A startling confession left members of The Synagogue, Church Of All Nations (SCOAN) in Lagos speechless on Sunday 10th April 2015, as a Nigerian university lecturer revealed her literal ‘journey through hell’.
Dr Azuh Mary Ifeoma said her battle with ‘demonic’ oppression had led her to practically all the major churches in Nigeria but it was the prayer of T.B. Joshua – whom she had been bluntly told was a devil – that finally set her free.
According to the academic, her problem began when her father, who was a pastor with the late Archbishop Benson Idahosa’s ‘Church Of God Mission’, decided to destroy the ‘shrine’ where a goddess was worshipped in her village in Aniocha North, Delta State, Nigeria.
Mary led the youth of that village in a triumphant dance at the scene of the destroyed temple, mocking the ‘gods’ the community had worshipped for centuries. Little did she know the horrific spiritual repercussions of her innocent actions that were about to unfold.
One unforgettable night in her mid teens, a female ‘image’ appeared physically to Mary. “She told me that my father burned her shrine,” she reminisced, describing the lady as old but extremely beautiful. That signalled the beginning of a tortuous journey.
With her uncanny academic proficiency, Mary quickly rose through the ranks to become a lecturer in Economics at Delta State Polytechnic in her early 20s. But it was in front of her students at the lecture hall that the ‘demons’ struck in the cruellest of manners.
“Each time I entered the lecture hall or I was in a crowd of people, the image would appear,” she solemnly recalled, stressing this was a supernatural phenomena she alone witnessed.
“It comes with a sound like the beating of drums. When she comes, she would stand and order me to be dancing in the way we danced before her shrine.
I would abandon everything I did at that moment, start dancing and then collapse. When I opened my eyes, I would see myself surrounded by my students or in a hospital.”
Understandably, most onlookers attributed her eerily erratic behaviour to a mental breakdown but frequent visits to psychiatric hospitals left no discernible diagnosis of any psychological problem.
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