Guardian

Being continuation of a lecture delivered by Jacob K. Olupona, a noted Professor of African Religious Traditions, Professor of African and African American Studies at the Nigerian National Order of Merit (NNOM) laureates’ event recently. First part was published on Tuesday, January 1, 2013

“BONDAGE,” is premised on our knowledge of religion as paradoxically both functional and dysfunctional. In Nigeria’s case, despite religion’s positive contributions as outlined above, religion has also become a form of bondage.  First, religion tends to stifle rational discourse and promote the belief that only adherence to faith and devotional life will solve our myriad national problems.

Organised prayer sessions, fasting, and retreat, we claim, will return us to our normal self.  While I believe in prayer and indeed am convinced that a praying people triumphs in times of national crisis, we risk turning God into a magician who, against all odds, can perform miracles to rescue us from our human-created crises. However, those who hold such beliefs may be unaware of another dimension of religion, as a force and a phenomenon that frees us from ignorance, and that requires that in the name of God we hold our leaders accountable for their moral failures and their reckless disregard for the sufferings of the millions of Nigerian citizens under their care.

The public discourse on prayer was vividly brought to our attention recently in a sermon by the former Primate of the Anglican Church and Archbishop of Abuja, Bishop Jasper Akinola. The bishop dared the nation’s elite, including Mr. President, to say amen to his prayer that God would punish those Nigerian elites who had been unfaithful to the Christian tradition by breaking one of Christianity’s cardinal commandments, “Thou shall not steal from the nation’s treasury.” Needless to say, not a single soul responded with the required amen, although our own Dr. Ruben Abati, the president’s spokesperson, later gave a strange response and excuse for the silence: that Mr. President unfortunately had used his quota of “amen,” that day and could not respond to the archbishop’s prayer!

The crisis of religious violence that has engulfed us indicates that religion, as it is currently expressed, puts individuals, communities, and the nation in bondage.  No serious scholar trained in the discipline of religion and committed to a national agenda that promotes the quest for peaceful coexistence, poverty alleviation, transparency and lack of corruption, and the pursuit of human happiness through social welfare programs should ignore religion as an important component of sociopolitical bondage. But paradoxically, religion is also crucial in fighting such bondage.

The debate on whether it is religion or politics that triggers the frequent violence in Nigeria underestimates religion’s powerful function in molding cultures and societies around the world.  Certainly, religion constitutes a key element in individuals identity construction and is a key marker of group identities, including ethnic and national identities  Unfortunately, people too often associate this thesis solely with Islam in northern Nigeria where, of course, ethnic and religious identity are very much intertwined.  One must also note situations in other regions of the country where different religious beliefs play overlapping roles in shaping communal loyalties.

It is very hard to separate the religious from the non-religious, in particular in the North, where the current spate of violence is not purely religious, but may also be social, economic and political. Religion is social/public and should be, while the social is about power and politics.  Religion too often becomes a rallying point around which to articulate political views.  The discourse of salvation in evangelical Christianity and jihad in Muslim rhetoric has been used to justify each group’s clarion call to aggression.  Any time a new leader emerges in our nation, he tends to build a religious castle to ensure his own survival, which further aggravates religious sensibilities.  A cursory look at events in the country in the past few decades indicates that such religious interventionism varies, from the importation of Muslim Marabouts from neighboring countries, as we witnessed during General Abacha’s dictatorship, to the upsurge of evangelical Christian proselytisation for personal survival among government dignitaries in high places and in government circles. Christian evangelical aggression may convey to Muslims that Christianity too is intolerant and domineering.

While there is nothing wrong with southern Christian communities holding on to their faith traditions as minorities in many Muslim regions, a triumphalist display of faith may be counterproductive and detrimental to the nation’s religious climate.  Some revival meetings publicised on billboards, particularly those that portray the faces of foreign evangelists, may have the effect of suggesting to Muslims and other non-Christians that Christians seek to conquer their territory.

But the deeper dilemma is that, with only Islam and Christianity remaining as the principal expressions of religious identity, the two traditions are confronting each other in the public sphere. The bi-polar world of Nigerian faith traditions stimulates an intolerance of African values and increasingly encourages conversion and violence. The current situation reflects a competition between the two monotheistic traditions for the soul of the country.

Similarly, the religious struggle between these two faiths has manifested in the guise of a new cold war between global Islam and the international evangelical Christian communities.  In addition, Americans and Europeans have begun to finance, construct, and promote the growth of Christian institutional influences within Nigeria just as the Gulf States are financing Islamic movements and institutions here.

