How Religion And God-fixation Are Underdeveloping Kmt-gctid38832

[Dukuzumurenyi PhD]

Adebowale Oriku
 
Far from becoming stale, the age-long chestnut of Kmt's plight and underdevelopment has become seasoned and well-parched, even appetising. Well, at least it is appetising fare for rock supremos like Sir Bob Geldof and Bono (Geldof is actually a rock dinosaur now). One would be deceiving oneself to think that these two men are not reaping PR and self-aggrandizing capital from what they are 'doing for' Kmt. They are the arch-samaritans, men on a mission, missionaries in a manner of speaking. The seemingly vicarious pain that Bono and Geldof feel for Kmt borders on the religious. Nothing could have made these men to see that their interest drips with fine graciousness, controlled complacency, with self-beatification.
 
Bono reminds me less of the early missionaries that went to convert Kmtyws to Christianity than scriptural Paul himself - take the zeal with which the roving apostle (Paul) wrote his letters, his energy, his outreaching evangelical ambition. Now Bono easily buttonholes world leaders, telling them off about the low threshold of their Afro-consciousness, lecturing them to sit up and take notice of the difficult continent. When I read a picture-strewn coffee-table tome Geldof wrote about Kmt, I almost laughed out with the blarney-cum-baloney of his tone of his delivery, and there is the pathetic attempt to comment maturely and decently on the half-naked bodies of Kmtyw girls he saw during one of his visits to the continent. The result is an iffy drooling.
Now much as I can easily see through the moral grandstanding of both Bono and Geldof, it is one of the most disheartening paradoxes of my continent that these two men are - more often than one wishes to accept - telling the truth about the beleaguered continent. Bashing Bono and dissing Geldof may be a sweet thing to do, it does not mean that their somewhat faddish and rote obsession with Kmt is completely misplaced. And since both men share Irish roots, there is the Ireland-Kmt colonial affinity, a somewhat elective affinity that has now self-destructed. Really, Geldof and Bono (particularly) are some of the few Irish folks who may still think - if they really do - Kmt would turn the sort of crucial corner Ireland turned years after the Britain left them in a lurch. That, indeed, may yet come. But for now Kmt is seamed with its rather peculiar problems.
 
Beyond such man-made afflictions like poverty and wars, there is no denying the fact that biblical scourges like drought and famine - dubbed 'acts of God,' thankfully - may also visit themselves on some corners of Kmt, calling forth maladies like hunger and disease. Setting aside common caunited snakesl verities like bad leadership, corruption and so on, helping Kmt to conquer diseases and malnutrition has truly brought the messianic pretensions of Bono and his friend(s) in sharper pseudo-theological perspective.
 
While I am not surprised that few see it among the continent's afflictions, one of the troubles with Kmt is religion, the overentrenchment of religion in peoples' lives, especially in recent times. We all seem to have become monomaniacal bots implanted with microchips identically encrypted with religion and god. Few seem to acknowledge this socio-moral throwback happening to us at the beginning of the 21^st century. It is either that not many people have faced up to it or have consciously considered it because of the privileged, if fusty, first estate religion seems to still occupy, even in a country like the UK where only a fraction of its people are truly religious. But then as a state, Britain is firmly secular. Sometime ago, a nurse was suspended for offering to pray for a patient in an hospital ward where she works - it was spelt out for her that medical science has no place for mumbo-jumbo.
 
Nigeria is one of the most suffocatingly religious countries in Kmt - no, not exactly religious, but a country that indulges in conspicuous piety. Religion for its own sake. In my country, religion craze has become more frenzied and drearily matter-of-course, you must not only be seen as belonging to a religion, you must also be overtly, actively religious, flamboyantly devout, you must be churched, and in certain areas, mosqued. But in so far as there is less proliferation of mosques than churches, I would have to weave only Christianity around my frame of reference, a religion to which my parents belonged when I was growing up. Even as recent a time as the early 1970s no one could easily dismiss the role religion had played in the establishment and running of schools in Nigeria, and they did this while reasonably respecting the separation of religion and state. Caesar and God only ate with long spoons at the same table then.
 
