The Shadow of the Sun

Behold, the Lord Rideth upon a Swift Cloud

When I entered, the interior was already filled by a throng of the faithful. All were kneeling, motionless on simple, backless benches. Their heads were bowed and their eyes were closed. There was total silence.

“They are confessing their sins and humbling themselves before God, so as to lessen His anger,” whispered the parishioner who had earlier arranged permission for me to enter and who now accompanied me.

We were in the city of Port Harcourt, situated in the hot and humid Niger delta. The temple belonged to a congregation called the Church of the Faith of the Apostles, one of the several hundred Christian sects active in southern Nigeria. The Sunday mass was about to begin.

It is not easy for an outsider to gain admittance to such a rite. I had tried my luck to no avail in other towns and with other congregations (I am using terms interchangeably here — sect, congregation, gathering, church — because they are used this way in Africa). The sects engage in a politics characterized by a certain contradiction: on the one hand, each tries to have as many adherents as possible, but on the other makes acceptance a long and painstaking procedure, with extremely careful screening and selection. This is the consequence not only of doctrinal demands; there are also important economic reasons. The majority of these sects have their headquarters in the United States, in the Antilles and the Caribbean, or in Great Britain. It is from there that donations of money as well as medical and educational assistance flow to the African affiliates.That is why, in indigent Africa, there is no end to those who want to join a sect. But the sects are intent on their followers having suitable social and material standing. The poor and the down-and-out are not admitted. There are many thousands of these congregations in Africa, and millions of members.

I looked around the interior of the temple. It was a spacious, sprawling hall, resembling a great hangar. The walls had wide grilles, so that fresh air could enter and the breeze offer some relief, all the more important given the corrugated tin roof, warmed by the sun. I didn’t notice an altar anywhere. There were also no sculptures or paintings. An orchestra several dozen strong, however, with large brass and percussion sections, stood on an elevated platform near the presbytery, and right behind it, on the uppermost level, a mixed choir dressed in black. The center of the proscenium was occupied by a massive mahogany pulpit.

The priest who now stepped up to it was a graying, heavy Nigerian, perhaps over fifty. He leaned his hands on the edge of the pulpit and looked at the faithful. They had raised themselves by now from their kneeling position and were sitting, watching him attentively.

The proceedings began with the choir singing the fragment of the prophecies of Isaiah in which God announces that he will punish the Egyptians with a great drought:

Behold, the Lord rideth upon a swift cloud and shall come into Egypt: and the idols of Egypt shall be moved…

And the waters shall fail from the sea, and the river shall be wasted and dried up.

And they shall turn the rivers far away; and the brooks of defence shall be emptied and dried up: the reeds and flags shall wither.

The paper reeds by the brooks, by the mouth of the brooks, and every thing sown by the brooks, shall wither, be driven away, and be no more.

The fishers also shall mourn, and all they that cast angle into the brooks shall lament, and they that spread nets upon the waters shall languish.

If the goal was to instill anxiety and dread in the faithful, to evoke the atmosphere of Apocalypse, the text was aptly chosen. For these were local people, from the land upon which the mighty Niger splits into dozens of smaller rivers, into numerous twisting branches and canals, creating Africa’s largest delta. This watery net has given them sustenance for generations, and the biblical vision of drying and disappearing rivers was bound to awaken in those gathered the direst forebodings and fears.

The priest now opened the large Bible bound in red leather, paused for a long while, then started to read:

Moreover the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Jeremiah, what seest thou? And I said, I see a rod of an almond tree.

He looked at the assembled and continued reading:

And the word of the Lord came unto me the second time, saying, What seest thou? And I said, I see a seething pot…

Thou therefore gird up thy loins, and arise, and speak unto them all that I command thee: be not dismayed at their faces…

He laid the Bible aside and, pointing at the congregation, shouted: “And I am not dismayed at your faces! I did not come here to be afraid of you, but to tell you the truth and to cleanse you!”

From the very first moments of his sermon, from the first words and sentences, he was in high gear, brimming with accusations, anger, irony, and fury. He continued: “Above all else, the Christian must be clean. Internally clean. And are you all clean? Are you clean?” He motioned somewhere toward the back of the hall, but because he didn’t actually single out any one person, a whole group of people standing there cringed guiltily, as if they had been caught in the act.

“And perhaps you consider yourself to be clean?” He moved his finger, pointing at another place in the hall, and now the people standing there cowered and hid their faces in embarrassment.

