Talking Religion
Interview with German Journalist on Religion and politcs of Nigeria
2000
Jahman Anikulapo
Are you member of any church?
Currently, I am not, but I used to be a member of the Catholic Church. I moved on, I have been to Anglican, eventually I moved to African churches, because of the theatrical content in the African churches, the theatre content, you know, there is a lot of music and a lot of expression, and I thought that was what really defined my kind of character, so I went into African churches, I am in “Celestial Churches” and “Cherubim and Seraphim”, I was there, but then, I am not really committed to them, but I do like to attend to their services because of the heavy celebration of life. But I am not a member of any of the churches. Even though my friends belong to them, so I only go there when they have harvest festival or carnivals – so I got to eat their food, let me say.
Sie sind mehr oder weniger eine Ausnahme? Fühlen sie sich so?
Yeah, I used to think that I was very exceptional, until I discovered that there are a lot of young people too, who are not necessarily members of the churches. They go, because their parents … they were born into those churches. So they go because of parental pressure. Some , because they are looking for one miracle or the other. But they are not necessarily members. The church has become something like a social place. The one who is looking for a wife goes to a church, the one who is looking for a husband goes to a church, when you need a job … but the moment you get what you need, you get out of it. That is one of the hypocrisy that I have discovered. There is a mercantilist attitude: you go in, you get what you want, and you get out. 2:44 that is what I have seen in the majority of people. So I don’t think I am strictly an exception. Just that – I haven’t tested all of them, but
I have been a Muslim, my dad converted at one point to Muslim, I went to a Muslim school, I went to an Arabic school, I attended a catholic school, I attended an Anglican school, so I have some kind of a broad experience, and as such myself, I don’t see anything that will make me that Christian or that Muslim. I want to operate from my head, that is what I am doing.
wie haben die Kirchen den spirutellen und geistigen Raum besetzt?
Currently you can say that the fastest growing industry in Nigeria is the church. Because all of a sudden, we just discovered that every corner in the city, for instance, is a church. In the past, when I was growing up – I am just 40 now - when I was growing up, you could look, before you get to church, you have to move from your house, you have to go at least ten kilometres or 15 kilometres before you attend a church. or atmost maybe five kilometres, but now there is a church in every corner, which means that people can just tie their towel or wear their sleeping dress, pyjamas, and just walk into a church. so there is this rush, some kind of a search for salvation, an explosion.
It didn’t come to be until the 80s – this is very strange. The moment, Nigeria took the IMF–loan – I always like to date our problems to that time, I was in school up to 1985, when we took the IMF. I graduated 1986. up to this 1985, things were calmer, for me. At least, there was a semblance of real life that was going on. Maybe the economy was better, the economic policy was better, the political environment was not stable, but it was not volatile. It didn’t inspire violence even in thought.
But 1985, Nigeria took the IMF. IMF – that is the international monetary fund - IMF came with its own politics, structural adjustment politics, SAP, it came with austerity measures, it came with tightening your belt, and I think the economy became so emasculated that it sort of squeezed the people, these Nigerians who have been used to some kind of …. there used to be a false sense of massive wealth, that we have oil – so what do we need agriculture for? As a matter of fact, we dumped quite a lot of things, we dumped Agriculture, we dumped a lot of things that we were able to be involved with. We just went straight into oil. so by 1985, the oil money did not come in, foreign investment stopped, that is after we took the IMF-loan, so many things had to happen within the economic space.
And so the middle-class, to which many of us, when you graduated from university, then, there is a job waiting for you, there is a car waiting for you, so many things were already waiting for you, you were recruited from school. I was interviewed in school to come and work in a company. But at that time, everything stopped, so the middle-class disappeared. And for me, the disappearance of the middle-class at that time let to this rush of churches, because a lot of the young people then, there was only one way to survive: abroad, okay, that was the beginning of the brain-drain, the university was dying, so a lot of the intelligentsia was moving outside the country or trying to find another economic space, and many of them who went out, I always say that most of them brought back what we have as Pentecostalism. In the country currently, there are a lot of people who lost their jobs, so because of the general depression in the mind and the purse of people, a lot of them wanted some sort of easy escape. so they came out with this idea of miracle, that you really don’t need to work – Manna is going to fall from heaven, you only need to pray, you only need to wish, and so we had this rush of even conmen men became pastors, // conmen like fraud, some of them have probably never read the bible, but they thought: look, that is an easy way, because they saw that a lot of people were depressed, and when people are depressed, they have always been going to church and thinking of god, so they were all rushing into the churches so that they can get some kind of miracle, some kind of deliverance. the key-word was deliverance, let us deliver you from economic depression, from a mental torture that you are undergoing because you lost your job, because a
lot of people were retrenched – “let us free you from demons! Demons have infested the country, and they are affecting people – that is why you lost your job, that’s why you can’t safe money!”
so a lot of people were not realistic in their perception of the situation in which we found ourselves. A lot of them thought that it was probably because of the sins; because one of the preachment of one of the earlier pastors was that the sins of Nigeria were so much that God had decided to visit Sodom and Gomorra experience on us, so that unless you enter the Noah-arch, you cannot escape. so a lot of them started lashing on to that arch and the Noah-arch is this deliverance, these churches, that if you come to us, we pray for you, we get a miracle for you from God, and then, you can be free again.
The preachment was not that you should work harder, or that you should expand your horizon, or that you should become more creative so that you can get back on the economic track. The dogma was that you must just believe that God is capable of giving you a miracle, that miraculously, you can become rich again, you can stand on your feet again.
So with the advent of the same SAP, a lot of industries shut down, which means the warehouses shut down, were we store foods, where we store goods, shut down, because there was no direct foreign investment. If you go along this road, because this road leads … this end here is airport, the other, the extreme end is seaport, so it is just this linear movement, and along the place, because of the nature of that road, you have a lot of warehouses, even next door to Guardian here, next door to us. This used to be a warehouse, the Guardian now, it was a warehouse for imported cars, Peugeot it used to be the biggest warehouse for cars - it was at that time when the economy started crashing, that by 1983, 84 it was becoming difficult, so the owner of the company has started selling his cars and trying to re-invest his money in something, and that is how the Guardian was born in 1984.
Even the Guardian started the year before the advent of SAP. actually, it started two years before, 1983, but being a businessman, he started seeing the writing on the wall, and a lot of warehouses along this road, where we used to store goods, a lot of goods, produced or imported, a lot of them had to shut down. And they were there laying fallow (brachliegen) for a long time, because there were no goods in there.
So when the churches came, it was some sort of a pre-meditated attack on the industry. The first set of place they went for were the ware-houses. So if you go along this road now, the next warehouses you see up to the port are mostly churches now. To some of us, it became, it was very worrisome. I remember my very first shock. I went to the National Theatre for a performance, and there is a warehouse very close to it, where I used to go and buy frozen food, I went there and I saw that it was a church!
And the pastor – his name was pastor Jordan – the pastor was preaching vehemently the way to exercise demons from this land is to take over all the places of commerce, and that commercialism had destroyed the soul of the people of Nigeria. That we are chasing money too much, we were all running after quick money. the way to exercise it was to make sure that those consumptions that encouraged commercialism or mercantilism are taken over by the churches.
And he took over that big warehouse there, and it started spreading, everybody …. they were not building their own churches, they were only taking over the warehouses. 13:46 And we saw that we were helpless because the economy was not in good shape, the military government continued with Abacha and the rest of them, many other companies left the country.
surprisingly, like a second phase of the attack, they went after the theatres, cinema-houses. Since because in 1985, when we took SAP, one of the things that first of all suffered was the film. when there was no money, the entertainment industry died. All the clubs shut down, all the recording companies shut down, there were no concerts, there were no cinemas. 14:20 We used to get films from India, from Hollywood that were being shown here, you watch them. I grew up watching Hollywood films. When they were released, they were here. 14:31 But all of a sudden, you couldn´t get all those things, because there is a ban on them, 14:38 so the cinema-houses naturally had to shut down, and that killed the cinema industry. 14:40
14:44 so cinema houses around there were then being taken over by the churches. They have taken all of them now. They were taking all of them now. So the last one that we thought was standing, the last one of the cinema-houses, one of the older cinema houses in Agega, Pen-cinema – some few month ago I was driving there and I saw that Pen-cinema was gone! 15:03 And when I was a little kid, Pen-cinema was where I always escaped to, even as a secondary school boy, and it is such a painful thing that churches are 15:14 taking over all these places, and the preachment was: look, you have to arrest that phillandeering soul of this nation. That this nation has done so much sins, that the only way to redeem it is to take over the industries and take over the churches! it wasn´t put straight like that, but it looked like a doctrine that was fashioned by somebody and it has been applied.
1
5:50 and then television stations – much of preaching is done on the television. So that in some mornings … they have a lot of money, they buy up all the airspace, so that your radio drama or your television drama or your soap opera cannot make the television, because you don´t have the money. They pay. There is a church that pays alone about 10 million naira per month. That is a huge sum of money. Just to appear on the television and preach. 16:19 So you could see kind of a systemic taking over of the entertainment life, of the cultural space, of the social space of the people, many houses have been converted to churches. 16:30 people start a church in a one-room apartment, and it begins to flourish, so the entire cultural and social space has been under attack. 16:45
16:45 I didn´t realise the impact of that until I went to Ghana, to the pan African historical theatre festival, it is called panafest, it is done every two years, it started in 1992 and I have been going there. // so when we went there in 1994, there was a professor from the US, professor James Small, I think that was his name, who presented a paper, and he was saying that in Nigeria as in 1994 had already about 1006 churches, not buildings, denominations. 18:04 It was a shock. I couldn´t sleep. Denominations 1006! and that Ghana was going around 400. So he said that he had decided to Ghana to let them know that there is something horrible happening, that all your space is being taken over by churches - Ghana is smaller - // that all your space - your business space and your economic space, your cultural space, your social space - is being taken over by churches. 18:39 he had come without document that to prove to them that they can still arrest it. 18:45 And when they can arrest, it to begin to revalidate your cultural heritage. Make them very strong so that they can counter this onslaught – in fact, he called it onslaught. 18:55 Church onslaught. 18:59 So after the conference I went to him and said: but what about Nigeria? I am afraid about what is going on there. He said: My brother, Nigeria is beyond redemption. That you cannot arrest it in Nigeria because the volume of money that has been pumped in the church business is so huge that you need double or triple that amount to counter it. 19:30
wo das Geld herkommt?
der US-Professor: hat Verschwörungstheorie
Dass Kirchen von Afroamerikanern kommen, die zahlen die Kirchen, aber das Geld käme nicht direkt von denen, sondern von den Institutionen, die auch Martin Luther King gefördert hätten,
man müsse nur den Lebensstil der Pastoren betrachten – US-gefärbt. Sprechen nicht nigerianisches, sondern afroamerikanisches Englisch –
und zwar prosperity-churches. Die Institutionen, die die fördern, seien angeblich mit KKK in Kontakt. Angriff auf Nigeria, weil reiches Land, viele schwarze Leute, und enge Kontakt zu afroamerikanischer Community. Potential zu einem der wichtigen wirtschaftlichen Mächte in der Welt zu werden
sechstgrößtes Öl-Land in der Welt
ich sage: prosperity churches sagen doch, dass man arbeiten muss. Nein, sagt er.
