Elnathan John

Oh shit. The Financial Times talks about my book. I need to call my mummy. 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

If you mean in Nigeria then this is no shock. You cannot have a country where people are having debates about whether stealing books is ok and no libraries and sub par education and the complete destruction of any sort of intellectual ecosystem and expect any publisher to have enough resources to buy books. I was just talking earlier about how there are more functional libraries just in the city of Tshwane in South Africa than all of Nigeria combined. The City of Tshwane has set aside R2 million as part of a larger Gauteng provincial library services grant of R7.3 million, aimed at promoting and developing local Tshwane authors. In fact it is a miracle any publisher (apart from church publishers) is surviving in Nigeria.

This is a public relations officer of the Nigerian police responding to a woman talking about a matter of sexual assault. In public. Tweeted to millions of people. Now imagine what happens inside a police station.

New Substack: open.substack.com/pub/elnathanjo…

I see basic public services like this in countries like South Africa, and I wonder why Nigerians keep settling for non governance. These below are libraries in one municipality (in Nigeria that would be one Local Government Area) in South Africa (and the city of Tshwane alone has 62 public libraries). How many functional public libraries does the whole of Nigeria have (let's not even mention the WiFi)? Why again does anyone call Nigeria the giant of Africa?

@nomedeplumejksk Hard to say. Because the core is something I have been researching for years. This piece however is something I began early this year.

@elnathan_john Congrats 👏. This seems interesting. If you don't mind, for how long did you research?

First draft finished. 25,000 words. Whew. I am exhausted. I think I can make this a book actually. I will post one chapter on Substack tonight. It has been so exciting researching the philosophical connections between Bori cosmology and Greek mythology and I look forward to doing more with this work over the next few years.

@JChizobaVincent 💜💜💜

Sir Elnathan John has a new work on substack. Open substack, read, and subscribe if you haven't. You will love this one.

Time to go discover typos and errors after I pressed send last night.

Thanks. I am writing a text in hybrid style, somewhere between creative nonfiction and academic, taking Bori — the Hausa spirit possession tradition of northern Nigeria and the wider Sahel — as its primary subject, and arguing for its place as a philosophical and literary tradition of the first order. The text’s central ambition is to show that Bori has been doing things that Greek mythology, philosophy, and literary theory have approached from the outside without fully building: a teachable discipline of spirit possession as epistemological practice; a distributed system of knowledge held in praise-epithets, drum patterns, and spirit songs with a classificatory precision that rivals written archives; a philosophy of illness as relation misaddressed rather than organism malfunctioning; and a moral geography of gender, space, and invisible occupancy that thinks the body as social, historical, and cosmological simultaneously. It is both academic and narrative, serious and lyrical. I am absolutely enjoying the process.

@elnathan_john Congratulations on finishing your first draft, Elnathan! That's a huge milestone! What topics does your book explore?

The notification for "Jangare and Olympus in Conversation" just hit my inbox, and I couldn't stop reading. As a subscriber to @elnathan_john mailing list, I expected brilliance, but this is a masterclass in intellectual reclamation. By placing Bori cosmology side-by-side with Greek mythology, Elnathan isn't just "comparing" cultures—he's demanding the same institutional seriousness for the Sahelian spirit tradition that we’ve reflexively given the West for centuries. Two standout insights worth mentioning: Sarkin Aljan Sulemanu vs. Zeus: One is a literary epic; the other is a "practical, diagnostic" authority you negotiate with daily. Inna vs. Hera: A stunning breakdown of female authority—Hera as "reactive and displaced" while Inna is "structural and uncontainable." Jangare doesn’t need to justify its seat at the table; it has simply been waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. A profound, necessary piece of writing I'd say.

@Sepiyoung Thanks a lot!!! That is just one chapter from the long essay. There will be more over the next few weeks!

This is an own goal. So you know he is a terrible person, deeply unwell per your own narration, but you discussed how the "enfant terrible" would get into government "several times"? And even "encouraged him to be patient and prayerful" while feeling his "deep frustration and depression"? He did not change. So why are you, patient prayer warrior, involving us in the matter? Why not take your own advice and be patient and prayerful?

Rewatching this beautiful, heartbreaking performance from the Young@Heart film where Fred Knittle delivered this rendition while battling severe health issues. It was supposed to be a duet, but Knittle performed it alone, with a breathing tube, after his partner, Bob Salvini, passed away days before the concert. Fred Knittle himself died less than two years after the film, on New Years' day in 2009.

@cremechic11 Sturdy, baby. Like our love. Which is going nowhere.

