Elder James Must Die!
by Yemisi Aribisala
Power has been conceived throughout Nigeria’s history partly in spiritual terms and the spiritual domain is one in which power is actively contested.
—Stephen Ellis
Since Scottish Presbyterians and Portuguese Catholics came to the place later to be called Nigeria, and insisted on the wholehearted and unquestioning conversion of the indigenes to monotheism, eschewing all ancestral gods, West Africans learned to respond diplomatically. The missionaries weren’t asking anyone’s opinion on whether they would like to befriend the Christian deity in whose authority they came. They were there to enforce their deity’s superiority and the corresponding superiority of their own representative capacities. Thus it made sense, having studied the missionaries, and noting how they conciliated domination and charity, to mirror a similar position. We’ve easily conflated Christianity and other traditional allegiances, and it seems that the safest place to hide as a Nigerian occultist might be in the church.
The thing was to swallow household gods and altar whole in deferential agreement with the missionaries and smiling all the while, especially if you wanted to rise in the ranks of delegated white-man authority. You agreed with missionaries and colonialists; you believed in their divine allegiances and concurred with all they said. Then you went back home to appease your own gods, whom you were considerably more in awe of. More afraid of.
The empowerment that proximity to white men granted the Nigerian was a big deal. I know it personally, from stories of a relative who used to cook for colonials and on this basis became highly placed in his community. More highly regarded than wealthy farmers and landowners, on par with royalty, just on the basis of cooking for foreign stomachs and bringing exotic leftovers home at the end of the day. This relative’s access to unnaturalised foods enhanced his eligibility and spending power to the point where he married a scandalous number of women and spent the rest of his life managing an intractable polygamous situation.
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