In February 2010, Eddie Glaude, professor of religion at Princeton University, penned an obituary in the Huffington Post in which he lamented that the black church -real or imagined - had lost the prophetic voice with which it has been associated with over the centuries. He argued that in the face of higher rates of unemployment, inadequate healthcare and general poverty among African Americans as compared to the general American population, the black church's voice could not be distinctly heard.
Glaude's brief and concise essay has preoccupied my mind for the last few months, especially since leaders of the mainstream and evangelical Kenyan churches made what a miseducated and irrational decision to oppose the adoption of Kenya's new constitution. However, it resonated anew last week following reports about a prayer meeting organized by prominent church leaders from the Rift Valley to declare their support for William Ruto and Joshua arap Sang, two suspects indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. It was simply shocking to see supposed men of God, who are heads of churches with followers from all over the country, beholden to politicians who would like to portray the destiny of two men as the destiny of an ethnic group for which innocent Kenyans must pay the price.
Yet the Kalenjin church leaders are not alone in having accepted that ethnic blood is thicker and more powerful than the blood of Jesus Christ. In different regions, churches have now caved in to the demon of ethnic parochialism. Just like for William Ruto, the knees of church leaders from other regions increasingly bow and their tongues confess that Kalonzo Musyoka, Uhuru Kenyatta, Raila Odinga are Lord or risk the wrath of the respective ethnic groups. In the meantime, politicians have now appointed themselves disciples of Christ. Kalonzo Musyoka, for instance, is hoping to appeal to the Christian vote in his bid for the presidency, and so he gallivants around the country as a peacemaker, pronouncing postmodern binaries, after which he declares a hybrid Kenya with a patronizing "it doesn't matter what side you're on, let us be Kenyans, let us love one another." Raila Odinga - well, we all saw the baptism and conversion. Uhuru Kenyatta has not yet performed such elaborate theatrics, but he's at some church every Sunday where a political leader calls on the Kikuyu to unite.
Ruto, Raila, Uhuru and Kalonzo are walking a path also trod by a cloud of other witnesses such as those whom Kwamchetsi Makoha termed as the "triumvate" of "Pastor Pattni, Brother Maina Njenga and Canon Mike Sonko. Pattni, the architect of the colossal Goldenberg scandal that dealt a severe blow to Kenya's economy, is now brother Paul with his own church. Maina Njenga, the leader of the dreaded and vicious Mungiki sect was washed as white as snow by Bishop Margaret Wanjiru, while Sonko, who has criminal charges following him, recently performed a theatrical piece where he grabbed the microphone from a pastor, kind of like Napoleon at his coronation taking his crown from the Pope's hands to put on his head.
The distinction between faith and crime continues to be blurred thanks to the antics of people like Bishop Wanjiru who, it is said, won the by-election thanks to the windfall of her leading an ex-Mungiki leader to the Lord, and Mutava Musyimi who reduced the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK) to a shell of its former vibrant self after using it as a spring board to join politics.
While this perversion of faith and politics deeply troubles me, it does not gore me to the bone as much as the failure to engage the Christian faith by African intellectuals. When a Sonko in Kenya or Goodluck in Nigeria seeks to make political mileage from "humbling himself" before the Lord, in front of a smiling potbellied bishop smirking at the big fish of a sinner that she or he just caught, the typical response of journalists, bloggers and academics is to scoff and make sarcastic comments about the hypocrisy of the so-called believers. When there is an occasional sympathetic ear, we hear a lament similar to the one by Mukoma wa Ngugi about the failure of the African church to stand up for the downtrodden.
This detached observation on matters of faith, rather than an engagement with faith, follows the tradition of intellectuals like Ngugi wa Thiong'o who - and rightly so - saw Christianity as a tool of colonialism, or of the Cameroonian writers Mongo Beti and Ferdinand Oyono who satirized the church in the context of the sexual foibles of the colonial community. Don't get me wrong - the criticisms are very well merited. However, and a big however, the church remains an important institution in many African societies. Therefore, if we are to march towards the empowerment our fellow citizens, we must not only use the linguistic, but also the religious vernacular. We must not only write in our mother tongues - we must also write in our mothers' faith.
Carter G. Woodson presented this imperative in The Miseducation of the Negro, in which he argued that blacks educated in the North were impotent to engage their communities for social transformation once they returned due to their detachment from the church, yet the Negro church was "the great asset of the race" and the "only institution which the race controls." The Negro church was the force behind the schools in which, ironically, the same graduates had received their intellectual foundation before heading north. The church had also provided a platform for black thinkers to develop ideas, for black entrepreneurs to develop their businesses, and for professionals to develop their skills. By dismissing the church, therefore, intellectuals were committing the triple crime of distancing themselves from the masses, failing to reinvest in the community that invested in them, and most of all, abandoning the institution to decadence. His words on the same are forceful:
It is unfortunate, then, that these classes do not do more to develop the institution. In thus neglecting it they are throwing away what they have, to obtain something which they think they need. In many respects, then, the Negro church during recent generations has become corrupt. It could be improved, but those Negroes who can help the institution have deserted it to exploiters, grafters, and libertines. The "highly educated" Negroes have turned away from the people in the churches, and the gap between the masses and the "talented tenth" is rapidly widening.
Woodson's observations were not of an apology for the faith; rather, they were an evocation of the reality that the black church was the backbone of the community, whether the intellectuals liked it or not. To observe the church as an outsider is to distance oneself from the community.
African intellectuals must, therefore, begin to engage social issues through the lens of faith, rather than simply criticize the church for not doing so. There is no doubt that the contemporary African church, saddled with the prosperity gospel and stinking rich celebrity preachers, is steeped in intellectual mediocrity, hence its inability to speak prophetically on the issues of the day. Ironically, though, these churches are also starting evangelical universities across the continent, many times modeled on and in collaboration with evangelical Christian universities in the United States. Such universities require lecturers to apply a literal reading of the Bible to their disciplines, which means that it is unlikely that any prophetical or radical theory will come from the universities. If anything, the exponential growth of Christian universities will continue the vicious cycle of the Christian faith being used to sustain political and intellectual mediocrity.
In other words, and as I have intimated before, Africa needs a radical pan-African theology that speaks forcefully for the oppressed and liberates people from ignorance, poverty and exploitation. Unfortunately, such a theology was never developed because intellectuals left religion up to politically conservative scholars like John S. Mbiti who saw liberation theology as angry and as useful to Africans as water-buffalo theology. Of course they are Bishop Tutu, Rev. Allan Boesak, Bishop Muzerewa, Bishop Okullu, Bishop Muge and Archbishop Luwum, but we cannot ride on their laurels to address the needs of today. We need theory and theology that will help us educate our students to resist the shoddy thinking and political manipulation inflicted on the church. One of the few political theorists who was willing to engage black theology was Steve Biko, who called for a theology that was contextual, because "too many people are involved in religion for blacks to ignore," and "the only path open for us now is to redefine the message in the bible and to make it relevant to the struggling masses." Biko recognized that "no nation can win a battle without faith."
Pan-Africanists everywhere need to realize that the battle for the soul and mind of black people is still raging on. It has simply morphed, from the colonial days when European missionaries wanted to restrict the education of Africans to primary or secondary school level, into today's American evangelical infiltration of our tertiary education institutions. It is time we got our heads out of books deconstructing colonial missionary discourses and started combining in-depth theology with our disciplines for the benefit of our people. We must equip our people build a new church founded on justice, intellectual rigor and love for mankind, and in so doing bury the religious deadwood that produced by ethnicity once and for all.