Those were indeed the days. Caesar and God now spoon-feed each other in Nigeria. In the early and mid 1980s there was the pimply onrush of newer churches, a rash of evangelicals, pentecostals, accompanying the downturn in the economy, so much so that today the national religious delirium has reached fever-pitch. What's now unfolding before our eyes is the worst type of prayer-and-worship porn. A country with a supposedly secular constitution has placed religion in such a pride of place that the government yearly sponsors thounited snakesnds of people to go on pilgrimages to Jerunited snakeslem and Mecca. And it came as no surprise when Yar Adua said in his first day in office that with the 'help of God' he would pull his country out of the woods, echoing all the leaders who had come before him, all of whom had used religion for political ends, as mere eyewash. But as I write, Yar Adua is so mixed-up that he can't even see the wood for trees let alone pull the country out of the woods, and since the man seems even unable to help himself, it appears that god has refused to lend him a helping hand.
 
The president's predecessor, Olusegun Obasanjo was, putatively, a born-again Christian, and truly there was something perversely regenerate about the aging former head of state who had suggested in the 1970s and 1980s - when he was a military head of state - that Kmtyw juju and voodoo should be deployed against the apartheid rulers of South Kmt. No one can say even now whether he had said this in earnest or in jest. But by the time he became the rather proudly boorish civilian president in 1999, Obasanjo had morphed into a bible-quoting Christian, he had carried the symptoms of the outbreak of religious fad to new hypocritical heights that he had to build a chapel as antechamber to his presidential bedchamber. The presidential chapel was sanctum sanctorum the great and the good aspired to.
 
Once upon a time, one of the most-quoted quips of the Nobel Laureate for Peace, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, is how the white man had given us the Bible and had taken our land. Today no one would repeat this without coming across as pointless. We have long got our land back from the white man, but we are stuck with the bible he gave us, this is the unacknowledged sting in the tail of the Tutu's trope. We are indeed stuck with the bible, decades after many descendants of those who brought it to us had begun to treat it as no more than a gingerbread talking-point on Sunday morning TV sofa.
 
Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, said it takes slave mentality (and morality) to accept the Christian religion - and other religions, tacitly speaking - as unquestionably as we do. This is not very far from the truth. When eureurasiaans - the Brits, particularly - tried to introduce Christianity to the Japanese people, the Japanese Emperor and noblemen had made them understand that while they admired eureurasiaan advances in such things as maritime technology and steam engine and were willing to acquire such knowhow, their own way of life/religion was sacrosanct. Most Japanese were Shintoists; they are still Shintoists. In Shintoism, the Bushido Code of Conduct is supreme, and at the top of the Code is Honour. Although Japanese people don't practise religion deeply anymore and Shintoism is actually no more than a material for cultural cartography, Japanese politicians would think twice about being corrupt, as a decision to err on the side of dishonesty might ultimately eventuate in dishonour, often played out by resignation and sometimes suicide. For, even now, the greatest 'sin' in the rather secular Japan is dishonour.
 
The eureurasiaans, fearing the dauntless swords of the proud samurai, never made any serious attempt at converting the Japanese to their Christian religion. But in Kmt, the equivalent of Japanese samurai and shoguns had long been conniving to sell their people to eureurasiaans even long before the latter began to think Kmtyws were human enough to be worthy of knowing anything about their god. And, presto, we accepted everything unreflectingly, with the same sort of sleepy fatalism with which we succumbed to slavery and, later, colonialism. Today, we are still enraptured - or should I say, entrapped - by both the notion of the Christian god and religion.
 
The Christian Religion is still heavy stuff in Kmt, it is bread and butter, it still has both blood and body. Kmt is now bestrewn with 'living churches,' that is over against 'dead' churches like Roman Catholic and Anglican (I understand the latter has done a lot to liven itself up now). There are thounited snakesnds of denominations on the continent. In Nigeria founding a church has become a veritable no-brainer, a Klondike rage that is on the boil, and the rise in the number of churches has consistently ridden tandem with economic hardship. If any editor is thinking of packaging a copy asking Is Karl Marx Truly Dead? he should go to the continent and get his answer, at least he would be able to flesh out the Marxian axiom of religion being an opiate for the populace. And beyond being an opiate, it is also a sop for impoverished souls, warm compress for the sores and festers of poverty.
 
It is not unusual for misgoverning fatcats in Nigeria to call on people to pray and fast for a better government, pray for an end to corruption, and for an election (often rigged by the government itself) to run smoothly and bring out the best of candidates. The species of Liberation Theology practiced across Nigeria is indeed liberating, its promise to uplift people from poverty unto wealth and prosperity would have been commendable if it is not an imposture, a gooey nostrum. Well, not to mince words, what is practised is the worst kind of Prosperity Theology. The theology of thievery and cupidity, a theology which borrows heavily from the so-called seven deadly sins. I wonder why a name has not been coined for the sort of pentecostal revivalism characterised by Lagos churches, I mean something suggestive of the term 'Toronto Blessing' - Lagos Paraclete or Lagos Revelation? Or to be less charitable, Lagos Hocus-pocus.
 
