Chapter 15  

The Virgin

Something about Yemi reminded me of my father back in his glory days, at his full height and strength. Both were tall and pleasing-looking, if not quite handsome, and both were mischievous and irreverent. They each had a kind of natural confidence that didn’t come off as egoistical, maybe because it was paired with an easy charm and an endless curiosity about other people. Like my father, Yemi had a dim view of human nature. But where my father was infuriated by the way people constantly let him down, Yemi was delighted that people continually proved him right.

We’d first been connected by Gary Foxcroft, the aid worker from the documentary film. Yemi and his friends regularly traveled from Ibadan to Akwa Ibom to visit Sam Itauma’s center, bringing them supplies and doing their best to draw international media attention to their case. Gary said that if I was serious about going out to see the children in Akwa Ibom, Yemi would be my best bet. He was the only person Gary would trust to get me there or to arrange security for the trip. Gary said it would be expensive to hire armed guards—at least ten thousand naira—but he insisted it was the only way for me to make the trip safely.

My first meeting with Yemi was at Spices, the campus bar at the University of Ibadan. There were only a few people there in the afternoon, and I was easy to spot. Yemi wore delicate wire-rimmed glasses that made him look somewhat like a Russian revolutionary. His hair was cropped close against his skull and a clump of keys dangled against his chest from a lanyard. We shook hands and then Yemi and I and his friend Jude drank from twenty-ounce bottles of Star beer and shared bowls of ponmo—roasted cow skin—while Yemi told me how he studied outcasts.

“Omoita. It means a child of the outside,” Yemi said. “It’s the word we use for motor park agents. It’s a stigma word, it automatically ostracizes. The government doesn’t take care of these people because they are omoita. They are seen as nothing—not educated, not deserving of education.”

Yemi’s friend Jude nodded and drank his beer, looking dour. “We have a bad culture here. I love my country. I would die for it, but it’s a bad culture.”

Yemi explained that he was no stranger to religion. As a kid, he had gone through a Christian phase, and then he’d briefly converted to Islam. “I’ve read the Bible,” he said cheerfully. “My favorite books are Lamentations and Ecclesiastes, because they’re about the absurdity of life.”

Now Yemi identified as a humanist. He was drawn to humanism because it was utterly devoid of the supernatural.

“This God stuff—Christian, Muslim, whatever. It’s bullshit.”

Jude threw his head back and stuck out his tongue. “Stop being so bad!”

I asked Yemi if it was possible for atheists to thrive in Nigerian society.

“Oh yes, I think so,” he said, his eyes dancing. “The language of money takes over. When you get money, nobody cares. People would just pray that the Lord would reveal himself to me.”

After that first meeting we saw each other nearly every day. Yemi picked me up in his prized possession, a sleek late-model Honda Civic, and then drove fast through the streets, honking constantly at people he recognized. “How do you like my Nigerian ghetto?” he’d ask me, dodging dogs and vendors and potholes. As we drove we sketched out our lives for each other and before long we were getting past the surface and into the core of things. We talked about our ambitions and our dreams, our relationships. He teased me that as close as we were becoming, he knew Americans well enough. They buddied up to you quicker than anyone but when they left they were gone for good. He mimed picking up the phone and calling me a year from now, and I’d squint and say, “Yemi? Yemi who?” I shook my head furiously. That would never happen, I told him. We were in it for good.

Yemi’s favorite topic was his beloved country, with its tangled history of wars and violence and colonialism. Nigeria was a mess, he said, shaking his head. In the fifty years since independence, the country had hardly had any credible elections. For almost a quarter of its history, Nigeria was led by a series of military dictators, each one fiercer than the last. In the late 1960s, the country entered the devastating Nigerian-Biafran War, which resulted in the death of millions of people. These days, Yemi explained, over half of Nigeria’s population lived in dire poverty. Despite taking in annual proceeds of over $20 billion, largely from oil revenues, the government failed to provide basic services to its citizens, much less any kind of safety net for the poor, elderly, or mentally ill. The Christian south blamed the Muslim north for everything from poisoning vegetables to bombing churches to taking more than their share of power. The north blamed the south for taking the bulk of the oil profits from the Niger Delta. Yemi himself blamed a culture of widespread corruption, in which powerful politicians diverted millions of dollars of oil revenue to their own bank accounts while most people in the rural regions lived on less than a dollar a day. When they fell sick they had to pay before a doctor would even look at them, which was part of the reason why the life expectancy for the average Nigerian was barely fifty years. Yemi reminded me that when it came time for President Obama to visit Africa for the first time as president, he bypassed Nigeria and flew into Ghana instead. “I don’t blame him a bit,” Yemi said.

