tb-joshua-and-fantasy-constructions/
Toyin Falola
Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM, CDOA
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Chidi Anthony Opara is a Poet, Professional Fellow of Institute Of Information Management Africa, MIT Chief Data Officer Ambassador, Registered Freight Forwarder and Editorial Adviser at News Updates.
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cornelius...@gmail.com
Stockholm
Sweden
The People’s Planet.
22nd January, 2024
“Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time”
(From A Psalm of Life by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ( in trochaic tetrameter
“ By their fruits shall ye know them.”
WISEMAN HARRY'S REACTION ON BBC'S DOCUMENTARY ABOUT TB JOSHUA AND SCOAN!
It was refreshing to read Professor Wariboko’s clear speak. He has done a masterful moderating job here, at least not condemning anybody, and only mildly reprimanding not the BBC but us post-colonial Africans - The Black Man’s Burden - it’s the Black Man that takes Israel to court for genocide and crimes against humanity, and again it’s mostly the Black Man - the suffering servant, that suffers, has suffered and is suffering from all the fallout when the BBC goes to town with TB Joshua. In the crucible of poverty - not only low in spirit, “ suffer, suffer for world, enjoy for heaven” - na your fault be that. “ Suffer, suffer for world - and when you die , enjoy for heaven” is the salvation theology.
Nigeria, one of the most religious countries in the world, the BBC exposé documentary has succeeded in achieving its aims, on the one hand titillating its civilised world with some more of ”What good can come out of Africa?” and on the Nigerian domestic front promoting some more self-critique, the ransacking of many a troubled conscience, and some inevitable soul-searching.
About ten years ago, I told Stephen, one of our Igbo bros here in Stockholm, that my brother who lives in the Hague in the Netherlands, was very ill, and he (Stefan) told me to get in touch with TB Joshua, immediately. TB Joshua? Yes, he assured me - people are travelling from faraway places like Germany and Russia, and TB is healing them. Like my boss in Bakana who was an adherent of The Brotherhood of the Cross and the Star, in her case she wanted me to accompany her to Calabar for a splash in the holy river there, that was the year before Marvin Gaye’s Sexual Healing ; but I have already taken a splash in the River in Umuahia, I told her. This is different, she assured me, even the Russians are going there to receive his blessings. “Even the Russians”? Why is it that they always hope to achieve some credibility by holding up “the Russians” as the yardstick by which to measure the extent of their pastor's fame or the extent of his healing powers that know no bounds? I thought that I would accompany her to Calabar after all, to see my friend Dr Matthias Offoboche from whom I had a standing invitation since our days in Stockholm, to listen to some Efik Gold, live, and more importantly to link up with Cromwell ( Akintola Josephus Gustavus Wyse - my classmate from Form 1 to Upper Six - and my roommate during our first year in college) as he was then busy professing history at the University of Calabar, whilst our other classmate Abimbola Sylvester Young was busy professing Mathematics at the University of Benin, in the then Bendle State...
TB Joshua was in the United States just then; Stephen gave me a number where he could be reached; I passed the number over to my brother. I think that he was a little sceptical, unlike a brother from Zimbabwe who once actually showed me some “anointing oil” that he had got from TB. I wonder how he’s feeling about all this, right now. I don’t know, because he’s in Mozambique at the moment.
I’m most curious about what Nigeria’s other mega-pastors are saying, some on behalf of their Brother TB (putative birds of the same or a similar feather) and of course the the extent - and the lengths to which - contrastively and in counter-distinction from TB, some of the other holier-than-thou Pentecostal Pastors are prepared to go in denigrating him, taking a distance as far away from TB as possible, and telling some of their flock,” I told you so” in that respect, not very different from some of their Pharisee brothers, as maligned in the so-called” New Testament, this example from Luke 18:10-12 : “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’
It was very simple, really. When the Christian missionaries first encountered the Aborigines of South Australia and tried to sell them, Jesus of Nazareth, as God, the son of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, there was no long theological discussion or debate, the Aborigines merely asked matter-of-factly, “The one you are talking about, this Jesus, does he go to the toilet? Does he have an anus?” The missionaries believing that honesty is the best policy answered in the affirmative and thought that in being honest they had won the day, had told the truth and shamed the devil, but the Aborigines did not agree: “If he indeed has an anus and goes to the toilet just like us, then he cannot be God - ATNATU - because the meaning of ATNATU is “He who does not have an anus and does not need to go to the toilet.” I guess that put an end to any follow-up theological dialogue about virgin birth, crucifixion, death, or resurrection.