No! the prosperity churches say that you don´t have to work! there is Manna from heaven! That is what the churches are saying!
25:09 we have a lot of people now, we can testify, a lot of people go to these churches now – they don´t believe in hard work! they don´t believe that to make money, you have to invest, you have work hard, and you make money. What they do, when they have a little problem, they run to the pastor and say: Please pray for me! I think I have been attacked by a demon! 25:28 And the pastor says: I remove the demon! you know the way they preach? They put their hand on your head, and once they do that, you fall down, and then they say: the spirit has left! 25:39 //
The only means of preaching is not to counsel, the church does not counsel, it is not longer a social institution, where they sit down with you and ask: how are you doing? How is your business doing? If you say you are in economic depression, you know.. when I was attending the catholic church, they would call you and say: we have a social group, and they would sit down with you and ask: how is your business doing? what investment have you done? they had economic counsellers in some of those orthodox churches, but not these ones! there are none! they only tell you, when you come and say: my business is going down! I am not making as much money I used to do – I am afraid. They say: Well, maybe you have been infested by a demon! And so, we have to exorcize! you have to remove the demon! 26:41 and it is by laying their hand or using a handkerchief - a very unorthodox means of getting the problems solved! 26:44 the reason why we call them prosperity church: they only preach about prosperity. Getting rich quick. 26:55 they are not preaching about hard work. And that that is why we say we believe that some of the steps that they have taken look like a premeditated attemps to destroy industry. Where the only places you could buy up are the warehouses. so that now when the economy seems to be cralling back, there are no warehouses to keep goods. 27:19
Aber welche Institutionen stehen dahinter? bezieht sich noch mal auf US-Professor – indirekte Verbindung zu KKK
And actually you have to wonder where the churches get their money from! If they spend 10 million naira a month, two million naira a week to buy airtime to preach – where does the money come from? That are things that some journalists have tried to investigate in the past, but the media itself are infested by pastors now, we have so many pastors now who are editors, and you cannot even investigate, they are protecting their leaders and that kind of thing. So you have to ask yourself: where does the money come from? Even the money for the tracts! the volume of tracts, the little religious pamphlets that come into this country – at a time when we say that the publishing industry is dead! the most thriving books //, these books come out almost every day! in fact at a point we had to stop our book review page, because the only books you could get to review were pamphlets, church books and things. Where does the money come from? The publishing industry has been in depression for almost ten years now, but the only publishing – apart from text books for the schools, the only publishing that is going again you could say on a massive scale are the publishing of religious tracts and books, so the volume of them - every week, you have the Nigerian port authority announcing that there is a large consignment of tracts, and bibles and books and things coming in. 29:38 And then the size of the churches, the kind of buildings that they have – the whole catholic churches are very conservative buildings, and these are the most flamboyant buildings that you say: somebody must have spent millions of naira to get them. 30:00 so it is a nagging question. You keep on asking: where does this money come from? Certainly not Naira. It is foreign currency. 30:09
impact of local industry?
people think that the local industry may be involved. // You know there has been what we call “money laundry” in this country. that means: re-circulating profit and diverting it to other organizations and acting as fronts. you were right when you were asking the question about coca cola, unilever and things others - there have been some investigations in the past that link some multinationals to the financing of some of these churches, and that is the contradiction: // I have noticed that some of the multinational companies actually have sympathies for some of the churches, but then you take it to be because maybe the managing director is a member of the church – I mean, that was our naïve understanding of the situation, that if I belong to a church for instance, and I am a big man in the Guardian, I might go and give to them, but I think overtime we have discovered that it is not necessarily so, 31:28 it looks like there is a direct investment of multinationals in the churches. What some unconfirmed researches have said is that money has been channelled through the multinationals into the churches. From where – I don´t know.
Coca-Cola hat nicht nur sign-boards für Schulen, sondern auch für Kirchen gemalt
You said that you are afraid of this take-over – why exactly are you afraid?
It is multi-dimensional. My first fear was that when you take over warehouses and you take over business-environments and the sense of enterprise of the people, 34:14 then, you can never grow the economy. You are not encouraging the young people who are coming out of school, who ought to go and to engage their creative enterprise to do to expand the economic horizon – you are not encouraging them to do that. You are encouraging them to come into the churches and wait for a miracle.
So we thought that taking over the economic space is dangerous, because you are not encouraging the people to be creative, you are not encouraging them to be technologically minded, to be industry–minded, you are just telling them that: look, do the little you can do, and you get money. 36:09
The most dangerous dimension is that many of the institutions now, if you are looking for a job, you are not likely to be employed because of merit, because you are qualified and you can do the job. You are likely to be employed because you are a member of the church. you see, when you sacrifice meritocracy in a developing economy, then, the economy is in shamble, it is going to die. and this is prevalent. We know very close to this place is a recording company where, unless you belong to the mans church, you cannot work there. //
37:08 and when they resume in the morning, from eight am to ten am, they are praying. If you walk by the place now – I have not been there for some time – you are hearing every prayer between eight and ten. 37:25 They resume work at ten, they close at five, there is fellowship every afternoon, and that is what many companies are doing now. 37:31
37:31 Wednesdays for instance, many of the churches now, they congregate on Wednesday evenings. You close early on Wednesday so that you can go to the church and do fellowship. 37:43 There are some churches where fellowship is every day, there are so many groups in the church – prayer warriors, satan opponats – there are so many. you belong to this organization, so you are supposed to meet Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays… so that the time that you spent creating or working // is the time that you now spend just praying and hoping for Manna. 38:15 And the prayer is like war.
38:16 That is at the economic front: The man hours are wasted. People are not investing their money. When you have money now, you are not investing in anything - you take it to the church.
38:26 We just finish the case of a worker who was stealing money from the Sheraton hotel, 39 Million Naira, and he was donating it to one of the biggest churches. And the pastors says: Well, he was directed by the holy ghost to bring the money, so what is my offence? 38:41 And the state seems to be helpless. 38:43 // He was a junior staff, maybe just like a clerk. He has barely – maybe 20.0000 a month. And he was bringing millions and donating generators, a generating plant that is worth ten Million Naira to the church, and the pastor didn´t ask him: Where did you get the money? He doesn´t even have a car! 39:13 // but that´s just a sign of what many people are doing. Many people now, when they have money, they bring it to the church. When they have money, they build a house for the pastor. 39:30 when they make profit from their business, they buy a jeep for the pastor. 39:35 this is money that ought to be invested in the economy so that the economy itself can grow! 39:39
The churches are richer than the state! some of the churches can finance the entire budget of Nigeria! 40:07 The first set of people, private people, to ride private Jets in this country were pastors! //
40:27 And then, when someone like Bonnke comes to Nigeria – forget it! Bonnkes is a german preacher who comes regularly – if he comes to Nigeria, the crowd that you see - I used to keep a picture. It is amazing! The heads that were present there, and for three days or five days, they would not work!
Just like when you are going on the way to Ibadan now – the whole of the express way that has been taken to be an industrial layout, just like you have in Ghana and other places - there are now churches! Every point is a church now! That if you make the mistake of being trapped there, you can spend the whole day on just trying to navigate those churches!
And we say that the next religious war in this country will be on that express road! Because the muslims too have taken their own stand. They have taken mass land, and they now preach on Sundays too. To tell you the extend to which religion is likely to explode in this! The Muslims, they normally pray on Fridays, they now pray on Sundays. They have what they call “Nasfat”, that is a national organization of young Muslims. They behave like born-again Christians. They appear on television on Sunday – you know, Friday is their own holiday, but now, that is like an attack! 41:46 They appear on Sunday, the whole fellowship, just like the born-agains, they speak in tongues just like the born-agains, and very soon, there is going to be an explosion. may we be saved!
That is at the economic front.
The cultural front: 1977 hätte Nigeria die Dämonen der ganzen Welt importiert, weil da ein Festival war – weil die Masken, Tänze etc.
sagen, die Traditionen seien vom Satan oder dämonisch – das zerstöre das Selbstbewusstsein der Menschen
if you start preaching like that, you are destroying the self – confidence of the people.
People have been told not to speak their language because it is infested with evil. 43:10 I show you something that I eat – I am eating it in defiance. some pastors … this is a cola-nut, it is very harmless, it is just like coffee, it keeps me awake, because I don´t sleep all the time, but some pastors are preaching that it is infested by the demons, I must not eat it! 43:25 And I used to have a girl friend who was complaining that when you eat this, you are infested with demons – I said: okay, I will eat it! And I eat it all the time!
When you preach about things like that … there is food, that you cannot plug, certain vegetables, which you cannot plug on your farm, because they are infested with witches!
You cannot plant flowers in your compound, because certain flowers are infested by spirits! 43:53 You know, you are destroying the peoples consciousness gradually. 44:00 And then, you destroy the peoples culture by telling them that the dances from Yoruba-land, for instance, are the dances the Gods! So because they are dances of the Gods, they are dances of the Demon! You must do it.
