By Ayodeji Adebanjo

The world of Abejoye unfolds both as a narrative and as a contest of sensibilities: a gradual unfolding of how a people comes to understand itself when two orders of meaning occupy the same psychic space. What is at stake is not merely the victory of one system over another, but the deeper question of why translation between them is never innocent. Christianity arrived on our shores as a totalizing grammar, and Yoruba culture, already complete in its metaphysics, is made to either bend, mimic, or disappear. A close viewing of Abejoye highlights this drama across the domestic, the spiritual, and the symbolic.

It begins, fittingly, with disturbance. The children of Elder Dele scream in their sleep, describing suffocation, invisible assaults, a pressure that is at once physical and metaphysical. Their mother, Laide, responds in the idiom of religious vigilance, resorting to fasting, prayer, and hyper awareness. Dele counsels restraint, invoking faith but resisting escalation. At this early stage, his reluctance appears temperamental; later it will reveal itself as moral evasion. But what matters more immediately is Laide’s interpretations. She suspects a connection between these disturbances and her father-in-law’s impending visit. This suspicion, while signaling paranoia in the crudest sense, is nonetheless rooted in a cosmology where events are never merely events. The Yoruba speak of àpẹ, signs, and àkíyèsí, the attentive disposition required to decode them. Together they constitute a way of being in the world, a cultivated sensitivity to the idea that reality is layered, that the visible is only ever a surface.

This disposition finds an uneasy parallel in Christianity’s insistence on vigilance. The Christian believer is enjoined to “watch and pray,” to recognize that the world is a theater of unseen contestation, where Satan prowls and tests. The resemblance is nevertheless deceptive. In the Yoruba frame, the interpretive act is not anchored in a single moral polarity; it is a negotiation with multiplicity, ambiguity, and mystery. Christianity, by contrast, tends toward binary clarity—light and darkness, God and the devil. Thus when Laide later refuses to host a dinner because “her spirit” resists it, she occupies an ambiguous space: she speaks in a language that is culturally Yoruba but religiously Christian, a hybrid idiom that signals both continuity and rupture.

Baba’s arrival sharpens this tension. His first words, of gratitude, locate him squarely within a moral economy where children are extensions of their parents’ being. “Omo a toju iwo naa,” he says to his son: your children will care for you as you have cared for me. This extends beyond social expectation into metaphysical continuity. In the commandment to “honor thy father and mother”, Christianity affirms a similar ethic, but the grounding differs. In Yoruba thought, the self is already plural, distributed across lineage; in Christianity, the command is divine injunction. The overlap, then, while real is not identical.

More striking is Baba’s casual address to unseen enemies upon arrival. When questioned, he replies that their eleda (loosely translated as “essence”) are present. Here the Yoruba conception of spirit as mobile, unbounded by space and time, comes into view. Communication does not require proximity because intention travels. This is echoed later when said enemies attempt to summon Baba’s spirit from afar. Christianity, too, posits a universe in which prayer traverses distance effortlessly. A pastor may pray for a labouring woman continents away; the efficacy lies not in physical adjacency but in spiritual connection. The difference is not in the possibility of such transmission but in its ontology. For Baba, spirit is immanent, woven into all things; for the Christian, it is mediated through a sovereign God who dispatches power.

This convergence and divergence are encapsulated in a single word: Ase. When Baba responds to prayers with Ase instead of “Amen,” the film stages a subtle confrontation. Both words function performatively—they do not merely conclude a prayer but activate it. But Ase carries within it a cosmological weight, an assertion that spoken words possess inherent power. “Oro jade, ase tele” – the word goes forth, ase follows – is a common refrain of modern pastors. In Christianity, “Amen” affirms; in Yoruba thought, Ase effectuates. A delicate but profound distinction.

In Abejoye, set as it is in Yorubaland and abroad, language itself becomes a site of estrangement. When Dele asks whether Baba’s utterances are prayers or incantations, the question betrays a dislocation. These are Yoruba words, intelligible within their own system, yet they have become alien even to a Yoruba son. The scene reveals, perhaps inadvertently, the success of an orchestrated epistemic shift: what was once familiar now appears occult. Christianity’s  “strange words”, for instance the utterances attributed to Jesus—“Talitha cumi,” “Ephphatha”, etc —operate in precisely this register of sacred foreignness, and much more so than Baba’s words. Yet the believer of Yoruba origin responds with confusion to one but not the other. The difference lies not in the presence of mystery but in its authorization. Where one is deemed sanctified, the other is suspect.

The narrative repeatedly returns to this asymmetry. Traditional practices are permitted no margin of error. When they fail, they are dismissed as inherently deficient. Christianity, however, is granted interpretive elasticity. When Dele’s family suffers despite prayer and fasting, the failure is attributed not to the insufficiency of power but to Dele’s hidden sin. The system remains intact; the fault lies in the practitioner. Traditional practice receives no such generosity. Baba’s incomplete ritual is noted but not seriously considered as a cause; the conclusion, that traditional power fails, is immediate and final.

