The Bible
Sekai Nzenza
Throughout Zimbabwe, there is a growing spiritual identity crisis between Christian religion and African culture. We are caught in a massive pendulum in which we swing from one end to the other, in search of a place that can define us in
relation to God, the ancestors and the rest of the world around us.
This search for a spiritual sense of identity is not new. When the first missionaries arrived at Munhumutapa’s Kingdom in 1650, our ancestors feared the loss of culture so they stayed away from the Portuguese missionaries and their Christian religion. Naked children, bare breasted women with short leather skirts and men with loin cloths stood there, looking at the strange exotic white people with amusement. Gospel seeds of salvation fell on dry foot paths, rocks and thorny trees.
Munhumutapa was hesitant to accept a foreign white God intend on imposing an alien Western culture while changing the spiritual identity of his people. He told the missionaries that we worshiped God through the
Mwari religion. Outside God and the ancestors, there was no other God and no other religion or culture to define us.
The Portuguese missionaries hardly converted anyone. Clutching their Bibles in despair, they left Munhumutapa’s kingdom, totally convinced that Africans will never see the light of salvation. How wrong the first missionaries were!
Many years later, the London Missionary Society came to Matabeleland in 1859. After 20 years of fasting and praying, they made no converts, other than a handful of their domestic workers. They struggled to understand why the natives would not convert to Jesus. Worried about this resistance, the missionaries appealed to Cecil John Rhodes and his British South Africa Police for support. An “alliance of community interests” between the missionaries and Cecil John Rhodes paved the way for the establishment of mission stations across the country.
In 1887, Empandeni mission was started by Fr Peter Prestage while Fr Andrew Hartman, a Jesuit missionary, joined the settler Pioneer Column arriving in Mashonaland in 1890. In 1891, the Administrator, Dr L S Jameson authorised Bishop G W H Knight Bruce, first Anglican Bishop of Mashonaland to take 3000 acres of land and to build St Augustine Mission in Penhalonga.
By 1918 Methodist missionaries had already arrived at my great grandfather’s court, Chief Kwenda and asking for permission to build a Methodist mission. Not only did he agree to the mission being build and named after him, Chief Kwenda allowed his daughter, (my grandmother Mbuya VaMandirowesa’s aunt), to marry Samuel Tutani, the South African evangelist and translator for the missionaries.
One day, a young English pastor arrived from England to preach the Gospel of salvation. Full of the new missionary zeal and smartly dressed in white collar, the young missionary stood at the altar of the grass thatched church while Evangelist Samuel Tutani translated for him. The women sat quietly breast feeding their babies, listening to the sermon. Halfway through the sermon, the missionary stopped preaching and pointed to the young mothers suckling their babies: “There will be no naked breasts in the house of the Lord! The women must stop breastfeeding immediately,” he declared.
Evangelist Tutani went around and translated the orders to the mothers. The women said nothing and turned their eyes to Mbuya VaMandirowesa because her role as Chief Kwenda’s oldest daughter gave her the right to speak first among the women.
With one breast almost smothering one year old Tete Emma’s mouth, Mbuya VaMandirowesa stood up, frowned at the missionary, hissed and walked out of the church.
Then all the women, breastfeeding or not breastfeeding, followed her. The following Sunday the church had a handful of men, some boys and a few girls. The missionary impatiently paced up and down looking at his wrist watch. Evangelist Tutani rang the bell once again to remind the women to respect time and hurry to church.
After a while, a message came from the village to say that the women’s absence had nothing to do with keeping time: they were busy breast feeding and will come to church one day when they are done with child bearing. Mbuya VaMandirowesa never went to church again. In all the years I lived with her, Mbuya did not see any conflict between traditional culture and Christianity. The two were separate. She helped us to understand God, Mwari and the spiritual value of our ancestors.
My mother, unlike Mbuya VaMandirowesa, accepted the Bible, the uniforms, songs and everything that defined new African Christian womanhood. The Anglican Church at St Columbus School was like a women’s club. My mother and the other women attended church on Sundays and followed catechism and communion rituals. But once they were outside the church grounds, they brewed beer and followed traditional ancestor worship. This is where they were positioned and nothing was going to take away that sense of cultural place.
My mother sent us all to boarding school at various denominational missions. We were converted to Christianity and we obeyed the missionaries. But once we got home, Mbuya VaMandirowesa, my mother and the elders applied the village rules and codes of behaviour to guide us. They said the Christian religion stayed at the mission. We managed to keep the two worlds separate and yet we maintained both Christian and African cultural identities without too much conflict. We did not fight with anyone in the family or outside over religion.