You must not go and watch theatre! 44:22 it is only now that they are coming to theatre. At some point, you must not go to theatre, because the theatre is where we practise demonic activities. 44:25 We have some staff here who attend some church – they must not watch television! I am sure you are aware of that, that they must not listen to news, they must not watch television because the television is a medium of the devil. 44:40 // 44:55 And because of this preaching, many young people who ought to be engaged in the arts, like you have in the American society where the first place you ernest the energy of the youth is through the arts and entitlement. It is difficult now because the young ones are in the churches. 45:11 They cannot be involved in any creative enterprise of theatre and finance and things, because the theatre and entertainment is a place for the demon. 45:25
45:20 I tell you that I have some art-work at home which a college of mine gave to me. Before she was told to change her name, and she changed her name. And then she was told that any piece of painting or sculpture is a representation of the devil. She mentioned casually that she wanted to throw them away. I said: please, give them to me, so I collected them. I have about seven artworks which I collected from her.
45:51 That is a very enlighting person, almost an editor here, and who have been convinced that if you keep harmless painting in your house – painting! – that you hang on the wall, is the work of the devil. And she was going to through it into the dustbin. 46:09
46:08 I am just giving you examples of how you can destroy peoples self-confidence, self-estime, self believe and their conviction in their own heritage, in their own dignity as a person, in their identity. And once you continue to do that, and then you attack them on the economic front again – why are we talking of development? those people are not going to be part of any developmental process. They are just going to be so retarded that they will remain on the same spot 46:39 for life.
der Glaube an witchcraft hat offenbar zugenommen?
It has increased, because again we blame the usual suspect, the church. Because now, when you preach about it all the time – I show you some books – if you preach about it all the time, people are now being forced to, even those who didn´t believe in it before. 47:14 And especially when you see some manifestations, when you see how in some churches they are exorcising the devil, they tell you that the spirit is in the person and she is infested - a lot of people are beginning to believe that it is true. 47:29 That there are devils, there is witchcraft – many people did not believe it in the past, // but now, it is being logged in the peoples consciousness that there are witches and once you have a problem, that problem is not causal and effect, that if you do certain things it is likely to yield certain results, people are now just being told that it is the devil that is being responsible. 48:00 That´s what we see as a problem. A lot of people now believe that there are witchcraft, there are wizards, there are spirits, and demons, homids, and they are likely to affect them and things like that. 48:16 And that is very very dangerous. So many more people actually now believe.
what we are saying is: gradually we are removing realism from our national life. And we are living in illusions. 48:55 // 50:00 So the concept of witch crafting is becoming heavy in our sensibility again. We don´t believe in reality any more, we don´t believe in causal and effect any more, we just believe that there must be a miracle or some kind of extra supra natural forces working against. 50:24
but the believe in witchcraft is rooted in the African mind …
49:02 … ja, war in der Vergangenheit stark, dann aber durch Kontakt mit Westen und orthodoxen Kirchen erst die Überzeugung gewachsen, dass die Hexen und so weiter den Menschen nicht überwinden können, sondern durch den Glauben überwunden werden
the foundation we had in terms of orthodox religion told us that you don´t have to subject yourself to negative thoughts, and negative thoughts are the witches are part of negative forces. So we are told not to believe in that, that you should believe in your self will. But now, you are not to believe in your will power, you are to believe in some extra-beings or extra forces are affecting you.
ein wichtiges Angebot der Kirchen ist der Kampf gegen witchcraft
There are some words which have become so popular in our lexicons now: demons, witchcraft, deliverance, prosperity, believe. That are the popular famous words now
that you can not even read some books … look at the recent example in Kenya where some pastors took Chinua Achebes book and tie a question in it that he is corrupting the youth because he talks about witchcraft fairy tails –You know a book like Harry potter will not be a success here! If we continue the way we are going. If we continue the way we are going, our children are not likely to learn those stories like Gulliver’s travels. If you present that kind of story, some pastors are likely to attack you!
So one major thing that the churches and the mosques that they play on is fear. 53:29 They instil fear in you. And it is worth if the fear is a fear of a force that you cannot control. If it is for me to fear the next person because he can beat me, because he is bigger than me, it is still somehow manageable, I can confront it. But if it is the fear of something I cannot see, something I have to imagine, that is just a flitting idea, it cannot manifest physically like a book or a tape in front of me, it is worth because I don´t know what to expect. So, people have been instilled with so much fear that they don´t really know how to proceed. 54:14 To solve his own problem. The capacitiy of man to solve his own problem is being eroded. 54:33 and when you erode the capacity of a persons to confront a problem and to overcome it, it is very dangerous, it is really dangerous for the development of the human mind. It is dangerous for the development of the nation. 54:49 It is dangerous for the development of the social ethos. Because the society will not make any advancement.
was mit dem nächsten religiösen clash?
man denke immer an den Norden, aber er auch über situation im Süden beunruhigt
55:40 In the southwest - from my experience in the family – you can be a muslim and live with a Christian here. We don´t have these conflicts of ideas or interest. If it is there, it is barely down. To bring it up and use it as an instrument to fight is very rare. Rather people clashed in the southwest on maybe ethnic – Yoruba versus Haussa – you know, that is a natural phenomenon in the composition of the Nigerian nation. 56:12 but in the north, the experience of the Scharia riot has taught us that there is an explosion that may come some day. 56:22 Because when the problem starts in the problem starts in the north, it looks from the beginning like an ethnic conflict, but deep down, it is religious. usually the attack comes on Friday afternoon, when the muslim come out of mosques, // and then the Christian comes out on Sunday, and they retaliate. it is almost a definite pattern.
now the scharia thing has come to really encourage it, so that … erklärt das …. redet gegen Scharia …. gegen Kleiderordnung …
okay, aber für uns nicht neu, dass es islamischen Fundamentalismus gibt, aber heizt er Boom der Kirchen die Spannung nicht weiter an?
It´s true. It´s fundamentalism. That´s why we are saying that the intensity of preaching and the intensity of appearance of these churches is some kind of fundamentalism, and personally I have observed and I have said it before, and I have noticed that even though most of the time we would say that the Islamic religion is very hard, it likes Jihad, it is a religion of force, they like force to instil discipline in you, I have noticed that the new Pentecostal churches, they are anti-debate. 58:49 You cannot argue with them. I have noticed from my personal interaction with a lot of my friends who are born again Christians, the moment you try to question something in the bible or you question a pastor´s lifestyle, they go in anger, they want to fight you, so // the fundamentalism is even worse in the new Pentecostal movement. it is anti-argument. You cannot argue with them.
Even in our meetings as enlightening as a newspaper environment is supposed to be, you cannot question certain things. Once you raise it, somebody will say: Why are you attacking my pastor? They don´t like to be questioned. And so, sorry, that is fundamentalism in another sense. And that is what you can see on the express road where I told you that we are likely to have a major explosion, Now every last friday of the month, about four of the huge churches – if you travel by that road, you will see vast expands of land, that is where they build their churches – and because of the lack of control, these people park their cars on the major highway and they create this huge traffic jam that can last for two days, sometimes. If you are just somebody who has got frustrated and you try to challenge them, you are likely to be …. you may not escape alive.
And then we came here, we wrote, even my newspaper wrote an editorial on that, we said: look, you can have your church on that road, but please leave the road for the road user, because it is a common property - and they came to attack, not physically, but they wrote back and said that why are you questioning God? It is Gods will that we must be there, why do you want to destroy the will of God? I mean, that is fundamentalism, you cannot argue!
I am telling you, in my office there, there is some of my staff that I must not say certain things, they are like “ha!” – they want to fight you, because you must not question: Why is this word written like this in the bible?
sagt, wir warden noch so ein Erlebnis haben wie in den USA, wo sich die ganze Sekte umbrachte, denn
1:03:00 the followership is passionate. It is an religion of passion. 1:03:15 every heavy stuff of passion.
werben sie agressiv um neue Anhänger?
Yeah. Well, it is not directly to win the muslims, it is to win souls. They are fishers of men, like they say. They have won a lot of people over from the muslim side, and the muslims now, in reaction to that – that is why I said they have formed what they call their own born again, the “Nasfat”. They formed their own because … the aggression is coming from the Pentecostal churches, and they are winning a lot of their people, and so, they too, they have formed their own. And there is the spirit of competition, even among the churches.
spricht von “media war” diverser Kirchen gegeneinander. Im Fernsehen, aber auch im Internet
The war is on all fronts: physically, on the television, in the internet, in the newspapers, aggressive adverts in the papers.
Zahlen Kirchenführer ihre eigene Miliz?
ja, es gab Milizen, es seien auch welche aus Nigeria gekommen
über Kaduna: man nehme allgemein an, dass Politiker die Unruhen schüren. Medien berichteten, sie hätten gesehen wie ein General habe 200 Milizionäre in seinem compound bewaffnet und bezahlt – der General bestritt das – um die gegnerische Seite zu zerstören – der aber hätte eher eine politische, als eine religiöse Agenda
Annahme dass Hintergrund für Unruhe die Wahlen waren
Jahmans Vater früher Christ, dann ging er nach Norden, konvertierte, kehrte nach Lagos zurück, einige Freunde kamen zurück – baute in der Straße eine Moschee, damit sie beten können
1:08:50 diese Geschichte s.o.
bald beschwerten sich die christlichen Nachbarn, dass in der Straße schon um fünf der Muezzin. Also baute er für sie auch eine Kirche, wenn auch kleiner als die Moschee. Jahmans Haus steht dazwischen – um fünf morgens der erste Angriff – wie er sagt – von der Moschee, um 6:30 der nächste Angriff von der Kirche
man sieht den
you see this kind of competition, and sometimes its fun - down south here, it is fun, because you enjoy the two. // but in the north, you can´t try it.
der General bewaffnete offenbar Muslime – aber nutzten die neuen Kirchen nicht auch Milizen?
gibt solche Gerüchte ja. Man kennt aber keinen konkreten Fall. Eher fragt man sich, woher die Leute im Fall einer Krise immer so schnell an die Waffen kommen
Er möchte die Unruhestifter eher hoodloms nennen, oder area boys, Arbeitslose. Die kämpfen vermutlich für jede Seite. Aber die meisten Leute wurden vermutlich im Tschad und Niger gemietet.
in my office there are certain things I must not say. I joke about a lot of things, but there are certain things I dare not say, because it can lead to some kind of war. This was the basis of my interview with CNN where I said that even though you want to go and investigate and see how you can put some counter measures, but you must be very careful.