We must chart the history of religious evolution in contemporary Nigeria, and point to where and why the fulcrum of Nigerian religious history shifted from tolerance in the past to intolerance and violence today. We need to understand how we moved from the time when religion was a source of bonding, particularly at the time of independence, to today, a time in which religion seems more a form of bondage.  I use these terms as typologies; they are ideal types rather than absolutes in Max Weber’s formulation. To assert that religious bondage consumes the country does not mean that strong manifestations of productive bonding in contemporary Nigerian communities no longer exist.  Rather, my goal is to examine the nation’s transition from religion as a unifying force to religion as a divisive force.

The religious history and sociopolitical events in Nigeria since independence indicate that the laudable experiments in religious pluralism initiated in 1960, which encouraged strong bonding between traditions, began to disintegrate shortly thereafter. At the dawn of Nigeria’s independence, there was a firm recognition of the nation’s triple religious heritage: Islam, Christianity, and indigenous traditions.   This recognition, in turn, permeated the political, social, and cultural institutions established after independence.

Most state events incorporated invocations of God, based on the assumption that civilians considered God the common denominator among the three traditions. God-talk became the most significant bond among Nigeria’s 350 ethnic groups.  Professor Bolaji Idowu’s Nigerian Independence Lecture, organised by the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation in October 1960, titled “God in Nigerian Beliefs and Practices,” was perhaps the first and only occasion when this triple heritage articulated by the founding figures of this nation was expressed.

Although there were skirmishes then among traditions, they did not lead to sustained conflicts like those seen in Nigeria in recent decades. The independence era also espoused a central national ideology whereby Nigerian leaders encouraged the promotion of values and culture, recognizing their significance to social development. They motivated scholars in the humanities and social sciences to research arts, culture, indigenous education, and medicine. Professors like Adeoye Lambo in Psychiatry and Babs Fafunwa in Education responded to the national call to indigenization with successful results, not to mention the Nsukka physicists who, despite their sufferings during the civil war, wanted to offer the nation the benefits of their scientific knowledge to spur technological development.  That period in our nation’s history was also important, because similar moments in the history of other nations like South Korea, Malaysia, and India inspired the faithful to leap towards political, technological, and economic emancipation and advancement.

The nation-builders recognised that modernisation does not equate with Westernisation and indeed that African cultures, including religions, could develop their own forms of modernity.

In 1977, a landmark conference took place known as the Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC), during which large gatherings of African-diasporans assembled in Lagos under General Obasanjo to reaffirm the authenticity of African traditions, promote these values in national development, and ensure that national objectives included cultural components. This was a turning point in our national life.

Shortly after this, in the late 1970s, Nigeria took a turn for the worse when suddenly new apostles of modernisation and Westernization condemned indigenous values and cultures. Until this moment, indigenous faiths constituted a more active part in Nigeria’s collective identity than they do today.  Indigenous religions conveyed local values and worldviews. Relationships between ethnic cultures, anchored in African myths, rituals, and symbols, reminded us that Christianity and Islam were non-indigenous missionary faiths that needed thorough domestication.  They arrived either via trade routes or with the Europeans and needed to become Africanised in order to achieve legitimacy.  This encouraged more tolerant strains of Islam and Christianity. In this sense, the indigenous component of Nigeria’s cultural memory served as a buffer between Islam and Christianity.  The Nigerian faith-hearth had three legs, like my grandmother’s three legged cooking hearth, which never allowed her cooking pot to fall off.  As the Yoruba proverb would say, “Adiro meta ki yebe sina!”

But in the late 1970s, many Nigerians began to perceive indigenous culture as an enemy preventing the nation’s progress into the modern world. This marked a critical juncture in Nigeria’s religious history, when the country began its spiral slide into chaos. As Nigeria embarked upon nation building under various military rulers, particularly in the post-civil war era, we began to witness the erosion of indigenous values and the undermining of the virtues of religious tolerance and mutual engagement that characterized the 1960s and early 1970s.

