Deidre Helen Crumbley. Spirit, Structure, and Flesh: Gender and Power in Yoruba African Instituted Churches. Africa and the Diaspora Series. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. xv + 180 pp. $50.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-299-22910-8.

Reviewed by Derek Peterson (University of Michigan)
Published on H-Africa (May, 2010)
Commissioned by Brett L. Shadle (Virginia Tech)

Yoruba Churches

In the forty years since John Peel's pioneering study, Aladura: A Religious Movement among the Yoruba (1968), the Aladura (the "Owners of Prayer") have become much more than a "religious movement among the Yoruba." Between 1992 and 2002, some seventy-five thousand Nigerians made their home in the United States, and Aladura churches now have congregations in New York, London, and elsewhere in Europe and America. There is a vibrant Aladura presence on the Internet, and Aladura entrepreneurs are busily composing their history, writing apologetics, and participating in international conferences. In Spirit, Structure, and Flesh, Deidre Helen Crumbley offers guidance for those who wish to understand the gender politics of the Aladura churches. Her aim, she says, is to help prepare American churches for "productive intercultural ecumenical dialogue, by displacing ethnocentric misinformation with pertinent ethnographic knowledge" (p. 8). But this is not a handbook for church officials to read. It is a lively, sympathetic study that illuminates the structures of power that constrain, and also enable, women's participation in the Aladura churches.

Crumbley's particular focus is on three churches: the Christ Apostolic Church (CAC), founded in the early 1920s by schoolteachers in Ijebu and Ibadan; the Church of the Lord Aladura (CLA), formed in 1925 by the prophet Josiah Oyelowo Ositelu; and the Celestial Church of Christ (CCC), inspired in the late 1940s by the healer Samuel Bilehou Joseph Oshoffa. All three churches, she shows, share a "certain unease--sometimes subtle, sometimes glaring--with the female body as a conduit of both divine power and procreative potential" (p. 136). The CCC excludes women from the leadership of the church; sequesters women who are menstruating from the congregation; and arranges church members in a hierarchical fashion, with junior members sitting in the back of the church. The CAC is less particular about the physical arrangement of its congregation, but like the CCC, it excludes women from ordination into the priesthood. The CLA, by contrast, celebrates women's role in the church's leadership. Ositelu, the church's founder, declared that the ordination of women was a "divine injunction," and female priests are today among the leaders of the church (p. 45). "Women count in the day-to-day life of these Aladura churches," Crumbley concludes, even where they confront rules that exclude them from full participation in the church's life (p. 137).

Crumbley's book is by no means a dry institutional history. Raised in a black "sanctified" church in Philadelphia, Crumbley spent four years living and working in Ibadan, and during that time she found common ground with her Aladura friends. She was actively involved in the life of the three churches she studied: she offered lectures at the CLA seminary, helped to draft a document on "The Status of Women" for the same church, and taught a congregation how to sing "Joy, Joy, Joy, Joy, Down in My Heart." In turn, Aladura protocols shaped her research program. Crumbley describes how, while worshipping at one church, she was subject to correction by other attendees, who obliged her to sit with a straight back, point her feet toward the altar, and use a white coverlet while sleeping in the church. When she asked for permission to explain her research questionnaire to a CCC congregation, the church's authorities refused to give her opportunity to speak, explaining that women were not permitted to address the church. As an author and as a field researcher, Crumbley does not hide behind a screen. She writes as a partisan, an advocate, eager to advance Aladura women's interests. In a chapter on "Gender and Power," for example, Crumbley offers advice to church authorities. "Were CAC women ordained," she writes, "they could effect change directly on policy-making committees,"  allowing the church to retain the services of inspirational female evangelists (p. 107).