So what we have done as artists and culture workers is that we try to organize programs that will bring everybody together, especially among the artists. We resolve that you can use artists and cultural workers because art is not respecting of any religion or anything, so when you meet in a festival – we just finished one – when you meet in a festival, Muslim will bring his own artwork, Christian will bring his own artwork, beggar will bring his own artwork - we are just celebrating life. We enjoy the same music, 1:13:08 we share the same food. We believe that if you have more of this kind of programmes, people can begin to understand each other.
Herausgeber hier, und Mitarbeiter arbeiten nicht gut – keine Entlassungen?
I don´t have the power to sack, but I have the power to maintain some kind of discipline. I have sanctioned some people. I have sanctioned somebody who has been my my staff for over ten years, I just noticed that within a certain period of time I noticed that she disappeared to go somewhere, then I discovered that they stop work at some point and then, they go to fellowship outside of this place. And after warning, that look, it is work hour! Eight hour that you are spending here is for work, after that, I don´t care if you sleep in your church, and she continued to go, and I sanctioned her. I recommended for some sanctions which was applied. But in some organisations, it doesn´t matter. In fact, they just give them … I just told you of people who say that between eight and ten, you must do fellowship. so you are not working between eight and ten. So if that is a bank, and if you go to that bank, you will not be attended to in that time, because they are fellowshipping. 1:15:06 And then in the evening, there is fellowship. And what you discover that most of the people attending the same church, the same people work in the same environment. So, it is a sort of a grand conspiracy. So that they are just saying: Well, today is Wednesday, we are closing at two, because we are going to fellowship. And you can´t stop it.
und wenn ein Redaktionsmitglied jetzt erfolgreich etwas über einen Pastor recherchiert hätte – könnten sie das drucken?
yeah, we do. You have to notice one thing: The media has not really been over pampined by these churches. We have not. We have always been publishing. Granted there are sympathies, maybe somebody in the media establishment belongs to a particular church, and when something affects the church, he is trying to be careful, not to offend his pastor – in fact there have been journalists who have been sanctioned from their churches. There is one church that drove some two journalists out, because they reported that they bought a car that was worth nine Million Naira. They said they must not enter the church again. He said: these guys are devils, nobody should relate to them!
in manchen soft – sell magazinen regelrechte Kämpfe – die Herausgeber gehören zu unterschiedlichen Kirchen, aber die liberalen Medien immer weiter publiziert. Versuchen auf Seiten Religion Gleichgewicht zu behalten zwischen muslimischen und christlichen Beiträgen
schreiben regelmäßig über die diversen Kirchen
und drucken sonntags predigten –
Because on sundays, people want to read such preachment. It is a fact of our history that the churches are popular now, and the people want to read about scriptures on Sundays. So, we give them space. On Friday, we publish things about the islam, on Sunday, we publish things about church. But I think that we are lob-sided, we do more for Christians than we do for Muslims. I mean, the Guardian is lob-sided. We only have one page on Fridays for Muslims, but on Sunday, it is eight pages for the churches. But occasionally, we bring Muslim articles, information on the page. It is not that we discriminate them, it is just that the Christians are more aggressive in terms of publicity and public communication. They are more aggressive than the Muslims.
Gab´s im Süden schon religiöse Zusammenstöße?
meistens im Norden, im Süden meist ethnische
It may change. It tell you that that express road, I am expecting that one day, there will be an explosion there. The churches are lying in this way, and the Muslims now are buying in the same place. I ask myself: Why did they decide to go and get a land almost at side of the church if not if they are really trying to provoke some crisis? It may take time to explode, but definetly one day, because it is only …. Look, as a nude a matter, as a Christian parking his car in front of the Muslim ground, it is enough to cause a riot, because they will say: Remove your car! And he says: I won´t remove it! Then, they will burn the car, and then, there will be fight.
the major religious fight that we have had in the south was at the university of Ibadan. But it was not really a riot, it was fought as an intellectual playing. I attended the same school. … Moschee neben Kirche, das Kreuz der Kirche war immer für Muslime sichtbar wenn sie beteten, Christen sollten das wegnehmen, machten sie nicht – viele Diskussionen, dann am Ende das Kreuz durch Sichtschutz verborgen vor Blick der Muslime
Zurück zu express way:
And they cause all the huge traffic jam, there is always a tension, anytime there are activities there. And they all meet there on Sundays and they meet there last Friday of the month, and it is going to explode, I know. 1:22:23 some day it is going to explode.
How does Bonnke fit in that context?
The Bonnke factor in this place…
Bonnke saw an open ground. He saw that the industry, the church industry was building here, and he is just working, so he is doing a legitimate ... because they are all doing it here.
kommen auch amerikanische und britische Pastoren
And you know, these other pastors that come, mostly, they are blacks, but this is an European who comes, and he is commanding a huge following in this place. In fact, sometimes we believe that he lives here, because he is always here. So Bonnke comes, and he is doing a legitimate thing. Probably what outstanded some people is the way in which over a short period of time he has been able to amass so many followers. Í take it as his legworkers here a really doing a good job. They are really on their toes, fishing for men and winning souls for him. 1:24:58 If Bonnkes enters this town, it is like the entire Lagos empties into the stadium. It is a pilgrimage. They are just trooping there – it is amazing.
ist er aggressiver als andere? es gab Tote?
Well, that is expected because of his crowd-control. It is the fact that he has so many people attending that he looses control of the crowd. I have seen him at one or two … on television. I have never attended, but they record it well and they show it, so it is like you were present. So, it be more because of the crowd control, not because Bonnke is doing anything … I don´t know, but I doubt that he is doing anything to affect that.
Is he rising the tension between the religious groups? the political tension in this country?
political crisis – I think, that is remote. He doesn´t talk politics. He preaches just like a normal pastor, he preaches prosperity and … well, the one I have seen. // He preaches in such a way to tell people: “Don´t worry, there is hope! Just believe in God, there is hope, and you are likely to get better” - and that kind of thing. // 1:27:53 Just like the other preachers. Just that he is a more articulate preacher. And he has charm, sort of. 1:27:56 so that he can easily attract the attention of the crowd.
1:28:03 But there is something: In Nigeria like in most African countries, a white person is still like a God, it is like a mystery. So when Bonnke is preaching, people respond more to his skin. That he is a white person – he is a “master”! Not because he is the best preacher. The white person is still seen as a special being from our colonial mentality, colonial past, the kind of orientation that some of our people had, many of them have not even seen a white person before, so when Bonnke is preaching, they see a white who looks like Jesus – that is my mischievous (boshafte) interpretation of it. That he is closer to Jesus than Mr. Blackman who is trying to preach. That is my mischievous interpretation. // But I know that he is very articulate, he is very aggressive, the publicity is always massive. There are also a lot of other African and American pastors coming, and they get a lot of followings too, but Bonnke is exceptionally huge. It is an exodus, always.
Kann die Situation im Land explodieren? wir haben bisher nur über den Express-way gesprochen …
It can affect the whole country, because when those churches have their programmes there, and the mosques, the Muslim organizations, when they have their programmes, people come from all over the country. In fact, it is like a pilgrimage. They come from as far as Port Harcourt - even from Cameroun, Ivory Coast, from Senegal – outside of Nigeria. That to tell you that it is really a pilgrimage – if you see the busses that come, they come from outside of Nigeria. And so, when something happens in that place, there is anxiety from around the country that: What is happening to my person who has attended the programme there? So if they know that there is a major crises there, they are likely to react. Already when they hear that rumour – it is the first thing that will sell. If somebody says: Look, all the delegation from Port Harcourt has been wiped out – the people in Port Harcourt, they will not wait for anybody to tell them that this is a lie. They will go up in arms. Here, people already act by rumour. So that is why we think it something happens there, it may affect the whole country.
ähnlich Vorfall, wo auch wegen Gerücht eine Krise:
Just about three kilometres away from here, there is a mosque, and a little boy wanted to ease himself and he went to the gutter just next to the mosque. And because of that, the Muslim community just sprang to action and started burning and looting. 1:32:02 there was a tendency to say that it was a religious riot, that they were reacting because of the mosque – it wasn´t. It was because the boy - from my investigation, the boy is a Yoruba person, and there has been ethnic tension between the Yoruba and the Hausa, the Yoruba own the land, but the Hausa people are in the majority, it is a corner they have just taken like you can say the foreign corner, and once that little fight started from there, there was a reaction in Kano, because the Hausa people thought that the Yoruba people here had an upper hand, they were able to deal with them surppres them. In the North, the Hausa people took up arms and started to kill the Yorubas in the North. That is the way Nigeria operates: Any little thing somewhere sparks up something else. Reprisal attack in the other place.
es müsste eigentlich einen Mechanismus geben, der diese Unruhen am Anfang stoppt. Aber den gibt es nicht.
That´s why it is always good for a mechanism to be in place, to arrest it immediately it starts. But the governments overtime, they have never shown political will to stop it. // Because // Nigeria is not a structured society, it is not a structured federation, // President Obasanjo is a compromise president. He is a Yoruba by birth, but he was put there not just by the Yorubas – in fact, it was more by the votes of the northerners. Because they were looking for a compromise-able candidate. And president Obasanjo, apart from the fact that he speaks Hausa, he was in the military, most of his friends are military people, he grew up in the north, he has always been anti his own people, he is not popular among the Yoruba people, //
das könnte doch gut sein – frage ob bei Krise interveniert was anderes
He is not a leader. He is not a national leader. He is a politician who is just trying to play the balancing game.