The state as an instrument of governance, which was perceived to be neutral and impartial towards religious traditions, failed to understand that the decades of peaceful religious tolerance in the land were the fruits of previous efforts toward modernity and secularism, properly understood. What happened in the post-FESTAC era, then, represents a coalescence of misguided state policies and wanton corruption that deflated people’s confidence in the state’s neutrality and impartiality towards religion. This provided a recipe for factional politics, including religious fanaticism. In this new atmosphere, the two dominant religious factions, Christians and Muslims—became the central players.  I must add that what led to the marginalisation of indigenous religion was not modernity and secularization, but the state’s inability to grasp the complexity of the nation building project and particularly the role of indigenous values in this project.  The opposition to FESTAC by both Christian and Muslim religious purists was a real sign of the times. Both Christian and Muslim elites considered FESTAC, with its celebration of black culture and traditions, to be an endorsement of paganism!  The backlash it provoked led to Christian and Muslim zealotry at the expense of traditional values.  Military rule did not help this situation, as political leaders exploited the geographical distribution of Muslims and Christians in order to consolidate power.  Coupled with this was the gradually increasing influence of some Middle Eastern embassies in promoting a new form of Islamism that valued Arab culture more than Black culture.     Ironically, it was also a time when the influence of indigenous Christianity, such as Aladura, which had flowered along with Nigerian nationalism in the 1950s to 60s, began to wane and was replaced by the more vibrant and exhilarative evangelical Pentecostal and Charismatic movements. Aladura Christianity, by the way, promoted traditional values within a Christian framework and proved to the world that African Christianity can be as rich and authentic as Western Christianity.  This is evident in their adoption of African hymnals, an indication of the seriousness with which they responded to the African indigenous worldview.

In the larger Islamic scene, we must comment on the new Islamism that the late Sheikh Abubakar Gumi championed.  Gumi’s strong connection with Wahhabi traditions in Saudi Arabia Islam as well as his own personal piety allowed him to speak powerfully to the Northern Muslims.  It was Gumi who embarked on a program to root out indigenous-flavored Sufi practices in order to promote a new interpretation of orthodox Islam, thus uniting various Muslim groups under the pretext of modernization. Gumi’s ingenuity provided the basis for the later quest for Islamic rule and a rejection of secularism and the secular nation state.  In the northern region, via the  ‘Yan Izala Movement, Sheikh Gumi waged war against more tolerant, native forms of Sufi tradition in the Tijaniyya and Q?diriyya Sufi brotherhoods, because he believed they brought unacceptable innovation to Islamic practices.  His achievement and success were rewarded with the King Faisal Prize, misleadingly dubbed the “Muslim Nobel Prize.”

The 1980s witnessed significant shifts in the Nigerian religious landscape.  Indigenous Christianity began to lose its high profile for two reasons.  First, global Pentecostal Charismatic Christianity denigrated native Christian traditions and promoted foreign cultural values in the guise of religion.  Second, the rise of this movement coincided with the economic downturn in Nigeria, during which the currency tumbled and the State was forced by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank overlords to take an IMF loan with a structural adjustment policy (SAP) that created wrenching poverty. One should not be surprised that this economic crisis contributed to an explosion of religious practice as the populace began to look to religious institutions for solutions to their problems. Unfortunately, these institutions failed to address the underlying economic problems that caused such poverty. Pentecostalism became increasingly attractive to the disadvantaged not only because it promised prosperity, but also because it provided social services that catered to the poor, leading citizens to see faith in instrumental terms. Indigenous Pentecostalism also struck familiar chords in the local cultural repertoire.  For instance, indigenous traditions taught that good health, prosperity, and a long life lay at religion’s core, the same teaching Pentecostalism offered. The two differed, however, with Pentecostalism having a broader scope: worldly salvation was no longer defined as the exclusive preserve of the Gods, but rather salvation was broadly defined as both earthly prosperity and other-worldly bliss.

I do not mean to imply that our national religious life in the post-independence years, particularly in the era of military dominance during the 70s and 80s, was one in which religious institutions were complacent about the declining state of our public life.  Some religious leaders fired prophetic warnings shots and used their pulpits to speak truth to power by calling the attention of our leaders to the declining state of our nation.  Remembering those who did so can help us re-imagine today the central role that Nigeria’s religious organizations and institutions can play in Nigerian civil society.  In 1982, during his second visit to the Bigard Memorial Seminary in eastern Nigeria, one of the largest seminaries in the Catholic world, Pope John Paul II, who chastised activist priests in Latin America and Europe, marveled at the apparent silence of Nigerian priests who faced sociopolitical oppression in Nigeria under the military.  In a speech citing liberation theology’s basic components, he challenged them to rise up against their oppressors and liberate the poor from socioeconomic deprivation.  Several Nigerian religious leaders against all odds followed the Pope’s advice, speaking out and successfully making their voices heard. The moment admonished Nigerian Catholics to preach against human suffering and political abuse in Nigeria.

In our own times, a careful look at contemporary Nigerian society suggests that religious institutions constitute some of the strongest “communities of interest,” with significant social and religious capital at their disposal. If and when properly put to use, they can have significant influence on both the private and public lives of Nigerians.  The common person respects and trusts religious leaders much more than he respects and trusts politicians.

