Locating Africanity: Elastic Nimi Wariboko In the Post-colonial And Pentecostal Incredibles

[Abiodun Gbada]

I don’t mean to disrespect anyone, and I don’t think I would if I refer my readers interested in his profile and trajectory to Google-search the name Nimi Wariboko. That would be too much of a labor for the real reason of this exercise, which is already a cumbersome one that is hard to filter for the substance it weighs. Besides, some couple of weeks back, I wrote an op-ed where I extolled the contributions of this erudite figure. I have chosen to describe him as an erudite figure of intellectuality—a term which itself embodies an intricate web of structured realities—not because I’m not aware of his means of survival, but because of the pattern of his career growth as a scholar and knowledge production that exceeds the boundaries of any known academic culture.

Sometime in the fall of 2017, after the shock of our academic culture and knowledge systems had struck me hard like a torpedo dropped on a ship, but in lieu of sinking with the drowning, I was rescued by the ideas of the likes of Wariboko. It occurred to me at this time that the paradigms of research and knowledge increasingly coming out of Africa, Nigeria especially, were losing focus on the micro aspect of our society to project onto the world and produce original thoughts, ideas, and theories. The unconscious drift of our social sciences into the immersion of African realities into western epistemologies was palpable in many of the theses, dissertations, journal articles and book manuscripts I happened to review at this time. Let me be clear that this is not a new issue in the (global) African academe; if anything, this structure was birthed in it and has been consistent in reversing this trend. What is, however, different at this time is that, it seems we were losing this latter tradition informed by the works of the likes of Kenneth Dike, Joe Alagoa, Bala Usman, Adiele Afigbo, Ade Ajayi, Achille Mbebe, Kwasi Wiredu and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, just to mention a few these pioneers.

Further, in the face of present contradictions and mutual suspicion that characterize the Nigerian state, can the government be trusted to be deeply involved in the administration of these churches? In this place of abnormality where there is a thin line between possibility and impossibility, Ogboin and Adelakun adopted Wariboko’s “Logic of Invisibility” to interrogate the common imaginary space where politics and Pentecostalism reside in Nigeria. The implication of this is that the tool of invisibility that shrouds sovereignty in mystification, adopted and mastered by the two entities, have been responsible for the “Post-colonial Incredibles.” If anything, is it not incredible that the government that would not want to be answerable to anyone, including those who have chosen its anchors, would want another entity equally in the invisibility trade to open its account and daily activities to it under the pretense of regulations. All of these raise more questions than answers. And indeed, that is the kind of ambience often generated by the fusion of politics, economics, philosophy and ethics in a gathering of over two dozen established scholars from different fields and locations.

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