One of the most striking examples of African indigenous religious creativity is the Aladura, a group of churches that emerged in Western Nigeria from the 1920s and 1930s. They are so called because of their penchant for prayer, healing, prophecy, exorcism, trances, visions and dreams. The Aladura made inroads into the European religious landscape in the late 1960s and have continued to grow in numbers. This paper examines their historical development, belief patterns and their appropriation of rituals in diaspora. Aladura's public image, particularly in the European media, has been somewhat controversial. Drawing insights from Great Britain, Italy and Germany, especially relating to the recent 'Thames Torso' ritual murder in Great Britain, the transnational sexual labour trafficking in Italy and Germany and their alleged connections with some Aladura churches, the paper shows how media sensationalizing of such allegations further serves to heighten public apprehension of Aladura. An insufficient grasp of Aladura religious worldview and their strong emphasis on ritual re-enactments may often continue to attract public misrepresentation and diabolization.
International and African discourses on the HIV/AIDS pandemic and intervention neglect the role of religion and religious organizations. Social science perspectives in tackling health and disease neglect religious doctrines and faith central to worldviews and praxis of religious groups. Both aspects are important for religious groups and individuals affected by HIV/AIDS. Informed by a religious studies paradigm and through the religious ethnography of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) in Nigeria and the Diaspora, this article demonstrates mechanisms employed by African Pentecostals to combat the epidemic and provide support for infected members. The RCCG conceptualization of disease and healing is central to understanding responses and measures in combating HIV/AIDS.
One issue that has launched Nigeria into international réclame and public ignominy, especially in the last decade, is the Advance Fee Fraud (a.k.a. '419'), a code which refers originally to the section of the Nigerian Penal Law that deals with specific fraud schemes. The paper located the economic and socio-political upheavals in Nigeria from the late 1970s as the leverage for the advent and consolidation of fraudulent schemes. It demonstrated how youths have increasingly appropriated the Internet as a gateway to the world and as conduits for information enhancement, economic empowerment or a means to achieving their own ends. Through a careful analysis of 150 documented scam letters, this paper describes the emerging variations of a theme. As a transnational organised crime, this paper demonstrates how its increasing complexity and sophistication, with the target audience of individuals and corporate bodies within the domestic and international frontiers, has attracted local-global security attention and action. The paper concludes that the changing anatomy and the elasticity of the criminal transnational networks can be better grasped, and the preventive measures by individual, government and corporate security agencies prove efficacious, when understood and located within local-global contexts and wider operational frameworks.
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