Religion, Conflict, and Democracy in Modern Africa

The Role of Civil Society in Political Engagement

Elolia

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621891710
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Spanning various regions of Sub-Saharan Africa, the authors of this volume come together to explore the complex relationship between religion and democracy in contemporary Africa. As a result of the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union, many African countries have come to the realization, however partial, that political and social change is inevitable in spite of government heavy-handedness and threats. It has also become evident that no political system that refuses to permit freedom of political expression and alternative systems of governance could continue to be sustained.It is in precisely this political climate that religious institutions have collaborated with other elements of civil society to call for political reforms, with the church often becoming the prominent voice against oppressive governments in countries such as Kenya and South Africa. It is the purpose of this book to assess how religion shapes political issues and to what extent religious forces influence the civil society. By acknowledging the role of the civil society, the essays recognize the resilience that comes out of Africa even when the sociopolitical situation seems unbearable.

part one

The Theoretical Perspectives of Religion in Africa

1 Violence and Social Imagination

Rethinking Religion and Politics in Africa1

Emmanuel M. Katongole

The missionaries had come to the Congo eager to evangelize, to fight polygamy, and to impart to Africans a Victorian sense of sin. Before long however, the rubber terror meant that missionaries had trouble finding bodies to clothe or souls to save. Frightened villagers would disappear into the jungle for weeks when they saw the smoke of an approaching steamboat on the horizon. One British missionary was asked repeatedly by Africans, “Has the Savior you tell us of any power to save us from rubber trouble?”2

On 13 July the four bishops comprising the investigating committee published their report. In this they listed all the reasons advanced for or against removing the bishop, and tried to arrange them in some sort of order. This report seemed to support the bishop, but its recommendations seemed to acknowledge the basic justice in the rebel’s cause. The first of these recommended that the diocese be split into three new dioceses, and the second that Bawoze remain as a diocesan bishop if requested to do so by any of the three new dioceses, or take early retirement within one year of the acceptance of the report. This report however, solved nothing, because when Archbishop Okoth on 10 August visited the diocese to communicate the recommendations of the committee, the anti-Bamwoze faction refused to meet him in a hotel and assembled at the cathedral instead. The archbishop refused to speak to the crowd assembled inside on the technicality that he could not enter a cathedral in his province without the consent of the local bishop, and offered to address the crowd outside the cathedral. The “mammoth gathering which had now turned into a mob” insisted that he address them inside the cathedral, and began dragging him there. It was only with considerable difficulty that the archbishop reached his car, and managed to drive off, the “rear window smashed by stones thrown by the wild crowd.” On 27 August [bishop] Bamwoze himself was subjected to similar physical violence at Batambogwe.3

Introduction: Religion and Social Formation in Africa

Facing “King Leopold’s Ghost”

Sometime ago in the summer, I got a chance to read Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost—a very moving, but extremely disturbing book. It recounts the crazy and unstoppable ambitions of King Leopold II of Belgium and his domination and brutal plundering of the Congo Free State. It is the story of untold death, wanton destruction, and civilizing barbarism as Leopold used his mercenary army of Force Publique to drive the Congolese natives into mines and rubber plantations, to burn villages and mete out sadistic punishments, including the severing of hands and other forms of dismemberment. In numerous descriptions and personal narratives of survivors, one catches horrifying glimpses of how the natives viewed, endured, and suffered the throngs of what was later to be mythologized as the “wonderful benefits of cilivization.” This is how, for instance, one Tswambe remembers the state official Léon Fiévez:

All blacks saw this man as the devil of the Equator . . . From all the bodies killed in the field, you had to cut off the hands. He wanted to see the number of hands cut off by each soldier, who had to bring them in baskets . . . A village which refused to provide rubber would be completely swept clean. As a young man, I saw [Fievez’s] soldier Molili, then guarding the village of Boyeka, take a net, put ten arrested natives in it, attach big stones to the net, and make it tumble into the river . . . Rubber causes these torments; that’s why we no longer want to hear it’s name spoken. Soldiers made young men kill or rape their own mothers and sisters.4

