IN the last episode we indicated that we would begin exploring the link between African spirituality and the phenomenon of relatively new African churches. We noted that Zimbabweans in these hard economic times are flocking to these Apostolic and Pentecostal Christian churches.
Here we will also continue to interrogate the very legitimacy of Africans recruited into Western Christianity vis-a-vis the vision of African spiritual independence.
Our general understanding is that people go to church to fulfil their spiritual needs.
We have argued that the spiritual gospel according to Western churches is sterile.
It calls for people to link to the Creator, through an artificial link, the biblical or rather New Testament ‘son of God’.
The Western Christian gospel assumes that Africans are at ground zero as far as their relationship with God is concerned; that African spirituality is at the infancy stage and that the African needs to be held by the hand.
As we have shown elsewhere, nothing can be further from the truth.
The assumption that Africans are so stuck in sin (they are also black) must explain why even the missionaries looked down on their African parishioners as lesser beings.
How many of you blacks, young and old, were ever freely invited into white missionaries’ houses as would be the case if we were all the children of one father?
Blacks, despite the facade of Christian camaraderie put up by the white priests, remained second class believers.
The white pastors never readily mixed or shared their lives with Africans.
So we can see that the white missionaries and priests/pastors acted in unison with the white settler colonial regime in marginalising and dehumanising black people.
And they focussed on destroying the black people’s spirituality because it is central to the independence of Africans.
This is why we reject the argument that the Western Christian gospel as preached by them, is holy, or that it is about the love of God or even preparing people to go to heaven.
God does not discriminate, but they do.
We see that even today the white pastors/priests discriminate against their African ‘fellow Christians’.
We are saying religion is practical, not theoretical.
Religion cannot be ‘do as I say’ and not as I do.
And so clearly the Western church gospel never struck a resonant code with the Africans.
To grow the church whites resorted to all kinds of skulduggery and they still do today.
The tricks include, but are not limited to threats of burning in hell, misinterpreting Bible verses and elaborate and confusing sermons that seek to address every facet of life.
It is like teaching an infant to walk.
I will always ask this question.
How could we be so spiritually dull that we need to be preached to daily?
There must be another reason for this relentless mental pounding.
Look at full grown men who run big corporations sitting in the church audience like puppets listening to a preacher drooling about everything and nothing!
They have fertile imaginations these preachers.
The people listen attentively, polite like true Africans, careful not to disappoint the preacher by showing that he is talking nonsense.
You can tell that the spirituality is not there; and this is why these preachers keep calling for believers to bank on faith.
It does not make sense; telling us just believe what we the ‘men of god’ say!
Have faith.
If you question or express some doubt, you are immediately accused of lacking faith.
Just believe, says the priest!
But we Africans already believe in Mwari, Muskavanhu, the Creator.
The spiritual link to God through the Western gospel is not there.
Any semblance of a spiritual link is an artificial one; it has to be reinforced everyday with Bible verses, prayer meetings and you know what else.
It has to be a matter of faith!
Compare with our African spirituality!
My ancestors are real and the line from me back through them to Musikavanhu, the Creator is real.
Let me end by referring to a book by Steinberg titled The Grapes of Wrath, in which one of the characters explains that he was a preacher, but left ‘the calling’ after he was disillusioned by the outcome of his preaching.
He says words to the effect that: he was a preacher once, but he is not anymore.
He says he used to watch the people responding to his inspired gospel messages. The congregants at open air gatherings would be screaming full of the holy spirit!
And he (the preacher) would be literally possessed, with pieces of Jesus Christ literally coming out of his mouth (his words)!
And to his surprise, just when he thought that here the devil would have no chance even in hell, he would take one of the girls for a romp in the tall grass. The more the girls were full of the holy spirit, the readier they were to go into the grass, he says!
What contradiction!
Readier to sin when one was supposedly full of the holy spirit!
So he left preaching.
I make reference to Steinberg’s character to illustrate the hollowness and lack of spirituality associated with some of the religious gatherings that are billed as great successes.
The search for African spiritual identity and independence is a legitimate pursuit.
Imitating others will not take us far.
We must independently dock with our Creator’s spaceship.