Author: Siyanda Mohutsiwa

What if Christianity is African?

Ethiopian Christians praying for Nelson Mandela outside the Mediclinic Heart Hospital in Pretoria on June 30 2013. (Pic: AFP)

Is Christianity African?

This question came to my attention while encountering a recent article on The Africa Report that drove me into a rage. Truthfully, it was not the report so much as one sentence that riled me up, which was:

“Following the US’s endorsement of same-sex marriage in June this year, many Ghanaians have expressed resentment at the practice, describing it as un-Biblical, un-Christian and, therefore, un-African.”

I tweeted the last portion of this excerpt, the part where the logic of this assertion is revealed, and asked Twitter users to tell me what’s wrong with this sentence.

The majority of answers mimicked my own thoughts. People did not hesitate to point out that “un-biblical, un-christian and therefore, un-African” was an oxymoron, wrapped in a riddle, served on a plate topped with hypocrisy in a restaurant called Ignorance.

I could not agree more. The idea that African culture and Christianity could be considered inseparable, struck me as just plain wrong. But what was even more wrong to me, was the reality that in many parts of Africa where Christian missionaries had carried out prep-work for European colonialists, there was a large group of people who
seriously believed that Christian practices had become their culture.

I was still picturing Christianity as this completely Western institution that was carried in on boats and slave-ships not that long ago. I could not fathom the mixture of Christianity and African culture ever being anything but unnatural.

I knew that culture is an evolving thing, constantly absorbing new beliefs and ideas until the customs of ancestors are unrecognisable to descendents. I accepted this premise under the condition that the new beliefs would have to rise organically – whatever that meant – from the imaginations of the people that formed the communities.

Upon further reflection, this struck me as odd. I thought back to all the non-Botswana African people I’d known throughout my childhood. Having attended English medium schools for the entirety of my education, and having been terrible at Setswana by virtue of having a foreign mother, my childhood was rife with a plethora of international friendships. Friends from Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Rwanda littered my childhood and perhaps inspired the earlier sparks of pan-Africanist sentiment that would light a fire in my belly throughout adolescence.

But when I went to their homes, or had their families visit mine, one thing stood out as a unifying factor. Despite having different “home languages,” different tints to their browness, different kinks to their fros, they had one thing in common that I’d known for sure then, but somehow forgot as I got older.

They were all seriously Christian.

Some history

When I googled “Christianity in Africa,” I expected to get results that were a mixture of “ancient” history (the beginning of the Ethiopian Orthodox church, one of the world’s first churches in the 4th century) and news on the bizarre church stories of our time (eg. pastors making congregants eat grass), and I did. But I also got an opportunity to reflect on the space in between.

Instead of dismissing this new idea because of the few centuries in between, where African practices were crushed and Christianity was introduced as a precursor to colonial oppression, I realized I might gain far more by realising that most African Christians did not do this.

The average African Christian does not exactly walk around thinking himself a product of cultural domination. He considers his faith as organic as I do the earth. It is natural to him to believe in the Christian God, and, like many Africans, he sees no evidence – besides the whiteness of the Jesus statue in his church – that Christianity was anything other than his all along.

I always thought this strange, as well as an opportunity to tout my victims-of-white-brain-washing horn into the ears of whoever would listen. But then I found out that, according to David Barrett, most of the 552 000 congregations in 11 500 denominations throughout Africa in 1995 were completely unknown in the West.

I was introduced to the term “African initiated church” and started to make connections in my mind that I should have been making all along. Africans had been “taking back” Christianity for decades and I hadn’t even noticed. I had remained stuck in my simple-minded box, still thinking of African culture in terms like BC (before Christianity) and AC (after Christianity) where the latter signified death to me.

I was refusing to see all the contradictions and hypocrisies I’d noticed in African Christians as the formation of a new Christianity. I too had been taking part in cultural trivialisation by refusing to see African culture as a living, breathing, complex thing that would not forever remain in the animal-skins and tribal-dancing of our ancestors. Our beliefs and customs hadn’t died, they’d just found new ways to live in Christianity.

How else would one explain the ZCC?

The ZCC

If you live in Southern Africa, there is a chance that you are aware of the existence of one of the largest churches on the continent. Walking through the bus station in almost any city south of DRC, you are likely to encounter women in robes and intricate scarves covering their hair and men in military-esque khaki uniforms; or at the very least, plain-clothes people with a star-badge on their chest.

These people are part of the ZCC: Zion Christian Church. Although it traces its origins to the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion, the ZCC has been a symbol of African Christianity for decades. This church has been able to take in Africans into the Christian faith without beating their identities out of them.