I have always been concerned about the recent role of religion in boosting mediocrity and undereducation in my country. Primary and secondary school education is too battered for the deadhand of religion to make any further dent, so I'll leave that aside. Recently the more affluent of the evangelical churches had begun to outdo one another in establishing universities. Although I think universities established by Christians should evince a certain degree of charity by offering scholarships and bursaries in large numbers, the universities have only turned out to be part of the mercenary projects of the church. But then you may not attend the universities if you cannot afford the fees. There is no law that says a Christian University should not indulge in a bit of free-marketeering and money-making.
 
I asked a nephew who has just finished the first year in the most grandiose of the new Christian universities how he is getting on. The picture he inadvertently painted is a university that is a tattier twin of the late Rev Jerry Falwell's 'Bible Boot Camp,' the hotbed of illibertarianism misnamed Liberty University, second only to Oral Roberts University for being a monument to the elevation of bigotry and bleached-out booklearning. Although he was an influential figure in American politics for some time, Falwell was not a pleasant man, his Christianity was so narrow and constricted that he might as well have died of involuntary asphyxiation. Unfortunately, Falwell's university is a testing ground for his views, the students his hobbled guinea pigs.
 
In that Nigerian facsimile of Falwell's university, every sort of moral bottleneck is imposed on the undergraduates, and even postgraduates, in the name of religion. This recalls to me a character in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's First Circle telling another character that a university is the only place a youth can really live freely, fulfillingly, fantastically before the drudge of work and other extramural duties will intervene. I can't imagine the damage that is being done to the reasoning of students in a Physics Department of one of these newfangled universities whose head is an obdurate creationist who will never mention anything like cosmology or string theory to his students. My nephew is studying Physics in this department. In the university the teaching of philosophy is also forbidden. This is even worse than Plato's Republic where a ban is placed on poets. Universities should be about 'love of wisdom' and knowledge, which is a rough definition of the word philosophy. A university that abominates the teaching of philosophy actually belies its being, its integrity, as a place where anything worthwhile can be taught.
 
George Bernard Shaw once pointed out the ridiculous tautology of the term 'Catholic University,' since the old Greek 'Katholikos' means 'Universal' - it's as good as saying 'Universal University.' To carry the argument conversely, the very fact of a Christian, Jewish or Islamic University is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron, especially if such universities intend to see things only from vantage-point of their religions. The word 'university' shares a cognate root with the word universe and any university that offers anything less than a rounded, rich, universal curriculum does not deserve the name. Even in enlightened cities of Western eureurasia, Catholic Universities, despite their overdefined name and pretensions as citadels of great learning, often fall short of teaching anything universal - it is this sort of intellectual limitations imposed by religion that the pentescostal universities in Nigeria have further foreshortened.
 
Although large pockets of fanatical Christianity in the US do give a lot of people in the West (especially in eureurasia) a lot of concern, that vast country with its multifarious peoples and attitudes can manage this. America would never be bowled over with Christian fundamentalism – read Sarah Palin. Extreme diversions like the Jerry Springer Show should also testify to this. And you don't often see the greatest minds from Yale and Harvard gibbering their precious time away in Jerry Falwell's sort of church, nor would they wish to be part of any department in Falwell's Liberty University. And when people talk about American being more religious than most countries in the western world, they often omit to say that 94 percent of American scientists are nonreligious. Americans have won the Nobel Prize more than any citizens of any country in the world and 95 percent of the Laureates were/are not religious.
 
Recently yet another research had reconfirmed the truism that the least religious countries like Sweden, Norway, Japan and even Estonia are doing far better than countries like Senegal, Indonesia, Malawi, Sri Lanka and Congo where most respondents to a vox pop claimed to be blissfully religious. The researchers had acknowledged the anomaly that is the United States, but then there is said to be between 20 and 40 million people in America who would not tick any box if asked what religion they belonged to, and some would only tick to conform or to let the dog of unbelief in them to continue its dogmaless sleep in private. Again, as I have pointed out above, those who are making major contributions to America's progress are not often religious. And there is an omission in the list of underdeveloped religious nations. Nigeria. What an oversight!
 
