Missionaries failed us by not taming the coloniser

Hard weapons played the decisive role in Western Europe’s colonisation of the human habitats the whole world over, including Africa, led by England and France.

But carelessness with language has usually been a superpower weakness, especially of the United States of America, ever since the District of Columbia replaced London as the world’s self-appointed superintending power.

Often fired to the tune of a lilting Christian hymn, the gun was what inspired the world’s easy surrender to the religion being preached by the missionaries accompanying the gun-toting men from the other side of the Mediterranean.

COUP DE GRACE

Never having seen any killer as miraculous as an automatic weapon, natives simply surrendered to the deity being preached by the missionaries accompanying the gun-wielders.

In short, religion came in extremely handily merely as a coup de grace in the world’s pacification by Britain and other Bible-wielding Western European states.

Certainly, the Christian doctrine was what helped Britain and other Western European property owners to subdue and colonise the world with such apparent ease.

But what is a “superpower”? In our time, at least, not superior wisdom but only possession of certain kinds of weapons seems to be the only answer to that question: If so, then the US and what remains of what was once the Soviet Union are the only superpowers that the modern world has ever seen.

INDOCTRINATION

So the question is ineluctable: Are weapons the only tools by which a power can subdue the world? It seemed so throughout humankind’s history up to the 19th century.

However, during that historic century, Europe showed that the world can also be conquered by preaching a religion — by means, that is to say, of a general and sustained indoctrination of the human mind.

It can be done through the ideology of a superior race chosen by God himself to spread the word to the “heathens” throughout the globe.

Yet, if the preaching societies had been wiser, they would have avoided the extreme racial arrogance and dictatorial overlordship by which Europe imposed the salvation doctrine on the whole human world.

MESSENGERS

The methods by which the Europeans tried to impose their religion and introduce their form of education were so tyrannical, so unwise, that intelligent human beings even among the conquered could not help beginning to ask the extremely simple question how it was that these Godly messengers were unable to conquer the world by mere preaching.

How was it that the world surrendered to the European version of godliness only by means of a number of extremely inhuman steps, often even subjecting African adults to the cane if they failed to attend church on a Sunday?

TUITION

If the missionaries had been chosen and had come with enough knowledge of human evolution and with enough wisdom, they might have rejected the racial conceit that characterised the white-skinned missionary and school teacher.

They would have found a way by which to prevail on the military men accompanying them from Europe and North America so as to treat the natives with humaneness, not with the racism and cruelty that characterised Caucasian Euro-American colonisation and classroom tuition throughout the rest of the human world.

No, the Caucasians did not monopolise such arrogance and cruelty.

It seems to belong to human races and even tribes whenever they conquer one another.

CRUELTY

My own Luo people might have mistreated the natives of Lake Victoria’s shores when they subdued them in the Luo peregrination from Egypt southwards along the Nile.

No, all human societies the whole world over have perpetrated such cruelty to other human societies – not to mention to other species – ever since humanity elbowed its way into evolution with a seemingly unmanageably large brain, and with truly deadly weapons in the hand.

If the human brain represents true evolutionary progress, we are yet to see it in real action environmentally.