Abstract
In this thesis, I explore the concept of religious syncretism and its representations in four twenty-first century Nigerian novels. In reading these Nigerian texts as a type of cultural history, I trace the development of religious syncretism as an amalgamation of Christianity and Indigenous African spirituality in recent postcolonial literature, and I contrast this with predominantly dichotomous representations of religion that present indigenous African spirituality and Christianity as irrevocably incompatible. Contemporary culture places value on hybridity and “in-betweenness”, and the literary concepts associated with these frameworks. Therefore, simultaneously exploring African indigenous practices and Christian doctrine and symbols, and how these complement one another, allows their polarisation to be contested while emphasizing their liminality. This study expands on Kwame Bediako’s prescription of African Christianity as an alternative to Western-centric and imperialist Christianity, and it further explores how African Christianity engages with indigenous African spirituality, which involves ancestor and idol veneration as part of African ontology. I begin this study by tracing the erasure of the dichotomy between indigenous spirituality and Christianity. After that, I investigate religious syncretism’s relevance in contextual identity formation and expression, paying close attention to the primary texts’ thematic concerns. The connections between the novels under study lie in their unique depictions of hybrid, contemporary identities in Igbo and Yoruba cultures, their varied articulations of doctrine and community (religion), and their more intimate expressions of personal spiritual worldviews (spirituality). Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2004) examines the polarisation of religious worldviews and their syncretic combination through a practice of reversal and emergence: it acknowledges the religions’ incompatibilities while negotiating for their integration. The novels discussed subsequently, Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater (2018), Okey Ndibe’s Foreign Gods Inc. (2014), and Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s Stay with Me (2017), expand on the role of emergence in religion and spirituality by exploring how these influence the concepts of transnationalism, identity, gender, and capitalism respectively. This study is valuable not just in exploring Christianity’s representations in contemporary African cultures but also in considering how Nigerian writers, and African writers generally, are reclaiming their agency in theological discourse, reformulating indigenous African spirituality within current global frameworks while removing Christianity’s Western-centric undertones and adapting it to African contexts.