of partial recognition. For Ong, states exercise sovereignty in uneven and flexible ways, granting or withholding citizenship depending on economic utility, political loyalty, or racialized belonging. This framework resonates strongly in Zimbabwe, where Malawian descendants, recruited as colonial laborers and later displaced during land reforms, occupy a liminal position within the national order (Daimon, 2015; Muzondidya, 2007). Despite their long residence, they remain symbolically and politically “non-citizens,” excluded from land redistribution and enduring stereotypes as mabwidi, people without totems or legitimate roots.

Nisha Vora’s (2020) notion of impossible citizens deepens this insight by showing how states construct inclusionary frameworks that simultaneously deny full recognition to certain groups. In her analysis of South Asian migrant workers in Dubai, Vora argues that these individuals are “permitted to belong economically but not politically” (2020). This paradox, of presence without belonging, captures the condition of Malawian migrants in Lydiate, who are physically embedded in Zimbabwean society but remain legally and symbolically excluded. Their position exemplifies what Nyamnjoh (2006) describes as insiders and outsiders: populations perpetually at the threshold of recognition, whose partial inclusion reproduces the hierarchies of postcolonial sovereignty.

Spiritual infrastructures: Enchantment as governance

The concept of spiritual infrastructure offers a lens to theorize how enchantment operates as a material and political force in urban governance. Peter Geschiere’s (1997) The Modernity of Witchcraft was among the first to show that far from being remnants of a pre-modern past, witchcraft and other occult practices intensify under conditions of capitalist modernity, mobility, and political uncertainty. For Geschiere, the proliferation of occult discourses is symptomatic of the moral and relational anxieties produced by neoliberal transformation, where wealth and power appear to flow through invisible means. Comaroff and Comaroff (1999) extended this argument through their concept of occult economies, showing how magical and spiritual practices emerge as rational responses to the contradictions of global capitalism, providing alternative logics of accumulation and governance. These scholars collectively demonstrate that spirituality in contemporary Africa is not a passive cultural residue but an active, dynamic infrastructure through which people navigate inequality, exclusion, and modernity’s dislocations.

Building on this corpus, De Boeck (2015) argues that African cities are organized as much through “occult infrastructures” as through material ones, where spirits, ancestors, and invisible powers shape urban morphology and everyday governance. In peri-urban contexts like Lydiate, the Nyau tradition exemplifies such an infrastructure: its rituals and performances establish territorial order, regulate behavior, and enforce norms through affective and spiritual means. Fear of ancestral reprisal or mystical harm functions as a disciplinary mechanism, replacing absent legal institutions. As Comaroff and Comaroff (2005) note, these forms of spiritual governance produce “a politics of the invisible,” where unseen forces become the ultimate arbiters of legitimacy and power. This perspective challenges the enduring secular bias in urban studies that equates governance with legality and rationality. Instead, it suggests that the spiritual is not outside politics but one of its constitutive modalities.

Methodology

This study draws on an interpretive ethnographic methodology designed to capture the lived practices, symbolic meanings, and invisible infrastructures through which displaced Malawian migrants in Zimbabwe’s peri-urban frontier of Lydiate negotiate authority, land, and belonging. Ethnography was selected because it provides the depth, reflexivity, and temporal engagement necessary to access complex spiritual and social worlds that are often inaccessible through surveys or short-term field visits (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2019; Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw, 2011). In contexts where authority operates through secrecy, fear, and ritual performance, long-term immersion allows the researcher to grasp both the explicit and the hidden dimensions of social life (Scott, 1990; Clifford, 1986).

Ethnographic immersion and data collection

Fieldwork was conducted over an eighteen-month period between July 2018 and January 2020. This prolonged engagement was critical for developing trust and gaining access to spaces and practices, such as Nyau initiations and witchcraft consultations, that are usually closed to outsiders. Following Marcus’s (1995) notion of “multi-sited ethnography,” the research traversed overlapping social worlds: ritual gatherings, Pentecostal church services, informal land negotiations, and everyday domestic life. Observation occurred both in public and semi-private contexts, encompassing Nyau ceremonies, funerals, weekend processions, and Pentecostal crusades. This strategy of “partial participation” (Jackson, 1989) balanced participation and observation, enabling insight into the performative dimensions of ritual authority while maintaining ethical distance.

Data were gathered through a combination of participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and informal conversations. Thirty participants, comprising men and women of Malawian descent, from the age of 18, were purposively selected to reflect diverse generational, gendered, and religious perspectives. This included active Nyau members, Pentecostal converts, traditional healers, and non-affiliated residents. Purposive and snowball sampling were used to identify key interlocutors, given the sensitivity surrounding occult and ritual practices (Bernard, 2017). Interviews were conducted primarily in Shona, later translated into English, and focused on experiences of land access, spirituality, fear, and authority. Field notes, ritual descriptions, and recorded interviews were triangulated to corroborate accounts and identify convergences across different actors and spaces (Denzin, 2017).

Triangulation was especially valuable in addressing the interpretive challenges posed by secrecy and rumor. For example, claims about witchcraft-related land conflicts were cross-checked through multiple testimonies from Nyau members, Pentecostal leaders, and indigenous caretakers living adjacent to Lydiate. Observational data, such as attendance at Nyau dances or church healing sessions, were compared with interview narratives to discern discrepancies between discourse and practice. Through this iterative process, the analysis moved beyond surface narratives of “belief” toward a more grounded understanding of how spiritual infrastructures materialize and regulate everyday life (Desjarlais and Throop, 2011).

Analytic approach

Data analysis followed a grounded, inductive process informed by interpretive anthropology (Geertz, 1973) and political ethnography (Schatz, 2013). Field notes and interview transcripts were coded thematically using NVivo software, with initial categories drawn from both the research questions and emergent field themes, such as “spiritual protection,” “land fear,” “ritual masculinity,” and “Pentecostal legitimacy.” Analysis sought to interpret how participants articulated relationships between land, authority, and the invisible, emphasizing meaning-making rather than verification. This interpretive approach recognizes that ethnography is both empirical and representational: it constructs knowledge through dialogue between researcher and participants (Clifford and Marcus, 1986). As Comaroff and Comaroff (1992) argue, the anthropologist’s task is not just to document the exotic but to reveal how local worlds illuminate broader social processes, in this case, how spirituality becomes a political infrastructure under conditions of displacement. Consequently, analysis moved continually between emic understandings of ritual power and etic theoretical frameworks on governance, sovereignty, and urbanism.

