As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God
By Matthew Parris, from The Times Online
Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a
boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it's Malawi, and The Times Christmas
Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps
rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their
village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.
It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities.
But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been
trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to
avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs,
stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing
belief that there is no God.
Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous
contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply
distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and
international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and
training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's
hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The
change is good.
I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical
work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that
salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white,
working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write;
and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital
or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow
that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine:
but what counted was the help, not the faith.
But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the
missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect
that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.
First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and
as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my
little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we
had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong
believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed
or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and
relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with
the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to
be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.
At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced this
impression. From Algiers to Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central
African Republic, then right through the Congo to Rwanda, Tanzania and
Kenya, four student friends and I drove our old Land Rover to Nairobi.
We slept under the stars, so it was important as we reached the more
populated and lawless parts of the sub-Sahara that every day we find
somewhere safe by nightfall. Often near a mission.
Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to
acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed
and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you
direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become
more deferential towards strangers - in some ways less so - but more
open.
This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries. You do not
encounter missionaries in the lobbies of expensive hotels discussing
development strategy documents, as you do with the big NGOs. But
instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members
of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong
Christians. “Privately” because the charity is entirely secular and I
never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working
in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our
conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the
car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service.
It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism
in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was
secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in
turn, influenced by a conception of man's place in the Universe that
Christianity had taught.
There's long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for
placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques
founded in our own culture: “theirs” and therefore best for “them”;
authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours.
I don't follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable
than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think
collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and
tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and
gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a
swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole
idea of loyal opposition.
Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild,
of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the
whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and,
call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual
spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't
take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.
How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the
philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds -
at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language
to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the
answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the
mountain? “Because it's there,” he said.
To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not
climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere?
Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation
- that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for
passivity.
Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a
direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God,
unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human
being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework
I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious
to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it
liberates.
Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition
must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the
knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change.
A whole belief system must first be supplanted.
And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian
evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the
mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone
and the machete.
By Matthew Parris, from The Times Online
Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a
boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it's Malawi, and The Times Christmas
Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps
rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their
village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.
It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities.
But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been
trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to
avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs,
stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing
belief that there is no God.
Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous
contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply
distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and
international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and
training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's
hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The
change is good.
I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical
work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that
salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white,
working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write;
and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital
or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow
that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine:
but what counted was the help, not the faith.
But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the
missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect
that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.
First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and
as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my
little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we
had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong
believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed
or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and
relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with
the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to
be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.
At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced this
impression. From Algiers to Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central
African Republic, then right through the Congo to Rwanda, Tanzania and
Kenya, four student friends and I drove our old Land Rover to Nairobi.
We slept under the stars, so it was important as we reached the more
populated and lawless parts of the sub-Sahara that every day we find
somewhere safe by nightfall. Often near a mission.
Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to
acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed
and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you
direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become
more deferential towards strangers - in some ways less so - but more
open.
This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries. You do not
encounter missionaries in the lobbies of expensive hotels discussing
development strategy documents, as you do with the big NGOs. But
instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members
of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong
Christians. “Privately” because the charity is entirely secular and I
never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working
in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our
conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the
car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service.
It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism
in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was
secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in
turn, influenced by a conception of man's place in the Universe that
Christianity had taught.
There's long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for
placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques
founded in our own culture: “theirs” and therefore best for “them”;
authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours.
I don't follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable
than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think
collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and
tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and
gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a
swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole
idea of loyal opposition.
Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild,
of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the
whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and,
call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual
spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't
take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.
How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the
philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds -
at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language
to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the
answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the
mountain? “Because it's there,” he said.
To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not
climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere?
Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation
- that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for
passivity.
Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a
direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God,
unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human
being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework
I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious
to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it
liberates.
Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition
must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the
knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change.
A whole belief system must first be supplanted.
And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian
evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the
mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone
and the machete.
