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USA Africa Dialogue Series - Project Completed : "Womb Wisdom to Cosmic Wisdom: Women and Africana Spiritualities in Africa and the Diaspora" for The Palgrave Handbook of African Women's Studies

June 25, 2019, 11:12 am
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                                                                           Project Completed 

                             "Womb Wisdom to Cosmic Wisdom:  Women and Africana Spiritualities in Africa and the Diaspora" 
                       
                                                                             for the forthcoming

                                                    The Palgrave Handbook of African Women's Studies

                                                                                           ed by 

                                                                       Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso and Toyin Falola 


                                                                               Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                           Compcros
                                                                 Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
                                                      "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"  

                                                         

                    Exquisite sculpture and vase combination from the apartment where Ayoola Gbolahan's "In Pursuit of Onenness" art exhibition was held  


I am feeling empowered, a sense of inward potency along with a need to rest and recharge having just passed through a demanding but fulfilling mental and physical process, editing, in response to  Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso's very encouraging but rigorously critical  reviewer's comments,  my essay  "Womb Wisdom to Cosmic Wisdom:  Women and Africana Spiritualities in Africa and the Diaspora" for the forthcoming Palgrave Handbook of African Women's Studies ed by Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso and Toyin Falola.

Creative people  i have encountered only online, except one,  and largely on social media, i have now been able to discuss with some depth in that  chapter.

This essay is the fruit of years of effort, writing largely on Facebook, and for one of the creatives, also significantly through blogging.

I stumbled on the women's studies book project as I watched Yacob-Haliso work on it at the Falola@65 conference in Jan 2018  which I was invited to review and chair a panel by Toyin Falola and Samuel Oloruntoba.

This is my third essay this year submitted for a publication edited by the omnivorous scholar Toyin Falola.

Anther is an essay on African environmental ethics in the Palgrave Handbook of African Social Ethics edited by Nimi Wariboko and Toyin Falola, for which I was recommended by Adeshina Afolayan and guided in writing by discussions with Afolayan and Wariboko. This essay hearkens back to the Platonic model in being composed in a dialogical form.

Another is an essay on Falola and his In Praise of Greatness  for the Yoruba Studies Review which I was also invited to do by Afolayan.

These essays have inspired other, self published essays, from the essay on the imaginative technology of a Yoruba women's spirituality related to the chapter  on Africana female centered spiritualities, to one comparing African and Western philosophies of nature motivated by the environmental ethics essay to  two on Uli philosophy and mysticism-second is not yet published and two desktop composed  films from the Falola  In Praise of Greatness essay.

My personal universe of knowledge thereby takes increasingly definite shape within its essential dynamism.

Great thanks to the Toyin Falola Network.

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USA Africa Dialogue Series - ORPHAN 2

June 25, 2019, 1:15 pm
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Professor Ed Keller (at University of California Lost Angeles) and Professor Georges Ntalaja-Nzongola (at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) have both converged on the label ''MASTERPIECE''  to describe the tribal mark of 'ORPHAN 2' - a  literary shout.
The work was recently issued by AMAZON; and has the burden of hosting the name OKELLO OCULI - as author.

Please feel free to order/obtain copies from the nearest AMAZON outlet..
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USA Africa Dialogue Series - A Republic of Extraverted Pentecostals: A Response to Ebenezer Obadare's Pentecostal Republic

June 25, 2019, 3:08 pm
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Ebenezer Obadare's Pentecostal Republic: Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria masterfully captures the troubling intersections of state politics and religion in Nigeria, staging vividly Pentecostalism's unabashed appropriation of political power in Nigeria's Fourth Republic. What Pentecostal Republic accomplishes the most is how it makes intelligible the transformation of the political by the forces of religion. The author tracks and solidly analyzes the ascendancy of a brand of Nigerian Pentecostalism that impacts the performance and discharge of official power in Nigeria, arguing that an "enchanted democracy" (15) is the outgrowth of "the social visibility and political influence of a Pentecostal 'theocratic class'" (23) whose grips on Nigeria's democracy further consolidates a vexing desecularization of the country. As a participant observant of the Pentecostal dynamics Obadare writes about, I find Pentecostal Republic to be a magisterial account of the way in which certain vectors of Pentecostalism renders visible an enthronement of hegemonic totalities that stress a theocratic imaginary both in the processes of governance and in public discourses.

That said, the brilliant analysis of this book, and this position comes from critical and ethnographic encounters with Pentecostalism in Nigeria, is contingent on the assumption that Pentecostalism in Nigeria and Prosperity Christianity (based on the so-called prosperity Gospel) are the same. They are not. Obadare's framing of the Pentecostal in the context of Nigerian politics appears to be an essentialist categorization that hardly captures the full spectrum of the Pentecostal experience in the country.

Prosperity Christianity has as its chief aim a morbid desire for the accumulation of capital, which provides an ideological imaginary for the rituals of Christian behaviour and the performative excesses that have come to be associated with a large section of Christianity in Nigeria in recent decades. Its major impulse is the practice of Pentecostalism as a response to the privations and deprivations of the postcolonial moment in the country. The condition for the existence of this brand of the Pentecostal is the desire to transcend the precariousness of economic hardships and failed sociopolitical experiments through an uncritical reliance on the benevolent spectacles of a self-made and ever-present Deux ex machina by which many Christians interpret meaning and reality. Yet, it is upon this premise that Obadare appears to construct his most enduring argument — the belief that state power in Nigeria is burdened and overdetermined by Pentecostal inflections that shaped the politics of Nigeria's Fourth Republic. This thesis is true, but only to the extent that the mode of Pentecostalism that has been intelligently and vigorously analyzed is, in fact, a manifestation of only one of several valences and temperaments of Nigerian Pentecostalism.

Although it is a work that offers a compelling narrative brilliant and gripping in every sense, Pentecostal Republic also ignores a huge swath of the Pentecostal population in Nigeria, a section of Nigerian Pentecostalism that constitutes an alternative strand. There is a sense in which this group might be seen as a puritanical subculture of mainstream Nigerian Pentecostalism, but it should be more appropriately defined as an Introverted Pentecostal culture, as against the extraverted Pentecostalism which Obadare lucidly writes about. Introverted Pentecostalism is marked by a strict insistence on holiness and missionary activities, rather than position itself to perpetuate the "deflection of theological emphasis from holiness to prosperity" (22) as does most of the Pentecostal actors and leaders Obadare's work examines in the context of the struggle for political dominance in the Nigerian state. Introverted Pentecostals are likely to be given to Christian apologetics as well as an intense focus on Christian discipleship, theological domains that are peripheral mostly in practice among mainstream, extraverted Pentecostals, who, ironically, are more visible in the public arena.

While the extraverted Pentecostal appears to shape the explicit discourses and narratives of Nigerian Christianity, it is the introverted Pentecostal that implicitly embodies the quintessence of biblical morality. There could be the argument that this latter group is too reclusive to compel any meaning changes in the politics of state; this is a similar argument that may be made on behalf of moderate Islam which equally seems to stand at the margin of the ascendancy of political Islam on the cusp of global terrorism. To that charge, I will offer an example, noting the obvious imbrications in the ritual expressions of both the Introverted and the extraverted. For instance, Gbile Akanni's Peace House in Benue State gathers thousands of Nigerian Pentecostals to its campground in the city of Gboko every year, and among them may be found some of the most prominent actors of the Fourth Republic that is the focus of analyses in Obadare's book. This fact is in addition to the numerous times Gbile Akanni himself speaks in several meetings organized by state governors and state parliaments across the country. The aim of this evangelical effort is not to seize political power, but to have Christian disciples who quietly live out the principles of the doctrine of Christ in the corridors of power.

This example is not a rare singularity or an exception; there are many other groups that may or may not be visible in the way their practice of Pentecostalism shapes national politics, although we can also acknowledge the recent emergence of an urban middle-class Pentecostal culture (such as Poju Oyemade's church in Lagos) that is savvy in its use of social media, seeks to shape national conversations through secular-rational platforms, and which is highly critical of the crass materialism of prosperity Christianity. I imagine that sequels to Obadare's Pentecostal Republic will attend more critically than I could ever attempt to do to these other groups. Without any intention to romanticize this group, I would suggest that any argument that imagines introverted Pentecostals as a mere conservative bloc of other Pentecostals that may also surrender to the enticing allure of material gains dangled by members of the ruling class that interact with them will be shown to be a misreading of what Introverted Pentecostalism signifies.

I close by reiterating that the vision of Pentecostalism presented in Pentecostal Republic foregrounds prosperity in a manner that departs from the biblical morality of Introverted Pentecostals which, rather than 'demonize' them and all of reality as extraverted Pentecostals do, accepts and celebrates social problems as a necessary and an essential component of the Pentecostal experience. At the unconscious of this paradigm of Pentecostalism that explains every socio-economic malady in spiritual terms, therefore, is a quest for survival that surrenders agency to that which is empirically untenable. The Nigerian political space has a character informed by the capitalist cooptation of state resources. The diversion of public funds for private gains is something that has perennially undermined economic progress in Nigeria. With religion thrown into that mix, what is produced is not only a wanton display of avarice but also a mélange of the impulses of prosperity Christianity and the accumulative propensity of a thieving political class. In other words, both prosperity Christianity and the politics of the Fourth Republic, and indeed most of the Nigerian political space, are driven by the same ideological impulses — the will to capital. It goes without saying that in this framework, religion is not just a mechanism of escaping precarity, it is the means by which state power and resources are distributed, and with prosperity Christians in the locus of this, there is an intensification that assaults common sense.