Ethical and positional considerations

Working with displaced and often undocumented migrants raised complex ethical challenges. Many participants faced legal precarity and social stigma due to their Malawian descent and association with Nyau or witchcraft. Ethical protocols were guided by the University of Zimbabwe Research Ethics Committee (UZREC/2018/0103), emphasizing informed consent, anonymity, and participant safety. Informed consent was obtained verbally and, where feasible, in writing. Given the risks of exposure, pseudonyms were used for all participants, and sensitive information, such as ritual sites and accusations of witchcraft, was anonymized or paraphrased to prevent identification.

The researcher’s positionality required constant reflexivity. As a Zimbabwean scholar with partial insider familiarity but outsider status to the Nyau fraternity, access was negotiated through gatekeepers, including community elders and church leaders. Reflexive awareness was critical for managing the politics of trust and suspicion inherent in studying secretive spiritual systems (England, 1994; Davies, 2012). This involved maintaining ethical distance from ritual participation while showing respect for local cosmologies and avoiding dismissive or pathologizing interpretations of belief. Following Scheper-Hughes’s (1995) notion of “ethical witnessing,” the researcher aimed to engage compassionately with participants’ moral worlds without romanticizing them.

Lydiate: The peri-urban frontier

Lydiate (Fig. 1), a sprawling informal settlement on the outskirts of Norton, west of Harare, epitomizes what scholars of African urbanism describe as the peri-urban frontier, a liminal zone between the formal and the informal, legality and illegality, citizenship and statelessness (Bhanye et al., 2025). The area emerged as a resettlement site for displaced farmworkers, many of Malawian descent, who were evicted during Zimbabwe’s Fast-Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) between 2000 and 2005 (Moyo, 2000; Rutherford, 2016). Once resident laborers on white-owned commercial farms, these families became landless when their employers were expelled and estates subdivided. Lacking recognized citizenship or ancestral claims to Zimbabwean land, they were excluded from both state resettlement schemes and traditional communal areas (Daimon, 2015; Muzondidya, 2007). Their displacement was thus not just spatial but ontological, a loss of moral and political ground that rendered them strangers within the nation.

Fig. 1: Area of study—Lydiate squatter settlement.
Fig. 1: Area of study—Lydiate squatter settlement.The alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.
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A Zimbabwean Map. B Lydiate Locality Map. C Lydiate Squatter Settlement Map. Source: Author.

The settlement’s emergence reflects the expansion of peri-urban zones where dispossessed populations build precarious livelihoods through informal housing, vending, and piecework (Potts, 2010). Lydiate sits on the edge of a former tobacco estate, its landscape characterized by irregular plots, makeshift dwellings, and absent infrastructure (Bhanye et al., 2024). Yet beneath this apparent disorder lies a complex moral geography sustained by spiritual and kinship networks. With the state largely absent, governance and belonging are negotiated through ritual authority, ancestral legitimacy, and charismatic religiosity. African urban frontiers thrive on improvised sovereignties—constellations of actors and practices that produce order where formal governance fails (Simone, 2004). In Lydiate, this improvisation takes a spiritual form: authority is enacted through Nyau rituals, witchcraft discourses, and Pentecostal deliverance, all of which serve as technologies of territorial control and moral regulation.

Historically, Malawian migration to Zimbabwe dates back to the late nineteenth century, when colonial labor recruitment drew tens of thousands of men from Nyasaland to work on mines and farms (Phiri, 1975; Chirwa, 1997). These migrants were incorporated as alien natives—permanent outsiders whose labor sustained settler agriculture but whose belonging was perpetually conditional (McCracken, 2012). After independence in 1980, their descendants remained largely invisible in the nationalist imagination, lacking totems (mitupo) and ancestral land claims, which are key markers of belonging in Shona cosmology (Muzondidya, 2007). During the FTLRP, these “foreigners” were often accused of complicity with former white farmers or of being sell-outs and were forcibly evicted without compensation (Daimon, 2015). Many sought refuge in peri-urban fringes like Lydiate, where land could be occupied informally but remained legally ambiguous.

This history situates Lydiate as a rough frontier: socially and spatially unstable zone where the state’s authority is weak, and residents rely on improvisation, negotiation, and sometimes intimidation to secure land. In such spaces, boundaries are not fixed but continuously re-enacted through performance, rumor, and spiritual display. Fear and uncertainty are pervasive, yet they also serve as resources for governance. As Geschiere (2013) notes, fear in postcolonial Africa is both an affective and political technology—it organizes relationships of power and accountability in the absence of bureaucratic oversight. In Lydiate, the fear of witchcraft, ancestral punishment, and spiritual retaliation operates as a regulatory force that disciplines behavior and deters transgression.

The settlement’s spatial organization embodies this moral logic. Homesteads are informally demarcated, but ownership is affirmed through ritual acts, libations, ancestral invocations, and nocturnal Nyau processions that consecrate land. These acts transform otherwise illegal occupations into morally legitimate spaces. One elderly resident explained during fieldwork that “the soil listens when Nyau dances,” a phrase that encapsulates how ritual performance is understood as communicative with the land and its unseen custodians. This resonates with De Boeck’s (2015) observation that African cities are structured as much by invisible infrastructures—spirits, ancestors, and moral forces, as by concrete and roads. In Lydiate, Nyau processions, funeral performances, and initiations materialize an alternative spatial order: they define community boundaries, mark the transition between sacred and profane space, and instantiate the authority of those who command ritual power. Figure 2 shows precarity, poor infrastructure, inadequate sanitation, and spatial improvisation that typify everyday living conditions in Lydiate, where residents continuously negotiate safety, privacy, and dignity within limited resources.

Fig. 2: Everyday materialities of precarity in Lydiate.
Fig. 2: Everyday materialities of precarity in Lydiate.The alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.
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Source: Fieldwork.

Precarity in this sense is generative. The uncertainty of tenure and the fragility of citizenship do not merely produce victimhood; they foster new forms of creativity and governance. Migrants improvise moral economies where legitimacy is derived from ancestral continuity rather than state recognition. This echoes Nyamnjoh’s (2016) notion of incompleteness, where social life in Africa is defined by perpetual negotiation and improvisation rather than finality. In Lydiate, incompleteness manifests spatially, the settlement is never fully legal nor fully illegal, and spiritually, as residents oscillate between Nyau allegiance, Pentecostal salvation, and fear of witchcraft. These overlapping regimes constitute a plural field of governance in which no single institution monopolizes authority.

Pentecostal churches, proliferating since the early 2000s, add another layer to this moral geography. They promise deliverance from witchcraft and poverty, offering migrants an alternative vocabulary of modernity and legitimacy (Meyer, 2009; Maxwell, 2006). Yet their presence also intensifies spiritual competition. Nyau adherents accuse Pentecostal pastors of disrespecting ancestors, while Pentecostals denounce Nyau as demonic. These rival cosmologies coexist uneasily, producing what Bialecki (2017) calls “plural infrastructures of faith,” where competing claims to divine power reflect broader struggles over territory and belonging. For many migrants, switching between or combining these affiliations is a pragmatic strategy of survival, aligning with whichever spiritual infrastructure offers the most protection or opportunity at a given time.

At the same time, spiritual authority intersects with gender and generation. Older men, often initiated into Nyau, wield ritual power to defend land and enforce moral codes, while women and youth engage more actively with Pentecostal movements that promise empowerment and economic mobility. This generational divide mirrors broader shifts in African religiosity, where younger populations gravitate toward global Pentecostal imaginaries that valorize prosperity and modernity (Englund, 2011). In Lydiate, these divergent orientations create a moral economy of coexistence and tension, shaping how space and power are negotiated on the ground.

The peri-urban frontier thus emerges as a space of paradox: exclusion and innovation, fear and solidarity, illegality and legitimacy. Lydiate’s residents inhabit what Mbembe (2001) calls the postcolony—a space of improvisation and excess where power is theatrical and authority is performed. Yet their everyday practices reveal that governance need not emanate from the state; it can emerge from the spiritual and the invisible. Through rituals of Nyau, discourses of witchcraft, and the moral aspirations of Pentecostalism, migrants in Lydiate continuously produce and reproduce a sense of place and order. Their settlement is neither a failed urban space nor a chaotic slum but a spiritually governed frontier, a testament to how marginality and uncertainty can generate new forms of urban life and political imagination.

Nyau as infrastructure of placemaking

In Lydiate, the Nyau tradition operates not just as a spiritual association or cultural heritage but as a spiritual infrastructure through which displaced Malawian migrants materialize claims to land, authority, and belonging. As both a moral system and a performative technology, Nyau mediates the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, the living and the dead, the human and the ancestral. It transforms precarious terrain into socially recognized territory through ritual performance, fear, and ancestral sanction. In the absence of formal tenure or state protection, the Nyau tradition provides an alternative form of governance—a system of spiritual citizenship that defines who belongs, who leads, and who has the right to occupy space.

Nyau as spiritual infrastructure and territorial authority

Originating among the Chewa-speaking peoples of Malawi, Zambia, and Mozambique, Nyau (also known as Gule Wamkulu, “the Great Dance”) is a secret male initiation society that regulates morality, social reproduction, and ancestral communication (Kaspin, 1996; Phiri, 1975; Schoffeleers, 1979). Historically associated with the Chewa polity’s governance structures, Nyau has long functioned as an institution of discipline and authority, organizing labor, enforcing taboos, and performing funerary rites that reaffirm the community’s link to ancestral land (Kaspin, 1996). Among Malawian migrants in Zimbabwe, however, Nyau has been repurposed to meet the demands of displacement and exclusion. In Lydiate, it acts as a moral and territorial infrastructure through which migrants reconstruct authority in a context where both the state and local chiefs deny their legitimacy. Figure 3 shows Nyau public displays in Lydiate.

Fig. 3: Nyau public displays in Lydiate.
Fig. 3: Nyau public displays in Lydiate.The alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.
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Source: Fieldwork.

The concept of infrastructure, usually associated with roads, electricity, or bureaucratic systems, has increasingly been expanded by scholars to include social and affective arrangements that make life possible (Larkin, 2013; Simone, 2004). Within this expanded frame, Nyau operates as a spiritual infrastructure: a network of ritual practices, performances, and moral codes that enable migrants to organize space, regulate behavior, and sustain collective life. During fieldwork, participants frequently described Nyau as “the pillar of our community” or “our government in the bush.” These metaphors convey how Nyau substitutes for absent state authority, translating spiritual legitimacy into territorial order.

At the core of Nyau’s authority is its performative power. Public processions, especially funerary dances, transform the landscape into sacred space. Masked dancers (known as zikulu or ziwerewere) emerge from the bush accompanied by drumming and chanting, embodying ancestral spirits who return to inspect the moral health of the community. The dance is simultaneously spectacle and surveillance: a dramatization of ancestral authority that disciplines the living through awe and fear. One elder explained, “When Nyau dances, the land knows who its people are. Even those who mock us stay away that day.” The performance thus operates as a territorial claim, inscribing the migrants’ presence onto contested land through ritual movement and sonic intensity.

As Geschiere (2013) and De Boeck (2015) argue, in contexts of weak state regulation, the affective force of fear often becomes a mode of governance. Nyau capitalizes on this affective economy. Its secrecy, nocturnal movements, and association with death create a pervasive sense of surveillance that regulates community conduct. Violating Nyau rules, mocking dancers, trespassing on sacred sites, or divulging secrets, invites threats of supernatural punishment. Such fear is not irrational but socially productive; it enforces moral order and sustains the spatial boundaries of community. As one young man noted, “Even the police do not enter when Nyau is dancing. They respect.” In this way, Nyau authority extends beyond ritual space into everyday governance, filling the vacuum left by state neglect.

Initiation, masculinity, and the production of spiritual citizenship

Initiation lies at the heart of Nyau’s social and political power. It is through initiation that men are transformed into full moral subjects and granted access to the ritual and territorial privileges of the community. During fieldwork, initiates described the process as “becoming a person with roots”, a phrase that encapsulates both the spiritual and spatial significance of the rite. In Chewa cosmology, adulthood and belonging are inseparable from ancestral recognition (Schoffeleers, 1979). For Malawian migrants who lack ancestral graves in Zimbabwe, Nyau initiation symbolically reconstitutes this lost continuity, connecting them to a translocal network of ancestral power that transcends national boundaries. Figure 4 shows a very young Lydiatian participating in Nyau cult dances.

Fig. 4: Young Lydiatian participating in Nyau public dances.
Fig. 4: Young Lydiatian participating in Nyau public dances.The alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.
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Source: Fieldwork.

The production of spiritual citizenship thus begins in the bush, the secluded initiation site, where boys are instructed in moral codes, ritual knowledge, and the cosmology of the ancestors. Initiation rites are shrouded in secrecy, but ethnographic accounts and participant testimonies suggest that they involve symbolic death and rebirth, the acquisition of ritual names, and the transmission of ancestral authority (Kaspin, 1996; Kaspin, 1996). Through these processes, initiates gain the right to participate in community governance, attend funerals, and perform Nyau dances, acts that mark full membership.

This transformation is profoundly gendered. In Lydiate, Nyau initiation constitutes the moral foundation of masculinity: to be an uninitiated man is to be incomplete, childlike, and excluded from the moral community. The ritual society thus functions as both a fraternity and a government of men, its hierarchies mirroring political authority, with senior initiates serving as elders, judges, and enforcers. Decisions about land allocation, disputes, and moral transgressions are often mediated within Nyau circles rather than formal or traditional courts. One informant summarized this succinctly: “The chief has his court, but here, Nyau is the law.”

This masculinized authority is not uncontested. Women, while excluded from initiation, play critical roles as custodians of lineage and as mediators between Nyau and domestic spirituality. Yet they also experience the moral economy of Nyau ambivalently, fearing its disciplinary power while depending on its protection. Some Pentecostal women interviewed described Nyau as “our men’s secret government”, an institution that both defends and dominates. This tension reflects broader gendered dynamics in African spiritual governance, where male ritual authority often coexists with female religious agency (van Dijk, 1998; Maxwell, 2006). In Lydiate, women’s participation in Pentecostalism can thus be read as both a critique of and an escape from the patriarchal moral order maintained by Nyau.

Ritual performance and the spatialization of power

The performative dimension of Nyau is central to its role in placemaking. Every public dance, funeral, or initiation procession enacts a territorial claim. The bush—thicket space surrounding Lydiate serves as both literal and metaphysical infrastructure: it is where spirits dwell, initiations occur, and ancestral power is renewed. By maintaining exclusive rights over these spaces, Nyau converts natural landscape into sacred territory. During one observed funeral ceremony, dancers emerged from the bush at dusk, their masks glinting in firelight as drums reverberated across the fields. Residents gathered silently, some crossing themselves, others clapping in reverence. The performance temporarily suspended ordinary time, transforming the settlement into a theater of ancestral sovereignty.

Mbembe’s (2001) notion of the theatricality of power offers a useful lens for understanding these spectacles. Power in postcolonial contexts, Mbembe argues, is not only exercised but performed; its legitimacy depends on public display and affective engagement. In Nyau performance, the spectacle of masked dancers dramatizes the continuity of ancestral authority. The masks, representing spirits, animals, and colonial figures, embody moral commentary on social conduct, ridiculing greed, promiscuity, and betrayal. This didactic function aligns with what Barber (1987) identifies as the pedagogical role of African ritual performance: to make visible the invisible principles of order. For migrants in Lydiate, these performances reaffirm moral boundaries and spatial belonging in the face of political exclusion.

Fear and fascination converge in these moments. Outsiders, especially non-initiates and Pentecostal converts, often retreat indoors during Nyau performances, citing fear of spiritual contamination. Yet this withdrawal reinforces Nyau’s spatial sovereignty: by compelling avoidance, it demarcates sacred territory. As Geschiere (1997) observes, power in African cosmologies is frequently constituted through distance and opacity, the ability to remain unseen or incomprehensible. The Nyau’s secrecy thus becomes an instrument of governance. Those who command the secret command the land.

Over time, Nyau’s ritual spatiality has become deeply intertwined with the geography of Lydiate. Certain paths, trees, and clearings are recognized as shadow zones where spirits reside and where no construction or farming is permitted. These invisible boundaries organize settlement patterns and mediate conflicts. When disputes arise over land, elders often consult Nyau leaders or diviners to determine ancestral will. As one informant explained, “The ancestors decide; we only follow.” Through such practices, spiritual authority substitutes for cadastral maps and legal titles, creating a parallel regime of land governance.

Importantly, Nyau’s spatial order is not static but dynamic. As new migrants arrive and Pentecostal churches expand, ritual boundaries shift, generating constant negotiation between competing forms of moral geography. This fluidity mirrors what Simone (2004) calls “the improvisational politics of the city,” where urban space is continually reconfigured through everyday practices. In Lydiate, these reconfigurations are spiritual: processions extend territory, exorcisms cleanse land, and ancestral rituals reclaim polluted sites. Spiritual placemaking, in this sense, is a continual process of renewal and defense, a struggle to make the invisible visible and to render marginal existence morally and spatially legitimate.

Nyau and the politics of recognition

At a broader political level, Nyau’s authority represents a critique of exclusionary state sovereignty. Denied recognition by both the Zimbabwean state and local chieftaincies, Malawian migrants deploy ancestral legitimacy as a counter-sovereign discourse. Their claim to belong is grounded not in documents or totems but in the assertion that “our ancestors dance here.” This articulation of belonging through performance redefines citizenship as spiritual rather than bureaucratic. As Ong (1999) and Vora (2020) argue, populations excluded from formal citizenship often invent parallel regimes of recognition; Nyau embodies such invention. Invoking transnational ancestral networks that stretch back to Malawi, migrants assert continuity across colonial and postcolonial borders. This resonates with Englund’s (1998) argument that Chewa cultural forms, particularly Nyau, operate as “moral diasporas,” enabling migrants to sustain identity and dignity across displacements. In Lydiate, this diasporic imagination transforms the frontier from a space of exile into a landscape of ancestral renewal. The bush becomes both refuge and homeland; its rituals translate homelessness into moral emplacement.