2000
Jahman Anikulapo
Are you member of any church?
Currently, I am not, but I used to be a member of the Catholic Church. I moved on, I have been to Anglican, eventually I moved to African churches, because of the theatrical content in the African churches, the theatre content, you know, there is a lot of music and a lot of expression, and I thought that was what really defined my kind of character, so I went into African churches, I am in “Celestial Churches” and “Cherubim and Seraphim”, I was there, but then, I am not really committed to them, but I do like to attend to their services because of the heavy celebration of life. But I am not a member of any of the churches. Even though my friends belong to them, so I only go there when they have harvest festival or carnivals – so I got to eat their food, let me say.
Sie sind mehr oder weniger eine Ausnahme? Fühlen sie sich so?
Yeah, I used to think that I was very exceptional, until I discovered that there are a lot of young people too, who are not necessarily members of the churches. They go, because their parents … they were born into those churches. So they go because of parental pressure. Some , because they are looking for one miracle or the other. But they are not necessarily members. The church has become something like a social place. The one who is looking for a wife goes to a church, the one who is looking for a husband goes to a church, when you need a job … but the moment you get what you need, you get out of it. That is one of the hypocrisy that I have discovered. There is a mercantilist attitude: you go in, you get what you want, and you get out. 2:44 that is what I have seen in the majority of people. So I don’t think I am strictly an exception. Just that – I haven’t tested all of them, but
I have been a Muslim, my dad converted at one point to Muslim, I went to a Muslim school, I went to an Arabic school, I attended a catholic school, I attended an Anglican school, so I have some kind of a broad experience, and as such myself, I don’t see anything that will make me that Christian or that Muslim. I want to operate from my head, that is what I am doing.
wie haben die Kirchen den spirutellen und geistigen Raum besetzt?
Currently you can say that the fastest growing industry in Nigeria is the church. Because all of a sudden, we just discovered that every corner in the city, for instance, is a church. In the past, when I was growing up – I am just 40 now - when I was growing up, you could look, before you get to church, you have to move from your house, you have to go at least ten kilometres or 15 kilometres before you attend a church. or atmost maybe five kilometres, but now there is a church in every corner, which means that people can just tie their towel or wear their sleeping dress, pyjamas, and just walk into a church. so there is this rush, some kind of a search for salvation, an explosion.
It didn’t come to be until the 80s – this is very strange. The moment, Nigeria took the IMF–loan – I always like to date our problems to that time, I was in school up to 1985, when we took the IMF. I graduated 1986. up to this 1985, things were calmer, for me. At least, there was a semblance of real life that was going on. Maybe the economy was better, the economic policy was better, the political environment was not stable, but it was not volatile. It didn’t inspire violence even in thought.
But 1985, Nigeria took the IMF. IMF – that is the international monetary fund - IMF came with its own politics, structural adjustment politics, SAP, it came with austerity measures, it came with tightening your belt, and I think the economy became so emasculated that it sort of squeezed the people, these Nigerians who have been used to some kind of …. there used to be a false sense of massive wealth, that we have oil – so what do we need agriculture for? As a matter of fact, we dumped quite a lot of things, we dumped Agriculture, we dumped a lot of things that we were able to be involved with. We just went straight into oil. so by 1985, the oil money did not come in, foreign investment stopped, that is after we took the IMF-loan, so many things had to happen within the economic space.
And so the middle-class, to which many of us, when you graduated from university, then, there is a job waiting for you, there is a car waiting for you, so many things were already waiting for you, you were recruited from school. I was interviewed in school to come and work in a company. But at that time, everything stopped, so the middle-class disappeared. And for me, the disappearance of the middle-class at that time let to this rush of churches, because a lot of the young people then, there was only one way to survive: abroad, okay, that was the beginning of the brain-drain, the university was dying, so a lot of the intelligentsia was moving outside the country or trying to find another economic space, and many of them who went out, I always say that most of them brought back what we have as Pentecostalism. In the country currently, there are a lot of people who lost their jobs, so because of the general depression in the mind and the purse of people, a lot of them wanted some sort of easy escape. so they came out with this idea of miracle, that you really don’t need to work – Manna is going to fall from heaven, you only need to pray, you only need to wish, and so we had this rush of even conmen men became pastors, // conmen like fraud, some of them have probably never read the bible, but they thought: look, that is an easy way, because they saw that a lot of people were depressed, and when people are depressed, they have always been going to church and thinking of god, so they were all rushing into the churches so that they can get some kind of miracle, some kind of deliverance. the key-word was deliverance, let us deliver you from economic depression, from a mental torture that you are undergoing because you lost your job, because a
lot of people were retrenched – “let us free you from demons! Demons have infested the country, and they are affecting people – that is why you lost your job, that’s why you can’t safe money!”
so a lot of people were not realistic in their perception of the situation in which we found ourselves. A lot of them thought that it was probably because of the sins; because one of the preachment of one of the earlier pastors was that the sins of Nigeria were so much that God had decided to visit Sodom and Gomorra experience on us, so that unless you enter the Noah-arch, you cannot escape. so a lot of them started lashing on to that arch and the Noah-arch is this deliverance, these churches, that if you come to us, we pray for you, we get a miracle for you from God, and then, you can be free again.
The preachment was not that you should work harder, or that you should expand your horizon, or that you should become more creative so that you can get back on the economic track. The dogma was that you must just believe that God is capable of giving you a miracle, that miraculously, you can become rich again, you can stand on your feet again.
So with the advent of the same SAP, a lot of industries shut down, which means the warehouses shut down, were we store foods, where we store goods, shut down, because there was no direct foreign investment. If you go along this road, because this road leads … this end here is airport, the other, the extreme end is seaport, so it is just this linear movement, and along the place, because of the nature of that road, you have a lot of warehouses, even next door to Guardian here, next door to us. This used to be a warehouse, the Guardian now, it was a warehouse for imported cars, Peugeot it used to be the biggest warehouse for cars - it was at that time when the economy started crashing, that by 1983, 84 it was becoming difficult, so the owner of the company has started selling his cars and trying to re-invest his money in something, and that is how the Guardian was born in 1984.
Even the Guardian started the year before the advent of SAP. actually, it started two years before, 1983, but being a businessman, he started seeing the writing on the wall, and a lot of warehouses along this road, where we used to store goods, a lot of goods, produced or imported, a lot of them had to shut down. And they were there laying fallow (brachliegen) for a long time, because there were no goods in there.
So when the churches came, it was some sort of a pre-meditated attack on the industry. The first set of place they went for were the ware-houses. So if you go along this road now, the next warehouses you see up to the port are mostly churches now. To some of us, it became, it was very worrisome. I remember my very first shock. I went to the National Theatre for a performance, and there is a warehouse very close to it, where I used to go and buy frozen food, I went there and I saw that it was a church!
And the pastor – his name was pastor Jordan – the pastor was preaching vehemently the way to exercise demons from this land is to take over all the places of commerce, and that commercialism had destroyed the soul of the people of Nigeria. That we are chasing money too much, we were all running after quick money. the way to exercise it was to make sure that those consumptions that encouraged commercialism or mercantilism are taken over by the churches.
And he took over that big warehouse there, and it started spreading, everybody …. they were not building their own churches, they were only taking over the warehouses. 13:46 And we saw that we were helpless because the economy was not in good shape, the military government continued with Abacha and the rest of them, many other companies left the country.
surprisingly, like a second phase of the attack, they went after the theatres, cinema-houses. Since because in 1985, when we took SAP, one of the things that first of all suffered was the film. when there was no money, the entertainment industry died. All the clubs shut down, all the recording companies shut down, there were no concerts, there were no cinemas. 14:20 We used to get films from India, from Hollywood that were being shown here, you watch them. I grew up watching Hollywood films. When they were released, they were here. 14:31 But all of a sudden, you couldn´t get all those things, because there is a ban on them, 14:38 so the cinema-houses naturally had to shut down, and that killed the cinema industry. 14:40
14:44 so cinema houses around there were then being taken over by the churches. They have taken all of them now. They were taking all of them now. So the last one that we thought was standing, the last one of the cinema-houses, one of the older cinema houses in Agega, Pen-cinema – some few month ago I was driving there and I saw that Pen-cinema was gone! 15:03 And when I was a little kid, Pen-cinema was where I always escaped to, even as a secondary school boy, and it is such a painful thing that churches are 15:14 taking over all these places, and the preachment was: look, you have to arrest that phillandeering soul of this nation. That this nation has done so much sins, that the only way to redeem it is to take over the industries and take over the churches! it wasn´t put straight like that, but it looked like a doctrine that was fashioned by somebody and it has been applied.
1
5:50 and then television stations – much of preaching is done on the television. So that in some mornings … they have a lot of money, they buy up all the airspace, so that your radio drama or your television drama or your soap opera cannot make the television, because you don´t have the money. They pay. There is a church that pays alone about 10 million naira per month. That is a huge sum of money. Just to appear on the television and preach. 16:19 So you could see kind of a systemic taking over of the entertainment life, of the cultural space, of the social space of the people, many houses have been converted to churches. 16:30 people start a church in a one-room apartment, and it begins to flourish, so the entire cultural and social space has been under attack. 16:45
16:45 I didn´t realise the impact of that until I went to Ghana, to the pan African historical theatre festival, it is called panafest, it is done every two years, it started in 1992 and I have been going there. // so when we went there in 1994, there was a professor from the US, professor James Small, I think that was his name, who presented a paper, and he was saying that in Nigeria as in 1994 had already about 1006 churches, not buildings, denominations. 18:04 It was a shock. I couldn´t sleep. Denominations 1006! and that Ghana was going around 400. So he said that he had decided to Ghana to let them know that there is something horrible happening, that all your space is being taken over by churches - Ghana is smaller - // that all your space - your business space and your economic space, your cultural space, your social space - is being taken over by churches. 18:39 he had come without document that to prove to them that they can still arrest it. 18:45 And when they can arrest, it to begin to revalidate your cultural heritage. Make them very strong so that they can counter this onslaught – in fact, he called it onslaught. 18:55 Church onslaught. 18:59 So after the conference I went to him and said: but what about Nigeria? I am afraid about what is going on there. He said: My brother, Nigeria is beyond redemption. That you cannot arrest it in Nigeria because the volume of money that has been pumped in the church business is so huge that you need double or triple that amount to counter it. 19:30
wo das Geld herkommt?
der US-Professor: hat Verschwörungstheorie
Dass Kirchen von Afroamerikanern kommen, die zahlen die Kirchen, aber das Geld käme nicht direkt von denen, sondern von den Institutionen, die auch Martin Luther King gefördert hätten,
man müsse nur den Lebensstil der Pastoren betrachten – US-gefärbt. Sprechen nicht nigerianisches, sondern afroamerikanisches Englisch –
und zwar prosperity-churches. Die Institutionen, die die fördern, seien angeblich mit KKK in Kontakt. Angriff auf Nigeria, weil reiches Land, viele schwarze Leute, und enge Kontakt zu afroamerikanischer Community. Potential zu einem der wichtigen wirtschaftlichen Mächte in der Welt zu werden
sechstgrößtes Öl-Land in der Welt
ich sage: prosperity churches sagen doch, dass man arbeiten muss. Nein, sagt er.
