Of Oro, Yoruba Religions, and "Live and Let Live"

(By Pius Adesanmi) - Live And Let Live

If you are Yoruba and you are older than the Facebook or Twitter generation of Nigerians, if you are struggling to cope with expressions such as LOL (laugh out loud) , LMAO (laugh my ass off) OMG (Oh my God), and 9ja (Naija) in emails and texts you receive daily from Nigerians in their teens and twenties, chances are you grew up in a village in Yoruba land where life is suffused in culture, tradition, and a panoply of ancestral rituals and spiritual observances, all instances of man shaping order out of primordial chaos. 

Chances are, growing up, you partook – as audience or celebrant– in a very colourful tapestry of ancestral liturgies: Ogun festival, Sango festival, Imole festival, Egungun festival, and, of course, Oro festival, the fear of which is the beginning of wisdom for Yoruba women. 

Chances are you enjoyed the atmospherics of these observances, partook of propitiatory offal, sang, and danced to a host of inspirational choruses and processionals welcoming the ancestors and the orishas into the realm of unworthy mortals at each spiritual enactment.

"Iyalaya Anybody": Street Lingos and Pop Culture

(By Pius Adesanmi) - In its pristine cultural background in the Yoruba world, “iyalaya” is an obscenity hurled at your opponent in a brawl to display contempt for his or her maternal lineage. It is usually accompanied by the insulting palm and five-finger flash we call “waka” in the face of your opponent. The consequence, as you all know, is often a bloody nose and an unscheduled trip to the hospital. However, as cultures evolve across generations, new meanings emerge and old words or expressions and are sent on new errands by the human imagination. ...
          The mere mention of “iyalaya anybody” brings to mind the Nigerian musician, Olamide, and his famous spat with music industry icon, Don Jazzy. No Nigerian needs to be reminded the details of this spat which shook the African entertainment industry to its roots and set Twitter and Facebook on fire for weeks. With the whole world watching, Olamide had shot out at the audience, “iyalaya anybody”, while dissing Don Jazzy.

#Lionheart and the Metaphor of the Possible

Adanna and her uncle, Godswill

(By Pius Adesanmi) - NIGERIA is notorious for her belief in the indestructibility of a project that everybody purports to hate, dislike, disavow or disown. Somewhere in the core of the Nigerian psyche lies the belief that we are the only people on earth whose country will always survive our unquenchable hate, bitterness, and hostility expressed along our three most intractable fault lines: ethnicity, faith, and political affiliation, worsened by the democracy of social media and the conquest of that space by millennials – Nigeria’s most populous demographic – who no dey look Uche face.

However, I do not believe that Nigeria could have survived another week of hatredvaganza and the attendant cursefest that has happened upon us because of the presidential election season had art and the artist not intervened this week to do what they have done for humanity and society since the beginning of time: provide instrumental catharsis and place in front of  a society on the brink of implosion through self-inflicted injuries a mirror showing pathways of the possible.

That is the symbolic role that Nigeria’s cultural icon, Genevieve Nnaji, played this week with the release of her new movie, #Lionheart, on Netflix. I do not intend to explore the plot of the movie here. Go and watch it like millions of Nigerians have already done. When you are done watching it, join the commentariat on social media who have been busy dissecting scenes, characters, and other elements of the movie in a moment of national cultural jouissance that has united home and diaspora. My intervention is necessitated by a pattern of misses I have noticed so far in the social media commentary.

The Muslim Whose Presence Defiled Christ

Source: loonwatch.com

(Pius Adesanmi)-- ...Modees, obviously, is a Muslim. His best friend who was getting married is a Christian. A Muslim was going to be best man in a Christian marriage! The Christian groom and his Muslim best friend thought nothing of this until wedding day and the officiating Pastor somehow caught wind of the faith of the best man and refused to proceed with the ceremony.

It was bad enough for Modees, a Muslim, to have come to defile the body of Christ in his church! To approach the pulpit as the best man in the wedding was adding insult to injury! All entreaties to the Pastor failed. No Muslims allowed here!

The story of this foolish fundamentalist Christian Pastor in Calabar is the story of Nigeria. It is indeed the story of Africa. It is the story of the failure of critical intelligence. It could very easily have happened the other way round. It could have been Modees getting married and his Christian friend being bundled out of the ceremony for defiling a Mosque.

The trouble with Nigeria, the tragedy of Africa, is that in a world of mutual connectivity and global influences and interactions, we have not figured out a way of making whatever we accept from the outside, whatever is forced on us from the outside, sit on the solid foundation of our own worldviews and humanity.

And Okonkwo Goes Viral!

