Tuesday, May 09, 2017

Miracles

You stare at the handsome, three-piece suited up man on the telly as he approaches a row of people holding up rectangular sheets that proclaims illnesses, diseases and other physical conditions. His suit is white. He always wears white when ministering to the sick.

As usual, your imagination makes up for the lack of audio. When he speaks, you imagine what he is saying. In your little corner of the world, 'imagination is everything ' is not just a badass quote.

"Healed! " he roars and a woman jerks and goes down.

"Out of her! " he thundered and another woman, a white woman, starts vibrating like powerful volts of electricity were running through her body.

You switch off the television and return to shuffling papers. You are tired of miracles.

Faith this, faith that. Believe this, believe that.

Hey, if you love me, prove it. Don't make me ask you twice. Or three times. Don't tell me something about having faith moving mountains. I just want to use faith to cut some stubborn grass in my own backyard. Leave mountain matter for pro climbers.

If you love someone, you go out of the way for them. You bend every rule in the book. You bypass every law. It ain't even up for debate.

Actions speak louder than John 3:16. Burn me.

Wole Soyinka on Religion, the Pope, and Wine

#Literature Is Global Because It's Specific

L-R: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Trevor Noah, & Chris Jackson; Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan

“‘People are surprised they connect with my characters,’ said [Chimamanda Ngozi] Adichie. ‘And

men are surprised they liked a book written by a woman.’ That surprise illuminates the privilege of thinking only one type of story is allowed to be ‘universal.’ After all, white authors aren’t asked to change the names of their characters to appeal to African and Asian markets. The assumption is that the specificities of nonwhite, non-Western life cannot be universal, and that anyone else has to change themselves to be heard. But, for both Adichie and [Trevor Noah, diluting themselves is not an option.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (by Jaya Saxena)
@2017 PEN America Voices Festival, New York

The Sycamore Tree Christian

(By Hymar Idinie David) - He is like Zacchaeus. He has fallen from grace. He has lost sight of the master. So he climbs a sycamore tree to see Jesus pass him by.

He is so focused on the crowd of people seeking Jesus. He thinks the master won't have his time. He thinks the master won't hear him. He doesn't believe like the Psalmist that he can seek the Lord and would be heard and delivered from all his fears.

So Zacchion went and climbed a sycamore tree to watch Jesus pass him by.

Like some of us, we are in that place where we isolate ourselves from the presence of the Lord. We go out of the way to get out of the way. Why did Zacchion not stand there and wait?

Because he felt he was too short.

Another reason was because he felt he wasn't worthy.

Zacchion was a cheat, a rogue, a corrupt man. The later verses explained it clearly. He thought Jesus was going to take one look and judge him. So he put himself out of reach. He climbed a sycamore tree to watch Jesus pass him by.

Jesus, surrounded by crowds, was walking past the tree. Then he stopped. And looked up.

(By Joy Isi-Bewaji) - In Nigeria, a celebrity will give birth to quadruplets, hide them in a sac, marry a second time, kill her neighbour's dog, buy a house in Miami, sleep with Drake, enrol at a strippers club, amputate her left leg, suffer a heart attack, go clubbing on a yatch, have a street fight with her best friend, steal her best friend's third husband, have his baby and poison his tea with arsenic...

No blog or "gossip website" will know a thing...until the celebrity, by herself, posts it on social media.

We do not have exclusives. There are no paparazzi waiting at Genevieve Nnaji's gate to tell who she's dating.

If Genevieve doesn't take a half nude picture with a man in bed and post on Instagram OR her friends have the mouths of worn baskets... then no blogger gets to know jack about her life.

It is why I find it ridiculous when Naija celebrities rant about privacy.

You can have all the privacy you want in this country. Nobody is snooping. I have met many A+ celebrities at malls, and people just walk by. Maybe a smile from a few shoppers, but mostly serious boning and prouding from Nigerians.

Thank God for selfie sticks, now they ask for a selfie.

But nobody... not ONE photographer will bother taking pictures of his life or her activities.

(By Immanuel James Ibe-Anyanwu) - There are two ways to describe patriarchy. First, as a sociopolitical system marked by the privileging of men over women. Second, as an unfair system with a conscience which, without any real, palpable threats, admitted its own mistakes and injustices and made amends. A system that refused to call the bluff of feminine logic, that turned against its own gender and cut itself to size. Feminism owes a large part of its success to the support of men.

A trite remark, nonetheless it is necessary to help us avoid the danger of a single story. Patriarchy has been so demonized you'd think it's all sour grapes: a system that is, arguably, responsible for the glory of the developed world as we see it. The skyscrapers, the physical developments, the moon landings, the technological revolutions that make life easy today—all owe their actualisation largely to patriarchy, to men who worked the dirt spreading bare backs in the sun to build our infrastructures—but these are ignored by the single story. To this point, we shall return later.

There are at least three major areas of human empowerment: politics, economy, and culture.