No! the prosperity churches say that you don´t have to work! there is Manna from heaven! That is what the churches are saying!
25:09 we have a lot of people now, we can testify, a lot of people go to these churches now – they don´t believe in hard work! they don´t believe that to make money, you have to invest, you have work hard, and you make money. What they do, when they have a little problem, they run to the pastor and say: Please pray for me! I think I have been attacked by a demon! 25:28 And the pastor says: I remove the demon! you know the way they preach? They put their hand on your head, and once they do that, you fall down, and then they say: the spirit has left! 25:39 //
The only means of preaching is not to counsel, the church does not counsel, it is not longer a social institution, where they sit down with you and ask: how are you doing? How is your business doing? If you say you are in economic depression, you know.. when I was attending the catholic church, they would call you and say: we have a social group, and they would sit down with you and ask: how is your business doing? what investment have you done? they had economic counsellers in some of those orthodox churches, but not these ones! there are none! they only tell you, when you come and say: my business is going down! I am not making as much money I used to do – I am afraid. They say: Well, maybe you have been infested by a demon! And so, we have to exorcize! you have to remove the demon! 26:41 and it is by laying their hand or using a handkerchief - a very unorthodox means of getting the problems solved! 26:44 the reason why we call them prosperity church: they only preach about prosperity. Getting rich quick. 26:55 they are not preaching about hard work. And that that is why we say we believe that some of the steps that they have taken look like a premeditated attemps to destroy industry. Where the only places you could buy up are the warehouses. so that now when the economy seems to be cralling back, there are no warehouses to keep goods. 27:19
Aber welche Institutionen stehen dahinter? bezieht sich noch mal auf US-Professor – indirekte Verbindung zu KKK
And actually you have to wonder where the churches get their money from! If they spend 10 million naira a month, two million naira a week to buy airtime to preach – where does the money come from? That are things that some journalists have tried to investigate in the past, but the media itself are infested by pastors now, we have so many pastors now who are editors, and you cannot even investigate, they are protecting their leaders and that kind of thing. So you have to ask yourself: where does the money come from? Even the money for the tracts! the volume of tracts, the little religious pamphlets that come into this country – at a time when we say that the publishing industry is dead! the most thriving books //, these books come out almost every day! in fact at a point we had to stop our book review page, because the only books you could get to review were pamphlets, church books and things. Where does the money come from? The publishing industry has been in depression for almost ten years now, but the only publishing – apart from text books for the schools, the only publishing that is going again you could say on a massive scale are the publishing of religious tracts and books, so the volume of them - every week, you have the Nigerian port authority announcing that there is a large consignment of tracts, and bibles and books and things coming in. 29:38 And then the size of the churches, the kind of buildings that they have – the whole catholic churches are very conservative buildings, and these are the most flamboyant buildings that you say: somebody must have spent millions of naira to get them. 30:00 so it is a nagging question. You keep on asking: where does this money come from? Certainly not Naira. It is foreign currency. 30:09
impact of local industry?
people think that the local industry may be involved. // You know there has been what we call “money laundry” in this country. that means: re-circulating profit and diverting it to other organizations and acting as fronts. you were right when you were asking the question about coca cola, unilever and things others - there have been some investigations in the past that link some multinationals to the financing of some of these churches, and that is the contradiction: // I have noticed that some of the multinational companies actually have sympathies for some of the churches, but then you take it to be because maybe the managing director is a member of the church – I mean, that was our naïve understanding of the situation, that if I belong to a church for instance, and I am a big man in the Guardian, I might go and give to them, but I think overtime we have discovered that it is not necessarily so, 31:28 it looks like there is a direct investment of multinationals in the churches. What some unconfirmed researches have said is that money has been channelled through the multinationals into the churches. From where – I don´t know.
Coca-Cola hat nicht nur sign-boards für Schulen, sondern auch für Kirchen gemalt
You said that you are afraid of this take-over – why exactly are you afraid?
It is multi-dimensional. My first fear was that when you take over warehouses and you take over business-environments and the sense of enterprise of the people, 34:14 then, you can never grow the economy. You are not encouraging the young people who are coming out of school, who ought to go and to engage their creative enterprise to do to expand the economic horizon – you are not encouraging them to do that. You are encouraging them to come into the churches and wait for a miracle.
So we thought that taking over the economic space is dangerous, because you are not encouraging the people to be creative, you are not encouraging them to be technologically minded, to be industry–minded, you are just telling them that: look, do the little you can do, and you get money. 36:09
The most dangerous dimension is that many of the institutions now, if you are looking for a job, you are not likely to be employed because of merit, because you are qualified and you can do the job. You are likely to be employed because you are a member of the church. you see, when you sacrifice meritocracy in a developing economy, then, the economy is in shamble, it is going to die. and this is prevalent. We know very close to this place is a recording company where, unless you belong to the mans church, you cannot work there. //
37:08 and when they resume in the morning, from eight am to ten am, they are praying. If you walk by the place now – I have not been there for some time – you are hearing every prayer between eight and ten. 37:25 They resume work at ten, they close at five, there is fellowship every afternoon, and that is what many companies are doing now. 37:31
37:31 Wednesdays for instance, many of the churches now, they congregate on Wednesday evenings. You close early on Wednesday so that you can go to the church and do fellowship. 37:43 There are some churches where fellowship is every day, there are so many groups in the church – prayer warriors, satan opponats – there are so many. you belong to this organization, so you are supposed to meet Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays… so that the time that you spent creating or working // is the time that you now spend just praying and hoping for Manna. 38:15 And the prayer is like war.
38:16 That is at the economic front: The man hours are wasted. People are not investing their money. When you have money now, you are not investing in anything - you take it to the church.
38:26 We just finish the case of a worker who was stealing money from the Sheraton hotel, 39 Million Naira, and he was donating it to one of the biggest churches. And the pastors says: Well, he was directed by the holy ghost to bring the money, so what is my offence? 38:41 And the state seems to be helpless. 38:43 // He was a junior staff, maybe just like a clerk. He has barely – maybe 20.0000 a month. And he was bringing millions and donating generators, a generating plant that is worth ten Million Naira to the church, and the pastor didn´t ask him: Where did you get the money? He doesn´t even have a car! 39:13 // but that´s just a sign of what many people are doing. Many people now, when they have money, they bring it to the church. When they have money, they build a house for the pastor. 39:30 when they make profit from their business, they buy a jeep for the pastor. 39:35 this is money that ought to be invested in the economy so that the economy itself can grow! 39:39
The churches are richer than the state! some of the churches can finance the entire budget of Nigeria! 40:07 The first set of people, private people, to ride private Jets in this country were pastors! //
40:27 And then, when someone like Bonnke comes to Nigeria – forget it! Bonnkes is a german preacher who comes regularly – if he comes to Nigeria, the crowd that you see - I used to keep a picture. It is amazing! The heads that were present there, and for three days or five days, they would not work!
Just like when you are going on the way to Ibadan now – the whole of the express way that has been taken to be an industrial layout, just like you have in Ghana and other places - there are now churches! Every point is a church now! That if you make the mistake of being trapped there, you can spend the whole day on just trying to navigate those churches!
And we say that the next religious war in this country will be on that express road! Because the muslims too have taken their own stand. They have taken mass land, and they now preach on Sundays too. To tell you the extend to which religion is likely to explode in this! The Muslims, they normally pray on Fridays, they now pray on Sundays. They have what they call “Nasfat”, that is a national organization of young Muslims. They behave like born-again Christians. They appear on television on Sunday – you know, Friday is their own holiday, but now, that is like an attack! 41:46 They appear on Sunday, the whole fellowship, just like the born-agains, they speak in tongues just like the born-agains, and very soon, there is going to be an explosion. may we be saved!
That is at the economic front.
The cultural front: 1977 hätte Nigeria die Dämonen der ganzen Welt importiert, weil da ein Festival war – weil die Masken, Tänze etc.
sagen, die Traditionen seien vom Satan oder dämonisch – das zerstöre das Selbstbewusstsein der Menschen
if you start preaching like that, you are destroying the self – confidence of the people.
People have been told not to speak their language because it is infested with evil. 43:10 I show you something that I eat – I am eating it in defiance. some pastors … this is a cola-nut, it is very harmless, it is just like coffee, it keeps me awake, because I don´t sleep all the time, but some pastors are preaching that it is infested by the demons, I must not eat it! 43:25 And I used to have a girl friend who was complaining that when you eat this, you are infested with demons – I said: okay, I will eat it! And I eat it all the time!
When you preach about things like that … there is food, that you cannot plug, certain vegetables, which you cannot plug on your farm, because they are infested with witches!
You cannot plant flowers in your compound, because certain flowers are infested by spirits! 43:53 You know, you are destroying the peoples consciousness gradually. 44:00 And then, you destroy the peoples culture by telling them that the dances from Yoruba-land, for instance, are the dances the Gods! So because they are dances of the Gods, they are dances of the Demon! You must do it.
