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This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. 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.
Like how to start planning for retirement, creating a healthy skincare routine, understanding when and how much to tip someone, and so much more. Let's learn about all of it and then some. Listen to Grown Up Stuff How to Adult on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search Grown Up Stuff.
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. This episode also includes strong language.
We're in Lagos, Nigeria, and everything is going wrong. This argument is happening in front of a compound with 12-foot-high walls guarded by a group of men. And one of them has a gun. We want it removed first, so that whatever you want to do, we can.
They're trying to force me to hand over my camera, evidence of what's been going on behind those walls. If you want to remove any footage from the BBC, you'll need a lawyer and you'll need to get a court order. Over 100 people died inside this place. Countless lives have been destroyed and nobody knows the truth. This compound isn't a prison, it's a church.
And the man who built it is one of the most powerful religious figures of the century. A man with something to hide. You know people don't want you to do a story when they come at you with a gun. This is World of Secrets, season two, The Disciples. This story is like a horror story. It's like something you watch in fiction, but it's true.
A BBC World Service investigation with me, Charlie Northcote. And me, Yemi Siadigoke. Episode one, Sin No More. A lot of this story is going to take place in Nigeria. It's where my family's from and where I've worked as a reporter for the past decade. But the reach of the man at the centre of this story goes much further.
across the African continent to Latin America, Asia and the US. And to understand why a bunch of BBC journalists are being shot at outside his compound, we need to go back to where it all started. To England, where I'm from, and where I work as an investigative journalist. And to a posh little pub in Oxford, where I met Ray.
When you meet a source for the first time as a journalist, you're always trying to suss them out. You're trying to work out if what they're saying is true. And one of the best ways to do that is to meet them face to face and to look them in the eye.
We agreed to meet in a pub. I had my dog with me because you can't leave... We have to take my dog everywhere. This is Ray. She has short, spiky hair, thick glasses and is a bundle of intense energy. I do, like, I'm a little bit too much myself sometimes. It was a sunny day. People were eating fish and chips, sitting on wooden benches next to a river. But we went inside where it was quiet.
And we found a table in the corner. I think I was really hot. I remember turning up in like shorts and t-shirts. Ray was talking quickly, making lots of jokes. But that portrayed a kind of tension inside of her and you could see it in her face.
I didn't want to spook her, so I didn't record our meeting. But we found ourselves talking about it the other day. I remembered that Ray ordered food, but she didn't eat. I barely got a word in. Ray had talked and talked and talked, telling me a story so strange and so disturbing, it's hard to believe it when you hear it. I think none of us expected what we were going to hear.
Ray fell down a rabbit hole into a nightmarish world where things that seemed impossible were possible, where miracles and magic became real. When I asked Ray where we begin, she took us back to the 1990s, to a small, sleepy English village. Ray was in her late teens. David Beckham was playing for England. The Spice Girls were rocking stadiums. It was a time of Tamagotchis and floppy discs.
Going to the cinema or renting a video was an event. Back then, people still had handheld video cameras for filming special events, and Ray and her friends recorded a lot. We've got hours and hours of footage of her during her teens,
And in loads of it, she's playing outside, in beautiful English countryside, climbing trees and running in fields full of wildflowers. I hope you didn't see a stick of pellet then. Is this your barbecue, Mr Mummery? Is it going well and everything? Except for the boat and the weather. I would like to say my upbringing was pretty normal and stable. My dad was a chartered accountant, he worked in London, we lived rurally. Barbecue.
Yummy. But I don't think I was normal and stable in the sense that I had a lot of things going on for me privately that I didn't feel I could speak about.
Can I show you a picture of yourself from that time? Oh, yeah, I remember that. Oh, that's a really nice one with big, like, crazy eyes. I look like I'm on something, mate. I was on the Holy Spirit, everybody. Just, like, please, on record. You've got a beer in your hand. You're wearing a hoodie. You're having a laugh with your friends. Life could have been so different for you. Describe your haircut. I've got curtains, so I'm well proud of those. God.
Ray and her friends were really into music. Boy bands were huge. And one of the biggest was Take That. All my secondary school friends, right, they're all like into Take That and they're like wanting to get down with Robbie Williams. And I'm just not getting it. Because there was something Ray hadn't told her friends.
Instead of boy band Take That, her teenage crush was Kylie Minogue, now a superstar. Then better known as a TV soap actor. So yeah, I like was crushing on Kylie like massively. Couldn't tell anybody, couldn't even really accept it myself. So there sort of ensued this immediate cover up of my like natural inclinations. Here's another thing about 90s Britain. Every teenage room was plastered with posters.
