Inside charismatic Pope Francis’ image of a rising Africa

Pope Francis is deeply intellectual, charismatic and different.

His maiden trip to Africa brings to mind Toni Morrison, the American Nobel laureate (1993), who in 1998 described former US President Bill Clinton as “the First Black President”.

“White skin notwithstanding,” Morrison argued in a comment for The New Yorker, “this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime.”  

Of course, Morrison has lived long enough to witness the election of Barack Obama as America’s first actual black president in 2008.

But the Nobel Laureate was speaking to the most obstinate legacy of European slavery and colonialism: racism or the “colour line”, which WEB Dubois before her described as “the problem of the twentieth century”.

Despite the euphoria of an Africa rising, racism, sometimes in its most crass and crude forms, continues lingering on in the 21st century.

This was precisely the point the sagely Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe was making in his famous Chancellor’s Lecture, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1975), where he accused Joseph Conrad of being “a thoroughgoing racist” for depicting Africa as “the other world”.

In extremely subtle ways, racists are using new technology platforms such as cable televisions and Twitter to isolate Africa in global affairs by painting it as the “heart of darkness”.

IN BAD LIGHT

This is the larger context in which CNN described Kenya as “a hotbed of terror” ahead of President Obama’s visit in July.

In the same fiendish light, Fox News wrote: “Pope visits War-ton Africa” as he arrived in Kenya in his first tour of Africa.

Even Al Jazeera, whose journalists were sentenced by Egypt’s new leaders in September 2015 for “biased coverage”, “false news” and for “aiding a terrorist organisation”, carried a barefaced headline: The Holy Pope Shakes Hands With ICC Criminals, which targeted Kenya’s top leadership.

Notably, the Pope visits Africa against the backdrop of the recent deadly terrorist attack in France and Mali.

But if the Pope’s trip was to France, where more than 250 people have been killed and over 600 injured in terrorist attacks since the 1960s, including two attacks in 2015 alone, the media would not have described the West’s tourist destiny of choice as a “cesspool of terror”.

Instead, it would have accented the Pope’s “sympathy” and “solidarity” with the French people.

The West’s media was fretting about the pontiff’s security, describing his first trip to Africa as “the most dangerous”.

But when asked by journalists whether he was nervous about his trip, the Pope retorted that: “The only thing I’m worried about is mosquitoes.”

It is Pope Francis’ public contempt of residual racism, solidarity with the African people in the face of all genre of violence and social challenges as well as audacious hope for the continent’s bright future that makes Papa stand out as simply different.

In a sense, the Pontiff’s recent African trip conveys to naysayers the message that Africa matters to the leader of 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, the head of the Vatican State and the Holy See.

EXTREMISIM IN AFRICA
As home to 12.57 per cent of the total Catholic population in the world, Africa ranks third after the Americas (48.75pc) and Europe (26.37pc).

Crucially, it is also the fastest expanding frontier of the Catholic Faith, soon expected to overtake Europe.

Africa’s share of the world’s Catholics is expected to double to more than half a billion by 2050 compared to 670 million adherents of Islam at the same time.

Nigeria is home to the world’s largest seminary and Africa produces a large percentage of Catholic priests.

With 16 out of 192 cardinals and over 400,000 catechists coming from Africa, the continent is at the centre of the transformation of the Catholic Church in the new Millennium.

By visiting parts of Africa facing the three-pronged problem of Islamic extremism, Christian extremism and Christian-Muslim violence, the Pope is sending the clear and blissful message that the faith-based rifts can, and must be, bridged.

In Kenya, the Al Qaida affiliated Al-Shabaab gunmen in Somalia have targeted Christians and non-Muslims in their deadly attacks.

The militia has also targeted Uganda.

But the country has also faced violent extremism from Christian fundamentalists linked to the Lord’s Resistance Army.

In the Central African Republic, the Muslim Seleka rebel coalition that toppled the president in 2013 has given way to deadly anti-Muslim violence by a Christian militia known as the anti-Balaka.

MISUSING GOD'S NAME
The Pope calls for a dialogue of civilisations, faiths and communities. He has urged for peace, reconciliation and tolerance to heal communities.

Speaking to 25 religious leaders in Kenya, who included Muslims and non-Catholics, the Pope said that equating Islam with violence is wrong.

“We have our share of them (fundamentalists),” he said.

But while he has described the Koran as “a prophetic book of peace”, the Pope states that using God’s name to justify hatred and violence is wrong.

He called on peace-loving Muslims to draw the line in the sand and issue a global condemnation of terrorism to help dispel the stereotype of Islam as violent.

The Pope also brought tough love to Africa.

His message was Africa has to tackle the root causes of violence, including a spectrum of social injustices and vices such as ethnicity, exclusion, hatred, corruption and poverty.

Protecting our environment, fighting poaching and reversing climate change is critical to ending violence and conflicts.

God created us to make rational choices and be responsible for our own action and destiny. This seems to be the enduring Papa Francis’ message.