Africa my Africa! You and your mysterious ways! Only yesterday I was upbraiding you for rudely disturbing my early morning beauty sleep. And now, this evening, you confront me with a scenario that leaves me in utter admiration of the things you do to and with foreign cultures rammed down your throat by your conquerors. I’m sitting on my verandah as usual to watch and listen to the prosperity Pentecostals gathered for their open air service on the field just across the road from my residence in the federal housing estate of the trans ekulu of enugu. Every evening, I faithfully sit down to observe them because the wind of prosperity Pentecostalism blowing across Africa is a subject of intense scholarly curiosity for me. From my perch as a Roman Catholic, I study the beautiful poetry of their language of binding, rebuking, and coming against adversity. I study the impact of their culture on governance, democracy, civics, and public service delivery in Africa. I theorize them as enemies of good governance because they abandon the sites of the social contract (where citizens are supposed to insist on the state fulfilling its own side of the contract) and transfer everything to the domain of miracles and portions. If your reaction to epileptic power supply is to bind the spirit of darkness and come against the forces of power failure, why would you expect government to live up to its responsibilities? I love the intensity of their permanent war against powers, principalities, and dominions who never play fair and constantly shift the goal post, requiring more tithes to lubricate the Pastor’s fire power. I love the perpetual expectation of their millions; of their miracle; of their portion. I love the idea of possessing your possession. Like Okonkwo, our titled brother in Umuofia, I’m interested in what this strange new version of Christianity is doing to the African psyche. I have studied, observed, and mingled with them for so long that I speak their ministration language perfectly. I can blend very easily among them. I spend hours watching and studying the videos of Chris Oyakhilome. Take the fake American accent out of it and you’ve got beautiful stagecraft and performance. Enoch Adeboye, David Oyedepo, T.B. Joshua, Ayo Oritsejafor, Paul Adefarasin, Biodun Fatoyinbo, Sign Fireman: none of them even comes close to the stagemanship of Chris Oyakhilome. But this evening, I’m unable to see these folks across the field from me as scholarly material. I’m totally carried away. Almost two hundred of them singing in Yoruba or hausa – I don’t know the language and I don’t care – and I’m so so carried away by the sheer beauty and melody of the songs. It’s almost like 200 kegites singing the Orunmila processional hymn at the beginning of gyration: “aji gini, arin gini, l’oruko Orunmila, Orunmila baba Ifa, Ifa la o pe, Orunmila la o bo”. I know that these Nigerian prosperity Pentecostals are not paying homage to Orunmila. I suspect that these songs are from their traditional yoruba or Hausa repertory. I suspect that, as happens also everywhere in Nigeria, the songs were odes to local gods or deities who have been thrown out of the lyrics and replaced with Christian deities but the intensity, the delivery, the rapturous sonority of it all is no less captivating. Oh Lord, I don’t want them to stop singing. I’m suddenly like Red in The Shawshank Redemption who has no idea what those heavenly operatic voices rendering, Sullaria, from Mozarts The Marriage of Figaro, are talking about. He doesn’t care. He just wants them to continue singing till the end of time. I dont want these worshippers to stop singing. Africa, how can you visit so much violence upon yourself and still create beauty? You take your traditional songs, evict your gods from their lyrics, provide five-star accommodation in those same lyrics for a Christian pantheon which conquered you, and still deliver so much beauty. Now, like Okigbo and his Idoto, I’m lost in the legend and aesthetic appeal of these Pentecostal songs delivered so beautifully in a Nigerian language I don’t understand. Africa, tell me, how do you do it? How do you give Christianity its life-force when the White man who imposed it on you has run out of ideas about how enliven his religion and his own Christian service is so insipid, so boring, so lifeless?
Posted on: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 19:58:58 +0000