Amongst Catholics in Nigeria

Amongst Catholics in Nigeria
Having spent well over a week at the Catholic Institute of West Africa (CIWA) at their annual conference, I had Palm Sunday lunch with Sister Teresa Okure, world renowned professor in the New Testament. I asked her one of these standard questions: have you not considered taking up offers for work at other universities or research institutes elsewhere? Her reply was fairly lengthy and proved that she had had a number of offers, at Centre Biblique in Jerusalem, but also in Europe and the USA. Then she added: I haven’t seriously considered taking up any of these offers for a longer period of time as I want to be here in Africa and I like to be here, because I am always connected.

In fact Sister Teresa summed up what I had experienced during a whole week. Her colleagues, most of them men and priests, but also a fair number of nuns working as academic teachers, also seemed to be connected and completely at ease working and living in Nigeria in the outskirts of Port Harcourt, in the Niger delta, which is also the oil district, infamous for its many hijackings and kidnappings.

It is true that I was confined to one place and a conference the whole time, which makes one very limited in terms of giving comments on a whole country. Here I will however only talk about what transpired during this week, giving a few highlights. We were on a campus with a number of large stone buildings scattered over a large field. In the beginning, people talked about the chapel that was near the other gate leading to the main street, but it took me two days before I had a chance to join the mid-day Eucharist. To my big surprise I found myself walking into what to me was much more like a cathedral. The chapel church is big, at least four times as big as the biggest Lutheran church in Cape Town (Eureka, Elsies River). And they call it a chapel!

A full Eucharistic service each lunch time with about 500 people, 25 priests and local choirs, different traditions each day on display; I asked the chaplain if I could take communion, which was stupid of me. I knew that it could not be granted officially and this is how far we are from one another when it comes to sharing the body of Christ in the ecumenical church. However, somehow, I do not know how, bread was smuggled to me in the pew.

It was a great week of fellowship for me. I could relate to most of what was said and done. The liturgical act was more than familiar to me, it was my liturgy. In the conference I also enjoyed many contributions, and as I was invited to give one of the commissioned papers, there were nearly 40 papers given in all during that week. I had come to an institute that is very well known in the Roman Catholic world. Most of the scholars there have doctorates, and many of them are also connected to other research institutions in the world, in Rome, elsewhere in Europe or in the US. I had ended up in a world that many, especially in the Protestant world of Africa, don’t know anything about. In typical African fashion and in a typical laid-back Nigerian style, I did not get a precise answer to my question: how many Roman Catholics are there in Nigeria? After a while I concluded that they must be around 30 million, only in Nigeria.

I had hit a major gold mine in a great nation, still to many more known as a place of corruption and hijackings (of foreigners who are thought to have money in the bank at home), that is about to emerge. Another five years and it will be apparent to all of us. Nigeria is the largest nation in Africa with its nearly 150 million people.

As I have already alluded to, I was struck by the following three things, catholicity, scholarship and inculturation. First of all, I found myself in a large church, where there was a strong sense of self worth. It is also a church that has good reason (despite the current scandalous stories of paedophile priests, and ultra-conservative ways and attitudes in many quarters) to feel confident in the present as well as the future. What I encountered was an African catholicity that was not stuck in its own African-ness but open and just confident. There is no wonder that this is so; a huge country, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, and a state that is a federation. And yet the lingua franca is English, but take note it is Nigerian English, sometimes very difficult to understand. Why did people say ‘thord sorvant syndrom’, ‘chaurch’, ‘opdate’, ‘discaussed’, ‘walked’ instead of ‘third servant syndrom’, ‘church’, ‘update’, ‘discussed’, ‘worked’?

The scholarship of the place I have already mentioned and be sure, I enjoyed many of the papers and ensuing discussions. Let my just mention a few people, almost at random, as there were so many people around of note.

The keynote address speaker was George Ehusani, who challenged the church as well as the nation when it came to the role of theological education in relation to nation building; a brilliant scholar, still fairly young. There was also Austin Echema who has done a very important study of extreme unction, the church’s seventh sacrament, seen in relation to some local customs of healing in Nigeria. I also had to take note of Justin Ukpong, nowadays Vice Chancellor of Veritas University, the Roman Catholic university in the capital Abuja. Only afterwards I realised that Ukpong is famous for having been one of the first to elaborate on the notion of contextualization (contextual theology) in an article he wrote in 1987.

But there was also Teresa Okure. She chaired the session when I spoke. One could say many things about her: her gentleness, her openness, her courage (also to stand up to powerful men if need be), her burning zeal for Christ. It was great to be with her and see that in her there are so many things that speak for hope, a future, the courage to be progressive, hope not only for a world church in big trouble, but even more for the whole of Christianity.

‘Inculturation’ is a concept that has Roman Catholic roots in Africa. At CIWA it seems to have become a way of life. The term could be taken to mean a process by which the gospel becomes part of a particular culture. The gospel is always already dressed up in a particular cultural dress and Jesus was a Jew, but it also has a core meaning that is universal. When the gospel reaches a new culture the following happens. The gospel itself, that is thus coming in some cultural form will be changed; at the same time the local culture that is receiving the gospel will itself be transformed, from within. The gospel will eventually have a stake in the core values of that particular culture. If I am not mistaken I had the privilege to live for a week at a place where this had happened. The Nigerian-ness was unmistakable, the African-ness as well; at the same time I had rich experiences of how the ‘hard core’ values of the gospel had been inculturated in the place where I was.

More people have to be mentioned. Luke Ejezie, the conference secretary who did a wonderful job, and who welcomed me early on in writing, but who also is a well known scholar of the Old Testament, the Rector of CIWA, and also the official host, Felix Adeigbo, who made me feel at home at once, and finally those wonderful people who fetched me and took me to the airport, Father Modestus and Sister Eucharia. I could have mentioned many other people and I hope they will feel included when I say that it was a great week of fellowship for me, that has convinced me totally that Africa already has what it takes to do authentic theology and that the word must now go out that people, all over the world must come and see, listen and read for themselves.