Olusola Omoju: Can the black Madonna save Nigeria

The more I see the world, the more I fall in love with my dear country. No matter how sick Nigeria seems to be, I am beginning to think that it is the best country in the world. She only needs to get a few things right to be on top of the world.

I was so worried about Nigeria that I had to go to a prayer mountain in far away Barcelona, Spain to seek the face of God for intervention in Nigeria. If you ask average Nigerians what they know about Barcelona, they will only remember Messi and Camp Nou.

However, there is a popular deity that was believed to have saved Spain a couple times from tribulations. She sits on a mountain close to Barcelona, they call her the BLACK MADONNA!!!

The Black Madonna, a romanesque polychrome carving, was believed to have been carved in Jerusalem around the 12th century. It is one of the most famous Black Madonna statues in the world, and in 1844 Pope Leo XIII declared the Virgin of Montserrat, the patroness of Catalonia.

It was believed that she saved the monastery from the Swedish invasion and siege of 1655. She was also credited with defeating a Russian attack in 1920. You won’t therefore blame me that I went to plead with the lady to save NIGERIA from our numerous predicaments.

Maybe my upbringing is affecting me. When I was in secondary school, pastors and churches were respected and revered unlike today. I remember the first time I

went to an interdenominational prayer mountain for a weekly friday night vigil. They call that mountain Ori oke, BASIRIBASIRI (The mountain where God covers our shameful secrets) located in Akure where I grew up. As a secondary school boy, all my prayers were dutifully answered on that mountain and I started believing that God answers prayers on the mountain more than the plain.

I was attending a public secondary school until my JSS3. I so much desired to go to one of the unity schools which were the standard schools of those days. I prayed that Friday night that God should miraculously send me to a unity school. I came home the following morning ( saturday) and I was sleeping due to the previous night vigil when my father came to wake me up and asked if I would like to write the Unity exam that very morning. I was shocked!

It happened that a man brought his two daughters from the village to write that exam and he had no place to stay except my father’s house. We would never know about the exam if that man didn’t bring his daughters to our house that fateful night. My father asked him how he got the forms for the daughters, the man said they would pay for the forms at the exam venue and he was yet to get the forms.

How coincidental or was it the prayers of the night before? That was how I went for the exam without any form of preparation the very morning I pleaded with God to grant me admission to the school. I wrote the exam and forgot about it. My father never went to check the result.

Someone told him in his work place one month later that he saw my name on the admission list and I came second in the whole state among over 500 applicants. Guess what? The two ladies that made me know about the exam never passed. That was the beginning of my belief in the efficacy of mountain top prayers. You will therefore appreciate my enthusiasm when I set out on a similar adventure decades later in far away Barcelona.

I started my journey early in the morning from Barcelona to climb the highest summit of montserrat, the mountain that housed the monastery that housed the lady. The summit sits at 4055 feet above sea level. This time, I decided to climb the hill in a funicular. The views were so spectacular and It was indeed, an incredible experience. There is a whole lot of history behind the monastery but I will limit my discussion to my encounter with the lady I was on the queue for close to an hour, passing through an intricately sculptured but ancient basilica in awe and reverence.

When I finally met our lady, I was amazed and disappointed at the same time. Is it this small statue that attracts millions of pilgrims monthly or something else? I heard a little of the many miracles attributed to an encounter with black madonna no doubt but the statue looked so ordinary that if it were located anywhere in Nigeria, all the pentecostal churches including Pastor Adeboye and Oyedepo will be daily cursing the people that visit the statue, saying it is idolatry. You can as well say she looks like YEYE OSUN of Osogbo..

The funny part is that the statue is even black. Does that mean that MARY THE VIRGIN was a black woman? I guess the worshippers didn’t want to attribute anything good to blacks so they came up with an explanation. They said the statue was not originally painted black but because it was painted thousands of years ago, it turned black over time due to wear and tear. Very convenient! Let us wait and see whether MONA LISA will also turn black. I don’t believe the theory at all but how else would the Almighty Spain explain that a black woman’s statue saved them from the Russians in 1920?

Anyway, I finally held the hand of our lady. I had a personal discussion with the lady. My only request to the lady…MAY PRESIDENT TINUBU ‘get it right’. May Nigeria be great again. My group later lit a candle to seal the prayer as demanded by tradition.

I met thousands of people from all over the world coming to pay homage and receive blessings from our lady. Everywhere I turn all over the world, I see millions of tourists patronising places that look so ordinary and I keep wondering what is wrong with my dear Nigeria. When will tourists start queuing to see IDANRE hills? When will they come to learn the famous history of OLUA, a popular deity in my hometown who is equally attributed with a lot of miracles? When will Nigeria get it right?

As I descended from the montserrat in a funicular, the only question going through my mind was …WILL THE BLACK MADONNA SAVE THE MOST POPULOUS BLACK NATION?

Dr Olusola Omoju is a researcher cum public affairs analyst.