Religious syncretism and Nigeria’s “money ritual” problem

Tunde is a 35-year-old Christian male from Nigeria living in the year 2022. “Bill” was a 35 year-old Christian male from Bristol, UK living in the year 1897. Bill was asked to oversee a squadron of men working for the British Army on a mission to destroy Benin City, the heart of the Benin Kingdom, which he did easily and with minimum force. Benin fell in just 5 days, and Bill lost only 8 men out of 1,500. Bill exiled the Oba of Benin to Calabar and proceeded to cart away the entirety of Benin’s cultural treasures. Today, they can be observed at the British National Museum in London.

Tunde in 2022 however, maintains a terrified reverence of the Oba of Benin in 2022 despite allegedly sharing the exact same faith as the person who disdainfully kicked it over like a child flipping a bucket 125 years before. Tunde is frightened because of the Oba’s alleged black magic powers which have never been proven to exist, and which clearly had zero effect when they were needed. What is more, despite being supposedly Christian, Tunde also firmly believes that he could become fabulously rich if he would perform the same human sacrifices that Oba Akenzua used to indulge in a century ago.

Clearly, Tunde’s Christian faith is little more than skin deep, no matter what he might tell you, but there is something more fundamental to understand about the baffling pathology of Tunde and millions of his contemporaries across Africa today.

Something for nothing: Africa’s destructive perennial obsession

I have previously argued that the deeply-held belief that it is possible to get something in exchange for nothing is central to everything that is wrong with the ancient and modern African psyche. Practically all of our problems can be traced to the fact that we genuinely do not believe in Newton’s 3rd Law of Motion, and we strongly believe that we deserve outcomes that we have done no work to create.

Take the trans-Atlantic slave trade for example- a 300-year economic decimation event that took about 12 million of the continent’s brightest and best, and used them to build the economies of the New World. Why did this monstrous phenomenon last so long? Because wealthy Africans and African leaders expressly wanted it that way, so as to maintain an inflow of consumables like umbrellas, gin, cloth, corrugated roofing sheets and cannons. It never at any point occurred to any of them that they could obtain the technology behind these items and make them for themselves. Instead, exporting cheaply captured human beings whom they did not create in exchange for these items, was the closest possible thing to magic.

It is still in evidence today, as millions of Africans continue to believe that either by singing and dancing furiously in a modern African Traditional Religion temple euphemistically known as a church, or by offering a blood sacrifice to a native shrine, it is possible to magic financial value out of nowhere. No matter that this is a fundamentally illiterate understanding of what money is and how it works – millions of us genuinely believe these things.

This is why in 2022, Nigeria finds itself confronting headlines about 17-year-old boys murdering their girlfriends in macabre ritual human sacrifices. The problem is not that the people in question are greedy and prepared to do almost anything for money – given the right mix of desperation and societal breakdown which Nigeria offers in generous quantities, most humans can unravel to any depth of gutter behaviour. The problem is that there exists a widespread belief, borne out of the nature of our culture and native spiritual beliefs, that it is very possible and in fact probable that one can obtain wealth without creating value.

Solution? Accept and modify traditional worship

I am an atheist, and this is well known. This is often misunderstood to mean that I have no use whatsoever for the idea of God and religion. I believe in fact, that religious belief can be useful in achieving outsized societal governance effects. It can be argued that the organisation of ancient European society around Christianity is what formed the basis for the Enlightenment, which became the basis for the explosion in human technology, longevity and achievement that the whole planet benefits from today.

Similarly, it can be argued that large scale organised religion at its core, was just humanity finding a way to organise itself around higher principles than the evolutionary law of the jungle where we originate from. Human beings for the most part, are selfish and driven almost entirely by self-interest, as against altruism or group interest. The intellectual concept of “right” and “wrong” on their own are not strong enough to govern most people, which is why laws courts and prisons exist. Religion arguably was humanity’s first attempt at creating a state – a governing entity that rewards good behaviour that benefits the groups and punishes poor, selfish behaviour that is detrimental to the group.

With this in mind, I believe a solution to the age-old African obsession with trying to magic value into existence is to acknowledge the source of this obsession, to embrace it, and to modify it in a manner similar to how Christianity eventually modified itself, and Islam inevitably will too. Clearly, millions of us in Nigeria are not Christians or Muslims as we claim to be. We clearly maintain a stronger, more visceral belief in African Traditional Religion, but because we refuse to acknowledge and own this, we exist in a perpetual state of denial, self-rejection, confusion and cognitive dissonance.

What is the supposedly Islamic “Alfa” – a concept unheard of in Islam – but a syncretism of the native diviner and proto-Islamic doctrine? What is the dancing, screaming, palm frond-waving, incomprehensible-language-babbling pentecostal pastor, but a mere syncretism of the native “babalawo” with Christian layering? In fact, millions of our estranged African cousins domiciled via slavery in South and Central America today, practise Santeria – a blatant and unapologetic fusion of native West African belief systems and Christianity, where the “saints” include Yemoja and Sango from the Orişa pantheon.

I believe accepting ourselves for who we are and what we actually believe – as against what we merely claim to believe – is the first step on the journey to reversing the damage. Only after embracing African Traditional Religion in the open instead of hiding it away behind hypocritical layers of Jesus and Allah, can we get round to modifying all that is wrong with it – and by extension, fixing many of the things that are wrong with the African psyche.

This exact process of societal transformation through a religious journey took place in Europe and it is now known as the Protestant Reformation. The Reformation challenged the Catholic Church’s Dogma and strict hierarchical setup, paving the way for the growth of critical thinking, exploration, democratic ideals and the Scientific Method in Europe. This was perhaps the single biggest factor that triggered what we now know as the Enlightenment. Practically everything we now enjoy as modern humans can be traced back to the Enlightenment and its results which were exported around the world via trade and conquest.

I believe it is about time for African Traditional Religion’s Protestant Reformation movement. This, however, is only possible when Africans give up on the fool’s errand of syncretising African Traditional Religion and Christianity or Islam.

It doesn’t work, and it’s time to admit it.

Credit:businessday.ng