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Before we start, some episodes in this series of World of Secrets contain graphic descriptions of sexual and physical violence, including sexual assault, rape and the language associated with it. As if anyone asks us where we're going, just say we're lost. We're in Lagos, Nigeria, scoping out the original site of T.P. Joshua's church, known as Prayer Mountain.
Like the church compound 10 minutes away, it's difficult to see what exactly is going on behind the giant walls. It's a little tricky to tell which way to go at it from because there's security outposts all along the wall, CCTV cameras. The wall itself is about 20 foot high. When you look at Lagos on Google Maps, it's a sea of dense housing.
one of the most populated cities in the world. And the Praia Mountains sits right in the heart of one of the busiest areas. It's not actually a mountain. It's a huge lake dotted with islands, surrounded by a forest with a helipad in the middle. And right now, in this car, it looks very unlikely we'll be getting in. There's a police car right ahead there. This guy in the Range Rover is looking funny. OK, yeah.
OK, guys, hide the mics. Hide the mics. The disciples we've spoken to for this investigation have told us that knowing what happened here at Prayer Mountain will help us understand the man who transformed this swampland into this closely guarded and very private site. Easier said than done. OK, yeah. Should we...? I don't think this is safe. Yeah.
Should we turn around? Yeah, yeah, let's turn around. To get close to the wall just then, we had to pass through a gate, like a metal gate with a kind of outer wall. And the guys guarding it were wearing T-shirts that said Vigilante on it, and on their back was a cross symbol made out of AK-47s. We might not have been able to get in, but we were able to speak to someone who knows the Prayer Mountain site and some of its secrets.
I remember he allowed me on the speedboat. We went so far. It was so, so, so far. This is Jessica. She was a disciple of TB Joshua for five years and was one of the few people who spent time with him inside the prayer mountain. It meant she saw things that Ray and Annika didn't. Pictures, disciples, old, the current disciples, people who have offended him in the past, those pictures are there.
From the BBC, this is World of Secrets, Season 2, The Disciples. With me, Yemi Siadegoke. And me, Charlie Northcote. Episode 4, Daddy's Calling. The roads around here are absolutely terrible. We're off the main road, so we're taking these sort of side streets and none of them...
Having left the walls of Prayer Mountain, we're driving through a pretty deprived part of Lagos. You know, just a stone's throw from where these people are living, someone has invested millions and millions of pounds building this complex fit with a helicopter pad.
And that money came from church members. Initially, TB Joshua had paid them to visit. But as those videos reached far and wide, people started paying TB Joshua for the chance to visit the church in Lagos. Visitors like Jessica. Meeting TB Joshua for the first time was the most scariest thing. The first time Jessica met TB Joshua was at the Prayer Mountain. He'd spotted her in a service and invited her to come. What was Prayer Mountain?
Prayer Mountain was this sacred place that was a sanctuary somewhere where you can hear the voice of God. It was designed with wood. There was a lake. It was as if you were in Galilee. It had this beautiful, peaceful ambience. When you enter, there's like a walkway, but then there's water on the side.
He wanted to make it as beautiful and something that's close to heaven. What did he say to you the first time he met you? He told me that I see a star on your head. I see you becoming a big evangelist, a prophetess in Namibia. When we meet her, Jessica is impeccably dressed, in a red power suit with matching red lipstick and long red nails.
She's incredibly focused when she talks, calm, composed. She looks like a TV presenter and she is one in Namibia, where she's from. Jessica was just 17 years old when he recruited her. He asked me, do you go to school? I said, yes, I'm an 11th grader.
And at the time I was doing like an internship at a local radio station and I was aspiring to be a presenter and a journalist. Then he told me that God wants to use you. God wants to use you so you go back to Namibia and you say your goodbyes. At first, Jessica wasn't sure. I said, I'm in school. He said, education is not a criteria for anointing.
It might seem strange to us, the idea of a teenager...
nothing more than joining a church, but TB Joshua's fame and reputation for healings was so enormous that for many people, this was the greatest honour, not just for them, but for their entire family. The idea that they could be chosen to become a disciple. TB Joshua had this presence that you would feel in your bones. He was very hypnotising.
and charming. Everybody wanted to know how he got his power, but the story was just like vapor. There was this mystery to him. Even Adejuan Shainke, the Nigerian journalist who followed TB Joshua's rise, told me that he always refused to meet TB Joshua in person, despite many invitations, because he was afraid that there was something about him that would draw him in.