At the same time, Nyau’s politics of recognition complicate dominant narratives of cosmopolitan modernity. While Pentecostalism often aligns itself with progress, order, and legality (Maxwell, 2006), Nyau embodies an alternative modernity grounded in secrecy, reciprocity, and ancestral governance. It insists that belonging is not achieved through state paperwork or urban respectability but through ritual practice and moral accountability. In this sense, Nyau offers what Nyamnjoh (2016) would call a convivial modernity—a mode of living with incompleteness and multiplicity rather than erasing them.

Witchcraft as defensive placemaking

In Lydiate, discourses and practices of witchcraft (ufiti) form a crucial dimension of spiritual governance and placemaking. Far from being irrational residues of “traditional belief,” witchcraft operates as a moral and regulatory infrastructure that sustains order, mediates conflict, and enforces boundaries in an environment of legal ambiguity and spatial precarity. As Geschiere (1997) and Niehaus (2001) have shown, witchcraft in contemporary Africa is deeply entangled with modern processes of mobility, inequality, and insecurity. Its significance lies not in the supernatural per se, but in the ways it indexes the anxieties, rivalries, and desires produced by rapid socio-economic transformation. In Lydiate, witchcraft is both feared and instrumentalized: it deters encroachment, regulates relations of trust, and serves as a moral language through which residents interpret misfortune and power.

Witchcraft as a defensive infrastructure

For displaced Malawian migrants who lack legal title and political protection, witchcraft provides an alternative system of territorial defense, a spiritual technology for securing land in the absence of police or courts. Residents often speak of “fencing the yard” through invisible means, such as charms, buried medicine, or ancestral invocation. These acts create what Geschiere (2013, p. 214) calls “spiritual frontiers”: unseen barriers that demarcate ownership and deter trespassers. Such practices transform witchcraft from a tool of aggression into a form of defensive placemaking.

One participant, a middle-aged man known locally as Baba Chabwera, described how he protected his newly acquired plot from neighbors’ encroachment: “When I came here, there were no boundaries, only bush. I poured medicine on the four corners and told my ancestors to guard the land. Now no one dares to build close to me; even the thieves avoid this side.” This narrative illustrates how spiritual acts materialize invisible property lines, producing a sense of security and permanence where none exists in law. As De Boeck (2015) argues, in the African urban periphery, “the invisible is the infrastructure”, spiritual protection becomes the architecture of tenure. Through invisible fencing, migrants convert precarious occupation into morally recognized possession, anchored in ancestral rather than bureaucratic legitimacy.

Yet, this defensive use of witchcraft also reproduces an atmosphere of mutual suspicion. Because protection and aggression are often indistinguishable, every act of defense risks being read as a potential offense. This ambiguity gives witchcraft its double edge: it both stabilizes and destabilizes social life. As Ashforth (2005) notes in his study of Soweto, the pervasive presence of witchcraft engenders a “spiritual insecurity” that is both a symptom and a mechanism of governance. Fear of bewitchment keeps people vigilant, regulating behavior through moral restraint. In Lydiate, such fear operates as a social fence, a boundary that, while invisible, powerfully shapes relations of proximity and trust.

The moral economy of suspicion

Witchcraft accusations in Lydiate often arise during periods of prosperity or conflict. A person who suddenly acquires material success, perhaps through remittances or business, is likely to attract suspicion of having “strong medicine”. These suspicions express not only envy but also the community’s moral anxiety about unregulated accumulation. The idiom of witchcraft thus enforces a moral economy of moderation, penalizing greed and reinforcing norms of reciprocity. As Comaroff and Comaroff (1999) argue, witchcraft in neoliberal Africa often functions as a critique of illicit wealth and moral disorder, translating structural inequalities into interpersonal narratives of sorcery.

A brief ethnographic vignette from fieldwork illustrates this moral logic. During 2019, a dispute erupted between two households over a vegetable plot near the stream. When one family’s crops mysteriously withered, rumors spread that the neighbor had buried “medicine” to curse them. At a community meeting, an elder intervened, declaring, “The land has eyes. When you are greedy, it rejects you.” The matter was resolved not through evidence but through ritual appeasement; both families contributed to a cleansing ceremony involving beer and tobacco offerings to the ancestors. In this context, witchcraft accusations functioned less as instruments of vengeance than as mechanisms of moral recalibration, compelling the parties to restore social harmony.

Such cases exemplify what Geschiere (1997) describes as the politics of the invisible: the capacity of unseen forces to mediate social contracts and spatial order. By invoking witchcraft, residents articulate moral claims about rightful ownership, fairness, and communal belonging. The idiom thus performs a dual role; it enforces collective ethics while affirming local autonomy against external authority. In this sense, witchcraft operates as both discourse and infrastructure, organizing social relations and land governance through moral affect.

Ambivalence, fear, and invisible boundaries

The ambivalence of witchcraft, its simultaneous potential for harm and protection—renders it central to Lydiate’s moral geography. To protect oneself may be to endanger others; to guard land may be to provoke suspicion. This ambiguity produces what Nyamnjoh (2016) terms incomplete belonging: a condition in which social ties are constantly negotiated through fear and dependence. In everyday conversation, residents oscillate between condemnation and reliance. A Pentecostal woman commented, “These things are evil, but without them, people would not respect your yard.” Her statement captures the paradox of spiritual governance: witchcraft is both rejected as immoral and valued as necessary.