As we drove out of the main town, through the verdant green hills of Ibadan, Yemi explained that during the heady mid-seventies, when oil revenues tripled in the space of two years, trains crisscrossed the south and it was safe to travel. But when the oil bust hit a few years later, the bush crept over the train tracks again and no one dared drive at night. He pointed out the homes that had been abandoned half-built when oil prices started falling, and he said that was the same time that churches had started sprouting up like mushrooms. There was the Redeemed Church, which was seen as more middle class; Deeper Life, known for its emphasis on purity; the Mountain of Fire and Miracles, which claimed to heal people from HIV and AIDS; and countless others.

Yemi’s own wife converted to Christianity in those years, and he wasn’t sure that spirituality had much to do with her conversion. But he didn’t blame her. He spoke kindly of religious people and saved his bitterness for the pastors. He said they were vultures preying on the poor, the ignorant, and the superstitious. As he talked I thought of a clipping that one of Yemi’s friends had shown me a few days before. The headline read “N50,000 Tithe Technically Knocked Out 8 Years of Barrenness of the Womb.” In the accompanying article, a man wrote of how he had received a half-million-naira contract and paid a tithe of 10 percent, and then, shortly after, his wife miraculously conceived a child after years of infertility. Similar signs were posted all throughout the city, advertising miracle services with slogans like “Expect the Unusual and Supernatural.” Some encouraged couples trying to conceive to bring baby clothing or bottles, so the pastors could pray over those objects. One poster promised a special anointing for twins and triplets, quick marriage, easy baby delivery, and godly riches. Another promised deliverance from “marital delay, barrenness, poverty, failure, lack of tangible achievement, curses, and spiritual wreckage.” Another featured a whole series of full-color photographs of people who stood on the stage holding a microphone, sharing their stories with the congregation. HIV 1 and 2 healed, the captions read. Healed of heart enlargement. 17 years staphylococcus, five years piles cured. Salvation granted and ten years of barrenness broken.

Yemi pointed out that as Nigerians converted to Pentecostal Christianity, there was an uptick in traditional beliefs as well. The more people believed in the Holy Ghost, the more they were inclined to believe in his enemies. That’s what he said had happened in the Niger Delta state of Akwa Ibom. For centuries, witches had lurked at the fringes of society. Witch-hunting crusades were common as recently as the 1970s, when volunteer armies of fierce-eyed young men would go from village to village with machetes and sticks, forcing everyone into a central square. Their leaders would study the faces of the men and women and then subject those they suspected of witchcraft to age-old tests—burning them with hot metal, rubbing red pepper into their eyes, covering them with biting ants, and forcing them to eat the poisonous esere bean. But it wasn’t until the twenty-first century, just after the release of the film that Helen Ukpabio made to teach her followers about the dangers of child witchcraft, that children in Akwa Ibom began to be accused. End of the Wicked followed the adventures of an eight-year-old girl whose soul is summoned from her sleeping body by a small witch-boy dressed in black. The two of them travel to an underground coven where a man in whiteface sits on a throne. The children are charged with draining money, health, and happiness out of their people, and for the rest of the film, they run amok, eating human flesh and causing their fathers to have heart attacks.

