The converts at first showed great enthusiasm, they wore their new Sunday clothes with pride and learnt their catechism and all that was to be learnt. But in a few months as the novelty wore off they lost interest and grumbled at some of the church rules which they found tiresome. A man was not allowed more than one wife. Then what were the people who came into the church after marrying many wives to do ? Put the others away, said the church. But then how was one to recover the bride price? The parents of the wife would have spent of it.Then it sometimes happened that a man’s first wife failed to have any children. One couldn’t very well, if one could help it, resign oneself to the situation of dying without leaving children behind to carry on one’s line.
In many other ways the church failed to satisfy the converts.They said for instance that you shouldn’t use charm. Then how was one to protect oneself against enemies and their ”nsi, the poison charms they made? There was no such thing as charm said the Church, and even if there were, you only needed to pray to chukwu(God) and his saints and they would clear it all away. Obeying this command, Nnatu Ulili the palm-wine tapper had before his baptism taken the charm in his house to the white ‘ fada’. The priest had blessed him. Then all the charms that had been brought in that day had been piled up before the churc and burnt. But two days after Nnatu had done this, the enemy against whom he had made the charm had transformed himself into the fearful ‘ witch bird’, the drinker of blood, and had perched on Nnatu’s roof and cried Kwoloolm! Kwololom! with impunity. Nnatu had lain awake all through the night shivering and biting his finger-nails with regret. For if the charm had been there to protect him, the witch would not have dared come near his house. And if it did it would have dried up, and so would the body of the man whose soul inhabited the bird. The next norning Nnatu had run back to the diviner at Mbammili and made an even more powerful charm than the first. But this did not restore his peace of mind. For he had now offended Chukwu, God of the sky. Now he had loaded his soul with deadly sin and at his death chukwu would throw him into the fire of the spirits.
The cief source of grievance however was the lack of colour of the Church. Spirit worship was a colouful drama with masquerading and fluting and singing and dancing. Furthermore the festivals were well spaced out through the year. On these occasions people from the other villages visited their relatives, rejoiced with them and strengthened the bond of affection which bounded them together and sustained their lives.
The Church on the other hand had no festivals. They had feasts of the saints referred to as ‘unexpected Sunday’, but one didn’t feast then, one attended church and sang the monotonous church songs and came home again no more refreshed than if there had been nothing uncommon. There was ‘ Kelesmes’ (Christmas)too, if you could properly call that Christian. It seemed to have become more or less a day of rejoicing for everybody, Christians and spirit worshippers alike. And even at this period the Church tried to limit the joy of its members.They forbade them to masquerade, for the masdquerade, they said, was a pagan institution.
The new converts, faced with all these difficulties, usually drifted back to spirit worship, which was a more satisfying experience. The steps the Church leaders took to put a halt to this backsliding were prompt and severe. An angry group visited the house of the backslider and carried away his utensils and brought them into the church. There they kept them until the owner redeemed them with a fine, and promised to be more diligent in future.
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