Of late, there have been assorted movements dedicated to ‘decolonising’ things from statuary to science. One wonders why religion hasn’t been targeted with the same zeal.
‘Jesus kills,’ said a Covid-19 response doctor who shall remain nameless.
In late May, while much of the rest of society was still at a standstill because of draconian and misguided lockdown rules, it was announced that places of worship would be permitted to re-open from 1 June, subject to an attendance limit of 50 people, all wearing masks.
Of course, that limit is entirely arbitrary. A church that seats thousands could easily accommodate far more people safely. Small churches with inadequate ventilation would become Covid-19 super-spreaders, which they did, in South Africa and around the world.
The early reopening of places of worship, and the declaration that church leaders should be legally recognised as providers of essential services, underscored how religious South Africa really is.
Only 10.9% of the population consider themselves to be irreligious, according to the 2016 Community Survey conducted by StatsSA. Fully 78% of South Africans describe themselves as Christians of some variety, the biggest slice of which are members of the African Independent Church. Only 4.4% claim to follow traditional African religion. Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism are even smaller. (You could try to extract that data from the massive StatsSA dataset, which is too big to fit in a spreadsheet, or you can find a handy pie chart on Wikipedia.)
That Christianity is so dominant in South Africa puzzles me.
Decolonising
There has been a great hullabaloo about ‘decolonising’ education, symbolised by the fall of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes at the University of Cape Town, but formally extended to education in general, and even mathematics.
Some of this effort is justified, especially in the social sciences, which are often built largely upon Western thought, without local context. By contrast, decolonising the hard sciences is an absurd concept, other than perhaps making an effort to appreciate the contributions to scientific knowledge by non-Westerners.
Amid all this talk of decolonisation, I am surprised that religion has not come under the spotlight. After all, Europeans arrived in South Africa carrying bibles, and proceeded to carve out colonies that largely excluded the indigenous peoples of the region.
Sons of Ham
I attended a whites-only school during Apartheid. We were told that we were God’s chosen children. Why, exactly, when that claim used to be reserved for the Israelites, we never asked.
It was explained that the subservience of black people to white people was the natural order of things, and in any case, was decreed by God.
Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham and Japhet. After the great flood, these three would, according to the myth, repopulate the world.
Shem’s line included the Israelites, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Elamites, Arameans, Moabites, Ammonites, and Edomites.
Japhet’s progeny included the Persians, Romans, Scythians, and Macedonians.
Ham’s line produced the Canaanites (named for his son, Canaan), the Babylonians, the Phoenicians, the Cushites, and the Egyptians.
This, we were told, amounted to the fact that Jews were sons of Shem (hence ‘semite’), whites were the sons of Japhet, and Africans were the sons of Ham. (Sorry about the gendered nouns. The Bible doesn’t care much for women.)
Now Ham once came upon his father lying naked in a drunken stupor. Instead of apologising for being an offensive drunk, Noah was embarrassed that Ham had seen his 600-year-old unmentionables and proceeded to take it out on Ham’s son, Canaan.
‘Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers,’ said Noah. ‘Praise be to the Lord, the God of Shem! May Canaan be the slave of Shem. May God extend Japheth’s territory; may Japheth live in the tents of Shem, and may Canaan be the slave of Japheth.’
Some time later, the Israelites colonised what today is called Palestine, having been instructed by their God to kill or evict the Canaanites whose land it was. Their leader, Joshua, made a sort of peace with the Canaanites and other conquered groups, on condition that they subjugated themselves.
‘Now therefore ye are cursed,’ he proclaimed, ‘and there shall none of you be freed from being bondmen, and hewers of wood and drawers of water for the house of my God.’
Ergo, blacks are born to be slaves. They’re supposed to call white people ‘baas’. It says so in the Bible.
Christianity and colonialism
In 2001, addressing the 21st Africa-France summit, then-president of France, Jacques Chirac, said this: ‘In the name of religion, we destroyed [African] culture.’
On the eve of receiving his Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, Archbishop Desmond Tutu told a gathering in New York: ‘When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.’
European colonists held up the Bible as justification for subjugating the native peoples of Africa. Perversely, that very same religion promised them a way to bear all the oppression. They were told to accept their lot and respect the rulers God had placed over them.
They were taught to pray, with the promise that if God did not deliver them from their misery in this life, He would surely do so in the next life. Christianity and colonisation went hand-in-hand.
In this sense, Marx and Engels were right to reject religion as the ‘opium of the masses’.
Mega-churches
During the last half-century, Africa has been overrun with mega-churches at which zealous evangelical pastors preached the ‘prosperity gospel’, also called the ‘health and wealth’ gospel.
Preaching to poor and desperate flocks, pastors exhort their congregants to donate generously, in return for God’s blessings upon their endeavours. Yet the only blessings God appears to be able to bestow are obscene riches heaped upon the prosperity gospel pastors themselves.
Take the good prophet, Shepherd Bushiri, as an example. Now a fugitive from justice in Malawi who managed to escape from right under the noses of South Africa’s courts and law enforcement authorities, he once was the very epitome of a self-enriching health and wealth preacher.
He told his congregants that he would make them millionaires. His methods were crude. Followers were encouraged to transfer all they could afford – at least R100 000 – into bank accounts controlled by Bushiri and his associates. In return, they were promised a 50% return on their investment in 30 days.
The payday, of course, never happened, which is why Bushiri and several co-accused ended up in criminal court on charges of fraud and money laundering worth over R100 million. He has just been charged with rape, too. Class act, this prophet.
This kind of exploitation of the poor, the vulnerable, the desperate, the fearful, and the meek is commonplace in African churches.
The prosperity gospel has been denounced from within as a pyramid scheme. It enriches those at the top at the expense of those at the bottom, and the leader’s wealth – which is entirely derived from the congregants – is then held up as proof that God does indeed enrich those who claim that money is unimportant to them.
Wealth is then presented as something the dupes in the pews can also aspire to, if they humble themselves, give generously, and suffer the trials of poverty with faith and fortitude.
Churches preach that God will protect believers against life’s ills, including Covid-19 and other diseases. They teach people they are not the masters of their own fate, nor are they responsible for their sins, because everything that happens is God’s will, and the sins of the devout will be forgiven.
Rejecting religion
It is not surprising, then, that religiosity is the highest in poor countries. Conversely, in the world’s most prosperous, happy, peaceful, and non-corrupt nations, such as Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the UK, Australia, Germany, Japan, South Korea and Canada, large majorities of the population have rejected religion.
Christianity was brought to these shores by the colonisers to help ‘civilise the barbarians’. It is now exploited by thieves and charlatans to part the poor and their money. So why would any self-respecting black person wish to follow the religion of the colonists and oppressors?
What all this religious fervour obscures is who to hold responsible for the distressing circumstances of so many millions. Since the demise of colonialism, the main causes of poverty have been wars, corruption, and socialism.
The responsibility for this lies with our politicians. Instead of going to church to pray for deliverance, we should take responsibility for our own actions and hold our elected officials to account.
A lot more can be said against religious beliefs in general, but decolonising religion would be a great start.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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