Unfortunately, the summation of prosperity Christianity is its attainment of political significance and the rendering of reality solely through a logic of spirituality. The problem of the critic is, therefore, not Nigerian Pentecostalism. It is with the practice of prosperity Christianity in Nigeria. In Obadare, the slippages and contradictions produced by this theological project that brazenly insinuates itself into politics are excellently charted. There is so much to learn from Pentecostal Republic. I enjoyed reading it.

— James Yeku writes from Saskatoon, Canada.


--
James Yeku
Department of English
University of Saskatchewan, SK Canada
+1306 8504149
 
Do not curse the darkness, BE the candle. Do not just be the candle, REPRODUCE more candles (Matthew 5:14)

--
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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - A Republic of Extraverted Pentecostals: A Response to Ebenezer Obadare's Pentecostal Republic

June 25, 2019, 6:13 pm
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Beautiful.

I was struck by the characterization of Poju Oyemade's church, which I have attended. The church is a very impressive initiative.

The strongest religious power in Nigerian politics, though, is Islam, not Christianity, on account of the domination of Nigerian politics by the Muslim North.

Its wonderful for there to exist an introverted Christianity that sustains a more inward looking, holiness focused Christian walk, as this review indicates.

thanks

toyin





On Tue, 25 Jun 2019 at 23:45, James Yeku <yeku.james@gmail.com> wrote:

Ebenezer Obadare's Pentecostal Republic: Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria masterfully captures the troubling intersections of state politics and religion in Nigeria, staging vividly Pentecostalism's unabashed appropriation of political power in Nigeria's Fourth Republic. What Pentecostal Republic accomplishes the most is how it makes intelligible the transformation of the political by the forces of religion. The author tracks and solidly analyzes the ascendancy of a brand of Nigerian Pentecostalism that impacts the performance and discharge of official power in Nigeria, arguing that an "enchanted democracy" (15) is the outgrowth of "the social visibility and political influence of a Pentecostal 'theocratic class'" (23) whose grips on Nigeria's democracy further consolidates a vexing desecularization of the country. As a participant observant of the Pentecostal dynamics Obadare writes about, I find Pentecostal Republic to be a magisterial account of the way in which certain vectors of Pentecostalism renders visible an enthronement of hegemonic totalities that stress a theocratic imaginary both in the processes of governance and in public discourses.

That said, the brilliant analysis of this book, and this position comes from critical and ethnographic encounters with Pentecostalism in Nigeria, is contingent on the assumption that Pentecostalism in Nigeria and Prosperity Christianity (based on the so-called prosperity Gospel) are the same. They are not. Obadare's framing of the Pentecostal in the context of Nigerian politics appears to be an essentialist categorization that hardly captures the full spectrum of the Pentecostal experience in the country.

Prosperity Christianity has as its chief aim a morbid desire for the accumulation of capital, which provides an ideological imaginary for the rituals of Christian behaviour and the performative excesses that have come to be associated with a large section of Christianity in Nigeria in recent decades. Its major impulse is the practice of Pentecostalism as a response to the privations and deprivations of the postcolonial moment in the country. The condition for the existence of this brand of the Pentecostal is the desire to transcend the precariousness of economic hardships and failed sociopolitical experiments through an uncritical reliance on the benevolent spectacles of a self-made and ever-present Deux ex machina by which many Christians interpret meaning and reality. Yet, it is upon this premise that Obadare appears to construct his most enduring argument — the belief that state power in Nigeria is burdened and overdetermined by Pentecostal inflections that shaped the politics of Nigeria's Fourth Republic. This thesis is true, but only to the extent that the mode of Pentecostalism that has been intelligently and vigorously analyzed is, in fact, a manifestation of only one of several valences and temperaments of Nigerian Pentecostalism.

Although it is a work that offers a compelling narrative brilliant and gripping in every sense, Pentecostal Republic also ignores a huge swath of the Pentecostal population in Nigeria, a section of Nigerian Pentecostalism that constitutes an alternative strand. There is a sense in which this group might be seen as a puritanical subculture of mainstream Nigerian Pentecostalism, but it should be more appropriately defined as an Introverted Pentecostal culture, as against the extraverted Pentecostalism which Obadare lucidly writes about. Introverted Pentecostalism is marked by a strict insistence on holiness and missionary activities, rather than position itself to perpetuate the "deflection of theological emphasis from holiness to prosperity" (22) as does most of the Pentecostal actors and leaders Obadare's work examines in the context of the struggle for political dominance in the Nigerian state. Introverted Pentecostals are likely to be given to Christian apologetics as well as an intense focus on Christian discipleship, theological domains that are peripheral mostly in practice among mainstream, extraverted Pentecostals, who, ironically, are more visible in the public arena.

While the extraverted Pentecostal appears to shape the explicit discourses and narratives of Nigerian Christianity, it is the introverted Pentecostal that implicitly embodies the quintessence of biblical morality. There could be the argument that this latter group is too reclusive to compel any meaning changes in the politics of state; this is a similar argument that may be made on behalf of moderate Islam which equally seems to stand at the margin of the ascendancy of political Islam on the cusp of global terrorism. To that charge, I will offer an example, noting the obvious imbrications in the ritual expressions of both the Introverted and the extraverted. For instance, Gbile Akanni's Peace House in Benue State gathers thousands of Nigerian Pentecostals to its campground in the city of Gboko every year, and among them may be found some of the most prominent actors of the Fourth Republic that is the focus of analyses in Obadare's book. This fact is in addition to the numerous times Gbile Akanni himself speaks in several meetings organized by state governors and state parliaments across the country. The aim of this evangelical effort is not to seize political power, but to have Christian disciples who quietly live out the principles of the doctrine of Christ in the corridors of power.

This example is not a rare singularity or an exception; there are many other groups that may or may not be visible in the way their practice of Pentecostalism shapes national politics, although we can also acknowledge the recent emergence of an urban middle-class Pentecostal culture (such as Poju Oyemade's church in Lagos) that is savvy in its use of social media, seeks to shape national conversations through secular-rational platforms, and which is highly critical of the crass materialism of prosperity Christianity. I imagine that sequels to Obadare's Pentecostal Republic will attend more critically than I could ever attempt to do to these other groups. Without any intention to romanticize this group, I would suggest that any argument that imagines introverted Pentecostals as a mere conservative bloc of other Pentecostals that may also surrender to the enticing allure of material gains dangled by members of the ruling class that interact with them will be shown to be a misreading of what Introverted Pentecostalism signifies.

I close by reiterating that the vision of Pentecostalism presented in Pentecostal Republic foregrounds prosperity in a manner that departs from the biblical morality of Introverted Pentecostals which, rather than 'demonize' them and all of reality as extraverted Pentecostals do, accepts and celebrates social problems as a necessary and an essential component of the Pentecostal experience. At the unconscious of this paradigm of Pentecostalism that explains every socio-economic malady in spiritual terms, therefore, is a quest for survival that surrenders agency to that which is empirically untenable. The Nigerian political space has a character informed by the capitalist cooptation of state resources. The diversion of public funds for private gains is something that has perennially undermined economic progress in Nigeria. With religion thrown into that mix, what is produced is not only a wanton display of avarice but also a mélange of the impulses of prosperity Christianity and the accumulative propensity of a thieving political class. In other words, both prosperity Christianity and the politics of the Fourth Republic, and indeed most of the Nigerian political space, are driven by the same ideological impulses — the will to capital. It goes without saying that in this framework, religion is not just a mechanism of escaping precarity, it is the means by which state power and resources are distributed, and with prosperity Christians in the locus of this, there is an intensification that assaults common sense.

Unfortunately, the summation of prosperity Christianity is its attainment of political significance and the rendering of reality solely through a logic of spirituality. The problem of the critic is, therefore, not Nigerian Pentecostalism. It is with the practice of prosperity Christianity in Nigeria. In Obadare, the slippages and contradictions produced by this theological project that brazenly insinuates itself into politics are excellently charted. There is so much to learn from Pentecostal Republic. I enjoyed reading it.

— James Yeku writes from Saskatoon, Canada.


--
James Yeku
Department of English
University of Saskatchewan, SK Canada
+1306 8504149
 
Do not curse the darkness, BE the candle. Do not just be the candle, REPRODUCE more candles (Matthew 5:14)

--
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USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Courage to Identify with the Unjustly Treated

June 25, 2019, 7:47 pm
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I have great courage for the biblical character, Joseph of Arimathea.
Find out why by clicking on this link:

https://x-pensiverrors.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-courage-to-identify-with-unjustly.html


Thank you.
Sincerely,
Obododimma.



