I Don’t Believe in God, but, They Need God Over in Africa

As usual, we the Africans, and our problems, which are many, I concede it at the outset, are the subject of someone else’s diagnostic discourse.

Matthew Parris doesn’t believe in God but that doesn’t stop him from arguing that Africa needs God to get it past “the crashing passivity of its people’s mindset.”

Africans need Christianity because belief in and communion with a personal God supplants an outdated belief system, enhances our engagement with the world, and encourages a positive individuality in stark contrast to a suppressive collective superstitious belief system.

As it happens, I do believe that active engagement with a personal God can and does have a transforming effect on the individual life. He could have made an argument about fatalism and ideas having consequences that would have left me a tad uncomfortable but more resigned and less apt to argue with him.

But he didn’t. He went and cast his nets overboard and fished out collectivism and went on to ascribe to it failings not necessarily its own.

Which is why I now feel obliged to call him out on three false assumptions he makes stroke odd misconceptions he holds on his convoluted path to being patronising.

First, I do not see a doctrinal foundation for the claim about Christianity’s ability (and or propensity) to transform a collective culture into an individualistic one. I could, however, quite easily make a biblically-based argument for movement in the reverse, from individualism to collectivism.

Before we even get there, however, why have we drawn a double yellow line between individualistic cultures on one lane going one way and collective cultures on the other lane going the other way and awarded all the pluses to the one side and all the minuses to the other side and ne’er the twain shall meet? How does he make the tenuous jump from collective culture to superstitious people cowed into passivity? Is he saying, and are his commenters agreeing, for the most part, that there is nothing good to be found collective cultures and nothing whatsoever bad about individualistic cultures? Really? As in it’s all black and white?

Second he implies that hailing from an individualistic (and therefore by Parris’ implication a proactive) culture inspired Edmund Hillary to climb a mountain simply because it was there. On the other hand, hailing from a collective culture, which is elsehow known as a passive culture, makes the faceless, nameless, all of us because he is one of us African not climb the mountain because first it is just there, and second of all, because nobody’s ever done it before.

Here’s the thing I’ve always wondered: why does everybody assume that no African had ever climbed the mountain before the adventurous foreigner came along and did it, and taught him how? (For porter’s sake, of course.) Who’s to say, definitively and conclusively? So the lion hasn't published his memoirs, is that ample basis on which to conclude that the hunter was always the victor?

Third, I’m puzzled by the way in which he clearly links the advancement of the Christianity in Africa to foreign missionaries in the present time. When he speaks of the catalyst for spiritual transformation in Africa, he clearly has foreign missionaries in mind. The Africans are changed, certainly, but they are changed in large part by their interaction with missionaries and their being objects of missionary activity.

Case in point: when he recalls how he travelled through Africa when younger, he remarks that the people who had changed were the people they encountered when they ‘entered a territory worked by missionaries.’ I come to the conclusion that these missionaries are foreign because African Christians don’t live in secluded missions unless they’re working for or with foreign missionaries, (all the more to impress Matthew Parris). What African missionaries there are in Africa typically live among the people they are ministering to, blending into the crowd, whether it be in city, town or village.

This underlying assumption on the part of Matthew Parris is puzzling especially as Christianity is growing so fast in Africa that the tide of mission should be returning to whence it came, with the African church sending envoys to strengthen the dwindling pulpits and pews of the very Churches that sent the first missionaries of the modern era to her, beginning about a century and a half ago.

It raises the question of what value he places on second third and even fourth generation Christianity made in Africa, by the Africans for the Africans. Will this kind of Christianity yield the same value for the Africans as the Christianity brought by the foreign missionaries? Or is theirs a generic low cost version which creates a perpetual need for the foreign premium product?

(And this I say not to disparage every modern day missionary to the continent. Hardly. I’m determined not to do stereotypes, (even though Mwangi wants me to seriously consider them)).