Has Christianity been bad for Africa?
By Mathew Otieno.
“When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.” So goes a famous quote often attributed to either Jomo Kenyatta, the founding president of Kenya or Bishop Desmond Tutu, the late South African anti-Apartheid campaigner.
Annoying and tired as it may be, this idea, that Christianity was little more than the Trojan horse through which colonialism was smuggled into the continent, retains enthusiastic merchants even today.
It found loud expression in a recent viral video, in which Dr Arikana Chihombori-Quao, former African Union (AU) permanent representative to the United States, contends that, in order to set the stage for slavery and colonisation, the white man first sent Christian missionaries to subdue the African mind, teaching Africans that, for instance, “when you get slapped, turn the other cheek, and that your riches are in heaven.”
Now, I could go ad hominem right here and point out that Dr Chihombori was not only educated in the United States after high school, but made herself rich practising medicine there for 29 years, while Africa’s sick were tended by the same Christian missionaries she was excoriating. But I won’t, because Wikipedia already did this.
Muddled-up history
I could go even lower and let my reader in on the secret that not only did Dr Chihombori do precious little, during her time as ambassador, to obtain any real benefit for the continent, but was also sacked in 2019 on misconduct grounds; and that, when the AU, clearly trying spare her the embarrassment, kept those reasons private, she fomented such a backlash that the AU was forced to air the dirty linen. But I won’t, because the news media already reported it.
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