Locating Africa in Christian and Pan-Africanist dialogue The fact that Obi is arrested in Achebe’s “No Longer at Ease”, despite his seniority as a civil servant, shows that it is possible to fashion out new horizons for a corruption-free Africa in which those aboard the speeding gravy train blowing its sonorous whistle as it passes through the churchyard of societal hopes are brought to book for the greater good.
Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe

Stanley Mushava Literature Today
Monumental feats are prefigured by an awareness window whereby ideas ferment and flare up public sympathies for a particular cause.
Literature is among the principal framing chambers in which ideas are deliberated, debated and diffused.
Ideas merit greater investment than stockpiles of arms, considering the pen’s potency over the sword.
While people make history by responding to conditions in their immediate environs, books often come in as the interface by which people contextualise their experiences and as the mainstay which stiffens the spine of resistance.

It is impossible to have a deflated estimation of books unless one does not consider how “The Republic,” “The Rights of Man,” “On Liberty,” “The Wealth of Nations,” “On the Origin of Species,” “Das Capital” have pre-drafted history, notwithstanding varying degrees of authenticity.

“Mein Kempf” was immediately shelved as the manifestation of a disturbed and obscure convict’s mind. Ironically, a 15 million body count from Hitler’s failed project was to demonstrate that when ideas are not intercepted in the library, they will be reckoned with in the battlefield.

Africa’s awakening was proliferated as the continent came to terms with ideas which faulted its subjugation and dehumanisation under the imperial scourge.
Although the conditions had long subsisted, it took the facilitation of literature (in this case the written word generically, not just the creative arts) to ignite the revolutionary bonfire.

Two world views, Pan-Africanism and Christianity, currently command major stakes in the Africa discourse.
It is noteworthy, though, that several assumptions about the relationship of the two have been widely ratified without passing the test of authenticity.
Pan-Africanism and Christianity are generally perceived to be incompatible and mutually exclusive, at times hostile, influences while the latter is often ostracised out of public debate, based on allegations of guilt by colonial association and assumed lack of intellectual rigour.

In “Homecoming,” Ngugi wa Thiong’o complains about the contradiction between Christianity’s fundamental doctrine of universal love and equality and what he regards as its unholy alliance with colonialism.

Colonialism, notes Ngugi, was built on “the inequality and hatred between men and the subsequent subjugation of the black race by the white race”.
He also incriminates the faith for setting in motion a process of social change that facilitated tribal disintegration and supplanted social norms, ancient rites and indigenous religious practices.

These developments Ngugi decries as having robbed the soul of Africa, hence his well-known disclaimer “I am not a man of the church, I am not even a Christian”.
It can be demonstrated, however, that such repudiation of Christianity borders on a slipshod premise.

Christianity as a way of life and worldview must be evaluated on the merit of its own written values, requirements and standards as noted in the Bible, which Ngugi acknowledges as “love and equality”; not on the character of fly-by-night imposters, in this case, colonialists and racists.

To incriminate Christianity based on what a materialist group did in the name of Christianity is like levelling charges against Toyota Motor Corporation because a convicted robber used a Starlet as his get-away vehicle, or arraigning a cutlery manufacturer because a criminal used a kitchen knife to commit his crimes.

That, of course, would be a logical.
In Ngugi’s native Kenya, early post-colonial leaders like Tom Mboya and Jomo Kenyatta aheaped massive personal wealth with the benefit of public office, to mass disenfranchisement and in contradiction to the socialism they professed to champion, the same way Willowgate and Salarygate fat cats have conned Zimbabweans.

However, should one fault socialism, the rational method would be do demonstrate the shortfalls of its ideals, internally, and of its feasibility, externally, rather than base a critique on people who profess but contravene the fundamentals of the system.

Currently, there are mainstream churches that promote homosexuality, abortion and child molestation although the Bible unequivocally outlaws and anathemises such practices.

The renegade sects, not Christianity as an ideology, get the blame: plain and simple.
It is, for example, self-contradictory and distorted to claim, “It has been found that Mount Kilimanjaro is not as high as it was fabled to be because there is documented evidence that a Canadian tourist only managed to climb eleven metres.”

Yet this is what African writers consistently do by overstretching the missionary-settler complex ad-infinitum.
The other problem mainstream African literature has with Christianity is the latter’s moral certitude and canonical inflexibility – its aversion to ambivalence and syncretism.

Ngugi’s foregoing disenchantment, rather evocative of T.S Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi,” is prototypical.
Chinua Achebe concurs in a 1991 interview with Conjunctions: “Of course, I did have long periods of doubt and uncertainty, and had a period where I objected strongly to the certitude of Christianity – I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.”

He expresses alternative affinity for religions which recognise different gods and acknowledge “that you might be friendly with this god and fall out with the other one;” that one “might worship Udo to perfection and still be killed by Ogwugwu”.

“Such sayings and proverbs are far more valuable to me… than the narrow, doctrinaire, self-righteous attitude of the Christian faith. This other religion, which is ambivalent, is far more artistically satisfying to me,” Achebe says.

Settling for a religion is, needless to say, a matter of personal preference. However, moral certainty in a world view is not undesirable, as Achebe suggests.
As a matter of fact, it renders standards of accountability indivisible and uncompromising.

There is universal consensus in all religions that there is God, the departure-point being who that God is. For some it is the God who created the world; for others, the gods who were created by the world.

The latter deities are regarded convenient people because they are subservient to carnal impulses, condone the adaptation of truth to personal weakness and offer an excuse to evade moral responsibility.

Justice and truth certainly do not co-exist with ambivalence since ambivalence is an open-ended terrain.
Mainstream African literature subscribes to a world of dualities and abdicates from the stratification of right and wrong. This explains the contradiction and self-negation, for instance, in literature which exhibits nationalist fervor while bristling with divisive overtones and flaunts public integrity while indulgent of private decadence.

Intellectuals have also instituted a normative rift between religion and ideas. Religion is generally branded as a lower level of consciousness which only comes in as a referral sidebar in public discourse since it is assumed that religion cannot be rationally argued.

The implication is that religion and intellectual rigour are mutually exclusive domains.
Ideas, however, exist in both secular and religious domains and must be evaluated not for their sleeves but for their substance. Joseph Addison short-circuits the assumption that the musings of so-called free-thinkers are worthy more credulity merely by virtue of their being atheist or infidel.

Christian ideals which hold justice and charity to be the two arms of love, prescribe the righteousness which exalts nations and require moral accountability to God and to fellow men are what Africa needs more than the ambivalence, individualism and anarchy propagated in major African literature.

On the whole, repudiation of ideas based on geography is rationally bankrupt.
Marcus Garvey helpfully inquires whether the world must not accept Protestantism because Luther was German, if the US must reject democracy because Hamilton was not their native, or if the world should reject telegraphy because Marconi was Italian?

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