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17. Living Water: Ọ̀ṣun, Mami Wata, and Olòkún in the Lives of Four Contemporary Nigerian Christian Women
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c h a p t e r s e v e n t e e n Living Water O .̀ s .un, Mami Wata, and Olókùn in the Lives of Four Contemporary Nigerian Christian Women Mei-Mei Sanford This essay is concerned with the lives of four Nigerian Christian women for whom the water deities O .̀ s .un, Mami Wata, and Olókùn are part of religious experience at its deepest level: Yetunde, a Yoruba professor from Lagos; Iya Aladura, a Yoruba Independent Church elder; Chief Victoria Abebe, an Edo midwife; and Grace, a professor from the Niger Delta. These women claim a connection to their deities by lineage, by a revelation of divination early in life, or by a conscious choice made later in life. This water deity relationship is a source of spiritual authority that is central to these women’s identities, and that they, as Christians, manifest in their church lives. The two women with lineage connections to deities of water have searched for and found new ways to carry on their family religious responsibilities—through Western science and the institutions of the church. This study developed as a result of changes in the way I do religious ethnographic research. I began my studies of Yoruba and other Nigerian religious experience by looking past people’s Christianities and Islams, assuming that some “pure” indigenous religion existed apart from these. I didn’t pursue conversations about religion with people who told me they were Christian or Muslim. In the next phase of my work, I listened through people’s relating of their Christian and Islamic experiences, waiting to hear about the indigenous deities behind them. Often I found that they talked eventually about indigenous deities in the context of their families, their lineages, or a healing crisis. This process assumed that the object of my study was something hidden and that the surface of a person’s religious life was not as real as what lay beneath the surface. I have come to feel that both of these methods were impertinent and forced. In both cases I strained not to experience what people were presenting to me, and as a result did not recognize the significance of Christianity in the lives of many of the people I know and work with. Listening as fully as possible to people describe and formulate their own religious experience in Christian and indigenous religious language has led me to an increasing awareness of the ways that Christianity and indigenous religion co-exist, affect, and suffuse each other in people’s lives. The evidence of the women’s lives described in this paper suggest a model of multiple religious practice, sometimes called syncretism, that is not mechanistic, in which each religion is engaged not just strategically, but religiously . Also evident is the women’s agency in their lives, their religious lives, and in the religious identities they form. The Christian women with whom this essay is concerned each have a deep sense of connection with a deity of water. For some the precipitating factor was a call, a spiritual event, and for one, a deep sense of identification with a grandmother who was a priestess. The women, all between the ages of 40 and 70, had grandmothers who were indigenous religionists and healers. They all have parents who were first-generation Christians and who raised them as Christians. I am interested in how these four women continue to be Christians and integrate their relationship with the deity of water and the spiritual authority emanating from it into their lives in individual and complex ways. This essay is an exploration on an individual level, rather than an institutional one, of the interlacings of Christianities and older indigenous religions, particularly religions of the water. The research in this essay grew out of friendships I have with these four women. While these women have come to comfort and joy in their connections with the deities of the water, they do not speak about them often in their church or professional lives. Iya Aladura told me that if I had been a stranger coming into her church to ask about O .̀ s .un, she would have told me nothing. For the two women who are college professors, academia has added another layer of risk to owning “non-standard” religious experiences. For these reasons, “Grace” and “Yetunde” are pseudonyms and I refer to one woman by one of her titles, Iya Aladura. Chief Victoria...