By Farayi Mungoshi

IN my previous article, I touched on the principles of hunhu.
I must confess it was not until I had gone to church last Sunday that I noticed the need to talk about this and the vastness of the topic.
A young pastor was giving an account of a meeting he had with the senior pastors who were encouraging them to have hunhu as young pastors, without which one can be viewed as no different from the immoral or disrespectful, lacking in character.
I found this interesting because oftentimes you find certain people from church raising their eyebrows at you the moment you mention hunhu/ubuntu.
For years, living my life as a Christian, I barely spoke about hunhu/ubuntu, that is because I must have subconsciously linked it with chivanhu.
When you generally term something chivanhu nowadays, people assume you are talking about the mysteries of African religion still practised by others, but above that, the majority have linked it to practices which mostly bring harm to other people, like witchcraft.
We also link it to the brewing of beer to appease the ancestors or the rain-asking ceremonies still practised in certain parts of Zimbabwe.
These are practices different from Christian beliefs. For example, in Christianity the brewing of beer for the ancestors or kurova guva is prohibited because it involves communicating with the dead. However, the two, hunhu and chivanhu, cannot be defined to mean the same thing.
It is only now that the true meaning of hunhuism is becoming clearer for me and undoubtedly for a number of young people who have awoken to the fact that they are African and not European/American.
Most of us are suffering from an identity crisis because of what we have decided to associate our lives with and most of that is Western through the usual media like television and social networks that continue to corrupt our way of thinking.
Most things European/American promote individualism, which is akin to selfishness, a good example being their (whites) funerals compared to ours.
You find that at most of their funerals, it is the immediate family and a few friends who attend whereas with us, everybody is welcome, even the witches attend.
The misunderstanding most of us have today is that we think we are free.
We do not realise or see that there is a war going on right now — the battle for our minds.
I have written before in this paper that the Bible indeed was used as a weapon by the Westerners to conquer and enslave Africans.
How scriptures have been manipulated in order for them to control us! So, when I go to church today and I hear of a senior pastor telling junior pastors to have hunhu, I must say I am taken aback.
It makes one smile and question if we are finally awakening, even in the church?
These days, African attires are a common sight, even in the churches. Does this mean we are finally realising our self-worth, even through such fashion statements?
Let’s take a look at one of the descriptions of what hunhu is.
According to Wikipedia: From the 1970s, ubuntu began to be described as a specific kind of ‘African humanism’.
Based on the context of Africanisation propagated by the political thinkers in the 1960s period of decolonisation, ubuntu was used as a term for a specifically African (or southern African) kind of socialism or humanism found in blacks, but lacking in whites, in the context of the transition to black majority rule in Zimbabwe and South Africa.
This makes interesting reading; let me use my own personal experiences to drive my point home.
A lot of times when I tell someone that I go to church, the next question that pops up is which church?
Is it one of the modern day churches or the old ones?
The reason is that the two are different in the way they operate.
There seems to be extra emphasis on money when it comes to the modern day church and extra devotion to the church which places the family second when it comes to attending church and its activities.
Hence when I hear of hunhu being mentioned in church today, I listen. Why? Because this is who we are regardless of what religion we belong to, this is what binds us together as a people.
Hunhuism can be described as: Munhu munhu nekuda kwevanhu.
We cannot be separated because of the Church.
Some modern day church doctrines, that are not even in the Bible, have acted as catalysts in destroying the hunhu philosophy. People need to wake up and realise that these are just scams to con you out of your money.
I like one of the maxims of hunhuism by Stanlake J. W. T. Samkange: ‘If and when one is faced with a decisive choice between wealth and the preservation of the life of another human being, then one should opt for the preservation of life.’
Unfortunately, today we see the opposite being true. One would rather opt for wealth rather than preservation of life.
We put all our resources and monies into making sure that the pastor lives the kind of life all of us desire for our own fathers while our true fathers and mothers are suffering at home with nothing to eat.
We seed money at church not because God told us but because the pastor told us to, despite the fact that you have a brother or sister in need of money to go to school.
And when you dig deeper, you discover that the reason most of us give in church is selfish in itself.
Why and how?
We are told if you give US$10, you reap seven-fold.
If you are not married, you get a husband/wife and so on, but this is not who we are.
Instead of promoting individualism we ought to take a look back at who we are in order for us to move forward.