Looking for Transwonderland

by Noo Saro-Wiwa

  ‘Lagosians do like their noise,’ I said.

  ‘I think it’s natural with human beings. If you are born in a noisy environment, you are afraid to be taken away from it. What will you do? That’s one of the ways of life in Lagos . . . shouting, arguing. A first-time visitor will see Nigerians as mad. Mad people coming together,’ he gave a closed-lipped chortle. ‘So now that you are in Rome, you have to do as the Romans!’

  Julius showed me his collection of old naira notes and coins. He poured a bagful of old money onto the coffee table.

  ‘I remember these!’ I said, picking up some 10 and 20 notes. My parents used to give me these low-denomination bills as pocket money when I was child. I could spend the cash on fruit and skewers of suya meat, and I still had change to spare. In the 1970s, two naira equalled one British pound sterling. Now the exchange rate was 250 to the pound. Over the years, the government has reprinted naira notes in higher denominations to keep up with the naira’s declining value. Regardless of their economic value, I cherished those crisp, newly issued notes, which seemed an improvement on the current soggy, bacteria-infested bills.

  Julius handed me a one kobo coin, a sure contender for the world’s most valueless coin. One hundred of these coins made up one naira. Once upon a time, a few kobo could buy me some sweets; now they wouldn’t buy me a mouthful of banana. Julius showed me a 2 coin, issued in 2006 by the government in a bizarre imitation of the British £2 coin. The coins were withdrawn from circulation after public protests about their weight: most things cost 100 or more; even sachets of ‘pure water’, the cheapest item, go for 5.

  Someone of Julius’s rank should have been enjoying comfy-slippered retirement. Instead he was topping up his retirement income by selling office furniture and stationery and renting cars to businesses around Lagos. He said he could cheat his clients if he wanted to, but he preferred to enjoy their goodwill instead.

  ‘Was there corruption in the civil service when you worked there?’ I asked.

  ‘We had it,’ Julius said. ‘But when we had it we had what you might call “old level” corruption. You could put it at about 5 per cent. But now it is one million per cent. When we were at the civil service there was temptation, even from outside . . . people advising us to steal funds. But we were typically honest.’

  ‘Do some people regret not stealing?’ I asked.

  ‘You are correct. The reason why is that some of them say, “We are retired but we have no money, no pension.” Successive governments have been very slow in releasing many civil servants’ pensions. Many retirees are complaining. They say if they had known, they would have stolen. And now it is the cause of why younger ones are stealing . . . they look at the older ones being punished, not being paid their entitlement. So they wonder if they must suffer the same fate. They are afraid.’

  Julius was an appealing character. He was feisty and raw, but had an old-school gentility and charm, a member of that generation who spoke very upright Nigerian English (‘Have you got your choice drink?’). Yet he didn’t share the intense religiosity of most Nigerians. Sinful thoughts, he believed, were not the same as sinful deeds.

  ‘I don’t know about heaven and this afterlife,’ he whispered conspiratorially to me, out of earshot from his daughter and her friends, who were playing loud gospel music. ‘You can create a paradise of the heart.’

  ‘I agree.’ We both felt that heaven and hell seem too extreme a conclusion, and very few people deserve to end up in either place. God surely calibrates our virtues and sins more finely than that.

  But Julius’s relative secularism was unusual. After three weeks, I had resigned myself to Nigerian levels of religious fervour. If there’s a country more religious than Nigeria then I haven’t been there. According to the Bible, God made the earth in six days and took a rest on the seventh. But by creating Nigerians, he ensured that that was the last day off he’s enjoyed ever since. Twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week we call upon his services, connecting with him, singing his praises, establishing dialogue with him (and extremely loud dialogue at that). In my time in Lagos I had heard hairdressers singing their hallelujahs at salons; evangelical radio stations resounding in Internet cafés; bus passengers collectively breaking out into ovine choruses of ‘Jeezos is my father . . . he never, never fail me’.