I first heard this piece of holy gossip from that excellent raconteur, Ahmed Deedat , that
“The aborigine of South Australia calls his God “Atnatu because some philosopher, poet or prophet had programmed him that the Father in Heaven is absolutely free from all needs; He is independent; He needs no food nor drink. This quality, in his primitive, uninhibited language, he conversely named ATNATU, which literally meant “the One without an anus – the One without any flaw” – i.e. the One from Whom no impurity flows or emanates. When I started sharing this novel idea with Hindu, Muslim and Christian friends, without exception, their immediate reaction was one of mirth, they giggled and laughed. Most of them not realizing that the joke was on them. The boot was on the other foot. Though the word “anus' ' is a very small word, only four letters in English, most people have not heard it. One is forced to use the colloquial substitute which I hesitate to reproduce here, nor will I use the same in public meetings because of people’s hypersensitivity – because in the words of Abdullah Yusuf All, people “HAD PERVERTED THEIR LANGUAGE ONCE BEAUTIFUL, INTO JARGONS OF EMPTY ELEGANCE AND UNMEANING FUTILITY.”
That was Australia. According to the Christian missionaries, a strong belief in the supernatural, and a spirit-based culture that’s laced with superstition has its tentacles on the African mind, South of the Sahara, and that’s why we are told about His Holiness (I fondly refer to him as “Benedictus Erectus” and in Papal Bull , we’re told that “The little ex-Hitler Youth, Pope Someone the Something had just returned from his African Holy-day. He made one important announcement for a continent crippled with the doctrines of bankism, poverty, genocide, and sexual anarchy with its pandemic disease. Africa, he declared, had to cure itself of witchcraft and the practices of magic.”
And again, of course, and this is the truth that will probably not set you free, when you and the BBC acknowledge that Pentecostalism in Nigeria - and Ghana - thrives best in cultures imbued with local witchcraft, with witches and wizards galore - the scapegoats and safety valve outlets through which those societies are “healed” through the great works performed by Pentecostal exorcists such as TB Joshua whose claims have been ratified by the societies in which he has been operating all this time, casting out demons - just as Jesus did - casting out Belzebub, through the agency of the Holy Spirit…
Sadly, now that TB Joshua is not here to defend himself, all kinds of spurious things are being said about him…
If only an exalted holy personality such as Jesus, not just any Jesus but the Jewish Jesus who we suppose (following sound tradition - a sign of the covenant) was circumcised on the eighth day - if only he had written an autobiography probably starting with those later famous words he is said to have uttered when he was about thirty years of age, “Before Abraham was, I am “ - at which point according to John 8: 48 - 59 , the Jews took up a few stones with which to stone him - because - according to what it is alleged, they had reasoned, Jesus was an ordinary mortal man just like them and from their legalist point of view, back in those days that kind of blasphemy carried the death penalty - death by stoning - just as at the time of Mansur al-Hallaj - the misunderstanding or misinterpretation of the Jesus-like claim “Ana al-haqq” ( I am the truth / I am at-one-ment with the Father” etc. led to al-Hallaj’s crucifixion
If only TB Joshua had left us with an autobiography, that could have clarified a lot that is now left for endless speculation. For now, the man probably remains not guilty, no matter how much he is crucified and vilified, posthumously, in absentia
"Finally, too many of us still have ‘colomentality.’ The BBC documented something and suddenly everyone is talking endlessly about it as a 24-hour news channel. What is really new about what the BBC put out?"-Nimi WaribokoThe credibility rating(determined by many factors) of information providing institutions determines the acceptance of the information such institutions put out, which is most likely why Nimi published this essay on Punch instead of on Tide(published by his state government).The higher the credibility rating, the higher the acceptance.It has nothing to do with "colomentality".-Chidi Anthony Opara (CAO)
On Tuesday 23 January 2024, Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:
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Oluwatoyin Adepoju
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Victor Okafor
If you may allow me, I would rewrite the verb in your second sentence to "BBC propagated something ...," for the BBC package was a piece of propaganda, a piece of rubbish. Yes, the reactions of some folk to their former colonial master's mouthpiece, is indeed, reflective of the colonial mentality/slave mentality that still silently holds sway within the elite population of one of Britain's former colonies. Commenting on the slovenly personality of a typical house slave, Malcolm X once noted that it was a habit of a house slave to ask the following question of an ill-disposed master: "Massa, we sick?"
