Religion as a weapon of imperialism

In one of his popular patriotic songs, the late Gikuyu musician Joseph Kamaru sang “Gutiri muthungu na mubia”. According to him, there was no difference between a colonial administrator and a Christian missionary. They were both working toward the same goal. This was a view that was shared by many who lived through the emergency period in colonial Kenya.

The question whether Christianity aided colonialism or vice versa is one that has been a subject of scholarly debate for decades. To some, the question may seem redundant; since the former colonies got independence the relationship between missionaries and colonialists no longer matters. But it does matter, not least because the past informs the future. The evidence abounds that the same relationship has been extended to aid neocolonialism. The tactics may appear or may be different but the effects are the same.

Religion is one of the elements of social evolution. Bearing in mind that all elements are connected, it is important to examine each of the elements in order to bring out a wholesome history of a society. Indeed, as Auguste Comte persuades us in his Law of the Three Stages, society, like the human mind, proceeds in three stages of its development. The first stage is the theological or fictitious, the second is the metaphysical or abstract and the third is the positive or scientific.

Based on the above, it is important to understand the impact of the imposition of new or alien religious beliefs on the developmental trajectory of a society given that such an imposition disrupts the gradual and predictable continuity of the progress of the society on which the new religious ideas are being imposed.

It is also important to take into account that more often than not the imposition of alien ideas, especially in a campaign of imperialism, results in the degradation or overthrow of existing ideas. The struggle for liberation, from the time of colonization and the victim community’s attempts to resist it, through the period of colonization, on to the concerted activities to drive out the colonial power and then to the struggle against neocolonialism, is actually a struggle between indigenous ideas and structures, ideas that are familiar and clear and on which the colonized are able to predetermine their future, against unfamiliar ideas and structures imposed solely to perpetuate their domination and exploitation of their resources. It is a struggle between coercive, exploitative ideas and those that assert the primacy of the colonized and ameliorate their situation.

In Africa, the former colonizers used unbridled violence to disempower and disenfranchise African populations. And they used Christian tenets to justify their oppression. On the other hand, neocolonialists use softer tactics to perpetuate poverty and hence create dependence which in turn creates avenues for fake benevolence through aid organizations, more often than not Christian. The goal is the same. Dispossession and exploitation. And religion has faithfully played its role of lubricating the wheels of injustice. A soft weapon.

Dr. Etim E. Okon, a Senior Lecturer in the Deptartment of Religious and Cultural Studies at the University of Calabar, rightly asserts that: “Even with the pervasive influence of Christianity, educated Africans have refused to put off the memory of colonial dimensions of missionary enterprise.” (Christian Missions and Colonial Rule in Africa: Objective and Contemporary Analysis – European Scientific Journal, June 2014).

It is not that the involvement of Christian missionaries in the colonial enterprise was all negative. One cannot deny the fact that the missionaries built education and health institutions that greatly elevated the colonized. That also adds to the historicity of their involvement. Indeed, one cannot overlook the fact that the academic institutions and the instruction they provided formed the foundations of post-independence political leadership. But some scholars have argued that the provision of education and health was a strategy to lure those who were not responsive to theological appeals.

Indeed, the debate has revealed that negative aspects of the missionary engagement in the colonial enterprise far outweigh the positive. The debate has so vexed the Christian church that the Vatican has found it necessary to condemn past and current culture that claims to make everything new by imposing itself, cleaning away the traditions, history and religion of a people. On November 21, 2017, Pope Francis issued a homily which denounced what he called “ideological colonization” which he defined as both “cultural and spiritual, intolerant of differences and capable of persecuting even those who believe in God”.

Pope Francis also used the same term to describe what he sees as a form of oppression of developing societies by affluent ones, especially the West, through imposing an alien world view or set of values on poorer societies, often by making adoption of those values a condition of humanitarian or development aid.

In fact, Pope Francis has slammed colonialism as blasphemy against God, saying that many grave sins were committed against native peoples in the name of God. “No actual or established power has the right to deprive peoples of the full exercise of their sovereignty,” according to the Pope.

While the colonial administrative machinery used violence to put in place a system that would make it easy for them to plunder, the Christian missionaries used the soft power of the Bible to make the targeted populations subservient to the imperial aspirations. In order for both Christianity and imperialism to succeed, it was necessary to bring down institutions and beliefs that glued the targeted victim communities together. This is a historical practice used by empire builders since the earliest civilizations.

Having established their military superiority and in order to secure their long-term goals, it becomes necessary for empire builders to undermine the pillars of nationhood of the victim community. The institutions, beliefs, images and practices that reflect positive existence to the victim community must be destroyed and replaced with those of the colonizers. They must be undermined to look inferior, primitive and shameful. Among the most important of these pillars is religion.

In his book, History of Resistance in Kenya, Prof. Maina wa Kinyatti quotes a conversation between Mau Mau Gen. Tanganyika and a priest who wanted to baptize the general before he was executed. The priest explained to Tanganyika that without baptism and believing in Jesus of Nazareth, heathens and pagans like the Agikuyu, despite their contributions and achievements here on earth, would definitely go to hell after death.

Tanganyika: And those who are baptized and believe in Jesus of Nazareth, where do they go after death?

Priest: They go to heaven to live with God and his Angels and his son Jesus.

Tanganyika: How about the British who are killing us, raping our women and have occupied our country, where do they go after death?

Priest: Well, if they are baptized and confessed their sins, they go to heaven.

Tanganyika: I see…so the British, the killers of our people; go to heaven? Then I do not want to go to heaven. I want to join our heroic ancestors in the next world after I die.

