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

9 years ago

Tell the African story – including corruption

(Pic: Flickr / DW Akademie)

Two weeks ago, one of Kenya’s leading newspapers, The Daily Nation, published the story of a county governor who had spent some $197 000 on accommodation at a high-end hotel while awaiting renovation of his official residence. Quoting a report by Kenya’s Auditor General however, the paper noted that the county’s government also spent some $5 300 on house rent for the same Governor, during the same time period he was living at the hotel (July 9th to August 1st 2015). If these numbers don’t speak for themselves already, then add some 1.2 billion shillings ($11 855 844) misappropriated by the same county in September of 2013. You get the picture?

What is worrying about such blatant corruption and outright impunity in Africa is not its existence; it is the recurrence. It is the fact that it is as systemic as the education sector or agriculture is to the common citizen. I worry that while a child’s disease and a region’s poverty will be well documented by some aid agency and paraded to solicit funds from some well-meaning individual, these incidences of corruption will not see the light of day in the western world. It seems as if, we Africans, would rather allow benevolent stereotypes to flourish than for our dirty linen to be aired in public. The narrative thus remains the same. Africa is poor because it is poor; and while we’re out fighting the poverty narrative, we fiercely defend the source of our poverty.

I know there is a lot of noise about ‘Africa Rising’ going around the web and in intellectual circles; I also know that this is complete hogwash. Africa is going nowhere – not yet at least. There cannot be any development on a continent that propagates and recycles the same ideals that have kept it from developing for the last 50 years. So, citizens having some internet with which to shout at western media will not in itself change the continent’s trajectory. The corruption will stay, terror attacks still go unattended and ethnic strife still pit us against each other. Just because we can tweet at CNN and get an apology does not mean we are better off as a people. While it is laudable that we are challenging stereotypes about our continent; and while we need to show things as they are, we must acknowledge that incidences of corruption too are a part of our social fabric. They might be undesirable alright; they might be shameful; but integrity to our continent and preparedness for real development implies (indeed requires) that we talk about these indecent characteristics too.

So what happens to our sandy beaches and wild animals and M-Pesa and the Savannah? Nothing. But if we want a complete story of us, we must be at the forefront of telling it. If any media speaks about corruption, or terrorism in Kenya, it has every right to. Granted, sensational reporting is below media ethics, the truth must nevertheless be spoken. It is pretentious of us Africans to imply that exposure of our continent’s weaknesses, or our politicians’ misdeeds, somehow blemishes our “good name”. Because it is this very identity that gets tarnished every time we want to keep the monopoly on talking about corruption within our borders.

There is no substitute for thinking.

Franklyn Odhiambo is an alumni of the African Leadership Academy and student of the university of California, Berkeley. Oh,and he’s Kenyan too.

9 years ago

Nigerian erotica: how the church leader became a sex symbol

“When he talks the breeze ceases and the roof trembles. He commands the crippled to rise, and they rise. He lays his fingers on the blind, and they see. He touches a widow’s sick son, and he is healed.”

“He” is Pastor Samuel, the protagonist of a new fiction series, Holy Sex, that is using the erotic genre to examine the influence and power that the church pastor has over women’s lives in contemporary Nigerian society.

Published by Brittle Paper, an African literary blog, editor Ainehi Edoro explains that the fictional pieces key into an important social phenomenon. Wealthy and operating intimately in people’s lives, pastors are equivalent “to Oprah or they are Dr Phil… they give people a sense of hope,” Edoro explains.

The author, Obinna Udenwe, is the first to eroticise the Nigerian church in fiction, according to Edoro.

Your pastor is handsome. His nose is finely chiselled. His clear white eyeballs are draped in long eyelashes. His lips are full and sensuous. His broad shoulders fill out his designer suits. And when he doesn’t wear a tie, his 22-carat gold necklace sparkles in the reflection of the glass pulpit. A thick gold ring on which is mounted a cross and a bleeding heart adorns the finger he uses to swipe the iPad screen during his sermons

Holy Sex, episode one

Shaming the church?

Throughout the series Pastor Samuel has numerous affairs under his wife’s nose and extorts money from women in exchange for sex. The author describes female characters dressing in “plunging necklines” for Sunday service, with some antics resulting in unwanted pregnancies.

In episode two, one woman’s monologue reads: “To be perfectly honest, who doesn’t want to sleep with God’s anointed, these days?”

