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Nigeria: A Sweltering Insight into God’s
Kingdom I will never forget Independence Day in Nigeria, October 1, 2004. My frustration was mounting while traveling across the southeastern part of the country. I had never seen such beaten roads. Near the end of the day I stood drenched in my own sweat, glaring at a motionless fan in my room in a seminary complex in the rural town of Ogobia. I cursed the country’s sporadic electricity. Did the politicians who pocket the oil monies ever put anything back into the infrastructure of this country? Ironically when the power went off I had been reading Wole Soyinka’s account of his sweltering, mosquito infested imprisonment: The Man Died. Soyinka, a Nobel prize-winning playwright and author, had been imprisoned for criticizing Nigeria’s government on the eve of the country’s civil war in 1967. The war erupted when one of Nigeria’s largest and predominantly Christian tribes—the Ibo—attempted to secede from the country. Indescribable violence and famine followed, forcing the Ibo region called Biafra back into submission. So there I stood on the country’s 44th birthday, sweaty and doused in deet in the middle of Biafra. My worst expectations of Nigeria had been confirmed. Although it is the seventh largest exporter of crude oil in the world, Nigeria is ridden with poverty. Average lifespan is twenty years less than in the US; the infant mortality rate is far greater. I had seen that much of the populace lives in mud block huts with thatched roofs and no potable water. Soyinka has referred to Nigeria as the “open sore of a continent.” That’s a fitting description of a land that continues to see the wealth from its abundant natural resources hoarded by a small elite and leaked uninhibited abroad. The metaphor also befits a country that has known ongoing violence and several military coups in such a short history. No doubt the political instability and corruption are remnants of an imperial imposition upon 250 different indigenous tribes. Religious tension has also added fuel to the fires in Africa’s most populous country. Nigeria is 50% Muslim and 40% Christian. Stir in the oil and you have a bubbling brew of unease in today’s social-political climate of the developing world. Hopes for prosperity had been raised by the adoption of a new constitution and the first multi-party elections in 1999. These elections, which were widely fraudulent, brought the former general Olusegun Obasanjo into power as president. Obasanjo was (supposedly) overwhelmingly reelected in Nigeria’s most recent elections in April 2003. The World Factbook, published by the American Central Intelligence Agency, reports that “despite some irregularities, the April 2003 elections marked the first civilian transfer of power in Nigeria’s history.” I learned in a town in Akwa Ibom State what constituted an “irregularity.” One poll in the town was only open for ten minutes during the election because the paper ballots were not available. It was later officially reported that 6,000 votes had been cast from the poll in support of incumbent president Obasanjo. Despite such “irregularities,” the current administration in Nigeria is an important ally of the United States. Bill Clinton visited the country in 2000. During his first term, President W. George Bush met with Obasanjo three times. The friendship extended Obasanjo by American presidents is not surprising, since Nigeria is the fifth largest provider of crude oil to the US. Ironically, the third meeting between Obasanjo and George Bush took place in the White House only a month after Bush’s reelection, and at a time when Nigeria teetered on a national strike by its workers protesting low wages and inaccessible domestic oil prices. The inability to read in the on-setting darkness started to depress me until I heard a somewhat familiar, yet alien sound drifting across the seminary complex. The seminarians were chanting evening prayer. I easily recognized the words of the opening hymn: “Oh God our help in ages past...” It was the different cadence and drumming that made the hymn seem so alien and beautiful. There was something primal in the African chanting of a traditional western song. I had a similar experience attending church in the southern city of Enugu. There I was surrounded by 1,500 Nigerians, who prayed, sang, and danced for hours. I had never seen so many profoundly poor people exhibit such joy and faith in God’s providence. Yet, this was not a blind faith. The presiding celebrant spoke of trust in God, but tempered his message with comments about the oppression under which his parishioners lived. He summed his message with simple but potent words of expectant deliverance: “We wait. We wait.” Hearing these words among the spirited Nigerians, I realized I was glimpsing the Kingdom of God in a profound sense that I never experienced before. For the faithful but oppressed Nigerians, deliverance is at hand, but not yet arrived. They wait at the edge: an uncomfortable place where perseverance in providence sharply meets prophetic expectation. The Kingdom of God is uncontainable, liberated spirit in the midst of physical oppression. It is conversion containing its own immediate reward of deferred promise. It is painful, but joyful awareness. Praying alongside the Nigerians I realized that the Kingdom announced by Jesus is a place of heightened consciousness—not one concerned so much with heaven but Earth. The homilist put real life and quite humorous examples before his people to convey how their experience of oppression insults the love and order of God. His use of earthy stories to make notions of justice and providence concrete reflects the homiletic practice of Jesus. The Gospels mostly depict Jesus preaching and teaching about the Kingdom of God through parables. The parables were filled with irony and paradox. As such they engaged and shook up the listener and confronted preconceptions. In teaching through parables Jesus provoked critical thinking among his listeners. In his work Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed,William R. Herzog argues that Jesus was a master of critical pedagogy. Herzog suggests that the Kingdom parables were subversive teachings exposing the injustice of the Pharisaical-Roman regime in power in ancient Palestine. Jesus’ teaching and theologizing which began “not with the mysteries of God but with the perplexities of daily life” opened eyes and minds. The Pharisees, however, who feared for the fragile collaboration between the Jewish and Roman authorities numbed people into an unquestioned acceptance of the political-religious hegemony by burdening them with puritanical imperatives. My Kingdom epiphany in Nigeria compelled me to take a sad look home to the United States. It was hard not to compare the rhetoric of the presidential elections at the time to the Pharisaic stifling of critical discourse. From this new perspective it was easy to see how the swirling fog of patriotism, insecurity, and consumerism blinded American consciences from profound moral questions surrounding economic disparities and pre-emptive military action. Standing among the Nigerians, I grasped new insight into the words: “How hard it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven” (Luke 18: 24). If the Kingdom proclaimed by Jesus of Nazareth is essentially a call for redistributive justice, then the rich and powerful are excluded by very definition! As privileged and powerful Americans we are in a bad place on Kingdom terms: we can’t get there from where we are. The corollary question “then who then can be saved” (Luke 18:26) is pointedly ours as Americans for the asking. Redemptive insight is more accessible to God’s poor and suffering. There is little hope for us who are privileged until we realize how much we need those who are dispossessed. Nothing less will open our eyes. The Kingdom of God arrives through a transforming solidarity between the have-nots and the haves, the developing and the industrialized. I spent my last day in Nigeria in a small village outside the city of Abuja. I was wakened in the dark hours of early morning by the sound of another chanting that drifted into my room and seemed alien, beautiful, and primal. This time the voice belonged to a praying Islamic imam. It was a powerful wakeup call for an American Christian about to return home to a rich country led by an entrenched military- and oil-dependent regime. I feared that our blindness would spur greater violence among this already suffering Nigerian people. I mourned our fading opportunity to share in the clarity of their vision of God’s love. Scott Fina Scott is associated with Vincentian Solidarity Office & CPF |