IN the last episode in this series we argued for Africa to reclaim its spiritual independence.
This is only possible if we understand and follow our African religion.
The relentless assault on African culture and religion by Western Christianity, has left many Africans wondering in a spiritual wilderness, unable to define who they are, where they have come from or where they are going.
European colonisers used the Christian religion as a pacifying tool, one that brutally demonised and attempted to uproot African spirituality to replace it with a foreign religion which focuses on individual rather than collective/communal interests.
This religion is totally at variance with the family/community focus of our African religion and culture.
Spirituality is at the centre of all religions.
Each one of us has a spirit which dwells in our body.
What is ‘us’ is the spirit; the body returns to dust when we die, but the spirit lives on.
It is through our spirits that we connect with God.
We are spiritual beings.
Africans have always had a strong spiritual dimension to their existence.
It is this spiritual identity that has enabled them to maintain their identity and independence over thousands of years.
Spirituality is the main pillar of African independence and identity.
Because it is the spirit that endures even after death, our ancestors are therefore continuously in touch with us.
It is reasonable to think that their (our ancestors) spirits will continue to look after us the same way they did when they were alive as physical bodies.
Hence our unshakeable belief that our ancestral spirits intervene in all aspects of our daily lives.
European colonisers of Africa recognised the central role of spiritualism in the total existence of Africans.
They made the destruction of African spiritualism their primary target and mobilised a whole army of Western Christian missionaries to work tirelessly to disconnect, alienate and demonise and destroy African spirituality as enshrined in the cultural and religious beliefs and practices of the people.
Christianity we re-emphasise is to all intents and purposes a colonising tool.
We have previously made reference to King Leopold of Belgium holding briefing workshops for Christian missionaries who were going out to Africa.
He advised them not to waste time teaching Africans about God because they already knew him.
Rather the missionaries were to use Christianity to tame the wild black savages so that Europeans could loot Africa’s wealth in relative peace.
There is a Chritian church hymn which reads, in Shona:
“Tarirai kune nyika uko;
“Tichandofarawo musi watichazosvikako.”
The hymn seeks to mystify heaven as the place to be, where happiness abounds. The aim is to psychologically prepare the ‘believers’ to lose interest in their physical world and look up to heaven.
The bad would burn in Gehena.
Incidentally, African religion focuses on developing good relations with our neighbours and relations here on earth.
There is no heavenly dimension in African religion; if anything the ancestral spirits ‘vadzimu’ who literally dwell among us but in the spiritual dimension, will punish errant persons through various misfortunes right here in this life.
This forced individuals to behave properly in the community.
The missionaries were instructed to select Bible verses, often out of context, that taught Africans to hate wealth, to abandon their religion and culture, which the Christian God allegedly considered to be the work of the devil.
All African religious and cultural practices were banned by missionaries.
Gehena was defined as the place where all those who sinned against the Christian God were burned as punishment.
And all those who did not believe in Jesus were sinners destined for hell!
Africans were being forced and today continue to be forced to adopt a foreign spiritual pathway to Mwari, Musikavanhu.
Even the Christian God was made to sound superior to the African God.
All persons were declared sinners; all were lost souls who had to spend all their lives trying to make up for their sins.
All the people were declared lost!
Only the spirit of Jesus and the Holy spirit could redeem them!
No other religion could save the people.
Africans continue to find it strange that Christianity assumes all people are already sinners.
So despite our clear route to Mwari through or ancestral spirits, we are already condemned and need God’s mercy to save us from Satan and hell fire.
It pleased the Christian God, so the missionaries and evangelists taught, if the African converts obeyed their rulers, the colonial masters.
If one felt aggrieved, they could wait for justice in heaven, after death.
Christianity taught Africans to embrace poverty as a virtue, something that made them look good before God.
‘Blessed are the poor!’ the pastors preached every other day.
Accepting that poverty was a virtue meant that the Africans had little zeal to fight and defend their land and property.
That belief also took away their zeal to work and better themselves.
By preaching the gospel of poverty, humility, obedience to authority, Christian missionaries acted as the long range artillery that bombards and softens the target for the ground troops to move in, take the land, the wealth, the cattle.
To put the debate into perspective, the Christian missionaries forced the Africans to abandon and reject their spiritual connections to Mwari, the Creator through their ancestral spirits and spirit mediums.
To date ancestral spirits and spirit mediums are condemned as demonic and belonging to Satan.
One only needs to open a television channel broadcasting religious programmes. Then you wonder how your loving mother and father who raised and sent you to school and supported you in so many different ways suddenly become demons upon death.
This is the hypocrisy of Western Christianity.
It is at total variance with our African spirituality.
We are all spiritual.
We are all the sons and daughters of our Creator, Mwari, God.
Over millennia, thousands and thousands of years, we have evolved a close relationship with our Creator God.
We have well-defined ways of thanking our Creator and seeking his intervention in times of need. How can someone emerge out of nowhere and tell us we are lost?
Render the people rudderless then you can lead them anywhere.
Disconnect them from their ways and they become like lost sheep.
In the next episode we shall examine the various dimensions of our spirituality.