--
--
B.A.,First Class Honours (English & Literary Studies);
M.A., Ph.D. (English Language);
M.Sc. (Legal, Criminological & Security Psychology);
Professor of Cultural Semiotics & Stylistics,
Department of English,
University of Ibadan.

COORDINATES:

Phone (Mobile):
+234 8033331330;
+234 9033333555;
+234 8022208008;
+234 8073270008.
Skype: obododimma.oha
Twitter: @mmanwu
Personal Blog: http://udude.wordpress.com/

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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - New book on the Yoruba by Cambridge University Press

June 25, 2019, 10:59 pm
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Many congratulations Kikiwe. More ink to your printer.

Biko

On Tuesday, 25 June 2019, 04:27:26 GMT-4, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:


God!

On Tue, 25 Jun 2019 at 06:40, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:

51-tznFoaZL._SX329_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

 

 

https://www.amazon.com/Yoruba-Prehistory-Present-Aribidesi-Usman/dp/1107064600/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=aribidesi+and+falola&qid=1561440506&s=gateway&sr=8-1

 

The Yoruba are one of the largest ethnic groups in West Africa, with significant populations in Nigeria, Benin and Togo, as well as a sizeable diasporic community around the world. By considering the art, religion, economics and political systems of the Yoruba, Aribidesi Usman and Toyin Falola chart the history of the Yoruba through the lens of the group's diverse and dynamic cultural and social practices. Using archaeological data, oral, and archival sources alongside rarely-discussed local histories Usman and Falola form a rich and detailed picture of the Yoruba from a period of early occupation and agriculture, the growth of complex societies and empires, the turbulent colonial period to the present day, constructing a comprehensive account of Yoruba history brought together in a single volume.

 

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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: New book on the Yoruba by Cambridge University Press

June 26, 2019, 12:52 am
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Congratulations are in order to the authors of this important volume
Sam

On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 1:25 PM 'Michael Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:
Congrats, gentlemen! I look forward to reading through the pages, much more interested in the prehistoric Yoruba. Hope the book is available at TOFAC.
MOA






On Tuesday, June 25, 2019, 9:27:22 AM GMT+1, Assensoh, Akwasi B. <aassenso@indiana.edu> wrote:


SIR Toyin:

We extend exceptional congratulations to you and Professor Usman (Arisibesi) on the publication of this significant 
book (certainly very close to one's opus) by Cambridge University Press.

Our refereed Journal cannot wait to review the book for our many readers!  

A.B. & Yvette Assensoh.


----
Rev.  A.B. Assensoh, LL.M., PH.D.,
Emeritus Professor  (Indiana University),
Courtesy Emeritus Professor (University of Oregon),
Department of History,
McKenzie Hall (2nd Floor), University of Oregon,
Eugene, OR 97403,   U.S.A.

Telephone: (541) 953-7710
Fax: (541) 346-6576​


From:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com<usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, June 25, 2019 1:39 AM
To: dialogue; ya
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - New book on the Yoruba by Cambridge University Press
 

 

 

https://www.amazon.com/Yoruba-Prehistory-Present-Aribidesi-Usman/dp/1107064600/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=aribidesi+and+falola&qid=1561440506&s=gateway&sr=8-1

 

The Yoruba are one of the largest ethnic groups in West Africa, with significant populations in Nigeria, Benin and Togo, as well as a sizeable diasporic community around the world. By considering the art, religion, economics and political systems of the Yoruba, Aribidesi Usman and Toyin Falola chart the history of the Yoruba through the lens of the group's diverse and dynamic cultural and social practices. Using archaeological data, oral, and archival sources alongside rarely-discussed local histories Usman and Falola form a rich and detailed picture of the Yoruba from a period of early occupation and agriculture, the growth of complex societies and empires, the turbulent colonial period to the present day, constructing a comprehensive account of Yoruba history brought together in a single volume.

 

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USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Yoruba Affairs - New book on the Yoruba by Cambridge University Press

June 26, 2019, 1:30 am
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Congratulations, Prof. Toyin Falola and Prof. Usman Aribidesi! The publication has come at the right time -when many people, especially those who care to explore different avenues to get the historical information of the Yoruba.

Bayo Omolola
On Tuesday, June 25, 2019, 06:40:14 AM GMT+1, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:


51-tznFoaZL._SX329_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

 

 

https://www.amazon.com/Yoruba-Prehistory-Present-Aribidesi-Usman/dp/1107064600/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=aribidesi+and+falola&qid=1561440506&s=gateway&sr=8-1

 

The Yoruba are one of the largest ethnic groups in West Africa, with significant populations in Nigeria, Benin and Togo, as well as a sizeable diasporic community around the world. By considering the art, religion, economics and political systems of the Yoruba, Aribidesi Usman and Toyin Falola chart the history of the Yoruba through the lens of the group's diverse and dynamic cultural and social practices. Using archaeological data, oral, and archival sources alongside rarely-discussed local histories Usman and Falola form a rich and detailed picture of the Yoruba from a period of early occupation and agriculture, the growth of complex societies and empires, the turbulent colonial period to the present day, constructing a comprehensive account of Yoruba history brought together in a single volume.

 

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USA Africa Dialogue Series - Toyin Falola and the Culture of Academic Productivity

June 26, 2019, 2:21 am
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It would be wonderful if Toyin Falola could take time to educate people about how he is able to develop his growing scope of productivity in  academic book publication. The last time I checked, he does not list single texts like articles or talks, of which he has many,  on his website, only books, which he began publishing as sole author, co-author  or editor decades ago on completing his PhD at the then University of Ife.

This number has been steadily growing, reaching 11 books published in 2017 or 2018. This year he has brought out two already, one massive sole authored text and another co-authored, books that are likely to have been years in production. 

He also runs a good number of academic book series with various publishers.

What Falola is achieving represents the development of a skill. A method of harmonizing mind, body and lifestyle.

It would be wonderful if that skill could be described by Falola, at his own convenience and using a platform of his choice.

Along with the product of a creative initiative, such as books, there exists the methods through which that initiative was brought into existence.

The development of such methods by the individual, within the context of the generic framework of methods distinctive to  particular endeavours as actualized within modes of creativity in general, may be understood as the central goal of research training.

That goal, however,  should be central to all education, in the understanding that learning is best developed as an individualized process, even though operating to a greater or lesser degree within the general contexts of cognitive development in disciplinary and social terms.

What approaches to learning and expression prove particularly productive for specific individuals? Can others learn from these examples in developing their own distinctive creative identities?

It is in this context that learning about his creative strategies from Toyin Falola would be helpful. 

Moving from the creative products to glimpse the transformative spaces through which these products come into being in the mind and hands of the creator.




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USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Mysterious Loved One : Tales of the Unknown

June 26, 2019, 4:04 am
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                                                                              The Mysterious Loved One 

                                                                                  Tales of the Unknown

                                                        Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju,  Tony Umez and Abraham Madu

                                                                                                                 
                                                                                                       
                                                             

I created the work of art you see above as a way of memorializing an amazing experience of mine.

I once had an amazing wife, deeply loving, ravishingly beautiful, potently erotic, deeply satisfying.

But we had no child.

I wanted a child very badly. A little one of my own to love, to experience the fulfillment of their  soft body as I held their diminutive form against mine, watch the filling of gaps in their  teeth as they  grew,  stretching out to vigorous teenage years and adulthood, the ascendance of their  life force as mine reached its zenith and dwindled, the rejuvenation of life across time.

It was also an abomination not to have a child where I come from. Someone to carry on the lineage.

My wife and I tried every medical and herbal approach we could. Yet no success in decades of effort.

One day, as I sat at a bar relaxing with friends, one of them suggested my wife and I should see a traditional spiritual specialist, in this case a dibia, a specialist in Igbo spirituality in  Port Harcourt,  Nigeria, where I lived.

What did I have to lose?

My wife and I had tried everything.

We both went to see the dibia recommended by my friend.

The dibia  consulted his divination instruments and gave us a date to return.

A week after he called me on the phone, asking me to come over. I told him my wife was busy at work and could not come with me. He urged me to come anyway.

On arrival, he bade me sit.

After I had settled down, he told me the most awful thing anyone could say. 

He told me my wife and I could not have children because she was a snake.

"Nonsense!", I shouted. "Such bullshit is why I avoid people like you!".  "Nonsense!" I screamed.

He watched me calmly. 

"You need to see for yourself", he said.  "Take this colorless powder and place under her pillow."

"I will never do that! Nonsense!". I could not say more. I was so enraged.

"You can take it as an experiment that will prove how foolish I am", he stated. "You have already tried everything else possible. You and your  wife can later laugh together at  my  stupidity."

Put that way, I was divided. Should I do this and betray my wife by even giving this idiocy any form of respect?

After much struggling with myself, I took the powder. 

After further battles with conscience, I placed the colourless powder under her pillow and slept off. I could not be bothered about thinking further about the folly I saw myself as engaged in though my heart was heavy with the sense of betrayal of my loved one.

