A Yoruba Tale of Marriage, Magic, Misogyny and Love

A YORUBA TALE OF MARRIAGE, MAGIC, MISOGYNY
AND LOVE
by
MARC SCHILTZ
(The Queen’s University of Belfast)
ABSTRACT
In this paper I approach the eZorescence of witchcraft-sorcery concerns in post-

colonial Africa through the personal experiences of Délé, a Nigerian friend and
research assistant. At one level, the witchcraft-sorcery incidents oVer illustrations
of the rural-urban con ict situations that the ComaroVs and other Africanists have
written about in recent years. Yet at another level I read Délé’s texts for what
they are, the chronicles of a real-life drama in which he plays the tragic hero’s
role. As a storyteller, Délé recalls events in which the actors’ virtues, vices, and
emotions constantly mirror our own experiences of what people can turn out to
be as they progress through life. In Délé’s case I perceive such a progression in
his shift from a virtue-centred Catholic upbringing in rural Ìs!éyìn to a more
prayer/power-centred aládúrà-Pentecostalism in Lagos, when recently the spectres
of mágùn sorcery and witchcraft began to close in on his marriage, livelihood and
health. Délé’s tale compels me, as a friend and correspondent with a diVerent
view of the world, to reconsider the morally universalising aspects of what it entails
to be human. I attempt this from the triple perspective of Délé’s ancestral roots
in traditional Yoruba religion, his attraction towards aládúrà-Pentecostalism in a
failed nation-state, and his nostalgia for the missionary Catholicism through which
our friendship rst developed.
Introduction
The eZorescence of witchcraft and sorcery in postcolonial Africa has
stimulated considerable research among anthropologists in recent years
(see, for example, ComaroV & ComaroV 1993; Colson 2000; Geschiere
1997; Rowlands & Warnier 1988; Parish 2000; Singleton 1990-91).
Unlike earlier studies, which tended to focus narrowly on the tradi-
tional, pre-Christian socio-cultural factors underpinning witchcraft con-
cerns among rural African populations, current approaches seek to
interpret the attending beliefs as precipitates of the power relations
of postcolonial systems (Colson 2000: 333). If, then, the forces of
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2002 Journal of Religion in Africa, 32.3

Also available online – www.brill.nl
336 Marc Schiltz
modernisation function as catalysts for the current growth of witchcraft-

sorcery beliefs in both rural and urban contexts, and even further a eld
among African diasporas in Europe and America, we must take a fresh
look at these national and transnational precipitates, and examine how
they construct new social discourses on such topics as misfortune, envy,
power and the moral economy. Keeping in mind that the plausibility
of any local discourse on witchcraft-sorcery derives from an emotional
charge of the relationship between the aggrieved and the agents of
misfortune, our alertness to the macro-transnational dimensions of these
phenomena implies that we can no longer view them as mere periph-
eral blots on the African social landscape. Instead, the destructive de-
sires that witchcraft fears evoke are, as the ComaroVs (1993: xxix) point
out, disconcertingly real, violent and integral to the discourse on
modernisation.
Concomitant with these phenomena, there has been an upsurge of
faith-healing and Pentecostal churches (Maxwell 1998) for which div-
ination through the gifts of prophecy, speaking in tongues and posses-
sion by the Holy Spirit, combined with an unwavering faith in the
power of prayer, oVer a Christian riposte where the missionary churches
had turned a deaf ear to indigenous discourses on witchcraft-sorcery
and divination. Peel’s (1968) pioneering monograph, Aládúrà: A Religious
Movement among the Yoruba, is still one of the few sociological studies of
these indigenous churches, which in the last twenty years have been
proliferating at a striking rate in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa. Peel’s
book focused on the organisation and teachings of these Yoruba churches
in contrast to the missionary churches from which they had originated.
However, Marshall-Fratani’s (1999) recent ndings in the city of Ibadan
indicate that the Pentecostal movement’s success now lies in oVering
the image of an alternative road to modernity from that provided by
the Nigerian state, which is paved with broken promises. Unfortunately,
students of religion in Yorubaland are still so enthralled by what remains
of the ancestral cults of the òrì§à gods and goddesses that they have
tended to ignore or neglect this Pentecostal movement. As further evi-
dence of its importance, the movement today also nurtures the young
zealots who have been embroiled in bloody clashes with Muslim jihadists
in Lagos, Kaduna and other ashpoints in Nigeria (Marshall-Fratani
2001; Schiltz 1999; Maier 2002). Yet even the ComaroVs’ (1993) recent
collection on modernity’s malcontents in Africa fails to include within
the malcontents’ ranks these Christian soldiers.
In this paper I approach this increased prominence of witchcraft-
sorcery fears and the attraction of Pentecostal Christianity through the
A Yoruba Tale of Marriage, Magic, Misogyny and Love 337
personal experiences of Délé Adébísí, a long-time Nigerian friend whom

I rst knew in the rural town of Ìs!éyìn in 1972.1 From one perspec-
tive, his accounts of the witchcraft-sorcery incidents that ll the pages
of his memoirs, eld-notes and letters to me in the past quarter-century
contain an abundance of what one may call text-book illustrations
of Yoruba people’s representation of evil and its mystical and human
agencies in the modern world. From another perspective, however, I
read Délé’s texts for what he wants me to know about himself and the
world around him. As an author in his own right, he chronicles a real-
life drama in which he plays the tragic hero’s part, picking his way
and aided by his faith in God, in an attempt to thwart his rivals and
all of Satan’s minions.2 Thus, unlike the discourse of the anthropolo-
gist, for whom ethnographic vignettes are the primary data for expli-
cating a collective phenomenon like witchcraft-sorcery, Délé’s discourse
concerns primarily himself. What he wants me to know is how he lives
his life and how he confronts the dangerous powers of the occult. For
him, the reality and lethal eYcacy of witchcraft-sorcery are beyond
questioning, in so far as they reveal themselves through their victims.
The logic of such reasoning is aptly captured in the Yoruba syllogism:
The witch shrieked out yesterday, àjé$ ké l’àná
the child died today, )om)o kú l’òní yí,
who does not know that yesterday’s witch tani kò m)ò pé àj)é àná
devoured today’s child. l’ó pa )om)o òní j)e.
What I must emphasise from the outset is that Délé speaks to me

not just as an informant who imparts ethnographic knowledge, but as
one who experiences the world around him—including me—as a moral
universe. The events and situations that he describes are accounts of
human relationships in which he portrays the protagonists as motivated
agents who are accountable for their actions. Their moral bre is con-
stantly under scrutiny until made visible in the outcome of their actions,
especially in relation to Délé’s own progress. No doubt these assess-
ments of other people’s vices and virtues sound highly subjective and
often paranoid. On the other hand, as a keen observer of human rela-
tionships and people’s feelings, foibles and intentionalities, Délé re ects
critically on the world to the point where his thoughts transcend the
particularities of the local Nigerian environment in which he lives. What
he recalls are events and the parts played in them by himself and other
actors whose feelings and disposition often mirror experiences of what
people—whether in Nigeria or elsewhere —are like, or can become as
they progress in life. In Délé’s own case, I note this progression espe-
cially in his shift from the virtue-centred (liberal) mission Catholicism
338 Marc Schiltz
in which he grew up in rural Ìs#éyìn, to a more faith/power-centred

(prophetic) Pentecostalism in the human jungle of Lagos, when in the
early 1990s the spectres of sorcery and witchcraft had closed in on his
marriage, livelihood and health.
In what follows, I start my reading of Délé’s tale of marriage, magic,
misogyny and love at the time of this marriage crisis, and retrace in
the light of this traumatic experience how the twin lethal themes of
mágùn sorcery and witchcraft had informed his writings since the begin-
ning of our collaboration in the mid-1970s. That the chickens should
have come home to roost at that time was perplexing. When I visited
Nigeria again in the late 1980s, Délé and his wife Felicia had struck
me as an exceptionally well-matched couple. Moreover, in his more
introspective writings of that period, in his backward stance on his che-
quered career, Délé had expressed the wisdom of one at peace with
life and also with his wife, whom he praised for her unfaltering virtue
of constancy. What I read into Délé’s account is that in his view the
marital storm he and Felicia ran into shortly afterwards, and the scars
it left on their relationship, are less the result of their own failures as
the evil intent of others who wanted to wreck their success and hap-
piness. This raises many questions: who were these malevolent agents,
what precipitates activated them, and how did they blight Délé’s and
Felicia’s relationship?
Marriage and the spectre of mágùn