Do you feel like people have said to us that they're even afraid to say TV Joshua's name out loud? I'm not an expert, sorry mum, on the Bible and stuff. There is this strong belief here about the power of the tongue and being careful of what you talk about or invite into yourself. Also avoiding things that could be...
negative or demonic or something that taps into a deeper cultural belief around like watching your words and not speaking carelessly and inviting quote-unquote calamity or like ill fortune onto yourself. One of those who believes that TB Joshua did have some kind of spiritual power is Bisola, the woman who asked Ray to stay. She was one of TB Joshua's earliest followers back when his church was here on the Prayer Mountain.
Meeting TB Joshua for the first time, you would think maybe you have met God's representative, if not God himself. He looked charming. Not charming as, "Oh, I like this man," but spiritually charming. When he looked into my eyes, I was thinking that he pierced into my subconscious.
Bissola first went to see TB Joshua when she was having troubles in her family. The house had recently burnt down, and despite having a good job as a banker, she thought maybe this mysterious man could help her. For me, the spiritual power of TB Joshua hypnotizes people.
The spiritual power of T.B. Joshua makes people to have strange fear. You understand, you'll be afraid of him. Members of synagogue believed T.B. Joshua was omnipresent. Even some people say he appeared to them physically in their homes.
The disciples we've spoken to have told us some pretty strange stories, claiming that TB Joshua used to perform rituals inside the prayer mountain. Here's Jessica. The normal prayer mountain, the place where people worship and pray was like really normal. But then he had prayer huts that were built.
stationed there, but you needed to take a speedboat to reach there. I remember we went so far. It was so, so, so far. And it was here, far from where people met TB Joshua publicly, that Jessica told us rituals would take place. When we are praying, we would hold a sword. We are going around a table that has people's pictures, disciples, old people,
The current disciples, people who have offended him in the past, those pictures are there. They have candles, they have candle waxes, and we are holding this sword, going around the table. Oh Lord, forgive us. Oh Lord, forgive us. Oh Lord, forgive us. Have mercy on us. Have mercy on us. And just enchanting.
One church insider who wants to remain anonymous told us how disciples weren't allowed to flush away any menstrual products, how swords were buried in the ground and how sometimes people's photographs would be pierced with those swords. When we asked who, the insider told us it was people who had left who might speak up. And that's not the only thing we heard about Prayer Mountain from those we spoke to for this series.
You'll recognise Jessica's voice here, but there are others too. Some have asked to remain anonymous. Their words have been read by a BBC producer, Georgia. Obama's picture was in his shoes. Yeah. Really? Many of these rituals involve photographs, photos of disciples, but also of powerful people in society and the rest of the world. So he would be walking around just day to day with President Obama's picture in his shoes? In his shoes, yes.
I feel his power came from that place. I see everything that he's doing connected to all these marine spirit activities where people worship a river goddess. He went into the deep woods and he came back with a bottle of water, but that water was brownish, like dirty brownish water that he asked me to drink.
He has a red scarf on his hair. Then he has some people that he calls his prayer warriors that are women and they will hold swords. We were not allowed to go into the prayer rooms when we were on our period and we would wear white gowns. He used to pour honey on his underwears. I don't know what he does that for. So he's walking around with honey all over the inside of his pants? Yes, that's how he moves. He must go through hundreds of pairs of pants. Yes.
When you listen to people describing him, the idea that your pastor puts honey in his pants is not something that is normal or widely known. I mean, I think a lot of this type of stuff, I mean, what we've heard from the disciples is the type of stuff you kind of see in Nollywood. It's stuff that you see...
so-called evil people doing. To think that the person that you're looking towards for spiritual guidance, the person that is teaching you, that you're learning from, is engaging in this type of ritual that you don't really understand. Many of the disciples also described how witnessing him do these things filled them with fear. It made them feel afraid to challenge him because...
Your assumption is if you do something wrong to that person, your face is going to be the next face in that photograph. And what does that mean for you in your life? It played on your mind. It played on your emotions and it played on your psychology and also spiritually.
Every disciple we spoke to described T.B. Joshua's magnetism, an unexplainable power to make you want to be close to him, to make you crave his presence. To be a disciple, there are certain things you must do every day. And one is to say, good morning, Daddy. We all called him Daddy. Annika, Ray and Jessica all remember this. Everybody called him Daddy, you know, and at the beginning there were questions about why are you calling him Daddy?
Isn't that a bit weird? When I first arrived, it was only a couple of days that I started hearing disciples calling him Daddy. And I was a little bit... I thought it was a little bit unusual. One of the first things he told me is, I'm going to be your father, I'm going to be everything to you. I quickly enjoyed using that term for him because it meant I'd been accepted and allowed to call him Daddy.