However, in the past few years, there has been so much family conflict based on the types of conversion and Christian beliefs. The biggest fight is between my cousin Laiza and the rest of the extended family.
When Laiza found Jesus five years ago, she stopped coming back to the village. Her church, with a head office in America, told her that when a person becomes a
Christian, she is a new creature, the past is all gone and so is everything linked or connected in any way to traditional African practices. The Laiza we used to bath and play “crocodile eat your sadza,” (garwe heri sadza) in the Chinyika river is not the same person any more. She does not want to be reminded of that time when we were all free, dancing around on rocks waiting for our womanhood to ripen into womanhood so we can be mothers and good wives. No. Laiza is now a new creature and that past to her is dead and gone. She has changed her name to Beulah. Every month she gives a certain portion of her salary to the church.
Laiza’s mother, a strong Anglican asked, “Whoever heard of a church that asks you to donate a lot of money from your salary while your own family is starving and standing in line for donor food handouts? Did I send you to school to feed the pastors and help build churches?” But the more Mai Laiza got angry, the more Laiza stopped communication with her, saying it was the devil speaking through her mother.
The other day Laiza came to the village because her mother had suddenly collapsed and fell unconscious for a few minutes in the field. Laiza hired a kombi and arrived in the village the following morning. By the time she came, Mai Laiza was feeling much better, lying comfortably next to the fire in her kitchen hut, surrounded by all of us. We were talking and laughing together catching up on village gossip. Prayers had already been done by women from various churches. We all pray together around here when the occasion calls for a prayer.
Then we all go for ceremonies that require the spiritual guidance of ancestors. It has been like this for as long as I remember. Wearing tight pants and a T-shirt, Laiza walked into the kitchen hut, shook hands with all the women who had spent the night looking after her mother. She took a moment to examine her mother and still standing, she said, “And why are you dressed up like this, as if you are going to a party?”
Her mother said when the chest pain started yesterday, she was convinced her day of death had arrived. She knew that after her death, all her clothes would be distributed among her nieces and other relatives. So she got dressed up like that so that when she gets to heaven they will think she has money and they will let her jump the queue into heaven’s gates, she joked. We all laughed.
Laiza said we should not laugh at matters of death and after life like that. “You and your nice outfit will not get to heaven. Mhai, if you do not know the Lord, you are going straight to hell. You are not saved. ” Then Laiza went on to preach to us like we had never heard of God before. She sang in English and laid her hands on her mother’s head.
Then she spoke in a language we never heard before, for a good twenty minutes. She shook her mother’s head and demanded the devil to depart from her mother immediately. “Get out of here Satan. Buda mumba muno Satani. Out, out with you Dhiabhurosi!” After a short sermon about salvation, she asked us all to come to the Lord and accept salvation. She urged us to throw away witchcraft gnomes and everything associated with traditional beliefs and ancestor worship. But nobody stood up to accept the Lord. We all looked at each other and said nothing.
Then Tete Mai Roger, Laiza’s aunt, stood up and said, “Laiza, since when do you talk to us like we are your children? Does your God have no respect for elders? You have not set foot in this village for five years. You only talk about American this, Americans that, pastor this, pastor that, what about us?
“What kind of praying is this that makes you forget that you are one of us and you will always be one of us even if you leave Zimbabwe and go and preach in America? We were not without God before the white man came. We will not be taught about God by a child like you, born yesterday. ”
Laiza looked at us with hostility. She grabbed her Bible, jumped back in the kombi and left.
“With this type of religion, I might as well say I have no child (Nesvondo yakadai iyi, ini handichisina mwana),” said Laiza’s mother sadly. If the Portuguese missionaries were to land in Zimbabwe now, they would praise the Lord for the number of churches mushrooming everywhere. Everyday, you see Christians clothed in white robes like angels in the open spaces, in fashionable clothes in stadiums where there is no space to stand. There are free television stations whose aim is to spread the Word.
The pendulum of Christianity has swung completely the other way, sometimes destroying family structures. Where now, is the place for traditional African religion and culture?
We have entered a religious schizophrenic stage where the truth of who we are and what languages we speak to God is unclear even to ourselves. Modes of prayers are continually being reproduced and new religious movements and new prophets created each day. The origins of some Christian Pentecostal movements are not known and there is no room to question their origins. Meanwhile, the foundations of our traditional religion that once defined us is being eroded as we move to the city and embrace various forms of worship, a new way of being and ultimately, a confused identity.
And yet, there is a middle ground to balance this swinging pendulum and keep it still. The first step is to know the spiritual values that defined us in the past, how these were eroded and how they can be recreated and reinvented to help us find a spiritual position that incorporates Christianity and still respects the Mwari religion of our ancestors from the time before Munhumutapa to the present.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment