Archbishop Desmond Tutu. At a time when repression had silenced mass movements as well as intellectuals and leaders calling for change, the clergy could still speak out from the relative safety of their pulpits. Reuters
Growing up, I have three distinct memories of Christian clergy — one is of Archbishop Desmond Tutu winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his work against apartheid. Another of President Moi, being prayed over by richly robed clergy in a magnificent Nairobi church, and lastly of clergymen like Reverend Njoya speaking out against Moi’s excesses.
The church then played two roles — one in support of an oppressive status quo, the other in support of those trying to subvert that status quo. At a time when repression had silenced mass movements, as well as intellectuals and leaders calling for change, the clergy could still speak out from the relative safety of their pulpits.
Too oppressed
The people were too oppressed in their poverty, political persecution too acute, and the betrayal of the struggle for independence too heavy for preaching about heaven not to seem like a contradiction, when hell seemed to be living on earth.
Evil was not abstract, it was breathing down the necks of the people. The churches supporting subversion of the status quo in South Africa and Kenya were not a political party — nor were the clergy revolutionary Marxists disguised in Christian robes.
But many clergy marched, prayed over the fallen in funerals, they risked their lives, and sometimes their lives were taken.
They took courage knowing that the people were behind them, listening, and they took faith in a God they knew would not punish them for searching for justice.
The fiery Che Guevara once said that love is the basis of revolution. The clergy that stood against apartheid and dictatorships, or gave refuge to the hunted during the genocide in Rwanda, might not have agreed with Che’s methods, but they were certainly being moved by a deep love for a collective humanity. Addressing church leaders in apartheid South Africa, Steve Biko once wrote that, “Christianity can never hope to remain abstract and removed from the people’s environmental problems.
In order to be applicable to the people, it must have meaning for them. If they are an oppressed people, it must have something to say about their oppression.”
But today, without the evil incarnates of apartheid and the neocolonial dictatorships of the 1990’s, oppression is no longer so easily definable. We are living in confusing times. Opposition parties have been bought out.
Intellectuals are unable to help us digest what the betrayal of our second independence demands of us.
Political activists engaged, sometimes by basic issues such as housing, cannot attend to the national and international dimensions of our struggles. In globalised Africa, we have cell phones but no electricity or clean drinking water, we have computers but they are locked away in the cities and internet cafes, we are part of a global economy but with withering local economies, we have the vote, but we don’t have the right politicians, more wealth is being generated but dire poverty increasing.
Quality of life is on the rise, but life expectancy is falling. Weigh President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda against former dictator Idd Amin and there is progress — somewhat. Things are getting better and at the same time they are getting worse. We wake up each morning to find both statements to be true.
Yet for such a complicated world, the truth of our existence is simple — to be with and if need be to take care of those that we love, to nurture our children for the next generation and the demands that come with that, to be happy, and, only when need arises, to suffer in dignity.
To meet our basic needs, whether physical, psychological or emotional, does not require that we deprive them of a fellow human being. To give your child an education and a home does not mean that someone else’s child has to be homeless and illiterate.
Yet many churches have lost sight of these simple truths and forsaken the love for a common humanity. Unlike against apartheid and dictatorships, the churches have fallen into a political apathy.
They have forsaken the duty to take a higher moral and political ground in order to give people a new vision.
Take the African Anglican Church for example. Its biggest fight today is against the ordination of gay clergy and sanctification of gay marriages, which in turn has led to a schism between it and its western counterparts.
There are the obvious points here —that this makes African gay Christians even more vulnerable to violent homophobic attacks; and that the church’s role should be to extend freedoms not curtail them — after all there was a time when interracial marriages were illegal and black folk could not worship in the same churches as whites.
Social discrimination
Instead of promoting social discrimination at home, shouldn’t the African Anglican church be critical of its Western counterpart for failing to take a public stand against illegal wars, or the continuing criminalisation of young black men in the US, or the xenophobia prevalent in immigration issues throughout the Western world?
Bishop Tutu in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech said in part “Unless we work assiduously so that (we all) enjoy basic human rights, the right to a fulfilled life, the right of movement, of work, the freedom to be fully human, with a humanity measured by nothing less than the humanity of Jesus Christ Himself, then we are on the road inexorably to self-destruction…” That was in 1984, yet the task could not be more urgent.
The clergy, by the faith vested in them by people, have a moral duty to chart a new liberation that speaks to and for Africans.
Wa Ngugi is the author of Nairobi Heat (Penguin, SA 2009), Hurling Words at Consciousness and a columnist for the BBC Focus on Africa Magazine where this essay first appeared.
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