Délé and Felicia had settled in Lagos shortly after the birth of their
rst son in 1978. Like other rural migrants, they lived an intense social
life, experiencing the vicissitudes of making a living and raising a fam-
ily. When their marriage started heading for the rocks in the early
1990s, they had hit very hard times nancially. It was during that stress-
ful period that Délé confronted the spectre of mágùn sorcery. In a dream
one night he saw Felicia enter the room of the man who eighteen years
earlier had fathered her rst child, Àdùk#é. Délé woke up in fear of his
life and immediately warned Felicia of the terrible danger of mágùn to
which she would expose him if she visited her ex-lover.
Indeed, mágùn—which literally means ‘do not mount/fuck’—has the
dubious reputation of being one of the most lethal of Yoruba jùjú (black
medicines).3 Several authors (Lucas 1948; Fádíp#é 1970; Buckley 1985;
Abraham 1959; Láoyè 1974) have described it as a magic drug which
a man secretly puts on a woman to ensure that the rst man who has
sex with her will die. Only the babaláwo herbalists who have been ini-
tiated into the mysteries of Ifá, the Yoruba god of divination, know
the secret of mágùn. According to Tìmì Láoyè (1974), the late king of
# d#e, it was in Ab)éòkúta in the early part of the 19th century that the
E
babaláwo herbalists rst procured mágùn to enable cuckolded husbands
to curb wifely in delity. But, as Láoyè admits, when acquired by an
adulterer mágùn is equally capable of killing a cuckold. And if no man
has sex with the woman, who is unaware of having been infected with
mágùn, the jùjú would kill the woman herself within seven days.4
The rst time Délé dropped a hint about his marital troubles was
in 1993, when he wrote to me in Minnesota. ‘Satan has touched my
family with his nger ( f)ow)ókàn)’, he wrote:
Thank God we have overcome it with strong prayer . . . It is like this: if a man
is praying to God that he may be spared from Satan, but the man is married,
then he and Satan are eating from the same dish. I will tell you how this came
about later.
This news came as a great surprise, but it was another two years
before Délé sent me a ten-page account of the crisis that the ominous
dream episode had brought to the open. By then Délé could reassure
me that their problems had been sorted out somehow, and ‘everything
is now in the cooler.’ Nevertheless, his detailed account of the roots of
the crisis, and the unfortunate circumstances that had brought it to a
head, showed how important it was for him that I should know what
was behind the arguments between him and Felicia. After all I had
been their unwitting matchmaker two decades earlier, when he had
fallen in love with Felicia on the occasion of a visit to me in Ìgànná.
Already at that time, in the 1970s, Délé’s eld diaries included sev-
eral reports of men who had fallen victim to mágùn sorcery, allegedly
at the hands of husbands whose wives they had seduced. Interestingly,
in his 1995 account of how he had come face to face with mágùn, he
primed me rst by reporting the sudden death of Akínl)éy)e, a mutual
friend of ours. ‘Mr Akínl)éy)e is dead. He died of mágùn’, he blurted out.
This came as a shock to me, but no doubt that is how Délé wanted
me to react, to drive home how lethal mágùn was. He did not spare
me any of the lurid details of our friend’s ignominious death. This was
Délé’s report:
Mr Akínl)éy)e, the retired teacher from Ilérò and father of twins, had a girlfriend
in Òkèhò. She too was married with several children, but because of her aVairs
with other men, her husband had sent her back to her natal compound. There
she kept a room for the pleasure of her boyfriends. Mr Akínl)éy)e was one of them.
One morning after the woman had spent the night with one of her lovers, her
estranged husband stopped by to discuss some matter concerning their youngest
340 Marc Schiltz
child who was still in her care. When he knocked on the door, she stepped out-
side to talk to him. The boyfriend inside wondered why the husband had come,
and he immediately suspected that the man still had a sexual interest in her.
Instead of asking for an explanation, he made up his mind to do away with the
husband. So, shortly afterwards he got up and excused himself, saying that he had
some urgent business at home but would be back soon.
When he returned he brought with him the jùjú which is mágùn. Then when she
went outside to wash, he quickly put the jùjú down on the threshold of her room
so that, unbeknown to her, the mágùn infected her the very moment when she
entered her room. While she put on her makeup, he stealthily retrieved his med-
icine, put it in his pocket and left, rmly convinced that the husband was going
to die and that no other man would be his rival.
Shortly afterwards, at around 9 a.m., Mr Akínl)éy)e dropped by to see his girl-
friend. After greeting the people in the house, the woman welcomed him into her
room. Thus Mr Akínl)éy)e entered the trap that ended his life. He somersaulted
three times and was gone to the home of no return.
The woman then panicked. She put Akínl)éy)e’s trousers back on, but in her con-
fusion she put them on back to front. She ran out and bought some bean cakes
and maize gruel in the market, because she did not know how otherwise to break
the news of what had happened. When she re-entered the house she started to
scream, telling everyone that the visitor who had come to greet her, and for whom
she had gone out to buy food, had suddenly died while she was out at the mar-
ket. They all rushed inside the room. They knew immediately that it was mágùn
that had killed Akínl)éy)e.
When the police came to investigate the incident they were surprised to see the
condition of Akínl)éy)e ’s trousers, and also of his penis, which had remained erect.5
They ordered the woman to undress, and called a photographer to take a picture
of her holding Akínl)éy)e’s penis, as proof that she was the one who had killed him.
When Akínl)éy)e ’s family was informed of his death they asked the police to leave
the woman alone, as they did not want a court case, knowing all too well that
what their kinsman liked most was what had killed him. They were quite correct,
because Akínl)éy)e liked other men’s wives very much.
However, the woman and her boyfriend were not spared by the law of the king
of Òkèhò, who ordered them to leave and never set foot in his town again. We
were told that the man confessed, saying that he did not even know that Akínl)éy)e
too was the woman’s boyfriend, and that the reason why he did the thing was
because of the estranged husband. Anyway he is the one who confessed. As for
Akínl)éy)e , the father of twins, that is how he ended his own life.
What seemed to bother Délé most was the other boyfriend’s confes-
sion—ostensibly based on hearsay, since Délé was in Lagos when our
friend died in Òkèhò—that he had wanted to kill the husband because
he considered him to be his rival. The Akínl)éy)e case was also a reminder
that there were still babaláwo who procured mágùn, not only to cuck-
olds but also to wife-stealers. In other words, Délé’s real fear was that
if Felicia visited her ex-lover in Òkèhò, on the pretext that she needed
his help for paying their daughter’s school fees, the man might secretly
‘infect’ her with mágùn in order to kill him.
What remains less clear, however, is whether, prior to the ominous

dream vision of 1993, Délé had nurtured fears that one day Felicia
might want to renew contact with her ex-lover, thus putting him at
risk of mágùn revenge. I raise this question because in all of Délé’s writ-
ings over many years I nd no evidence that the thought ever occurred
to him. Yet after reading his recent lengthy missive, in which he reca-
pitulated with new disclosures the history of how he had started his
relationship with Felicia, I am led to believe that the spectre of mágùn
had been in the back of his mind all along.
Love at rst sight put to the test

The story of how he met and eventually married Felicia featured as
a kind of denouement to the rst part of Délé’s life story, which coin-
cided with my eldwork in Ìgànná in the mid-1970s. When he sent
me the manuscript in 1983 during my stay in Papua New Guinea, I
was glad to learn that his work for me had earned him not only some
cash but also a wife and a new life.
His rst decisive encounter with Felicia occurred one afternoon when
a teacher friend had invited him to an inter-school sports day in Ìgànná.
Délé was then a twenty-six-year-old bachelor, actively dating girls, while
Felicia was a sixteen-year-old nalist at the Ansar-U-Deen school in
Òkèhò, hoping to move to secondary school the following year.
‘While I sat there among the invited guests’, Délé recalled,
I kept wondering whether God might perhaps provide me with one of the lovely
girls that day. What I did not know was that God was listening to my prayer.
While the record player entertained us with Jùjú music by Sunny Adé, I spotted
one very beautiful girl who was dancing with the other girls. I was all the time
eyeing her, but she never once looked in my direction.
When the whistle blew all the pupils moved to the race track. For us there were
refreshments, but I was not interested in soft drinks. Instead I was totally absorbed
in watching the girl that my eye had caught earlier on. She proved to be a good
athlete. She came rst in every race and won many prizes.
Clearly Délé was smitten, and, though he already held hopes of a

marriage made in heaven, he soon learned that God had not yet
removed various major hurdles between him and his dream girl. Finding
out that she was a nominal Muslim 6 called Fatima (later changed to
Felicia) was relatively easy. But his rst attempts at irting with her
got him into trouble immediately, rst with her mother and then with
a married man to whom she had promised to become second wife.
Délé, however, was too infatuated with Felicia to take no for an
answer. ‘I thought to myself ’, he wrote,
342 Marc Schiltz
That since my rival was already married, I was not going to give up so easily. In
fact this information strengthened my resolve to befriend the girl and make her
mine. . . .
My dear brothers and sisters, as love can be very powerful and blind, I could not
stay away from my beloved’s house for long.
These heartfelt words of Délé’s, which might have been lifted from
some romantic novel,7 did eventually yield what he had hoped, though
not without some initial bitter disappointments. ‘One evening in the
king’s market’, he continued,
I heard a voice whisper behind me, ‘brother, brother!’ At rst I ignored the call
thinking that it was some silly girl who under the cover of darkness wanted to
draw a boy’s attention. But when I heard the voice again and looked back, I saw
to my surprise that Felicia was coming towards me. We chatted cheerfully and
before we parted she gave me a bag of roasted peanuts.
In Délé’s eyes, this present could only mean that she loved him too.
However, his aunt, who lived in Òkèhò, failed to share his enthusiasm.
As we shall see, she must have heard rumours that had not reached
his ears.
Indeed, the period of bliss following the encounter in the market did
not last long, because ‘some time later’, Délé wrote, ‘I discovered that
Felicia was pregnant. For a while I continued to visit her, but the truth
is I felt shattered. The ardent love that had drawn me to her had sud-
denly evaporated, and I no longer wished to marry her.’ From his
account at the time, as well as from his more recent disclosures, one
can see that he entered Felicia’s life at a time when her life was in a
mess because of an unwanted pregnancy. According to Délé’s aunt, the
cause of it all was Felicia’s interfering mother, who was hoping to trap
lovesick Délé as an amenable husband for her daughter. Still, the ques-
tion remains whether Felicia had responded to Délé’s advances out of
love or simply because it seemed convenient in her hour of distress.
Though I never put the question to Felicia, I have good reason to
believe that from the outset she must have felt quite genuinely attracted
to someone as engaging and earnest as Délé. Also, over the years their
love did carry them through many diYculties, while the marriages of
many of their age-mates ended in divorce.
Délé rst met Felicia’s ex-lover—who not so long ago had caused
him so much mágùn anguish—in August 1975, shortly after she had
given birth to her daughter, Àdùk#é. He was a motor mechanic from
*Òy)ó who had set up a repair shop in Òkèhò. When Délé challenged
him about Felicia’s baby, he denied being the father.
Later Felicia went to the secondary modern school in Òkèhò and
left baby Àdùk#é in the care of her mother. Délé, for his part, after my
return to London had refocused his attention on his own pursuits in

Ìs#éyìn. He courted a few girls but nothing came of these relationships.
Feeling depressed, he consulted an aládúrà prophet as well as a babaláwo,
but both diviners concurred in telling him—independently of each
other—that none of the girls would have been right for him, and that
he should exercise patience.
Indeed, after two years a major turning point in his life occurred.
Following a chance encounter with Felicia and her mother at the bus
stop in Òkèhò, his friend, Dúró, took it upon himself to broker a
reunion. After the long cooling oV period, both suddenly realised that
they wanted to start again. ‘What actually speeded up our becoming
husband and wife’, Délé wrote afterwards, ‘was the birth of our rst
child in 1978. That is what love did to us, and you readers must not
blame me for this—or will you?’
Bad debts and the witchcraft-sorcery fears of small-town life soon
drove Délé to Lagos. His struggles to make a living there have con-
tinued to ll the pages of his later writings. But for most of the 1980s
his marital situation seemed steady, notwithstanding continuous nancial
hardships and a lot of peer pressure on Délé to emulate the philan-
dering and the taking of two or more wives, which was part of the
‘Lagos boys’8 sub-culture.
In 1988 he concluded his life story with a glowing tribute to Felicia
for her constancy amidst the adversity that they had endured together
in a decade of married life. ‘If I had not been given courage by my
wife’, he wrote, ‘can you imagine what would have happened? My wife
stood by me throughout. She is the kind of wife a man must have in
life, since she will welcome both the time of enjoyment and the time
of suVering.’
I met Felicia shortly afterwards on a return visit to Nigeria. The
whole family, including their four children, shared a single room in a
tenement in the overcrowded Lagos suburb of Mushin. I thought that
she bore out wonderfully well Délé’s highly favourable report of her.
Above all she struck me as a very intelligent, attractive woman with a
mind of her own, who at the same time was devoted to her children
and husband. In short, they seemed a happy and well-suited couple
and a focal point for neighbours and friends who came to them to
socialise or to seek help in the settlement of domestic disputes.
How then did Délé account for their marital crisis? As already men-
tioned, it took him two years to put the whole episode into perspec-
tive. However, his 1995 version brought some new, disturbing incidents
to light.
344 Marc Schiltz
Felicia had wanted to marry the *Òy)ó man, but her mother wanted her to marry
the Òkèhò man who already had one wife. Therefore she broke oV with the *Òy)ó
man and arranged to go and collect her belongings from his room one afternoon.
He, however, had asked his friends in the compound to leave him alone and give
him a chance to say goodbye to his girlfriend. When she entered his room he
locked the door and took her by force, just for the fun of it. She screamed loudly,
but the man overpowered her.
Not long afterwards Felicia realised that she was pregnant. He denied
all responsibility, even though nobody believed him, since among the
Yoruba the common assumption is that the woman always knows the
father of her child, even when she has had sex with more than one
partner.9 ‘She nearly killed herself ’, Délé wrote, ‘in her attempts to
abort the pregnancy.’
Some time later the *Òy)ó man left Òkèhò for Northern Nigeria where
he started a family of his own. But with the mounting political ten-
sions between northerners and southerners in the 1980s, he, like so
many other Yoruba migrants, made his way back south and resettled
in Òkèhò. Délé’s business ventures in that period had come to nought,
and for much of the time his family’s only source of income was Felicia’s
meagre earnings from selling provisions. At one time Délé was so des-
perate for cash that he tried to work as a labourer. But carrying stones
at a building site proved too much for his health, as he was suVering
from an untreated hernia, as well as high blood pressure.10
Having belatedly exposed the *Òy)ó man as a vindictive rapist, Délé
went on to portray him as a true menace who would not shrink from
using mágùn if Felicia went back to him. But how did he rationalise his
wife’s return to her erstwhile tormentor? He certainly knew that I
thought well of her. Also, as a Yoruba man he could not denigrate
himself by suggesting that his wife was more attracted to another man.
Only one explanation made sense for Délé, that some other person
had persuaded his wife to do something as reprehensible and poten-
tially lethal as visiting her ex-lover. And this person was none other
than Felicia’s own mother.
From the beginning in the 1970s, Délé had portrayed his mother-
in-law as a manipulative, domineering and greedy woman. His aunt in
Òkèhò had rst tipped him oV about the mother’s interference in
Felicia’s choice of suitors. Later, after they had married, Délé often
complained that, no matter how much money he spent on Àdùk#é’s
education and no matter how much he helped his parents-in-law, noth-
ing he did was ever suYcient in the eyes of his mother-in-law. On one
occasion, when Felicia’s father was very ill and Délé had taken him to
the hospital in Lagos, he wrote to me that his mother-in-law had been
furious with him whereas the old man and his junior brothers had
thanked him. Délé, who was still reeling from his own recent brush
with mágùn because of what he interpreted as the old woman’s inter-
ference in his marriage, now witnessed what he thought was her wish
to see her husband dead. His fear of her increased greatly. As he wrote
to me only a few months ago, that incident gave him the rst clear
indication that his mother-in-law had to be one of the women whose
real identity one cannot name—an ‘àj)é ’ (witch).11 Felicia was very upset,
Délé wrote, adding: ‘she did not like the name that I wanted to call
her mother, and that I should be careful for what I had told about
her to an àlùfá’ (Muslim diviner). In a postscript, he asked me not to
refer to this matter when I replied to his letter. Clearly we were all
walking on thin ice.
From Délé’s letter I also gathered that Felicia’s attempts to make
Àdùk#é’s father contribute to his daughter’s education had not been suc-
cessful. This no doubt explains why in 1996 Délé could give me the
following good news:
I give thanks to God for he has shown my wife and her mother the truth. Àdùk#é
is now with us in Lagos, and my wife and I are responsible for her upkeep . . . I
am determined now that if I hear of any resumption of my wife’s visits to Àdùk#é’s
father I shall go to court and divorce her. Luckily she has come to her senses
and everything has returned to normal. She has again danced to my tune and
the family is very happy, even though there is no happiness in Nigeria today,
except once I have money to be a trader again.
As always, Délé agonised over his deteriorating relationship with the

woman whom I suspect he still deeply loved and admired. He would
tell her oV, yet he saw her as more sinned against than sinning. Indeed,
beyond all the acrimony and ill feeling, especially towards his mother-
in-law, Délé ended his ten-page letter of 1995 by showing his aware-
ness of the more global forces that had conspired to ruin his family
life. ‘My understanding was’, he wrote,
that maybe it was all due to the fact that there was no money like before. That
was the reason why I had to become nothing in her eyes. . . . A man who is not
blessed by God with a good job cannot be the husband of a wife in today’s
Nigeria. Satan is everywhere. . . . This has ruined many families, including some
of my friends’ homes. It is terrible, but I think it is just a test of my marriage. . . .
If we in Nigeria started thinking too much about what is happening every day,
then soon many of us would no longer be alive.
Our government is a big liar, and the whole country has become a place of
liars . . . Many young people in my home area have died recently. Some died of
mágùn, others died in need of money, several disappeared until the police found
their bodies from which the important parts had been removed,12 while others
again had died by worrying too much.
346 Marc Schiltz
Later, in May 1997, just before I returned to London from Minnesota,

Délé decried the military dictatorship of the late General Abacha as
the worst ever:
We have landed from the frying pan into the re. Life in Nigeria is hell. Those
who could help us are now in prison. All that’s left for us is prayer and the hope
that one day God will surely help us out. Anyone who says anything against the
government is put in jail.
Yet often when he re ected on his own problems he would be aZicted
by self-doubt. For instance, after yet another business partner had run
oV with their capital outlay of cloth, he wrote: ‘I must be very stupid,
or what shall I call myself, or is it because I am a Christian that every-
body is cheating me?’ Similarly, as a Yoruba man he was anxious to
share with me his doubts about the modern liberal idea that husbands
and wives can swap the role of main family breadwinner. This was
after Felicia had complained to her mother that she was the one respon-
sible for maintaining the family in Lagos. ‘As for me’, Délé commented,
‘I see nothing bad in that, because all the time I have been doing my
best as a breadwinner, and now that things have changed from my
side to hers, I think that’s how God wants it. But for her mother that’s
not how it should be.’
Even more agonising were his re ections on whether he had been
too trusting—as a Yoruba husband—of Felicia. After one of her meet-
ings with Àdùk#é’s father, Délé wrote:
This made me feel so angry that I almost beat her, but thank God I did not do
so, because I knew that once I started beating her our love would be nished.
Everybody who heard about our troubles blamed my wife, and it taught some of
my friends a lesson not to trust a woman and also not to show too much aVection
to an African woman because in the end she will disappoint you.
If these words were meant to provoke me, they had certainly succeeded,
especially since Délé had a good grasp of the universalist-feminist
values which I endorsed. But in his part of the world he reckoned that
such values were a luxury. They presuppose the good life, which kept
eluding impecunious Nigerians like him. His was a daily struggle for
survival, one he had to ght on several fronts against Satan and all his
minions, from Nigeria’s military rulers and their cronies who siphoned
oV the country’s petro-dollars into their Swiss bank accounts to the
witches in rural Ìs#éyìn and elsewhere who, since his childhood, had
been after his blood.
Indeed, when I rst suggested to Délé in 1975 that he write his life
story, he did not start in the conventional way (‘I was born in 1948’,
etc.), but, reminiscing on his untutored persona, he began with a dra-
matic curtain-raiser: ‘I was ten years old when my mother died in 1958.
After her death I didn’t learn anything in school, because I was only
interested in food and play . . .’ Délé, it seems, could not wait to remind
us of the fate that awaits all of us, namely death. In his case it was
the trauma of losing his mother in childhood. As he explained later, a
cantankerous widowed aunt whom his father, out of kindness, had wel-
comed into their home was the evil person who had enticed the witches
to aZict his mother with an incurable illness. It was this cruel act that
subsequently he came to see as the true beginning of all his close
encounters with witches and wizards later in life. If, as Walter Benjamin
reminds us, the meaning of a character’s life in a novel is revealed only
in his death, I cannot think of a more eVective way for Délé to draw
the reader into his own life story than by ‘giving him’, as Benjamin
puts it, ‘the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads
about’ (1992: 100). For Délé, whose leitmotif in his life story has been
the quest for the good life and becoming his own master without hav-
ing to bribe and pander to the rich and powerful,13 this may seem per-
plexing. But the truth is that death has remained a close companion
throughout his memoirs. All along he portrays himself as a survivor
who by God’s grace has been able to foil the attempts of the wicked
to kill him with jùjú. As we saw earlier, in 1993 it was God who had
warned him in a dream of the imminent danger of mágùn. Similarly,
in 1999 God revealed to him that unless his mother-in-law, who was
staying with him in Lagos, left them, Felicia would continue to suVer
from blood de ciency, and he would not get any contract oVers. On
this last occasion the revelation had been made by a prophetess at their
Celestial (aládúrà) Church in Lagos. ‘After praying and fasting’, Délé
wrote, ‘she told us that God’s message was that we should not har-
bour any person in our house whom God had not asked for.’ For Délé,
this was the strongest con rmation yet of his growing fear that his
mother-in-law was, if not actually a witch, at least a witch’s messen-
ger. Hence the divination was a clear warning that she had to leave
them and return to Òkèhò, before the ‘road could be open’ again for
his progress.
Délé’s predicament and Pentecostal Christianity

The depth of misogynistic bigotry to which my friend seemed to
have sunk during the 1990s depressed me and made me wonder if this
was still the same worldly-wise, generous Délé I had known all these
years. On second thoughts, I saw that my reaction was reductionist
348 Marc Schiltz
and perhaps lacking in empathy with a situation I knew about but had
never experienced. For one thing, he had made it clear that no mat-
ter how angry he had been with Felicia, and terri ed of mágùn, he did
keep a tight rein on his emotions by not resorting to wife-beating and
thereby ruining the love on which their relationship was built. Secondly,
his reference to the innate treachery of African women, and hence the
mistake of showing too much aVection to one’s wife, sounded more
like the talk of men rehearsing their version of Yoruba gender ideol-
ogy, which rests on the assumption that husbands dominate wives and
men dominate women (Mann 1990: 6). Certainly nothing he had writ-
ten about Felicia could have warranted such a characterisation of women:
in 1988 he had praised her virtue of constancy and never had he
faulted her for being remiss towards her children, or unfaithful to him.
In fact, the self-deprecatory comment about the innate treachery of
Africans is one that I had heard on more than one occasion from the
mouths of other Yoruba interlocutors. Interestingly, when I wrote back
to Délé about one mean-spirited, envious female academic at the
University of Minnesota, to let him know that there was no shortage
of treacherous people among Whites also, it was his turn to express
shock and disbelief. ‘If I had read about this in a history book’, he
replied,
I would not have believed it. I thought that all such things happened only among
us Blacks. I used to believe that Satan’s colour was black. That’s the reason why
many of his ways have been revealed to Blacks so that they would form all kinds
of evil societies. I did not know that some Whites have also agreed to be used by
Satan.
Fearing for my safety and job, Délé enclosed an aládúrà prophet’s

pamphlet with a selection of powerful psalms and cabbalistic-sounding
holy names, accompanied with detailed instructions on when and how
to recite them in order to neutralise the power of the enemy.
When an enemy rises against you, go outside by night nakedly and face the East.
Read Psalm 7 with the Holy name FIL-ELJONI and the enemy will be over-
thrown . . .
If you go out, read Psalm 35 nakedly outside in the night and witches will ee
from you altogether. Pronounce JAH (7 times). (De Claremont n.d. The Secret of
Psalms)
Since these prayers had allowed him to prevail over his enemies and
the powers of witches, he assured me that they would be equally eVective
in my case (see also Peel 1968: 121-122 on the use of holy names in
prayer among the Cherubim and Seraphim). I admit that I failed to
recite the prescribed psalms, but the knowledge that there was a friend
in Nigeria who cared for me was a great comfort.
With regard to Délé’s image of a black Satan, I know for sure that
it had not featured in the Catholic catechism he had learned for his
rst communion. Moreover, by the 1960s—in the wake of the Vatican
Council reforms—angelology and demonology had become rather dis-
credited, not only among progressive theologians but also among the
*Òy)ó White Fathers. But even if we ignore the alleged blackness of the
devil, what the missionaries should have remembered was the central-
ity of Satan in the popular Christian imagination in Yorubaland. Satan,
the prince of darkness, in opposition to Jesus, the prince of light, is
indeed a Manichaean vision of good versus evil which is most emphat-
ically preached in the aládúrà-Pentecostal churches. As one can gather
from Délé’s writings of the past ten years or more, it is from this aládúrà
discourse that he has increasingly drawn his strength for neutralising
his enemies and reclaiming his manhood as a householder in the face
of great adversity.
Like most Christians, whether Catholic, Baptist, Anglican or aládúrà-
Pentecostal, Délé rmly believed that Jesus Christ was the son of God
who through his death on the cross and resurrection had saved the
world from Satan and sin. Where he and other Christians and their
various churches diVer most is in their interpretation of the hybridity
of Christ as both human and God/spirit (cf. Douglas 1975).14 Not only
is the Christian belief that Jesus of Nazareth is one and the same as
the God of Abraham blasphemous to the ears of Muslims and Jews,
but even among Christians it has continued to be a contentious topic,
theologically as well as politically, depending on which side of the
man/God paradox the contestants championed their cause. Historically,
therefore, it is in the way Christians have interpreted and practised
their faith that we also notice how diVerent churches and their faith-
ful have oscillated in trying to resolve the dialectic between the theis-
tic and human poles of the Christian continuum.
Evidently, when Christians pray to nd a job, or for protection
against their enemies, they focus on the theistic/spirit pole of their faith
even when addressing their prayers to Jesus, since they believe that he
is God and therefore has the power to answer their prayer. On the
other hand, when in the hustle and bustle of Lagos a man like Délé
heeds Jesus’ commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself (Luke
10: 27), or tries to settle a dispute (Matthew 5: 9), or reaches out to
a friend in need without asking to be paid (see Matthew 25: 35-36),
his actions bespeak the other dimension of Christian religiosity, namely
350 Marc Schiltz
that it is through humankind (especially in the encounter with those who

suVer like Jesus) that one nds God. Unlike the spirit/power-centred,
theistic pole of the Christian life, this virtue/empathy/compassion-cen-
tred impulse focuses on the human/humanitarian pole. And although
Délé belongs to a theistic culture in which the notion of a world with-
out a supreme spirit (%Ol)órun-Olódùmarè/God/Allah) and a host of
lesser spirit forces is hard to imagine (Idowu 1962; Morton-Williams
1964; Horton 1972), it is nevertheless at the humane end of the Christian
continuum that he can most easily participate in a universalist discourse
with like-minded people from other faiths and cultures. This includes
also someone like me, for whom the historical phenomenon of Christ
remains central to my own being in the world, even though I am quite
unable to believe in Délé’s or any one else’s spirits or demons. Of
course, I am also aware, like Délé, that our life is aVected by forces
beyond our control, just as our agency and that of others impacts in
foreseeable and unforeseeable ways on other people’s lives, for better
or worse, now and long after our death.
Looking back on the pastoral community-development endeavours
of the White Fathers whom Délé had known in Ìs#éyìn, one may sur-
mise that in his experience missionary Catholicism had positioned itself
nearer the humanitarian than the spirit/power end of the Christian
continuum. For instance, in a recent letter he reminisced about the
days when the White Fathers were still in the area: ‘You will remem-
ber that during the time you and the other reverend Fathers served
here, the Catholic Church was the church all the other churches were
looking at, especially because of the way you people would help those
who were in need.’
Absent from this glowing tribute, however, are Délé’s recollections
of the missionaries in their ritual-prophetic capacity as òjís)é Olódùmarè
(literally ‘emissary of God’, this being a praise epithet that was usually
chanted to welcome a newly ordained Catholic priest when he cele-
brated his rst Mass). Even in his lengthy memoirs and correspondence,
there are only a few passing references to their priestly functions, such
as his mention of Father Gingras, who in 1958 had buried his mother
while the eerie cries of the witch birds who had killed her sounded all
around. Later, after he had left primary school, he reminisced about
Father Edmond, who had ‘preached forcefully that indulging in pre-
marital sex was sinful.’ Because of this, Délé wrote, he had kept his
love ‘pure’ for the girl whose aVection he had won amidst strong com-
petition from his age-mates. More recently, when his marriage was fail-
ing, he sought the advice of the Dutch priest in Ìséyìn who some years
previously had blessed his marriage. The good missionary gave him a
fatherly admonition to exercise patience and understanding towards his
wife and her mother. He also gave him a pastoral guidance book on
the sacrament of matrimony, which he read but Felicia had shown no
interest in. If Délé believed that Felicia’s ex-lover had plotted to kill
him with mágùn, and her mother was using witchcraft to wreck their
marriage, clearly a Catholic book about the virtues of love, patience,
companionship and forgiveness in matrimony would have sounded
unhelpful.
The aládúrà prophetess in Lagos, on the other hand, addressed the
problem head-on. After several days of fasting and prayer she con rmed
his worst fears about Satan’s hand in his domestic aVairs, and proph-
esied that if he banished Felicia’s mother from their home and sepa-
rated her from her daughter, God would open again the road for
progress.
The *Òy)ó White Fathers, like European missionaries elsewhere in
Africa (see, for example, van Dijk 2001: 220), denied the existence of
witchcraft and rejected the power of spirits, curses and jùjú as mere
superstitions that would eventually die out thanks to education and
modernisation. This complacency was not shared by the Yoruba Protestant
pastors I befriended in the 1960s and 1970s, who were in no doubt that
the marginalisation of òrì§à cultism and the expansion of Christianity
and Islam had ushered in an unprecedented increase in witchcraft and
sorcery. What they impressed on me was not only their awe for the
traditional Yoruba arsenal of occult powers, potions, curses and incan-
tations, but also their genuine concern that these lethal powers, previ-
ously under the control of the òrì§à priests, babaláwo and kings, had now
found their way into the hands of unscrupulous individuals and secret
societies. These included rural as well as urban folk, Christians and
Muslims as well as pagans. These dangerous mystical powers enabled
them to operate beyond the legal gaze of the modern secular state and
victimise whomever they wanted. The preoccupation of these pastors
with the power vacuum which the demise of paganism had created
(evoking Euro-American paranoia over former Soviet nuclear weapons
being peddled to rogue states and international terrorists) reiterated,
interestingly, the kind of popular anxieties that the founders of the
aládúrà movement in Yorubaland had addressed some forty years ear-
lier, in a period of rapid social change between the two World Wars
(see Peel 1968). What this grassroots movement oVered to its followers
was free and democratic access, independent of the missionary hierar-
chies, to God’s saving power in their daily battles against Satan and
352 Marc Schiltz
all the forces of evil under his command. Central to aládúrà Christianity,
then, is the notion of God as Alágbára (literally ‘the powerful’), which
Peel glosses as ‘dispenser of power’ (1968: 135). Through prayer (àdúrà)
based on trust (ìgb)ékèl)é ) in Christ’s salvation, and faith (ìgbàgb)ó ) in God’s
power to answer people’s prayers, the faithful are reassured that with
God’s power (l’ágbára %Ol)órun) nothing is impossible, even in this life.
New Pentecostalism, according to Marshall-Fratani (2001: 85, passim),
has raised this expectation to even greater heights in recent years by
preaching the ‘gospel of prosperity’, especially among the upwardly
mobile urban audiences (see also Maier’s colourful descriptions of this
phenomenon [2002: 251 V.]).
Of special importance to most aládúrà and all Pentecostal churches
is the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, as happened to the apostles on the
day of Pentecost (Acts 2). The main eVect of the Holy Spirit is to ll
people with agbára (power). Special agbára, as personal charisma—speak-
ing in tongues, the gift of healing, prophecy, and so on—may not be
regarded as necessary to eternal salvation (Peel 1968: 147) but it is
de nitely central to the prophetic ministry which many of these churches
now oVer to all those who, like Délé, in times of distress are in search
of guidance and strength in their ght with the forces of evil (Marshall-
Fratani 1999: 36).
In present-day Nigeria it is precisely at this power/spirit end of the
Christian continuum that the aládúrà-Pentecostal Churches have raised
their banners. But in the overall context of Délé’s quest for the elusive
good life, it seems that this latter-day aládúrà-inspired quest has come
at a heavy price for his marriage. He himself may have believed that
the prophetess’s message was God’s answer to his prayers to spare him
and his family from witchcraft attack. However, I gather from his recent
letters that Felicia had strong reservations about the prophecy’s exclu-
sion of her mother from their household, and especially the injunction
that she should not even visit her in Òkèhò. Rather than trying to heal
their bruised marital relationship, the aládúrà solution seems to have
opted instead for propping up husbandly authority at the expense of
wifely submission and aYnal exclusion which, from a customary point
of view, radically subverts the reciprocal obligations between husbands
and their parents-in-law (see Fádíp)é 1970: 73 V., 89 passim), as well
as the life-long bond between mothers and daughters. Such a reading
of Délé’s letters makes me wonder what purpose the aládúrà prophecy
served from their Christian-pastoral perspective. From a sociological
perspective, one may wonder whether propping up husbandly author-
ity by divine at stands much chance of eliciting wifely devotion and
aVection in a society where women are free to earn their own income,
or to initiate divorce proceedings on the grounds of nancial neglect
or emotional hardship.15
Délé also wrote about a consultation with a Muslim diviner (àlùfá)
in Lagos. This was the rst diviner who had warned him in 1999 that
his mother-in-law should leave their house and return to Òkèhò, since
her witchcraft was blocking his progress and causing Felicia to suVer
from anaemia.16 The fact that Délé had never mentioned a consulta-
tion with a babaláwo throughout his marital troubles of the 1990s is
worth dwelling upon brie y. After all, earlier in his life there had been
occasions when he had consulted an Ifá diviner, notwithstanding the
injunction against Christians doing so. I therefore view his more recent
avoidance of the babaláwo as yet another indication of his shift towards
aládúrà-Pentecostal Christianity and its prophetic ministry. Nevertheless,
for the sake of argument, one might speculate how a worldly-wise Ifá
diviner might have divined, in contrast to the more Manichaean Muslim
and especially aládúrà prophets he did consult.
From what informants had told me in Ìgànná in the 1970s, I gath-
ered that an experienced babaláwo tends to be extremely circumspect
when a supplicant wants to know who the witch is who is trying to
harm him or her. In my eld-notes of September 1975 are the fol-
lowing comments from Okedokun, my senior assistant and one of my
rst Yoruba teachers in 1962.
Witches are always women, mainly old ones . . . people suspect those who are
mean, or gossipmongers, and those who try to instigate ghts inside the house, or
who are always nagging and threatening. After the babaláwo has divined that a
witch is at work, the person concerned will try to nd out who she is. This goes
by the oracular method. The supplicant whispers the name of the suspected witch
on a coin (or another object) which the babaláwo hands to him or her. Then the
babaláwo divines again to see whether the answer is ‘yes’ or ‘no’, until the witch
is identi ed.
Normally women who have been identi ed as witches will also know that they
are witches indeed.17 They are believed to be many. Once it has become public
knowledge that so and so is a witch, people will watch her and give her presents
of food or money in the hope of placating her, and so stop her from causing
harm. Witches also turn up at feasts and collect what they consider is theirs.
Okedokun then whispered that some of the women we had talked to on previous
occasions were in fact witches, as were two of our Catholic church members.
Clearly, the Ifá diviner is one who will warn the supplicant that a witch
is at large, but rather than forcing her to confess or chasing her, as
the Àtíngà witch- nders once did (see Morton-Williams 1956) and the
aládúrà prophets still do, the babaláwo will divine which protective sacri ce
the supplicant must oVer and counsel the proper behaviour that will
354 Marc Schiltz
avoid provoking a witch’s displeasure. Ifá’s wisdom, therefore, clearly

