Religion, Nigerian Politicians, & Ruinous Duplicity

(By SegunAdeniyi) - By imposing a theocratic order that pushes the responsibility for ‘blessing the people of the state’ to God … [Nigerian politicians] are assured of support in a society where majority of the people are ever ready to die for the faith they proclaim, even if it does not reflect in their character and lifestyles. The interesting thing is that the same people who order the destruction of vehicles carrying alcohol in Kano may be sharing such drinks with friends in the privacy of their homes. It is the same with Christian governors who build expensive cathedrals in their government houses, to reinforce the unholy wedlock between the pulpit and the political podium. …

We should all be worried about the growing importance of religion as a marker of identity and a tool for political exploitation in our country. While religion can indeed help to restore moral order, the experience of Nigeria has shown that it is actually being deployed in promotion of private interest. By invoking religious sentiments, the people are easily triggered to action in support of whatever cause the political leader seems to be pursuing. In a predominantly illiterate society, nothing can be more appealing than to be seen as ‘one of us’ by the masses.

          The story of the drunkard and his bottles of beer [see below] … is very instructive. The man could pick and choose which bottle to destroy and which one to keep because it was all part of an elaborate scam to keep on deceiving himself that he was making the right choice.

Of the Supernatural and Modern Half-Believers

"...Student of folklore Christina Hole describes the half-belief when she notes that while '... most people would hotly deny that they believe in magic, many frequently resort to it in luck-bringing rites, precautionary words or actions against misfortune.' Most of us may know a person (or may be a person) who, after asserting that a certain rather unpleasant occurrence has never happened, will then 'knock on wood' ... --probably a relic of the ancient belief that woods such as elder and oak have magical, protective powers.
          The modern knocker-on-wood may do so with a mocking laugh, or some other outward disclaimer, in case his associates (or employer or wife) suspect his maturity and sanity. Nevertheless, he performs the ritual. He may also carry a rabbit's foot, or similar 'lucky charm, ; though he may deny that he believes that it contains any magical power to bring him good luck. But he makes sure, when he goes lout, that he has it with him. He is a half-believer; he is trying to hedge his bets.
          Incidentally, some of the superstitious magical practices we still indulge in are often not recognized as such. We know it is 'foolish' to believe that a broken mirror will bring bad luck (one's mirror image supposedly contains one's soul, and breaking the mirror prevents the soul's return to the body). We may not know that the enjoyable modern ceremony of throwing rice (or its up-to-date substitute, confetti) over a newly married couple is in fact an ancient fertility ritual--the scattering of products of plentiful nature being a symbolic and magical act intended to make the marriage equally fertile and productive."

Douglas Hill and Pat Williams, 1965, 20-21

The Supernatural

In Memoriam: Robert Gabriel Mugabe

Of Fela, His Music, and Social Change

(By Sylvester Asoya) - “Arrest the Music!” 

I met Professor Tejumola Olaniyan a couple of times just before his exciting work: “Arrest the Music: Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics” was released.

The amiable scholar who teaches African Cultural Studies and English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, told me some interesting stories about Fela during the course of our conversation. The most fascinating for me, is the growing popularity of the Afrobeat king at leading centres of learning in the United States and other parts of the free world. According to him, Fela is currently a subject of great interrogation and extensive study, especially on issues of popular culture and mass mobilization. 

Olaniyan also revealed the origin of his bizarre title, “Arrest the Music!” “Arrest the Music!” was actually a military order by an unlettered soldier on sighting Fela on the performing arena during one of those government sponsored raids on Kalakuta, Fela’s former residence around Ojuelegba area of Lagos in 1977. 

But Fela was indeed, the music! On this score, I think the untutored soldier voiced unusual philosophy.