It wasn't just Kylie Ray was crushing on. She fancied another soap actor called Melissa George. Don't worry, I've never heard of her either. I couldn't put the posters up because all the people I like were girls.
So I had to pick couples, right? So when I had, like, a crush, I was like, so my classic one, I had a crush on Melissa George, her on-screen, like, love of her life guy called Dieter Brummer. They got together. Yeah, I had, like, posters all over my wall, but all of them were of them as a couple because I couldn't put Melissa George on the wall because...
I couldn't have my parents see that and I couldn't have anyone else know that. That's kind of how I was living my life and then that of course came off the walls of the bedroom and I started crushing on actual real people. And that is when I started having, I would say it really began to disturb me because I realised I couldn't control it. She was really desperate to go to this particular prophet.
Ray is going to be such an important part of this story. So we wanted to talk to someone who knew her growing up. Someone who featured a lot in these home videos. Carla. But contacting Carla didn't exactly go to plan. Like a lot of people who've been to the compound in Lagos, she's wary of journalists.
And to our horror, Carla did what most people on TikTok do these days. She posted a video about it. So basically this morning I got an email from a reporter. His name is Charlie and apparently he works for the BBC. He was asking about my best friend when I was younger. My story about what happened to me and what happened to her, she wouldn't want it out there. So
So I don't believe this Charlie guy. I watched this TikTok, like sitting in bed on a Sunday morning, just thought, oh my God, what are we going to do? Not the greatest. The reason this is so bad is the church still has quite a lot of supporters and we're being really careful about keeping our work on this story quiet. And as expected, almost immediately, people were commenting underneath the video.
He sounds very dubious. Well done you, never tell anybody. Tell the reporter they're only in it for the money. Her story is hers. Don't betray your friend's confidence. But after a long call and many messages, Carla not only agreed to delete the video, but also to talk. So I hopped on a train with producer Rob.
Nice to meet you. Hi, I'm Hugh. I'm Robyn. Charlie. Yeah, we brought some milk. Oh good, because I don't drink milk. Are you filming photos? I have, and I...
We're looking down at a coffee table strewn with dozens of photos and even handwritten letters between the pair of them. That's the last one of us ever, so there she is looking at me. The dress sense and everything is just like a time machine back to the early 2000s. One photo shows Ray and Carla together.
spaghetti-strapped dresses, drinking a beer. I knew that Rachel would not want to speak to me. She has made absolutely clear to me that I am no longer in her life. So for you to come to me and say, oh, hi, I've been talking to Ray, and she reached out and said you might know her, to me that seemed alien because she wouldn't want me to speak about her life. I am to stay quiet, I am not to put photos out there. Did you think maybe I was someone from the church trying to get information on you? Yeah, I thought you were from the church. Right.
and that you wanted some information on her. I tried to kind of reassure Carla as we settled down on the sofa and encouraged her to talk about Ray. I was in a concert, it was a Christian concert, and I was really into the lead singer. I don't know who was with her, but two of the other people from church...
came in with rachel and i remember looking over and she was the coolest person i've ever seen in my life she had this thing about her where she had this confidence which i think was probably quite fake but to me i was like you are just amazing i just want to be friends with you
And I remember making my way down to the front where she was and I just remember being really brave and talking to her and I think I probably said, oh, I really like him. And then she said, oh, I really like the drummer. And they were best friends. And then from then on in, we were just, I guess, inseparable. For much of their teens, they would spend most of their time together. She was energetic, bubbly, fun, energetic.
She was just funny. She was always positive. I looked up to her. She was older than me. She drove the car and we would just go on like a drive for hours just talking. What kind of things were you talking about? About God, about life, about our futures. I want to say to God that my life is in his hands and I'm ready to take next steps for him today.
At this point, they were both taking their faith pretty seriously. Basically, I'm here today because God's led me here and I know that God's going to guide me on. They even got baptised together, captured here on video. There was something else. Carla was a massive crush in my life for many years. So I was like 16 and I was like crushing on Carla and...
I used to spend all my time around her house and it was a really difficult time for me because she did not reciprocate how I felt. In fact, on the contrary, she was busy chasing guys. Sounds like young love. Teenage. Teenage love. Yeah, you see, Charlie, I don't even know what that is, right? Because I didn't have it. Back then, like in the environment I was in, like no one was really out. In fact, I don't think I even knew that term. I didn't know a single other person who was queer. Ever.
That, I think, drove me to pursue God, like, more and more and more. I was like, that is the only solution for these feelings. That is the only solution for getting out of this terrible inner turmoil and self-hatred.