(Pius Adesanmi)--Thank You, Millennials!

Despite sorrow, despite anguish, despite depression over Kogi state, Nigeria, today, I somehow had to find the strength to go and teach that introduction to African literature second-year class.

Discussions came to the cultural and contextual bases of similes, metaphors, and other figures of speech. I take an example from Things Fall Apart:

"During this time Okonkwo’s fame had grown like a bush-fire in the harmattan"

Nigeria, Ethnicity, AND Nationalism

Source: tourbrockersinternational.com

(Pius Adesanmi)--Pan-Nigeria does not ask you to forget your ethnic, religious or other identities. It asks you to sacrifice nothing. In fact, pan-Nigeria cannot even exist as a philosophical concept without those differences.

What I want you to know you cannot even be a good Nigerian if you are not a fantastic Igbo, Yoruba, Ijaw, etc. So start by being very proud of your ethnic and cultural identity and specificity. Then, apply yourself to understanding the history and cultures of your ethnicity’s ancestors.

You see, ethnic hatred in Nigeria is borne out of crass ignorance of the humanism and philosophical generosity of the ancestors of the federating ethnicities.

I have studied the cultures of Africa long enough to understand their deep humanism which should form the basis of an extension of the self into others, a projection into them to respect them in their own distinction and specificity.

So, understanding the story of humanism in your Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa, Fulani or Ogoni history and culture is the road to the pan-Nigerian humanism I envision. Go back to your folk tales and listen attentively to what happened to the tortoise whenever he undermined the dignity of his own people or of neighbouring peoples.

The fundamental humanism in our ancestral stories is what we have not been able to properly integrate into the modern project Nigeria.

King Jona's Snub, by Pius Adesanmi

Ipile ti Jesu

Fi lele leyi

Ti Baba Aladura n to, 

Keda mase ro pe 

O ye kuro nibe 

O duro le Kristi apata

Kerubu e yo

Serafu e yo! 

A o fi ipile lele lori otito

A o fi ipile lele lori otito

After I finished singing this song, the angel with the seventh seal appeared to me and saith: remove your white garment, put on a red garment, discard your white candles, replace them with red candles and repeat the song.

And I did.

After I finished singing the song a second time, the angel with the seventh seal appeared to me and saith: remove your red garment, put on a yellow garment, discard your red candles, replace them with yellow candles and repeat the song.

And I did.

The Internet of Prosperity Gospel

"In the hand of the Internet, Pentecostalism has also 'seen pepper,' to borrow a popular Nigerian expression. Contemporary Pentecostalism in Nigeria operates a theology of instant prosperity and endless miracles that has transformed it into one of the most lucrative sectors of the Nigerian economy.

"Instant razzmatazz woven around a deified character always known as Founder General Overseer. If the God of Nigerian Pentecostalism is not a God of poverty, as adherents of that version of Christianity insist, He nonetheless has this annoying habit of always zeroing in on the Founder General Overseer as the only example of boundless prosperity among thousand of poverty-ridden church members. Thus, the Founder General Overseer is often the only one God elects to deck in Armani suits and Ferragamo loafers, supply with posh cars that can sometimes run two hundred kilometres on empty, and ferry across the world in a private jet. Sometimes, as is the case with [some of them], the bonus of a fake American accent is added unto these numerous blessings.

"But the Internet is what we Nigerians call amebo--a busybody, a loudmouth, a flaneur, a voyeur, and a whistle-blower rolled into one. And so, when the Internet pokes its unwanted nose into the business of the gospel, you could have a scandal of international proportions develop around something as ordinary as a pastor buying a private jet in an ocean of poverty."

Pius Adesanmi

You're Not a Country, Africa

Philosophizing the Ifa Corpus

"Philosophising for the public should be about helping that 'modern' Yoruba fella understand that no philosophical text is superior to the Ifa corpus produced by the genius of his people; that the Western progress and modernity he celebrates while recoiling in Christian or Islamic horror at the first mention of the Ifa corpus were all once part of a Western 'pagan' intermesh of history, myth, and science until fellas like him applied themselves and separated the science from everything else; that the microphone that his pastor uses to give him gospel every Sunday was part of that pagan mix until the separation; that there is still room to separate that science from the Ifa corpus for the elevation of humanity if only he and I would study it, apply ourselves to a creative extraction of that knowledge, and stop diminishing it as an inferior pagan text."