It is a church that has been difficult for academics to understand, and indeed for many Africans to understand – particularly Africans who, like me, had a very limited fundamentalist idea of Christianity as a Western notion. But the people of ZCC have managed to make the practice of Christianity a lifeline of their previous lives.

The drinking of holy teas and the laying of hands as a healing methods can all be traced back for centuries into histories of African societies.

The ZCC is just one of thousands of “African Indigenous Churches” that were formed by ‘black prophets’ who wanted to give Africans an alternative to the crushing anti-black sentiment of European denominations.

So what if Christianity is African?

If Christianity is African then I’m stumped. I’m outsmarted. I can no longer argue against African Christians on the basis that they worship alien ideologies. I can no longer turn my nose up at African church-goers as sheep ignorant of their bloody pasts. I can no longer dismiss the beliefs of those that don’t agree with my politics because of Christian scripture.

I am stumped.

I can’t even call them hypocrites any longer: accuse them of picking and choosing which scripture they follow, because being denominations separate from the West means Africans are free to emphasise what they wish as being Christian.

How can I point out their acceptance of infidelity and corruption while taking such a harsh stance on homosexuality? How can I ridicule them for their fringe groups eating grass and licking hair for healing?

How can I ignore that many of the parts of African Christianity that offend me are the African parts? Can I continue to blame the ghosts of white Christians when Africans claim that mini-skirts are offensive? Can I continue to conjure up the spirits of European colonisers when Africans assert that homosexuality be punished by death?

If Christianity is now African then we have nobody to blame but ourselves for our failings. We can no longer look to our colonial pasts and claim that bigotry, hatred and oppression are Western inventions. We can no longer look at pastors who take advantage of poor Africans as a continuation in the centuries-long tradition of Western institutions crushing African lives.

We can no longer ignore the fact that if Christianity is now African, so is the oppression we subject one another to.

That’s what it would mean if Christianity is African.

Siyanda Mohutsiwa is a 21-year-old mathematics major at the University of Botswana. She is currently slumming it in Finland. Follow her on Twitter: @SiyandaWrites

10 years ago

The AU owes young people inspiration

Hundreds of people adorned with traditional regalia from different cultures march through the streets of Durban on May 23, ahead of the annual commemoration of the 1963 founding of the Organisation of African Unity, presently recognised as the African Union. (Pic: AFP)

The African Union owes the citizens of African states an opportunity to gain true inspiration from their organisation. We have not been given that opportunity. The average educated African citizen sees the Union as a toothless dog barking at its problems, and if they surmount, merely burying them in Africa’s backyard, which I imagine is an abandoned desert filled with broken dreams. If this appears to be a dramatic analogy to you then allow yourself the chance to imagine what the uneducated citizen considers the African Union to be. Nothing. And no dramatised imagery can take that truth away.

Numerous articles have been written on the ineffectiveness of this organisation. Disaster after disaster has visited the member states of the African Union, while those involved in it appeared to do nothing more than shake their heads at the graveyard of missed opportunities. And who has suffered the most? The African people.

The purpose of the AU is to promote peace and security in Africa, but recent al-Shabab attacks in Kenya are thought by some to be a result of the mistakes made in the AU’s mission in Somalia which had an initial mandate of six months – yet close to eight years later, the operation remains active. The AU has also been accused of “regionalising local conflict”.

The purpose of the AU is to promote improvement in healthcare access for African citizens, but the Ebola crisis showed an organisation that seemed to insist on always remaining many steps behind local and international efforts to combat the epidemic.

The purpose of the AU is to promote Pan-African development. Since its founding in 2001, and despite the rise in trade-agreements between member states, intra-Africa trade has remained below 12%, an embarrassing figure when compared to Western Europe whose intra-continental trade clocks in at 80%. It is clear to even the most optimistic observer that African states just don’t take these agreements seriously.

More of these failings can be seen as you go down the list of objectives the AU set up for itself upon its birth. And every failure comes with its own excuse: low resources, pressure from the West, etc. But despite some of them being valid, the rest I chalk down to a blatant refusal to take this organisation where it should go as well as an obvious lack of faith in the vision that birthed the AU: the vision of a united and self-sufficient Africa.

How else can you explain the clumsy handling of regional conflicts? How else can you explain the slow response to healthcare disasters? How else can you explain the sheer lack of implementation of agreements between member states? How else can you explain how Africa can continue to produce almost entirely things it does not consume and consume things it doesn’t produce?