Second, the Nigerian judiciary has failed to be the arbiter for the common people, leaving poor, ordinary citizens with no choice but to look beyond the courts to resolve their complaints before the court of God, where they believe the ultimate judgment will take place.  If government is so damaged, can and should we blame citizens for looking elsewhere for assistance?

By the beginning of the new dispensation and re-democratisation era that began in 1999, Nigeria had reached a crossroad. Under a sequence of leaders, we went through new phases of religio-political crisis and protest over the implementation of the Shari’a, Miss World Pageantry, and Islamic banking, to the point where now virtually any crisis in the core Muslim world sends ripples of anxiety into Nigeria.

The question is, which is the way forward for Nigeria? We need to unpack some of the terms scholars have used to describe the relationship between religion, state, and politics in our nation and draw a roadmap for our future.  That map must include a definition of the state that acknowledges that religious formations are at its core.  Though the vehicle of faith may appear rudderless, as King Sunny Ade musical metaphor reminds us, this should not deter us from responding critically and substantially to Nigeria’s religious situation.

I propose five key steps for applying the lessons of the study of religion to Nigeria’s nation-building project of socio-cultural transformation.

First, we must develop religious literacy.  There is a need for the country to embark on a rigorous educational program where religious literacy will be pursued.  “Religious Literacy” means exposing Nigerian youth to the country’s many religious traditions, not for the purpose of conversion or indoctrination, but to acquaint them with the traditions that constitute the core of Nigerian religious and cultural inheritance. Ideally, religious literacy should be pursued by scholars in Religious Studies Departments in Universities, but unfortunately this has become difficult in recent decades as Religious Studies departments become increasingly controlled by Christians and Arabic and Islamic Studies departments by Muslims, and both have become too much like seminaries pushing partisan agendas. Given Nigeria’s present climate of religious partisanship, it is now an uphill struggle to pursue the neutral, objective study of religion. How we teach Nigerian religious wisdom to our youth is central to the success of any religious literacy program we initiate.   For example, if you ask a Nigerian history student about Shehu Uthman dan Fodio, the great cultivator of Islam in northern Nigeria and the founder of the Sokoto caliphate, the student will most likely inform you that he was the architect behind the jihad whose ideological pursuits led to the northern Nigerian establishment of Islam known today.  The student is unlikely to know, however, an equally important fact: that education, especially, education for women, was integral to dan Fodio’s reforms.

This intellectual revolution is exemplified by Nana Asma’u bint Shehu Usman dan Fodio (1793-1864), a poet, teacher, Sufi mystic, and educational reformer. One could consider her a womanist, and an icon for educated Muslim women in Nigeria.  Her legacy has been passed on to us through her writings, which have become an important subject for scholars in Islam around the world. At his 2011 Jodidi lecture at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center, His Excellency the Sultan of Sokoto Alhaji Muhammadu Sa’adu Abubakar III provided a significant opportunity to recall Nana Asma’u’s life. During the dinner following his speech, an audience of almost two hundred attendees heard Nana Asma’u’s poetry recited.  It moved many to tears.  Nana Asma’us biography made a very deep impact on scholars of Islam and gender studies, because her life and works point to women’s deep involvement in religion as a form of public/civil practice.

It seems that religion is one domain where women can potentially contribute to nation-building, as they have done historically. Their contributions are especially valuable, because forceful militarized governance masculinises so much of civil life, as we currently witness in our nation.  Without question, we must teach inspiring history such as this to reaffirm the significance of education, women’s importance in Islam, and the value of poetry to devotional life in Nigeria.

Second, I recommend maintaining a line between private and public expressions of faith.  The custodians of communal traditions and culture such as the emirs, obas, and obis must avoid combining personal evangelical espousal of fundamentalist Islam and Christianity with the public faith discourse.  Civil leaders should recognise that by virtue of their position, they preside over a diverse community of believers, and they offer a sacred canopy under which these eclectic traditions exist.

Third, we must establish and nurture interfaith dialogue. It seems that Nigeria is finally making significant progress in intra- and inter-faith conversation.  Many groups exist that respond to the need for a viable, ongoing conversation. Yet meeting only in response to a crisis seems counterproductive, because the conversation gets stuck.  Moreover, the State sponsors most interfaith dialogues, rendering it difficult to maintain the required neutrality during such conversations. In several other countries, even in times of peace, robust interfaith initiatives have been sponsored by nongovernmental agents.  We need the same here in Nigeria. I have a two-pronged vision for interfaith dialogue in Nigeria. On one end, government-sponsored interfaith representatives should partner with nongovernmental, socially engaged interfaith groups in promoting values and engaging in community projects that improve the quality of life of their people.  If this goal is realized in Nigeria, our contentious religious dyad will become a source of bonding benefiting the community rather than a source of bondage and conflict.