This ambivalence mirrors broader African urban dynamics where invisible forces underpin social cohesion amid institutional fragility. As Luig and von Oppen (1997) note, witchcraft and sorcery in peri-urban Africa serve as “regimes of risk management,” providing a sense of control in contexts of uncertainty. In Lydiate, the constant fear of witchcraft produces social vigilance, a moral surveillance that substitutes for formal policing. People watch each other not only for theft or encroachment but for signs of mystical aggression: nocturnal noises, unexplained illness, the sudden death of livestock. This continuous interpretive labor transforms everyday life into a theater of moral scrutiny.

Invisible boundaries emerge through these affective regimes. Residents speak of certain paths or compounds as “hot”; places charged with dangerous energy. These spaces are avoided after dark, reinforcing de facto territorial divisions. During one interview, a young man gestured toward an abandoned homestead and whispered, “No one builds there; that place belongs to those with strong chum.” Such statements are less about metaphysical belief than about spatial politics: they mark zones of exclusion and safety, delineating who belongs and who must stay away. As Simone (2004) observes, urban African life is governed by “intense acts of negotiation and avoidance,” where proximity and distance are continuously recalibrated. Witchcraft, in this sense, is a spatial practice, it organizes settlement through fear and respect, inscribing moral topographies onto the landscape.

Witchcraft, authority, and the politics of the invisible

While Nyau establishes visible structures of authority through performance, witchcraft sustains the invisible counterpart of that authority. Both systems operate within the same cosmological field but perform different functions: Nyau governs publicly through spectacle and discipline, while witchcraft governs privately through deterrence and rumor. Together, they constitute “convivial authoritarianism”—a mode of power sustained as much by intimacy and fear as by coercion (Mbembe, 2001).

For community leaders, witchcraft serves a practical purpose. Rumors of mystical retaliation deter land grabbing, theft, and disrespect. One elder explained, “People behave because they fear the unseen. Even if the police never come, they know the spirits are watching.” Here, fear is instrumentalized as moral infrastructure, a resource of governance that requires no bureaucratic apparatus. Yet, this governance is not benign. Suspicion fractures social trust, isolates individuals, and generates cycles of accusation that can escalate into violence. In 2020, a young woman accused of causing illness through witchcraft fled the settlement after her house was stoned. The incident revealed witchcraft’s volatile capacity to both maintain and destabilize community cohesion.

Such volatility highlights witchcraft’s political ambivalence. It is simultaneously conservative and subversive, conservative in upholding moral order, subversive in challenging official authority. As Ellis and ter Haar (2004) observe, in African societies where state legitimacy is weak, spiritual power often constitutes an alternative domain of politics, shaping perceptions of justice, morality, and sovereignty. In Lydiate, witchcraft fulfills this political role: it translates invisible fear into visible order, ensuring that every moral infraction carries the risk of supernatural reprisal.

Pentecostalism and the reconfiguration of space

If Nyau governs Lydiate through secrecy, fear, and ancestral authority, Pentecostalism asserts its power through visibility, revelation, and moral purification. The rise of Pentecostal churches in Lydiate over the past two decades has reconfigured both the spiritual and physical landscapes of the settlement. These churches, often modest in structure but expansive in aspiration, constitute alternative infrastructures of belonging and legitimacy for Malawian migrants navigating displacement and exclusion. Their proliferation signals not a decline of older ritual systems such as Nyau, but the emergence of a plural spiritual geography where competing cosmologies vie for control over space, morality, and meaning.

Pentecostalism as an infrastructure of moral modernity

Pentecostalism’s expansion across southern Africa has been closely linked to processes of neoliberal restructuring, urban precarity, and moral uncertainty (Maxwell, 2006; Meyer, 2009; van Dijk, 1998). Its emphasis on personal transformation, prosperity, and divine protection resonates powerfully with populations experiencing social marginalization and economic instability. In Zimbabwe, Pentecostal churches such as ZAOGA FIF, AFM, and a host of independent ministries have positioned themselves as spaces of both material and moral regeneration, “factories for new persons,” in the words of one pastor. For Lydiate’s Malawian migrants, Pentecostalism offers not only spiritual renewal but a new vocabulary of belonging that transcends ethnic stigma and ancestral exclusion.

Unlike Nyau, which derives legitimacy from secrecy and ancestral continuity, Pentecostalism operates through exposure and revelation. Its idiom of “deliverance” casts hidden forces, witchcraft, ancestral spirits, Nyau masks, as agents of bondage from which the believer must be freed. As Meyer (1998) and Engelke (2010) argue, Pentecostalism’s power lies in its capacity to render the invisible visible: to expose the occult through prayer, prophecy, and exorcism. In Lydiate, this dynamic manifests in sermons that denounce Nyau as demonic and in public testimonies of deliverance where former initiates renounce ancestral allegiance. The church, in this sense, functions as a counter-infrastructure to Nyau, a moral project that seeks to displace secrecy with transparency, ritual fear with divine empowerment.

Sunday services, often held in open-air tents or unfinished brick structures, are among the most visible public gatherings in the settlement. The sound of amplified preaching and ecstatic singing extends across the landscape, overlapping with the rhythmic drumming of distant Nyau dances. This sonic coexistence epitomizes the overlapping spiritual regimes of the peri-urban frontier. During one service attended in 2019, a pastor declared, “The darkness of the bush cannot stand before the light of Jesus.” Congregants responded with shouts of “Fire! Fire!”—invoking spiritual warfare against invisible adversaries. Such moments dramatize Pentecostalism’s spatial ambition: to cleanse, occupy, and sanctify contested ground. Churches mark territory not through ancestral ritual but through sound, visibility, and moral spectacle.

The spatial politics of deliverance

The theology of deliverance situates Pentecostal believers within a moral cartography that divides space into domains of light and darkness. As Maxwell (2006) observes in his study of Zimbabwean Pentecostalism, spiritual warfare is inseparable from spatial purification, the casting out of demonic presence from homes, bodies, and neighborhoods. In Lydiate, these rituals of deliverance are acts of placemaking. Prayer marches, night vigils, and exorcisms physically map the settlement through spiritual cleansing, transforming mundane locations into zones of divine authority.

