Colonialists were inhuman, but so are we all

From her Luo culture, my mother could never have been a star in any Hollywood sense.

Her name stella ("star") was Church-imposed.

Somebody chose it for her when she was baptised in South Nyanza early in the 20th century.

She was given that name, that is to say, at the height of Britain’s forced Christianisation of my people, my country and my continent.

With an R added to it, then, stellar is simply the adjectival English form of the Latin word stella, which was the name that somebody chose for my mother when she was Christianised and baptised at the beginning of the 20th century into the Seventh Day Adventists (SDA), an extremely dogma-laden North American Christian sect.

TOO MANY

However, as the English novelist Charles Dickens might have put it, the word stella was "too many" for the mouths of my ethnic people.

So, when, at some point two centuries ago, the British arrived — full to the brim with religious conceit — and imposed Christianity upon Kenyans as the God Jehovah’s only sanctified road to something called salvation — my mother became simply Setela (note the first E and the single L).

Setela remained her Christian name all the way till my mother passed away a few decades ago.

However, whether it led her to heaven, is knowledge that I have never been privileged to acquire.

DEITY'S ABODE

The Luo — the Nilotic ethnic people among whom I was born — had had their own idea as to how to arrive in the deity’s abode on the "upper" side of the clouds on the other side of life.

Howbeit, the extraordinarily conceited elite of an extraordinarily superstitious people called British or simply English suddenly arrived in our country to trash with extraordinary conceit as "Satan’s mischief" all our traditional religious and other beliefs and practices.

Britain’s bigoted priests asserted that all of it had been the work of some evil counter-god called "Satan" or "the Devil".

It was an assertion which, however, merely posed a million of other questions.

Yet none of our leaders of that time and afterwards appears to have dared to express any of those questions, knowing from experience, that to put any question of that kind would have led the questioner to extreme mental and bodily suffering in the hands of the omniscient white-skinned colonisers from the northern side of the Mediterranean Sea.

MENTAL CONCEIT

In other words, upper-class Europe’s Christianisation of Kenyans, other Africans and other non-Caucasian Third Worlders was achieved through extreme Caucasian mental conceit and physical cruelty to human beings the whole world over, yet both in the name of an apparently very humane and extraordinarily intelligent personality known as the Nazarene.

To be quite sure, much of the extreme cruelty that the upper classes of the Europeans perpetrated against human beings of other racial kinds must be attributed to extreme human ignorance, which means that, if the elite of a people as black as the Luo, to whom I belong, had colonised Europe, Japan or New Zealand, they might also have perpetrated racial crimes.

HUMAN IGNORANCE

Racial or ethnic tiny-mindedness of the kind that upper-class Caucasians have perpetrated against humanity is an expression of human ignorance and cannot be confined to Caucasian Europeans.

In the same socio-historical circumstances, even the Kalenjin, the Kikuyu and my own Luo would have perpetrated such crimes against humanity.

In short, all the crimes that a class of Western Europeans has perpetrated against humanity have nothing essential to do with anybody’s race.

All human societies — ethnic, racial and religious — are capable of such anti-human crimes.

Yet if every human individual is a potential Adolf Hitler, so every individual is a potential Mother Teresa.

Philip Ochieng is a veteran journalist. [email protected]