The lost Jews of Nigeria

Back in the 1970s, when Moshe Ben Avraham was growing up in Port Harcourt, in southern Nigeria, the town was small and fringed by bush villages, and there were no Jews in sight. Ben Avraham wasn’t yet Jewish himself; he wasn’t even “Ben Avraham”, for that matter. His Anglican parents gave him the name Moses Walison – still his official name – and they raised him as a churchgoing boy. In this, they were no different from millions of others in their part of the country. One of the first demographic details anyone learns about Nigeria is that while people living up north are predominantly Muslim, those down south are just as overwhelmingly Christian. The minibuses sputtering up and down these southern highways bear slogans like “Jesus is Needful” on their back windows. On billboards, preachers hype their ministries; a prayer meeting is never just a prayer meeting – it is a “global mega powerquake” or a “harvest of miracles”. Islam and Christianity have been in Nigeria for centuries, but Judaism has none of that conspicuous history or heritage. In his childhood, Ben Avraham knew nothing about Judaism, and he’d only encountered Israel as a biblical name: “Israel, Abraham, all those things,” he recalled.

Then, in 1986, his father died, and a few years later, in the midst of a growing disaffection with his church, Ben Avraham fell ill: a cut on his tongue that set off a severe infection. At the time, he came across a Christian ministry called the White Garment Sabbath, and after one of its white-robed, barefooted priests healed him, he joined the group. In Nigeria, the White Garment Sabbath calls itself a church, and its prayer halls host icons of Christ on the cross. “But they told me that Saturday is the day of worship, the shabbat – not Sunday,” Ben Avraham said. It was the first time he’d heard this, but when they offered him proof – careful readings of Genesis and Exodus – he wondered what else he’d been doing wrong. “On my own,” he said, “I started to go deeper.”

A decade later, Ben Avraham took a further step, becoming a Messianic Jew – a member of a movement that spun out of Jews for Jesus in the US half a century ago, which considers itself to be a Jewish sect that nonetheless exalts Jesus as the messiah. To Ben Avraham, being a Messianic Jew didn’t feel very different from being a White Garment Sabbatarian. Both groups convened on Saturdays, prayed barefoot to God as well as Jesus, and slaughtered rams for Passover in accordance with old Jewish scripture. Ben Avraham opened his own hall of worship and called it Ark of Yahweh.

By this time, as the century turned, Port Harcourt was heaving with industry, on its way to becoming the biggest oil-refining city in Nigeria. It had offshore rigs, chemical skies and scores of visitors from other countries. In 2001, a Jewish-American executive with Shell, passing through Port Harcourt, saw Ben Avraham’s Ark of Yahweh and dropped in. “He told me that it should be called Ark of Hashem, because Jews don’t use Yahweh to call out the name of God,” Ben Avraham said. They kept in touch. “He was the one who told me so much about Judaism, sent me books and introduced me to rabbis in the Holy Land.” So when, in 2003, Ben Avraham spotted a small posse of Port Harcourt men in distinctively Jewish attire walking into a building on a Saturday, and when he followed them in to talk to them, and when their leader told him that the building was a synagogue and that they’d decided to worship only God the creator rather than the Holy Trinity, he was already well primed. “That was when I became fully Jewish.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/26/lost-jews-of-nigeria-igbo-judaism-israel

 

Unsafe and uncertain: Inside Nigeria’s mandatory youth corps

It was about 3pm on a Sunday in mid-May when 27-year-old Kelechi* looked out of the front window of the 18-passenger mini-bus taxi he was travelling in.

A graduate of the University of Calabar in Nigeria’s Cross River state, he was making his way to neighbouring Benue, which had become a hotspot for attacks by armed groups and bandits.

The Benue state government had banned motorcycles in the area and set up checkpoints along the roads. But as his minibus joined a queue of vehicles at a checkpoint, Kelechi saw a motorbike approach. The men on board were carrying guns. They opened fire, killing two people.

“People were running helter-skelter,” Kelechi recalls, describing how the men then climbed back on their motorcycle and fled.

When Kelechi reached his apartment, the numbness he had initially felt subsided and he realised “it could have easily been me [who was killed]”. That night, and on the nights that followed, he struggled with insomnia as what he had witnessed that day played out in his mind over and over again.

Normally, Kelechi would have been at home in Calabar, where he grew up in a working-class family. But when he graduated from university, he was ushered into Nigeria’s National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) – a mandatory one-year programme for graduates of tertiary institutions – which eventually placed him in Benue.

