New York, USA - The symptoms of demonic attacks, listed on fliers that had been tacked to hundreds of lampposts and bus stops in southeastern Queens, were enough to stop travelers in their tracks:
“Feel pressed down on the bed and unable to get up even when awake.”
“Chased by animals in your dreams.”
“People suddenly change their mind about you without a good reason.”
That section of the borough is home to about 125,000 West Indians, many living in fear of curses that, they believe, can expose them to harm. The fliers offer help, promising that the accursed can “receive deliverance” at the LifeZone Church.
On a recent weeknight at the church, a 28-chair place of worship on the first floor of a wood frame house on 107th Avenue in Jamaica, the pastor, and the author of the flier, the Rev. Kehinde Olufemi Akojenu, announced that it was time to pray. Mr. Akojenu, a 32-year-old native of Nigeria, founded LifeZone late last year. He said that he could thank the fliers, which he wrote and began posting two months ago, for helping to fill his church’s seats.
Mr. Akojenu, better known to his parishioners as Femi, is not just preaching for religion. He is also preaching against certain religions — and that is the source of both his popularity and the resistance to his mission. He specializes in deliverance, a Christian practice of ridding people of evil spirits. For those who attend his church, the process often involves renouncing Haitian voudon (voodoo), Jamaican obeah and other African-derived religions, which Mr. Akojenu and many others whom he described as evangelistic Christians dismiss as forms of witchcraft.
At his church on that recent night, Mr. Akojenu barked out a string of impassioned declarations to his congregation. “When they consult some voodoo man somewhere or some obeah man somewhere,” he said, referring to any enemies of his parishioners, “wherever they go, whatever they put together, it will not work.”
Mr. Akojenu said he knew of three other local ministers engaged in crusades like his.
Marta Moreno Vega, founder of the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute in Midtown, described activities like those of Mr. Akojenu as a legacy of European colonialism. “How do you colonize?” she said. “By destroying people’s culture. What do you do? You write books and introduce materials that tell people their systems are primitive, backwards and evil.”
Others, however, share the attitude of Neil Waldron, a 46-year-old from Trinidad and Tobago who owns a cleaning business. Mr. Waldron, who attended LifeZone after seeing Mr. Akojenu’s fliers at a bus shelter, says practitioners of witchcraft have long bedeviled members of his family. “They were landowners,” Mr. Waldron said of his relatives. “They still own a lot of property — and a lot of people were jealous.”