What does the storm fomented entirely out of a “born again” king’s
tea cup tell us about our rulers, “spiritual” or “temporal?” By a
proclamation, the Olu of Warri, Ogiamen Atuwatse II, sought to abrogate
the ancestral title of Ogiamen on the ground that it implied worship of a
false god, Umalokun the Itsekiri deity of the sea. He also sought to
change the national song (anthem) and other communal rites of his
people. It was an attempt to rewrite Itsekiri history and folklore
according to the Pentateuch and the New Testament. Yet there had been no
conflict between the personal beliefs of Itsekiri monarchs and the
tenets of their monarchy, as he was promptly informed by his outraged
“subjects.”
“I solemnly confess and testify that there is only One God,” the
crusading king began his public confession of Christ as his lord and
personal saviour, seeking thereby to also make that confession on behalf
of all Itsekiris, irrespective of their individual convictions. It
happens, however, that he means the “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,
the fathers of Israel,” the “Creator of all people and things . . . all
worlds and realms, kings, thrones, dominions, principalities, powers,
seas and abyss.”
It matters little to me what religious dogma, what sacred
superstition, a person chooses to believe. After all, one goes to
“heaven” or “hell” or simply rots alone. If one person believes in an
almighty God that lives in the sky, a concept borne of the old belief in
Sun-worship — incidentally, Moses borrowed the idea from
sun-worshipping Egypt, hence the never-ending battle to impose this God
on the previously heathen and polytheistic Jews after the exodus — and
another believes in an almighty power beneath the earth, the realm of
dead-but-living ancestors, while yet another espouses no religious
convictions, all should, so to speak, have their day under the sun. The
problem arises when one superstitious, even if practical, dogma seeks to
denigrate and dominate the other.
As in the shocking instance of the Olu’s inability to distinguish
between his role as a ceremonial monarch and his personal quest for
eternal life through a foreign religion. “Render unto Caesar the things
that are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s,” Jesus
enjoined his disciples. But in his frenzy, the zealous Olu gave no ear.
Thus, no indication that he has ever thought about the proper relations
between the spiritual and the secular or that he has heard of the
doctrine of separation of state and religion. Consequently, he yearns to
be priest, prophet and king; a potentate whose personal whims and
caprices must be adopted by everyone. He could not even say, like
Joshua, to his people: “choose you this day whom ye will serve . . . as
for me and my house, we shall serve Jehovah, God of the fathers of
Israel!” With no faith in his people’s history, ethical values, or
metaphysical system, he deems them unworthy of his confidence.
He even mistakes the myths (which all nations, be they Christian,
Muslim, Bhuddist or animist, devise to explain their existence and their
societies) for verifiable history, thereby seeking to do away with the
culture and knowledge they bear. Yet, he does so by embracing wholesale
the myths of another nation! Hence, his troubling — delusional, one
might say — premise: that he was exercising his power “as a priest in
the Order of Melchizedek” and using “the authority . . . name . . . and
. . . power of the Blood of Jesus to destroy all ancient and new
altars in Iwere (Warri) land not raised up to the Lord by the laws
governing the new covenant of life in Christ.” A charitable response to
this sort of Sunday school or revival night drivel might be that the Olu
would rather be a miracle-peddling pentecostal pastor than a monarch.
For then the miracle of transformation of the king of a riverine
community in Africa into a priest of the tribe of Judah might be
understandable. Even then, one might wonder why he professes
Christianity, and not Judaism.
Still the question: why did the Olu feel compelled to publicly
renounce his history for that of another nation, to pledge his people to
“the fathers of Israel?” A king, the pious Olu ought to know,
symbolises the collective memory of his people, the “unbroken”
connection of his people to their history, to their font of being, and
to humanity at large. I do not know what DNA tests convinced Godwin
Toritseju Emiko (as he was before ascending his forefathers’ throne), a
lawyer, that he is not only a scion of Noah but, specifically, a son of
Shem who was Melchizedek.
A part of me is shamed by the price of self-abnegation that His Royal
Highness had to pay for this coveted identity. Yet there is holy
precedent for it, and on the authority of Christ no less. The gospel of
Mark at Chapter 7 tells the story of a Greek woman, and so a gentile,
who beseeched Jesus to deliver her daughter of “an unclean spirit.” But
“salvation is of the Jews” as a birthright — until it is clear that “he
came unto his own, and his own received him not”— and not for gentiles
or . . . well, dogs! “Let the children first be filled, for it is not
meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it unto the dogs,” said
Jesus. And the distraught woman? “Yes, Lord: yet the dogs under the
table eat of the children’s crumbs.” Only then does Jesus relent and
deliver her stricken daughter. “For this saying go thy way; the devil is
gone out of thy daughter,” said Jesus.
I doubt that Ogiamen Atuwatse II sees himself as a dog foraging for
the crumbs of the bread meant for the children of Israel. If perchance
he does, he is sure to count it his singular blessing to be “saved” by
the crumbs dropped by Shem/Melchizedek. How unlucky he must feel to be a
king in benighted Iwere, far from “the Promised Land!”
Saharareporters
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has written an open letter
asking customers to stop bringing guns into his 7,000 coffee shops —
just two days after a man who had been enlisted in the Naval Reserves
allegedly shot and killed 12 people at Washington DC, Navy Yard. 