Of Yoruba Cosmology, Mythology, and Terra Incognita

“The central Yoruba tradition—that of the sacred myth describing the creation, evolution, and jurisdiction of the deities and historical heroes—represents a remarkably rigorous cosmology of intellectual coherence and elegance. It is a universe of elemental forces natural and social with finds metaphoric expression in a pantheon of deities, whose complicated interrelationships, jurisdictions, and necessities are rationalized into an architectonic system of knowledge. The sophisticated worldview embodied in this myth has as its central value the balancing and harmonizing of powerful forces—natural, numinous, and social.

Out of the interplay of deities, ancestors, and humanity, through a process of mutual obligation expressed in language, ritual, and protocol as handed down by tradition, society became possible. A universe of history, stability, morality, and order was achieved.            

But bordering on this system of stability was terra incognita: the evil forest, the bad bush. Here was the home of chaos, where random spirits without name or history, of bizarre forms and malignant intent were to be found. This was the domain of the deformed, the unnatural, and the abominable. The Sunufo, distant cousins of the Yoruba, have a mask that expresses this. It has the snout of an alligator, the tusks of a boar, the horn of a rhinoceros, and the ears of a zebra. It represents an animal that existed before order was imposed on the world.

Yoruba World: A Rich Tapestry of Culture, Religion, and Orature

“But the youthful imagination was fed not only by the awesome images looming in the dim, sacred, ile-ere. Ritual, spectacle, song, dance, drumbeats, mystery, and power surrounded him. Poetry, pageantry, and history combined in the luminous presence of the egungun as the ancestor became flesh and danced among his children. The boy was attracted to the art of the storyteller, a tradition of oral literature that has reached a very high level of complexity and diversity among the Yoruba. But to call these expressions of the culture ‘stories’ is reductive. As developed in this culture, their elaborate narrative line incorporated elements of theater, music, mime, ritual, magic, dance, and the linguistic elements of proverb, poetry, riddle, parable, and song. They were not told so much as performed, dramatically reenacted, so that the accomplished taleteller had to be master of a range of skills. He was at once actor, mime, impressionist, singer, dancer, composer, and conductor, using his range of artistic skills and even the audience and environment to create a multidimensional experience that has no obvious equivalent in Western culture. A more elaborate expression of this form—most often with a strictly religious reference, being ritual recreations of sacred myths—was performed by costumed dancers to the accompaniment of religious music, and became known to Western observers as ‘folk operas.’”

Michael Thelwell, 1984, 182-83

“Introduction,” The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by Amos Tutuola

Of Yorubaland and 1st Encounters with Christianity

“What was not anticipated was the way in which the integrity of the indigenous Yoruba institutions of Abeokuta would begin to fell an unprecedented and unassimilable pressure. This is not to say that the region had been culturally insulated. At the time of Odegbami’s appointment (circa 1900-10), Islam has long been present and mosques were not unknown in the city. Islamic culture and doctrine and Yoruba belief and practice co-existed relatively free of tension, for Islam in West Africa went back many centuries and each system had had time and pressing reason to adjust, however uneasily, to the peculiar character of the other.

The new pressure came at this time from an intolerant, bumptious, and vigorously proselytizing European Christianity, a new dispensation that was not to content itself with the harvesting of souls and the elevation of the spirit, but which increasingly set itself the task of transforming societies. The missionaries—courageous and mostly doomed—frequently brought, or possibly had to bring, to their civilizing mission that narrow self-righteousness that is so often the sword and shield of the religious idealist.

More significantly, hard on the heels of their chapels, mission schools, and hospitals had come new laws and moral codes which were enforced by native courts, a parallel civil service buttressed by police and military forces, a mercantile economy accompanied by a different system of currency, and a new and mysterious system of land tenure, all of which in combination represented during the transition first a parallel government and then a superceding one. The cumulative effect of this challenge on all the traditional institutions

"Living in Bondage: Breaking Free" - A Sequel

Ramsey Nouah (L) and Kenneth Okonkwo

(By BellaNaija) – [A] sequel to Nollywood classic “Living In Bondage” is here … and it is titled “Living In Bondage: Breaking Free”.