  Television brought little respite. Whenever the electricity miraculously flowed in Aunty Janice’s house, I would flop onto the sofa to savour a football match or a music show, only to be lulled out of my square-eyed stupor by a pastor barking down a microphone at the start of The Divine Connection Hour and other such broadcasts.

  Night time was no haven either. One morning, as daylight diluted the inky sky and the humidity had receded enough to allow me finally to sleep, I was woken by a man walking down the street outside, preaching the gospel at the top of his voice. Temptations of the flesh and the evils of promiscuity were the main themes: ‘. . . You no want for sexing! . . . You no want for sexing!’ he bellowed in the cool dawn. I couldn’t hear the rest of his sermon because he was sauntering down the street, allowing residents of each house to catch only portions of what he said. Had he been serious about spreading the Good News, he might have chosen to stay in one place and let everyone in the vicinity hear his message in full. But he wasn’t concerned about this; the act of imparting the message was his main motive, a conspicuous show of piety that bordered on the self-indulgent.

  All of this was evidence that God’s love is spreading, Christians would say. My view of the situation was less nourishing: years of economic struggle and political corruption seem to have focused Nigerians’ attention on God more strongly than before. I noticed these changes in some members of my extended family. Religion anaesthetises the pain of bad transport, low wages, stuffed ballot boxes and candlelit nights. People’s anger seems to have faded into a muted resignation that shies away from staging street protests. Instead, they develop strategies to earn more money: selling items on the side, begging relatives and friends for loans and donations. But above all, they pray for salvation from life’s tribulations.

  Half of Nigeria’s population – concentrated in the north – is Muslim, but among the other half, evangelical Christianity, especially the Pentecostal kind, is thriving. This charismatic, fundamentalist form of Christianity originated in the 1920s. Focusing on a direct relationship with God, its adherents affirm their faith through the baptism of the Holy Spirit and speaking in ‘tongues’, a strange babble understood only by God. Their interpretation of the Bible is a more literal one, with a strong emphasis on abstaining from alcohol, gambling, extramarital sex and other vices.

  Charismatic Pentecostalism began to flourish in the 1980s as Nigeria tumbled into an economic abyss. On IMF orders, General Babangida had introduced a harsh economic structural adjustment policy aimed at cutting government spending and opening Nigeria’s markets to imports. It ended the decadence of the oil boom years and brought on a nightmare of high unemployment and even deeper poverty for the ordinary man. Out of this emerged an educated elite with a strong, highly conservative message. These Pentecostal Christians believed that by being ‘Born Again’, i.e. living a life of spiritual purity free from sin, one could be ‘saved’ from going to hell – like the rest of humanity – and enjoy a healthy and successful life on earth.

  Pentecostals set up new churches that branched away from the colonial Catholic and Anglican churches. The preachers were entrepreneurially savvy and well qualified, often former lawyers, professors and doctors. Inspired by American televangelists, they ran their churches like businesses. Worshippers were promised that by becoming Born Again and making generous donations to the church, they would be blessed with health, wealth and good luck. Pentecostal ministers are seen as prophetic figures, responsible for passing on God’s words to followers. They are self-styled faith healers, problem-solvers, doctors, philosophers and economists all rolled into one. They offer the gospel as a cure-all for every ill, their services focusing
on divine healing, exorcisms and the performance of miracles.

  Call it what you will – Prosperity Christianity, Health and Wealth Gospel – Nigerians are highly receptive to its message. Around 20 million people now belong to a Pentecostal church, pouring money into its bulging coffers, and turning some churches into highly lucrative concerns. The ministries (some of which may specialise in certain types of healing, such as finances or fertility) are run like commercial enterprises: they manufacture books, CDs, DVDs and merchandise stamped with their own logos.

  These churches have proliferated like mice. A handful of large ones enjoy million-strong congregations, but the other thousand or so ministries are generally tiny, established by anyone who wills it. For every legitimate ministry, several are run by charlatans seeking enrichment of the non-spiritual variety. Competition for adherents is fierce. Yet their wealth isn’t frowned upon. My sister Zina once came across an article in the Nigerian society magazine Ovation titled the ‘Jet Set Pastor’, in which a wealthy church leader posed for photographers in the plush interiors of his mansion. His wealth may very well have been legitimate, but such affluence often evades suspicion because, much like in the gold-encrusted churches of sixteenth-century Europe and South America, in the Pentecostal mind wealth and virtue are intertwined.

