The Southern Times

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What if Africa has her own God?

By Staff Reporter on 17th January 2017No Comments

> Thandekile Moyo

I HAVE NEVER totally understood what we know as the African traditional religion. I just know it involves spirit mediums, rituals, the brewing and spilling of beer and several other superstitious and dubious activities.

One of my grandmothers is a spirit medium. I am not really sure what it entails but I know it involves getting into trances and speaking in alien voices, snuff snorting and a lot of grunting.

I also know it involves the worshipping/honouring of the dead and buried; those we know as ancestors. By default, not desire, I know quite a lot about Christianity.

This religion has been shoved down our throats so forcefully that try as one might, you cannot avoid it.

We have been taught that Christianity is civilised, dignified, appropriate, applaudable and ideal. Being a Christian in Southern Africa is respectable.

Nothing screams “I’m good!” louder than a woman carrying a Bible as she briskly struts to church one beautiful Sunday morning after another.

I was born and raised in the Roman Catholic Church. No, that is a lie. Most of my extended family are Catholics; I’m supposed to be one too, but well… I even have a handsome brother who is a Roman Catholic priest and a gorgeous sister who is a Catholic nun.

Christianity, like the ATR, involves grunting, trances and attacks by a certain spirit they call the Holy Spirit, if you are successful enough in its pursuit.

Although, instead of speaking in unknown voices, Christians speak in unknown languages (tongues) when their spirits enter them. Christians also fervently worship ancestors such as Mary and her carpenter son, Jesus.

There is no snorting of snuff though in Christianity, just the burning of incense, the occasional spraying of insecticides on the flock and most recently the drinking of antiseptics and anointed sewage water.

The similarities in these two religions fascinate me, but not more than they frighten me. The fundamentals are the same, both preach love for one another, they advocate for respect of one’s parents and they both place their hope in the dead, who supposedly rose again and visit us once in a while in the spirit.

Both these religions have gods who will fight tooth and nail for the salvation and freedom of their followers.

In the earlier centuries, the pope at the time blessed slave trade declaring that taking Negroes from Africa was good business.

On ports in Zanzibar, they built their churches just above the slave holding cells. They drowned the moans and groans of black men, women and children chained together with feverish prayers and hymns.

 The British landed in Africa in the 17th century and wormed their way into our lands using missionaries and Christianity as a front.

Leaders of different churches like the Methodist, Dutch and Roman Catholic priests spread the gospel across Africa by day and plotted mass murders of Africans with the soldiers by night.

In Zimbabwe, a spirit called Murenga, instructed his people to fight the British who had invaded the land and were terrorising indigenous dwellers.

Murenga led the first and second Chimurenga wars (named after him). We lost the first and he instructed us to fight a second one which we won, leading us to attain independence in 1980.

Ironically, to celebrate our Independence, we invited a Roman Catholic priest to bless our celebrations and we held a mass to the Christian God in thanksgiving and celebration.

According to the Christian Bible, the God of Israel is an extremely jealous God. He is also not very tolerant.

He turned the poor wife of his most faithful servant Lot, into a pillar of salt merely for looking back at the burning Sodom and Gomorrah.

He violently flooded the entire world and drowned people and all other living things to death, save for Noah and a chosen few, just because…!

Now imagine our god, the god of Africa, was just as jealous. How much wrath do you think he could unleash on a nation he led to victory and saved from the hands of missionaries, only for that nation to turn their backs on him and bow down to the God of their assailants, the very day they attained their independence? Africans shock me.

If I were their god I would turn them all into pillars of salt and wash them away with rain or I would burn up the whole continent and start afresh!

Let us assume for once that there is indeed a god of Zimbabwe. For argument’s sake, let us imagine that our ancestral spirits are not evil as alleged by Christians, but are good spirits who love us and protect us from our enemies.

Are we doing them justice by being prayer warriors to Yahweh, a God who is clear and unapologetic about having a chosen people and being the God of Israel?

Do you not think that maybe our country has been cursed by a jealous and angry god who tears his flesh and weeps as he watches us prostitute ourselves to foreign gods?

If it is the gods who give rain, prosperity, peace, love and happiness to their people, what hope is there for a continent that has forsaken her god?

Is it naiveté or stupidity that makes us fail to realise that schools for Africans were named after “saints” while schools for the British were named after their heroes.

We have Prince Edward and Alan Wilson High Schools in Zimbabwe vs St Ignatius outside Harare and St Francis of Assisi in Chivhu.

