Despite devastation in His name, God is not African

ANEW pope — the most powerful representative of God on earth — has been chosen. Despite widespread talk of the possible election of the first black pope, he is not an African, but an Argentinian. A recent visit to St Peter’s Basilica, days before the pope’s election, triggered my reflections on the effects of Christianity on Africa.

The biblical Garden of Eden is said to have been located in Africa. The cradle of Christianity is now in the volatile Middle East, from where it was exported to Europe and became a religion of kings. Christianity was undoubtedly one of the most devastating aspects of European colonialism in Africa. Christian missionaries destroyed widespread faith in indigenous gods, dismissing local religions as primitive “pagan” ancestor worship. From the 15th century, Portuguese Catholic missionaries and their government participated in the slave trade to sustain themselves, with God and the devil marching hand in hand.

By the 19th century, Portuguese Jesuits, Italian friars, German Lutherans, Scottish Calvinists, English Protestants and French, Belgian, and Spanish Catholics swarmed around Africa like locusts. These men were often patronising, paternalistic priests bringing “salvation” to the natives through their “white” God. Christian missionaries followed and often served as auxiliaries of the imperial project. This was a marriage between the Bible and the gun. As Kenya’s founding pres- ident, Jomo Kenyatta, noted: “The white man came and asked us to shut our eyes and pray. When we opened our eyes it was too late — our land was gone.”

European missionaries helped to Anglicise and Gallicise Africa and also evangelised the continent in a “theology of imperialism”. In the process, they helped to promote racist depictions of Africans as morally depraved and “backward” heathens. According to some Christian missionaries, blacks had inherited the “curse of Noah” from their alleged ancestors, Ham. The “Ham theory” propagated by the Christian church since the 16th century, involved the divine “chastisement” of black people, an idea allegedly confirmed by the black skin of Africans and the slavery they suffered for 400 years.

Missionary zeal and patriotic fervour were the hallmarks of these holy men. French priests received financial support from their government and consulted senior government officials. British missionaries advocated the free trade and commercial goals of their country’s politicians, bankers, mandarins and merchants. As in the world of politics, the spiritual realm also saw the forging of unholy alliances. British missionaries worked closely with the brutal regime of Belgium’s King Leopold in the Congo, whose widespread atrocities and forced labour resulted in 10million African deaths. Leopold offered them land, blood money and protection, and in return they urged their government to recognise his “Congo Free State”.

European missionaries inculcated ideas such as the “Protestant work ethic” in the “natives” to train Africans in “duties of obedience” and principles of producing for the market and wage labour: work highly valued by colonial governments. The successful lobbying by missionaries of metropolitan governments and their usefulness to the imperial cause was rewarded at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, where the rules were set for the partition of Africa. In the conference’s final document, European leaders recognised the right of missionaries to have unfettered access to African territories.

Christian missionaries, dependent on public funds and seeking to win public sympathy and continued contributions, sometimes exaggerated their reports in depicting unconverted African “pagans” as brutal and barbarous until their souls had been “saved” by white priests. A similar tradition is continued today through modern humanitarian nongovernmental organisations, such as Save the Children, that continue to use manipulative images of emaciated African children to raise funds. There were also, of course, missionaries who contributed to ending slavery, promoting education across Africa and translating local languages.

Today, the Catholic Church has 186million adherents in Africa, 16% of the world’s 1.2-billion Catholics. African languages, songs and dance have now been incorporated into the religion to make it more indigenous. But many Africans oppose conservative Catholic dogma on condom use and the celibacy of the clergy. Though Catholicism is the world’s largest Christian church, it has lost many adherents in Africa to the more liberal, “charismatic” Pentecostal churches. These churches have pastors with lavish lifestyles, including sometimes private jets. While these “Brother Jeros” — as depicted in Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka’s famous plays satirising charlatan “prophets”— assure their congregations that their mansions are being prepared in heaven, many are building theirs on earth in the here and now. Ironically, as much of the population of Europe turns its back on organised religion, Africans have become among the most religious people in the world. Could God yet become an African?

Adebajo is executive director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution and author of The Curse of Berlin: Africa After the Cold War.