Cedric Mayson
SPIRIT LEVEL
Our children’s shoes lived in the car, put on going to school and kicked off on the way home. That changed when we went into exile and walked the frozen earth of London. But in the spring our youngest scandalised the neighbours by running down the street kaalvoet, saying: “I want to find my African feet again!”
Religion needs to do the same thing. Africa has dressed itself in foreign religions.
In Wits University stands a huge stone cross which Vasco da Gama erected to claim the continent for Christ 500 years ago.
Both cross and teaching were a long way from Jesus but have claimed a major place among us.
Islam came with Arab traders and Malay slaves, and domes and minarets decorate our cities and townships. Workers indentured to the sugar fields of Natal brought Hinduism, and now its adherents flourish in the professions and trade. Jews, Baha’is and Buddhists have wide influence.
They all came for economic and political reasons but invested a wealth of spiritual resources too.
None of them had any time for the spirituality of Africa. When Africans spoke to their ancestors (who they knew) as intermediaries between them and Qamata or Umvelingangi (who they did not know) this was condemned as ancestor worship and their spiritual life rejected as superstitious witchcraft.
But in recent years there has been a growing desire among people in all sectors to find our African feet. “We the people of South Africa … believe that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity,” says the Constitution, which is a religious as well as a political statement.
We need to find our own theological feet because religion not planted in indigenous soil is merely historical artefact.
Western Christianity has lost the authority of Jesus, and in the north has been rejected as inadequate. You can pick up a second-hand church for a song in Europe and turn it into a house, a factory or a filling station. They sell tickets for cathedrals which are now museums.
Fundamentalism turns dogmatic Western interpretations of scripture into a false gospel, and hymns have degenerated into charismatic doggerel with a hell of a beat that engulfs the emotions but strands the soul.
Jesus maybe, but do we need this?
Should South Africans’ concern for religious events in other countries inhibit a spiritual commitment to their own? Are some Jews and Muslims more committed to the Middle East than Africa?
Is something amiss when Hindu relationships are strained by divisions in India rather than united by issues in Africa? Should north, west and east take precedence for those who walk on African feet?
We are Africans, human beings from the south, who discover riches in all religion, but seek to liberate ourselves from things irrelevant to the necessities of our experience today.
This began with the emergence of the African Independent Churches.
Archbishop Ndumiso Ngada has said: “They began to realise that there was nothing at all in the Bible about European cultures and Western traditions. The African people were suffering from spiritual hunger. They found what they were looking for in the Bible but not in the white churches.”
The process has gone on. Black clergy were key figures in liberation theology and lead most churches today. Some are obsessed with denominational dictatorship like their colonial mentors, but others have an inter-faith vision which invites us to stride forward.
Bishop Mvume Dandala of the Methodist Church and the South African Council of Churches spoke in Nairobi in March on the challenges facing Africa. He said: “Something able to supersede the cut and thrust of politics has to be found … as a spiritual base to guide and inform the life of Africa.
“This sub-culture must be built on the bedrock of that which is beautiful in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, in the profession of other living faiths and in the heritage and milestones of Africa.
“The challenge stands for our theologians to unpack Christianity and redress the gospel in African thought patterns, if Christianity is to make a profound contribution … to … the transformation and healing we long for in Africa.”
Professor Joe Teffo of the University of the North believes there are “common basic truths found in religion that are basically African which would unify and enable people to participate in spiritual renaissance”, which he sees in the philosophy of ubuntu.
African societies placed a high value on “a humanism that found expression in a communal context rather than in the individualism of the west”.
Rick Turner, murdered 22 years ago, thought the same: “Community is a good in itself … it is the basic mode of human fulfilment.”
“The religious community should dedicate itself to a religious renaissance,” says Teffo, “to try to give a spirit, a dynamism of love to this fabric of humanity.
“The prophetic dimension of religion, its healing power and its ability to reconcile and unite communities should be embraced.”
Here we sit, building a new South African nation, with the tools of all religions to hand. Is it beyond our ability to link in unifying communities, to come together to tackle the real problems like an economy that makes most people poor, to replace the Western politics of contention with African politics of consensus, and recognise that the energy of spiritual integrity is far more important than a power suit, a cellphone and a BMW?
The time has come to find our own African feet – even if it does scandalise the neighbours.