Deep into the night my wife woke me up.

"What is it?", I responded. She did not answer. I came awake to her staring at me.

She asked, "Why?"

"About what?" I responded.

She did not respond but kept gazing at me.

Was the white of her eyes becoming red? Were my eyes playing tricks with me?

Before my horrified eyes, my beloved wife transformed, head, neck, body, into what the dibia had said she was. 

I became like a dead man. I could not move. I could not think. 

In languid, graceful motions, she slid off the bed and headed for the door.  It opened by itself. 

The paralysis left me and I gathered my dazed body and mind. I followed. 

She traveled a long distance, using streets deserted at that time of night.

Eventually, she reached the river and entered.

On reaching a rock at a point where I could still see her clearly, she coiled on the rock and looked at me a long time, in a deeply sorrowful manner, after which she slid into the river and was gone.

It took me years to recover from that terrible experience.

In my quiet moments, however, I recall my wife's exquisite presence, her skill at transforming our home into a wondrously welcoming and inspiring place, her mesmerizing scent, her magnificent tenderness and the life affirming joy of holding her and lying with her, my best friend whose deepest self was unknown to me but who loved me with all her soul.

I don't know if I needed to know what I learnt with the help of the dibia.



Story told to me by Tony Umez. Elaborated on by myself. Elaboration inspired by Abraham Madu's posting of the image above on a social media group.

Also published on

Facebook

Encounters with the Unknown blog














__,_._,___

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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigerian Languages Apps

June 26, 2019, 5:41 am
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The apps can be accessed from the play store link if any any android phone or tablet.

As a professional language teacher for non native speakers U commend the layout and methodologies of presentation of the apps as consistent with any college taught courses of their kind.  I meticulously went through the Igbo app and came to the conclusion non Igbo speakers who diligently apply themselves will without doubt be Igbo speakers. The same goes for the Yoruba app:  They use professional language teaching methodologies such as flash cards, vocabulary building verb classifications, matching and so on.


OAA



Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.


-------- Original message --------
From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>
Date: 25/06/2019 23:58 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigerian Languages Apps

Boxbe This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (toyin.adepoju@gmail.com) Add cleanup rule | More info
how does one get these apps?

On Tue, 25 Jun 2019 at 16:46, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:
Wow.

A great well done!

On Tue, 25 Jun 2019 at 16:02, OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:
Ladies & Gentlemen,

Im very pleased to report to this Forum that following our  heartfelt appeal to persons of goodwill around the world  about a year or two ago to facilitate the instruments of linguistic cohesion in Nigeria the Primal Linguist has heeded our call and hearkened, entered into the hearts of benevolence there to speak from.

Lo, this year is born the triplets of language apps for Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba the three widest spoken indigenous languages in Nigeria.  With this development enter Nigerian languages into the committee of global languages of power to be studied around the world without stepping a foot into a conventional brick and mortar classroom nor within the physical confines of the geographical milieu of native speakers. A comparatist's paradise.

                                          All praise be to the Primal Linguist
                                          At the crossroads.
                                          All praise be to the Great Levelller
                                          Who carved out
                                          A cavernous classroom
                                          For the crossrads
                                          Of Learning
                                          Plumbed from the interstices of space.
                                          An animistic classroom
                                           --'without walls
                                           To weld nations together


OAA
         

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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Mysterious Loved One : Tales of the Unknown

June 26, 2019, 5:57 am
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I first thought this was Toyin Adepoju's personal story but realizing it is Tony Umez retold by Toyin all I can say is ' Oro pesi je' and ask if Toyin believed the story.

OAA



Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.


-------- Original message --------
From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>
Date: 26/06/2019 13:44 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>, Yoruba Affairs <yorubaaffairs@googlegroups.com>, nigerianworldforum <NIgerianWorldForum@yahoogroups.com>, Bring Your Baseball Bat <naijaobserver@yahoogroups.com>, Talkhard <talkhard@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Mysterious Loved One : Tales of the Unknown


                                                                              The Mysterious Loved One 

                                                                                  Tales of the Unknown

                                                        Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju,  Tony Umez and Abraham Madu

                                                                                                                 
                                                                                                       
                                                             

I created the work of art you see above as a way of memorializing an amazing experience of mine.

I once had an amazing wife, deeply loving, ravishingly beautiful, potently erotic, deeply satisfying.

But we had no child.

I wanted a child very badly. A little one of my own to love, to experience the fulfillment of their  soft body as I held their diminutive form against mine, watch the filling of gaps in their  teeth as they  grew,  stretching out to vigorous teenage years and adulthood, the ascendance of their  life force as mine reached its zenith and dwindled, the rejuvenation of life across time.

It was also an abomination not to have a child where I come from. Someone to carry on the lineage.

My wife and I tried every medical and herbal approach we could. Yet no success in decades of effort.

One day, as I sat at a bar relaxing with friends, one of them suggested my wife and I should see a traditional spiritual specialist, in this case a dibia, a specialist in Igbo spirituality in  Port Harcourt,  Nigeria, where I lived.

What did I have to lose?

My wife and I had tried everything.

We both went to see the dibia recommended by my friend.

The dibia  consulted his divination instruments and gave us a date to return.

A week after he called me on the phone, asking me to come over. I told him my wife was busy at work and could not come with me. He urged me to come anyway.

On arrival, he bade me sit.

After I had settled down, he told me the most awful thing anyone could say. 

He told me my wife and I could not have children because she was a snake.

"Nonsense!", I shouted. "Such bullshit is why I avoid people like you!".  "Nonsense!" I screamed.

He watched me calmly. 

"You need to see for yourself", he said.  "Take this colorless powder and place under her pillow."

"I will never do that! Nonsense!". I could not say more. I was so enraged.

"You can take it as an experiment that will prove how foolish I am", he stated. "You have already tried everything else possible. You and your  wife can later laugh together at  my  stupidity."

Put that way, I was divided. Should I do this and betray my wife by even giving this idiocy any form of respect?

After much struggling with myself, I took the powder. 

After further battles with conscience, I placed the colourless powder under her pillow and slept off. I could not be bothered about thinking further about the folly I saw myself as engaged in though my heart was heavy with the sense of betrayal of my loved one.

Deep into the night my wife woke me up.

"What is it?", I responded. She did not answer. I came awake to her staring at me.

She asked, "Why?"

"About what?" I responded.

She did not respond but kept gazing at me.

Was the white of her eyes becoming red? Were my eyes playing tricks with me?

Before my horrified eyes, my beloved wife transformed, head, neck, body, into what the dibia had said she was. 

I became like a dead man. I could not move. I could not think. 

In languid, graceful motions, she slid off the bed and headed for the door.  It opened by itself. 

The paralysis left me and I gathered my dazed body and mind. I followed. 

She traveled a long distance, using streets deserted at that time of night.

Eventually, she reached the river and entered.

On reaching a rock at a point where I could still see her clearly, she coiled on the rock and looked at me a long time, in a deeply sorrowful manner, after which she slid into the river and was gone.

It took me years to recover from that terrible experience.

In my quiet moments, however, I recall my wife's exquisite presence, her skill at transforming our home into a wondrously welcoming and inspiring place, her mesmerizing scent, her magnificent tenderness and the life affirming joy of holding her and lying with her, my best friend whose deepest self was unknown to me but who loved me with all her soul.

I don't know if I needed to know what I learnt with the help of the dibia.



Story told to me by Tony Umez. Elaborated on by myself. Elaboration inspired by Abraham Madu's posting of the image above on a social media group.

Also published on

Facebook

Encounters with the Unknown blog














__,_._,___

--
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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigerian Languages Apps

June 26, 2019, 6:10 am
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You are correct.  The learner will still need to interact with proficient speakers to reinforce skills learnt with the app.  The apps can take him to that stage. The difference between classroom  learning and apps learning as I discussed with ny Congokese-French student in 2017 is that the app is interactive by design in native language setting whereas the classroom setting is not.  It is steps beyond above classroom setting.

OAA



Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.


-------- Original message --------
From: 'Michael Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: 25/06/2019 23:58 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigerian Languages Apps

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Prof. Agbetuyi: This is one heck of some good news! Although, I must add, even with this app (or these apps?) to learn any language to even a proficient, let alone a competent level, as Olmstead has long argued some five decades ago in his Out of the Mouth of Babes: Earliest stages in language learning, it will still require the human agent. That means we can't throw away the four corners of the classroom, neither can we ever discount "the physical confines of the geographical milieu of native speakers." I join you to salute  the Primal Linguist and thank you for your laudable pursuit!

 

MOA

On Tuesday, June 25, 2019, 4:02:42 PM GMT+1, OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:


Ladies & Gentlemen,

Im very pleased to report to this Forum that following our  heartfelt appeal to persons of goodwill around the world  about a year or two ago to facilitate the instruments of linguistic cohesion in Nigeria the Primal Linguist has heeded our call and hearkened, entered into the hearts of benevolence there to speak from.