Was injecting taboo into the social power-centre of the church meant ruffle feathers? No, says Edoro, it’s playful fiction and not meant to be threatening: “It’s partly about the sex, it’s partly about the system,” she explains. The church has a certain power over women’s bodies, but as an editor didn’t mean to offend, just to encourage people “to think”.

Readers of Holy Sex have certainly recognised some truth in Udenwe’s tales: “I am dumbfounded, but this is exactly a replica of what ladies see in Nigerian churches – it is such a shame,” writes Amaka, a commenter on Brittle Paper.

Anonymity

Though the series has been extremely popular, most online readers were not comfortable commenting publicly or sharing the link via Facebook or Twitter, says Edoro.

Anonymity via e-readers and the internet has been attributed to the runaway success of books like Fifty Shades of Grey, but in Nigeria blogs read in private are the main way people like to consume erotica, Edoro adds.

He continues to come to your house once a week. Sometimes he sleeps over. He asks for money. You give him double of whatever number he requests. You gossip with your friends and tell them everything. You tell them that no one kisses like him. They envy you.

So this Saturday, Pastor Samuel visits your house. You’ve just paid a lot of money into his account that afternoon. You also agreed to fund his trip to Sweden for an evangelical conference, so he has come to say thank you for paying four million naira into his account

Holy Sex, episode five

Others who’ve made their names writing about love and sex in Nigeria include “romance author” Kiru Taye, based in London but specialising in “multicultural romance set in Africa”, and Dames Caucus who describes her style as “telling fictional stories laced with a little sex”.

Then there’s Abuja-based Cassava Republic Press who’ve set up a romance imprint. The team made a bundle of love and romance stories free to download on Valentine’s Day this year, and say their aim is to demonstrate “that romance can be empowering, entertaining, and elegantly written”.

Caucus, real name Vickie Aluta-Obueh, publishes steamy blogposts twice a month but wishes she could do more. She thinks that blogs are the preferred way for Africans to consume erotica because they’re often free to access, and, she says, can be printed out and added to people’s “naughty stash”.

Both Aluta-Obueh and Edoro talk about erotica being enjoyed by both men and women alike – unlike in the west, where the market is largely divided and marketed along gender lines.

Playing catch-up

African erotic fiction is very much in it’s infancy, according to Edoro, who says it has a long way to go to catch up with Nollywood or the music industry, who have both been successful in selling African desire for the mass market.

Edoro puts this down to African fiction still being the “preserve of the intellectual classes” and while some pop fiction , like sci-fi and fantasy, are starting to find their feet, the genre needs time to flourish.

She explains that the obstacles relate to the lack of investment in popular Nigerian writing, suggesting there’s little money for local authors beyond celebrated names like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Teju Cole.

Just as doubts begin to fog your mind, his hand, his long and smooth hand, wanders to your dress. He lifts it and reaches your thighs. You recoil, but he pulls you close.

Holy Sex, episode four

Writer Aluta-Obueh blames Nigerian culture’s conservative attitudes to sex for choking the market: “There are so many talented erotic writers out there but fear of being vilified curbs their zeal to write,” she says. But despite what she describes as a “hypocrisy” where “anything sexual is frowned upon”, her feedback from readers has been overwhelmingly positive.

A few other comments from the readers of Holy Sex suggests that a burgeoning market is out there for erotic fiction: “Brilliant. I cringed at holy milk each time but in Naija [Nigeria] reality is stranger than fiction”, wrote a user known as Snapes. “A lot about the ease of the writer convinces me of the validity of such a story. I really appreciate such creativity”, added another user, Olatunde.

Maeve Shearlaw for the Guardian Africa Network

9 years ago

Beyond Cecil the lion: Issues the media need to cover about Zimbabwe

The lion named Cecil was a popular attraction among tourists in the Hwange National Park. (Pic: Zimbabwe National Parks/AFP)

Not since the unprecedented political and economic crisis of 2008 has Zimbabwe made consistent international headlines. Punctuated by a free-falling currency, extreme food shortages, a contested presidential election and the outbreak of cholera, the small nation of 13-million became a regular international media feature as its cumulative woes led to general disintegration.

What anyone who lived through this time of turmoil – myself included – might never have believed is that it would take the death of a lion to once more locate Zimbabwe within the world narrative.

Within days of news breaking of the murder of Cecil the lion, a global petition calling for justice for the cat – said to be the largest lion in Hwange National Park– has garnered over 300 000 signatures. International media has diligently reported the latest news on the situation with updates on the American dentist, Walter Palmer, who is responsible for the trophy hunt coming in thick and fast. Additionally, #CeciltheLion has trended on Twitter, with #JeSuisCecil also featuring prominently.

