Aladura, the 1918 Epidemic and a Double Refusal

J. D. Y. Peel's study of the Yoruba Aladura churches found the same structure in west Africa, arrived at independently. The name itself is the doctrine: aladura means owner of prayer, one who prays. The movement's founding episodes were healings during the influenza pandemic that reached western Nigeria in 1918, a catastrophe in which mission clinics and the older Yoruba remedies both plainly failed, and in which prayer groups formed inside Anglican and other mission congregations before separating from them. What distinguishes the resulting doctrine from ordinary faith healing is that it refuses two systems rather than one. The mission hospital was refused because healing power is God's and does not require a drug to operate. The older Yoruba remedy, and the charm or medicine bought from a herbalist or diviner, was refused because its power was held to be the wrong power altogether, so that the convert who abandoned charms for prayer had made a religious change and not merely a medical one. The strictness was never uniform across the movement.

The Christ Apostolic Church has held the position most firmly, refusing medicine as a matter of doctrine; other Aladura bodies, and in southern Africa many Zionist churches, came to accept medical treatment alongside prayer without giving up the claim that the real cause of an affliction is spiritual and that the real cure is therefore religious.