You must not go and watch theatre! 44:22 it is only now that they are coming to theatre. At some point, you must not go to theatre, because the theatre is where we practise demonic activities. 44:25 We have some staff here who attend some church – they must not watch television! I am sure you are aware of that, that they must not listen to news, they must not watch television because the television is a medium of the devil. 44:40 // 44:55 And because of this preaching, many young people who ought to be engaged in the arts, like you have in the American society where the first place you ernest the energy of the youth is through the arts and entitlement. It is difficult now because the young ones are in the churches. 45:11 They cannot be involved in any creative enterprise of theatre and finance and things, because the theatre and entertainment is a place for the demon. 45:25
45:20 I tell you that I have some art-work at home which a college of mine gave to me. Before she was told to change her name, and she changed her name. And then she was told that any piece of painting or sculpture is a representation of the devil. She mentioned casually that she wanted to throw them away. I said: please, give them to me, so I collected them. I have about seven artworks which I collected from her.
45:51 That is a very enlighting person, almost an editor here, and who have been convinced that if you keep harmless painting in your house – painting! – that you hang on the wall, is the work of the devil. And she was going to through it into the dustbin. 46:09
46:08 I am just giving you examples of how you can destroy peoples self-confidence, self-estime, self believe and their conviction in their own heritage, in their own dignity as a person, in their identity. And once you continue to do that, and then you attack them on the economic front again – why are we talking of development? those people are not going to be part of any developmental process. They are just going to be so retarded that they will remain on the same spot 46:39 for life.
der Glaube an witchcraft hat offenbar zugenommen?
It has increased, because again we blame the usual suspect, the church. Because now, when you preach about it all the time – I show you some books – if you preach about it all the time, people are now being forced to, even those who didn´t believe in it before. 47:14 And especially when you see some manifestations, when you see how in some churches they are exorcising the devil, they tell you that the spirit is in the person and she is infested - a lot of people are beginning to believe that it is true. 47:29 That there are devils, there is witchcraft – many people did not believe it in the past, // but now, it is being logged in the peoples consciousness that there are witches and once you have a problem, that problem is not causal and effect, that if you do certain things it is likely to yield certain results, people are now just being told that it is the devil that is being responsible. 48:00 That´s what we see as a problem. A lot of people now believe that there are witchcraft, there are wizards, there are spirits, and demons, homids, and they are likely to affect them and things like that. 48:16 And that is very very dangerous. So many more people actually now believe.
what we are saying is: gradually we are removing realism from our national life. And we are living in illusions. 48:55 // 50:00 So the concept of witch crafting is becoming heavy in our sensibility again. We don´t believe in reality any more, we don´t believe in causal and effect any more, we just believe that there must be a miracle or some kind of extra supra natural forces working against. 50:24
but the believe in witchcraft is rooted in the African mind …
49:02 … ja, war in der Vergangenheit stark, dann aber durch Kontakt mit Westen und orthodoxen Kirchen erst die Überzeugung gewachsen, dass die Hexen und so weiter den Menschen nicht überwinden können, sondern durch den Glauben überwunden werden
the foundation we had in terms of orthodox religion told us that you don´t have to subject yourself to negative thoughts, and negative thoughts are the witches are part of negative forces. So we are told not to believe in that, that you should believe in your self will. But now, you are not to believe in your will power, you are to believe in some extra-beings or extra forces are affecting you.
ein wichtiges Angebot der Kirchen ist der Kampf gegen witchcraft
There are some words which have become so popular in our lexicons now: demons, witchcraft, deliverance, prosperity, believe. That are the popular famous words now
that you can not even read some books … look at the recent example in Kenya where some pastors took Chinua Achebes book and tie a question in it that he is corrupting the youth because he talks about witchcraft fairy tails –You know a book like Harry potter will not be a success here! If we continue the way we are going. If we continue the way we are going, our children are not likely to learn those stories like Gulliver’s travels. If you present that kind of story, some pastors are likely to attack you!
So one major thing that the churches and the mosques that they play on is fear. 53:29 They instil fear in you. And it is worth if the fear is a fear of a force that you cannot control. If it is for me to fear the next person because he can beat me, because he is bigger than me, it is still somehow manageable, I can confront it. But if it is the fear of something I cannot see, something I have to imagine, that is just a flitting idea, it cannot manifest physically like a book or a tape in front of me, it is worth because I don´t know what to expect. So, people have been instilled with so much fear that they don´t really know how to proceed. 54:14 To solve his own problem. The capacitiy of man to solve his own problem is being eroded. 54:33 and when you erode the capacity of a persons to confront a problem and to overcome it, it is very dangerous, it is really dangerous for the development of the human mind. It is dangerous for the development of the nation. 54:49 It is dangerous for the development of the social ethos. Because the society will not make any advancement.
was mit dem nächsten religiösen clash?
man denke immer an den Norden, aber er auch über situation im Süden beunruhigt
55:40 In the southwest - from my experience in the family – you can be a muslim and live with a Christian here. We don´t have these conflicts of ideas or interest. If it is there, it is barely down. To bring it up and use it as an instrument to fight is very rare. Rather people clashed in the southwest on maybe ethnic – Yoruba versus Haussa – you know, that is a natural phenomenon in the composition of the Nigerian nation. 56:12 but in the north, the experience of the Scharia riot has taught us that there is an explosion that may come some day. 56:22 Because when the problem starts in the problem starts in the north, it looks from the beginning like an ethnic conflict, but deep down, it is religious. usually the attack comes on Friday afternoon, when the muslim come out of mosques, // and then the Christian comes out on Sunday, and they retaliate. it is almost a definite pattern.
now the scharia thing has come to really encourage it, so that … erklärt das …. redet gegen Scharia …. gegen Kleiderordnung …
okay, aber für uns nicht neu, dass es islamischen Fundamentalismus gibt, aber heizt er Boom der Kirchen die Spannung nicht weiter an?
It´s true. It´s fundamentalism. That´s why we are saying that the intensity of preaching and the intensity of appearance of these churches is some kind of fundamentalism, and personally I have observed and I have said it before, and I have noticed that even though most of the time we would say that the Islamic religion is very hard, it likes Jihad, it is a religion of force, they like force to instil discipline in you, I have noticed that the new Pentecostal churches, they are anti-debate. 58:49 You cannot argue with them. I have noticed from my personal interaction with a lot of my friends who are born again Christians, the moment you try to question something in the bible or you question a pastor´s lifestyle, they go in anger, they want to fight you, so // the fundamentalism is even worse in the new Pentecostal movement. it is anti-argument. You cannot argue with them.
Even in our meetings as enlightening as a newspaper environment is supposed to be, you cannot question certain things. Once you raise it, somebody will say: Why are you attacking my pastor? They don´t like to be questioned. And so, sorry, that is fundamentalism in another sense. And that is what you can see on the express road where I told you that we are likely to have a major explosion, Now every last friday of the month, about four of the huge churches – if you travel by that road, you will see vast expands of land, that is where they build their churches – and because of the lack of control, these people park their cars on the major highway and they create this huge traffic jam that can last for two days, sometimes. If you are just somebody who has got frustrated and you try to challenge them, you are likely to be …. you may not escape alive.
And then we came here, we wrote, even my newspaper wrote an editorial on that, we said: look, you can have your church on that road, but please leave the road for the road user, because it is a common property - and they came to attack, not physically, but they wrote back and said that why are you questioning God? It is Gods will that we must be there, why do you want to destroy the will of God? I mean, that is fundamentalism, you cannot argue!
I am telling you, in my office there, there is some of my staff that I must not say certain things, they are like “ha!” – they want to fight you, because you must not question: Why is this word written like this in the bible?
sagt, wir warden noch so ein Erlebnis haben wie in den USA, wo sich die ganze Sekte umbrachte, denn
1:03:00 the followership is passionate. It is an religion of passion. 1:03:15 every heavy stuff of passion.
werben sie agressiv um neue Anhänger?
Yeah. Well, it is not directly to win the muslims, it is to win souls. They are fishers of men, like they say. They have won a lot of people over from the muslim side, and the muslims now, in reaction to that – that is why I said they have formed what they call their own born again, the “Nasfat”. They formed their own because … the aggression is coming from the Pentecostal churches, and they are winning a lot of their people, and so, they too, they have formed their own. And there is the spirit of competition, even among the churches.
spricht von “media war” diverser Kirchen gegeneinander. Im Fernsehen, aber auch im Internet
The war is on all fronts: physically, on the television, in the internet, in the newspapers, aggressive adverts in the papers.
Zahlen Kirchenführer ihre eigene Miliz?
ja, es gab Milizen, es seien auch welche aus Nigeria gekommen
über Kaduna: man nehme allgemein an, dass Politiker die Unruhen schüren. Medien berichteten, sie hätten gesehen wie ein General habe 200 Milizionäre in seinem compound bewaffnet und bezahlt – der General bestritt das – um die gegnerische Seite zu zerstören – der aber hätte eher eine politische, als eine religiöse Agenda
Annahme dass Hintergrund für Unruhe die Wahlen waren
Jahmans Vater früher Christ, dann ging er nach Norden, konvertierte, kehrte nach Lagos zurück, einige Freunde kamen zurück – baute in der Straße eine Moschee, damit sie beten können
1:08:50 diese Geschichte s.o.
bald beschwerten sich die christlichen Nachbarn, dass in der Straße schon um fünf der Muezzin. Also baute er für sie auch eine Kirche, wenn auch kleiner als die Moschee. Jahmans Haus steht dazwischen – um fünf morgens der erste Angriff – wie er sagt – von der Moschee, um 6:30 der nächste Angriff von der Kirche
man sieht den
you see this kind of competition, and sometimes its fun - down south here, it is fun, because you enjoy the two. // but in the north, you can´t try it.
der General bewaffnete offenbar Muslime – aber nutzten die neuen Kirchen nicht auch Milizen?
gibt solche Gerüchte ja. Man kennt aber keinen konkreten Fall. Eher fragt man sich, woher die Leute im Fall einer Krise immer so schnell an die Waffen kommen
Er möchte die Unruhestifter eher hoodloms nennen, oder area boys, Arbeitslose. Die kämpfen vermutlich für jede Seite. Aber die meisten Leute wurden vermutlich im Tschad und Niger gemietet.
in my office there are certain things I must not say. I joke about a lot of things, but there are certain things I dare not say, because it can lead to some kind of war. This was the basis of my interview with CNN where I said that even though you want to go and investigate and see how you can put some counter measures, but you must be very careful.
