We should wake up to the fact that it is in religion that many stereotypes that stigmatised blackness and exalted whiteness were fabricated, writes Andrew Wutawunashe in his book Dear Africa – The Call of The African Dream that The Patriot is serialising.

CHURCHES should therefore teach a doctrine of ‘African Redemption’.
This doctrine should clearly show black people that the sacrifice of Christ was also for their redemption from the enslavement and colonialism through which people of other nations brought a damage to their minds that was meant to frustrate their God-assigned contribution to mankind.
African liberation, after 400 years of subjugation strangely akin to the Hebrews’ 400 years of slavery, is definitely a result of divine redemption.
The Christian church should therefore emphasise on teaching the black person how to be set free from the damage which was done to him through subjugation so that he may be empowered to fulfil his God given purpose among the nations.
It is the Church which should affirm black people’s liberation struggles by showing them clearly that their leaders in liberation are fulfilling the same divine role that Moses fulfilled.
It is also the Church which must affirm the role of the leaders of African liberation, and underline to them their divine obligation to continue the struggle, as Moses and Joshua did.
This would be done by renewing and retraining the minds of black people, and ingraining in them the culture of self-dependence and of fighting for the ownership of their and the world’s resources.
Indeed, the Church must sanctify the struggles and wars of liberation of the black people for the just Pilgrimages which they are.
I don’t know whether you have noticed how diligently white people ennoble their wars and struggles, even ancient ones, through religious services and commemorations.
It is the opposite with black people.
A freedom fighter in one of Southern Africa’s liberation struggles recently remonstrated with me on how the negative attitude of contemporary preachers in black Christian Churches towards black freedom fighters and the struggles they fought in, has traumatised some freedom fighters into feelings of guilt and shame concerning these just and legitimate struggles.
This is against a backdrop where young black people have been conditioned to admire the fighters of any white war they know about.
Time has come for black religious leaders to do the overdue diligence of redeeming the wars, struggles and holocausts of black people from the premature archives to which they have been confined, and conducting relevant religious services and commemorations of them.
A worldwide service, for example, of ‘Thanksgiving for Emancipation’ of black people from slavery and colonialism should be held in all churches, and particularly in black Churches.
May 25 is Africa Day.
At the forefront of celebrating this day adopted to commemorate freedom of African nations and to inspire African unity, should be Thanksgiving Services in all Churches, acknowledging the divine roots of African freedom.
There is a frightening phenomenon in modern Christianity in which black people will flock to white churches and leaders while no matter how gifted a black preacher is, he will only be patronised by multitudes of his own colour.
I believe with all my heart that churches should be a beacon shining forth the light of integration and synergy of the races.
Yet it is hard to run away from the fact that the reason why it is only the black Christians who seek the Ministries of white Christians is that black Christians suffer from the very same inferiority complex, self-hate and inordinate admiration of white people which plagues black people in other arenas of life.
Nor can we close our eyes to the fact that the reason white Christians do not seek the leadership of black Christians is, at best, that they have confidence in themselves—in their own colour, and at worst that they still suffer from the same ungodly superiority complex that spawned enslavement of black people.
We should wake up to the fact that it is in religion that many stereotypes that stigmatised blackness and exalted whiteness were fabricated.
Chief of these was, God is white and the Devil is black.
For this reason, many sectors of religion regarded the struggles of black people for equality and freedom as either evil or as a worldly pursuit in which people of true faith should not involve themselves.
This has remained the Achilles’ heel of churches that represent modern Christian revival.
The fact that even powerful Christian broadcasting networks ignore issues of social justice, colour and the traumas of black people while millions of their black adherents need serious ministry in this area — is making faith irrelevant or hypocritical in the eyes of many black people.
Hypocritical, because the Bible is not silent on issues of social injustice, racism and even colour bar.
In the Book of Exodus for example, God curses Moses’s sister, Miriam with leprosy for mocking Moses because he married a black woman.
Jesus himself goes out of his way to defy Jewish racism by interacting with a Samaritan woman and affirming her before prejudiced Jewish men.
You would think pulpits and the airwaves would reverberate with preaching from texts of this nature, affirming blackness against racism.
But alas, a conspiratorial silence!
What kind of God keeps silence on issues such as these which are a heavy yoke on the neck of millions of His Creatures?
Is this not the proverbial petty holiness that strains a gnat and swallows a camel? Modern Evangelical Christianity should digest the sobering thought that black people are not blind as to which religions are seeking to be relevant to their deepest need.
Ultimately, it is the black religious leader, Minister, teacher, theologian, church person who must wake up to the fact that the church is the most important spring of hope for a black restoration and renaissance.
It is here where masses of black people flock voluntarily once, twice even thrice weekly looking for teaching, healing, ministry and guidance.
It is here that black people must hear a clear voice affirming their God purposed blackness and the contribution God wants it to make among the nations.
It is here that black people must hear the voices that chronicle their holocausts and traumas clearly and point to the path of redemption and healing from the effects of enslavement.
It is here again that black people must be taught like Job of old to say to peoples of other colours to whom they have felt inferior, “What you know, I know; I am not inferior to you.”
It is here that they must be taught self reliance, responsibility and creativity and embrace a mission to take the ‘Promised Land’.
It is here that black children must be taught the beauty of their colour and the divine origins and greatness of their progenitors such as Cush, Keturah the black wife of Abraham, Jethro the black priest, the black wife of Moses, the great African Queen of Sheba who charmed King Solomon, the great African Prophet, Zephaniah who saw black people from beyond the rivers of Ethiopia come to worship God, Simon the African who carried the cross of Jesus, and Simeon Niger and other Africans who ordained Paul the great missionary.
It is in the church that a deliberate emphasis on the expression of black things, African things, must be mooted — so that we hear African rhythms, dance, music and lyrics in the worship, to the accompaniment of African instruments of music — the eternal drum, rattles, marimba and trumpets of rams’ horns.
It is here that the colours of African dress must bloom, and church luncheons and dinners where indigenous nutritious African dishes are rediscovered and re-dignified.
It is here where Diaspora Africans must organise classes where their children learn their mother tongues, history and culture.
As African political leaders have fought to liberate black people and to build the African nation, the black preacher has persistently prophesied to them to be spiritually correct in their politics, and rightly so.
But as we have called upon politics and governance of black people to be spiritually correct, it is even more important that the preacher and the Church be ‘politically correct’.
Religion which does not identify with the needs and aspirations of its people provides an illusory happiness — that ‘religion is the opium of the masses’.