Helen’s movie sold quickly in outdoor markets throughout the south, and the more popular the movie became, the more children there were in the street, running in packs and scavenging corncobs from the market. Every day there were new reports of child witches: a young girl in Ondo who was said to have changed into a cat and back again as her mother grew sicker and sicker; the two-year-old in Eket whose hunched back and small stature was a sure sign that the Devil was growing in him; or the six-year-old twins who were nearly buried alive by a man who believed they were behind the death of his wife. Helen had never met any of those particular children, but Yemi said that didn’t mean she wasn’t to blame.

Since that pair of Dutch filmmakers filmed their documentary, countless charity workers and reporters had bucked the travel bans to the Delta. Some of them had tracked down and interrogated Helen Ukpabio, and when they did, she denied the existence of any street children in Akwa Ibom, saying that the very notion of abandoning one’s children was un-African. She claimed that, unlike other pastors, she didn’t even charge fifty naira for delivering witches, and when she came across one, she didn’t abuse them. She said she could deliver witches without even touching them, because the attack she made was a spiritual one. Once the possessed were delivered she sent them back to their families, where, according to her website, they lived happily ever after. It may look strange to Westerners when she prayed over child witches in that particularly ferocious way, but she would say that’s because they are naïve and they don’t know that the Devil sometimes takes the shape of a lamb. She even told a New York Times reporter that the children who had been filmed and photographed with wounds and scars from deliverance ceremonies were likely actors, and even if their wounds were real, there were many ways that children could be maimed.

Back at our usual spot at Spices, Yemi said that after all the negative attention she’d received from the international press, there was no way that Helen would consent to an interview with me. I told Yemi that I wanted to go to Akwa Ibom anyway and he shook his head, saying the Niger Delta was no-go these days—even the oil workers with their armored vans weren’t leaving their compounds anymore. A trip like that would mean hiring armed guards to escort us to and from the airport, and even then the chances of a kidnapping were probably four in ten. As we ate and drank he told me story after story of kidnappings and shootings, but when he was done I counted out ten thousand naira and put the stack of bills on the table. He looked at the pile of money and leaned back with his arms folded and his mouth puckered.

“What’s there for you?” he asked.

I picked at the label on my beer. My boyfriend, Jake, had asked me the same question when I told him I wanted to go to Akwa Ibom. Reporters had already covered the story—what would I see there that I couldn’t read about in the New York Times? I couldn’t really explain it. I tried to explain to Yemi that I had grown up believing the same thing as those pastors, thinking that there were evil spirits lurking around every corner. I could see how easy it would be for a pastor to make those children the scapegoat for everything that had gone wrong with the community, and I could imagine how hard it would be for anyone else in the congregation to defend them. I told Yemi that I’d come to Nigeria to take a good look at the church and make up my mind about it. The churches that I visited and the interviews I conducted showed me one side. But this was part of the legacy of Pentecostalism as well—a crucial part—and it wasn’t unique to Nigeria. Surveys of Americans showed that a majority of us also believed that people could be possessed by demons. So I needed to face it. I needed to see the bad along with the good.

Yemi sighed. “I’ll give you one day,” he said. “One day, one night, then we get out.”

In the week before the trip to the Delta I busied myself with more interviews and made several trips to the visa office in an effort to get my papers renewed. Mrs. Afolabi, the woman I’d met in the Atlanta airport, checked on me regularly, calling to make sure I had everything I needed and even stopping by the university to inspect my room and scold the mistress of the residence hall about the holes in my mosquito net. It was the least she could do, she said, pointing out how I’d helped her and her husband with their bags back in Atlanta.

When I finally made it out to visit them, the three of us toured their house slowly. Mrs. Afolabi pointed out the empty place in the kitchen that would soon hold the washing machine, opened her closet of Nigerian clothes for me to try on, and showed me the orange trees in the backyard, along with the herbs, some of which we could name and rename in English and Yorùbá.

We landed in a long indoor sun porch that ran across the full length of the front of the house. It was cooler there, and the electricity wasn’t working that day. Outside a group of men worked under the hot sun, digging holes to install pipes for Mrs. Afolabi’s new washing machine. Mrs. Afolabi served a plate of peeled oranges, Nigerian style—a special cut that removed the green skin and membrane from the oranges, leaving only the ripe orange fruit. Pastor Afolabi sat on one end of the porch in a house-shift, a dress-like garment Nigerian men sometimes wear while relaxing at home.

