American and European readers may be inclined to dismiss such remarks as coming from a hidebound bigot, or perhaps from a demagogue seeking attention—but they would be wrong to do so. In his attitudes toward sexuality, and above all in his attitude toward religious authority, Akinola represents a deep-rooted conservative tradition in African Christianity that is flourishing and growing, and that is simply not going to vanish as levels of economic growth and education rise in Africa. The prospect of imminent global schism in the Anglican Communion is therefore real.
Matters may well have come to a head by the time this article goes to press: in October the Archbishop of Canterbury was scheduled to preside over an emergency session in London of the primates of his Church worldwide. Perhaps the session will turn out to avert open schism, but even the friendliest such meeting could not change the nature of the enduring conflict between the older and the younger Anglican churches, with those of Europe and North America set against those of Africa and Asia. Methodists, Lutherans, and Presbyterians are watching these events with foreboding, because what is really at issue, of course, is competing conceptions of the nature of religious authority, of the relationship between the religious and secular spheres, and even of the possibility of coexisting peacefully with other faiths.
Peter Jasper Akinola is (not necessarily in this order) a Nigerian, a Christian, and an Anglican. He is an imposing figure, tall and graying, who has been married for thirty-four years and has six children. He was born in 1944 and spent his early life in the province of Ogun, the land of the Yoruba people, in the far west of Nigeria; he was sixteen when the country achieved its independence. Akinola thus came of age in an era of enormous optimism about a nation that had the potential, because of its vast oil reserves and its surging population, to be one of the most powerful countries in Africa—indeed, possibly a world power. From 1966 to 1970, however, Nigeria was torn apart by a civil war that killed perhaps two million people, and from 1983 to 1999 the country was ruled by a series of brutal and stunningly corrupt military dictatorships that set back development at home and blighted the nation's reputation overseas. In this disastrous secular environment many Nigerians began to see their future in the Christian churches, which offered a growing place of refuge.
When Nigeria's civil war began, Akinola was starting an entrepreneurial career in Lagos as a carpenter and a furniture maker, with a sideline in patent medicines. In 1968 he began training as a catechist, and after studying at Anglican theological colleges in northern Nigeria, he was ordained a deacon in 1978 and a priest in 1979. He traveled to the United States and in 1981 received a master's in theology at Virginia Theological Seminary. Later that year he returned to Nigeria, to Abuja, the city that was being developed as the nation's new federal capital. His return coincided with the start of a remarkable religious explosion. The Nigerian Church has never since known anything but boom years, and the specific nature of this boom is central to understanding Akinola's response to the debates over homosexuality.