“No, you are not clean! You have a long way to go before you are clean! None of you are clean!” He said this categorically and almost triumphantly. Just then the orchestra blared, the trumpets, trombones, cornets, and horns roared. They were accompanied by the dull thud of drums and the chaotic moaning of the choir.

“And you probably think that you are Christians!” he exclaimed after a moment, mockingly. “I can swear that is what you think. That you are certain of this. Each one of you walks around, proudly sticking out his chest and announcing: ‘I am a Christian! Look at me, look and admire — now here is a Christian! A true one, so true, there isn’t a truer one in the world!’ That is how you think. I know you well. A Christian! Ha! ha! ha! ha!”—he burst into loud, nervous, scathing laughter, so suggestive that the atmosphere in the hall began to communicate itself to me, and I felt shivers running up and down my spine.

The people stood there bewildered, crestfallen, condemned. Who were they, if they couldn’t be considered Christians? What were they supposed to be, where were they supposed to go? Each of the priest’s utterances brought them lower, reduced them to dust. Standing in the middle of this rapt, emotional, terrified crowd, it would have been unseemly of me to observe them too openly and obviously. It sufficed that I was white; that alone drew attention. But out of the corner of my eye I could see that the women standing next to me had beads of sweat on their brows, and that their hands, which were folded on their breasts, were trembling. Perhaps what they were most fearful of was the priest pointing at any one of them individually, destroying their reputations, denying them the right to call themselves Christians. The priest had enormous, hypnotic power over them, and the authority to mete out the most heartless, severe judgments.

“Do you know what it means to be a Christian?” he asked. The audience, which until now had been standing still, dejected and humbled, stirred, expecting to hear an answer, some advice, a helpful recipe or definition. “Do you know what it means?” he repeated, and one could sense the tension rising among the faithful. But before they were able to hear the reply, the orchestra resounded once again. The tubas, bassoons, and saxophones thundered. Drums beat and rumbled. The priest sat down in an armchair, leaned his head on his hands, and rested. The orchestra fell silent. The priest rose again.

“To be a Christian,” he said, “means to hear within yourself the voice of the Lord. To hear the Lord asking, ‘Jeremiah, what seest thou?’ ”

After the word “Lord,” the congregation started to sing:

Oh, Lord,

You are my Lord,

Oh, yes,

Oh, yes, yes, yes,

Oh, yes,

You are my Lord.

They began rhythmically rocking and undulating, and billows of brick dust rose from the floor. Then everyone sang the psalm “Praise the Lord on loud cymbals…”

The tension diminished somewhat, the mood mellowed, and people loosened up a bit, breathed easier. But only for a brief moment, because soon the priest spoke again:

“But you cannot hear the voice of the Lord. Your ears are plugged up. Your eyes do not see. Because there is sin in them. And sin renders you deaf and blind.”

Absolute silence descended. The only ones now moving in the hall full of people sitting motionless — but moving carefully, almost on tiptoe — were a number of young, strong, well-built men. They wore identical dark suits, white shirts, and black ties. I had counted twenty of them earlier, at the gate leading into the churchyard: they were checking who was arriving. Then, right before the mass, they spread out through the hall and took up positions near the pews, in such a way that each of them could observe a different sector of the temple. Observe, intervene, lead. Their gestures, their whole behavior, were characterized by absolute concentration and decisiveness. No African muddling or lolling about here. On the contrary — efficiency, attentiveness, alacrity. They were in control of the situation, and one sensed that that was their mission.

The silence after the priest informed them that the road to the Christian ideal is blocked by sin, which they carry within themselves and commit continually by the mere fact of their own existence, sprung from a profound source. The members of the congregation belonged to the Ibo tribe, and the traditional religion of the Ibo, like that of the majority of African communities, does not know the concept of sin. The African belief system has a radically different understanding of guilt from that espoused by Christian theology. In Africa, the notion of metaphysical, abstract evil — evil in and of itself — does not exist. A deed first becomes evil when it is discovered, and, second, when the community or the individual declares it to be evil. Moreover, the criterion here is not axiomatic, but practical, concrete: that which does harm to others is evil. Evil intentions do not exist, because evil is not evil until it materializes, assumes an active form. There are only evil actions.

If I wish illness upon my enemy, I am doing nothing wrong, committing no sin. Only when my enemy actually falls ill can I be accused of an evil deed: of sowing the seeds of illness in him (illnesses here are not believed to have biological causes, but to result from spells cast by one’s adversaries).