On the outside, Rae was doing okay. It was the early 2000s, she was at university studying graphic design. She was really popular and she seemed to everyone around her to be happy. I was always busy, always out, always with my mates. And I remember coming home and it was, I'd be there outside and then I'd come back to my bedroom.
And I'd cry myself to sleep every single night. And nobody knew, like literally no one knew except myself. And I got so desperate one night. I remember I went outside. We used to have quite a big back garden. And I went and laid down. And I was like looking up at the stars. And I was so desperate for God to come and save me and rescue me. I lay out on the grass until about 11pm at night. And I was shouting like, where are you? Just like show yourself. Like if you're alive, like show yourself.
But for years, there was no sign of God, and no obvious cure for what she believed, and her faith told her, was a problem. Her sexuality. Until she saw a video, a video that would change her life. The footage you are about to watch is of a sensitive nature, and although it may not be suitable for all viewers...
It's here, for the glory of God. Feel free to move this around. Pretty much straight away, we're watching something really horrible. The warning still doesn't quite prepare you for what you're about to see. Even Charlie stops watching now. His eyes are covered by his hands. But Ray, she doesn't flinch. What? What?
She's seen these videos before, many times. The first time when she'd just turned 20. Oh, yes, I've got to tell you about this. Oh, my God. Yeah, so we were in a flat. It was predominantly women, from what I remember. There weren't very many of us, like maybe six, seven, with somebody who was a pastor from South Africa and had brought all these VHS cassettes over and wanted to show us these miracles to encourage our faith.
The first one we saw was this guy whose name was Thin No More. He had got this massively inflated scrotum, which they had diagnosed as scrotum cancer. I remember, like, giggling.
because having come from, like, a super conservative culture and then a conservative house on top of that, when had I ever seen a penis? And then all of a sudden there's one, like, swinging its stuff on telly, you know? So we're all sitting there, like, giggling, like, trying to be really serious but also laughing. As the man's standing there naked, this eerie figure comes up with a microphone in his hand and a white shirt on and he stretches out his hand and prays for that person. And you see the ball bag burst...
And then you've got testicles suspended in midair. They're just hanging there, open to the elements. And then they're filming this whole process over days and how basically the scrotum bag like re-grew. And he's testifying to how this prophet has saved his life. And you're like watching this, like I said, on Raw VHS and you're just like, how the hell did that happen? And before the video ends, there's one final scene.
Him basically renouncing his sin. So this whole thing about, you know, my name is sin no more. Jesus has healed me. This miracle was one of many that Ray would watch. And the more she watched, the more mesmerised she became. Documented miracles, that was something that I certainly had never seen. When this VHS cassette was shown to me, it was kind of like a little bit of a dream come true for me. If this man could heal and perform miracles, thought Ray...
Maybe he could offer a cure from what she saw as her biggest problem, her sexuality. These are like the miracles that I heard about in Sunday school and here they are and it hooks you. For Ray, this was the moment she'd finally found the God she'd been searching for.
I've got to go. I've got to go and see the power of God in action. Maybe this is the answer to my problems. Maybe this man can straighten me out. I'm going to be free. I'm not going to be gay anymore. Age 21, Ray was about to make the biggest decision of her life. To quit her studies, to leave university and to go to find that man in the white robe. The man who can heal people with his hands.
And she wasn't the only one. When you meet someone online, can you trust they are who they say they are?
I keep thinking so much about you. She's so stunning. It's all well planned. Love Janessa is the true crime podcast from the BBC World Service and CBC Podcasts, investigating the murky world of online romance scams. She was trying to get me to send her money. And it's available now. You win their hearts, you win their wallets. Search for Love Janessa wherever you found this podcast. ♪
Well, we got a minute. I'm going to buy that truck I've been wanting. Wait, don't you need, like, weeks to shop for a car? I don't. Carvana makes it super convenient to find exactly what I want. Hold up. You're buying a car on your phone? Isn't that more of a laptop thing? You can shop wherever you want.
I like to do my research, read reviews, compare models. Plus, Carvana has thousands of options. How'd you decide on that truck? Because I like it. Oh, that is a great reason. Go to Carvana.com to sell your car the convenient way. Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently, I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes. And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those onerous two-year contracts, they said, what the f***?
So to recap, we're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Ray was searching for something. And a bit further north in England, so was Annika. When I was in the pub in Oxford with Ray on that sunny day, Annika was there too. She was quieter though.
More reserved. Today, Annika and Ray are friends, but growing up, they didn't know each other. I was from a working-class family. My dad was a bus driver. My mum used to work at McDonald's. But I never felt like we were poor. Your life was good. Annika's really striking when you first meet her.