enjoins people to come to terms with the fact that witches are unavoid-
able, and that one must learn how to tolerate them.
Protecting supplicants against witches is only one aspect, albeit an
important one, of the Ifá diviner’s more general role of tracking for
each individual his or her fate-destiny as it is encapsulated in the Yoruba
concept of orí (literally ‘head’) which refers to a person’s ancestral
guardian soul/spirit (Bascom 1969: 119).18 Since the missionary churches
had turned their faithful away from Ifá divination, I recently put the
question to Délé: ‘I wonder whether Christians like yourself are still
concerned about their orí and want to nd out if it is good or bad?’
I expected him to con rm that Christians are indeed concerned about
their orí, but what really interested me was how he would express this
concern. ‘Yes, Christians are concerned whether their orí is bad or
good’, he replied.
You see, some people were created on this earth without much of a problem. But
the evil people will not allow that person to prosper, especially when they see that
his or her star in life is brighter than theirs. This causes many believers to become
pagans once their problems become too severe. I do blame them because, what-
ever adversity the Christian meets, he or she can overcome it with prayers. As
for me, if you read through my life story, you will surely believe that the person
whom the world (read aiyé/aráiyé, i.e. the evil people of the world, including pagans,
witches and sorcerers) tried to kill again and again, and who did not die, must
dance and praise God.
In his answer, Délé did not concern himself with rehearsing the
ancestral belief that, at birth, God (%Ol)órun) assigns each individual’s
chosen destiny and, if he so pleases, helps him or her to achieve it. As
a Christian, Délé omitted the need to oVer sacri ces to one’s ancestral
guardian spirit and òrì§à, insisting instead that prayer alone (àdúrà) will
bring down God’s blessing and protection against all those enemies,
envious of one’s success in life (cf. Bascom 1969: 117-118). On the face
of it, then, Délé’s Christian interpretation of orí (destiny) somehow repli-
cates traditional beliefs in a cruder, simpli ed form insofar as the indi-
vidual person is still destined to meet his or her Maker (%El)edá, God
the Creator) at the appointed time after completing his or her life
course. But skipping the sacri ces of Ifá divination, all the Christian
must do in order to secure a safe passage to heaven is to maintain a
hotline with God through prayer, and under no circumstances fall back
into paganism.19 Instead of relying on the Ifá diviner’s (babaláwo’s) warn-
ings and ritual prescriptions on how to avoid and overcome one’s ene-
mies, the Christian can also turn to the aládúrà prophet through whom
God may reveal what he or she should or should not do in any par-
ticular situation.20
For these reasons, some might argue that the aládúrà-Pentecostal’s
prophetic ministry is in fact a continuation of traditional Ifá divination-
healing practices dressed in Christian garb by substituting the Holy
Spirit for Ifá/%Òrúnmìlà. What such a formalist equation overlooks is
what I will call the ‘È$sù factor’ which, in Ifá divination, stands for the
spiritual agency that mediates people’s access to God, while in aládúrà-
Christian prophecy it is the agency that militates against God and his
creation. The reason for this is that in the Christian discourse on evil
and sin, È§ù has become identi ed with the devil/Satan of the Bible.
Thus, from being the divine messenger who conveys the sacri ces that
must be oVered to the òrì§à, and who also reports to God on the aVairs
of the world (Bascom 1969: 105; Awolalu 1979: 28-30; Idowu 1962:
80-85), È$sù has now become the personi cation of evil and damnation
in opposition to the God of redemption. Also, absent from the Christian
representation of È$sù is his traditional portrayal as the archetypal trick-
ster divinity (Pemberton 1975) who holds a mirror up to the mischief,
ckleness and treachery of humans, as well as to their constancy, courage
and generosity. In short, then, from being the most universalist spirit
power in the Yoruba pantheon for accommodating human diversity,
based on an awareness that good and evil are coeval within each and
everyone,21 È$sù has now been transformed into a sectarian spirit-agency
of social exclusion, intolerance and scapegoating. Not surprisingly, per-
haps, when people fall on hard times and their livelihoods are threat-
ened, a Manichaean Christian discourse which lays the blame squarely
in Satan’s camp will appeal to the malcontent imagination, especially
when its prophets name and shame his alleged minions, while oVering
the prayers and cures that will render them powerless.
At the macro-level of Nigeria’s failing economy, Délé was clear-
sighted enough to express his opprobrium against his country’s rapa-
cious power elites. Yet it was in searching for the personal enemy who
had taken advantage of this period of trial to wreck his marriage that
he found con rmation of his suspicions in aládúrà prophecy, rst when
he learnt that Felicia’s former lover was about to use mágùn against
him, and later that it was her own mother who was doing Satan’s bid-
ding. This procedure of tracking down the agent of misfortune to a
close relative follows the logic of the proverb ‘a person is not killed by
an outside enemy, unless there is treachery in his/her own home’ (bí
ikú ilé kò bá pani, tòde kò lè pani ). Délé had referred to this saying
356 Marc Schiltz
earlier in his memoirs when he cited his aunt who, during his child-
hood, had oVered his mother to the witches.
The reason why Délé would have suspected his mother-in-law of
bewitching him is not an obvious inference one can make from the
typically strained relations between a woman’s parents and her hus-
band (see Fádíp)é 1970: 73 V., 89, passim). In fact, with his late father-
in-law and other aYnes he seems to have had a rather good rapport
throughout his marriage. So the trouble between Délé and Felicia’s
mother seems to stem mainly from the dislike they had been nurtur-
ing for each other over the years, which came to a head in the early
1990s when he could no longer provide for his family. Shameful as
this must have been, it was at that time that Délé’s angst and quest
for reassurance from his aládúrà prophets seem to have led him to
demonise his mother-in-law.22 But as always, the moment his contract
business improved again, as was the case recently, his angst and sus-
picions gave way to thanksgiving and praise to God for answering his
prayers. This change of fortune for the better certainly improved their
family life, as I gathered from a letter that Délé’s son wrote to me.
Conclusion
As a genre of ethnographic writing, one Yoruba man’s account of
his marital problems has obvious limitations in that anthropology’s prime
concerns are with culture and society as collective phenomena. Never-
theless, the growing interest in self-accounts by men and women whom
anthropologists have encountered in the eld is an acknowledgement
that this genre of writing deepens our understanding of both the peo-
ple we study and the project of anthropology (see, for example, A. J.
Strathern 1979; Behar 1994). Hence also the need I felt—at the risk
of sounding self indulgent—to make myself visible/audible in eliciting
Délé’s talk, since ethnographic writing invariably stretches its roots in
unique human encounters and inter-subjective exchanges.
In my account, I was especially interested in Délé’s emotional reac-
tions and moral attitudes. As far as witchcraft and sorcery are con-
cerned, we must be aware of the forces of modernisation and the
con icts they engender both at the macro-level of Nigeria’s descent into
violence and corruption during the Babangida and Abacha dictator-
ships, and at the local level of everyday lives, as in the case of Délé’s
and Felicia’s marriage crisis. But having identi ed the connections
between these ashpoints we may still feel at a loss in trying to account
for what motivates a person to point the nger at this woman or that
man, rather than another, and believe or suspect that she or he is a

witch or a sorcerer. Not only will it depend on who was the suVerer
and who the diviner, but even after the witch or procurer of jùjú was
identi ed, we cannot be sure why some believed in the accusation and
others were sceptical or rejected it altogether—as was the case with
Felicia.
I do not claim that Délé’s tale resolves these epistemological ques-
tions. On the contrary, I would say that his discourse only makes us
more aware of the indeterminacy of his and other people’s practices,
thoughts, emotions, paranoia, moral attitudes and personal integrity. It
should also caution that, when making generalisations on the basis of
ethnographic vignettes, we should be willing to assess their validity in
the light of counter examples. Put diVerently, what a person thinks,
feels or intends in declaring that so and so is a witch may not cor-
roborate, or may corroborate only partially, what is known, either
locally or by the anthropologist, about the witchcraft-related phenom-
ena. Unlike investigative ethnography, based on focused interviews with
informants, an account like Délé’s always created its own context in
the course of his chequered career. Thus by putting him in the dri-
ver’s seat and being carried along on his life’s journey during the past
thirty years, I now confront an ethnography which is excessive, not only
by the sheer volume of Délé’s writings, but because his life-contexts
are at all times excessive in plots and sub-plots, as well as in stated
and unstated agendas.
But perhaps the main reason why our discourse on witchcraft-sor-
cery remains shot through with indeterminacy has to do with the fact
that it delves into the darkest recesses of people’s psyches and awed
relationships with others. Ultimately I see these as moral issues which
concern people’s experiences of fear, guilt and suVering (Desjarlais 1996;
Kleinman & Kleinman 1996), as well as their representations of the
evil and benevolent powers that impinge on their lives. This, inevitably
leads us to the realm of religion, which, as I have shown in Délé’s
case, has taken him from the missionary Catholicism in which he had
been raised, into the fold of the aládúrà-Pentecostal Christians in Lagos
in times of crisis. 23
Consistent with this shift and the hard times of the 1990s which
precipitated it, I also perceive a shift in his representation of what the
moral philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre (1984: 241-242)—in a reference
to Kierkegaard—refers to as the ethical life. This concerns a person’s
quest for unity in which the commitments to the future springing from
past episodes in which obligations were conceived and debts assumed
358 Marc Schiltz
unite the present to past and to future so as to make of a human life

a unity. By contrast, in the aesthetic life, MacIntyre states, a human
life is dissolved into a series of separate present moments in which the
unity of human life disappears from view. Délé’s life also has had its
share of aesthetic moments, but when in the late 1980s he entered his
prime and at last made his break as a self-employed contractor, he
suddenly turned philosophe and produced the narrative unity that pre-
viously I had failed to detect in his memoirs. Looking at the world
around him, the roads he had travelled and the vagaries of what was
still lying ahead, he then began to expound on the life of the virtues,
which, as MacIntyre points out, underpins the narrative unity of the
ethical life in the Kierkegaardian sense. After praising Felicia as the
strong, faithful wife, he followed up the theme of constancy and courage
in an allegorical tale about a king, betrayed by his wife and her para-
mour, which he concluded with the proverb: ‘everyday is for the thief,
and one day is for the owner of the property (read: the person who
has constancy)’ ()o j)ó gbogbo ni tolè, )o j)ó kan ni tolóhun). Moving on to a witty
homily on satisfaction in life which, if not based on constancy and
courage, will in the end make us envious of other people and unhappy,
he then drew the conclusion that although it is good to strive for
progress in life, we must never give way to envy (ojúkòkòrò).
Armed with these prophetic insights into the life of the virtues, Délé
soon afterwards ran into the marital storm on which I have focused in
my account. With his whole world suddenly falling apart, we saw then
that the focus of his ethical life also shifted from a universalism, dri-
ven by the virtue of constancy, to a prayer/spirit-based evangelism focused
on regaining—by divine at—his manhood as a householder. Yet here
also I see indeterminacy, and no doubt much toing and froing between
these ethical poles depending on Délé’s fortunes and misfortunes.
Ultimately, though, I trust that in his case constancy will prevail.
NOTES
Acknowledgments. An earlier version of this paper was presented in the School of