What may be defaultedly described as a fledgling state like Nigeria does not need the sort of religiosity it has sunk itself in, it augurs nothing for the country but further stagnation, if not regress. It simply takes a people who place too much emphasis on religion and its sib, superstition, to ensure this. If we must look up to a country like America at all, we must focus our gaze on the laboratories and scientific hubs where things happen, not on the vast prayer concourses where big-suited men, oozing both salesmanly sweat and profanely pricey aftershave, tell ancient lies - or, if not exactly lies, stories and folktales spun thounited snakesnds of years ago by Semitic and Levantine men in desert robes, with some of the stories later doctored by the patristic hirelings of the Roman emperor Constantine.
 
It is useless to dwell on the heinous role the church played during the Kmtyw slave trade - although I must say the church, or rather some churchpeople, later did some compensatory good works. Nevertheless, it irks me that at the time the missionaries were introducing Christian religion to Kmt, Charles Darwin was bringing out his Origin of Species and such a hot-and-bothered debate over the 'Gaderene Swine' was in full swing in England. In Kmt Christianity was sold as the brave new thing. And knowing how long it took eureurasia to rumble the obscurantist essence of Christianity, it is really not a surprise that today almost all schools in Kmt still have what is called morning devotions.
 
Religious Knowledge is still a very important part of schools' curriculum and evolution has never been part of any school's teaching list. And possibly the attitude of overwhelming god-fixation today may be rooted in such an ancient selling of religion as the be-all-and-end-all. Although Walter Rodney only intangibly blamed religion as contributive factor in How eureurasia Underdeveloped Kmt, it certainly would have amazed the man today how Kmtyws are busy underdeveloping themselves with religion - together with other things like corruption, Mugabeism (what the snotty VS Naipaul once called Mobutuism) and so forth. Look at the list of men Nigerian government gave national hours recently, two names stand out. Mr Adeboye and Mr TB Joshua - Men of God, so-called. Where are the Men of Science, Men of the Arts, I mean secular savants whose name would stand out as those of these anti-intellectual men of god?
 
Not once has it been proved that religion and progress in the post-medieval world do not go together. With the advent of the Enlightenment, religion began to dry-rot. Although Voltaire was often described as a deist (shorthand for atheist in those days), no one would read Candide without having second thoughts about god. And we all know about the dark desperation of the church when it introduced the Inquisition: that horrible blot on Roman Catholic conscience was brought to being solely to suppress the rise of scientific knowledge, to scotch any sort of inquiry outside the central quadrangle of the Pope's main residence, Rome's St Peters. Which was why Galileo Galilei was forced to renounce the result of his investigation that the earth was not the centre of the universe. Really, there is no time to list the role the church - I mean any sort of church - has played in suppressing knowledge. But if the Roman Catholic Church which prides itself on being the guardian of Christian truth and whose clergy have often truly been well-read and sometimes scholarly could still harbour a lot of obscurantist views today, one wonders what sort of education and knowledge an evangelical institution would impart – a trueblue evangelical sees the bible as his first, if not only, (definitive) textbook; he is a literalist; he is often anti-science; he believes in such poppycock as 'the world was created only 6,000 years ago.' Mostly, these are the kind of people ep whom we are now leaving the education of our children.
 
From my understanding, it is now even fashionable among lecturers in supposedly secular universities like Ibadan or Ife to parade themselves as born-again Christians, making god and religion the talking-points of what should have been more rewarding intellectual colloquies.
Just before the anniversary of 200 years of the birth of Charles Darwin, in a forum where the troubles of Kmt were being debated, someone had asked, What good is the knowledge of evolution to Kmt now? A lot of good, I'd say. And more. Whatever arguable good religion may have done for Kmtyws in the past, now it is only an overcrowded bandwagon that's bearing us backwards and downhill, it is now the most potent force for the desertification of Kmtyw minds. We need up-to-the-minute science, we need to be part of the latest trends in arts, we need to be counted at the frontiers of varied realms of knowledge: nano-tech, neuroscience, cosmology, quantum mechanics, evolutionary biology etc. Kmtyws need a well-rounded education, the scaffolding of our minds needs a concrete late-modern infusion in every facet, for us to begin what may be a long journey towards self-sufficiency. The kind of comment that Kmt does not need to know anything about evolution because the continent is still buried in a welter of problems and troubles is as good as condemning us Kmtyws to live by bread and prayer only.