Protesters call attention to the alleged poaching of Cecil the lion in the parking lot of Dr Walter Palmer’s River Bluff Dental Clinic in Bloomington, Minnesota. (Pic: AFP)

For many Zimbabweans, international focus on Cecil stands in stark contrast to the barely audible attention paid to Itai Dzamara, a local anti-state activist who has been missing for over four months. Or to the precarious status of unregulated local street vendors as police mount a crackdown on their activities. Or to Sangulani Chikumbutso, a high-school dropout who has become the first Zimbabwean to design and manufacture a hybrid helicopter and electric vehicle. It is the deepest irony that in a time when the #BlackLivesMatter movement continues to gain traction in highlighting the differential scales used to value human lives, the world should cast its eye on Zimbabwe for its wildlife, with no thought or concern for its people.

This is not to say that black Zimbabweans do not have any affinity for, or pride in, wildlife. The historical totemic heritage of the Shona people, which is still practiced today, is premised upon peoples being classified into different clans named after animals and wildlife common to local terrain, including the lion. Such groupings, by clan, foment kinship and solidarity and are instructive on marriage patterns; for instance, it is not advised that two members of the same clan marry as this is considered a sort of incest. Additionally, the pre-colonial legacy of the mhondoro – protective spirits said to reside within lions when not visiting a human host or spirit medium – still endures.

In her article, ‘The white man’s dog’, Gillian Schutte challenges the idea that black people generally have no relationship to animals and states, that the “the black man’s dog” in many instances is used for protection and hunting; functions more inclined towards utility than a humanised relationship. She also brings to discussion the economic challenges to many of maintaining animals as pets.

Many Zimbabweans, if not most, would never have heard of Cecil until Monday. Most Zimbabweans will never have visited any of our tourist destinations such as the Victoria Falls or Great Zimbabwe, let alone gone on a game drive or safari. These are not activities associated with a population generally in survival mode and as a result, little exposed to the culture of travel for leisure. It then follows that such activities continue to privilege a foreign tourist market and minority local middle class.

In my efforts to learn more about Cecil, I came across YouTube videos recorded by some foreign tourists on safari. In one video, camera shutters go off in paparazzi fashion as the visitors gasp and sigh in awe of the lion’s roar.

Indeed, Cecil was a majestic animal. And indeed, he died a senseless and unjust death. But this instance, as with many others, shows who has power to evoke global empathy and amplify select narratives about Zimbabwe.

And it isn’t Zimbabweans.

Stereotypes
Even as the global narrative around Africa is said to be shifting, the continent is still generally depicted around two stereotypes: its poverty and its wildlife. And unlike stories of strife and suffering, often leading to general global apathy, it is far easier to quantify – and therefore exotify – an Africa of harsh savannah plains, regal animals and majestic sunsets. And in such depictions, the less African people there are to deal with, the better. Here, I think of productions like the The Lion King, still playing to full audiences around the world and theme parks capitalising on ‘the heart of Africa’ experience by re-enacting voyeuristic scenes of a perfect animal paradise.

In many ways this shows how the world, particularly the west, continues to interact with Africa; either as expatriates and missionaries (amplifying the poverty aspect of the stereotype) or as tourists (favouring the safari and wildlife experience). As a result, it’s an outlook that continues to omit the in-between realities; the rising metropolises, the complex socio-political terrain, the evolution of cultures, the human history.

To entirely denounce this attention, however, would also fail to profit on its potential. Zimbabwean tourism has been on the wane for many years now, and a national discussion on how to conserve and promote our diminishing natural heritage is long overdue, especially in light of the fact that government has taken to selling and exporting local elephants to Asian markets. It would be a shame for any generation of Zimbabweans to grow up without the hope of seeing any wildlife in their own country.

But it would be a bigger shame if this was all the world would ever show its empathy and humanity towards.

Fungai Machirori is a blogger, editor, poet and researcher. She runs Zimbabwe’s first web-based platform for women, Her Zimbabwe, and is an advocate for using social media for consciousness-building among Zimbabweans. Connect with her on Twitter.

9 years ago

Zimbabwe: Chasing the dream of an independent media

(Pic: Flickr)

My uncle, Lovemore Dexter Mushaka, died in 2000 before the age of Google and Facebook. He was 40. For many years he was a legend in the family. He only existed as an idea. All I knew about him was that he lived in America. He left Zimbabwe in the early 80s with his wife and their baby. I was too young and vaguely remembered him.

