Out of Africa

Africa featured prominently in the media this week. There was Tony Blair’s ill-fated trip to America to bring the Bush administration on board with his international plan for the salvation of Africa. Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown had his say, speaking perhaps too optimistically of what might be achieved when the G8 countries meet at Gleneagles. And Sir Bob Geldof weighed into the fray, announcing a series of world concerts on the scale of Live Aid, but on this occasion not to raise funds for famine relief, but to mobilise people to protest at the time of the G8 meetings that too little is being done by the richer nations to alleviate endemic poverty in Africa. There is talk of a million people taking to the streets of Edinburgh, an estimate which is making that city’s authorities rather twitchy.

All this mind you, at a time when Europe and the USA were indulging in a childish game of ‘my plane is bigger than your plane’. Both regions provide hefty subsidies and kickbacks to plane manufacturers Boeing and Airbus, but America has taken its case against Europe to the World Trade Organisation, initiating a process which the experts say will take years to reach a judgement and cost both sides billions of dollars – while Africa continues to starve. Given the state of Africa, this costly charade is scandalous.

Down at the Black Cock, the village pub, which (now that the ancient Church of St Michael keeps its doors firmly locked apart from Sunday service times) is the only community meeting place we have in Llanfihangel Talyllyn, conversation also turned to Africa. Paul the horse breeder, Charles the retired engineer, and Mark the shepherd were agreed about one thing. Nothing we do for Africa will work until corruption is rooted out of African political and economic life. What is needed is appropriate governance so that international aid doesn’t disappear into the bottomless pockets of African elites. When asked how our village stalwarts proposed solving that problem the view was that there is nothing we in Britain can do about it; it is for Africans to get their act together, which sounded rather like the familiar blame-the-victim syndrome.

Then the conversation turned into a discussion of African Christianity which has been receiving some bad press in Britain. There have been some terrible cases of child torture and abuse brought to the public’s attention. The torso of an African boy who had been mutilated was found floating in the Thames. The press corps muttered about child sacrifices and witchcraft, and went on to reveal that there are hundreds of African immigrant schoolchildren who seem to have disappeared altogether, provoking alarm in some quarters about the scale of the problem. One report suggest that many have been sent home to Africa to undergo Christian deliverance rituals, and that some are not heard of again. Then in a much-publicised case which has provoked changes in Britain’s child care and protection agencies, a young girl Victoria Climbie, whose relatives accused her of being possessed, suffered deprivations and beatings which culminated in her death.

This week brought yet another case to prominence when three adults who had branded an eight year old girl a witch and tortured her for months, were convicted of child cruelty in a British court. The girl had over forty injuries to her body: she had been cut with a knife, slapped, kicked and beaten; she had had chilli peppers rubbed in her eyes; she had been starved; she had been tied up in a laundry bag and told she was going to be thrown into a river. Investigations indicate that the family were members of an African protestant church which preaches the reality of Satan in people’s lives, and insists that those who display symptoms of possession or witchcraft be summarily dealt with. This particular child – known only as Child B in court – was the subject of a prophecy in the course of a church retreat which had branded her ndoki or witch.

Child protection authorities are careful to point out that there is no evidence of the prevalence of child abuse in African communities being any greater than in other communities but it is the Christian connection which is alarming many. Anyone who knows Africa is aware of the way that in many instances Christianity is a veneer overlaid upon traditional religion whose practices are maintained. Thus in my own work in HIV/AIDS education in Africa, there have been examples of men declared HIV positive who, upon returning to their village, have been advised by a traditional healer to seek a cure by sleeping with a young virgin, thus transmitting the virus to an innocent child. And in the case of ‘witchcraft’, some variants of African Christianity have adapted traditional practices which call for the body to be subjected to various forms of brutality in order to exorcise the evil spirits.

This is not true of all African Christianity of course. One thinks of the gallant support churches in South Africa gave to the struggle against apartheid, or of those churches which are engaged in impressive programmes of community development, or at the forefront of the battle against HIV/AIDS. But there are also churches which preach a ‘prosperity gospel’ to those trapped in endemic poverty or which seek to exercise power and control over the poor by preaching not the power of Christ but the omnipresence of Satan. And there are many unfortunate instances of the kind of corruption identified at the political level, also being manifested in churches. In one diocese where I have close friends, the former bishop declared that he was unable to pay his clergy while at the same time constructing an enormous mansion for his impending retirement. We don’t need the skills of Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot to shed light on that situation.

So you must pardon me if, when Archbishop Akinola of Nigeria declares that the future of Christianity lies in Africa’s hands, or when my evangelical friends insist that Africa provides a model for the renewal of Christianity in Europe, I prefer to take a more nuanced view.