She's tall, with blue eyes and has a head of bright curly ginger hair. Both my parents were devout Christians, charismatic, evangelical. I can't remember a time when our family life did not revolve around church. Weeknights at a Bible study, falling asleep on someone else's couch while my parents read the Bible, colouring on the pews while the sermon was going on in the background.
Like Ray and Carla, Annika was baptised in her teens and it was recorded on home video. It was very natural to me to be part of a Christian community. A community that would be there for her in tough times. My mum was very sick around the age of 10, so she passed away of breast cancer. Seeing my mum go through that pain, I had a deep-rooted fear of...
inside me watching my mum die of that disease. As hard as it was, it meant she became really close to her dad. So it was just me and my dad, and me and my dad were like best friends. After her mother died, Annika and her father joined a new church that pushed the Christian evangelical view, a very literal, alive sense of Jesus and God, like the one Ray had found. Speaking in tongues, healing, healing,
hearing God audibly sometimes, gaining visions, having words of knowledge and prophecy. I believed that God was inside of me. I believed that God was walking next to me. And my whole purpose in life was to seek his face. And for all the teaching in the church, something was lacking. Like Ray, she wasn't seeing God when she needed him most. They were talking about
the Bible coming alive about we believe in miracles, we believe in healing. But then I'd ask myself, where are all these healings? I'm not seeing any. So tell me about the first time you came across or heard of
mysterious prophet in Nigeria. It was a Sunday service when our friend's dad came to the front crying and I'd never seen this man cry before and he was like and he couldn't get his words out he was so choked up and so emotional and he said I've seen miracles, I've seen Jesus I'd never heard anything like this before and I was like where is this place this is what I've been looking for
This is what I've been talking about. This is what we've been praying for. You know, and it exists. From then on, I just ploughed him with questions. Where have you been? Where are you seeing this? Show me. He invited me and a couple of other young people from the youth to his family home. And he showed us some videos. The same videos Ray had seen.
One video made a particular impression on Anika. It was of a woman, apparently cured of breast cancer, the same disease that killed her mum.
I've never seen anything like it since. This is what Jesus would have done. This is amazing. It was just miracle after miracle. And then slowly I saw the man who was praying for all these people. It was the same man. I was like, who is this man?
Ray and Annika didn't know each other, yet, but they both decided they needed to go and see the man performing these miracles. He was far away, in Lagos, Nigeria, but that didn't matter. Local churches across England were organising tours to visit this healer. I thought, this is incredible, I've just got to get my money together. And I worked in the kitchens at a local residential home to earn the money as a student to pay my flight to go out to Nigeria.
Annika was getting ready too. I put a calendar on my wall and crossed off every day, countdown of when I was going to go, 30 more days until I go, 29 days until I go. I was so excited. It was like I was going to go into a time machine and travel back to biblical times and I was going to meet Jesus. I was stepping into those videos. Hallelujah. Put your hands together properly for Jesus Christ. Hallelujah.
The crowds, the excitement, the Holy Spirit atmosphere. I was going to step into the screen and be there. When I first got to Lagos airport, we told them that we were going to the synagogue church Four Nations. Oh, go through, go through. Annika and Ray had arrived in the most populated city in Africa, a sea of concrete, traffic. The heat hits you like a hairdryer. It was an experience travelling through the town to get to the church.
And as we turned onto the drive of the church, immediately you know you're going into a secure place. It's guarded with gates and there is guards with guns. And that made me feel very secure.
Carla, Ray's friend, was less sure. The people in the car were not what I expected. When I'd gone to other places in a Christian capacity, they'd be like, oh, hello, it's so nice to see you, you know, it's so lovely. This was like, I don't know, like, it's a bit weird. And I think that's when my head was kind of thinking, oh, am I in trouble here? Then there's Ray's first impression. So you kind of went down a driveway in these vehicles that had other foreign visitors in. We had a
A mostly South African group, quite bubbly ladies, quite friendly, but kind of like, ooh, isn't this great? We're going to get healed. It's so amazing. What was the racial composition of those people? All white. All white. Yeah. Ray remembers entering that small, dusty church. And we were led around this compound. It was corrugated iron roof, dirt floors. There were loads of people sweeping with brooms.
There were queues and queues and queues of people, like hundreds and hundreds of people queuing up with various ailments. And we got taken to these taps that had water running out of them, and it was explained to us that this water had been anointed, and therefore it could heal because it had God's presence in it. There was great effort being put into showing how amazing and how well cared for everybody was. They kept referring to him as the man of God's
And then we were brought down into the auditorium again for the start of this service. And I was really amped. I was kind of like, oh my God, this is going to be amazing. Like, are you going to see this guy? And it was just like more of the same. More singing and singing and singing. I remember at one point thinking, where's this man? Where's this dude? Like, is he ever going to come out to the service? Like, we've been here for hours. There was electricity in the air.