Lo, this year is born the triplets of language apps for Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba the three widest spoken indigenous languages in Nigeria.  With this development enter Nigerian languages into the committee of global languages of power to be studied around the world without stepping a foot into a conventional brick and mortar classroom nor within the physical confines of the geographical milieu of native speakers. A comparatist's paradise.

                                          All praise be to the Primal Linguist
                                          At the crossroads.
                                          All praise be to the Great Levelller
                                          Who carved out
                                          A cavernous classroom
                                          For the crossrads
                                          Of Learning
                                          Plumbed from the interstices of space.
                                          An animistic classroom
                                           --'without walls
                                           To weld nations together


OAA
         

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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - A Republic of Extraverted Pentecostals:A Response to Ebenezer Obadare's Pentecostal Republic

June 26, 2019, 6:56 am
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This is a stimulating analysis of pentecostal Republic by James Yeku.  If the strand written upon by Obadare is in the ascendancy and larger we can argue it defines Pentecostal ism in Nigeria. Christianity has been in part political right from its beginnings from the edicts of Dioc letIan and Constantine in Rome. The writing of the New Testament which is the bedrock of Christianity is political in Nature.

However the writing of the Pentecostal Republic gives the misleading impression that Nigeria like America is an overwhelming Christian country in which Christian sects occupy the space of other religions. It is not

Because if the dominance if prosperity Christianity and irs anchorage to power and state business we cannot run away from my own deduction that they should be treated as business and the prosperity subjected to tax.  Those sections not operating as prosperity Christianity will pay less tax.

Also the biotin 10% of each formation in terms of economic means should have redemptive programs put in place from the incomes generated by the haves.  This is the surest way to rapidly transform Nigeria from the status of poverty capital of the world. A process of immediate economic and social engineering.

OAA.



Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.


-------- Original message --------
From: James Yeku <yeku.james@gmail.com>
Date: 25/06/2019 23:58 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Cc: james.yeku@usask.ca
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - A Republic of Extraverted Pentecostals:A  Response to Ebenezer Obadare's Pentecostal Republic

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Ebenezer Obadare's Pentecostal Republic: Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria masterfully captures the troubling intersections of state politics and religion in Nigeria, staging vividly Pentecostalism's unabashed appropriation of political power in Nigeria's Fourth Republic. What Pentecostal Republic accomplishes the most is how it makes intelligible the transformation of the political by the forces of religion. The author tracks and solidly analyzes the ascendancy of a brand of Nigerian Pentecostalism that impacts the performance and discharge of official power in Nigeria, arguing that an "enchanted democracy" (15) is the outgrowth of "the social visibility and political influence of a Pentecostal 'theocratic class'" (23) whose grips on Nigeria's democracy further consolidates a vexing desecularization of the country. As a participant observant of the Pentecostal dynamics Obadare writes about, I find Pentecostal Republic to be a magisterial account of the way in which certain vectors of Pentecostalism renders visible an enthronement of hegemonic totalities that stress a theocratic imaginary both in the processes of governance and in public discourses.

That said, the brilliant analysis of this book, and this position comes from critical and ethnographic encounters with Pentecostalism in Nigeria, is contingent on the assumption that Pentecostalism in Nigeria and Prosperity Christianity (based on the so-called prosperity Gospel) are the same. They are not. Obadare's framing of the Pentecostal in the context of Nigerian politics appears to be an essentialist categorization that hardly captures the full spectrum of the Pentecostal experience in the country.

Prosperity Christianity has as its chief aim a morbid desire for the accumulation of capital, which provides an ideological imaginary for the rituals of Christian behaviour and the performative excesses that have come to be associated with a large section of Christianity in Nigeria in recent decades. Its major impulse is the practice of Pentecostalism as a response to the privations and deprivations of the postcolonial moment in the country. The condition for the existence of this brand of the Pentecostal is the desire to transcend the precariousness of economic hardships and failed sociopolitical experiments through an uncritical reliance on the benevolent spectacles of a self-made and ever-present Deux ex machina by which many Christians interpret meaning and reality. Yet, it is upon this premise that Obadare appears to construct his most enduring argument — the belief that state power in Nigeria is burdened and overdetermined by Pentecostal inflections that shaped the politics of Nigeria's Fourth Republic. This thesis is true, but only to the extent that the mode of Pentecostalism that has been intelligently and vigorously analyzed is, in fact, a manifestation of only one of several valences and temperaments of Nigerian Pentecostalism.

Although it is a work that offers a compelling narrative brilliant and gripping in every sense, Pentecostal Republic also ignores a huge swath of the Pentecostal population in Nigeria, a section of Nigerian Pentecostalism that constitutes an alternative strand. There is a sense in which this group might be seen as a puritanical subculture of mainstream Nigerian Pentecostalism, but it should be more appropriately defined as an Introverted Pentecostal culture, as against the extraverted Pentecostalism which Obadare lucidly writes about. Introverted Pentecostalism is marked by a strict insistence on holiness and missionary activities, rather than position itself to perpetuate the "deflection of theological emphasis from holiness to prosperity" (22) as does most of the Pentecostal actors and leaders Obadare's work examines in the context of the struggle for political dominance in the Nigerian state. Introverted Pentecostals are likely to be given to Christian apologetics as well as an intense focus on Christian discipleship, theological domains that are peripheral mostly in practice among mainstream, extraverted Pentecostals, who, ironically, are more visible in the public arena.

While the extraverted Pentecostal appears to shape the explicit discourses and narratives of Nigerian Christianity, it is the introverted Pentecostal that implicitly embodies the quintessence of biblical morality. There could be the argument that this latter group is too reclusive to compel any meaning changes in the politics of state; this is a similar argument that may be made on behalf of moderate Islam which equally seems to stand at the margin of the ascendancy of political Islam on the cusp of global terrorism. To that charge, I will offer an example, noting the obvious imbrications in the ritual expressions of both the Introverted and the extraverted. For instance, Gbile Akanni's Peace House in Benue State gathers thousands of Nigerian Pentecostals to its campground in the city of Gboko every year, and among them may be found some of the most prominent actors of the Fourth Republic that is the focus of analyses in Obadare's book. This fact is in addition to the numerous times Gbile Akanni himself speaks in several meetings organized by state governors and state parliaments across the country. The aim of this evangelical effort is not to seize political power, but to have Christian disciples who quietly live out the principles of the doctrine of Christ in the corridors of power.

This example is not a rare singularity or an exception; there are many other groups that may or may not be visible in the way their practice of Pentecostalism shapes national politics, although we can also acknowledge the recent emergence of an urban middle-class Pentecostal culture (such as Poju Oyemade's church in Lagos) that is savvy in its use of social media, seeks to shape national conversations through secular-rational platforms, and which is highly critical of the crass materialism of prosperity Christianity. I imagine that sequels to Obadare's Pentecostal Republic will attend more critically than I could ever attempt to do to these other groups. Without any intention to romanticize this group, I would suggest that any argument that imagines introverted Pentecostals as a mere conservative bloc of other Pentecostals that may also surrender to the enticing allure of material gains dangled by members of the ruling class that interact with them will be shown to be a misreading of what Introverted Pentecostalism signifies.

I close by reiterating that the vision of Pentecostalism presented in Pentecostal Republic foregrounds prosperity in a manner that departs from the biblical morality of Introverted Pentecostals which, rather than 'demonize' them and all of reality as extraverted Pentecostals do, accepts and celebrates social problems as a necessary and an essential component of the Pentecostal experience. At the unconscious of this paradigm of Pentecostalism that explains every socio-economic malady in spiritual terms, therefore, is a quest for survival that surrenders agency to that which is empirically untenable. The Nigerian political space has a character informed by the capitalist cooptation of state resources. The diversion of public funds for private gains is something that has perennially undermined economic progress in Nigeria. With religion thrown into that mix, what is produced is not only a wanton display of avarice but also a mélange of the impulses of prosperity Christianity and the accumulative propensity of a thieving political class. In other words, both prosperity Christianity and the politics of the Fourth Republic, and indeed most of the Nigerian political space, are driven by the same ideological impulses — the will to capital. It goes without saying that in this framework, religion is not just a mechanism of escaping precarity, it is the means by which state power and resources are distributed, and with prosperity Christians in the locus of this, there is an intensification that assaults common sense.

Unfortunately, the summation of prosperity Christianity is its attainment of political significance and the rendering of reality solely through a logic of spirituality. The problem of the critic is, therefore, not Nigerian Pentecostalism. It is with the practice of prosperity Christianity in Nigeria. In Obadare, the slippages and contradictions produced by this theological project that brazenly insinuates itself into politics are excellently charted. There is so much to learn from Pentecostal Republic. I enjoyed reading it.

— James Yeku writes from Saskatoon, Canada.


--
James Yeku
Department of English
University of Saskatchewan, SK Canada
+1306 8504149
 
Do not curse the darkness, BE the candle. Do not just be the candle, REPRODUCE more candles (Matthew 5:14)

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USA Africa Dialogue Series - Come Teach in Nigeria : US-Nigeria Academic Migration : Questions Arising

June 26, 2019, 7:40 am
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How accurate?

'Occasionally, out of the blues a Nigerian university offers me a teaching job.

 I look at the monthly salary and it is generally about $2000 a month. I cannot meet my financial obligations with that. But in Nigeria apparently that sum is a big deal. 

In Nigeria the minimum wage is about $60 a month. 

The entire Nigerian federal budget is $27 billion dollars a year. This is about the budget of the University of California. 

Alaska with a population of less than a million people has a budget of over $10 billion dollars a year.

 Nigerians ought to start appreciating their country's poverty and talk realistically about it. '

Cheers, Ozodiobi

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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Mysterious Loved One : Tales of the Unknown

June 26, 2019, 7:49 am
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thanks OAA.

Who knows where Umez got the story from.

I have my own true life fantastic stories i will tell from time to time.

toyin

On Wed, 26 Jun 2019 at 14:27, OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:
I first thought this was Toyin Adepoju's personal story but realizing it is Tony Umez retold by Toyin all I can say is ' Oro pesi je' and ask if Toyin believed the story.

OAA



Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.


-------- Original message --------
From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>
Date: 26/06/2019 13:44 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>, Yoruba Affairs <yorubaaffairs@googlegroups.com>, nigerianworldforum <NIgerianWorldForum@yahoogroups.com>, Bring Your Baseball Bat <naijaobserver@yahoogroups.com>, Talkhard <talkhard@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Mysterious Loved One : Tales of the Unknown


                                                                              The Mysterious Loved One 

                                                                                  Tales of the Unknown

                                                        Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju,  Tony Umez and Abraham Madu

                                                                                                                 
                                                                                                       
                                                             

I created the work of art you see above as a way of memorializing an amazing experience of mine.

I once had an amazing wife, deeply loving, ravishingly beautiful, potently erotic, deeply satisfying.

But we had no child.

I wanted a child very badly. A little one of my own to love, to experience the fulfillment of their  soft body as I held their diminutive form against mine, watch the filling of gaps in their  teeth as they  grew,  stretching out to vigorous teenage years and adulthood, the ascendance of their  life force as mine reached its zenith and dwindled, the rejuvenation of life across time.

It was also an abomination not to have a child where I come from. Someone to carry on the lineage.

My wife and I tried every medical and herbal approach we could. Yet no success in decades of effort.

One day, as I sat at a bar relaxing with friends, one of them suggested my wife and I should see a traditional spiritual specialist, in this case a dibia, a specialist in Igbo spirituality in  Port Harcourt,  Nigeria, where I lived.

What did I have to lose?

My wife and I had tried everything.

We both went to see the dibia recommended by my friend.

The dibia  consulted his divination instruments and gave us a date to return.

A week after he called me on the phone, asking me to come over. I told him my wife was busy at work and could not come with me. He urged me to come anyway.

On arrival, he bade me sit.

After I had settled down, he told me the most awful thing anyone could say. 

He told me my wife and I could not have children because she was a snake.

"Nonsense!", I shouted. "Such bullshit is why I avoid people like you!".  "Nonsense!" I screamed.

He watched me calmly. 

"You need to see for yourself", he said.  "Take this colorless powder and place under her pillow."

"I will never do that! Nonsense!". I could not say more. I was so enraged.

"You can take it as an experiment that will prove how foolish I am", he stated. "You have already tried everything else possible. You and your  wife can later laugh together at  my  stupidity."

Put that way, I was divided. Should I do this and betray my wife by even giving this idiocy any form of respect?

After much struggling with myself, I took the powder. 

After further battles with conscience, I placed the colourless powder under her pillow and slept off. I could not be bothered about thinking further about the folly I saw myself as engaged in though my heart was heavy with the sense of betrayal of my loved one.

Deep into the night my wife woke me up.

"What is it?", I responded. She did not answer. I came awake to her staring at me.

She asked, "Why?"

"About what?" I responded.

She did not respond but kept gazing at me.

Was the white of her eyes becoming red? Were my eyes playing tricks with me?

Before my horrified eyes, my beloved wife transformed, head, neck, body, into what the dibia had said she was. 

I became like a dead man. I could not move. I could not think. 

In languid, graceful motions, she slid off the bed and headed for the door.  It opened by itself. 

The paralysis left me and I gathered my dazed body and mind. I followed. 

She traveled a long distance, using streets deserted at that time of night.

Eventually, she reached the river and entered.

On reaching a rock at a point where I could still see her clearly, she coiled on the rock and looked at me a long time, in a deeply sorrowful manner, after which she slid into the river and was gone.

It took me years to recover from that terrible experience.

In my quiet moments, however, I recall my wife's exquisite presence, her skill at transforming our home into a wondrously welcoming and inspiring place, her mesmerizing scent, her magnificent tenderness and the life affirming joy of holding her and lying with her, my best friend whose deepest self was unknown to me but who loved me with all her soul.

I don't know if I needed to know what I learnt with the help of the dibia.



Story told to me by Tony Umez. Elaborated on by myself. Elaboration inspired by Abraham Madu's posting of the image above on a social media group.

Also published on

Facebook

Encounters with the Unknown blog














__,_._,___

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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigerian Languages Apps

June 26, 2019, 8:03 am
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Addendum.

One must add that such fluency in Yoruba or other languages is a necessarily STARTING point of usage in other linguistic cultural products of any language.

Just because a native English is born in London and can speak and write English proficient does not mean they will be excellent students of English literature.  Many Yoruba of my generation did poorly in Yoruba subject in high school even though they were born and bred in Yoruba land and spoke fluent Yoruba.  Many professor of Yoruba origin speak and write better in English than Yoruba.  The same holds true for Igbo.  This development serves as corrective to that.  It also helps diaspora children a lit with minimal supervision from parents and colossal savings.

OAA.




Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.


-------- Original message --------
From: OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>
Date: 26/06/2019 14:36 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigerian Languages Apps

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You are correct.  The learner will still need to interact with proficient speakers to reinforce skills learnt with the app.  The apps can take him to that stage. The difference between classroom  learning and apps learning as I discussed with ny Congokese-French student in 2017 is that the app is interactive by design in native language setting whereas the classroom setting is not.  It is steps beyond above classroom setting.

OAA



Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.


-------- Original message --------
From: 'Michael Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: 25/06/2019 23:58 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigerian Languages Apps

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Prof. Agbetuyi: This is one heck of some good news! Although, I must add, even with this app (or these apps?) to learn any language to even a proficient, let alone a competent level, as Olmstead has long argued some five decades ago in his Out of the Mouth of Babes: Earliest stages in language learning, it will still require the human agent. That means we can't throw away the four corners of the classroom, neither can we ever discount "the physical confines of the geographical milieu of native speakers." I join you to salute  the Primal Linguist and thank you for your laudable pursuit!

 

MOA

On Tuesday, June 25, 2019, 4:02:42 PM GMT+1, OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:


Ladies & Gentlemen,

Im very pleased to report to this Forum that following our  heartfelt appeal to persons of goodwill around the world  about a year or two ago to facilitate the instruments of linguistic cohesion in Nigeria the Primal Linguist has heeded our call and hearkened, entered into the hearts of benevolence there to speak from.

Lo, this year is born the triplets of language apps for Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba the three widest spoken indigenous languages in Nigeria.  With this development enter Nigerian languages into the committee of global languages of power to be studied around the world without stepping a foot into a conventional brick and mortar classroom nor within the physical confines of the geographical milieu of native speakers. A comparatist's paradise.

                                          All praise be to the Primal Linguist
                                          At the crossroads.
                                          All praise be to the Great Levelller
                                          Who carved out
                                          A cavernous classroom
                                          For the crossrads
                                          Of Learning
                                          Plumbed from the interstices of space.
                                          An animistic classroom
                                           --'without walls
                                           To weld nations together


OAA
         

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USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nimi Wariboko, the Girl in the Bus and the Smell of Fasting : A Description of a Style of Christianity

June 26, 2019, 8:33 am
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                                                 Nimi Wariboko, the Girl in the Bus and the Smell of Fasting


                                                                 A Description of a Style of Christianity



The writer describes a style of Christianity.


"[ the ] desire is to capture the operation of the senses—sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell—and redirect or reengineer  them toward God. "


"So they are careful not to set wicked things before their eyes (Ps 101:3) or to get involved in coarse jokes (Ps 15:3 and Eph 5:3). Similarly, certain music is avoided as unfit for the ears of the believer attuned to the Holy Spirit." 


"Hugging the opposite sex in greeting is wrong, and so is sitting too close to the opposite sex, even on a crowded bus."


"If one finds oneself inevitably squeezed together with the opposite sex, one must use the chance to talk to him or her about the Gospel. If one fails to talk to her, one will be accused of 'enjoying the heat of fornication on a

bus.' "


"Alcoholic beverages and food offered to idols or food offered by Muslims in celebration of their holy days must also be avoided."


"A Nigerian visiting pastor once told his audience at a service at the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Roosevelt Island, in 1999, that fasting bodies have a smell: 'When people are fasting and have locked themselves up in a room for days and are praying 'hot prayers' there is an aroma of fasting in that room. In the US I do not sense that kind of smell when I

see brothers praying together.' "


Nimi Wariboko, Nigerian Pentecostalism, 89.