In Nigeria, in the Pentecostal tradition, it's not uncommon for people to call their pastor Daddy. But it seems like it was something TB Joshua insisted his disciples call him. We had to become more childlike. To hear he was awake, you had to drop everything and go to his office and there would be a queue of people all just to say, good morning, Daddy. Daddy's calling a meeting. Daddy's calling a meeting. And it was the same for the evening. Good night. Good night, Daddy. Good night, sir.
TB Joshua had become the father of the disciples. But not just any father, their spiritual father. The only person on earth who could help them achieve salvation. Should I follow my heart or swim?
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To the outside world, TB Joshua is a gentle, funny, generous man. But inside the compound, the disciples say there was another side to Daddy. Sometimes you go to the office and you see people coming and they would be like, he's hot, hey, he's hot, he's hot, Daddy's hot. And that basically meant that TB Joshua was in a fury.
We've interviewed 19 people with first-hand accounts of TB Joshua physically assaulting and torturing his disciples, spanning more than 20 years. They were screaming, Daddy, stop, Daddy, stop, please, stop, stop it. Many of their testimonies are too graphic to include here, describing physical assaults. There's some little madness in him. These are the voices of some of the people we've interviewed.
Disciples you've heard of, like Ray, Annika and Jessica. And others you haven't, like Paul. You actually lie down on the floor. This is what is called kubuku. This is horse whip. And they were screaming a scream and I just kept hearing this like, kwa-pow, kwa-ow. You use it, bawa.
When he was angry, he would explode. TB Joshua jumped up, flew over the desk. He hit me, he slapped me, he punched me, he kicked me in the stomach. Beating her down, shouted, no daddy, no daddy, no daddy. Within the warped ideology of the compound, the disciples found a way to justify this violence among themselves, using scripture.
He was violent, but he would make an excuse that it's because the prophets were also violent. The God of the Old Testament was fierce and vengeful, and so was TB Joshua. The training I had had, the teaching I had been taught, well, Jesus got angry in the temple. He tipped over the tables. We were told it's an honour. It's like getting a slap of correction from the Holy Spirit. And in the compound, there was one honour greater than any other.
Special time alone with the Prophet. Something reserved for only the most favoured disciples. Annika had become one of them. Over the course of many weeks, she was invited into TB Joshua's private quarters in the evening to study scripture. I'd be climbing on my bunk bed, exhausted, absolutely exhausted. I can't describe how tired you were constantly because you've had two hours sleep.
And you never have more than four hours sleep, ever. So you're in a constant state of exhaustion. You just close your eyes and you fall asleep. You stand up and you fall asleep. And you'd go, "Daddy's calling you, Daddy's calling you. "I'm in the dorm, I have to go to the phone and say, "Goodnight, Daddy. "Oh, I want you to come up. "I want you to come and see me."
And you would walk up the stairs to his private rooms. The room would be very dark. The carpet was so soft, really thick carpet. And it just, it felt lovely. Bellowing curtains, royal, like a royal room. Like a sofa or chalange in the far corner. And he'd already be there lying on there. And he'd beckon me over and I would kneel beside the chalange. And just very calm, calm.
Just sat there. He'd just be talking to me gently about how I was getting on and he was very positive. "You're so good at preaching." He would always have no top on and just his shorts on. And again, this was not unusual. No alarm bells for me. This was his home. He's relaxing. He's allowing me to come and have a private word with him. He'd asked me to put my hand on his chest. I remember he had a big scar on his chest that I was like, "Oh, I don't know whether, well, I should."
And he wanted that connection with me and I saw it as a connection. And his hand went under my top. And I remember thinking, oh, OK, I don't like that. But this is Daddy. You don't say no to him. So you just kind of freeze. The disciples were young.
And because of their faith, sex wasn't part of their lives. I was very innocent. I didn't know what sex was. I'd never had a boyfriend before. I'd never kissed a boy. I'd never hugged a boy. I'd never had that sort of relationship because I was a good little Christian girl who only thought about God. Each time consecutively, that hand at the top would be more prominent, it would venture more so around my body until that became normal. It's very slow.
I completely disconnected from my body whenever I heard the words, Daddy's calling you. It's like I zoned out and became a robot and then he would do whatever he wanted to do while I lay there. I once plucked up the courage to ask him why it wasn't wrong. I said, Daddy, why is this not wrong? And he laughed and he said, oh, you're very clever.
But then something changed. When he'd done, he stood up.
He basically said to leave. When I left the room, I remember walking down the stairs crying and for the first time feeling so cross. The manner in which he did it was horrible. I felt disgusting. I felt used. And it was the first time...
I was like, he's not this holy man. What he did, he did it for flesh. That was not a spiritual thing he just did. It was like I had a blindfold on and in that one moment they just went. And I was like, whoa, this is a bad place. And then it was, what am I going to do now?