It is a complete lack of commitment to self-sufficiency, it is a complete lack of commitment to the vision of a united Africa.

To reject a vision is to reject the future. And what is more a sign of a rejected future than the African Union having a centenarian president as a representative of the youngest continent in the world? To reject youth is to reject the future.

And so far, I have seen very little being done to engage young people in the AU’s mission.

But something can be done. Schools all over the continent can energise young people by creating AU clubs. How they will go about it can be determined by the resources and abilities of their respective faculties. If the AU has shown us anything, it’s that this can’t be done with a top-down approach. It has to be a “grassroots” movement implemented by teachers and communities that do believe in the dream of a United Africa.

And nobody can tell me such a thing is beyond the abilities of the often poorly-funded schools that form the majority of education systems in Africa. If there can be debate clubs and science competitions, however under-resourced, there can be a model AU after-school club.

I am aware that a model AU conference takes place in South Africa from time to time, but such an occasion seems limited to the privileged few who can afford the tedious process of getting visas (another barrier to intra-Africa trade, unaddressed by AU) and funding.

But I am talking about the average African student, who naturally craves, as all young people do all over the world, to make a real difference: to matter. The poor children in rural schools who feel forgotten by the world are just the people we need to engage in the vision of a compassionate and prosperous AU.

If I sound like a dreamer it is because that’s just what the AU needs, young people like me filled with optimism and dreams, and how else shall the two meet if not by gaining familiarity in this fashion?

All over the world, the model UN conference operates and ignites passions in the souls of young people who are eager to feel involved. A continent-wide model AU program might be just what is needed to put into the minds of my peers that leading Africa is our rightful place and no amount of bureaucracy, corruption and poor resources will stop us from claiming it.

On Africa Day, the day we are supposed to celebrate Africa’s achievements since 1963, when 30 newly-independent and ambitious African states got together and birthed a vision of a prosperous continent, we have to realise that the AU owes us inspiration. But we will be damned if we wait for them to hand it to us. We must seize it for ourselves and push ourselves to victory.

Siyanda Mohutsiwa is a 21-year-old mathematics major at the University of Botswana. She is currently slumming it in Finland. Follow her on Twitter: @SiyandaWrites

10 years ago

Ubuntu is dead and greed killed it

(Pic: AFP)

Botho is dead.

There, I said it. And quite frankly, it is about time somebody did. It’s about time we walked to the funeral of our most beloved product and allowed ourselves a few moments to come to terms with the reality that it is gone.

Botho or Ubuntu or African socialism or whatever name is now fashionable has always been a cornerstone of African societies or, to be more accurate, Bantu societies.

But now it is 2015. And in Botswana, Botho is a word so strong and loaded, that it has become the greatest political tool in the arsenal of the ambitious leader. A national address is incomplete without the speaker finding a way to praise us for upholding this core tenet of our civilisation and simultaneously admonish us for letting it slip away. It is the multi-purpose screwdriver in the toolbox of the mass manipulator.

Leaders in power shame us for having “lost” it, while leaders with ambitions to gain even more power praise us for upholding it. And this is not only a Botswana phenomenon, for South African leaders are also known to admonish wayward followers for losing their “Africanness”.

All over Africa, our culture, painted in the fantastic light of glamourised pasts, is waved in the faces of the ordinary Africans as some reminder that a different behaviour than that natural to all humans is expected from us.

Politically active youths demanding opportunity are said to be behaving without Botho, without respect for elders. Women asking for equal rights are said to be acting in their own interests and dismissing the needs of the community. Economically ambitious people are said to be thinking selfishly when they should be using their wealth to make the lives of their people better.

Well, I’m here to say that all of that is [expletive].

It is time we faced facts. We cannot foster societies that enable the greed of our leaders to be the driving force of our economies, and at the same time be expected to behave without that very same selfishness that is supposed to be at odds with our supposedly perfect pre-colonial societies.

At some point we have to choose between fulfilling the destiny Steve Biko believed was Africa’s responsibility (to bring a human face to civilisation) and following the rest of the world in letting capitalist aspirations shape our societies. And I’m afraid we have made that choice.

If the recent bouts of xenophobic attacks in certain parts of the continent are any indication, we, as African people, have chosen greed over Botho. We have chosen greed over idealism, over what Biko claimed was our special place in history. And we’ve done it without even knowing it.

At what point will we realise that our present acceptance of leaders who will do whatever it takes to gain as much personal wealth as possible at the expense of their people, is the very cause of the erosion of our belief systems? When will we realise these very same leaders are in no position to manipulate us with shame?

