Let us Pray

“When the white man came to Africa, we had the land and he had the bibles. He said “Let us pray”. When we lifted our heads we had the bibles and he had the land.” This is how Archbishop Desmond Tutu described the indefatigable link between western religion and colonialism. Certainly there are communities in Namibia who have retained their own beliefs and others who have assimilated elements of their own into Christianity, but there is no doubt that Jesus is booming in Africa. On Sunday I can hear the congregation of the Church of Our Saviour, singing and swaying like Christ’s return will be tomorrow. There are no empty pews here, no falling congregations, no churches turned into carpet warehouses or nightclubs, in fact more churches continue to be built, Evangelical, Baptist, Lutheran, Presbyterian.

I struggled to make sense of this. If Afrikaans was the language of the Oppressor then Christianity was his religion. The Dutch Reform Church, with the same Calvinist roots as our own, infamously using scripture to justify apartheid. I consulted the oracle, I asked my friend Iita.

“Oh yes I was very religious” he said. “I would pray many times each day.”  I pressed him on this, repeating how he had once said that the missionaries stole his culture. “It was necessary” he said. “When a child is frightened, when he can make no sense of things, when he needs protection he runs to his father. When the soldiers came to our house, when they held their guns against our heads my grandmother comforted us, saying that God would deal with these men, that he would look after us, and we prayed. When I was a young man so full of hatred, when the white garage owner in Tsumeb killed a man because he complained about his car, I prayed. If I didn’t have God I would have been like a wild animal, I could not have stopped myself.”

Iita no longer prays. “When I went to Britain I tried many churches.  I went to the Catholic church where they said prayers written by someone else, I went to the Church of England and watched the Boys Brigade marching, I went to the Baptist church and the Evangelical church. To Africans, God is white, yet in Britain, the people don’t believe. It was in Liverpool I lost my faith.”

Two years ago, a friend of mine was in Malawi when a statue of David Livingstone was unveiled. The guest of honour was no other than Nelson Mandela. Pulling the cover from the statue, President Mandela referred to David Livingston as Africa’s first freedom fighter. In Windhoek there is a street which was renamed in honour of the Reverend Michael Scott, the British clergyman who worked so bravely and so closely with Chief Hosea Katako against South African rule. And recently, the state funeral of the Reverend Hendrik Witbooi , the first deputy prime minister of the new Namibia, a much loved man and the grandson of  Kaptain Hendrik Witbooi  leader of the Nama peoples in the genocidal war of 1904-07 when the God fearing German army killed half of the Nama and 80% of the Herero people.

Waiting for Cameron and Eilidh last week, my eye was caught by the posters on the bus shelter. There was notice of a concert by Gazza, a big hip hop star, details of a fashion show, SWAPO posters urging all to vote for President Pohamba, and a picture of a smartly dressed young man in a three piece suit, “Apostle Daniel D. Double Portion. Fresh anointings.” It read  “Jesus is performing miracles today. Bring deads, cripples, deaf and dumbs, HIV/Aids, oppressed. Katatura Community Centre.” For some reason I thought of the time that Cameron, just six, had asked me if Rabbie Burns and Jesus were friends. Somehow, here in Africa, the question now seems a wholly reasonable one.

Alan