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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - A Republic of Extraverted Pentecostals: A Response to Ebenezer Obadare's Pentecostal Republic

June 26, 2019, 11:04 am
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Oga Toyin,
The issue is to question the introversion itself; to ask to what extent a Christian can live the inner life of the soul in a postcolonial context like Nigeria; to ask about collusion and complicity in the drive for existential meaning and meaningfulness. One of the things that has struck me clearly is the extent to which all of us, Christians and non-Christian alike, are complicit in the explorations of the loopholes made possible by postcolonial contexts like Nigeria. Do not be surprised that "introverted" Christians "wire" their electricity meter to avoid reading and generating bills. Christians drive across oncoming cars in a bid to get ahead of the traffic. 

Even "introverted" Christians are forced to the realization that life is not either white or black. The tension between the care of the soul and of the body/material thing (to use Wariboko's beautiful distinction) often make a nest distinction near impossible. 

Sermons in Nigeria are so beautiful and intriguing to listen to in Nigeria. You will hear wonderful homilies that attempt to steer the faithful through the existential landmine called the Nigerian society. I was joyous the day I heard a pastor said, in answering a question about corruption, if you are given a contract and you are asked for bribe, give it. That, for me, is the juncture where Pentecostalism meets realism. Let's call it shine-your-eye Christianity. 



Adeshina Afolayan  


Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone

On Wednesday, June 26, 2019, 2:13 AM, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:

Beautiful.

I was struck by the characterization of Poju Oyemade's church, which I have attended. The church is a very impressive initiative.

The strongest religious power in Nigerian politics, though, is Islam, not Christianity, on account of the domination of Nigerian politics by the Muslim North.

Its wonderful for there to exist an introverted Christianity that sustains a more inward looking, holiness focused Christian walk, as this review indicates.

thanks

toyin





On Tue, 25 Jun 2019 at 23:45, James Yeku <yeku.james@gmail.com> wrote:

Ebenezer Obadare's Pentecostal Republic: Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria masterfully captures the troubling intersections of state politics and religion in Nigeria, staging vividly Pentecostalism's unabashed appropriation of political power in Nigeria's Fourth Republic. What Pentecostal Republic accomplishes the most is how it makes intelligible the transformation of the political by the forces of religion. The author tracks and solidly analyzes the ascendancy of a brand of Nigerian Pentecostalism that impacts the performance and discharge of official power in Nigeria, arguing that an "enchanted democracy" (15) is the outgrowth of "the social visibility and political influence of a Pentecostal 'theocratic class'" (23) whose grips on Nigeria's democracy further consolidates a vexing desecularization of the country. As a participant observant of the Pentecostal dynamics Obadare writes about, I find Pentecostal Republic to be a magisterial account of the way in which certain vectors of Pentecostalism renders visible an enthronement of hegemonic totalities that stress a theocratic imaginary both in the processes of governance and in public discourses.

That said, the brilliant analysis of this book, and this position comes from critical and ethnographic encounters with Pentecostalism in Nigeria, is contingent on the assumption that Pentecostalism in Nigeria and Prosperity Christianity (based on the so-called prosperity Gospel) are the same. They are not. Obadare's framing of the Pentecostal in the context of Nigerian politics appears to be an essentialist categorization that hardly captures the full spectrum of the Pentecostal experience in the country.

Prosperity Christianity has as its chief aim a morbid desire for the accumulation of capital, which provides an ideological imaginary for the rituals of Christian behaviour and the performative excesses that have come to be associated with a large section of Christianity in Nigeria in recent decades. Its major impulse is the practice of Pentecostalism as a response to the privations and deprivations of the postcolonial moment in the country. The condition for the existence of this brand of the Pentecostal is the desire to transcend the precariousness of economic hardships and failed sociopolitical experiments through an uncritical reliance on the benevolent spectacles of a self-made and ever-present Deux ex machina by which many Christians interpret meaning and reality. Yet, it is upon this premise that Obadare appears to construct his most enduring argument — the belief that state power in Nigeria is burdened and overdetermined by Pentecostal inflections that shaped the politics of Nigeria's Fourth Republic. This thesis is true, but only to the extent that the mode of Pentecostalism that has been intelligently and vigorously analyzed is, in fact, a manifestation of only one of several valences and temperaments of Nigerian Pentecostalism.

Although it is a work that offers a compelling narrative brilliant and gripping in every sense, Pentecostal Republic also ignores a huge swath of the Pentecostal population in Nigeria, a section of Nigerian Pentecostalism that constitutes an alternative strand. There is a sense in which this group might be seen as a puritanical subculture of mainstream Nigerian Pentecostalism, but it should be more appropriately defined as an Introverted Pentecostal culture, as against the extraverted Pentecostalism which Obadare lucidly writes about. Introverted Pentecostalism is marked by a strict insistence on holiness and missionary activities, rather than position itself to perpetuate the "deflection of theological emphasis from holiness to prosperity" (22) as does most of the Pentecostal actors and leaders Obadare's work examines in the context of the struggle for political dominance in the Nigerian state. Introverted Pentecostals are likely to be given to Christian apologetics as well as an intense focus on Christian discipleship, theological domains that are peripheral mostly in practice among mainstream, extraverted Pentecostals, who, ironically, are more visible in the public arena.

While the extraverted Pentecostal appears to shape the explicit discourses and narratives of Nigerian Christianity, it is the introverted Pentecostal that implicitly embodies the quintessence of biblical morality. There could be the argument that this latter group is too reclusive to compel any meaning changes in the politics of state; this is a similar argument that may be made on behalf of moderate Islam which equally seems to stand at the margin of the ascendancy of political Islam on the cusp of global terrorism. To that charge, I will offer an example, noting the obvious imbrications in the ritual expressions of both the Introverted and the extraverted. For instance, Gbile Akanni's Peace House in Benue State gathers thousands of Nigerian Pentecostals to its campground in the city of Gboko every year, and among them may be found some of the most prominent actors of the Fourth Republic that is the focus of analyses in Obadare's book. This fact is in addition to the numerous times Gbile Akanni himself speaks in several meetings organized by state governors and state parliaments across the country. The aim of this evangelical effort is not to seize political power, but to have Christian disciples who quietly live out the principles of the doctrine of Christ in the corridors of power.

This example is not a rare singularity or an exception; there are many other groups that may or may not be visible in the way their practice of Pentecostalism shapes national politics, although we can also acknowledge the recent emergence of an urban middle-class Pentecostal culture (such as Poju Oyemade's church in Lagos) that is savvy in its use of social media, seeks to shape national conversations through secular-rational platforms, and which is highly critical of the crass materialism of prosperity Christianity. I imagine that sequels to Obadare's Pentecostal Republic will attend more critically than I could ever attempt to do to these other groups. Without any intention to romanticize this group, I would suggest that any argument that imagines introverted Pentecostals as a mere conservative bloc of other Pentecostals that may also surrender to the enticing allure of material gains dangled by members of the ruling class that interact with them will be shown to be a misreading of what Introverted Pentecostalism signifies.

I close by reiterating that the vision of Pentecostalism presented in Pentecostal Republic foregrounds prosperity in a manner that departs from the biblical morality of Introverted Pentecostals which, rather than 'demonize' them and all of reality as extraverted Pentecostals do, accepts and celebrates social problems as a necessary and an essential component of the Pentecostal experience. At the unconscious of this paradigm of Pentecostalism that explains every socio-economic malady in spiritual terms, therefore, is a quest for survival that surrenders agency to that which is empirically untenable. The Nigerian political space has a character informed by the capitalist cooptation of state resources. The diversion of public funds for private gains is something that has perennially undermined economic progress in Nigeria. With religion thrown into that mix, what is produced is not only a wanton display of avarice but also a mélange of the impulses of prosperity Christianity and the accumulative propensity of a thieving political class. In other words, both prosperity Christianity and the politics of the Fourth Republic, and indeed most of the Nigerian political space, are driven by the same ideological impulses — the will to capital. It goes without saying that in this framework, religion is not just a mechanism of escaping precarity, it is the means by which state power and resources are distributed, and with prosperity Christians in the locus of this, there is an intensification that assaults common sense.

Unfortunately, the summation of prosperity Christianity is its attainment of political significance and the rendering of reality solely through a logic of spirituality. The problem of the critic is, therefore, not Nigerian Pentecostalism. It is with the practice of prosperity Christianity in Nigeria. In Obadare, the slippages and contradictions produced by this theological project that brazenly insinuates itself into politics are excellently charted. There is so much to learn from Pentecostal Republic. I enjoyed reading it.

— James Yeku writes from Saskatoon, Canada.


--
James Yeku
Department of English
University of Saskatchewan, SK Canada
 
Do not curse the darkness, BE the candle. Do not just be the candle, REPRODUCE more candles (Matthew 5:14)

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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - A Republic of Extraverted Pentecostals: A Response to Ebenezer Obadare's Pentecostal Republic

June 26, 2019, 12:17 pm
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na wa.

thanks Oga Adeshina.