This story you've just heard is what Annika told me when I first met her in the pub in Oxford. It's one of the stories that kick-started this whole investigation, that brought us to Lagos and to those high walls in front of the Prayer Mountain, the same place we're now driving away from, carefully. It might seem tame to just be driving up to a wall, you know, in a car.
and looking at it. But in Nigeria... Not in this context. Yeah, in Nigeria and in this context, that is quite a significant risk, actually. By this time, we'd spoken to multiple people in Lagos, not just those you've heard here, but many former members of the church. And we'd been starting to get word that our reporting was getting out. So, yeah, someone sent one of our sources a message, this BBC UK thing, The Church Knows.
The next message they say is this means we are not safe. Someone else sent us a message saying like if the church knows that you're doing this you're not safe in Nigeria. And when you have been in an incident where they've unloaded their own weapons and detained you at gunpoint, commandeered your car, escorted you to a police station, you start to realise that those threats actually aren't quite real.
We need to think about things like keeping hard drives full of information safe, making sure things are locked away and hidden in a way that if we do leave our hotel rooms, no one can access it. We've changed hotels, I think, four times since I've been here. And that's just part of how you make it harder for people to keep an eye on where you are and what you're doing.
This country is a dangerous place to be a journalist. I think even reporters without borders, I think Nigeria is now considered one of the most dangerous places in West Africa to do journalism. People do not like being challenged. It's about protecting the sources as much as anything too. Absolutely, yeah, because they're taking huge risks. We can flee to an embassy in a worst-case scenario. They have nowhere to go often.
As we're talking in the car, driving up a steep hill away from the Prayer Mountain, we get a view of it down below. Oh, look, there's the... Oh, yeah. You can see it behind us super clearly when we reverse down here. It's so massive. The walls are so high and it's got, like, you know, watchtowers around it. It kind of looks like a prison. For Annika, escaping TB Joshua wasn't going to be easy.
Above the psychological caging you heard about in the last episode, there were physical constraints. Disciples had no money unless TB Joshua gave it to them. We're talking about the early 2000s. You couldn't just look up a location on Google Maps and book an Uber. You might have been able to email your family, but even those were monitored. Annika's moment to escape came when her visa expired. She needed to go back to the UK to get it renewed.
I was terrified that they would know what I was doing. The fear was physical. I was shaking while I stood there. It was like my adrenaline was rushing around. If I could have, I would have ran through that airport. And I look back at my brothers and sisters. They all stood there behind the barriers, waving me off. It felt like forever I was standing in that airport line. Hearing the wheels hit the runway...
I couldn't believe it. I thought, "I've done it." When I saw the green fields of the UK and when I realised I was home, the shakes started happening. I had to hold it together just a little bit longer because
Annika knew she never wanted to return to Nigeria.
to go back to that church, to that compound, to TV Joshua. Back home, slowly, she began picking up the pieces of her old life. And then one morning, she was waiting at the bus stop to go back to her old school. I saw someone walking towards me, on her own. Next time...
He said, I'm going to send you on a special assignment. I need you to go and I need you to bring Annika home. I recognised who it was immediately. I knew why she was walking towards me. God wants to use her and Satan is trying to disillusion her and take her away from her calling. She was walking towards me because she'd been sent to take me. We approached the Synagogue Church of All Nations with the allegations made in this series.
They did not offer a response or address any of the claims directly, but in an earlier email told us that making unfounded allegations against Prophet TB Joshua is not a new occurrence. None of the allegations was ever substantiated. Thanks for listening to World of Secrets, Season 2, The Disciples, from the BBC World Service. This is Episode 4 of 9.
Thank you to everyone around the world who spoke to us and shared their stories for this investigation. We want as many people as possible to hear their stories, so please do tell others about World of Secrets. And where you can do, rate and leave a review. We'd be really grateful and it really does help. This season of World of Secrets is produced by BBC Audio Documentaries and is presented by me, Yemi Siadigoke, and Charlie Northcott.
It's been made in collaboration with BBC Africa Eye, with original investigation by Charlie Northcott and Helen Spooner. The producer is Rob Byrne. Additional production from Tom Sarté. The executive producer is Georgia Katt. The series editor is Philip Sellers. At the BBC World Service, the senior podcast producer is Lee Chung. And the podcast commissioning editor is John Manel. Thank you again for listening.
Hey, everyone. This is Molly and Matt, and we're the hosts of Grown Up Stuff, How to Adult, a podcast from Ruby Studio and iHeart Podcasts. It's a show dedicated to helping you figure out the trickiest parts of adulting.
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