Created by Play Network Africa in conjunction with Native Filmworks, the movie is co-produced by award-winning producer, Steve Gukas, Dotun Olakurin and Charles Okpaleke; and directed by Nollywood star Ramsey Nouah.

Living in Bondage: Breaking Free is the story of Nnamdi, Andy Okeke's mysterious son, and his vaunting quest for the big life, one that he would do whatever it took to realize. Nnamdi’s untamed quest for the quick buck, fast car, easy living, inevitably took him on a perilous journey that is better told by the cast of stellar performers, classic and current, including Kenneth Okonkwo, Kanayo O. Kanayo, Enyinna Nwigwe, Nancy Isime and Munachi Abii.

Misfortune as Father of Superstition

"I was lonely in the midst of people, thought so much that I took ill. It was a life that had no substance in it, completely vacuous in the present and in the future. I began to ask introspective questions, making attributions to spiritual diabolism. Misfortune is the the father of superstition. My woes must be spiritual, I concluded.
          The spiritual churches I visited varied and amplified my confusion. I was lost in the labyrinth of prophetic declarations. At one place, I was told that Ekwueme had spiritually sealed my destiny; at another, that there was an ancestral curse upon me. A third said my paternal uncle had shot down my star spiritually. Prayer after prayer. Fasting and seed-sowing, yet nothing changed in my life. A fellow prescribed yet another spiritual house. 'It's the final bus stop; stubborn shackles are loosened there by our father in the Lord.' My spiritual shackles appeared to have been forged with something stronger than iron since there was no breakthrough after a visit to that church. All I wanted was a change in my circumstances, a better job to enable me rent my own abode, and pursue higher education. So, I could not understand why God would not look into my petitions, ordinary as they were. I had now become extremely despondent; my mind had reached a critical state of despair. Finally, I was fed up, and gave up on spiritual solutions."

Immanuel James, 2014, 66-67

Under Bridge

Seun Kuti: God is the Tool of Oppressors

Straight Talk With Kadaria

Of Religion, French Pecking Order, and Frogs

"Deep in the [post-war 1948] countryside of Correze in the Massif Central in the middle of France ... there was a church, packed with attendance by women and children, while the men discussed the important things of life in the bar-cafe across the square. The village priest, always called Monsieur l'Abbe, was friendly to me but slightly distant, convinced that as a Protestant I was tragically destined for hell. Up at the chateau on the hill dwelled Madame de Lamaziere, the very old matriarch of the surrounding land. She did not come to church; it came to her in the form of poor Monsieur l'Abbe, sweating up the hill in the summer sun to bring her Mass in her private chapel. The pecking order was very rigid, and even God had to recognize the distinctions.

          As my French improved, I made friends with a number of village boys to whom I was an object of extreme curiosity. The summer of 1948 was blazingly hot and our daily magnet was the lake a mile outside the village. There, with rods made from reeds, we could fish for large green frogs, whose back leg, dusted with flour and fried in butter, made an excellent supper." 

Frederich Forsyth, 2015, 14-16

The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue

"Religion Has Messed Up Many A Promising Life!"

(By Emeka Oparah) - Now, this is how people are being wasted! 
         I visited a cousin last weekend. We hadn’t seen each other for over a year. Expectedly, there was a lot of catching up to do including the rising spate of sudden and “inexplicable” deaths, especially of young people. In actual fact, there were more than 5 funerals due back home in the village, as we were talking-and that, my dear friends, bothered us a whole lot. Then, he told me a story.
         Last Christmas, he was home (while I was abroad, ironically). A diabetic, he probably over-reached himself, and started feeling “one-kind”. He asked to be rushed to a hospital and was taken to one of the better ones. As soon as the doctor saw him, he ordered he be given a drip! Drip, Father wondered. Yes, drip!
         “Doctor, why would you give me an infusion when you haven’t even asked me any questions; you haven’t taken my vitals or requested my medical history”, he questioned.
         The doctor took one cynical look at him and sarcastically asked him: “Are you a doctor? If you are, why then did you come to me. May be you’re not sick. When you are sick enough, you talk to me!” And with that said, he called the next victim, sorry patient.
         Crazy!!! And that’s how one of the folks, due for burial this weekend in the village, died. She too is a diabetic. A widow, her mother-in-law was to be buried the next day, and she suddenly started feeling sick. She called her friend, a “nurse”, who then gave her an infusion right in her bedroom and went away. After an hour or so, concerned family members went to check on her and found her dead!!! I’m not sure they didn’t say her late mother-in-law took her! You never know these things.