What did you call ugu? I have to reduce your groom price 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

There are few Nigerian soups that do not have rewarm value. Egusi, Ogbono, Kuka, Taushe, Ewedu, even pepper soup. I think the only exceptions are vegetable soups, because reheating kills the vegetables, especially anything that has spinach in it. Here I must say that Nigerian spinach (unlike sturdy vegetables like Ugwu/Ugu) is the single worst vegetable for cooking. Not very tasty and once heat touches it, it shrivels and changes colour like a Nigerian politician avoiding accountability. Personally I think Nigerian spinach should be goat food.

Just for clarity let me show you a few easy to find material on Bori: -Fremont E. Besmer, “Initiation into the ‘Bori’ Cult: A Case Study in Ningi Town,” Africa 47, no. 1 (1977) A good paper that looks at a Girka ceremony in Ningi. -Fremont E. Besmer, Horses, Musicians and Gods: The Hausa Cult of Possession-Trance (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, 1983) - Very detailed book if you can find it in a library or buy it. -Adeline Masquelier, Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power, and Identity in an Islamic Town of Niger(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001) - This one looks at the Mariya iskoki of Niger. -Older but also useful: A. J. N. Tremearne, The Ban of the Bori; Demons and Demon-Dancing in West and North Africa (London: Heath, Cranton & Ouseley Ltd., 1914)

@elnathan_john Thank you.

So ahead of my long essay comparing Bori cosmology to Greek mythology, here are some parallels I found between the Bori Iskoki of Jangare and the Greek gods you think you know so well. I of course have to think of the two patriarchs, Sarkin Aljan Suleimanu and Zeus. Suleimanu, King of the spirits of Jangare has wives, children, some pious, some a complete disaster. He holds court. He has bodyguards and blacksmiths because even in the spirit world a king needs infrastructure. Zeus would see him across a crowded room and recognise a colleague immediately. Two patriarchs. Two judges of worlds. Two fathers whose children keep causing problems they have to manage from the top. The difference? Zeus throws lightning when annoyed. Sarkin Aljan makes power expensive. One is loud about authority. The other makes you pay for approaching it. I know which one I find more interesting. There there is Bori's Inna and the Greek Hera. Inna is the mother of all Bori spirits and one of Sarkin Aljan's wives. She is also — and this is important — conducting a long-term open-secret love affair with Kuturu the Leper, her husband's chief counsellor. The entire spirit world knows. It is managed by ensuring they never appear at the same ceremony, because if Sarkin Aljan sees them together, things will go badly for everyone, including the humans hosting the event. Hera would understand the assignment but handle it completely differently. Hera persecutes. Inna's affair has been metabolised into the ritual calendar. The marriage does not explode the cosmology. It becomes part of how the cosmology runs. Also: she punishes thieves with fatal abdominal swelling. She is not someone you want to cross. Hera would respect that. They would compare notes on husbands and leave each other alone. Then there is Bori's Barade the Greek Ares. Barade means mounted warrior. He loves battle. He is volatile. When things don't go his way, he sulks. Ares would find this deeply relatable. Same raw martial energy, same blood, same unglamorous side of violence the other gods prefer not to look at directly. But here is the detail that stays with me: Barade's afflictions include internal bleeding. He does not just cause wounds you can see. He causes damage that hides inside the body. Ares causes wars. Barade causes what wars do to the people who survive them. Now one of the most interesting comparisons for me is the comparison between Bori's Kuturu and the Greek Hephaestus. Kuturu is head of the House of Lepers, senior counsellor to the king of Jangare. He cannot walk. He crawls. He moves like a snake. He is conducting the aforementioned affair with the queen. As you know, Hephaestus is lame, marginalised, cuckolded, found near the gate, generous despite everything. Kuturu crawls. Two cosmologies separated by a sea and centuries, both independently arriving at the same philosophical question: what happens when you put the most damaged body in the room closest to power? Both answering it the same way. The one who crawls is the one the king cannot do without. I do not think that is a coincidence. I think that is two traditions noticing the same truth. Perhaps an even clearer comparison is seen in Bori's Sarkin Rafi and the Greek Poseidon. Sarkin Rafi is the son of Suleimanu but does not live in his father's house — already telling. He inhabits rivers, makes the land fertile, wanted all of Hausaland's water for himself until the other spirits forced a territorial negotiation he did not enjoy. Poseidon would recognise the water, the violence, the irrationality. But Poseidon causes earthquakes. Sarkin Rafi causes madness — specifically violent madness, the kind that overtakes the mind completely. The water doesn't just flood the land. It floods the self. I would say that Bori understood something about water and mental disorder that the Greeks were only gesturing at. Of course this is not all of them. The essay goes much deeper. But I hope this gives you a sense of what happens when we stop treating Bori as a curiosity and start reading it as a cosmology that has been doing serious philosophical work for centuries. The spirits are there. The thinking is there. The parallels are real, and so are the places where Bori goes somewhere Greek mythology never had to go. Essay coming soon (this week hopefully). In the meantime: pour one out for Kuturu, who crawls through the palace of Jangare and holds it together from the ground up.