Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

Together with the award-winning Nigerian photographer Akintunde Akinleye, anthropologist Dr. Marloes Janson hit the road in the summer of 2013 to map the most important and busiest Nigerian road – the 120-kilometer long Lagos-Ibadan Expressway. While it has failed as the artery linking the north and the south of Nigeria, the highway has succeeded as a stage for the performance of public religiosity to the extent that it can be described as a ‘Spiritual Highway’. It owes this name to the fact that over the past three decades numerous Christian and Muslim prayer camps have sprung up along the highway. Despite the sharp division between Muslims and Christians in Nigerian society, the photographs visualize that the prayer camps have much in common in terms of both activities and discourse. The convergence of Christian and Muslim elements makes the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway a true crossroads. At this crossroads prayer camps act as road-builders in rendering meaningful the unstable flux of life in megacity Lagos.

Join Akinleye and Janson for this panel discussion, sponsored by the Center for Global Islamic Studies and the HARN Museum of Art.