  Pentecostal pastors are nearly always the founders of their church and the focus of attention. Thousands of worshippers gather in stadiums or convention centres to listen to their sermons. The preachers prowl and strut around the stage like R’n’B stars, using their charisma to spread the gospel and rouse the congregation into a frenzied, spiritual orgy. The ‘miracles’ they perform are something to behold: the blind can suddenly see, sex freaks discover monogamy, paraplegics stagger out of their wheelchairs for the first time since their car accident. Amen!

  In Lagos, not a week goes by without one of these evangelical events taking place somewhere. They’re promoted like rock concerts and given lavishly worded, pseudo-intellectual titles, such as the ‘Expository and Systematic Revelation of Victory Over Worry and Anxiety’. On the streets are countless billboards featuring these star preachers, looking extremely dapper in their silk ties and boxy Italian suits, handkerchiefs poking neatly from their breast pockets. Their shiny faces stared down at me with toothy, camera-ready smiles that might twinkle if I stared at them long enough. Such stylishness seemed rather disquieting. After all, Jesus, the Prophet Mohammed, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi and Aung San Suu Kyi aren’t renowned for their snappy dress sense.

  The preachers’ presentation is unmistakeably American in influence, though some intellectuals argue that their message of prosperity is rooted in traditional African animist religion, which has always sought material gain from the gods. Either way, many Nigerians see Christianity as a fail-safe conduit to financial prosperity. On a bus one day, a man sitting beside me was reading a book titled Unlocking Your Finances Through Faith. Intrigued as to how prayer can produce money, I read a section of it over his shoulder. The American author had identified a certain aspect of finance, making capital gains, for example, and followed it with a quote from the Bible to demonstrate how such wealth could be obtained via scripture. He leapt from one concept to another without offering any real structural or logical connection between the two. The man reading the book had underlined the biblical quotes in biro. I wondered what he would do with those quotes? Repeat them in his prayers? Then what?

  ‘Ninety per cent of literate Nigerians have only ever read the Bible or the Koran,’ my brother told me. Only half of the country is even literate. Most of the books published each year by domestic publishers are religious in some way. The conventional wisdom is that Nigerians are too poor to read novels or general non-fiction, hence the thriving trade in religious tomes. But surely it costs just as much to publish a religious book as it does to produce a new novel? Same paper, different content, that’s all. The demand for Christian reading simply obliterates all other genres. I worry that so much uncultivated intellect will breed more poverty and push Nigeria along a downward spiral. Already, I could feel the creeping philistinism smothering the country like a hot, wet blanket.

  The media, too, is being saturated. Churches are buying up TV and radio airtime and newspaper advertising space with zeal. The government-run media owes around two-fifths of its advertising revenue to the Church, and allows ministries to occupy large portions of its broadcasting time. By law, religious programming should not exceed 10 per cent of output, but the Nigerian Television Authority swept aside that limit, and dropped the concept of free, state-funded religious broadcasting altogether. Smaller church denominations can’t afford to get on air.

  But for all Nigerian religion’s flaws, I couldn’t imagine Nigerians surviving without it. By following the path of Jesus, people told me, they were paving their way to an afterlife of everlasting peace and happiness. Knowledge of this helps them endure the constant anxiety over financial survival. It makes them very happy. Their faces reflect a genuine euphoria as they calmly negotiate Lagos’s nightmare streets.

  ‘We are the happiest people in the world!’ Aunty Janice gleefully informed me. She had read the World Values Survey, which showed that Nigerians are indeed the most satisfied, contented people on earth; they know that beyond the power cuts and food rationing, beautiful heaven awaits.

