A WHITE male God, who creates a white male as his image on earth, is not the God of Africans.
The God of Africans is not a white man or gendered as a human being. There are no images of him hanging on walls in African homes. God is God in African worldview, and that is that.
The idea of a white male God was brought to Africa by white male priests who hated women where they came from.
They created stories to support their hatred. The stories had to be logical, consistent and convincing. The point to start was with God as a white male.
They took advantage of their European languages which can hardly conceptualise things without ascribing gender to them.
Once they had ascribed a gender to their God as a male, the second step was his only Son, Jesus, as the image of God. Like father, like son.
The third hurdle was to convince everyone that Jesus was begot without sex between man and woman.
With that accepted, the next step was to condemn women and sex as abominable to God. Church leaders should, therefore, shun women and sex. From here, everything was plain-sailing.
If God could beget his son, avoiding sex, he can surely create the first human being the same way.
That’s how the priests came up with the doctrine that God created the first “man” in his own image and formed the “woman” from the rib of the man he had created.
“Woman” therefore means “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” according to the man whose rib “woman” was formed from.
From here, no one was left in doubt that “woman” is indeed an appendage of “man”. So, the priests would now comfortably say, “Wives, submit yourselves unto your husbands, as unto the Lord. For, the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church.
“Therefore, as the church is subject unto Christ, let wives be subjects unto their husbands in everything. And husbands love your wives, even as Christ loved the Church, and gave himself for it” (Eph. 5: 22-25).
But the priest would carefully and quickly add stories to warn men against being carried away by women who they described as used by the Devil to cause man’s fall. A well known story is that of Adam and Eve where Adam says, “The woman you gave me is responsible for my fall.” The other well known story is that of Samson and Delilah.
With such stories in mind, St. Paul who stayed away from women and never got married would say with a double tongue, “It is well for a man not to touch a woman but because of the temptation to immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband.”
Another famous Father of the Church who dreaded women was St. Origen. He loathed women so much that he subjected himself to extreme methods of discipline, fasting and sleeplessness, summoning every power in him to resist being tempted by them.
When it dawned on him that he would not succeed, he cut off his manhood. The following verse in Mathew 19: 12 is an allusion to him. It says “There are eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.”
The following advice from St. Paul is another allusion to Origen. It says “To the unmarried I say it is well for them to remain single as I do. But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. It is better to marry than to be aflame with passion” (I Cor. 7:1-9).
All these white fabricated stories about a white male God, the first white male human being created as an image of God on earth, and the white woman formed from the rib of the first white man and called “woman” or “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” by the man from whose rib she was formed, are adopted and swallowed hook-line-and-sinker by Africans without thought.
For instance, “mukadzi” in Shona as a word or person is not in any way derived from or attached to “murume”.
It does not by any stretch of the imagination or magic mean “bone of my bone or flesh of my flesh” as the translators of the Bible from English to Shona blindly suggest.
Mukadzi and murume in Shona who are “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” are one and the same person and do not marry. That’s why they refer to each other by the same word “hanzvadzi” which is not gendered.
Such examples as the above make it quite clear that the idea that “woman” or female are appendages of “man” and cannot exist on their own right as independent words or persons from “man,” does not belong to African worldview, but to white male priests who formulated them into a religion for their own white churches and white societies.
For Africans to abandon their God Mwari and embrace the white male God and white male-female relationships as fit for men and women in Africa, clearly attest to the view that, of all the struggles of liberation in Zimbabwe and Africa, the liberation of the African soul from its deep ingrained enthralment with the white man’s God and doctrines, remains an unfinished business.
In fact, it has not begun. When it begins, it may take a thousand years to awaken the African soul from its stupefied slumber, as Ian Smith once projected.