While they were busy celebrating their war efforts their priests were busy turning us into Christians to pacify us. Decades after independence, the names remain while our own heroes lie uncelebrated.

They renamed Mosi oa Tunya the Victoria Falls, after Queen Victoria, and we see nothing wrong with that because we are Christians. We forgive and forget. We are not confrontational.

We are pacified! The Great Zimbabwe, our greatest achievement of all time, was trivialised and renamed the Zimbabwe ruins and we smile and say we are Christians.

We tell each other “thou shalt not fight” and we turn the other cheek! They erected statues of their heroes throughout the continent and because we have been pacified with the gospel, we are fine with it.

Because we are Christians we happily nurse the grave of Cecil John Rhodes, the biggest terrorist ever to land on our shores, on one of the most sacred lands of our ancestors.

The grave of Mzilikazi is just a short distance away, but lies abandoned while we religiously polish the bronze on CJR’s tombstone and that of his “partner” Jameson.  Imagine burying Hitler in Jerusalem. Or Bin Laden in Central Park, New York!

Until we recognise our own heroes, until we recognise our own god and respect our ancestors and spirits, we shall forever remain the cursed continent.

We shall always be colonies of Europe and we will remain at their mercy as we look up to them for donations, knowledge, technology, development and loans.

Need to find ourselves and pick up from where we left of before our systems, beliefs and way of life was disrupted. In our quest to be good Christians and Muslims, let us not forget that we are Africans and our continent needs our full attention. I totally believe in freedom of worship, my fear is that most people do not know that they are free to worship any god, even the god of Africa.

It is okay to be a Christian, it is okay to be a Muslim, it is okay to be an atheist but you need to ask yourself who is benefitting from you being what you have chosen to be. Is it you? Is it your pastor? Your colonisers? Is it your government?

After having had a merry Christmas celebrating the “birth” of Jesus of Nazareth, I pray you can now take a moment to look inside yourself and ask, what if Africa has her own god?

The Southern Times

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Africa: Towards South to South Dialogue

By Staff Reporter on 17th January 2017No Comments

> Mkhosana Mathobela Bingweni

IN AFRICA and outside, even in the West itself, most serious thinkers agree that the problems of the world from terrorism to social inequalities and poverty are still problems of the ‘West’ versus the ‘Rest’ of the world.

In earnest, there is no single economic and political problem of the countries of the South, Africa and Latin America, that is not linked to the enduring colonial problem.

The reason for this enduring Western problem in Africa and Latin America is that after decolonisation peoples of the South were made to believe that they can rely on ideas and strategies from the West or the Global North for their economic and political progress.

Many years of the Global South trying to depend on the Global North for ideas of economic and political progress have proven to be wasted years.

The Western promises to the world, from civilisation, democratisation, development, human rights and lately globalisation, have all proven, in actuality, to be the historical fraud of the centuries.

Historically and politically speaking, it is either the West is a great fraudster or the countries of the South are slow learners, or never learn at all.

As Southern African countries and communities enter 2017, as another year in the progress of the present century, leaders and their people must invest thought on how ideas can be invented and generated that will recover Southern Africa and the entire Global South from the present entrapment in the crisis of the world that manifests in extreme poverty, disease, ignorance, terrorism and the ecological catastrophe that threatens the entire planet with annihilation.

Our baptismal understanding should still be the time-tested wisdom that in reality we cannot solve a problem using the same thinking that created it.

The West introduced slavery and colonialism as capitalist economic strategies that have brought the world to this condition of misery for the peoples of the Global South.

That the same West will provide the ideas and strategies to get the world out of this planetary crisis is at best an article of blind faith and, at worst misguided belief in miracles.

Almost all threats to humanity that have emanated from the Western world have come dressed in the form and shape of one promise or another.

After so many broken promises and so many historical lessons that the people of the South have gained, wisdom would dictate that 2017 should at least provide a turn where leaders and peoples of the Global South should take seriously South to South dialogue, relating and learning from each other how to navigate the present world.

The Bandung Conference of 1955 was such a brief but meaningful moment where some countries of the South sat to imagine a world that was not dictated by the Global North. Africa and Latin America, and some parts of Asia need more of the Bandung moments.

The Fraud of Civilisation

Both the enslavement of the peoples and colonisation of the countries of the Global South were justified using the tantalising and mesmerising promises of modernisation and civilisation.

We were told by both imperial politicians and Christian preachers that forced labour and abuse of the enslaved and the colonised were the pain that came before the big gain of civilisation and modernity.

After centuries, the peoples and countries of the South have their pain and their poverty to show for it.