One vivid ethnographic episode involved a Pentecostal “territorial prayer” conducted near the edge of the bush traditionally associated with Nyau gatherings. A group of congregants, led by their pastor, carried bottles of anointed oil and salt, sprinkling them along the footpath while singing choruses of victory. The pastor proclaimed, “This land belongs to Jesus, not to the spirits of the dead.” For observers, this act was more than devotion—it was a performative reclamation of space from ancestral control. The bush, once the symbolic seat of Nyau power, was being materially and spiritually redefined.

These territorial prayers illustrate how Pentecostalism functions as an infrastructure of purification, a system that reorganizes spatial relations through moral intervention. As Knibbe (2009) notes in her study of urban Pentecostals in Nigeria, spiritual mapping and deliverance rituals “make space speak” by identifying and transforming sites of perceived pollution. In Lydiate, the act of anointing land serves both practical and political purposes: it signals occupation, affirms moral ownership, and embeds the church within the geography of the settlement. This practice echoes Ong’s (1999) concept of graduated sovereignty, but reconfigured in spiritual terms, churches enact sovereignty over fragments of space neglected by the state, asserting divine jurisdiction where political recognition is absent.

However, this purification is not neutral. It entails the moral displacement of other spiritual systems. Pentecostal leaders often frame Nyau and witchcraft as forms of satanic bondage, recasting ancestral guardianship as demonic oppression. Through this demonization, Pentecostalism reinterprets the very foundation of Malawian migrants’ spiritual citizenship. To be saved is to break from the ancestors; to remain loyal to Nyau is to dwell in darkness. As one young convert explained, “Before, I was dancing for the dead. Now I dance for life.” Such rearticulations of moral belonging reveal Pentecostalism’s dual role as both liberatory and disruptive, liberating believers from fear, yet undermining collective systems of ancestral governance.

Pentecostalism, legitimacy, and the politics of respectability

Pentecostalism also reconfigures social legitimacy within the settlement. While Nyau authority is grounded in initiation and lineage, Pentecostal belonging is performative and meritocratic, based on visible transformation and moral discipline. Converts often speak of being “born again” not only spiritually but socially, learning to dress properly, abstain from alcohol, and live “respectably.” As Englund (2011) and Freeman (2012) argue, Pentecostal ethics in Africa are deeply intertwined with projects of modern self-making, emphasizing discipline, entrepreneurship, and moral order.

In Lydiate, Pentecostal churches serve as platforms for self-presentation and social mobility. Choir uniforms, neatly arranged seating, and orderly worship contrast sharply with the secrecy and perceived chaos of Nyau gatherings. For younger migrants and women in particular, Pentecostalism offers a path to moral legitimacy in a context where Nyau masculinity monopolizes authority. Women become prophets, choir leaders, and prayer warriors, roles that confer visibility and voice otherwise denied within Nyau’s patriarchal hierarchy. One woman who led a women’s fellowship explained, “In church we speak; in Nyau we are silent.” Her statement underscores the gendered reconfiguration of authority that Pentecostalism enables.

The emphasis on cleanliness, order, and productivity also connects Pentecostalism to broader neoliberal ideals of respectability and citizenship. Maxwell (2006) notes that Zimbabwean Pentecostals often view themselves as “citizens of heaven and models for the nation,” aligning spiritual discipline with civic virtue. For migrants lacking formal citizenship, this moral identity provides an alternative route to recognition. By embodying Pentecostal respectability, they claim moral citizenship in the eyes of both God and society, countering stereotypes of Malawians as outsiders or witches. The church thus functions as a social infrastructure, a space where migrants can perform belonging through moral and aesthetic alignment with dominant norms of urban modernity.

Spiritual competition and plural geographies of belonging

The relationship between Nyau and Pentecostalism in Lydiate is best understood as a struggle for spiritual and territorial sovereignty. Each system claims to govern the same moral and physical terrain but through opposing cosmologies. Nyau anchors authority in the ancestors and the secrecy of the bush; Pentecostalism asserts divine visibility and revelation as sources of power. This competition is not merely theological but spatial. Where Nyau dances at night, Pentecostal churches hold night vigils; where Nyau guards the bush, pastors plant crosses and conduct deliverance rituals. The result is a landscape layered with conflicting spiritual inscriptions, where multiple moral orders overlap and contest each other.

Despite their antagonism, Nyau and Pentecostalism also coexist in pragmatic tension. Many residents participate in both systems, seeking protection from one and blessings from the other. This fluidity exemplifies Nyamnjoh’s (2016) concept of incompleteness, where African spiritual life thrives on multiplicity and negotiation rather than exclusivity. In interviews, some converts admitted to attending Pentecostal services while secretly consulting Nyau elders during crises. Such ambivalence reflects not hypocrisy but survival, a strategy of navigating the plural moral economies of the peri-urban frontier.

Rather than viewing Lydiate as a site of binary opposition between “tradition” and “modernity,” it is more accurate to see it as a plural spiritual geography, a terrain where different infrastructures of belief coexist, compete, and sometimes converge. Each system, Nyau, witchcraft, Pentecostalism, offers distinct yet overlapping pathways to protection, legitimacy, and place. Together, they constitute the moral architecture of the frontier, where belonging is negotiated through both ancestral invocation and divine anointing.

Discussion and conclusion: Toward a theory of spiritual placemaking

This paper traced how displaced Malawian migrants in the peri-urban settlement of Lydiate use spiritual practices: Nyau rituals, witchcraft, and Pentecostalism, to make place amid the structural exclusions of non-citizenship. What emerges is not simply an “enchanted urbanism,” that is, the persistence of spirituality in African cities (Bhanye, 2025; Mbembe and Nuttall, 2004; De Boeck, 2015), but a more dynamic process of spiritual placemaking: the active use of spiritual infrastructures to claim, govern, and sacralize space in the absence of formal state recognition. Spiritual placemaking foregrounds agency, improvisation, and performance; it is not the passive persistence of belief, but a strategic and spatial practice through which migrants materialize belonging, authority, and moral order.

