Vue aerienne de Kasongo-Lunda
VISAGES DU CHRISTIANISME NOIR: UNE RELIGION "PAIENNE" ?
Dianne M. STEWART, Three Eyes for the Journey .African Dimensions of the Jamaican religious Experience, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005, chap. 4-5
“Visitation” is an exploration of the African religion from the Jamaican perspective. “Communion” refers to the gathering of various theologies grounded in the African religious tradition. In both two chapters, the author studies the continuity and the meaning of that African religion yesterday in Africa and today in Jamaica. Kumina and Myal are one of the legacies from that African religion presented as a transformative power for the oppressed people. The main argument is that these religious practices of healing, empowering, protecting and so on… help people to resist the enslavement and the dehumanization with their consequences like the lost of identity, of history, of memory. They help to create a new worldview, to shape a new future and simply to survive as human being when white people reduce the slave into an instrument of labor. This is the general argument behind the meticulous details of the two chapters.
At the beginning of the reading, I was very skeptical –even dismissive- about the African religions. Not without any reason: these religions in Africa do not bring development and freedom; they are far from the Enlightenment which has brought science, technology and democracy and so… The evolution of religions from Durkheim’s perspective (cfr The Elementary forms of religious life) or from Eliade’s study (cfr The sacred and The Profane) demonstrates that these religions are about to die, that we are entering in a new dimension of religious consciousness. This evolutionary theory was the general assessment I was ready to make on these two chapters about healing, possession, deity etc… But I realized that it is a trap because what is at stake is the definition of the human being as agent of history, as creator of culture,as a master and an ally of the nature. It is a struggle for the recognition of the “Other” as a human being. White supremacy wants to dominate forever because it exists only by opposition to others and never by cooperation, dialogue and mutual respect. African history is plenty of white perfidy, betrayal and deceit. In order to dominate, they destroyed African culture and reduceed Africans and others to the status of beings without any human face. They even condemned the protest as a foolish attempt of avoiding progress. The studies of Durkheim, Eliade, the Western theologies are a process of legitimizing the anthropological impoverishment of Africans. We ended up by ignoring who we are, by dismissing our own inheritance and at the same time we remain the eternal aliens in the western culture, idolizing Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Rahner... and rejecting a "caricatural African tradition" painted by Tarzan and Tintin in Congo.
Since ten years I kept considering Congolese Christianity as the opium of people because Congolese has found refuge and consolation in prayers meanwhile they are just agonizing and dying like flies. Rather than invoking a dumb god, they have to fight for their own safety, to stand as one and to claim their rights. Their religion has become a sleeping drug to escape the nightmare of daily life. What is to blame is not religion as a social practice but the way it is practiced in DRC. Thinking about African religions in America, I am re-discovering how religion has been for the slaves a transformative power which mobilizes people and engage them in a battle of life or death (cfr Maroons in Brazil, Haitian revolution and so on…). The weakness of the Christianity of Congolese people is that it is an ‘Afrophobia’ or ‘Kongophobia’ which casts off their pride, rob their strength and makes them victims in search of God’s grace.
I have only one question: “How do we interpret today the God of Kumina, Myal, Bikhanda(to add a kongo religious practice) ? Show me the God you pray and I will show you who you are. If it is Yaweh, then we may wait for the liberation from people who enslave and yet impose a universal “God” escaping from their own cultural box. But if he is Black God called Nzambi Mpungu or Mvidi Mukulu, then we are back to our roots (Lucky Dube) and nobody will evict us from our own castle. Either we are stuck in the doctrine of special revelation either we move in the landscape of multiple revelations. People are still free to act with pride, intelligence and honour. There is a movie about Mohamed Ali “When we were Kings”. Where? In our lands.
Karma-Yoga
