Christianity and Nigerian Public Life

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.’

We attended Mass the following Sunday at a Catholic church in Ikeja, Lagos. I had missed the swinging censers, the enrobed lectors, and the processional cross lifted high. The women glittered in their sequins and headscarves of varying colours and dimensions were duly represented. Brocade, Ankara, Adire, George wrappers; clothes handmade, embroidered, starched, and ironed. This was the Nigerian way. Nigerian women were indomitable in the business of glamour. We walked into a room and people turned to look. We knew they would. Ten years ago, a Catholic church in Enugu in South East Nigeria banned the ícháfù, the crowning glory without which an Igbo woman’s traditional outfit was incomplete. After bombings by Boko Haram in the early 2010s, the parish priest said that these giant headscarves formed a barricade when women sat side-by-side. This was true. During Mass, you never wanted to sit behind a woman whose ícháfù towered two feet or more, defied gravity and your convenience, and made you crane to see the priest raise the host during the liturgy of the Eucharist.

The general disposition that Sunday was reverential. Trousers were scarce, heads were bowed, and arms were covered. We genuflected at the name of Jesus and said the Prayer for Nigeria in Distress, which we had prayed every Sunday since I was a little girl. ‘All powerful and merciful father, you are the God of justice, love, and peace. You rule over all the nations on earth. Power and might are in your hands, and no one can withstand you…’ we proclaimed in unison. There were multiple collections and we sat, knelt, stood, and swayed for over two hours. In my parish back in Charlottetown, Canada, a sea of grey heads presented itself on the walk down the aisle. Mass was finished in an hour, trousers were fine, and you covered your head out of personal devotion, in the winter or if perhaps your outfit needed a bit more panache.

At a wedding we attended a week later, the church wardens wore skirts that grazed at their ankles, put scapulars around their necks, and scanned the congregation for errancy. They turned women with uncovered heads away at the door and hounded those who made it inside until they left and returned with handkerchiefs, if they returned at all. The priest would not continue with the Eucharistic Prayer if all present—including the photographer and other non-Catholic guests—did not kneel. This aridity of spirit saddened me. Although the 1917 Code of Canon Law of the Catholic Church made it mandatory for women to cover their heads at Mass, this canon was removed in 1983. But I was in Nigeria, and we were more Catholic than the pope.

A Yoruba hymn from the Baptist church on top of the hill near our estate filtered in one evening and I sang along to the words I knew. ‘Mà kójà mí, Olùgbàlà. Gbó àdúrà mí.’ Pass me not, o gentle saviour. The seamstress who mended our dresses as young girls had closed her shop. When she still ran it, her husband started a church in their living room. When we went to drop off or pick up clothes, a light breeze would lift the curtain to show him pacing the floor, raised to realms beyond our material world, with a microphone in hand and a speaker at the altar. On the opposite wall was a bigger church; it was said that the pastor beat his wife. When they held their vigil services simultaneously on Friday nights with loudspeakers facing the street, I wondered whose prayer reached heaven first.

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. We were people who bound spirits and spoke to them as with intimate friends. We sent angels on assignments, brokered with heaven to have lightning annihilate enemies, and returned arrows to their senders. How did you touch that which no eye had seen? How did you cage the wind? How did you barter words with formless beings? My secondary education was at a Christian private school in Lagos. We prayed morning and evening and were each given engraved Bibles on graduation day. Our parents were called up to lay their hands on us and pray. When my anthropology professor at university in Canada said that he attended church on Sundays only so that if it indeed was that heaven existed, he could set foot on the streets of gold, I could not understand. It had never occurred to me to doubt. In Nigeria, God’s existence was the most basic premise from which you operated. You accepted as settled fact that evil spirits prowled the world; that spoken words could fetter a person’s destiny; that a person’s fortune was something you could look into as if it were a mirror; and that a person’s blood, hair, and fingernails had power.

Yet I came to see how our approach to religion and spirituality in post-colonial Nigeria wounded us. We had cast off the deities our ancestors venerated, at least publicly, but had not quite rid ourselves of that desire to see the object of our worship. Clerics filled that gap; our reverence for them was at par with our belief in God. Our upbringing made it such that we implicitly deferred to authority. We focused on semblances of worthiness before acceptance. We were easy to deceive by false appearances of piety. We sometimes thought that science negated faith.