How the Church in Africa has betrayed Christ’s teachings

Many of our cultural practices the world over are dismaying. But the attitude imposed on us by a certain European religion, claiming that a cultural rite can be godly only if it is Caucasian in form, is an unacceptable piece of injustice that Europe has recently imposed on non-European humankind.

None the least, I fully recognise that, as the clock ticks on, even the European-based Church will one day wake up to recognise wholly the injustice of this and other cultural forms that Caucasians have imposed on humankind.

Europeans might then take an appropriate action to modify that doctrine into a form that recognises and respects the legitimacy of the many other cultural forms that stud the human landscape.

It is for that reason that, likewise, although I am not a Christian, I wholly recognise, emphasise and try to practise many of the teachings that compose the message that European Christianity has imposed on mankind throughout recent centuries. I disagree with the Church only to the extent that, in my opinion, it and its members do, in practice, openly betray the teachings of their own Christ.

RACISM

The great teacher of the New Testament never preaches racism, economic deprivation and other forms of injustice to human beings.

No, the chief personality of the Christian New Testament is a teacher of ethical quality unequalled in the history of humankind. The Jesus of the gospels is a personality of impeccable ethical character.

That is why it is absolutely appalling that the human beings who introduced that Jesus to the rest of humankind did it in such completely un-Christ-like conditions.

Forced labour, exploitation, racial insults, subsequently completely unfair trade relations between Europe and Africa and a million other misdeeds by a class of Caucasians not only in Africa but all over the world are practices that the Jesus of the New Testament would have condemned in the strongest possible terms.

Europeans sought  to convert Africans to that Christ, while, at the same time, treating those Africans in a totally un-Christ-like manner, including forced and unpaid labour performed under a torrent of racial insolence.

LABOUR POWER

Our teachers from the other side of the Mediterranean taught us a religion totally divorced from the realities of the only world that mankind was ever likely to know. Our teachers never seemed to see anything wrong with uttering God’s name while, simultaneously, robbing their listeners of all their means of livelihood here on earth, their land, their minerals and their labour power.

The general fact, then, is that, throughout human history, individuals have taught doctrines of equal quality as that of Jesus, doctrines sometimes even more attractive.

I profoundly admire the original teachers of Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam. Indeed, I pick gemstones from all religions. Although the contradictions between doctrine and practice appal me, they never urge me to advocate or perpetrate any act of revenge.

We, Africans, would be sinking to the very low level of our historical tormentors if we resorted to revenge.

TORMENTOR

Instead, please try to convert your tormentor of yore from an animal into a human being. Always do try to teach him that we can make our humanism manifest only by treating human beings decently whatever their race, tribe or class. To make Africa proud, all Africans must treat all other human beings in a totally humane way.

Quite surely, Caucasians treated our fore-parents like animals for slaughter. But that implies merely that Europeans, being human, can recognise their past errors.

They are capable of doing something to atone for those human iniquities of yore. It is a reminder to yourself of the need, as a human being, never to behave like an animal against any other human being no matter what his or her skin colour.

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