CHRISTIANITY, POVERTY, IGNORANCE AND DESPAIR IN AFRICA: FIVE STORIES
By Betty Wamalwa Muragori

Part 2

Story One: God and Terror in Africa
I went to a service the other day in one of the many churches of unknown derivation that have sprung up on the continent. I joined relatives and friends to inter a loved one. The pastor, during his fearsome sermon, basically threatened the congregation. He told us that if we did not repent and ask God for forgiveness for our sinful and wayward ways we would be in trouble in the hour of need. He said when we did remember God, God would not hear us, instead God would laugh long and loud and reject us.

I was not really listening to the sermon as I expected to hear nothing of value, but these words jolted me out of my torpor and I began to listen. I was alarmed at the god to whom I was being implicated in worshiping. It was one with a very small g, one that laughed at people in want.

Sometimes when I hear the values and ideas that are portrayed in our discourse on God, I think we actually displaced God with the devil without knowing it. This was one such time. At best we are praying to a small mean god who laughs at our sorrow and has an insatiable appetite for being worshiped and for adulation. It appears as if in fact this god put us on this earth to do nothing but worship him and his outsized ego. To me this god sounds more like a golden calf. That is not my God. During the sermon in question, no one protested. It is not done. We all just hang our heads and allowed ourselves to be led to the devil or any other dubious deity without a whimper. And if anyone could have had the guts to whimper, there is a high likelihood that he or she would have been vigorously silenced.

There is a terror of God in this scenario that is sad. I myself have experienced this terror of God and religious institutions. And listening to many people speak about God this fear appears to be widespread. I still remember as a child hearing about the Christian hell and the terrible fires of hell. The God of my childhood was an angry God always ready to bring down terrible retribution on the heads of sinners. Every day I counted my sins and weighed whether I deserved heaven or hell if I were to die in the night. I always found the sins far outweighed my good deeds. No wonder I was so terrified as a child.

Story Two: Religion in the Village of Poverty
My friend went to her rural home on vacation. One day a group of young men who declared themselves to be men of God, came into the village. They walked into people’s compounds and told the people in those homes that they were men of God. I can just see them arriving in a group and fanning out throughout the village in swift battle ready formation. They said something like God had sent them and that they were there to get rid of sin, cleanse sinners through prayer as there was a great deal of sin all over that village which had made God annoyed at the villagers who had reacted by withdrawing his blessings from the village. There was a need for collective prayer to get rid of it. That’s what they said in public.

One of the confidence tricks they used was to isolate individual women, from whom they then demanded alms, to do God’s work, of course. They asked first for cash money, when this was not forthcoming they said they also accepted payment in the form of agricultural produce or small stock including chickens or goats. The isolated woman played with her own mind and convinced herself that it was her duty to save the village from sin and damnation. Or whatever individual fiction she invented, that made it easier for her to part with the fruits of her own hard work. The "trick isolation" prevented those skeptical few who may have questioned the need for such alms, from infecting the other women with their skepticism.

My friend is used to the con games of Nairobi so she recognized one such game in its budding stage and tried to warn the other women. The women turned on her and said that they wanted to get rid of the sin which was causing bad luck to befall them and that she would chase the young men away and the blessings they had brought for the village, if she persisted in opposing them. The women were sufficiently hostile to her and managed to shut her up.

A few days later after the young men had gone and the women had reflected on what had actually happened and more and more of them let slip about being asked for money and chickens, doubt started to flit across their consciousness and some of the women began to realize that they might have been conned. A few went to my friend and shared their concerns with her but the others decided to brazen it and refused to give credence to their secret fears. You can rest assured this village will be conned again and again with the active connivance of the women in particular.