It is when we realise that greed is what is stripping our societies of their core beliefs, that we will see that the only way to move forward is to reject it.

We, Africans, have to ask ourselves everyday if this is what our ancestors fought for. Is this the freedom they died for? The freedom to steal? The freedom to kill? The freedom to die poor and without dignity? Is the right for politicians to steal without consequence, what Lumumba, Sankara, et al., died for? Is the right for the poor to murder each other over the crumbs of our GDPs what Nkrumah, Nyerere, et al. dreamed of?

Are the lives of the first Africans who died at the hands of colonialists to be honoured by our own individual obsessions with material wealth? Are their lives to be carried forward by ancestors who care more about emulating their warped view of western life than upholding the principles of societies that were alive for centuries before western interference?

Did we go through all of this for this? We have to ask ourselves these types of questions everyday if we are to arrive at the correct conclusion: Africa has to fight greed harder than we have ever fought anything else. We have to fight it like we fought off cruel colonialists, we have to fight it like we fought for freedom, we have to fight it harder than we have ever fought anything, because greed is Africa’s greatest problem.

And it begins today, by refusing to accept corruption. By demanding harsher anti-corruption laws, by seriously thinking about what role mindless consumerism has played in the decaying of our cultural principles, by a number of ways we have yet to discuss.

We have to fight because Botho is dead, and only our actions can bring it back.

Siyanda Mohutsiwa is a 21-year-old mathematics major at the University of Botswana. She is currently slumming it in Finland. Follow her on Twitter: @SiyandaWrites

10 years ago

Miniskirt attack: This is not a Kenyan issue, this is an African issue

Women take part in a protest along a main street in Nairobi on November 17 2014. They demanded justice for a woman who was attacked for being dressed ‘indecently’. (Pic: Reuters)

It is a funny thing, the African’s relationship with his Africanness. Like the Christian discusses ‘the flesh’ when falling into the temptation to commit sins, the African brings up the question of Africanness when defending his anti-social behaviour.

When a group of men in Kenya put it into their minds to undress and assault a woman in public because she was dressed “indecently”, some African men defended this move and shrouded their argument in the opaque veil of Africanness. On Facebook posts of this story, top-voted comments included pleas to African women to remain “decent”.

Although it may seem perfectly natural for me to choose anger in such a situation, I decided to skip that step and muse on the meaning of “decency” in the mind of the modern African.

To whom shall we credit such a notion, but the missionaries? To me, it seems the term is only ever used to demonise some part of the African population. Whether it is homosexuals, or women wearing miniskirts, the question of Africanness is only ever brought up when violations of human rights are committed by Africans. But where did such an idea begin?

It is easy to surmise my previous conclusion, with an examination of even the simplest look into African history. With the introduction of European missionaries to African society came the idea of “decency” – more so the idea that the scanty attire of traditional Africans was indecent.

For how else can this notion develop organically in the minds of people who live in one of the hottest climates in the world? Surely, it cannot. We cannot claim that an obsession with covering up the bodies of women – a very Victorian obsession – could have developed naturally in the minds of African people.

I say “African” and not “Kenyan” because this issue is not confined to one African country. Just last year Swaziland talked about enforcing anti-miniskirt laws that were penned during, gasp, colonial times. Even in my native Botswana, there was a time when young girls were warned against wearing revealing attire at the bus station. This is not a Kenyan issue, it is an African issue.

To take it further, this is not a dress issue, it is an identity issue. More specifically, this is a crisis of identity. There must exist some conflict in the mind of a man deeming a woman in a miniskirt indecent when only a century ago his ancestors deemed even less clothing perfectly acceptable. Particularly when events still exist in the contemporary setting where African women dress in said traditional attire without protest from the very men happy to police the dress of women in urban settings. The disjoint in logic can only be rationalised by a mind in conflict.

In condemning the miniskirt, the modern African joins in the tradition of condemning his ancestors – a tradition inspired by the European missionaries of the 18th century.

I say this because even those that condemned the behaviour of these men used words like “barbaric” and “primitive” to describe them – in other words, they used the language of colonialism. Even in the minds of those that deplored this behaviour, there swam images of some immoral ancestors that went about undressing women.

This too is a symptom of an identity crisis, of associating decency with Other, and then going further to associate the immoral acts committed in the name of correcting indecency with barbarism, or quite clearly pre-colonial Africanness.

Both assumptions are founded in missionary teachings, whether asserters know it or not. It is this idea that pre-colonial Africans truly were morally bankrupt. This is incorrect.