Mrs. Afolabi unwrapped her gele, an extravagant headdress, and fanned her shaved, graying hair. She disappeared and came back with a shoebox full of photographs. She lifted one after another from the shoebox and put them in my hands. We sat close as she narrated the stories behind each one. “This is my daughter’s wedding,” she said, passing me the next one. I tilted the photograph to make the thumbprints disappear and pronounced the wide-eyed girl and the delighted man “beautiful.” A few minutes later Mrs. Afolabi presented another photo—smaller than the rest, sent from the United States, where her daughter’s family now lived. It showed a bewildered boy of seven months. The Afolabis had four girls—all very successful, all but one happily wed. It was that last one who worried them a bit. She was in her forties now and it was starting to feel like she might go all of her life without knowing that special blessing God has for wives and mothers.

Pastor Afolabi asked how old I was, and they both started when I said I was thirty, protesting that I didn’t look it. “The husband will come,” Beatrice said firmly, and I smiled and said I hoped so too. I told them about Jake, thinking that it would put them at ease. The Afolabis seemed relieved to hear that he was well educated and held a good job, but Pastor Afolabi didn’t seem to like the idea that he was a boyfriend and not a fiancé. He shook his head and said I should be careful about getting too close to someone without marrying him.

The afternoon was fading, the sun hitting the south wall, and we still had a stack of photographs to get through. Then Pastor Afolabi cleared his throat and leaned forward toward me. He said that there was something he wanted to ask me one day, when the time was right, but he didn’t want to offend me. I smiled up at him and said that he could ask me anything he liked.

“I want to ask,” he said with a slight tremor in his voice, “if you’ve been able to keep yourself pure with that boyfriend of yours.”

I stuttered and blushed.

“I’m asking as a father,” he assured me, “a pastor.” He gestured to the large Bible that sat on the table beside his chair, so tattered that it appeared to be more a stack of papers than a bound book. At my side Mrs. Afolabi patted my hand supportively. I didn’t blink. As a girl I had been taught that my body was a temple, to be guarded and kept pure until I left my father’s house and devoted myself to my husband. I had been taught that it wasn’t enough to merely believe in God. You had to keep yourself pure and free of sin or stain. You had to live out that belief through the process of sanctification. To become sanctified was to become holy. Any sin or stain was a break in the compact, and would keep you separated from God. You had to watch yourself continuously because the Devil was cunning and was always looking for a way to tempt and corrupt you. A sin wasn’t just a lapse—it was a rebellion against God. The pastor knew that if I had sinned by allowing my body to be corrupted, by having sex outside of marriage—then I was vulnerable to the work of the Devil.

There was no way that I could hedge around the question or refuse to answer. The pastor told me he was asking as a pastor and a father. His eyes were kind—he must have seen it happen so many times before. A girl was weak and she opened her body to sin, stepping away from the protection of God. She left the blanket of protection and the Devil gained a foothold. That was what he wanted me to avoid. The door that, once opened, couldn’t be unlocked again. I was young and full of promise, and it was essential that I be kept pure.

I imagined how it would go if I had been honest. The pastor’s face would fall. He would be so sorry for me. If I admitted my sin, he would take my hand and pray with me, to ask the Lord for forgiveness. Our God was a stern God, but above all he was forgiving, and there was nothing that could not be redeemed.

But if I wasn’t actually sorry for it, then that would mean I was truly lost. A subtle but unmistakable distance would grow between us. The pastor’s face would curl up; he wouldn’t leave it alone. He would try to understand, try to reason with me, and present biblical evidence that I was wrong. I would refuse to accept that evidence, and the conversation would disintegrate. I would make the long trip back to the university feeling shame in every part of my body.

