165 Christopher I. Ejizu COSMOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

165

Christopher I. Ejizu

COSMOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON EXORCISM AND PRAYER-HEALING IN CONTEMPORARY NIGERIA

Faced with illness of one sort and another human beings need both something practical to do and a wider philosophy of explanation which renders ill health, bereavement and every form of misfortune somehow tolerable by establishing it within a wider frame of refer- 1 ence. (Adrian Hastings)

I. Introduction

The practice of casting out evil spirits and prayer/faith-healing is certainly one of the most outstanding features of popular religiosity in the contemporary Nigerian scene. Its record of achievement, especially in the past thirty years or so, appears quite spectacular. And this largely accounts for the kind of fanatical appeal and excitement which people who claim to possess the spiritual power to deliver others from demonic attacks and afflictions of one kind or another in ° generate society..

Especially in Christian religious circles, there has been an unprece- dented wave of interest in the phenomenon. The leading names that have distinguished themselves of recent in the practice include late Pastor S.B.J. Oschoffa, Archbishop B.A. Idahosa, Prophet T.O. Obadare and Reverend Father E. Ede (C.S.Sp.). They have been referred to as "illustrious and celebrated men of God and faith-healers."' There are also hundreds of less acclaimed prophet-healers and exorcists in the ever-multiplying number of independent churches, pentecostal groups, prayer houses and healing centers both within and outside the mainline church groups.

The use of spiritual means like prayer, sacred objects and rituals to effect physical and psychosomatic relief is, however, not at all new in most living religious traditions. It features prominently in both the indigenous religious experience of different Nigerian groups as well as in Islam. For Christianity, however, this aspect of religious ex- perience even as it showed up strongly in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, was not clearly articulated and emphasized in the ministry of the majority of early missionaries who worked in the country. But it ought to be clarified that this was less because they did not believe in 166

the existence and nefarious activities of satanic forces, as some writers have suggested,' more than that they had a different conceptual orien- tation. Most of them paid regular pastoral visits to the sick and min- istered to their spiritual needs. While on the other hand, they operated mobile clinics and erected modem hospitals to care for bodily health.

It was, however, only with the emergency of the independent Afri- can churches at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly the Aladura churches which gained prominence in Yorubaland during the influenza epidemic of 1918, that exorcism and faith-healing became a recognizable feature of Christianity in Nigeria.' Today, the phenome- non has become widespread and is fast becoming the number one instrument of evangelization even among the usually conservative older churches like the Anglicans, Baptists and Roman Catholics.'

The development is a significant one in the religious history of Nigeria. And not surprisingly, scholars of various views and back- grounds have concerned themselves with casual explanations of one kind or another. Some have tended to a more socio-structural inter- pretation. T.U. Nwala, for instance, explains the phenomenon in terms of the sorry state of Nigeria's socio-economic circumstances.6 Others view the matter differently. C.U. Manus, for example, thinks that the development is "a form of conquest" which has made Christianity in contemporary Nigeria "a popular and pragmatic phenomenon." The Nigerian faith-healers and miracle workers, he contends:

have become agents of the mission of Christ who came to liberate oppressed humanity ... by their super human feats in arresting all manners of afflictions and by their pacification of all kinds of spiritual torments, (they) appeal to the common folk and the cream of the . society.7 .

Our major interest in this paper is not in causal theories as such. Rather, we propose to focus attention on the indigenous cosmological of the For, it is true, as R.LJ. Hackett . underpinnings development. pointed out, that "while many of the new churches and religious move- ments that concentrate on exorcism and prayer-healing call for a break with traditional charms and medicines, in essence they seek a rap- prochement with African worldviews."'