Priest: Your so-called “heroic ancestors” were pagans and devil worshippers, therefore they are not in heaven. They are in hell. Are you sure that is where you want to go? Think again. You have a few minutes to live.

Tanganyika: Please, you are wasting my time. Go and tell your friends that I am ready.

Like I have said above, it is a fact of war that victory is not complete until the victor destroys the pillars of identity and positive existence of the vanquished. Symbols of worship, which include shrines and divine images, are primary targets of destruction and abduction by an invading enemy. “The presence of the images means any kind of positive existence. They mean good luck, prosperity, growth, wealth, fertility, and divine protection,” writes Hanspeter Schaudig of the University of Heidelberg in a paper titled Death of Statues and Rebirth of Gods.

This is why Jerusalem had to be destroyed by successive invading powers. The Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar, after pillaging the city, carried away to exile the priests and other symbols of religious and secular authority. Indeed, Titus Caesar, after capturing the city went ahead to burn down the Temple and Sanctuary, the holiest monument of Jewish religion especially the Holy of Holies. And during the war of Troy, we are told that it was only after Ulysses and Diomedes stole the Paladion, the image of the goddess Athena, from her temple on the citadel, could Troy, deprived of its protective image, be captured by the Greeks.

The most profound example of abduction of a people’s divine identity is the appropriation of Christianity by the Romans, the imperial authority in Jerusalem during the time when Christianity started in those turbulent times that led to the seven-year Jewish war aptly recorded by Flavius Josephus in his book, The Jewish War, among others by the same eyewitness author.

Based on Judaic traditions and the teachings of a Jew, Christianity would have been expected to be a natural religion of the Jews. Its headquarters, or what the Greeks would call omphalos, the navel or centre, should have been Jerusalem. But the Romans not only took the headquarters to Rome, they assigned themselves the priestly duties and excluded the descendants of Aaron, the first High Priest of Israel, who were designated as the priestly class. And contrary to the law against graven images, the new religion was adorned with statues and other images reflective of Roman paganism including Sunday, a day assigned to the worship of the pagan sun god, replacing the Sabbath day.

Indeed, after Christianity was abducted from Israel to Rome, its hierarchy was fashioned on the structure of another abducted religion – the cult of the Greek god Apollo. For more than 1000 years, individuals, city leaders and kings came from all over the Mediterranean and beyond to consult Apollo’s oracle at Delphi, just as kings and nobles afterwards flocked to the Vatican to consult the Pope.

It was therefore not unusual that when they came to Africa, the first target of British imperialism was the African religion while their primary weapon was Christianity. Missionaries have variously been described as the colonial ideological shock troops as well as colonialism’s agents, scribes and alibi.

“The Christian missionaries were (as) much part of the colonizing forces as were the explorers, traders and soldiers. There may be room for arguing whether in a given colony the missionaries brought other colonialist forces or vice versa, but there is no doubting the fact that missionaries were agents of colonialism in the practical sense whether or not they saw themselves in that light,” argues Walter Rodney in his book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.

And according to Edward E. Andrews, Associate Professor of History at Providence College: “Historians have traditionally looked at Christian missionaries in one of two ways. The first church historians to catalogue missionary history provided hagiographic descriptions of their trials, successes, and sometimes even martyrdom. Missionaries were thus visible saints, exemplars of ideal piety in a sea of persistent savagery. However, by the middle of the twentieth century, an era marked by civil rights movements, anti-colonialism, and growing secularization, missionaries were viewed quite differently. Instead of godly martyrs, historians now described missionaries as arrogant and rapacious imperialists. Christianity became not a saving grace but a monolithic and aggressive force that missionaries imposed upon defiant natives. Indeed, missionaries were now understood as important agents in the ever-expanding nation-state, or ‘ideological shock troops for colonial invasion….’.” (Christian Missions and Colonial Empires Reconsidered: A Black Evangelist in West Africa, 1766–1816).

But which were those indigenous African religious ideas that the missionaries had to overthrow?  Jacob Olupoma, professor of indigenous African Religions at Harvard Divinity School, has spent a large part of his academic lifetime doing research on the subject and decries that the success of Christianity and Islam in Africa over the last century has been at the expense of indigenous African religions.

“Indigenous Africa religions refer to the indigenous or native religious beliefs of the African people before the Christian and Islamic colonization of Africa. Indigenous African religions are by nature plural, varied, and usually informed by one’s ethnic identity, where one’s family came from in Africa (this is in reference to Africans in the diaspora).

“African spirituality simply acknowledges that beliefs and practices touch on and inform every facet of human life, and therefore African religion cannot be separated from the everyday or mundane,” says Prof. Olupona in a 2015 interview with the Harvard Gazette.

But he warns that the word “religion” might be problematic for many African because it suggests that religion is separate from the other aspects of one’s culture, society, or environment, saying that for many Africans, religion can never be separated from all these. “It is a way of life, and it can never be separated from the public sphere. Religion informs everything in traditional African society, including political art, marriage, health, diet, dress, economics, and death,” Prof. Olupona emphasizes.

But he cautions against mistaking African spirituality as theocratic or religious totalitarianism. “African spirituality,” he says, “simply acknowledges that beliefs and practices touch on and inform every facet of human life, and therefore African religion cannot be separated from the everyday or mundane. African spirituality is truly holistic. For example, sickness in the indigenous African worldview is not only an imbalance of the body, but also an imbalance in one’s social life, which can be linked to a breakdown in one’s kinship and family relations or even to one’s relationship to one’s ancestors.”

It is in light of indigenous African spirituality as outlined by Prof. Olupona, among others, that the impact of the imposition of alien religious ideologies as a weapon or tool of colonialism can be understood.