On Rupture and Contempt: Pentecostal Receptions of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture

This paper analyzes Nigerian Pentecostal receptions of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC ‘77) and engages existing narratives of “rupture” used to characterize Nigerian Pentecostalism. In doing so, this paper seeks to offer an alternative account of Pentecostal relationships to the imagined “past” associated with Orisa traditions—focusing on “contempt” rather than “rupture”—that can account for both violent rejection of Orisa among Pentecostals as well as the presence of Orisa in Pentecostal religiosity. What may seem a rupture or break with the past, can alternatively be seen as Pentecostals inhabiting a contemptuous posture towards specific objects (groups, traditions, people, etc.). While Pentecostals consistently narrate the rise of Christianity as a break from a “dark” non-Christian past, Pentecostals in Nigeria and the diaspora draw from Orisa cosmologies and traditions while sustaining a theologically generative posture of contempt towards those same traditions.