There was an expectation, there was an atmosphere of what is going to happen. There was people everywhere and there was a hubbub. The disciples, they were carrying wires, they were running, they were getting things ready. There was always a crowd of people behind the cameras. Finally, the man in the white robe emerged, the Prophet. The first time I saw him, I think he was walking from one building to another and someone pointed out, there's the Prophet.
There was always a crowd of people that followed him wherever he went, just like Jesus. It was crazy. He started praying for someone and they started vomiting, like right in front of me. Maybe someone's just been healed and they're standing up shouting, I'm healed, I'm healed! And then there's like three or four girls pointing a microphone in their mouth, encouraging them to walk, come on, praise the Lord, praise the Lord! And there's shouting and there's people rolling in the aisle. There's people being sick. But there's such a joy there.
an air of praise and excitement. It's almost like being in a concert or a football match. It was like, wow, this is amazing. And it was almost too much. Ray remembers her first impression too. Standing in front of her was a man who gave her hope. A man who might be able to help her with her biggest secret. She'd find herself at the front of a long line of people queuing for their moment to be touched by the Prophet.
I can't remember whether he touched me or not. All I remember is it was quite an aggressive sensation and I found myself being hurled backwards into the dirt in front of everybody and then pushed back up again.
And then he, like, did it again, but it was really, like, quite... I remember being quite shocked and thinking, my God, this is actually, like... This is pretty vigorous. Thump, like, boof, to the ground, and you're up again, and boof, you're down again. And then I was kind of dragged to what was then, like, a central altar. It was, like, a circle. And he told me, like, I needed to go there and sort of confess or I needed to go and pray and...
In her public confession, Ray would talk about something she'd never spoken about to anyone. Everything I ever thought I'd done wrong, I wrote it in a little book.
as like a confession right and then I stood up in front of all of these strangers in this massive auditorium and like read it all out I remember I'm kind of confessing to the fact that um I'd got um like a lustful spirit I got spirit of homosexuality I was attracted to women I think I said that I used to undress people with my eyes so I used to imagine people naked and it was pretty humiliating it was like every deepest darkest secret that I'd ever had I just like vomited it
And I was absolutely adamant I had to do this thing because if I did that, then I'd be delivered. This demonic presence would leave my life. Something you can't put into words where I felt like I'm going to be free. I'm not going to be gay anymore. I'm going to be able to get married to a dude. I'm going to be able to have the kids I want. I'm going to be free. Ray had only planned on staying for a week.
But then, something happened. He had like a right-hand man, I say right-hand man, she was actually like a woman who was always with him. He seemed like super important. Her name was Bisola and Bisola came to me and said to me, the prophet's got a message for you. Bisola seemed to be a powerful figure within the church, but she was also warm and so welcoming. She'd bury visitors with big hugs and fill them with excitement about the miraculous things happening in the church.
We'll be hearing her story later, but to Ray and Annika, she was sitting at the right hand of the Prophet, doing his bidding. And what Ray didn't know was that Bisola had been watching her very closely. He roams around looking for particular people. They don't know we are picking them, but we know what we were doing. Ray, or Rachel by her biblical name, had caught the eye of the Prophet.
While Ray had felt something profound at the church, her best friend Carla had not. It was like he was Jesus.
Everyone thought he was amazing and he hardly spoke to anybody. To me, it was between me and God. I didn't need a middleman and I didn't understand why there was a middleman. Carla wasn't asked to stay, but Ray had been chosen. Among the hundreds of foreign visitors who'd come to the church on that trip, the prophet had picked her. That popular, smart, outgoing girl was about to give up everything she had ever known. Her degree, her family, her friends.
She was about to become a disciple. Carla remembers her drive back to the airport in Lagos. Ray was sitting next to her. They agreed to let her come in the car with me to go back to the airport. And actually, I remember sitting in the car. This is the worst... This is a bit where I might cry. I might need a minute, sorry. We're sitting in the back of the car and I'm holding her hand. And we're just looking at each other and basically trying to tell each other it's going to be OK. And...
It's the last time I ever saw her. Sorry. So, so stupid. But, like, literally, that is the last thing I have. It's just holding her hand, and that's the last time the Rachel that I knew ever existed. Thanks for listening to World of Secrets, Season 2, The Disciples, from the BBC World Service. This is Episode 1 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. The executive producer is Georgia Catt. The series editor is Philip Sellers. At the BBC World Service, the senior podcast producer is Lee Trung. And the podcast commissioning editor is John Manel. Thank you again for listening.
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