But I didn’t want to leave the circle. I wanted to stay here, on the warm sun porch, with these kind people, who looked at me fondly. Like a daughter. Who were pleased with me and delighted to have beliefs in common. And so I answered yes. I told the Afolabis that I had kept myself pure. But that meant slicing away the unacceptable part of myself, paring myself down so I fit into a belief system that would have otherwise scorned me. I watched Pastor Afolabi’s face loosen, and he clasped my hand and brought it toward his chest. “Thank God!” he cried with real passion. I felt as distant from him as I had felt from my mother and father the day they told me how they’d read my journal. I trained my mouth to smile and waited a reasonable length of time before stretching and saying that I’d better get back to the university before dark.

A few days later, I agreed to join the Afolabis for their Sunday service at a small, one-room Baptist church in a rural part of Ibadan. Pastor Afolabi had led the church since the early eighties, the same year the Nigerian Baptist Convention had passed a policy statement that attempted to put a stop to rapidly spreading practices like jerking or weeping while praying, shouting “Hallelujah” or “Yes!” during prayers, laying hands on people to give them the Holy Spirit, or “speaking in tongues which nobody understands or can interpret.” But most of the pastors simply ignored these new policies, as Pastor Afolabi had, or left the Baptist church for newer denominations like the Redeemed Church. Most of the Baptist churches in Nigeria now worshipped in the exuberant style that was once outlawed.

Pastor Afolabi had been retired for nearly a year and had passed the torch to a glowing young man, who on the day of my visit agreed to surrender a share of the stage so that Pastor Afolabi could introduce me to the congregation and tell them the story of our miraculous meeting in the Atlanta airport. I listened to this introduction not from the safety of my front-row seat, where I’d been tucked in next to Mrs. Afolabi, but rather from the middle of the stage, where Pastor Afolabi had strong-armed me a few minutes before. Pastor Afolabi was no longer wearing the red cableknit sweater he’d been wearing at the airport or the beige house-shift he’d had on the last time I’d seen him. Now he was a Yorùbá king, with his purple robe billowing around him in yards and yards of sequined, jeweled fabric. He held the microphone and smiled at the congregation, clearly enjoying their favor and attention. Meanwhile I stood in front of him, peering out nervously at the packed room.

“We all know whites don’t talk to each other—they don’t even look at each other, much less us—but here was this white American girl, and she came out of nowhere to help us. It was an answer to prayer.”

The new pastor sat behind him, wearing a dark suit and glossy dress shoes. He was smiling good-naturedly, and I thought it was kind of him to give Pastor Afolabi a few more minutes in the spotlight.

“Here’s the other thing,” Pastor Afolabi said, gearing up for another big revelation. “This girl, even though she has been in America all her life—even though she is almost thirty—she has kept herself pure for marriage. This girl is a virgin.”

There was nothing I could do. Pastor Afolabi was on fire. The congregation was receiving it all with perfect attention. When he finished his speech, people sprung to their feet, clapping and stomping. My face burned. At Pastor Afolabi’s prompting, the whole church stood as one body and prayed that the Lord would keep me safe in this strange country. They prayed that my boyfriend and I would find happiness and commit ourselves to one another and to God. They prayed for me to have traveling blessings on the dangerous roads here in Nigeria, as Pastor Afolabi had mentioned that I would be going to the Niger Delta next week. His announcement had been received with gasps of surprise.

When the congregation bowed their heads and raised their hands toward me, pleading with God for my safety as Pastor Afolabi led the communal prayer, I bent my head, willing myself to stop blushing, trying to receive the prayers the way they were meant, counting the seconds until I could retreat from the stage. My eyes swept out across that congregation and I knew that any of those men and women who were appealing to God on my behalf would happily take me into their homes if I asked them to. They would treat me like a sister, like a daughter, just as the Afolabis had. They saw me as a fellow believer, and my supposed purity was proof that we had a God in common. It didn’t matter that I was from a country six thousand miles away, on the other side of the world. We didn’t even need to share the same language. Our shared faith was enough to make us family. If the congregation could have peeled off my outer shell and seen the impure life that I led back home, their calls for my protection might have shifted into prayers for my repentance. But as far as they knew, I was on their side—God’s side—and so they only wished to protect me from evil in any form.