Onitsha, Gift of the Niger, By Chinua Achebe

"Onitsha is such a phenomenon. ...

Onitsha is an Igbo town which claims Benin origin. If we are to believe historians, this claim is not very well founded. But what really matters is that Onitsha feels different from the peoples and places in its vicinity. And it is different. It sits at the crossroads of the world. It has two faces—a Benin face and an Igbo face—and can see the four directions.... Its market, which had assembled originally on one of the four days of the Igbo week, had likewise grown ‘big eyes’ and engulfed every day in the sky....

Because it sees everything, Onitsha has come to distrust single-mindedness. It can be opposite things at once. It was both a cradle of Christianity in Igboland and a veritable fortress of ‘pagan’ revanchism. Many hinterland peoples ... would often say with a sad shake of the head that an Onitsha man had too much of the world in him to make a good Christian.

There is a story about one of the earliest converts in Onitsha at the turn of the century who did so well in the new faith that the Church Missionary Society decided to send him to England for higher studies and ordination. While in England he quickly lost the faith that took him there and returned to Onitsha where he obstructed the work of evangelization by his nefarious example. Why did the church preach so vehemently against heathen titles, he asked? What were all those knights and barons and dukes if not hierarchies of ozo? He took all the titles he could find and died a pagan.

(By Uzoamaka Doris Aniunoh) - I went to church today. The Catholic Church of Assumption, Umuoji. For our family thanksgiving, post funeral mass.

I came late, thankfully. All is well. Never mind the many 'second collections' that happen. At the end of mass, Father tells us about a project they are working on and how they need people to contribute. He calls on one man like that, the one who has the convincing voice. The man kneels down, Father blesses and hands him the microphone.

He prays and sings and tells us how he was speaking to Jesus before he came to mass that day. About how brethren of the church would give mightily. Amen.

He says that Jesus told him that four people will give 50k each. He begs for these three people to obey god. He sings and prays and sings some more. My father turns to me and says he is tired of this wahala. So he gives 50k, in the hopes that we'd move on. Nope.

He continues to beg the remaining three people. He tells them that they may not have the money at this time, but that it would come. They just need to pledge. He tells them that by giving this money, God would give them every single thing they ever asked of him in this life.

(By Adesegun Damazio) - PASTOR.

The cheapest and most easily attainable title on the African continent. So rudimentary has it become that you only need to do so little in order to attain so much, albeit without having any valuable influence on your followers.

To become a pastor in these parts, all you need is a bible, fancy suits, studio pictures in which your appearance must have been doctored to make you look immaculate, a well-dressed or good-looking wife, consistent outdoor advertising/marketing materials (flyers, pamphlets, billboards) and most importantly, you need to be brilliant at word play, not because you intend to say anything new but because you need to say old things in more fanciful ways.

You just need to look up a verse in the bible and think of how best to exaggerate its meaning in order to appeal to your audience. And yes, as a pastor in these parts, you must preach nothing but prosperity. Anything short of that and you might lose lucrative audience. Pay attention to that word, lucrative.

Without word play, there will be no mouthwatering offertory, donations, tithes, seed-sowing and the whole nine yards. Most times, you mightn't even need a wealthy congregation, just preach prosperity and the poorest members of the audience would gullibly donate their life savings to the "house of God".

In these parts, the pastoral journey has become more theatrical and less spiritual.

Nollywood and the Ideology of "Fast Money"

“In the Nollywood universe, there is an absolute requirement of ideological closure: good must triumph over evil at the end. …

“… Filmmakers have internalized the idea that their stories should have a moral and, like other African artists, they like to position themselves as teachers of lessons. … But overwhelmingly, the demand for moral closure comes from the audience’s aching need for order or justice. The reality of contemporary Nigeria does not provide either order or justice. Nigerians have faith in God, and they can depend on Nollywood to make sense of the world. Nollywood renovated stories about justice-dealing indigenous spiritual forces, and the rise of Nollywood coincides with the spectacular spread of Pentecostalism and Islamic fundamentalism, both of which, like Nollywood, offer narratives that explain and find consolation in a world of hardship, evil, and social disintegration.

“So the ‘fast money’ theme, like other Nollywood themes, is strongly rooted in a local popular discourse and pressing emotional needs. The moralizing is kept real because it is lived all the time. The temptations and instabilities that make the theme prominent are built into the structure of the industry itself.”

Jonathan Haynes

Nollywood: The creation of Nigerian film genres, 2016, pp. 54-55

Meningitis: When A People Chooses Ignorance

(By Nk'iru. Njoku) - So the governor of Zamfara allegedly made the boo-boo of stating that the recent outbreak of Meningitis in Zamfara area was an act of God - a punishment for sin.

The Nigerian arm of the internet has been thrown into an angry frenzy. Everybody is casting stones at this governor and I'm shaking my head. I mean, I do get the uproar.

