Missionary zeal

Missionary Zeal

Over the years, this old atheist has had a lot of contact with the missionary project. Even in CUSO and the Peace Corps there was always a nucleus of evangelical types who saw soul saving as central to their work in Africa. One of my first contacts was with an evangelical southern Baptist named Billy Joe Wheeler, whose rich Texan drawl when applied to the Chewa language was the cause of great hilarity among us Canadians. Down the road from my school near Mitundu was Mlale mission with a hospital and school run by an order of Quebec nuns and a church run by an old Quebecois priest whose name has long slipped from my memory. All the Catholics spoke excellent Chichewa and saw their schools and hospital as a service to the population, but in the end were trying to save the souls of the Africans.

I enjoyed the nuns, because for a couple of years, once a week I pedaled out after school to teach English to their African novitiates and the old ladies fed me a good meal of meat and potatoes. Then I would drop over at the old boy’s place and exploit his supply of rye whiskey and his news of hockey scores from Canada. They were very nice people and their hearts were full of compassion and the desire to help the people they had dedicated their lives to serving.

For years I grappled with my disdain for the church and the arrogance of the missionary project and the fact that the left just wasn’t there on the ground in poor countries. It was easy to join in solidarity with South African workers who had an economic system with an organised workforce and a militant communist movement that I had an affinity to with its anti-church, secular humanism. By comparison in poor countries like Malawi, trade unions were few and far between and the peasantry was extremely hard to arouse to any form of resistance to their exploitation. In the place of the left and in the absence of government services, the churches have become a dominant force. In rural Malawi, churches far outnumber economic enterprises or public services like schools and hospitals.

The churches provide something around 50% of health services in the country and run large numbers of schools. Under colonialism they provided way more services than the colonial government. In the meantime, where was the left? The struggles of Latin America and South Africa were easy for them, but they were largely absent in the poorer peasant based agrarian countries. They did not prosletyse, their message was absent and they provided no services like the religious groups did to attract their converts.

My problem is with the evangelical mission and its enormous arrogance. It is still very imperial in goal. The Zimbabweans used to say during the struggle for independence that when the white man came to their country, they owned the land and the whites had the bible. The whites taught them to close their eyes in prayer and when they opened them they had the bible and the whites had the land. Not much has changed.
The pre-Christian religions of Malawi have been completely denigrated and the most conservative forms of religious observance have been imposed and are referred to as Malawi’s traditions. The residual Victorian mentality dates back to the period of Livingstone and colonialism when the religious project involved the 3 C’s – Christianity, Commerce and Civilisation. Anything less than white as England was part of the ‘white man’s burden’ to correct. Now all the African elites wear suits and pray before meetings and what little is left of the pre-contact religions end up as traditional dances like the famous gule wamkulo with its masked dancers who are trotted out for public performance as quaint relics of another time.

I sat on the plane from Lilongwe to Addis Ababa with a very nice man from Arkansas, a Baptist who had been on a 2 week mission to evangelise and baptize as many people as possible. They spoke to over 15,000 people through the Salima district and brought them the word of the lord so they could be saved. I am sure that the good people of Salima would have preferred, economic progress, jobs, schools and hospitals, but these Christian believed that their way was so superior that they had to come and convince these poor people to convert to their belief. I was polite and friendly at the level of conversation, but led him away several times from the opening he was trying to make to talk about their mission. I have no time for the missionary zeal.

Finally, he asked if he could show me pictures of their work and I very politely declined. He asked if I believed and I told him that I did not. He asked about the state of the faith in my homeland and I explained the demise of the traditional churches in Quebec. I explained to him that I had been around for a long time and that I really did not want to see what he had been doing. I was as polite as I could be and he was very gracious about stepping back at my request, but it is not always such a graceful outcome.

He was not alone. On the same plane were a large gang of German Servants of Love mission, and some Brits with t shirts proclaiming that they believed in the right to life and that “I am glad that you were born” with a little foetus curled up in a womb. They had clearly been in Malawi to ensure that the abortion laws were maintained. Two elderly nuns tottered off beside me. It has often occurred on these trips that one of the participants in my tours will end up seated beside someone full of the zeal who will pray for them and try to get them to see the light.

Meanwhile the primary school teachers still teach about how Livingstone brought civilization to Africa, but know nothing of their pre-contact religious roots, and enthusiastically emulate anything western as superior to anything they possess. Illegal abortions wreak a horrible havoc on young woman, because their churches forbid legal safe abortions as a reproductive choice. The poor peasants are taught to pray and love a god that clearly doesn’t love them and the rich elites use religion as one more tool to cement their power over the poor.

Missionary zeal – bah humbug.