LAST week I wrote about how missionaries were instrumental in the cultural genocide of African people through the use of ‘soft power’ and the preaching of the gospel in different African countries.
Missionaries again, taking the biblical saying ‘let your light shine’, developed and entrenched the idea that Africa was a ‘dark continent’ hence they (missionaries) were to be the bearer of that light.
Missionaries further fomented racism in sub-Saharan Africa.
When missionaries built houses in selected mission stations and villages, they ensured the huts built for African workers or students were located on the western side of the wind system as winds in Africa generally blow from the east to the west.
In sub-Saharan Africa, it can be established that every location of African houses in any settlement established by Europeans, whether missionary or colonialist, were on the side where the wind would blow to.
This is why we have western suburbs today where the majority of blacks stay and eastern suburbs where the majority of whites used to or stay to date.
The whiteman did not want to breathe air that would have passed initially from and through an African location.
What has not been given prominence in most of the literature concerning missionaries in Africa is the highest level of deception and duplicity perpetrated by this group of European colonial advance party.
This has become particularly relevant when missionaries, whose message was conversion and salvation of individual souls, had been overtaken by secular missionaries.
Their original mandate to evangelise the ‘pagans’ of Africa seems to have been derailed by other interests of their compatriots, the empire builders, fortune seekers and the destitute of Europe who had no property rights in their home countries.
Missionaries, due to their seemingly humanitarian and Christian stance, came in the cultural, social and political side of the conqueror just as the soldier/colonialist was a military conqueror.
They came with weapons of mental destruction.
Among the Ndebele, under King Lobengula, the white missionaries who had to translate the Rudd Concession purported to have been agreed to and signed by King Lobengula exposed the dark side of the missionaries.
Reverend Helm, who had won the trust of Lobengula, misinterpreted the meaning and implication of the Rudd Concession.
He deceived King Lobengula, alleging Cecil John Rhodes’ missionaries wanted to dig ‘a single hole’ in order to extract some stones when in fact they wanted to prospect for minerals throughout Matabeleland and beyond.
Helm, who had stood as a friend to King Lobengula, was under these circumstances prepared to betray him against the machinations of the colonialists.
Reverend Robert Moffat, who was a close friend of Lobengula’s father, Mzilikazi, is reported as having said: “They (Matabele) have the notion that they’re people and that they can fight the Boers or even the English.
“The chief knows better, but he is hampered by the ignorance of his people.
“It’s a problem which occupies my thoughts night and day, how we’re to avoid the impending collision.
“To me, the only solution of the difficulty is the breaking up of this tribe, but I should be sorry to be the intermediary for sooner or later I should have to be the herald of war not peace.”
It is clear from the sentiments expressed by Moffat that the Christian missionary had not primarily come to convert ‘pagan’ Ndebele or Africans to Christianity and the purported Christian principles and values.
Moffat’s mission was to effect regime change and ensure the African way of life was changed, not necessarily to be like Europeans, but to be cowed into submission so the whiteman would loot the country’s resources unopposed.
The African had to accept the role of servant or second-class citizen to the whiteman if he was to be allowed to co-exist (with the whiteman).
The major aim of the missionaries therefore was never to be a brother to the African.
The African had to comply with the whiteman’s demands without fail.
Missionary deception and duplicity were again to be the main pillar of European colonisation of Africa.
It is reasonable to note that colonial scramble for and in Africa had its main support from the Christian missionaries.
Colonialism had to walk the path of missionary deception and duplicity.
The methodology of winning over the African was similar, setting the foundations of European colonial settlements and the establishment of colonial administrative headquarters.
It was like an international mission mafia in which again the missionary would take the lead.