MENTAL SLAVERY AND RELIGIOUS-CULTURAL DOMINANCE

FAMOUSLY Bob Marley sung, “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds.” The recent correspondences between Cuana Angula (The Namibian, October 29, 2010) and L Shikongo (The Namibian, November 5, 2010) remind me of Bob Marley’s song. It seems that we are dealing with mental slavery with special reference to the centrality of religion and culture in the life of the colonisers and the colonised.

Let me briefly explicate.
At the outset religion (or Christianity) has many times been seen and used as a weapon of breaking down (as a tool of colonialism, oppression or suppression) or breaking through (as a tool of liberation, transformation, nation building, reconciliation and healing) in the process of justice and salvation. Here it will be argued that there were (or is still) two distinctive discourses on the role played by the majority of foreign missionaries and religious leaders and the indigenous religious and political leaders respectively.
One discourse was about religious-cultural dominance and mental slavery and the other about being conscious of it and refusing to be domesticated, colonized, or as expressed in traditional African American spirituals, “Oh freedom, oh freedom, Oh Freedom over me. And before I’ll be a slave, I’ll …be free”.
Without question since Enlightenment, Europeans and North Americans argued that they are the makers of world history by sending to global South religious missionaries, colonial powers, traders, soldiers and settlers. Thereby religion and culture was reduced to conversions, church plantings, and gaining a place in the sun. The main tenet of this line of thought was based on a Western Weltanschauung, that was a combination of Darwinism and pan-Europeanism, namely the uncritical acceptance of the notion of nation (Volk) to the “strongest”, the “most highly developed”, and suggesting that the “underdeveloped” nation or people needed colonial protection. Therefore Africans have to be subjected to mental slavery, religious and cultural dominance. Consequently, the unholy alliance was formed under the four Cs (Christianity, Commerce, Civilisation, and Conquest).
Until today, this unholy alliance of the four Cs, or the culture of European and North American free market capitalism had, and continuous to have, enormous historical force, a force at once ideological and economic, social, even to the extent of the use of a colonial and oppressive language such as English as an official language in some African countries. In the case of Namibia, these four Cs invited the brutal and tragic war and genocide history of Namibia, namely Lothar von Trotha’s Vernichtungsbefehl, the extermination order in 1904! In short, according to George Steinmetz the colonial discourse of the four Cs were determined by “the devil’s handwriting.”
However, above story is the story of the colonisers. The same story ought to be told from the perspectives of the colonised. African leaders such as Captain Hendrik Witbooi were capable to unmask the twisted logic of the colonial-cum-religious discourses. For example, Captain Witbooi saw the twisted logic of the Germans on peace as the same as his death and the death of his people or “all I see in your peace is the extermination of all of us and our people.” Thus he instructed the Keetmanshoop District Commissioner Karl Schmidt to stop lecturing him “like a schoolchild” on peace because the peace of which Schmidt is talking serves only to “the destruction” of black Namibians and that knowledge is based “through the hard experience of …life.”
In the person of Captain Witbooi, we have the paradigm of discourses from the perspective of the colonised. Captain Witbooi aptly stated that he “received inspiration” for his struggle for freedom from God because… “The time is fulfilled. The way is opened. I lay a heavy task on you.” Such a theology is based on God’s commitment to salvation, liberation and transformation, namely that God acts in history to free people here on earth.
Above two discourses on mental slavery and cultural-religious dominance were put to test in 1971. The Church Boards of the two black Lutheran Churches in Namibia published a Pastoral Letter, known as the Open Letter, on 30 June 1971. Immediately after its release, the Open Letter became widely known for its prophetic denunciation of the injustice in, and illegal occupation of, Namibia by South Africa, and its urgent call to actively seek the independence of Namibia.
Thus, from the oppressed perspective Christianity is about God’s big heartedness to transcend colonialism, apartheid, tribalism, gender and sexual discrimination, race, class, and modern economic elitism even in Namibia, namely “…to preach good news to the poor…to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour” as well as commitment to economic and political justice, reconciliation, and nation building.
In sum: in contrast to Angula the message of the Bible is not merely about what “God has done to save humankind from their sin, to restore their relationship with God”-- but with equal importance, not more or less-- to liberate humankind in our contemporary countries from oppressive religious, political and economic sinful structures and ideologies.
Likewise, in contrast to the statement of L Shikongo on the supposed “backwardness of religion” the following:
I cannot suppress the truth of positive aspects of Christianity or religion. For example, even if missionaries often acted and reacted conservatively with regard to the colonial situation, their institutions—for example, the school systems that were almost totally in their hands—not only created the possibility of social mobility in the colonial society but through the spread of the Christian teaching unleashed a yearning for liberation and emancipation based on religion and natural law. These yearnings thus promoted the creation and development of Uhuru (freedom) liberation movements, and so, in the last analysis, the mission schools became catalysts of national emancipation and social progress.
Take the case of Nelson Mandela: During the 1998 General Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Harare he paid tribute to the school system of the missionaries. Mandela, one of southern Africa’s foremost anti-apartheid champions, told the gathering: “Your support exemplified in the most concrete way the contribution that religion has made to our liberation, from the days when religious bodies took responsibility for the education of the oppressed because it was denied to us by our rulers, to support for our liberation struggle.”
In short, religion rightly understood, means the “moment” when an African manifests her/his true-self; it is a moment when an African defies the projected negative images of who she/he is; yes a moment when she/he demonstrates the qualities of what it means to be human, religious, and free in a “throat-cutting” world. Once again, we ought to liberate ourselves from foreign mental slavery.

Prof. Paul John Isaak
Geneva, Switzerland.

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