Nothing was untouched by the practice of religion in Nigeria. You could not pour sand in your ears to drown out its demands. We carried on with the assumption that the spirit world was a place of dynamism where things happened before they reached our plane. I loved this about us... Yet I came to see how our approach to religion and spirituality in post-colonial Nigeria wounded us.
I arrived in Lagos that Easter morning in 2022 with swollen feet; it was the day of my resurrection. There was neither stone nor sepulchre but a plane from which I emerged. God was here. He was everywhere. On the lips of the customs official who first called me her daughter, thanked Him for journey mercies, and then extorted me; in the churches filled to the brim and overflowing this Sunday morning; and with the man who sat beside me and made a sign of the cross when the plane landed and we clapped.
People milled about the airport waiting for suitcases to appear, renting carts, calling family to say they had arrived. Arms akimbo, we hovered around the conveyor belt. Three feet from me stood a man whose pot belly bestowed an air of importance he wore as an accessory. One look at him and you just knew that he worked for government. Beside him was a tall white man wearing a linen tunic and wiping sweat from his forehead. Airport staff offered help with a fervour the uninitiated could not refuse. Here, in this land of compatriots and forebears, I was seen. Ordinary incidents presented themselves as occasions for my joy. The official who looked at my documents called my name in a manner so laden with familiarity that I could well be a distant cousin from his village. I had returned to this place where a cavalier kind of confidence presented itself in things like business names. A ‘lounge’ could be a small shed cobbled together, furnished with plastic chairs and strobe lights. If not a lounge, in fact, it was a lounge by prophecy. A business owner could also be an arbiter of God’s justice on earth. I saw a bus that belonged to Goodness and Mercy Mass Transit; its motto was, ‘No peace for the wicked.’
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