Bishop Okereke performs an exorcism on Niru

Bishop Okereke performs an exorcism on Niru as the decisive escalation of his father’s attempt to correct his son’s homosexuality through religion. The ritual follows domestic violence, forced travel to Nigeria, and a church-sanctioned diagnosis of Niru’s desires as spiritual contamination. In the cramped back room, prayer becomes physical control: Niru is surrounded, pressed toward the floor, held down, and told that his body and mind must be cleansed. The scene’s central irony is that an act presented as deliverance reproduces the coercion it claims to remove, leaving Niru frightened, divided, and still subject to the authority of his father and the church.

Causes and Religious Framework

The exorcism grows out of the confrontation in Niru’s family kitchen, where his father discovers Tinder alerts and interprets his son’s relationships with men as sinful, satanic, filthy, unnatural, and a disgrace to the family. The father’s outrage is not merely verbal. He grabs Niru by the ear, pushes his face into the kitchen table, and invokes the authority of the household while threatening to involve Ify. The later ritual therefore extends an existing pattern in which sexuality is treated as a violation of family order and Niru’s body becomes the site on which that order is enforced.

The church supplies the language that makes this coercion appear therapeutic. Reverend Olumide’s sermon presents repentance as the key to God’s kingdom and asks the congregation to repeat that formula. Niru refuses the invitation internally, telling himself that repentance is not for him, and leaves the pew while his mother watches. Bishop Okereke then gives the family’s panic a more aggressive institutional form. In his office, he asks Niru whether he has been engaging in “practices of homosexualism,” assumes that homosexuality is a demon entrenched in America, and declares Nigeria a place where faith remains strong and has not been infiltrated by the devil. The proposed remedy depends on a stark classification: heterosexual obedience is purity, while Niru’s desires are treated as a foreign spiritual force to be expelled.

Course of the Exorcism

After Niru’s father rises and follows Bishop Okereke through the church, Niru is taken to a back room where four people are waiting: the bishop, two women with cream-colored fabric over their heads, and a small man carrying a large, worn Bible. They form a circle in a room without windows. Flickering bulbs draw power from a generator, a small fan fails to dispel the heat, and the air is thick with sweat, body odor, and cheap perfume. These details make the setting less like a sanctuary than a sealed chamber, while the religious arrangement gives the confinement a ritual structure.

Bishop Okereke directs Niru to stand in the center and asks everyone to pray the Our Father. The women and the Bible-bearing man join hands around him; Niru’s father moves his mouth without making an audible sound and remains in a corner, refusing to look at his son. When Bishop Okereke tells Niru to kneel, the others close in with hovering hands and assure him that God is in control. The language of consent is absent even as the ritual is framed as help. Niru is not asked what he wants from the ceremony; he is positioned as an object of intervention.

The physical force becomes unmistakable when Niru struggles to breathe and tries to reach the door. Bishop Okereke’s body and outstretched palm block his path. The bishop presses Niru’s forehead with what feels like extraordinary strength, forcing him down, while the two women and the other man cover his head with their palms. Their murmurs rise into unintelligible phrases, and one of them holds Niru’s shoulder when he tries to stand. The ritual’s supposed purification is therefore enacted through restraint, pressure, and the deliberate removal of Niru’s ability to see or move freely.

The prayers name the target of the ceremony with increasing precision. Bishop Okereke asks for the demonic spirit harming Niru’s life to leave and return to hellfire. The prayer warriors call for the spirit of homosexuality and perversity to be bound and cast out, and ask God to destroy every unclean thought, untoward desire, and abominable notion in Niru’s mind and heart. They ask that he be refilled with religious teaching and returned to obedience to his parents. Exorcism thus joins sexual stigma to filial discipline: the desired result is not simply an altered desire, but a son who will hear and heed parental direction.

Niru’s Divided Response

Niru experiences the prayer as terror, but the scene does not reduce his response to simple resistance. As the voices grow louder, anger expands first in his chest and then in his stomach, followed by shame and renewed anger. He longs for anything that might free him from the room and from the hands dripping sweat onto him. At the same time, the exorcism’s accusations have entered his own thinking. He wants to be clean, to be normal, to hear his father pronounce his name with the pride reserved for OJ, and to look at his father without fear.

Under the pressure of Bishop Okereke’s prayers, Niru begins to redirect blame toward Meredith. He thinks that she put the dating app on his phone, pressured him to go on the date, and caused the confusion that brought him to Nigeria. He does not conclude that she is a bad person, but he accepts the idea that she has been a bad influence. This moment shows how the ritual works psychologically even without changing Niru’s identity: it encourages him to reinterpret intimacy, friendship, and self-disclosure as sources of contamination, while presenting submission as the route back to family love.

The exorcism also takes place within a larger conflict over belonging. Niru has always found Nigeria overwhelming and aggressive, although his father insists that it is home and has repeatedly brought the family there. After the flight, his father holds Niru’s passport and tickets, making the journey materially coercive as well as emotionally charged. Niru wonders whether the United States has filled him with ungodly values and whether Nigeria can cure him, but he also suspects that a week with prayer warriors will change nothing. The ritual therefore claims authority from both geography and religion: Nigeria is presented as the corrective homeland, while America is blamed for the identity the family rejects.

Immediate Outcome and Significance

At the climax, Bishop Okereke asks God to give Niru strength against temptation and presses his fingers into Niru’s forehead. He pushes forward and throws Niru onto the concrete. A bright light temporarily erases the solid figures in the room. When Niru’s vision clears, he sees shoes, legs, and a hand reaching toward him. His father’s face appears with tears on his cheeks, and the father tells him to get up and go home. The ritual ends not with a confession, a demonstrated cure, or a transformed Niru, but with the father physically and emotionally reclaiming the scene after the bishop’s assaultive intervention.

The event exposes the connection between religious doctrine, family authority, and bodily violence. Reverend Olumide’s public emphasis on repentance, Bishop Okereke’s claim that homosexuality is demonic, and Niru’s father’s kitchen attack all belong to the same system of classification and correction. The exorcism makes that system visible because its metaphors become actions: impurity is located in a body, obedience is demanded through prayer, and cleansing requires other people to hold the accused person down. Its failure is equally important. Niru’s fear, shame, desire for acceptance, and continued uncertainty remain; the ceremony can compel stillness, but it cannot produce the spiritual transformation it promises.