The Fabric of Nigerian Weddings

Bride Dola Olutoye poses with her bridesmaids in traditional Nigerian attire and matching geles, a scarf or fabric folded into an ornate shape atop a woman’s head.Olu Ogundeyin of IMG Artistry

(By Adenike Olanrewaju) - The Fabric of Nigerian Weddings. The color and flair of traditional ceremonies give brides and grooms a way to express a vibrant cultural heritage.

Dola Fatunbi Olutoye, 25, was ecstatic after becoming engaged last November to Dr. Yinka Olutoye, 26. She knew she wanted a traditional Nigerian wedding, but needed help executing the cultural elements of the ceremony, which took place on May 25 in Houston. 

Mrs. Olutoye, a pharmacy student from Houston, and Dr. Olutoye, a recent medical school graduate, are both Nigerian-Americans who are part of the Yoruba ethnic group, which is heavily concentrated in the Southwest region of Nigeria.

Of Nigerians and the Lunacy of Money Rituals

(By Temidayo Ahanmisi) - Meanwhile we still do NOT have the tiniest shred of evidence to suggest that money rituals work.

Not one.

Every suspected money ritualist has a thriving business which they pursue.
The question is Why? What's the point of striving at a trade when said ritualist could just as well order money to pour from anywhere, and crisp notes would litter the place?

I think I'm moving far ahead of myself on this. In the first place, the said ritualist or the native doctors even needing to subjugate their supposed powers to currency bills is the first fail.

Why can't the ritualist be powerful enough to just get all his needs delivered willingly to his doorstep? 
Bankers would bring cash. Car dealers would drop cars and skip away. Food sellers would drop food items..

Why need money? Why "mint" money?

Rationalism trumps this base superstition at any time, but the politics of religious people in need of validation of their myths and faith would not let reason have sway and take the day over ignorance, fear and Incredulity. It is imperative to the religious to have a phantom devil so intractably powerful that they would fight tooth and nail to maintain the contrivance of an omnipotent Evil, capable of the most insane feats.

Re Religion: Instinct Leads, Reason Follows

The "inferiority of the rationalistic level in founding belief is just as manifest when rationalism argues for religion as when it argues against it. That vast literature of proofs of God's existence drawn from order of nature, which a century ago seemed so overwhelmingly convincing, today does little more than gather dust in libraries, for the simple reason that our generation has ceased to believe in the kind of God it argued for. Whatever sort of being God may be, we KNOW today that he is nevermore that mere external inventor of 'contrivances' intended to make manifest his 'glory' in which our great-grandfathers took such satisfaction, though just how we know this we cannot possibly make clear by words either to others or to ourselves. ...

The truth is that in the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion. Then, indeed, our intuitions and our reason work together, and great world-ruling systems, like that of the Buddhist or of the Catholic philosophy may grow up. Our impulsive belief is here always what sets up the original body of truth, and our articulately verbalized philosophy is but its showy translation into formulas. The unreasoned and immediate assurance is the deep thing in us, the reasoned argument is but a surface exhibition. Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow. ...

Please observe, however, that I do not yet say that it is BETTER that the subconscious and non-rational should thus hold primacy in the religious realm. I confine myself to simply pointing out that they do so hold it as a matter of fact."

William James, 2012 [1901-1902], 54-55

"The Reality of the Unseen," The Varieties of Religious Experience