  Faith in God imbues Nigerians with an optimism that I rarely see anywhere else in the world. It is reflected in the names of businesses, such as the Winners Express bus line, the Victory Be Sure Academy, the Correct Restaurant or the club night featuring DJ Humility. The Christian half of the country seems to be fuelled by the ‘ecstasy of sanctimony’, to borrow a phrase from Philip Roth.

  But all this Christian passion still competes with pre-Christian beliefs. Paganism takes time to capitulate completely to Christianity in any society – Americans were still burning ‘witches’ more than 1,000 years after Christianity came to Europe, and Nigerians are unlikely to shake off our paganism only 150 years after the missionaries arrived. While we replaced our benevolent gods with Jesus, we’re still convinced that the traditional, malevolent spirits are out to get us, a part of that universal human obsession with the ‘dark side’. And so Christianity in Nigeria partly supplements our traditional religions; Jesus is often incorporated not as a new belief system but as a potent new force to combat those ancient evil spirits.

  Consequently, the lexicon of Nigerian Christianity is highly defensive and combative. Our pastors talk incessantly about ‘satanic agendas’ and ‘war against satanic manipulation’. Buildings are draped in religious banners, printed with phrases such as ‘I am blessed beyond satanic manipulation’; small stickers on bus windows say: ‘No weapon fashioned against me shall prosper’; people learn the Bible in institutions with names like the Weapons of Warfare Healing School.

  With attack considered to be the best form of defence, our churches are now filled with ‘prayer warriors’ who use the gospel to fight off evil. They’ve changed the nature and style of other denominations, too. Gone are the days when Catholics murmured in lethargic unison about sinning ‘in thought and word and deed’. Now they’re shouting the Lord’s praises and defeating evil. Many people, Aunty Janice included, have left these traditional denominations altogether and switched to Pentecostalism.

  ‘Why did you leave the Catholic Church?’ I asked her.

  ‘The prayers were not effective,’ she replied, as though describing a brand of medicine. ‘They were not hot.’

  Religion is by far the greatest manipulator and regulator of our thoughts and behaviour. Recognising this in their own societies, British taskmasters successfully incorporated the ‘work ethic’ into Christianity as a way of boosting worker productivity in the ‘dark satanic mills’ of the Industrial Revolution. If only the same had occurred in Africa. Had I been a missionary or imam in nineteenth-century Nigeria, I might have adopted a similar strategy and taught Babangida and Abacha’s ancestors to associate corruption with evil spir
its, thus striking fear into the hearts of their thieving progeny.

  Then I would have declared pounded yam to be the food of the devil, so I would never have been forced to eat it as a child.

  The strength of Nigerian spirituality was fully brought home to me on the bus one day when another preacher-salesman stood up to promote his self-written pamphlet, entitled: Total Formula for Victory Over the Hardships of Life.

  ‘I am not hungry,’ the man said, assuring us that this was no money-making scam. ‘I am a qualified university doctor,’ he said. ‘I am doing it purely for my new-found love of Christ . . . You are speaking to a former occultic general . . . the man who rejected Jeezos is now praising Jeezos today!’

  I bought one of his pamphlets for 400 and flicked through it. Printed on the front page were his contact details. In order to pass himself off as a university professor, the man had incorporated the University of Lagos domain name (‘unilag’) into the first half of his Yahoo e-mail address. Evidently, he was hungry. I opened a page at random, in which the ‘doctor’ was discussing the causes of female infertility. I was startled to see the following statement: ‘A woman is infertile because the vagina is an elephant’s ear or anus of a bird . . .’

  That evening, just after the electricity cut out, I asked Mabel whether she believed in the supernatural and believed this theory about infertility and bird-anus vaginas. Scepticism must have been written all over my torch-lit face.

  ‘Were you there when God created the world?’ she challenged pre-emptively. ‘Do you believe that God created the world?’ I cowered in silence. I’d never seen her so assertive. ‘Listen,’ she continued, ‘I know this guy who slept with a woman who was a prostitute or something like that. Afterwards, she told him he would never have children. And now he has trouble getting an erection.’