Pius Adesanmi

You're Not a Country, Africa

Yoruba "Paganism" and Religious Tolerance in Africa

"Esin kan o pe k'awa ma s'oro." I have translated what it says and what it leaves unsaid but implied:
'Oro hampers no faith. Let no faith hamper Oro.' Here we encounter the first indication of intrinsic humanism of Yoruba spirituality: the valuation of pluralism. We encounter consciousness and validation of the spiritual essence of the Other. Indeed, we are in the presence of the accomodationist ethos of the Yoruba world view. For what this Oro canticle hints at and acknowledges is the presence of other faiths in its own spiritual space of actuation.

This Islam Which is Not Islam

"This is the Islam I knew. This is the Islam that fed my belly and my mind. Now, I watch in horror, in stark contemplation of faith gone awry. How did this Islam arrive at the conclusion that it was okay to sever the head of Gideon Akaluka, mount it on a spike, and chant Allahu Akbar triumphantly in the streets of Kano? What about Christianah Oluwasesin, clobbered to death in the name of Islam by high school boys?

"Why have the educated elite from this part of Nigeria pretended thus far that they can do nothing about this nonsense for which they all, without exception, must be held responsible? Have they given a thought to forming alliances and embarking on sensitisation campaigns to wrest Islam from the control of a deadly and opportunistic political elite? We must ask the question, what is this Islam which is not Islam?"

Pius Adesanmi

You're Not a Country, Africa

That Ain't Right: Teachable Moment for the Nigerian Christian

I am getting old. I don't know how I could have forgotten this story, given its relevance to the Nigerian tragedy (a tragedy which shall prevail until we make some progress in rewiring the atrocious psychology of the Nigerian).

My brother from another mother, Bayo Aregbesola, a Director in Canada’s Federal civil service, reminds me of something that happened during our days at the University of British Columbia in the 1990s. Those were our wild oats graduate student days. We crawled the nightclubs of Vancouver to get our beering right between intra and interracial dating.

Looting Nollywood, by Pius Adesanmi

Last week, I travelled from my base in Ottawa, Canada to Johannesburg, South Africa. It was one of those dreadfully long trips that I have grudgingly come to accept over the years as an inevitable feature of my professional calling as a peripatetic man of culture.

As I boarded the first flight in Ottawa, I made a mental map – as I always do – of how to fill up the void of time. I had an hour ahead of me to Washington DC, nine hours from Washington to Dakar, and another nine hours from Dakar to Johannesburg.

Ain’t funny! Add to the distance the fact of not knowing how and where the pendulum of the international writing prize that was taking me to South Africa would swing. Only the thought that I would reunite with my bosom friend, Temitope Oni, a successful medical doctor in Durban whom I hadn’t seen since the end of our Titcombe college days in 1987, made the distance bearable. Tope Oni would redefine the meaning of brotherhood, human bond, and loyalty for me in ways that I am still too positively emotional to talk about. He is a subject of another essay. Another day.

Suffice it to say that in such long-flight situations, I usually oscillate between nap time, reading time, writing time (my laptop’s battery allowing), movie time, and alcohol time – with strong emphasis on the last. This time, I wish I had skipped movie time and concentrated on alcohol time. That would have spared me the agony and anger that did not abate until I landed in Johannesburg.

Of Pentecostalism, Pastors, and Politics

Pastor Adeboye praying for President Jonathan

Keeping Pastor Enoch Adeboye’s Feet To The Fire

By Pius Adesanmi

Pastor Enoch Adeboye, the Daddy General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, has been in the headlines for all the right reasons lately. In August 2010, several newspapers quoted him as he declared war on election rigging and riggers.

"We shall resist election riggers in 2011", the famous preacher was reported to have fumed decisively. He ended 2010 on a grand note: Goodluck Jonathan went to beseech God at Daddy General Overseer’s feet, creating a famous photo-op in the process. Our internet commentariat went gaga for the wrong reasons, condemning Goodluck Jonathan for contacting God through the pastor’s intermission. Jonathan’s genuflection before God became the issue. Nobody paid attention to Pastor Adeboye’s iteration of his warning that election riggers would not be tolerated in 2011. He even fired a warning shot at Attahiru Jega and threatened to lead protests against fraudulent elections in 2011.

This is a heartening development. Pastor Enoch Adeboye is welcome to the Pastor Tunde Bakare corner of our collective struggle to take Nigeria back from the vultures in Abuja and the state capitals. What took him so long? Hopefully, his residency in this auspicious corner of the struggle shall not be temporary. For now, we shall pretend that we don’t mind the fact that Pastor Adeboye is spending too much time warning INEC and Jega instead of just kuku directly telling the scurrilous Presidents, state governors, ministers, senators, reps, chieftains, stakeholders, elder statesmen and such other ridiculous characters who regularly go to him for kneeling sessions and photo-ops that their irresponsibility and corruption will no longer be tolerated.