Anthropological Studies at Queen’s University Belfast in 2001. I wish to thank the par-
ticipants for their helpful comments. I also give special thanks to Professor J. D. Y.
Peel, Dr Anthony Buckley, Father F#émi %Oládip#ò, Dr David Maxwell and the JRA ref-
eree for their careful readings and suggestions. As a one-time White Father in the dio-
cese of *Òy)ó (Nigeria, 1962-1975), I thank Bishop Adélakùn, and my former colleagues
in Ìs#éyìn and Ìgànná for their support during and after eldwork, as well as for an invi-
tation to revisit the diocese in 1988-9. In order to ensure the anonymity of the pro-
tagonists in this Yoruba tale, I have changed their names and whereabouts. To Lisette
Josephides and our daughter, Leda, I am particularly grateful, one for her critical read-
ing and lively discussions about culural diversity versus moral universals, and the other
for helping me retrieve this paper after my iMac had crashed.
1. I rst met Délé at the Catholic mission in Ìs#éyìn in 1972. He had then recently
returned home in the hope of settling down as a farmer-trader, following a decade of
youthful misadventures in Lagos and Kaduna. At the mission, Délé had already made
his reputation as a popular youth leader and choirmaster. Our friendship, though, grew
out of his involvement in my research work. More than just a knowledgeable infor-
mant, Délé had the keen eye of an ethnographer who, as if by instinct, knew how to
chronicle everything that is grist to the anthropological mill. I was at that stage still
pursuing my studies in anthropology at University College London, but when two years
later I returned to Nigeria for my doctoral eldwork on rural-urban migration and
socio-cultural change in the neighbouring parish of Ìgànná (1974-75), Délé and I soon
renewed our friendship. Throughout that period, he and several other assistants acted
as correspondents (‘private eyes’) who kept diaries of everyday events, gossip and dis-
putes in their home towns in the Ìgànná-Ìs#éyìn area, as well as in Lagos. After I left
the eld (and the church ministry) I kept up a correspondence with several of them,
but Délé was by far the most proli c scribe, story teller and ethnographer. Whereas
most chroniclers tended to be reticent in reporting on the more seedy or threatening
aspects of life in their communities, Délé had no such inhibitions. On the contrary, he
seemed forever anxious to make me (and the readers of his life story) privy to what-
ever caught his attention, as well as to his own progress in life. With regard to the
language and concepts that Délé used, I must clarify that both in conversation and in
writing he always communicated with me in English. This was entirely his choice, since
I have good command of Yoruba. In the beginning, I encouraged him to write in his
mother tongue but he never took up this suggestion, except when citing proverbs and
speci c terms or idioms in Yoruba. Transcribing and editing Délé’s prose and doing
justice to his literary style has always been an arduous task, yet one well worth under-
taking, since he is a true writer.
2. In Karin Barber’s (1981) seminal essay on Yoruba attitudes towards the òrì§à, she
stated: ‘Yoruba cosmology presents a picture of Man, a solitary individual, picking his
way . . . between a variety of forces, . . . seeking to placate them and ally himself with
them in an attempt to thwart his rivals and enemies in human society’ (p. 729). Délé’s
self presentation ts this image almost to the letter, except that as a Christian he now
looks upon all hostile forces as servants of Satan. For a rationalist interpretation of con-
version from òrì§à cultism to Christian or Muslim monotheism, see Robin Horton 1971.
As a critique of Peel’s (1968) study of aládúrà Christianity, Horton’s intellectualist hypoth-
esis, however, falls short of accounting for the discontinuities between aládúrà and other
monotheistic faiths, in terms of the aesthetic judgements and shared experiences that
motivate believers to convert or not to convert from one faith to another.
3. The generic Yoruba term for medicine is oògùn. Yoruba speakers make the dis-
tinction between European and native medicine in terms of oògùn Óyìmbó vs. oògùn
Ýorùbá/ìbíl)é. Jùjú is the common West African pidgin for magical medicine (not to be
confused with jùjú, the Yoruba music genre which I. K. Dairo rst made popular in
the 1950s). Oògùn dúdú (black)/burúkú (bad-evil) and jùjú were terms by which Christians
and educated folk, including Délé, usually referred to harmful, magical medicines.
4. Tìmì Láoyè of #Ed#e was an enlightened traditional ruler who combined his royal
duties with the promotion of Yoruba culture. For many years he was the patron (bàb)égb)é )
of all the Yoruba professional drummers. His interest in Yoruba medicine developed
from his rst training as a pharmacist at the Baptist hospital in Ogbóm#òs#ó (Beier 1993).
With regard to mágùn, Láoyè does not discuss the secret spells, incantations ()o f)ò), curses
(èpè) and ingredients that the babaláwo uses (see Buckley 1985: 141 V.), except that mágùn
is put on a piece of black or white thread, or else on a piece of broom quill. When
this is placed on the threshold of a woman’s room, she becomes ‘infected’ the moment
she steps over it, he states.
360 Marc Schiltz
5. Dr Anthony Buckley kindly pointed out to me that mágùn does not always result
in death, but may leave the victim ignominiously incapacitated with an erect penis. His
informant, Adébáwo, an Ibadan babaláwo-herbalist, told him that he treated such cases
with an antidote ()èr)ò mágùn) which he made with omi isàòkú (juices collected from a dead
body) which he added to a bottle of )otí (gin distilled from palm wine) in which a dead
param)ól)è viper had been marinated. Adébáwo did not disclose what incantations he made
over this recipe, but he claimed that whenever he treated such mágùn victims with a
cupful of this antidote he was successful in curing them.
6. Felicia’s male agnates were weavers (ahun§)o), a profession in which all the prac-
titioners identify themselves as Muslims in northwestern Yorubaland. Like other Yoruba
Muslims they prayed facing Mecca and attended their local and Friday mosques. On
the other hand, in major òrì§à festivals, especially those of Orò and Egúngún, their men-
folk tended to take an active part, including the family rituals of oVering sacri ces and
prayers to the lineage ancestors (though when immolating a fowl they would use a knife
rather than pull the bird’s head out of its neck in the ‘pagan’ way). In any case Felicia
told me that she knew very little about Islam, and had hardly practised it as a young
girl. Her name change from Fatima to Felicia when she had married Délé was con-
sistent with the Yoruba custom that on marriage a girl joins her husband in the wor-
ship of his religion/cult.
7. The idea that romantic love was alien to the Yoruba was one of many preju-
dices I recall hearing from expatriates (including missionaries). However, from my pas-
toral experience in the diocese of *Òy#ó, I soon learned that young people were as likely
to experience emotions of love, desire and infatuation for a person of the opposite sex
as their European counterparts. No doubt, the experience of what we label ‘romantic
love’ will vary from person to person, but after reading Délé’s memoirs I would not
hesitate to con rm my initial impression of him in the 1970s, as a romantic young man
who liked women.
8. ‘Lagos boys’ is a label Délé mentions several times in his memoirs to refer to his
age mates from Ìs#éyìn and other rural towns who, like him, had become streetwise
Lagosians (cf. Barnes 1974). It is this urban experience which had set him apart from
his rural peers who might occasionally have gone to Ibadan and Lagos, but not for
long enough to acquire an urban identity (Schiltz 1980).
9. I rst obtained this information from Chief Kútì, a long-serving magistrate whom
I knew in Ogbóm#òs#o in 1964. Others, including Anthony %O yáw#olé, a church elder in
%Òyán, also con rmed this assumption.
10. On at least two occasions during that period, I had sent money to Délé to have
the hernia operation performed by a doctor in Otú. The rst time the money was spent
on the big anniversary celebration of the death of Felicia’s grandparents in Òkèhò. The
second time the money went towards the funeral expenses of Felicia’s own father,
not long after he had acquitted himself of his lial obligation towards his long-dead
parents. The lavish entertainment of the crowds on both occasions gained them much
symbolic capital (cf. Schiltz 1982). In the process, though, Délé had had to borrow
money from friends. With his contract business in tatters, the anxieties of feeding
his family during those critical times must have contributed to Délé’s high blood
pressure.
11. The Yoruba term àj)é means ‘witch’. It can also mean ‘witchcraft’, as in ó ní àj)é
(she has witchcraft), or ó gba àj)é (she acquired witchcraft). Délé always used the term
‘witch’ when reporting in English. In Yoruba, however, I noted that he and other inter-
locutors avoided the term àj)é . Instead they would refer to witches by calling them àw)on
ìyá (the mothers), or àw)on àgbà (the old ones). Elsewhere, in the Ifá divination poems
(Verger 1965), we hear of them as àw)on )el)éy)e (literally ‘those who have the properties
of birds/are bird-like’, hence also the popular references to witch birds). Beier (1980:
15-17) cites one Ifá poem, which describes the fury of the hungry )el)éy)e as so terrifying
that neither the òrì§à #Sàngó, Ògún, nor Egúngún could withstand them. Finally, %Òrún-
mìlà (Ifá) gained control over them by ensnaring them by their own greed, by tricking
them to perch on a plate of food on which he had smeared glue so that their feath-
ers got stuck. (Hence, perhaps, Hallen and #Sódip#ò’s [1986: 103 V.] diYculty in trying
to interpret the babaláwos’ answers to the question, are there male witches? Their one-
upmanship over the )el)éy)e implies that in a sense they too must know the secret of female
power, since they claim to control it). Witchcraft, though, is ascribed only to women
(Morton-Williams 1956: 326), and in the g)èl)èd)é masquerading cult it is celebrated as
female power (Drewal & Drewal 1990). Calling a woman àj)é is not only actionable in
court, but, as one informant told me, the mere utterance of the word is dangerous.
Hence the traditional attitude of caution and deference by referring to them collectively
as the mothers.
12. Already in the 1970s I kept hearing rumours about the kidnapping of children
and adults who, as in Faustian pacts with the devil, were said to be the sacri cial vic-
tims by which the rich and powerful achieved their success. Interestingly, in the 1960s
Dúró Ládip#ò, in collaboration with Ulli Beier, had staged a highly successful folk opera
on this theme under the title of %Èdá, which was in fact a Yoruba adaptation of the
old German mystery play, Jederman (Everyman—see Beier 1994: 63-67). Nowadays, these
stories have been compounded in the popular press with cases of the alleged interna-
tional traYc in human organs (Marshall-Fratani 1999: 36; cf. Scheper-Hughes 1992:
233, 549, passim, in the case of Brazil).
13. Indeed, Délé’s memoirs read like a long saga of one man’s struggles against the
odds—especially his former bosses and patrons—to set himself up as a self-employed
entrepreneur. The most recent struggles to free himself were undoubtedly those which
he had to ght with his cousin from Ìs#éyìn, a rather shady entrepreneur, for whom he
had worked for several years after making his way to Lagos with Felicia in the late
1970s.
14. In her 1972 Henry Myers lecture, Professor Mary Douglas (see Douglas 1975:
276-318) rst drew my attention to the religious/moral signi cance of hybrid beings
(e.g. man/god or man/beast) as either a source of mediation/salvation or a source of
pollution/abomination in diVerent types of society. Although she based her analysis on
ancient Middle-Eastern and pre-colonial African and Melanesian data, it seems to me
that her argument about the socio-political correlations of the mediation versus abom-
ination dialectic is especially pertinent to my discussion of the diVerent types of Christ
(along the man/spirit continuum) whom Nigerian Christians are currently championing
in their multifarious churches and ultimately in their own lives.
15. Some elderly informants in Ìgànná insisted that in the old days there was no
divorce, as, indeed, Ají§Œf#é had asserted in 1924 in The Laws and Customs of the Yoruba.
It is true that, since the colonial Marriage Ordinance of 1914, the Native Courts have
been dealing with divorce applications at an increasing rate (Fádíp#é 1970; Adewoye
1977). Similarly, during my eldwork in Ìgànná in the 1970s, divorce cases took up
most of the twice-weekly court sessions. Practically all such applications were initiated
by women wanting to divorce their husbands. On average a divorce hearing was dealt
with in 15 to 20 minutes. Not present in court were the new husbands these women
intended to marry, though everyone knew who they were, as well as the fact that it
was their bride-price money that the divorcing women used to refund the bride-price
they had to return to their former husbands. Divorce certainly did take place in pre-
colonial times, though perhaps less frequently. In those days it was a question of two
men confronting each other when the adulterer/wife stealer had to pay oV the cuck-
old. What was new in the colonial Marriage Ordinance was that a wife was granted
the right to reject her husband irrespective of whether she had another husband in the
wings. In this sense, mágùn (or at least the seemingly high incidence of such cases nowa-
days) may be seen as a modern phenomenon (a kind of babaláwo-sanctioned male back-
lash against wifely in delity) as Láoyè (1974) has argued. Nevertheless, as Professor
Morton-Williams reminded me, already in pre-modern, mid-18th-century Old-*Òy)ó,
362 Marc Schiltz
Aláà n Amúniwáiyé suVered a mágùn-like death for having seduced the wife of his chief
babaláwo [see Johnson 1921: 175-176]).
16. Délé did not say why he chose this àlùfá. But if he thought that, as a former
Muslim, Felicia would have been readily convinced by the man’s divination, he was
quite wrong. Felicia was so angry, he wrote, that she went to tell oV the àlùfá for try-
ing to separate her from her mother.
17. As a female attribute, witchcraft is believed to pass on from mother to daugh-
ter (matrilineally), thus subverting agnatic descent. Whether or not a woman has inher-
ited witchcraft is not always obvious. Consequently, a woman may be a witch and yet
not be aware of her terrifying powers.
18. What Bascom recorded from his babaláwo informants was that, ‘[b]efore a child
is born (or reborn), the ancestral guardian soul appears before %Ol)órun/[God] to receive
a new body, a new breath, and its fate (ìwà) during its new life on earth. Kneeling
before %O l)órun, this soul is given the opportunity to choose its own destiny’ (1969: 115).
Later, when the child grows up, it will need the help of the diviner to nd out what
its prenatal destiny was as it begins to chart its way through life, and faces new choices,
dangers, etc.
19. Délé illustrated this with the ignominious death of a Catholic man in Ìs#éyìn. He
cared for nobody, never attended church and spent all his money on drinking and
having fun with his friends. One day, after yet another acrimonious domestic dispute,
his impecunious mother cursed him. He therefore drove her out of the compound,
even though his father was very ill and needed his mother. Only a few days later the
old man died, and not long afterwards the mother also died in her native town of
Otú. Yet before her death she had handed her son over as a ‘meat gift’ to the Otú
witches because, she told them, he was a bad son. These witches then wanted to nd
out for themselves how bad the son was and decided to attend the funeral feast that
he had organised for his deceased parents. By midnight they asked him to give them
a lift back to Otú in his minibus. First he ignored their request, but after persistent
begging he nally agreed to take them home. But halfway along the road, in the mid-
dle of the bush, he turned round and ordered them to get out and walk the rest of
the way home. Less than two weeks after this incident the man fell ill. He attended
various hospitals but no treatment could cure him. In the end they took him to a
native doctor-herbalist who called the Otú witches. When the witches came they said
that his own mother, not they, was the cause of his illness. They then took him to
Otú where those who knew how to call the dead called his late mother. She refused
to forgive him, and a week later the son was dead.
20. In the same letter Délé illustrated such an instance in the case of one newly
wed woman in Lagos whose local aládúrà prophet had warned her not to attend a
funeral celebration in her native Ìs#éyìn because, he told her, ‘a witch wants to kill you
there.’ It had never crossed her mind that her adoptive mother, who also was an usher
in the Ìs#éyìn Baptist Church, was the witch the prophet referred to. It was only when
she dropped on the ground while taking a bath and called out: ‘Abigail! What have I
done to you?’ that she revealed the name of the witch before taking her last breath.
Her people then used a charm to kill her killer. On the fourth day the charm worked.
The usher fell ill and started calling the young woman’s name, as well as the names
of all the other people she had killed before. She died on the Friday when Délé returned
to Lagos.
21. This practical ethics in relation to the coexistence of good and evil within each
person has echoes in various spheres of Yoruba socio-cultural life. For instance, many
proverbs allude to the interplay between chance events and human ambivalence, as in
‘the cripple has the desire/urge to dance, but not the legs’ (ìjó mb)e nínú aro, )es)è ni kò
sí ). Similarly in medicine, Dr Buckley told me that several of his herbalist informants
believed that certain diseases were hidden in bags inside the body where they could
bring health. When diseases over owed from their bag, they could cause illness (see
also Buckley 1985: 51).
22. Earlier I quoted my Ìgànná assistant, Okedokun, who had mentioned that most
witches were elderly women. Often such women are unhappy and made to feel a bur-
den to others, especially when they are widowed and have no sons to look after them
(Singleton 1974: 108, passim). The hope of being looked after by a daughter is often
frustrated by the son-in-law, as was the case with Felicia’s mother after she had over-
stayed her welcome with Délé, and also with her other son-in-law in Lagos. Traditionally
elderly women often gained respect as priestesses in the òrì§à cult societies, and people
would hold them in awe for their occult powers, sacred calabashes and ritual para-
phernalia (see, for example, Matory 1994: 155-161). But even for the poor and frail
ones, the mere suspicion of having witchcraft could have been an asset, in that people
would have respected them and given them food or money out of fear. However, when
witches become demonised, as happened during the Àtíngà witch trials of the early
1950s (Morton-Williams 1956), and is now the case under the impact of the aládúrà-
Pentecostal movement, the sheer fact of an elderly woman raising her voice in anger, or
revering her dead twins, may be suYcient to turn her into a social outcast, remembered
only for all the people she allegedly confessed to have killed at the time of her death.
23. Délé’s visits to the aládúrà did not stop him from remaining a staunch member
of his Ìséyìn Catholic church. Neither do aládúrà prophets expect that all those who
come to them for prayer and healing will become members of their church. The point
to note, however, is the growing impact of aládúrà-Pentecostal Christianity on Christians
generally. Délé, for instance, mentioned in a recent letter that in his Catholic church
in Lagos, the Nigerian parish priest regularly holds charismatic prayer meetings where
people speak in tongues.
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A Yoruba Tale of Marriage, Magic, Misogyny and Love