Crumbley's close relationship with her subject of study gives this book its intimacy and energy. But her intimate involvement in the church's life does keep this book anchored squarely within the precincts of the Aladura congregation, and only rarely does Crumbley move outside the church walls. She is preoccupied with the rules that oblige menstruating women to separate themselves from the body of the Aladura congregation: the subject is discussed--among other places--on pages 77 to 79, 95 to 96, 113 to 115, and in the conclusion. Crumbley herself experienced the "cost of having a female body": she was compelled to absent herself from the compound of the Church of the Lord (Aladura) while menstruating, and to perform a "sanctification" upon returning to the church's life. For the anthropologist Crumbley, the exclusion of menstruating women is a measuring stick by which to evaluate women's power in the church. The "ritual use of space in relation to the female body," she writes, "dramatizes the respective exclusion and inclusion of women within church structures and processes" (p. 135). But in her focus on the churches' ritual life, Crumbley makes it hard to see the uses women made of Aladura discourse. She catalogues the rituals of Aladura congregations, keeps track of women's menstrual periods, and maps their seating arrangements. But Crumbley only rarely allows her Aladura friends and informants to speak, and she spends little time reconstructing the biographies of the female commoners in Aladura congregations. We are left to wonder, therefore, about the ways in which their scrupulous command over Aladura practices empowered women in other spheres of their social lives. How far did Aladura Christianity offer its female advocates rhetorical and theological resources as they sought to advance their interests in the marketplace, in political societies, or in their kin relationships? What "gendered experiences" of being Aladura were constituted outside the church? Crumbley's angle of vision is fixed on the church's institutions, on its rituals and bureaucracy, and on its male and female leadership. She misses the opportunity to explore how Aladura women generated social capital as they moved into other spheres of the social world.

The point is not simply that Crumbley has been too focused on churches. The point is that the narrow character of her research makes it impossible to glimpse the wider world in which Aladura entrepreneurs took up a position. Throughout the book, Crumbley illuminates the "dramatic and undeniable continuities" that link contemporary Aladura churches with a longer Yoruba religious tradition, and the book begins by quoting the manifesto of the Organization of African Independent Churches, which claims that Aladura and other African-initiated churches "try to live Christianity with our own national clothing, in harmony with our own cultural heritage" (pp. 20, 6). Crumbley accepts Aladura Christians' self-justifying theology on its own terms, and ignores the innovative cultural and intellectual work in which Aladura partisans were involved. I. B. Akinyele, for example, appears in Crumbley's book as one of the founders of the CAC: he established the first CAC primary school at his farm in Ibadan in 1924, and as the first president of the CAC, he helped to build the church's "fledgling bureaucracy" (p. 65). But Akinyele was doing more than building churches. In 1916, some years before the foundation of the CAC, he published Iwe Itan Ibadan, a creative work of historical research.[1] On its pages, Akinyele drew together modes of discourse that Yoruba people had hitherto kept separate. The book presented, side by side, the praise epithets that female oriki poets commonly recited and the historical narratives (itan) that were ordinarily told by men. In Iwe Itan Ibadan, Akinyele was drawing Yoruba readers together, breaking down the separate spheres of discourse in which men and women practiced history, and constituting an integrated public. The churches that Akinyele helped to found might productively be seen as a further expression of that innovative culture-building project. The CLA's founder, Ositelu, is said to have filled six massive journals during the four years he spent preparing for his evangelistic vocation. During that time, he invented a holy script, coined a set of holy words, and gave out prophecies that he recorded in his book. Ositelu--like Akinyele--was creating both a vocabulary and a literature that his followers could learn, drawing Yoruba devotees into a sphere of discourse that was defined neither by age nor by wealth, but by a shared devotion to and command over a unitary set of texts.

Crumbley says nothing about Aladura partisans' creative cultural work. She keeps her analytical eye firmly fixed on the rituals that happen inside the walls of Aladura churches, and she fails therefore to illuminate how Aladura churches drew from and expanded on currents of thought and practice that Yoruba people more generally were inaugurating. Where else were Yoruba women and men being drawn together, whether in competition or in harmonious cooperation? Aladura churches are not simply an extension on an already -established set of Yoruba values and practices. As Peel has shown in Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (2000), and as Akinyele's work suggests, the Yoruba were co-created alongside Yoruba Christianity. What political work did Aladura Christians do as they imagined themselves to be Yoruba, and how far did their imagined community overlap with other Yoruba imaginaries?

But these are questions for another study. Deidre Crumbley has done us a service in offering an insightful, deeply felt book on a subject that matters, both for church people and for those who would seek to understand the lineaments of our cosmopolitan world.

Note

[1]. Karin Barber, "I. B. Akinyele and Early Yoruba Print Culture," in Recasting the Past: History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa, ed. Derek R. Peterson and Giacomo Macola (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), 31-49.

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Citation: Derek Peterson. Review of Crumbley, Deidre Helen, Spirit, Structure, and Flesh: Gender and Power in Yoruba African Instituted Churches. H-Africa, H-Net Reviews. May, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=26119

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