Even in the most patriarchal societies (if there is such a scale), I doubt that undressing a woman in public would happen without consequence. The dignity of a woman may have not belonged to her, but it belonged to somebody (likely, a father or husband) and doing whatever it took to violate it would not have gone unpunished. Our ancestors were not a group of speaking baboons: they too, had standards of conduct.

Ultimately, when situations like this arise, it is necessary that we examine our thinking and then act accordingly. We cannot allow people to use African culture as a scapegoat. We must be able to see if anything is to be deemed “barbaric” it is the idea that enforcing European missionary ideals in modern Africa is in some way “right.” We must examine our beliefs about decency and dignity and reconcile them with a switch in thinking: with an embracing of the realities that we inhabit. It should be a priority for us in this day and age to correct mentalities that defend any violations of basic human rights and use understanding of history to inspire the creating of environments that nurture and heal our social, religious and mental conflicts. And for this to be done, we should know that there are no [insert african nation] problems, but African problems.

Siyanda Mohutsiwa is a 21-year-old mathematics major at the University of Botswana. She is currently slumming it in Finland. Follow her on Twitter: @SiyandaWrites

10 years ago

Respect our language: A minister isn’t really going to defend President Zuma with her buttocks

Water and Sanitation Minister Nomvula Mokonyane. (Pic: Gallo)

Today, the South African media proudly told the world that a woman – a cabinet minister, at that – was so devoted to President Jacob Zuma that she would defend him with her buttocks.

I will give you a moment to reread that sentence, because if you are a learned speaker of any language it will quickly occur to you that such a statement is nonsensical. But if you are a speaker of a Sotho language, then you will not need to reread this statement, as it will be immediately clear to you that this is, in fact, a direct translation of the idiom Re tlo thiba ka dibono.

The saying directly translates to “we will block with our buttocks”. It simply means that the sayer pledges to (along with some group) defend an individual or ideal with every ounce of their being, even if that means the last resort will be to use a traditionally non-confrontational body part. There are hints by some that this saying comes from Sotho participation in the Anglo-Boer war where Sotho soldiers witnessed Scotsman die with their behinds revealed due to Scottish attire. I cannot say for sure if this is entirely true.

But apparently, this moment to reread this sentence was not afforded to the reporter who wrote this story and the editors who ran it – they neither had the time to research this idiom nor the interest in using this opportunity to provide the interesting history behind it. The original news report by the South African Press Association was republished on various websites including City Press, SowetanLIVE and Independent Online.

No, kind reader, the reporter was far too busy being excited about shoveling out another click-bait headline to give themselves the time to think about the dangers of misrepresenting Minister Nomvula Mokonyane. But the poor soul of this reporter is not my business here.

I am in the business of speaking Setswana and what an interesting business it is today. And by “interesting,” I mean “poorly advertised”, for had it been properly marketed, perhaps, the reporter would have heard about the over three million speakers of the language living in South Africa, and may have tried to contact at least one for clarification on the quote.

Perhaps it is poor marketing that prevented them from realising that an entire nation of Setswana speakers lies right above South Africa, and another nation of Sotho speakers actually lies in South Africa. Maybe if they knew this, they would have thought twice about their attempts to make the minister sound like a fool, by refusing to acknowledge the possibility that her language has any semblance of sophistication.

I want very much, as you can see, for this to be a matter of ignorance. And not what I fear it to be: a matter of pure disrespect. To refuse to investigate the meaning and context of this quote, is to refuse to consider that a language that has lived longer than South Africa can have the sophistication required for the phrase “fight with my buttocks” to make sense. To lazily slap on a headline with the barest seeking-out of clarification is to say to the speakers of that language that you will not even bother to think that it can have any kind of nuance, any kind of intellectual flexibility or in fact any kind of maturity.

The very idea that a woman would proudly proclaim that she will defend her leader with her buttocks should strike the listener as strange. But it appears this did not happen to the reporter of this story. For if it had, perhaps it may have occurred to him/her that there is a level of meaning that they are clearly missing. Perhaps, they would have wondered what they are missing.

But no, it is far more fashionable to undermine the intelligence of South African ministers, it is far more fashionable to undermine the complexity of African languages and it is obviously far more fashionable at the moment to insult African people as a whole.

And to that I say, le tla ipona! Or as the reporter might publish, “You will see yourselves!”

Siyanda Mohutsiwa is a 21-year-old mathematics major at the University of Botswana. She is currently slumming it in Finland. Follow her on Twitter: @SiyandaWrites