People · 1928–1959
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In 1928 a road worker's steamroller stopped dead on the Ilesa road and, he said, a voice called his name. A few years later he cleared a forest in Efon-Alaaye that nobody dared enter, and it is still a place of pilgrimage.
Joseph Ayodele Babalola was born on 25 April 1904 in Odo-Owa, a small town in what is now Kwara State. His parents were Anglicans, and his father, David Rotimi, was a church elder there. Joseph went to school as far as standard five at All Saints' School in Osogbo, then left to learn a trade as a motor mechanic. That did not last either. He joined the Public Works Department and ended up driving a steamroller, helping to build the road from Igbara-Oke to Ilesa.
According to his own account, as his followers later wrote it down, it was on that road that everything changed. In late September 1928 he could not sleep for a week, and did not know why. Then, one day at work, the steamroller's engine simply stopped. Nothing seemed to be wrong with it. While he stood there confused, he heard a loud voice, "like the sound of many waters", call him three times. It told him to go out and preach, and warned that he would die if he refused.
He did not want to go. But he eventually resigned from the Public Works Department, even though his British supervisor, a Mr Fergusson, tried to talk him out of it. He said the voice then told him to fast for seven days, and at the end he saw a figure in a dazzling robe who gave him a hand bell, to drive away evil spirits, and a bottle of water for healing. Those two things, a bell and prayed-over water, became the tools of his whole ministry. He also said an angel told him never to wear a cap.
His first mission was almost absurd. He was told to enter Odo-Owa on market day covered in palm fronds, his face smeared with charcoal. In October 1928 he did exactly that. People took him for a madman. He was arrested for disturbing the peace and taken to the district officer in Ilorin, who let him go. His followers say a smallpox outbreak followed soon after, and the man they had laughed at was suddenly in demand. Whatever you make of that, his prayer meetings in the Anglican church at Odo-Owa grew so lively, with people seeing visions and speaking in tongues, that the bishop of the area reportedly ordered him out.
In 1930 Babalola joined the Faith Tabernacle, a fellowship led from Lagos, and was baptised by immersion in the lagoon behind its church on Moloney Bridge Street. In July that year its leaders met in Ilesa to settle some arguments: whether a man with several wives could be baptised, and whether believers could take medicines like quinine for malaria or should rely only on prayer. They brought Babalola along and gave him a room to himself.
They only got through the first item on their agenda. His followers say he prayed over a dead child at the Oke-Oye church and the child came back to life, and the mother ran through Ilesa telling everyone. Crowds poured in. The meetings moved to an open field because no hall could hold them. People came for healing from all over the country and beyond, drinking water from a stream called Omi Ayo, the stream of joy. One church leader claimed that in three weeks about a hundred lepers, sixty blind people and fifty lame people were cured, that Anglican and Methodist churches in Ilesa emptied, and that patients walked out of Wesley Hospital. The head of the Methodist mission called these reports grotesquely inaccurate. A British officer who went in disguise to watch simply described a big crowd, many lame and blind, and said it was orderly.
Then came the act that frightened Ilesa most. In front of the Owa's palace stood a big tree that people believed was a meeting place of witches, where sacrifices were made. Babalola burnt it down. Everyone expected him to drop dead. He did not, and after that, it is said, even the Owa treated him with fear and respect. The Oke-Oye revival is the root of what became the Christ Apostolic Church, one of the biggest Nigerian-founded churches.
From Ilesa the revival spread, and Babalola travelled. At Offa he had to leave to avoid violence. From Usi in Ekiti he went on to Efon-Alaaye, a hill town in the west of Ekiti, where the Oba Alaaye welcomed him and gave his group a whole house to stay in.
Babalola asked the king for an open place to pray, and the king told him to choose. He chose a large area at the edge of town. It was a forest that Efon people had always treated as forbidden, believed to be full of evil spirits. The king tried to talk him out of it. Babalola insisted. He and his men went into the bush, cleared it, and consecrated it as a prayer ground.
Nothing happened to them, and that, more than any sermon, seems to have convinced Efon. Large numbers of people joined the new faith. White missionaries came from Ado-Ekiti and the Baptist seminary at Ogbomoso to see the wonder-working prophet for themselves. Then the kings themselves crossed over. The Oba of Efon was baptised as Solomon Aladejare Agunsoye, and the Oba of nearby Aramoko as Hezekiah Adeoye. After that, the news ran across Ekiti.
It was not all triumph. In 1932 he was arrested over preaching against witches, which had stirred trouble in a town in the old Bendel area, and he spent six months in prison in Benin City. When he came out, he went straight back to Efon-Alaaye. He later preached as far as Creek Town near Calabar, and married a woman named Dorcas in 1935.
Babalola died in 1959. He was buried in Efon-Alaaye, the town of the forbidden forest. His grave and his father's are now the centre of what the federal tourism survey of 2019 called religious tourism, and people call the place the Power House. Members of his church come from across Nigeria and abroad to pray on the hills, to sleep in the catacomb, and to bring kegs of water to his grave, believing his power still heals. On the road to Abeta, at the river Oni, the church has even built private bathrooms for pilgrims who come to wash in water they believe can cure sickness and help women conceive. The survey found it was one of only two sites it visited in Ekiti that were fully kept up and busy with visitors.
