For decades outsiders in Nigeria have leaned on a scattering of stereotypes, robes, candles, incense, all night vigils, to sum up the Aladura or white garment churches, the family of African Initiated Churches that includes the Cherubim and Seraphim Church and the Celestial Church of Christ. Anathema, a 2022 docudrama produced by Cheser Media Inc under executive producer Sam Ogunyooye and producer Francisca Eleyele, set out to answer that scattering with testimony rather than argument, letting members and non-members alike describe what the churches actually are and do.
The film takes its title from a word Ogunyooye has described as a vehement dislike for something people often know little about, and it was shot across Nigeria and the United States, drawing on contributors from within Nollywood and the Nigerian music industry alongside church members themselves. Its stated aim was not devotional persuasion but correction, addressing the stigmatization that white garment worshippers report and speaking to a younger generation who may know the churches only by reputation rather than practice.
Anathema held its world premiere on November 11, 2022, at the Irving Arts Center in Texas, a choice that put the film in front of the Nigerian diaspora before it reached home audiences, then returned to Lagos for a second premiere on November 15, 2024. That arc, and a choir recorded soundtrack released alongside it, marked the start of a larger project rather than a single film: three years later the same company carried the white garment story from documentary film to live theatre, staging the life of the Cherubim and Seraphim Church's own founder as Baba Aladura, this database's second work from the same effort to put the Aladura movement's own account of itself on the record.