The village that my friend comes from is poor like most African villages. Life is hard like it was in Europe in the Dark Ages. What I have found about poverty is that it is isolating in so many ways. It makes a person believe that he/she is special and alone in being prone to bad things. They then make up reasons for the bad things, calling it bad luck or a product of sin or due to breach of taboos. The family, which loses several children before the age of five, believes that it is happening only to them. They don’t know that this is a “normal” statistic in their community. The children whose parents die at the age of 40 know it is only happening to them. They don’t know that their parents are only conforming to the life expectancy of their region. For the family too poor to purchase fertilizers, or to access safe drinking water, or medicines, know it happens just to them or to members of their community alone. They do not read research reports that analyze their situation. If they did they may find out that the things happening to them are not because of the sins that they have committed. Rather more often their “bad luck” is a product of sins committed against them by bad leaders or sad circumstances. A bunch of conmen using religion—talking about sin being the cause of bad luck—find fertile ground for their confidence tricks. These outsiders are simply confirming what these people already know. This is a place of sin and bad luck!

Story Three: Electric Shocks as the Hand of God
These events happened in Uganda in the month of July this year, 2007. A preacher, one of the most successful charismatic ones, was found with an electric gadget that administered electric shocks when he “laid hands” on individual followers who came to him in need of special prayers because of the graveness of their bad luck. The gadget was wired so that the charismatic preacher only received a small jolt, whilst the flock member got a hefty shock. The zapped church member would fall down backwards like a tree that has been felled and start thrashing and wetting himself/herself exactly as happens when a person is hit by electricity. Of course the poor sod or soddess would now have incontrovertible evidence that he/she had been touched by the hand of God. The drama sealed the reputation of the pastor. More and more people joined the church as the zapping was clear evidence of the direct communication lines that the preacher’s had opened with God. “This man is truly powerful; he has a special channel opened with God!” The people must have thought quietly to themselves as they lined up for their very own zapping.

I am not going to say anything more it would be unfair of me to attack such a fragile target.

Story Four: A Personal Experience of Religion
When I was about twelve years old in the 1970s, I was captured for two years by a religious group of unknown provenance. A white woman walked into our house one day offering religious instruction and my mother put my younger sister and me into her hands for two years. After a year I started to become militant. I wanted to quit my faith and join this one in which I had been receiving instruction for one year. I was spurred on by visions of death and damnation that I was being promised would be my fate if I did not take my own salvation into my own hands and insist that my parents allow me to become baptized a Jehovah’s Witness. My family is Quaker, which in itself is a rather obscure unknown religion in these parts.

For the next year I became radicalized as I agitated with my parents to allow me to change religion. In the grip of religious zealotry I became fearless and would engage my father in lengthy arguments first on religion and then on any subject that caught my fancy. My mother grew increasingly alarmed and reprimanded me with the words,

“Don’t talk to your father that way, you are supposed to listen to your father not argue with him!” In my culture a daughter was not supposed to contradict her father and certainly not with such militancy. Normally my mother could control me with a look, but this time I would not be stopped.

My father seemed to enjoy his new feisty daughter and the arguments that we had. On my religious conversion he remained adamant though, when I reached 18 I could change religion and join any that I wished, but not until then. In the end what pried me free was the start of my teenage years. I started to develop new interests and being the only person in my social circle who celebrated the Sabbath on a Saturday became a test I failed. At last I was free. I think my growing militancy also alarmed my parents and the lessons stopped.

I have never talked about this time with my mother. But imagine giving your children over to a religion you don’t actually know without question My mother is a staunch Christian and I wonder whether she knew that Jehovah’s Witnesses do not believe in Christ, and that they are not Christians.

Yet it turned out well. The two-year sojourn into new religious territories, which were totally different from the ones I had known until then, actually freed me. I was no longer afraid of God because I came to realize that it was people just like me who were interpreting the Bible and inventing their own God. This freedom allowed me to start a journey of exploration about religion and then many other areas. It brought me closer to my father by allowing us both to overcome the cultural taboos that created distance between a father and a daughter and we built genuine communication, which we have never lost. The most important thing is it gave me a self-confidence that I have never lost.

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