But is this not the same country where every goddamn thing has a religious angle even when it has zilch to do with your God(s) and everything to do with your simple refusal to apply COMMON SENSE?

When you people hold prayer sessions in your offices before you start work for the day, what do you think you are doing?

I'll tell you.

You're saying 'I might be a professional, but my job is not really mine to do. If I fuck up, it's how God wants it to happen, after all I've prayed'.

When a person has a disability that has no cure but can only be managed, and you 'block your head' with the fancy words of your pastor and you then tell said person with disability to get a miracle from your pastor, you tell them you're sure they don't have faith and that's why they haven't been healed, what do you think you are doing?

When you as a technician are doing a technical job and you are asked what your timelines are and you say 'by God's grace we will finish on so and so day', what do you think you are doing?

Lagos and Nollywood: Art Imitating Life

"It occurred to me that the basic character of the Lagos urban fabric was the same as the structure of
the film industry, which also is gigantic, astounding in scale, filling the horizon farther than the eye can see, but all generated by small-scale independent producers. They can work quickly and cheaply because of the stock of interchangeable elements, but each product is unique. The predominant style is resolutely modern, but there are enduring, much older structures and occasional gleaming postmodern edifices. The film industry also, in its way, provides a place for Nigerians to live....

"The films are a record of and interpretation of contemporary Nigeria, a social and emotional history. Nollywood's characteristic themes and its distinctive and original set of genres arise out of Nigerian society and address its values, tensions, and historical experiences. Africans have had to struggle to get their stories told on film as well as in other media, and in this respect Nollywood is a triumph of enormous proportions, all the more impressive and interesting because it is a popular art form whose perspective must stay close to that of its broad audience of ordinary Nigerians or risk commercial disaster. Of course the stories Nollywood tells and the way it tells them don't spring sponteneously from the mind of 'the people'--they are mediated by the complex nature of the film industry itself."

Jonathan Haynes

Nollywood: The creation of Nigerian film genres, 2016, pp. xxi, xxiv-xxv

Sunday, April 02, 2017

Nigerian Catholic Church and N20,000 Blessing

(By Lucia Edafioka – Sabinews) - Catholic Church, when did all this nonsense start?

I attend a small military catholic church close to Yaba. Last Sunday I bowed my head out of church before church closed, I felt ashamed. As a Catholic I was raised to sit my butt down no matter what, until the priest gives the final blessing.

Missing ‘the mass is ended let us go in peace’ is akin to not attending church at all but I left way before that. I left after offertory. We had not even done communion. Catholics understand this.

We started at about 7am, the mass was scheduled to close by 9am, but it was 9am and we were still sitting, clapping hands over ‘chief ABC’s, Ten Thousand Naira’. This was the unveiling of the harvest theme for the year. I understand that the church has to raise funds but why are we staying 3-4 hours in church because of funds? Did they extend time for mass because of praise worship or because of the sermon? No. It’s always because of some other frivolities.

That is still not why I left though; I left because of the announcers and the priest. I couldn’t even believe what my ears heard.

‘N20,000! From N20,000 and above, come out here. If you know the lord has blessed you, come and give back to him, Chief this, Daddy that, come out, the lord knows your income. Are you going to give to God what has cost you nothing?’

Abiodun Kuforiji Nkwocha

(Abiodun Kuforiji Nkwocha- Saninews) - Dear men, this is how to commit adultery

Do men realise just how much the world has changed?

Sometimes I don’t think they do.

In our society, shame has always been a tool used to oppress women. To make them hide injustice because they do not want to be labelled. Women get raped and keep quiet because saying someone had sex with her, albeit forcefully, is always to their shame. Nothing can take away that she was penetrated and the defilement is hers.

No one wants to be labelled a slut. Women hid ‘vices’ like drinking and smoking because if they ever did that openly, they would be labelled. Don’t forget that people will tell them that these things will reduce their ‘wife material’.

Slowly things are changing.

Women are getting tired of keeping quiet. Women are tired of the hypocritical labelling that allows only men to do certain things.

If you are on Facebook, then you may have come across instances where women have exposed men (especially married men) that hound their inboxes swearing to be single and wanting to marry them.

Men jump from one inbox to another leaving a trail of their mess like goat droppings everywhere. They bank on the albatross around the necks of Nigerian women -the one that makes them keep quiet.

(Lucia Edafioka – Sabinews) - Lagos men and operation “show your penis”

I am tired of seeing penises in Lagos.

It seems everywhere you look there’s a penis hanging out passing or shaking off the last drops of urine.

What is this nonsense?

I do not understand how we came to be like this in a country where “do not urinate here” signs are more ubiquitous than our coat of arms.

Ok , we were all living in our villages before urban towns sprang up and people began to build houses without bathrooms and toilets. But there was always an outhouse for this purpose, so how did the along the road thing start?

How did it become okay that when people, mostly men, are pressed to urinate they just stop anywhere, bring out their shriveled penis and start urinating?

NollyCulture