Performing Power in Nigeria: Identity, Politics, and Pentecostalism

Abstract

“Performance?! You think we are playing here? No, we are not performing here. We are making power happen. Even when you see us sing and dance, we are not playing. If we are performing anything at all, it is power! We are a people of power! Power is our identity!” (2) This response by a Nigerian Pentecostal pastor to Abimbola Adelakun’s description of her Performing Power in Nigeria illustrates the central argument of her book: Nigerian Pentecostal identity is essentially about the performance of power. Readers should take Adelakun’s use of “performance” seriously, as her application of performance studies is a genuinely new and illuminating approach to the study of Pentecostalism.Performing Power in Nigeria is not a history of Nigerian Pentecostalism, though Adelakun aptly includes historical context where helpful and necessary. Scholars interested in the study of Nigerian religion and politics, Pentecostalism, Yorùbá religions, media studies, performance studies, and religion and politics more generally will find much in Adelakun’s work. Perhaps most impressive is the range of evidence leveraged to make her case. Adelakun’s use of firsthand interviews, experience, online articles, sermons, and social media make this study particularly refreshing and aware of the dynamic sites where Pentecostal spirituality is worked out in Nigeria.Adelakun’s first chapter, “Demons and Deliverance: Discources on Pentecostal Power,” undertakes a close reading of how two Nigerian television shows reflect “on the power identity of Pentecostals through the stages of evolution within Nigerian social and political contexts” (65). Since the 1990s, Nigeria’s political environment and the status of Pentecostalism in Nigeria have evolved. Earlier shows reflect a Pentecostalism seeking after power while newer programs demonstrate a Pentecostalism understanding the power it has achieved.Chapter 2, “‘What Islamic Devils?!’: Power Struggles, Race, and Christian Transnationalism,” will be of significant interest to scholars of African religions as well as scholars of Christian nationalism in the United States. Goodluck Johnathan, a Christian, lost his bid for reelection to Nigeria’s presidency in 2015 to the Muslim candidate, Muhammadu Buhari. This loss deprived Pentecostals of one source of power, stirring a turn to the United States and an idolization of Donald Trump as a “Christian president.” Adelakun sees this solidarity with Christian nationalist movements in the United States as a form of “Christian transnationalism” that connects similar Christian movements in pursuit of power across national boundaries (69).The internet is an important location throughout Performing Power in Nigeria. In chapter 3, “‘Touch Not Mine Anointed’: #MeToo, #ChurchToo, and the Power of ‘See Finish,’” Adelakun demonstrates how pastors use social media platforms to construct images of power identity. However, this “overexposure” creates the conditions where those images are ruptured through critical responses to pastors’ personae. The #MeToo movement and the accessibility of online platforms created conditions where individuals could question and criticize pastoral behavior (138). Chapter 4, “‘Everything Christianity/the Bible Represents Is Being Attacked on the Internet!’: The Internet and Technologies of Religious Engagement,” continues this theme by examining an online debate over pastoral calls to give tithes to churches. Pastoral power finds limits in the face of accessible online communities, because “people can easily assemble in the vast grounds of the Internet to speak back” (153).Pastors often perform power by navigating public affirmations and private contestations of that power (177). Chapter 5, “‘God Too Laughs and We Can Laugh Too’: The Ambivalent Power of Comedy Performances in the Church,” analyzes the more recent trend of Nigerian Pentecostal churches hosting comedy performances. Comedy, in these performances, does not necessarily contest Pentecostal power, but rather holds an ambivalent relationship to it. Typically, backroom-style negotiations determine the contours of the performance and chasten the critical capacity of comedy to question power.Chapter 6, “‘The Spirit Names the Child’: Pentecostal Futurity in the Name of Jesus,” demonstrates how historical traditions of naming children have become a source of Pentecostal power. Whereas naming rituals might have once bestowed names with ancestral significance, Pentecostals have adapted those rituals as way to bestow power to children by giving names with explicit Christian significance. Scholars of Yorùbá religions will find the interaction between a traditional practice of òriṣà devotion (naming rituals) and an ascendant Pentecostalism that fervently rejects òriṣà devotion particularly interesting.Public gathering restrictions around Covid-19 certainly rocked Christian communities worldwide. Adelakun closes her book with a reflection on the apparent weakness of Pentecostal power in the face of Covid-19. “Power Must Change Hands: Covid-19, Power, and the Imperative of Knowledge” offers a biting criticism of Pentecostal power and knowledge production as unable to stand up to the challenges posed by Covid-19, illustrated through a reliance on conspiracy theories and “myths of their embattlement” (28).While the methods of performance studies applied throughout Performing Power in Nigeria do illuminate particular features of Nigerian Pentecostal identity, I wonder what these methods risk obscuring. As a study in performance, Adelakun makes certain ontological assumptions without always stating them. In her apt political critiques of how Pentecostals perform demonization of others (35–36, 99), there is a priority placed on the action of the one demonizing without considering how the ontological world in which the Pentecostal functions shapes their performance. Put differently, emphasizing the acting self risks erasing those forms of religiosity that see nonhuman agents as acting upon the human self; neither God nor demons are narrated as actors in the Pentecostal performance. This is not to discredit the value of performance studies for studying Pentecostal power, but to suggest more explicit naming of the assumptions behind those theoretical approaches.Adelakun’s personal experience with Nigerian Pentecostalism and her interviewees shows throughout her prose, making Performing Power in Nigeria an enjoyable read. The theoretical rigor and use of performance studies make it a fresh scholarly contribution to the study of Pentecostalism and African religions, which an interdisciplinary audience would certainly appreciate.