The test of a successful interfaith endeavor is in praxis, not in the theory of interfaith dialogue.  A few months ago, the Somalian al-Qaeda killed worshipers in a Kenyan church.  It was depressing for me as a Nigerian to hear the reactions of Kenyans expressed on the British Broadcasting Corporation network: “We will not allow them to turn Kenya into what Boko Haram has turned Nigeria into.”  This remark was immediately followed by an action that will very likely surprise Nigerians themselves.  The Kenyan Muslim youth formed vigilante groups to protect the thirty-three Christian churches around the site of the massacre.  “They are minorities among us,” they said, “and our religion enjoins us to protect them.”  On the other end, contemporary leadership in Nigeria today should look to their cultural heritage for lessons on how to maintain a peaceful and secure existence among religious groups in the country.

In the past, traditional Nigerian rulers provided the sacred canopy that guaranteed peaceful coexistence of peoples of diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds and political affiliations.  Several contemporary rulers have now become pawns in the hands of the politicians who have taken control of our private and public lives.

Fourth, we need a national orientation that generates an invisible national faith, or to use the language of religious studies, a form of civil religion.  It would provide an overarching sacred space for political and social action. The nation should promote and strengthen symbols, rituals, histories, and metaphors pertaining to Nigeria’s collective identity.  Our history, our geography, and our social, political, and cultural life confirm the Durkheimian position that a functioning society requires a set of values to bind it together.  Unfortunately, we have yet to create new ones or nurture the old symbols and rites that have served this purpose in the past.  Nation building remains a work in progress.  It requires visionary, transformative leaders who will guarantee that the multiethnic, multicultural, and multireligious identities in Nigeria coexist underneath a single sacred canopy of the nation state. We must promote the symbols of national unity, recognise national sacrifice, and hallow our national Martyrs so that others will emulate their good services and recommit themselves to the task of nation building. I have addressed this issue in several of my writings, but permit me to say that what brought tears to my eyes when our young NYSC volunteers were killed in the midst of our last national elections was what one of them who was eager to participate in ensuring a free and fair election wrote on his Facebook page a few hours before he was killed in cold blood: that the next day he was going to participate in ensuring that Nigeria conducted a peaceful election.

Unfortunately, these young graduates paid the supreme price with their blood, killed at the prime of their youth serving an apparently ungrateful nation. In my opinion they are more deserving of our national honors than the politicians and looters in the corridors of power.

If we place Nigeria within the regional and global discourse on issues of social and economic development, including the role of governance and human capital, it is clear that religion must assume a productive role in our society. As a nation, we must reinforce our society’s secularity and religious pluralism, which, as I have argued, are not necessarily in conflict. We must also maintain the dialogic public sphere that I referred to early in my talk. Rather than decreeing modernity and secularism, we would be wise to include them among the prescriptions needed to recreate the Nigerian state. We need to spell out the ingredients of modernity and their constitutive relationship with the aspirations of a democratic state that is culturally pluralistic and that takes seriously the varieties of Nigerians’ religious values and cultures.

Consequently, my final recommendation is that the state should create a think-tank on religious affairs, something similar to The Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER.)  Because of the complex issues surrounding religion, it has become the most unregulated sphere of our nation’s life. We need a well-funded research Institute where critical thinking about religion and nation building can take place. Nigeria lacks a close relationship between religion and security matters. Security considerations require that we reevaluate the function of religion. Is it primarily violent or nonviolent? Is it used as a tool for other actions? Does it represent the faithful? In today’s Nigeria, violence associated with religion is everywhere.

While Boko Haram may be the extreme case, lesser-known forms of aggression in God’s name, such as dangerous and violent forms of witchcraft exorcism in children reported in Southeastern Nigeria or instances where religious leaders manipulate defenseless citizens, require equally attentive regulation.  We must focus our national security agenda not only on extremist religious violence, but also on the quotidian forms of aggression against the nation’s most vulnerable citizens.

In conclusion, let me state that the parameters I have set up for examining the foundational and substantive role of religion in state building and in the public sphere have enjoined me to think seriously about the role of the sacred institutions of Nigerian faith traditions, their evolution from institutions that provided bonding among our people, to their role as institutions that establish exclusive boundaries between faiths, to their status as institutions that subject people to bondage, breed violence, and threaten our national life.

It behooves men and women of good will, the nation’s leadership, traditional rulers, and civic society to join hands in establishing programs to reverse our current course.  Once again I thank the NNMA organisers and the audience for listening.  I am thankful for the great honor of being invited to present this national lecture.

Concluded