ABSTRACT
While the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway has failed as the artery linking the north and the south of Nigeria, it has succeeded as a stage for the performance of public religiosity, earning it the moniker the ‘Spiritual Highway’. It owes this name to the fact that over the past three decades, dozens of Christian and Muslim prayer camps have sprung up along the highway. While the Christian and Muslim camps compete for souls and urban space, one of the largest camps – Guru Maharaj Ji’s Holy Land – does not present itself as Christian or Muslim, but mixes divergent religious elements in an assemblage that the ‘Black Jesus of Nigeria’, Guru Maharaj Ji, claims to be ‘beyond religion’. During his weekly sermons, he preaches that in order to be decolonized from the ‘foreign religions’, Christianity and Islam, Nigerians should embrace the so-called African traditional religion (ATR). In his return to an ‘African heritage’, Guru Maharaj Ji draws not only from ATR but also from Hinduism. The fact that India, the cradle of Hinduism, and Nigeria share a history of colonial oppression explains why Guru Maharaj Ji identifies more with Hinduism than with Christianity and Islam. Challenging the evolutionary perspective that underpins the study of religion in Africa, this chapter, which is structured around an ethnographic case study of Guru Maharaj Ji’s Mission, studies ATR and the ‘world religions’ as contemporaries, thereby opening conceptual space for rethinking theological boundaries between monotheistic and polytheistic religions, as well as spatiotemporal boundaries between local versions of ‘traditional’ religion and the modern ‘world religions’. Ultimately, the chapter questions the very notion of ‘religion’ itself.