Why did this make you happy-
.
'I was joyous the day I heard a pastor said, in answering a question about corruption, if you are given a contract and you are asked for bribe, give it. That, for me, is the juncture where Pentecostalism meets realism. Let's call it shine-your-eye Christianity.  '  

what reason did the pastor give for this advice?



On Wed, 26 Jun 2019 at 19:17, 'Adeshina Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:
Oga Toyin,
The issue is to question the introversion itself; to ask to what extent a Christian can live the inner life of the soul in a postcolonial context like Nigeria; to ask about collusion and complicity in the drive for existential meaning and meaningfulness. One of the things that has struck me clearly is the extent to which all of us, Christians and non-Christian alike, are complicit in the explorations of the loopholes made possible by postcolonial contexts like Nigeria. Do not be surprised that "introverted" Christians "wire" their electricity meter to avoid reading and generating bills. Christians drive across oncoming cars in a bid to get ahead of the traffic. 

Even "introverted" Christians are forced to the realization that life is not either white or black. The tension between the care of the soul and of the body/material thing (to use Wariboko's beautiful distinction) often make a nest distinction near impossible. 

Sermons in Nigeria are so beautiful and intriguing to listen to in Nigeria. You will hear wonderful homilies that attempt to steer the faithful through the existential landmine called the Nigerian society. I was joyous the day I heard a pastor said, in answering a question about corruption, if you are given a contract and you are asked for bribe, give it. That, for me, is the juncture where Pentecostalism meets realism. Let's call it shine-your-eye Christianity. 



Adeshina Afolayan  


Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone

On Wednesday, June 26, 2019, 2:13 AM, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:

Beautiful.

I was struck by the characterization of Poju Oyemade's church, which I have attended. The church is a very impressive initiative.

The strongest religious power in Nigerian politics, though, is Islam, not Christianity, on account of the domination of Nigerian politics by the Muslim North.

Its wonderful for there to exist an introverted Christianity that sustains a more inward looking, holiness focused Christian walk, as this review indicates.

thanks

toyin





On Tue, 25 Jun 2019 at 23:45, James Yeku <yeku.james@gmail.com> wrote:

Ebenezer Obadare's Pentecostal Republic: Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria masterfully captures the troubling intersections of state politics and religion in Nigeria, staging vividly Pentecostalism's unabashed appropriation of political power in Nigeria's Fourth Republic. What Pentecostal Republic accomplishes the most is how it makes intelligible the transformation of the political by the forces of religion. The author tracks and solidly analyzes the ascendancy of a brand of Nigerian Pentecostalism that impacts the performance and discharge of official power in Nigeria, arguing that an "enchanted democracy" (15) is the outgrowth of "the social visibility and political influence of a Pentecostal 'theocratic class'" (23) whose grips on Nigeria's democracy further consolidates a vexing desecularization of the country. As a participant observant of the Pentecostal dynamics Obadare writes about, I find Pentecostal Republic to be a magisterial account of the way in which certain vectors of Pentecostalism renders visible an enthronement of hegemonic totalities that stress a theocratic imaginary both in the processes of governance and in public discourses.

That said, the brilliant analysis of this book, and this position comes from critical and ethnographic encounters with Pentecostalism in Nigeria, is contingent on the assumption that Pentecostalism in Nigeria and Prosperity Christianity (based on the so-called prosperity Gospel) are the same. They are not. Obadare's framing of the Pentecostal in the context of Nigerian politics appears to be an essentialist categorization that hardly captures the full spectrum of the Pentecostal experience in the country.

Prosperity Christianity has as its chief aim a morbid desire for the accumulation of capital, which provides an ideological imaginary for the rituals of Christian behaviour and the performative excesses that have come to be associated with a large section of Christianity in Nigeria in recent decades. Its major impulse is the practice of Pentecostalism as a response to the privations and deprivations of the postcolonial moment in the country. The condition for the existence of this brand of the Pentecostal is the desire to transcend the precariousness of economic hardships and failed sociopolitical experiments through an uncritical reliance on the benevolent spectacles of a self-made and ever-present Deux ex machina by which many Christians interpret meaning and reality. Yet, it is upon this premise that Obadare appears to construct his most enduring argument — the belief that state power in Nigeria is burdened and overdetermined by Pentecostal inflections that shaped the politics of Nigeria's Fourth Republic. This thesis is true, but only to the extent that the mode of Pentecostalism that has been intelligently and vigorously analyzed is, in fact, a manifestation of only one of several valences and temperaments of Nigerian Pentecostalism.

Although it is a work that offers a compelling narrative brilliant and gripping in every sense, Pentecostal Republic also ignores a huge swath of the Pentecostal population in Nigeria, a section of Nigerian Pentecostalism that constitutes an alternative strand. There is a sense in which this group might be seen as a puritanical subculture of mainstream Nigerian Pentecostalism, but it should be more appropriately defined as an Introverted Pentecostal culture, as against the extraverted Pentecostalism which Obadare lucidly writes about. Introverted Pentecostalism is marked by a strict insistence on holiness and missionary activities, rather than position itself to perpetuate the "deflection of theological emphasis from holiness to prosperity" (22) as does most of the Pentecostal actors and leaders Obadare's work examines in the context of the struggle for political dominance in the Nigerian state. Introverted Pentecostals are likely to be given to Christian apologetics as well as an intense focus on Christian discipleship, theological domains that are peripheral mostly in practice among mainstream, extraverted Pentecostals, who, ironically, are more visible in the public arena.

While the extraverted Pentecostal appears to shape the explicit discourses and narratives of Nigerian Christianity, it is the introverted Pentecostal that implicitly embodies the quintessence of biblical morality. There could be the argument that this latter group is too reclusive to compel any meaning changes in the politics of state; this is a similar argument that may be made on behalf of moderate Islam which equally seems to stand at the margin of the ascendancy of political Islam on the cusp of global terrorism. To that charge, I will offer an example, noting the obvious imbrications in the ritual expressions of both the Introverted and the extraverted. For instance, Gbile Akanni's Peace House in Benue State gathers thousands of Nigerian Pentecostals to its campground in the city of Gboko every year, and among them may be found some of the most prominent actors of the Fourth Republic that is the focus of analyses in Obadare's book. This fact is in addition to the numerous times Gbile Akanni himself speaks in several meetings organized by state governors and state parliaments across the country. The aim of this evangelical effort is not to seize political power, but to have Christian disciples who quietly live out the principles of the doctrine of Christ in the corridors of power.

This example is not a rare singularity or an exception; there are many other groups that may or may not be visible in the way their practice of Pentecostalism shapes national politics, although we can also acknowledge the recent emergence of an urban middle-class Pentecostal culture (such as Poju Oyemade's church in Lagos) that is savvy in its use of social media, seeks to shape national conversations through secular-rational platforms, and which is highly critical of the crass materialism of prosperity Christianity. I imagine that sequels to Obadare's Pentecostal Republic will attend more critically than I could ever attempt to do to these other groups. Without any intention to romanticize this group, I would suggest that any argument that imagines introverted Pentecostals as a mere conservative bloc of other Pentecostals that may also surrender to the enticing allure of material gains dangled by members of the ruling class that interact with them will be shown to be a misreading of what Introverted Pentecostalism signifies.

I close by reiterating that the vision of Pentecostalism presented in Pentecostal Republic foregrounds prosperity in a manner that departs from the biblical morality of Introverted Pentecostals which, rather than 'demonize' them and all of reality as extraverted Pentecostals do, accepts and celebrates social problems as a necessary and an essential component of the Pentecostal experience. At the unconscious of this paradigm of Pentecostalism that explains every socio-economic malady in spiritual terms, therefore, is a quest for survival that surrenders agency to that which is empirically untenable. The Nigerian political space has a character informed by the capitalist cooptation of state resources. The diversion of public funds for private gains is something that has perennially undermined economic progress in Nigeria. With religion thrown into that mix, what is produced is not only a wanton display of avarice but also a mélange of the impulses of prosperity Christianity and the accumulative propensity of a thieving political class. In other words, both prosperity Christianity and the politics of the Fourth Republic, and indeed most of the Nigerian political space, are driven by the same ideological impulses — the will to capital. It goes without saying that in this framework, religion is not just a mechanism of escaping precarity, it is the means by which state power and resources are distributed, and with prosperity Christians in the locus of this, there is an intensification that assaults common sense.

Unfortunately, the summation of prosperity Christianity is its attainment of political significance and the rendering of reality solely through a logic of spirituality. The problem of the critic is, therefore, not Nigerian Pentecostalism. It is with the practice of prosperity Christianity in Nigeria. In Obadare, the slippages and contradictions produced by this theological project that brazenly insinuates itself into politics are excellently charted. There is so much to learn from Pentecostal Republic. I enjoyed reading it.

— James Yeku writes from Saskatoon, Canada.


--
James Yeku
Department of English
University of Saskatchewan, SK Canada
 
Do not curse the darkness, BE the candle. Do not just be the candle, REPRODUCE more candles (Matthew 5:14)

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