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2021/9/28/is-nigerias-mandatory-youth-corps-still-fit-for-purpose

 

Inside the illicit trade in West Africa’s oldest artworks

Outside it has become night. In front of the windows of one of Abuja’s grandest hotels, the pool shines turquoise blue. Finally, the phone rings. It is the hotel’s front desk, announcing a guest.

The man who comes into the room, hours late for the scheduled appointment, is named Umaru Potiskum. He is an art dealer in his late 50s. He’s wearing a dark blue dashiki and is full of self-confidence, but is also suspicious. He knows us as art fundis, and possible buyers, but one of us has also introduced himself as journalist. His is, after all, an underground, illegal business.

“Here I have met many customers,” he says; buyers from Belgium, France, Spain, England and Germany. He shows us what he’s selling, carefully unwrapping two delicate terracotta statues from a piece of cloth.

The eyes gazing out from the ancient clay are triangular, typical of Nok figurines. Over the past decades, thousands of these figurines have been taken out of Nigeria. Many are on display in some of the world’s most prestigious art galleries, including at the Louvre in Paris and Yale University. Many more are no longer displayed, however, because their provenance is questionable.

https://www.zammagazine.com/perspectives/blog/1075-inside-the-illicit-trade-in-west-africa-s-oldest-artworks

 

A failure of leadership in Nigeria

In 1983, the novelist Chinua Achebe published a short treatise called The Trouble With Nigeria. With characteristic acuity, his very first paragraph answers the question posed in the title. 

“The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example, which are the hallmarks of great leadership.”

Decades later, these words ring just as true. This month, Nigerian citizens have risen up in their tens of thousands to protest against the brutality with which they are treated by state security forces. The specific target of their anger was the notorious special anti-robbery squad (Sars), which has been implicated in routine harassment and intimidation, torture, assault and even extrajudicial killings.

https://mg.co.za/opinion/2020-10-23-editorial-a-failure-of-leadership-in-nigeria/

 

Climate Change Devastates the Sahel

A man wading across an expanse of water carrying a mattress on his head. A woman piling onto a makeshift rowboat the pots and pans she has been able to rescue. Youths hastily trying to mount a sand dike in front of half-destroyed mud huts… For the past few years, these and similar pictures have become commonplace in the Sahel. Recently, on the social networks, we even saw an SUV dragged miraculously out of the water at the end of a cable while a crowd cheered.

At odds with what has been for years the region’s customary image—an increasingly parched savannah as the desert pursues its advance and where there is a penury of everything, especially water—the Sahel is now regularly devastated by severe flooding. Rainfall, vitally important for millions of farmers and livestock breeders, is not always impatiently awaited. Quite the contrary. In the bigger towns especially, everyone knows it will be coming sometime around the end of August or the beginning of September and will bring about huge rises in river levels and tragic flooding that will cause enormous damage and plunge thousands of families into mourning. “Every year it’s the same thing, there’s water everywhere. But what can we do?” Ali laments. He lives in Lamordé, a neighbourhood in Niamey, flooded again by the waters of the Niger at the beginning of September and who had to send his family to stay with friends while he cleaned his house.

https://orientxxi.info/magazine/climate-change-devastates-the-sahel,4152

 

Nigerian Women Say ‘MeToo.’ Critics Say ‘Prove It.’

It was, she said, a secret that burned so badly she could no longer keep it inside. So at age 34, Busola Dakolo, a well-known Nigerian photographer, went on television and finally spoke.

She said she had been raped twice as a teenager by her former pastor, Biodun Fatoyinbo, a church leader whose services draw thousands, and whose fans, admiring his flashy lifestyle, have taken to calling him “the Gucci pastor.” He has denied the allegations.

After years in which silence around rape and sexual harassment have been the norm, West Africa is seeing a wave of #MeToo proclamations.

Accusations have come from a Gambian beauty queen who said the former president raped her; a former presidential adviser in Sierra Leone who said she was sexually assaulted by a church leader; and a Nigerian journalist with the BBC who captured hidden camera footage of university professors soliciting sex in exchange for admission and grades.

 

Still Becoming: At Home In Lagos

Lagos will not court you. It is a city that is what it is. I have lived part-time in Lagos for 10 years and I complain about it each time I return from my home in the US — its allergy to order, its stultifying traffic, its power cuts. I like, though, that nothing about Lagos was crafted for the tourist, nothing done to appeal to the visitor. Tourism has its uses, but it can mangle a city, especially a developing city, and flatten it into a permanent shape of service: the city’s default becomes a simpering bow, and its people turn the greyest parts of themselves into colourful props. In this sense, Lagos has a certain authenticity because it is indifferent to ingratiating itself; it will treat your love with an embrace, and your hate with a shrug. What you see in Lagos is what Lagos truly is.