If I may ask, what if Nigeria's Federal Radio Corporation or its external outlet known as the Voice of Nigeria were to broadcast a similar medley of cock and bull stories about a dead leader of Westminster Abbey, do you think that the British elite would dignify it with the slightest of attention?
We must make knowledge of decolonized African history a compulsory subject in African universities for all undergraduates so as to avoid situations where people with quadruple PhDs would end up embracing the conquerors of their forefathers as their best friends, as their deciders of what is divine. An African proverb has it that if a child fails to find out what killed his father, that child would end up being killed by the same factor.
"Finally, too many of us still have ‘colomentality.’ The BBC documented something and suddenly everyone is talking endlessly about it as a 24-hour news channel. What is really new about what the BBC put out?"-Nimi WaribokoThe credibility rating(determined by many factors) of information providing institutions determines the acceptance of the information such institutions put out, which is most likely why Nimi published this essay on Punch instead of on Tide(published by his state government).The higher the credibility rating, the higher the acceptance.It has nothing to do with "colomentality".-Chidi Anthony Opara (CAO)
On Tuesday 23 January 2024, Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:
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Chidi Anthony Opara is a Poet, Professional Fellow of Institute Of Information Management Africa, MIT Chief Data Officer Ambassador, Registered Freight Forwarder and Editorial Adviser at News Updates.More about him here: https://independent.academia.edu/ChidiAnthonyOpara
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Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM, CDOA
On Wednesday 24 January 2024, 'Victor Okafor' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
If you may allow me, I would rewrite the verb in your second sentence to "BBC propagated something ...," for the BBC package was a piece of propaganda, a piece of rubbish. Yes, the reactions of some folk to their former colonial master's mouthpiece, is indeed, reflective of the colonial mentality/slave mentality that still silently holds sway within the elite population of one of Britain's former colonies. Commenting on the slovenly personality of a typical house slave, Malcolm X once noted that it was a habit of a house slave to ask the following question of an ill-disposed master: "Massa, we sick?"
If I may ask, what if Nigeria's Federal Radio Corporation or its external outlet known as the Voice of Nigeria were to broadcast a similar medley of cock and bull stories about a dead leader of Westminster Abbey, do you think that the British elite would dignify it with the slightest of attention?
We must make knowledge of decolonized African history a compulsory subject in African universities for all undergraduates so as to avoid situations where people with quadruple PhDs would end up embracing the conquerors of their forefathers as their best friends, as their deciders of what is divine. An African proverb has it that if a child fails to find out what killed his father, that child would end up being killed by the same factor.
On Tue, Jan 23, 2024 at 7:01 PM Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM, CDOA <chidi...@gmail.com> wrote:
"Finally, too many of us still have ‘colomentality.’ The BBC documented something and suddenly everyone is talking endlessly about it as a 24-hour news channel. What is really new about what the BBC put out?"-Nimi WaribokoThe credibility rating(determined by many factors) of information providing institutions determines the acceptance of the information such institutions put out, which is most likely why Nimi published this essay on Punch instead of on Tide(published by his state government).The higher the credibility rating, the higher the acceptance.It has nothing to do with "colomentality".-Chidi Anthony Opara (CAO)
On Tuesday 23 January 2024, Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:
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Chidi Anthony Opara is a Poet, Professional Fellow of Institute Of Information Management Africa, MIT Chief Data Officer Ambassador, Registered Freight Forwarder and Editorial Adviser at News Updates.More about him here: https://independent.academia.edu/ChidiAnthonyOpara
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--Sincerely,Victor O. Okafor, Ph.D.Professor and HeadDepartment of Africology and African American StudiesEastern Michigan UniversityEmail: vok...@emich.eduTel: 734.487.9594Food for Thought:"The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." -- Frederick Douglass
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