Now Finding God (Post 8)

'The fool who has said in his heart, there's no God above.'

I have a friend who once recounted to me how he fell so seriously ill that he was at death’s door several years back. His parents took him to lots of doctors who came back with one verdict – they couldn’t find anything wrong with the sick boy. Some of the doctors even ‘kindly’ suggested to the parents that their son’s illness could be the work of juju and that they should try a traditional solution (Smart doctors, wouldn’t you say?)

This friend of mine went on to claim how this is the reason of his undying belief in the supernatural; evil forces exist, he claimed; the supernatural is a real phenomenon. He even claimed that the native doctor who eventually ‘cured’ his illness revealed to his parents and him the person who had brought the illness on the lad; this image was shown them in a mirror. He saw the evil person in the mirror with his own eyes, he claimed (and there I was thinking mirrors only reflect the image in front of them).

Anyway, I’ve heard several narratives like this one. All of them have one thing in common – that the illness of the victim could not be understood by all the doctors consulted. And in some lucky cases, a doctor would refer them to a native doctor!

No disrespect to the NMA, but it is hardly a big deal if Nigerian medicine at its rather undeveloped level (compared with the developed world) either because of a lack of funding, facilities or knowledge is dumbfounded by an illness. Even Western science sometimes encounters its dark areas. But this takes me back to my first point, our idea of science, which is principally catch-up-with-Europe-and-America, based has remained stunted at that primitive level where we only have to find a gap in our knowledge or a problem we can’t solve to refer the case to the supernatural.

I call this ignorance which I define as the soil on which belief in miracles grows. Imagine the concept of scientific ignorance, copycat science lacking in the honourable attribute of a true devotion to the pursuit of knowledge and of solving problems. After all, once upon a time, our ancestors would refer malaria victims to their native doctors and many of those cases would have been diagnosed as having been caused by someone else. The same goes for thyphoid, tetanus, yellow fever and general infections; we didn’t understand them then so we looked for supernatural solutions. This is a very well known stereotype of Africans held by the rest of the world, isn’t it – that in Africa, it is never what caused it but WHO caused it.

I have a parallel to the touching story of my friend who almost died from an ‘unknown’ illness. I got talking with an English woman who also had become ill all of a sudden sometime before. In about twenty-four hours, she had become paralysed down one half of her body. Doctors at the hospital she visited were baffled as they couldn’t explain her condition but unlike us – and you might think unfortunately – they didn’t have the convenient recourse to native doctors or the supernatural. So, they did some research and browsed medical records all over the country. They eventually discovered that there had been a precedent for the lady’s illness back in the fifties, an illness that had to do with the thyroid gland, a very rare condition that the doctors had to go back about five decades to find the information they needed.

Well, isn’t it a good thing, they didn’t have juju or the supernatural to rely on; they have learned to be organised, detailed and so devoted to research and problem solving as any true scientific mind should be.

My Nigerian friend survived his illness but how many others have died while waiting on their native doctors and their juju to provide a cure. I have put this friend’s subjective experience with native doctor and the mirror alongside all the other thousands of subjective individual experiences that can’t be taken as objectively true. It certainly doesn’t help his case that he was very sick at the time; a mind in that condition is open to lots of suggestive possibilities. Even a bad case of malaria can render one delirious.

I am sure every one of you reading this will have a ‘miraculous’ story of yours to tell either from your own experience or as told you by someone you know. Each of us will want to think that we’ve been the beneficiaries of a divine hand, that we are that special, that loved, that looked after. Well, you have a right to think what you want; don’t just expect everyone else to take it as objective truth.