This movement of followers of Olumba Olumba Obu (b. 1918) began in Calabar, Nigeria in the late 1950s. It is also known as ‘Christ Universal Spiritual School of Practical Christianity’. The leader and members insist that it should not be called a church but rather it aims to establish God’s Reign throughout the world by uniting brothers and sisters in bonds of love. In this work, they believe their leader has a unique historic role to play.
There are many legends about Obu’s childhood but reliable information is scanty. However, it is clear that, from the age of eighteen, he earned his living as a trader dealing in drapery. He was known for his conspicuous honesty and for his readiness to help anyone in need. He gradually gained popularity as an itinerant preacher. In the early 1940s he gave up his business and resolved to devote himself to teaching and praying, while visiting homes, and to a simple life style. Then, because many came to him to pray for healing and for deliverance from witchcraft, he gave up travelling and was able to set up a prayer house in Calabar which he called ‘Bethel’. People from his home village of Biakpan who were living in the capital rallied to him and he thus became a leader in social development programmes. His movement was registered in 1956, under the name ‘Brotherhood of the Cross and Star’; early publications explained the symbolism: ‘Cross’ as the sufferings of Jesus Christ on our behalf and also the hardships His followers suffer in His footsteps and ‘Star’ as the glory attained through these sufferings.
As followers became convinced that his was a divine brotherhood and that he personally shared in that divinity, the movement spread throughout Nigeria and to other countries and continents. Bethels were established and, although Obu no longer left Calabar, he was believed to visit them in the guise of a traveller or of one in need, so providing a motive for generous hospitality. The Brotherhood Printing Press in Calabar began to publish sermons of Obu and treatises by his followers. Here a distinctive pattern of thought appears, based on study of the Bible.
The most striking non-biblical component in this teaching is the importance assigned to re-incarnation. This may have been due to contact with Indian religious thought or with esoteric movements present in Nigeria but African scholar Mbon shows that elements of local tribal religion are a more likely influence. One publication from the Brotherhood Press, The Gospel of ‘Reincarnation’ (n.d.) by Ofem E Otu demonstrates an original development of this thinking which is no doubt due to the leader himself. The topic presents Adam as a first ‘divine incarnation’ to be followed in series by Enoch, Noah, Melchisedech, Moses, Elijah, Christ Jesus, and finally, Leader Obu. The eight are taken by this author to be ‘God in mortalization’, that is to say, God, who is otherwise omnipresent, on occasions enters particular mortal life. In the final entry, God has come to judge the living and the dead.
This particular teaching, naturally, met with disapproval by most churches in the country. There was a public confrontation in the streets of Calabar in 1977 with charges of blasphemy and some violence. But much of the other teaching in the literature from the Brotherhood Press must have been more acceptable.
The teaching has many elements derived from traditional culture, including belief in the presence of the ‘living dead’ at their meetings, in going barefoot as a sign of the holiness of the earth and in the prevalence of sorcery. But, like many African initiated churches (see African Independent Churches and African Charismatic Churches), it includes rejection of cultural fraternities and traditional divination. Unlike some, it is also against polygyny.
In moral teaching the movement lays great emphasis on the commandment to love unselfishly with generosity to the stranger and this seems to have borne fruit in practices of hospitality and care for those in distress. The frequent Brotherhood feasts constitute a ritual which Mbon compares to African symbolism used in oath taking, bonding the community: Obu says, ‘They bring life and bind you together. There should be no divisions in the Bethel.’