In one story after another, the tales of senseless violence are recounted. What perhaps is even more disheartening than these particular accounts is the realization that these were not isolated instances of a particular form of terror (rubber, and limited to King Leopold’s Congo). Rather, as extreme and bizarre as these stories are, they reflect the sort of memories that will forever remain ingrained about the colonial presence in Africa. As Hochschild remarks: “What happened in the Congo could reasonably be called the most murderous part of the European scramble for Africa.”5 But is it just that—“the most murderous part.” For the sad truth is that the men who carried it out for Leopold were no more murderous than the many Europeans then at work or at war elsewhere in Africa. Conrad said it best: “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.”6

Our intention in drawing attention to Hoschild’s book in a discussion of mission and social formation is not to rehearse the somehow familiar and tired argument of mission as but just a form of colonial domination. Our goal rather is to explore what, if any resources mission can offer in the face of such violence and disposition. In this connection, I was particularly struck by a paragraph in Hochschild’s account. Getting away from the accounts of torture, plundering and violence, Hochschild remarks:

The missionaries had come to the Congo eager to evangelize, to fight polygamy, and to impart to Africans a Victorian sense of sin. Before long however, the rubber terror meant that missionaries had trouble finding bodies to clothe or souls to save. Frightened villagers would disappear into the jungle for weeks when they saw the smoke of an approaching steamboat on the horizon. One British missionary was asked repeatedly by Africans, “Has the Savior you tell us of any power to save us from rubber trouble?”7

That, I think is a significant question, for us today as well, even though we seem to be living in a completely different set of circumstances. For, in the Congo itself much has changed since the 1890s of King Leopold. For instance, the Belgian government would soon take over the administration of the Congo Free State, renaming the territory the Belgian Congo; King Leopold died in 1909, Congo became independent (and Congo Kinshasa) in 1960; became Zaire under Mobutu; and has since been re-named (by Kabila) the République Démocratique du Congo (RDC). The most significant development of all: over 60 percent of Congo’s 50.5 million people are now Christians. A lot has changed.

Yet, from another point of view, a very disappointing point of view, one must admit not much has changed. Even though Congo remains one of the richest countries in the world in terms of natural, mineral and cultural resources, the Congolese people, whether under Mobutu’s Zaire, or under the RDC of the Kabilas, have continued to live under the grip of massive poverty, military violence, and regimes as dis-empowering as King Leopold’s rubber terror. This is not just true of the Congo, but of a great many of African countries. Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Angola, to name but a few, all tell the same story of dictatorship, state-inspired corruption, the breakdown of social services, etc. Even within the more “promising” African countries by World Bank and IMF statistics, Uganda and Ghana, for instance, their much celebrated recovery or “economic turn around” has still to trickle down to the majority of citizens in terms of a better way of life and of stable structures of peace and progress.

If the name of King Leopold evokes a history of violence and dispossession in the Congo, then there is indeed something like a King Leopold’s ghost hanging over a great part of Africa. Accordingly, I will use the metaphor of King Leopold’s ghost to refer to the economy of violence, dispossession, and exploitation which greatly characterizes politics on the African continent. Neither Africa’s independence nor what has been dubbed the “second revolution” of the 1980s has brought any significant gains for the majority of African peoples, but increasing marginalization and dispossession. Like the frightened villagers in King Leopold’s Congo, many in Africa today are wondering whether Christianity has any power to save them from this nightmare?

This question (whether Christianity can save Africa) lies at the heart of Christian social ethics in Africa and, in fact, of any discussion on mission and social formation. For, as I understand it, the topic of mission and social formation tries to underscore the role of the church in creating conditions for social life in all its forms. I do not think that the assumption, that mission creates, or at least ought to create, conditions for human social life in its richest and fullest sense, needs any justification. After all, mission, as Bediako notes following Sanneh, is Missio Dei, the same God who in Jesus Christ comes so that “they may have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10).8 What is at stake here is the fact that if such mission has to be relevant for Africa, then the question of whether Christianity can indeed save Africans from King Leopo...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: Religion, Conflict and Democracy
• Part 1: The Theoretical Perspectives of Religion in Africa
• Part 2: Religion, Democracy, and Conflict Resolution in East Africa
• Part 3: Religion and State Formation in the Shadow of Apartheid in South Africa
• Part 4: Religious Pluralism and Social Change in West Africa