On Rupture and Contempt: Pentecostal Receptions of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture

From January 15 through February 12, 1977, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC ‘77) met in Lagos, Nigeria. Following the first festival in Senegal in 1966, FESTAC brought thousands of Africans from the continent and the diaspora to Lagos to celebrate “African culture.” While many received FESTAC as a sign of national unity and independence from colonial control, many others objected to the festival for both political and religious reasons. Pentecostals were one such early group of religious objectors, organizing to protest FESTAC on the grounds that it was a plot from the devil to revitalize idol worship. While FESTAC was an attempt at creating a national culture, Pentecostals took the events as “an attempt to revive the dying traditional religions.” (Ojo 74) Here, the very spiritual leadership and “destiny” of Nigeria were at stake. This interpretation of events did not fade after the closing of the festival. It was so strong that Ruth Marshall finds that among Nigerian Pentecostals FESTAC was “unanimously designated as the turning point in the spiritual and material demise of the nation, the sign of satanic power at work.” (106) In fact, FESTAC ‘77 is often the lens through which Pentecostals interpret the downturn of oil markets and contemporary political corruption in Nigeria.

How though should scholars understand this exchange between Nigerian Pentecostals and the imagined “past” that Pentecostals associate with “traditional religions,” most immediately Orisa traditions. To say that Nigerian Pentecostals are engaged in a dialogue with Orisa traditions would be to both challenge established knowledge about Nigerian Pentecostals and to stretch the meaning of dialogue. Significant scholarship on Nigerian Pentecostalism has deployed a narrative of “rupture” to characterize Pentecostal relationships with the past. However, Nigerian Pentecostals, while deploying violent language of destruction and demonization, also hold a receptive relationship to Orisa traditions. Drawing on existing publications and first-hand interviews (conducted over Zoom during 2022), this paper analyzes Nigerian Pentecostal receptions of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture and engages existing narratives of “rupture” used to characterize Nigerian Pentecostalism. In doing so, this paper seeks to offer an alternative account of Pentecostal relationships to the imagined “past” associated with Orisa traditions—focusing on “contempt” rather than “rupture”—that can account for both violent rejection of Orisa among Pentecostals as well as the presence of Orisa in Pentecostal religiosity. What may seem a rupture or break with the past, can alternatively be seen as Pentecostals inhabiting a contemptuous posture towards specific objects (groups, traditions, people, etc.). While Pentecostals consistently demonize Orisa traditions and narrate the rise of Christianity as a break from a “dark” non-Christian past, Pentecostals in Nigeria and the diaspora remain in a contentious dialogue with Orisa traditions, where Pentecostals draw from Orisa cosmologies and traditions while simultaneously sustaining a theologically generative posture of contempt towards those same traditions.

This paper makes its case in two parts. Part One challenges existing rupture narratives by demonstrating the persistence of Orisa traditions even in the Pentecostal reception of FESTAC. While learning from rupture-oriented accounts of Nigerian Pentecostalism, such as Marshall’s, Pentecostal receptions of FESTAC ‘77 complicate the emphasis on rupture in important ways. First, the concern with “destiny” and the future of Nigeria in the reception of FESTAC ‘77 draws from, rather than breaking with, a traditional Yoruba cosmology. Here, the operative notion of destiny draws on a similar concern surrounding one’s ori where spiritual powers can own, affect, or control one’s ori and eventual destiny. Second, while maintaining a consistently contemptuous reception of FESTAC ‘77 into the present day, Nigerian Pentecostals have increasingly appropriated traditional Orisa practices into their own religious lives. As one interviewee who helped organize the initial protests to FESTAC in 1977 and now serves as a high-ranking pastor in the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) points out, Pentecostals “threw the baby out with the bathwater” in the initial rejection of FESTAC and are now working to incorporate “traditional forms of worship” into RCCG services. Narratives of “rupture” and “break” cannot easily account for the persistence of Orisa traditions in Pentecostal life. 

If the relationship between Nigerian Pentecostals and Orisa traditions cannot be described as one of “rupture” or “break,” then what can describe and account for the common ways Pentecostals relate to Orisa traditions? Part Two points to “contempt” as perhaps a more useful lens for understanding this Pentecostal reception. Pentecostals do not necessarily create the forms of contempt from which they draw and those relations of contempt do not exist in a vacuum. Therefore, one should expect a contemptuous response to draw from an existing epistemic milieu. This contemptuous posture is representative of one common way Nigerian Pentecostals relate to Orisa traditions and engage the world more generally, in that they contemn specific objects while simultaneously drawing from them. Rather than taking contempt as merely performance or action of the self upon the self, this section identifies political theological conditions that render contempt useful for Pentecostals. Put differently, political theological conditions make a contemptuous response feel more faithful and more true to Pentecostal commitments. Within these conditions, the Holy Spirit is localized and exclusive to Pentecostal communities and that exclusive relationship is then understood as necessitating specific outcomes for specific groups. Pentecostal responses to FESTAC ‘77, then, demonstrate a posture towards specific objects of contempt that also maintains a relationship of contentious dialogue with those objects.

While this paper does offer evidence for what is assumed by scholars to be the Pentecostal reception of FESTAC ’77, it also helps to think about Nigerian Pentecostal politics more generally. Theorizing the theological value of contempt among Pentecostals can help to better understand how Pentecostals are motivated politically as well as the theologies motivating their complicated relationship to those traditions they demonize and seek to destroy.