The gains of the slavish and the colonial encounters are yet to be seen. A careful study of the state of world affairs instead shows that slavery itself and colonialism are actually continuing by other means and guises.

This is happening after Latin America started decolonising in the 18th to the mid 19th century, and Africa effectively after World War II.

Multiplicities of experiments of decolonisation, de-westernisation, and even de-imperialisation have not delivered the liberation that is desired in the Global South.

The Fraud of Democratisation

After the Atlantic Charter of 12 February 1941, an agreement that put importance in the autonomy of imperial colonies in the South, most colonial administrations in Africa started pretending to democratise.

The Atlantic Charter resulted from a meeting between Franklin D. Roosevelt the then US President and Winston Churchill who was the Prime Minister of the Britain.

Powered by the promise of the Charter, revolutionaries of Africa intensified the pressure for decolonisation and independence.

Colonial administrations, trying to elongate their stay in the colonies promised democratisation and the granting of freedoms and rights to the colonised.

In the process, unfortunately, the struggle between the colonisers and the colonised changed to being a struggle for democratisation and not full liberation.

Many decades after the decolonisation and democratisation of Africa, Africans have nothing to show for the democracy except new forms of colonisation that are perpetuated in some cases by some black governments.

Like civilisation, democracy has largely been another fraudulent promise from the West to the Global South.

The Fraud of Development

When democratisation, in the sixties and seventies, in Africa was emerging to be another tyranny with its own problems, the United States of America as part of its fear of the scourge of communism, started preaching and sponsoring development in the Third World.

Up to today, there is so much talk even in Southern Africa about the developmental state. In all the talk about development there was little and there is still little talk about that Africa needs development because in the first place it was underdeveloped.

Enslavers and colonisers might have found Africa undeveloped and what they went on to do was to underdevelop the continent.

The Western gospel of development in Africa grew from being a theory to being an ideology of developmentalism but all the same the years of trying and failing have shown that as preached and sponsored by the West, development in Africa has been another gigantic historical and political hoax.

The underdevelopment of Africa by the West continues under a litany of names and pretences.

The Fraud of Human Rights

When the dreams of civilisation, democracy and development were appearing to be real nightmares in Africa and in the entire Global South, the western gospel of human rights was given new importance.

Without a sense of irony and paradox, the people that introduced the cruel systems of slavery and colonisation, the worst abuses of human right throughout the centuries became the same people who promised the world human rights.

Throughout Africa, non-governmental organisations sponsored from the West arose to claim that the problem in Africa was the abuse of human rights by African post-independence regimes.

Fighting for human rights became an industry in Africa. When decolonial philosopher, Walter Mignolo asked the question “who speaks for the human in human rights ?” he meant to probe why those who spoke so much about human rights on record appeared to be the same people who introduced the abuse of human right in the world.

The Western sponsored religion of human rights is fundamentally a religion that does not have humanism. Before enslavers and colonisers conquered Africa and the entire Global South, peoples of the South had their civilisations, forms of democracy, ideas of development and progress and they respected humanism. Western human rights discourse compared to African humanism is a perfect fraud.

The Fraud of the Colonial State

Part of the dilemma of the Global South is that countries are trying to solve the frauds of civilisation, democracy, development and human rights using the platform of the colonial state, institutions of government that came with slavery and colonialism.

The universities are also reproducing political and economic ideas that were generated by philosophers and thinkers of Empire. Even leaders that pioneered African decolonisation such as Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere, Leopold Sedar Senghor and Nnamdi Azikiwe, among others, were fiery revolutionaries who paradoxically relied on ideologies and theories from Western and Eastern Europe in trying to liberate and develop their countries and peoples.

The enslavers and the colonisers produced the African intellectual, political and economic elite that took over African countries from the white colonial administrators and there our problems began and continued up to today.

Civic societies in Africa bemoan corruption, tyranny and human rights abuses by African leaders but refuse to realise how these problems are still connected to the slavish and the colonial problem.

African governments blame civic societies for being western sponsored and perpetuating coloniality and forget to realise that in a strong way, African leadership ethics are products from the colonial system and perpetuate colonialism by black people against other black people.

The 2017 should realise a decolonial turn in Africa and Latin America where intellectuals and political leaders generate vigorous South to South dialogues aimed at recovering the Global South from the fraud within the world political and economic system.

Decoloniality means exactly that awakening from the myths and frauds of coloniality to a realisation that there is another possible world besides that which the West has defined and structured for us.

*Mkhosana Mathobela Bingweni writes from South Africa