This asymmetry extends into the moral domain. The masquerade’s selective attack on Dele underscores the idea that sin renders one vulnerable. Christianity frames this as exposure to demonic assault; Yoruba ethics, through the concept of omoluabi, asserts that a person of upright character is ultimately shielded from such harm. Here, again, the overlap is evident, but the underlying motivations diverge. For the Yoruba, goodness is intrinsic, valuable in itself; in Christianity, it is often instrumental, tied to salvation or divine favor.

Perhaps the most poignant site of negotiation is storytelling. Baba gathers the children at night, recreating the atmosphere of moonlight tales. But the stories he tells are biblical, refracted through Yoruba idiom. Pharaoh becomes Ifarahun, the narratives take on the cadence of folktales, and the children sit as though at a village hearth. This is cultural translation at its most effective, and most ambiguous. Does it preserve the form while altering the content, or does it subtly reshape the content through the form? When Laide dismisses these as no different from Bible stories, she reveals both a recognition that the structures are analogous and a fear that the content might not remain contained.

Music, too, becomes a conduit. Baba composes songs that narrate biblical events as though they were local wrestling matches. The garden of Gethsemane becomes a contest, Christ and Satan as adversaries in a familiar arena. This is not trivialization but domestication, an attempt to make the foreign intimate. Tellingly, the same process produces dissonance. Traditional songs, once carriers of communal memory, are reworded, repurposed, sometimes demonized. Names, which anchor individuals to lineage and spirit, are abandoned for foreign alternatives. The result is a subtle but pervasive alienation, a self estranged from its own origins.

Abejoye does not merely depict this process; it participates in it. Traditional symbols are often cast as shadows (eégún and sigidi as darkness), and Christianity as light. Such declarations are less arguments than assertions, relying on repetition rather than engagement. The banning of the egungun festival in Baba’s hometown in favor of a crusade is emblematic. A communal, cyclical ritual that plays a part in sustaining identity is summarily abandoned, replaced by a linear, evangelistic event that seeks a dubious transformation. 

The narrative is, however, not entirely one of erasure. There are moments of convergence that resist simplification. The act of blessing a new home, whether through iwure or the recitation of Psalms, reveals a shared human impulse to sanctify space. Hospitality, embodied in the offering of water, resonates with the symbolism of baptism. Even the admonition not to look back, echoed in both traditions, speaks to a universal anxiety about regression.

What complicates the picture further is the question of class and modernity. The film gestures toward a contemporary reality in which cultural ignorance has become a marker of sophistication. Fluency in foreign idioms and distance from traditional practice are now signs of status. Christianity, intertwined with Western education, often becomes a vehicle for this shift. To be “born again” is not only a spiritual transformation but, in many contexts, a social one. The cost is a gradual erosion of cultural literacy.

But beneath this erosion, the older structures persist. The belief in generational consequences, the centrality of lineage, the reverence for elders, all these continue to shape behavior, even when reframed in Christian language. The film’s insistence that harm to one’s children is equivalent to harm to oneself echoes both Yoruba cosmology and biblical notions of generational inheritance. The categories blur, overlap, resist neat separation.

In the end, Baba’s conversion is staged as a culmination, a surrender of the “counterfeit” to the “authentic.” He kneels, relinquishing his former practices, embracing a new allegiance. But even here, the boundaries are porous. He continues to sing, to gesture, and to inhabit his body in ways that are unmistakably Yoruba. The tools change—the calabash becomes a Bible—but the rhythm persists. This is not a seamless replacement but transposition, a kind of shape shifting common to coverts like Baba.

What, then, are we to make of this interplay? It is tempting to read it as a simple narrative of triumph, but such a reading would miss the subtler dynamics at work. Christianity in Abejoye does not simply overwrite Yoruba culture; it inhabits it, borrows from it, reshapes it, even as it declares its supremacy. Yoruba culture, for its part, does not vanish; it adapts, sometimes defensively, sometimes creatively, sometimes at the cost of its own coherence.

The deeper question is whether such coexistence can ever be stable. A system that insists on exclusive truth will always strain against one that embraces multiplicity. The result is a kind of cultural vertigo, a sense of being pulled in two directions at once. For the individual, this manifests as confusion, hybridity, or, at times, a quiet reconciliation. For the culture, it raises the possibility of dilution or reinvention.

Having picked a side, Abejoye does not resolve these tensions. Its dramatization of them nevertheless invites a more careful consideration of what it means to inherit, to believe, and to belong. It suggests that identity is not merely chosen but negotiated, often under conditions not of one’s making. And it leaves us with the uneasy recognition that in the encounter between Christianity and Yoruba culture, something is always gained, something is always lost, and the balance is never finally settled.

Ayodeji Adebanjo is a Nigerian storyteller, cultural curator, and literary programmer. He holds a BA in Literature from Lagos State University and an MA in Media and Communication Studies from Bournemouth University. His work spans editorial practice, festival curation, and literary programming. He has contributed to major literary platforms, including Book and Art Hub, the Lagos Book and Art Festival, and the Quramo Festival of Words. His practice is rooted in shaping cultural narratives, supporting writers, and expanding engagement with African literature. Ayodeji writes from the United Kingdom.