West Africans have a long history of investing in their children's education by sending them to Britain. Yet, some young British-Nigerians are being sent to Nigeria for secondary education, going against a long historical grain. The movement of children from London to Nigeria is about the making of good subjects who possess particular cultural dispositions and behave in such a manner as to ensure educational success and the reproduction of middle class subjectivities within neoliberal globalisation. We maintain that this movement highlights the way in which global geographies of power -rooted in a colony -metropole divide -are being challenged and reconfigured, serving to provincialize the U.K., through the educational choices that Nigerian parents make for their children. Such small acts disrupt imagined geographies and particular spatial and temporal configurations of progress and modernity, in which former colonial subjects have travelled to the metropole for education, whilst generating counter narratives about Nigerian education, society and economy. Yet, the methods to instil new dispositions and habits in the contemporary Nigerian educational context are informed by the British educational colonial legacy of discipline through corporal punishment. Physical punishment was central to the civilizing mission of British colonial educational policy. Consequently, the choice to send children to school in Nigeria, and other African countries, as well as challenging global geographies of power, sheds light on the continued relevance of the colonial educational legacy and its disciplinary strategies which are, in turn, part of the broader project of modernity itself.

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We explore the tensions evident among Nigerian Pentecostals in London between social and ideological insularity on the one hand, and a more outward-oriented, expansive orientation on the other. Analysis of these stances is complemented by the exploration of believers' actions within a material but also metaphorical arena that we term “London-Lagos.” Such themes are developed specifically through a focus on believers' relations with Nigerian and British state systems in relation to child-rearing—an activity that renders parents sometimes dangerously visible to apparatuses of the state but also raises key dilemmas concerning the proper and moral location of socialisation into Christian values. We show how such dilemmas are embodied in a play, written by a Nigerian Pentecostalist, termed “The Vine-Keepers.”

We explore the production of space and place among Nigerian Pentecostal members of the Redeemed Christian Church of God by looking at tensions and overlaps between diasporic and Pentecostal identities as verbally expressed or mapped by believers based in London, England. In doing so, we examine the utility but also the ambiguities involved in analyzing such Christians through theoretical frames suggested by scholars of diaspora. Spatial tropes of “homeland,” “horizon,” “city,” “nation,” and “globe” form much of the focus of our study as we show how they are invoked within and beyond church activity, and contribute to complex forms of mapping that are evident not only in conventional physical representations but also in sermons, conversations, and other narratives. We see such mapping as indicating the shifting saliences diasporic and Pentecostal identities may have in believers’ lives over time. Overall, we argue that it is possible to see informants as moving between different perspectives as they are positioned, and position themselves, “in,” “of,” and “beyond” a Nigerian diaspora.