He spoke on the phone with his elder brother, my father, constantly. Our connection was through postcards he sent every Christmas, sometimes accompanied by a box of new clothes and some American memorabilia. Opening the box was always an occasion.

He returned to Zimbabwe in the late 90s but he was always on the move, chasing his dreams or looking for the next big deal. Uncle LDM, as we called him, had many business ventures of varying success. Then we heard in the news like everyone else that he was starting a TV station. He named the station after himself, LDM Broadcasting Systems.

The government of Zimbabwe had decided to rent out the second TV channel to independent companies to shake off pressure from civil rights groups to liberalise the airwaves. Unfortunately, the arrangement did not last. The new broadcasters – Joy TV, LDM Broadcasting and Munhumutapa African Broadcasting Corporation – were soon switched off air, apparently because they defaulted on their rent payments.

As Zimbabwe was proving to be a difficult operating environment, my uncle shifted his focus to neighbouring Zambia. His company was soon granted a satellite broadcasting licence by the Zambian government to establish a radio and TV multi-channel satellite facility that was to be built in Kafue, a town in the south-east of Lusaka. It was set to beam programmes to the entire SADC region. Two years after signing the agreement my uncle was dead. He certainly had foresight for what was to come, the proliferation of satellite TV.

In Zimbabwe, the broadcasting industry has not expanded in any significant manner since 1980. There has been only one state broadcaster that has dominated Zimbabwe’s airwaves, the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation. Instead of the popular acronymic name ZBC, many call the institution, Dead-BC. Some places in the border towns of Beitbridge and Binga have had no TV and radio signal since independence. It is just recently that the Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe has awarded radio licences to ‘independent entities and individuals’ all of whom have strong links to the ruling party, Zanu-PF.

Under the stewardship of Jonathan Moyo, state media channels increasingly became propaganda platforms. Stringent media laws such as Public Order and Security Act (POSA) and Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA) were passed to frustrate independent media and protect state monopoly on access to and distribution of information.

The political and legal environment made it near impossible for the entry of divergent media players. Government introduced a 75 percent local content policy to shut out external influences. Zanu-PF jingles, talk shows on patriotism and one-sided political programmes bashing the West and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change became the agenda.

Zimbabweans tuned out en masse. People started using Wiztech and Philibao decoders to decrypt South African signals. The free-to-air decoders, despite their illegal transmission, offered millions of Zimbabweans with alternative views and perspectives. TV shows such as Generations, Muvhango and Isidingo gained cult-like followings.

It is estimated that more than three million Zimbabweans used the free-to-air decoders to access foreign channels rather than subject themselves to Zanu-PF propaganda and the general poor programming on ZBC. A few well-to-do families subscribed to Digital Satellite Television (DStv). According to the Information and Media Panel of Inquiry report on the state of media in Zimbabwe released in March, Zimbabweans generally regard both public and private media as manifestly corrupt and designed for disinformation, propaganda and information cover-up.

The government’s reluctance to speed up the switch from analogue to digital has been widely viewed as political. In an ideal situation, digital migration will foster media pluralism or diversity by enabling the broadcasting of more channels with a wider range of programming. As a result viewers and listeners would be able to receive more diverse information and opinions.

My uncle’s TV station earned me a few points with girls at school. Its brief existence coincided with the time when I was finishing junior high school and slowly contemplating what to do with the rest of my life. I toyed with the idea of becoming a dentist or architect because I thought these professions would make me feel rich and important. But I had a natural affinity for writing and media and my uncle became an immediate example of the possibilities.

In January this year, I went to America for the first time to tread on the same ground as my uncle. Even though I have been a journalist for almost a decade, I felt it was time to step up and learn the business of media. It was no longer just enough to write but to come up with platforms that encourage and enable young people to participate in the national discourse. I also believe that young media entrepreneurs who develop new business models and innovative projects will shape the future of journalism in Africa.

The legend of Lovemore Dexter Mushaka lives on even though he still feels like an idea, a dark-suited dream that briefly walked in the streets of my youth. I only got to know and interact with my uncle during the last two years of his life but his ideas to enable millions of Africans to have access to information and quality journalism have never been more potent. It is an ambition I will fulfill.

Tinashe Mushakavanhu is a writer and journalist from Zimbabwe. He was a Tow-Knight Entrepreneurial Journalism fellow at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism in New York and currently building his own media start-up. Prior to that he was Online Editor at The Financial Gazette.