But perhaps most important, undiscovered evil is not evil, and therefore does not give rise to a feeling of guilt. I can cheat with a clean conscience until someone realizes that he is being cheated and points a finger at me. The Christian tradition, on the other hand, internalizes guilt: our soul aches, our conscience torments us, we are plagued by worries. That is the state in which we experience the full weight of sin, its stinging presence, its harrowing intrusiveness. It is different in societies in which the individual does not exist in and of himself, but only as part of a collective. The collective relieves us of private responsibility, therefore there is no individual guilt, and by the same token no sensation of having sinned. Awareness of sin takes place in time: I did something wrong, I feel that I committed a sin, I am tortured by this, and I look for a way to cleanse myself, to atone, to confess — to erase the sin. This is a process, and it requires the passage of time to unfold. To the African mind, this time simply does not exist; there is no space for sin and its consequences. Either I have not done anything wrong, since I was not found out, or else, if the evil is brought to light, it is at the very same moment, instantly, punished — and thus purged. Guilt and punishment go hand in hand here, form an inseparable unit, with no open space between them, no chink. In the African tradition, the conflicts and drama of Raskolnikov are an impossibility.

“Sin makes you deaf and blind,” the priest repeated for emphasis. His voice started to tremble slightly. “But do you know what awaits those who do not hear and do not see? Who think they can live at a distance from the Lord?”

He reached again for the Bible, and lifting one arm up high, as if it were the antenna along which the word of the Lord would flow down from the heavens, called out:

Then said the Lord unto me…. cast them out of my sight, and let them go forth.

And it shall come to pass, if they say unto thee, Whither shall we go forth? then thou shalt tell them…. Such as are for death, to death; and such as are for the sword, to the sword; and such as are for the famine, to the famine; and such as are for the captivity, to the captivity.

And I will appoint over them four kinds, saith the Lord: the sword to slay, and the dogs to tear, and the fowls of the heaven, and the beasts of the earth, to devour and destroy.

The drums boomed hollowly. But the choir and the orchestra were silent. Then, all was quiet. The congregation stood still, their faces lifted high. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed sweat pouring down. And I saw tense strained features, taut necks, hands stretched upward in a dramatic gesture that was partly a plea for salvation, partly an instinctive form of self-defense, as if in anticipation of a huge boulder that any moment now would come crashing down.

It occurred to me that the participants at this mass must be experiencing an inner conflict, maybe even a drama, although I wasn’t sure to what degree they would be conscious of it. They were for the most part young people from an industrial African town — the new Nigerian middle class. They belonged to a social group modeling itself on European and American elites, whose culture is essentially Christian. They wanted to familiarize themselves with this culture and this faith, get a feel for their nature, identify with them. So they joined one of the Christian congregations, which accepted them while at the same time imposing upon them doctrinal and ethical requirements alien to their native traditions. One of these was instruction in sin, a type of transgression and burden about which they knew nothing. As followers of the new faith, they now had to acknowledge the presence of sin, had to swallow that bitter, repugnant pill. And also to search immediately for ways to uproot it from their being — to become true, pure Christians. Relentlessly, the priest was hammering home the great and painful price they would have to pay. Hence the nature of his sermon: threats, humiliation. And they, for their part, fervidly accepted their status as sinners weighed down by the greatest of trespasses, were duly frightened by the specter of imminent infernal punishment, ready at a moment’s notice to don sackcloth and ashes.

Their eager submission to all the priest’s charges, grumblings, and accusations proved they considered this a price worth paying for the right to be in the church. The Ibo fear loneliness, regarding it as a curse and a condemnation. Here, they could participate in rites that gave them a sense of community, of belonging. And perhaps something greater still: many African societies have given rise to secret associations, a type of ethnic Freemasonry — secretive, closed, yet important and influential. Sects in Africa often try to model themselves on these traditional institutions, creating an atmosphere of secrecy and exclusivity, instituting their own system of signs and slogans, a distinct liturgy.

To avoid the rudeness of scrutinizing the hall during the service, I did not so much observe as intuit much of what was going on. I had within the scope of my vision only those standing closest to me. I was unable to see the others, but their presence was palpable: the atmosphere of this congregation was so concentrated, so full of vibrant, ecstatic emotion, so pervasive and poignant, that it couldn’t but penetrate and affect everyone. There was so much spontaneity, abandonment, and feeling in these people, so much ardent desire and quivering will and freely expressed sentiment, that one could deduce and comprehend everything that was going on behind one’s back, even far away.

As I was walking toward the exit at the end of the mass, I had to step carefully, because the crowd, their faces concealed from prying eyes, was again kneeling motionless. It was completely silent. The choir was not singing, the orchestra was not playing. The priest stood on the pulpit, tired and depleted, his eyes closed, saying nothing.