20 Feb 2009 |
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Adebowale Oriku Far from becoming stale, the age-long chestnut of Africa’s plight and underdevelopment has become seasoned and well-parched, even appetising. Well, at least it is appetising fare for rock supremos like Sir Bob Geldof and Bono (Geldof is actually a rock dinosaur now). One would be deceiving oneself to think that these two men are not reaping PR and self-aggrandizing capital from what they are ‘doing for’ Africa. They are the arch-samaritans, men on a mission, missionaries in a manner of speaking. The seemingly vicarious pain that Bono and Geldof feel for Africa borders on the religious. Nothing could have made these men to see that their interest drips with fine graciousness, controlled complacency, with self-beatification. Bono reminds me less of the early missionaries that went to convert Africans to Christianity than scriptural Paul himself - take the zeal with which the roving apostle (Paul) wrote his letters, his energy, his outreaching evangelical ambition. Now Bono easily buttonholes world leaders, telling them off about the low threshold of their Afro-consciousness, lecturing them to sit up and take notice of the difficult continent. When I read a picture-strewn coffee-table tome Geldof wrote about Africa, I almost laughed out with the blarney-cum-baloney of his tone of his delivery, and there is the pathetic attempt to comment maturely and decently on the half-naked bodies of African girls he saw during one of his visits to the continent. The result is an iffy drooling. Now much as I can easily see through the moral grandstanding of both Bono and Geldof, it is one of the most disheartening paradoxes of my continent that these two men are - more often than one wishes to accept - telling the truth about the beleaguered continent. Bashing Bono and dissing Geldof may be a sweet thing to do, it does not mean that their somewhat faddish and rote obsession with Africa is completely misplaced. And since both men share Irish roots, there is the Ireland-Africa colonial affinity, a somewhat elective affinity that has now self-destructed. Really, Geldof and Bono (particularly) are some of the few Irish folks who may still think - if they really do - Africa would turn the sort of crucial corner Ireland turned years after the Britain left them in a lurch. That, indeed, may yet come. But for now Africa is seamed with its rather peculiar problems. Beyond such man-made afflictions like poverty and wars, there is no denying the fact that biblical scourges like drought and famine - dubbed ‘acts of God,’ thankfully - may also visit themselves on some corners of Africa, calling forth maladies like hunger and disease. Setting aside common causal verities like bad leadership, corruption and so on, helping Africa to conquer diseases and malnutrition has truly brought the messianic pretensions of Bono and his friend(s) in sharper pseudo-theological perspective. While I am not surprised that few see it among the continent’s afflictions, one of the troubles with Africa is religion, the overentrenchment of religion in peoples’ lives, especially in recent times. We all seem to have become monomaniacal bots implanted with microchips identically encrypted with religion and god. Few seem to acknowledge this socio-moral throwback happening to us at the beginning of the 21st century. It is either that not many people have faced up to it or have consciously considered it because of the privileged, if fusty, first estate religion seems to still occupy, even in a country like the UK where only a fraction of its people are truly religious. But then as a state, Britain is firmly secular. Sometime ago, a nurse was suspended for offering to pray for a patient in an hospital ward where she works - it was spelt out for her that medical science has no place for mumbo-jumbo. Nigeria is one of the most suffocatingly religious countries in Africa - no, not exactly religious, but a country that indulges in conspicuous piety. Religion for its own sake. In my country, religion craze has become more frenzied and drearily matter-of-course, you must not only be seen as belonging to a religion, you must also be overtly, actively religious, flamboyantly devout, you must be churched, and in certain areas, mosqued. But in so far as there is less proliferation of mosques than churches, I would have to weave only Christianity around my frame of reference, a religion to which my parents belonged when I was growing up. Even as recent a time as the early 1970s no one could easily dismiss the role religion had played in the establishment and running of schools in Nigeria, and they did this while reasonably respecting the separation of religion and state. Caesar and God only ate with long spoons at the same table then. Those were indeed the days. Caesar and God now spoon-feed each other in Nigeria. In the early and mid 1980s there was the pimply onrush of newer churches, a rash of evangelicals, pentecostals, accompanying the downturn in the economy, so much so that today the national religious delirium has reached fever-pitch. What’s now unfolding before our eyes is the worst type of prayer-and-worship porn. A country with a supposedly secular constitution has placed religion in such a pride of place that the government yearly sponsors thousands of people to go on pilgrimages to Jerusalem and Mecca. And it came as no surprise when Yar Adua said in his first day in office that with the ‘help of God’ he would pull his country out of the woods, echoing all the leaders who had come before him, all of whom had used religion for political ends, as mere eyewash. But as I write, Yar Adua is so mixed-up that he can’t even see the wood for trees let alone pull the country out of the woods, and since the man seems even unable to help himself, it appears that god has refused to lend him a helping hand. The president’s predecessor, Olusegun Obasanjo was, putatively, a born-again Christian, and truly there was something perversely regenerate about the aging former head of state who had suggested in the 1970s and 1980s - when he was a military head of state - that African juju and voodoo should be deployed against the apartheid rulers of South Africa. No one can say even now whether he had said this in earnest or in jest. But by the time he became the rather proudly boorish civilian president in 1999, Obasanjo had morphed into a bible-quoting Christian, he had carried the symptoms of the outbreak of religious fad to new hypocritical heights that he had to build a chapel as antechamber to his presidential bedchamber. The presidential chapel was sanctum sanctorum the great and the good aspired to. Once upon a time, one of the most-quoted quips of the Nobel Laureate for Peace, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, is how the white man had given us the Bible and had taken our land. Today no one would repeat this without coming across as pointless. We have long got our land back from the white man, but we are stuck with the bible he gave us, this is the unacknowledged sting in the tail of the Tutu’s trope. We are indeed stuck with the bible, decades after many descendants of those who brought it to us had begun to treat it as no more than a gingerbread talking-point on Sunday morning TV sofa. Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, said it takes slave mentality (and morality) to accept the Christian religion - and other religions, tacitly speaking - as unquestionably as we do. This is not very far from the truth. When Europeans - the Brits, particularly - tried to introduce Christianity to the Japanese people, the Japanese Emperor and noblemen had made them understand that while they admired European advances in such things as maritime technology and steam engine and were willing to acquire such knowhow, their own way of life/religion was sacrosanct. Most Japanese were Shintoists; they are still Shintoists. In Shintoism, the Bushido Code of Conduct is supreme, and at the top of the Code is Honour. Although Japanese people don’t practise religion deeply anymore and Shintoism is actually no more than a material for cultural cartography, Japanese politicians would think twice about being corrupt, as a decision to err on the side of dishonesty might ultimately eventuate in dishonour, often played out by resignation and sometimes suicide. For, even now, the greatest ‘sin’ in the rather secular Japan is dishonour. The Europeans, fearing the dauntless swords of the proud samurai, never made any serious attempt at converting the Japanese to their Christian religion. But in Africa, the equivalent of Japanese samurai and shoguns had long been conniving to sell their people to Europeans even long before the latter began to think Africans were human enough to be worthy of knowing anything about their god. And, presto, we accepted everything unreflectingly, with the same sort of sleepy fatalism with which we succumbed to slavery and, later, colonialism. Today, we are still enraptured - or should I say, entrapped - by both the notion of the Christian god and religion.
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