The End-Time Army: Charismatic Movements in Modern Nigeria (review)

As John Peel observes in the foreword to this work, Matthew Ojo pioneered the study of charismatic movements and early Pentecostalism when most scholars still focused on aspects of Aladura/African Instituted Churches. Inspired by the works of Harold Turner and John Peel in the 1960s, and responding to the undisguised consternation of mainline churches at the rapid growth of the indigenous churches, scholars missed the flowering of charismatic movements among the youth. Deploying an encapsulation strategy, the former Archbishop of Onitsha, Cardinal Francis Arinze, sought to counter the Aladura influence by posting one of his priests, Father Ikeobi, to hold charismatic-like prayers on Tuesdays. Little did he know that there was a powerful Tuesday Group in the University of Ibadan that was radicalizing the Inter-Varsity Christian Union which had broken away from the Student Christian Movement. The group promoted the Baptism of the Spirit which became a cardinal feature of the new movement.

When scholars caught up with the movement, its character—which changed in every decade—was responding to the surging American electronic mass media in the 1980s. The late Benson Idahosa and a new class of professionally and highly educated leadership reshaped the face of Nigerian Pentecostalism. But this period was near what Francis Fukuyama termed the end of history—the victory of capitalism and liberal democracy. In the midst of globalization, sociologists dominated the analysis, pushed historians aside, and deployed various shades of instrumentalist analysis to privilege the appropriation of the “resources of externality.” The religious dimension became mooted in the welter of rational choice theories and market economy perspectives. Nigerian Pentecostalism was imaged as an extension of the American electronic church—a crossless Christianity that was fascinated with a “prosperity gospel.”

Ojo’s work is important as a detailed historical reconstruction of the early beginnings, showing that neither the Student Christian Movement nor the Scripture Union catalyzed the charismatic movement. He recovers the religious discourse to explain how the radicalized youth first supplanted the SCM and formed the Inter-Varsity Christian Union and then started a fight within the IVCU to privilege the born-again experience. He does not ignore how external evangelists came to minister and share their literature among speaking-in-tongues, spirit-filled believers. Ojo meticulously traces the development of the movement in both urban and rural contexts; he attends to its doctrines, liturgy, practices, political stance, passion for evangelism, and puritan ethics—including the socioeconomic backdrop to the rise and development of the movement.

This book concentrates on the charismatic movement in western Nigeria among the author’s own people, the Yoruba, and within the institutions of higher learning located in that region of Nigeria. Occasionally he mentions the evangelistic excursion of some of the charismatic youth from eastern Nigeria, but he does not write the story of this revival movement that started in the 1960s. Elaborating on a chapter in my book, The Embattled Gods: The Christianization of Igboland, 1841–1991 (Africa World Press, 1996), Richard Burgess recovered the story of the revival in a doctoral dissertation (“The Civil War Revival and Its Pentecostal Progeny: A Religious Movement among the Igbo People of Eastern Nigeria,” University of Birmingham, 2001); since then a number of doctoral dissertations have followed from the University of Nigeria-Nsukka on a variety of themes: on the Idahosa factor; on the role of Pa Ezeigbo (one of five young men who spoke in tongues in 1934 and invited the Assemblies of God into Nigeria in 1939); and on the Catholic Renewal Movement. Ojo himself has broadened his research on the expansion of the early charismatic movement into Muslim northern Nigeria, its missionary spread throughout Francophone West Africa, and its links with the Ghanaian charismatic movement.

This book is foundational. It is lucid with good illustrations.