Either/Or? Colonialism and Ancestral Worship
In response to last week's traditional wedding of President Jacob Zuma to his fifth wife, Thobeka Madiba, Christian Democratic Party leader Rev. Theunis Botha drew a comparison between traditional African "ancestral worship" and European "colonialism." It is ancestral worship "and not colonialism as some people believed", the Mail & Guardian reports, that Botha blames for keeping Africa "the continent in superstition and poverty." While many black African Christians--perhaps especially those of Pentecostal and Charismatic orientation--would not disagree with their white brother's indictment of ancestral worship, it is unacceptable that colonialism should receive such an easy absolution. On the contrary, it is precisely factors inherent to colonialism, and in the South African context also apartheid, which have further entrenched the ancestral worship Botha abhors.
It is now taken for granted in the best of Christian mission studies, for example, that western missionaries, infected with the secularism of their broader culture, were largely ill-equipped to preach a gospel which recognized and validated the needs of Africans to relate to the spirit-world. Consequently, rather than preaching the Christ "who became a life-giving Spirit" (1 Cor. 15:45) by virtue of his resurrection from the dead, colonial mission proceeded by seeking to discredit as "superstitious"--silly and irrational--Africans' sensitivity to the spirits; preaching was not so much for the Christ of the Bible as it was against the ancestors of African tradition. Faced thus with a gospel that did not accept their questions, many Africans stayed with the ancestors or, more commonly, sought to serve both Christ and the gods of culture--a contradiction in biblical perspective.
If the sin of colonial mission was more one of omission--the failure to apply the work of Christ to the daily spiritual realities of African life--then the sin of apartheid Christianity was one of commission--the exploitation of cultural differences for the purpose of separation between ethnic groups. As certain Afrikaner theologians at the mid-point of the last century were establishing an ideology of white supremacy in Christian vocabulary, the amaNazarites (perhaps the most well-known African Indigenous Church) were replacing Jesus in trinitarian-style creeds with their late founder, the Zulu prophet-healer Isaiah Shembe. Such a move demonstrated both a familiarity with creedal Christianity and a rejection of its central figure. For if Jesus was the Lord of whites who insisted upon their own superiority and the political system which guaranteed it as the design of God, then Shembe indeed might seem more quick to aid and worthy of devotion for those with whom he walked.
If, therefore, we cannot, as Rev. Botha does, separate ancestral worship from colonialism as the cause of Africa's problems, what shall be done? For starters, the beneficiaries of colonialism can repent, not in the debilitating guilt of inner turmoil nor with condescending gifts of charity, but in trying to understand the pain of their country's poor. In the process they'll hear a whole lot about the injustices of colonialism and ancestral tradition, and experience the compassion of Christ welling up from within.