So what we have done as artists and culture workers is that we try to organize programs that will bring everybody together, especially among the artists. We resolve that you can use artists and cultural workers because art is not respecting of any religion or anything, so when you meet in a festival – we just finished one – when you meet in a festival, Muslim will bring his own artwork, Christian will bring his own artwork, beggar will bring his own artwork - we are just celebrating life. We enjoy the same music, 1:13:08 we share the same food. We believe that if you have more of this kind of programmes, people can begin to understand each other.
Herausgeber hier, und Mitarbeiter arbeiten nicht gut – keine Entlassungen?
I don´t have the power to sack, but I have the power to maintain some kind of discipline. I have sanctioned some people. I have sanctioned somebody who has been my my staff for over ten years, I just noticed that within a certain period of time I noticed that she disappeared to go somewhere, then I discovered that they stop work at some point and then, they go to fellowship outside of this place. And after warning, that look, it is work hour! Eight hour that you are spending here is for work, after that, I don´t care if you sleep in your church, and she continued to go, and I sanctioned her. I recommended for some sanctions which was applied. But in some organisations, it doesn´t matter. In fact, they just give them … I just told you of people who say that between eight and ten, you must do fellowship. so you are not working between eight and ten. So if that is a bank, and if you go to that bank, you will not be attended to in that time, because they are fellowshipping. 1:15:06 And then in the evening, there is fellowship. And what you discover that most of the people attending the same church, the same people work in the same environment. So, it is a sort of a grand conspiracy. So that they are just saying: Well, today is Wednesday, we are closing at two, because we are going to fellowship. And you can´t stop it.
und wenn ein Redaktionsmitglied jetzt erfolgreich etwas über einen Pastor recherchiert hätte – könnten sie das drucken?
yeah, we do. You have to notice one thing: The media has not really been over pampined by these churches. We have not. We have always been publishing. Granted there are sympathies, maybe somebody in the media establishment belongs to a particular church, and when something affects the church, he is trying to be careful, not to offend his pastor – in fact there have been journalists who have been sanctioned from their churches. There is one church that drove some two journalists out, because they reported that they bought a car that was worth nine Million Naira. They said they must not enter the church again. He said: these guys are devils, nobody should relate to them!
in manchen soft – sell magazinen regelrechte Kämpfe – die Herausgeber gehören zu unterschiedlichen Kirchen, aber die liberalen Medien immer weiter publiziert. Versuchen auf Seiten Religion Gleichgewicht zu behalten zwischen muslimischen und christlichen Beiträgen
schreiben regelmäßig über die diversen Kirchen
und drucken sonntags predigten –
Because on sundays, people want to read such preachment. It is a fact of our history that the churches are popular now, and the people want to read about scriptures on Sundays. So, we give them space. On Friday, we publish things about the islam, on Sunday, we publish things about church. But I think that we are lob-sided, we do more for Christians than we do for Muslims. I mean, the Guardian is lob-sided. We only have one page on Fridays for Muslims, but on Sunday, it is eight pages for the churches. But occasionally, we bring Muslim articles, information on the page. It is not that we discriminate them, it is just that the Christians are more aggressive in terms of publicity and public communication. They are more aggressive than the Muslims.
Gab´s im Süden schon religiöse Zusammenstöße?
meistens im Norden, im Süden meist ethnische
It may change. It tell you that that express road, I am expecting that one day, there will be an explosion there. The churches are lying in this way, and the Muslims now are buying in the same place. I ask myself: Why did they decide to go and get a land almost at side of the church if not if they are really trying to provoke some crisis? It may take time to explode, but definetly one day, because it is only …. Look, as a nude a matter, as a Christian parking his car in front of the Muslim ground, it is enough to cause a riot, because they will say: Remove your car! And he says: I won´t remove it! Then, they will burn the car, and then, there will be fight.
the major religious fight that we have had in the south was at the university of Ibadan. But it was not really a riot, it was fought as an intellectual playing. I attended the same school. … Moschee neben Kirche, das Kreuz der Kirche war immer für Muslime sichtbar wenn sie beteten, Christen sollten das wegnehmen, machten sie nicht – viele Diskussionen, dann am Ende das Kreuz durch Sichtschutz verborgen vor Blick der Muslime
Zurück zu express way:
And they cause all the huge traffic jam, there is always a tension, anytime there are activities there. And they all meet there on Sundays and they meet there last Friday of the month, and it is going to explode, I know. 1:22:23 some day it is going to explode.
How does Bonnke fit in that context?
The Bonnke factor in this place…
Bonnke saw an open ground. He saw that the industry, the church industry was building here, and he is just working, so he is doing a legitimate ... because they are all doing it here.
kommen auch amerikanische und britische Pastoren
And you know, these other pastors that come, mostly, they are blacks, but this is an European who comes, and he is commanding a huge following in this place. In fact, sometimes we believe that he lives here, because he is always here. So Bonnke comes, and he is doing a legitimate thing. Probably what outstanded some people is the way in which over a short period of time he has been able to amass so many followers. Í take it as his legworkers here a really doing a good job. They are really on their toes, fishing for men and winning souls for him. 1:24:58 If Bonnkes enters this town, it is like the entire Lagos empties into the stadium. It is a pilgrimage. They are just trooping there – it is amazing.
ist er aggressiver als andere? es gab Tote?
Well, that is expected because of his crowd-control. It is the fact that he has so many people attending that he looses control of the crowd. I have seen him at one or two … on television. I have never attended, but they record it well and they show it, so it is like you were present. So, it be more because of the crowd control, not because Bonnke is doing anything … I don´t know, but I doubt that he is doing anything to affect that.
Is he rising the tension between the religious groups? the political tension in this country?
political crisis – I think, that is remote. He doesn´t talk politics. He preaches just like a normal pastor, he preaches prosperity and … well, the one I have seen. // He preaches in such a way to tell people: “Don´t worry, there is hope! Just believe in God, there is hope, and you are likely to get better” - and that kind of thing. // 1:27:53 Just like the other preachers. Just that he is a more articulate preacher. And he has charm, sort of. 1:27:56 so that he can easily attract the attention of the crowd.
1:28:03 But there is something: In Nigeria like in most African countries, a white person is still like a God, it is like a mystery. So when Bonnke is preaching, people respond more to his skin. That he is a white person – he is a “master”! Not because he is the best preacher. The white person is still seen as a special being from our colonial mentality, colonial past, the kind of orientation that some of our people had, many of them have not even seen a white person before, so when Bonnke is preaching, they see a white who looks like Jesus – that is my mischievous (boshafte) interpretation of it. That he is closer to Jesus than Mr. Blackman who is trying to preach. That is my mischievous interpretation. // But I know that he is very articulate, he is very aggressive, the publicity is always massive. There are also a lot of other African and American pastors coming, and they get a lot of followings too, but Bonnke is exceptionally huge. It is an exodus, always.
Kann die Situation im Land explodieren? wir haben bisher nur über den Express-way gesprochen …
It can affect the whole country, because when those churches have their programmes there, and the mosques, the Muslim organizations, when they have their programmes, people come from all over the country. In fact, it is like a pilgrimage. They come from as far as Port Harcourt - even from Cameroun, Ivory Coast, from Senegal – outside of Nigeria. That to tell you that it is really a pilgrimage – if you see the busses that come, they come from outside of Nigeria. And so, when something happens in that place, there is anxiety from around the country that: What is happening to my person who has attended the programme there? So if they know that there is a major crises there, they are likely to react. Already when they hear that rumour – it is the first thing that will sell. If somebody says: Look, all the delegation from Port Harcourt has been wiped out – the people in Port Harcourt, they will not wait for anybody to tell them that this is a lie. They will go up in arms. Here, people already act by rumour. So that is why we think it something happens there, it may affect the whole country.
ähnlich Vorfall, wo auch wegen Gerücht eine Krise:
Just about three kilometres away from here, there is a mosque, and a little boy wanted to ease himself and he went to the gutter just next to the mosque. And because of that, the Muslim community just sprang to action and started burning and looting. 1:32:02 there was a tendency to say that it was a religious riot, that they were reacting because of the mosque – it wasn´t. It was because the boy - from my investigation, the boy is a Yoruba person, and there has been ethnic tension between the Yoruba and the Hausa, the Yoruba own the land, but the Hausa people are in the majority, it is a corner they have just taken like you can say the foreign corner, and once that little fight started from there, there was a reaction in Kano, because the Hausa people thought that the Yoruba people here had an upper hand, they were able to deal with them surppres them. In the North, the Hausa people took up arms and started to kill the Yorubas in the North. That is the way Nigeria operates: Any little thing somewhere sparks up something else. Reprisal attack in the other place.
es müsste eigentlich einen Mechanismus geben, der diese Unruhen am Anfang stoppt. Aber den gibt es nicht.
That´s why it is always good for a mechanism to be in place, to arrest it immediately it starts. But the governments overtime, they have never shown political will to stop it. // Because // Nigeria is not a structured society, it is not a structured federation, // President Obasanjo is a compromise president. He is a Yoruba by birth, but he was put there not just by the Yorubas – in fact, it was more by the votes of the northerners. Because they were looking for a compromise-able candidate. And president Obasanjo, apart from the fact that he speaks Hausa, he was in the military, most of his friends are military people, he grew up in the north, he has always been anti his own people, he is not popular among the Yoruba people, //
das könnte doch gut sein – frage ob bei Krise interveniert was anderes
He is not a leader. He is not a national leader. He is a politician who is just trying to play the balancing game.
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