Seminar: The Spiritual Highway: Religious World Making in Megacity Lagos

This seminar, which accompanies the new exhibition (1 July - 30 September) at the ASC of photographs taken by Akintunde Akinleye, maps the conversion of Nigeria’s former capital, Lagos – often described as an ‘apocalyptic megacity’ – into a Prayer City. Since the late 1980s, numerous Christian and Muslim prayer camps have sprung up along the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway. Subsequently, this highway has grown into a stage for the performance of public religiosity, earning it the moniker, the ‘Spiritual Highway’. Visiting prayer camps as a means of solving problems related to health and wealth occurs on a grand scale in Nigeria, characterizing the Pentecostal upsurge. Muslims have responded to the Pentecostalization of Nigeria’s cityscape by establishing their own prayer camps. The photographs shed light on the mutual borrowing of prayer styles and images between Christian and Muslim prayer camps. In order to grasp the ways in which religion is ‘lived’ in daily life, we must bridge the division of labour between scholars studying Christianity and those studying Islam, bringing the two religious traditions together in a comparative framework.