And what do you see? A city in a state of shifting impermanence. A place still becoming. In newer Lagos, houses sprout up on land reclaimed from the sea, and in older Lagos, buildings are knocked down so that ambitious new ones might live. A street last seen six months ago is different today, sometimes imperceptibly so — a tiny store has appeared at a corner — and sometimes baldly so, with a structure gone, or shuttered, or expanded. Shops come and go. Today, a boutique’s slender mannequin in a tightly pinned dress; tomorrow, a home accessories shop with gilt-edged furniture on display.

https://www.esquire.com/uk/culture/a27283913/still-becoming-at-home-in-lagos-with-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie/

 

Der Reis bringt einen Modernisierungsschub

Im Laufe der vergangenen Jahrzehnte ist Reis in Afrika vom Luxusgut zum Grundnahrungsmittel geworden. Der Konsum nimmt südlich der Sahara jährlich um 3% zu. Die lokalen Bauern können mit der wachsenden Nachfrage nicht Schritt halten. Besonders frappant ist diese Diskrepanz in Nigeria, dem mit 190 Millionen Einwohnern bevölkerungsreichsten Land Afrikas. Die wachsende Nachfrage nach Reis hängt mit der Verstädterung und einem schnelleren Lebensrhythmus zusammen. Die Zubereitung der traditionellen Nahrungsmittel ist arbeits- und zeitintensiv; Reis hingegen lässt sich rasch kochen und ist trotzdem günstig. Aber der Reisanbau in Nigeria ist relativ unproduktiv. 90% der Reisbauern verfügen über weniger als eine Hektare Land. Sie besitzen weder Zugang zu Krediten noch zu verbessertem Saatgut, Dünger und modernem Know-how. Sie produzieren für den Eigenbedarf; nur was übrig bleibt, verkaufen sie. Da ihr Reis qualitativ schlechter ist als der aus Asien importierte, muss er billiger verkauft werden. Die Regierung verkündet, Nigeria werde bald keinen Reis mehr einführen, sondern sogar exportieren; der Import auf dem Landweg wurde verboten. Aber bis jetzt werden erst etwa 40% des Bedarfs durch einheimischen Reis gedeckt.

https://www.nzz.ch/wirtschaft/reis-nachfrage-in-afrika-waechst-ld.1451312

 

The juju curse that binds trafficked Nigerian women into sex slavery

Every night as dusk falls in Piazza Gastone in the Noce district of Palermo, a tall, imposing Ghanaian woman dressed in traditional west African robes stands before a small congregation sweating in rows of plastic chairs before her.The Pentecostal Church of Odasani has been converted from an old garage in a backstreet into a place of worship, albeit one unrecognised by any formal faith group. But what many of the congregation – largely young Nigerian women – have come for tonight is more than prayer; it is freedom.“Nigerian women come to me for help, they have bad spirits that have been put inside their bodies by people who want to make money from them,” says the self-proclaimed prophetess, as she prepares to start her service.

Source: The juju curse that binds trafficked Nigerian women into sex slavery | Global development | The Guardian

 

The Desperate Journey of a Trafficked Girl

It was close to midnight on the coast of Libya, a few miles west of Tripoli. At the water’s edge, armed Libyan smugglers pumped air into thirty-foot rubber dinghies. Some three thousand refugees and migrants, mostly sub-Saharan Africans, silent and barefoot, stood nearby in rows of ten. Oil platforms glowed in the Mediterranean.

The Libyans ordered male migrants to carry the inflated boats into the water, thirty on each side. They waded in and held the boats steady as a smuggler directed other migrants to board, packing them as tightly as possible. People in the center would suffer chemical burns if the fuel leaked and mixed with water. Those straddling the sides could easily fall into the sea. Officially, at least five thousand and ninety-eight migrants died in the Mediterranean last year, but Libya’s coastline is more than a thousand miles long, and nobody knows how many boats sink without ever being seen. Several of the migrants had written phone numbers on their clothes, so that someone could call their families if their bodies washed ashore.

The smugglers knelt in the sand and prayed, then stood up and ordered the migrants to push off. One pointed to the sky. “Look at this star!” he said. “Follow it.” Each boat left with only enough fuel to reach international waters.

In one dinghy, carrying a hundred and fifty people, a Nigerian teen-ager named Blessing started to cry. She had travelled six months to get to this point, and her face was gaunt and her ribs were showing. She wondered if God had visited her mother in dreams and shown her that she was alive. The boat hit swells and people started vomiting. By dawn, Blessing had fainted. The boat was taking on water.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/10/the-desperate-journey-of-a-trafficked-girl