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A YORUBA TALE OF MARRIAGE, MAGIC, MISOGYNY

In this paper I approach the eZorescence of witchcraft-sorcery concerns in post-

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2002 Journal of Religion in Africa, 32.3

modernisation function as catalysts for the current growth of witchcraft-

personal experiences of Délé Adébísí, a long-time Nigerian friend whom

What I must emphasise from the outset is that Délé speaks to me

in which he grew up in rural Ìs#éyìn, to a more faith/power-centred

Marriage and the spectre of mágùn

What remains less clear, however, is whether, prior to the ominous

Love at rst sight put to the test

Clearly Délé was smitten, and, though he already held hopes of a

return to London had refocused his attention on his own pursuits in

As always, Délé agonised over his deteriorating relationship with the

Later, in May 1997, just before I returned to London from Minnesota,

Délé’s predicament and Pentecostal Christianity

Fearing for my safety and job, Délé enclosed an aládúrà prophet’s

that it is through humankind (especially in the encounter with those who

avoid provoking a witch’s displeasure. Ifá’s wisdom, therefore, clearly

man, rather than another, and believe or suspect that she or he is a

unite the present to past and to future so as to make of a human life

Acknowledgments. An earlier version of this paper was presented in the School of

Abraham, R. C. 1958. Dictionary of Modern Yoruba. London: University of London

Strathern, A. J. 1979. Ongka: A Self-account by a New Guinea Big-man. London: Duckworth.

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