Reframing enchanted urbanisms as spiritual placemaking emphasizes that spirituality is not merely a worldview but a spatial practice, a mode of constructing and maintaining place in contexts of displacement and marginality. As Simone (2004) argues, African urban life depends on “people as infrastructure,” networks of improvisation and relational agency that sustain social and material life in the absence of state provision. The findings from Lydiate extend this insight by showing that these infrastructures are not only social and economic but spiritual. Migrants build not only with bricks and networks, but with spirits, rituals, and moral codes.

Nyau dances, witchcraft deterrence, and Pentecostal deliverance are spatial technologies, ritual acts that make and remake boundaries, both moral and territorial. Their power lies in visibility: the capacity to project authority through performance and spectacle. Nyau’s masked processions transform unregulated land into ancestral territory; Pentecostal prayer marches convert the same ground into sanctified Christian space. Both enact sovereignty in symbolic terms, asserting that legitimate belonging derives not from the state but from divine or ancestral sanction.

This performative aspect of placemaking resonates with Mbembe’s (2001) notion of the theatricality of power, the idea that authority in the postcolony is produced through display, repetition, and affect. In Lydiate, the visible spectacle of the sacred—the dancing mask, the exorcism, the night vigil—becomes a mechanism through which migrants assert control over uncertain terrain. Spatial agency here operates through ritual, emotion, and sound rather than legal documentation.

The Lydiate case reveals that authority and citizenship in Africa’s urban margins are often decoupled from formal institutions. As Ong’s (1999) concept of graduated sovereignty suggests, the state recognizes different populations unequally, producing zones of partial inclusion. For Malawian migrants denied legal recognition, ritual visibility becomes a substitute for legal identity, a way to be seen, respected, and feared in the absence of paperwork. These finding challenges conventional understandings of urban governance, which often equate legitimacy with bureaucratic authority. Instead, spiritual placemaking shows how governance is enacted through ritual performance, affective control, and moral accountability. Nyau and witchcraft provide ancestral legitimacy and deterrence; Pentecostal churches provide moral legitimacy and aspirational citizenship. Both systems regulate behavior, mediate disputes, and sustain order where formal governance has receded.

These forms of authority are not just compensatory; they are constitutive of urban life. As Geschiere (2013) and Comaroff and Comaroff (1999) argue, the proliferation of occult and religious infrastructures in Africa is a response to the volatility of modernity, not its negation. They offer moral and political vocabularies for navigating uncertainty. Spiritual placemaking thus represents a politics of the invisible: a domain where power is enacted through the unseen but felt through its effects on bodies, spaces, and relations.

The ethnographic material from Lydiate complicates binary narratives that oppose modernity to enchantment. Instead, it demonstrates how modernity and spirituality co-produce each other in Africa’s urban frontiers. Pentecostal churches adopt modern technologies: loudspeakers, microphones, and social media, to project divine power, while Nyau societies use mobile phones to coordinate rituals and disseminate warnings. Both deploy modern infrastructures to sustain spiritual governance, revealing that the sacred and the modern are not separate domains but interdependent assemblages.

This co-production challenges secular urban theory, which tends to treat religion as residual or private. The Lydiate case shows that the spiritual is public, performative, and infrastructural; it shapes where people live, how they relate, and what they fear or hope for. In this sense, African urban futures are not post-religious but poly-religious; not disenchanted but differently enchanted. Spiritual placemaking names this synthesis: a process where migrants use ritual and belief to build futures amid structural exclusion.

Furthermore, the coexistence of Nyau and Pentecostalism illustrates Nyamnjoh’s (2016) notion of incompleteness, a condition where belonging is never total, and life proceeds through improvisation and negotiation. Lydiate’s plural spiritual geography embodies this incompleteness: residents navigate between ancestral protection and Pentecostal deliverance, drawing selectively from both. This fluidity is not confusion but creativity, a pragmatic adaptation to the uncertainties of the frontier.

The concept of spiritual placemaking carries several broader implications. For migration studies, it demonstrates the importance of non-material and non-legal dimensions of belonging. Migrants construct home not only through housing or documents but through rituals that sacralize land and reconstitute moral community. This challenges Eurocentric models of integration that prioritize legality over lived legitimacy. For urban governance scholarship, the findings call for an expanded understanding of infrastructure. Spiritual practices, rituals, prophecies, and exorcisms perform infrastructural functions: they organize labor, regulate conduct, and delineate territory. Recognizing these spiritual infrastructures reframes African urbanism as a moral as well as material project, governed as much by invisible forces as by planning or policy. Finally, for the study of religion, this analysis demonstrates how spirituality functions as a spatial and political force rather than merely a domain of belief. Both Nyau and Pentecostalism produce alternative sovereignties that challenge the secular state’s monopoly over legitimacy. Religion, in this sense, is not retreating but reterritorializing, moving into spaces where formal governance has withdrawn.

The insights from Lydiate suggest that policy frameworks addressing informal urban settlements in Africa must move beyond technocratic and secular assumptions. Placemaking in such contexts cannot be understood solely through legal regularization or infrastructural investment; it must also engage with the moral and spiritual economies that sustain everyday life. Urban planners and development practitioners could benefit from acknowledging the role of spiritual authorities (church leaders, ritual elders, diviners) as de facto governors and mediators of community order.

Comparatively, the notion of spiritual placemaking invites further research across African and global South cities. Similar processes can be observed in Pentecostalized townships in Nigeria (Meyer, 2009), maraboutic quarters in Senegal (Buggenhagen, 2012), and Hindu or Islamic urban margins in South Asia (Simone, 2018). Across these contexts, spirituality constitutes an active mode of producing space, citizenship, and moral order. Future scholarship might explore how these diverse spiritual infrastructures interact with formal urban planning and transnational religious networks, shaping the moral contours of twenty-first-century urban life.

In Lydiate, migrants displaced from the formal order of the state have not disappeared into marginality; they have reconstituted community through spiritual means. Their dances, prayers, and invisible fences are not nostalgic survivals of tradition but living architectures of belonging. Through spiritual placemaking, they transform exclusion into emplacement, fear into governance, and invisibility into moral presence. The peri-urban frontier thus stands not as a void of state neglect but as a laboratory of alternative urban modernities—where the sacred and the political, the invisible and the material, cohabit and co-produce new futures for African urban life.