The Communist
Clergy
5/5
AFRICA & JAPAN
...
AFRICA
The missionaries usually
equated non-western cultures with degradation, barbarism, ignorance
and darkness -
Robert Moffat
Robert Moffat was a Scottish
missionary known for his efforts to improve local living standards in
Africa. His son-in-law was the missionary-explorer David Livingstone
(1813–73). This is how theological history would like to remember
him. In reality, he took land that belonged to Africans and enslaved
them. His son-in-law David Livingstone believed that the missionary
work had an important cultural role of leavening the alleged
primitiveness of African society with Christian western culture. They
both wanted Africans to denounce their culture and adopt western
ways, progressively becoming a clerical class.
According to 1990 estimates,
41% of Africa's 550 million people were Christians. The percentage is
much higher in countries south of the Sahara. Sub-Saharan Africa is
predominantly a Christian continent. The expansion of Christianity in
twentieth-century Africa has been so dramatic that it has been called
'the fourth great age of Christian expansion'. 1 in 5 of all
Christians is an African.
The missionaries who visited
Africa considered the traditional religious beliefs and traditional
customs inferior. It had to be done away with before the acceptance
of Christianity. They specifically targeted rulers to expand their
influence significantly. The missionary pioneer was the imperial
pioneer.
Missionaries taught their
converts to associate colonialism with Christianity, civilization and
the overwhelming superiority of European weapons and warfare. Efforts
were focused towards weakening the traditional authority, its values,
being and potential, and thus, they supported the colonial process in
their evangelization drive. They insisted that their converts to
Christianity should also adopt the western cultures as part of their
religious life.
John Philip of the London
Missionary Society who worked as a missionary in South Africa in 1820
and as superintendent of the London Missionary Society in South
Africa until 1850, argued that the source of the problem in Eastern
Cape was not the wickedness of the Xhosa, but that both the Boers and
British farmers had taken their land. The expulsion and displacement
of the amaXhosa from their original ancestral land was a wound that
went deeper than the struggle for agricultural land, as the land was
associated with the burial places of revered ancestors, and kraals
served as temples for sacrifices and other rituals. Sub-Saharan
Africa has known diseases and epidemics that plagued the people of
this region for centuries before the introduction of medical science.
In African thought, good health is regarded as equal to life itself,
which is why health is among the highest aspirations of black
Africans. Christian missions have introduced western medical,
surgical, and public health methods. It is true to say that the
African health landscape changed for the better, there was a decline
in child and maternal mortality rates, and an increase in the life
expectancy of all Africans.
Another level at which the
impact of Christianity proved to be detrimental was its undermining
of women's roles in religious leadership. The missionaries' preferred
a model of the family that was ‘male breadwinner, dependent
housekeeping wife and mother, dependent school-going children’.
Women were socialised to accept that a woman who took on the
masculine role of participation in public life was considered to have
renounced the feminine virtues of silence, reticence, modesty and
most significantly, chastity.
In South Africa, racial
discrimination started in the church itself. In the 19th century,
certain Dutch Reformed members' discriminatory behaviour led the
Dutch Reformed Church to introduce separate Eucharist services
severely compromising African human dignity. This decision was
founded on the demeaning misconception, held by some white
missionaries and their masters, that Africans were either sub-human
or animals.
Missionaries such as W.C.
Willoughby claimed infallible superiority of the white race, culture
and religion. They claimed to smooth cultural contact between the
colonizers and the colonized. Any idea of social and political
equality between the Bantu and the Europeans was unthinkable. The
modus operandi was to create a servile clerical class. Missionary
education was used as a great weapon to confuse people's minds, it
reinforced colonialism. It became an instrument to destroy people's
cultural values. Missionaries were seen as forming part of the new
trading and political network that was spreading from the south. The
mission stations were situated close to the local Chief's settlement.
They gradually became trade centres, thus building a network of nerve
control.
BOTSWANA
Botswana was monotheistic
from time immemorial, believing in a single Supreme Being called
Modimo, literally
meaning the one who is supreme and above. Missionaries forcibly made
Tswana religion resemble a morass of bizarre beliefs and practices of
a people generally believed to be savages and primitive (the opposite
of the missionaries who represented European civilization). John
Campbell, the pioneer of Tswana missions, saw the 'great end' of the
London Missionary Society to be 'the conversion of the heathen and
the promotion of their civilization.' Botswana was subdued by
colonialism education and trade. Its impact softened the hearts of
Botswana towards Europeans and consequently brought them under their
power and influence.
While missionaries were
responsible for introducing young people to reading and writing
skills, as well as teaching women sewing, baking, hygiene and the
nursing of the sick missionary education those educated in missionary
schools received a western-styled education which did not aim at
preparing them to be political leaders of their country, but at
taking up subordinate positions in a colonial system. Access to
missionary education was controlled by the missionary bodies
themselves. To receive education one had to become a Christian and
adopt western values of dress etc. Missionary education, therefore,
was first used as an agent of change. It was to destruct and
reconstruct African culture, tailored to own needs.
JAPAN
Christianity touched Japan
in 1549 when Francis Xavier arrived with a group of missionaries in
Kyūshū. He had been made in charge of the Goa Jesuit mission back
in 1541. The visitors were impressed with Japan. Kyushu became the
hotspot for lordly conversion. He returned to Goa two and a half
years later to resume missionary duties in Bharat. The first big fish
was lord Omura Sumitada (1533-1587) who held territories in
northwestern Kyushu. In 1570, Sumitada opened the port of a small
fishing village, Nagasaki, to the Jesuits.
The Jesuits found their
first most powerful ally in Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582), the first of
Japan’s great unifiers who began to patronize the Christians for
Portuguese guns and cannons. Nobunaga never converted, but he
certainly had no love for Buddhist institutions either. He had spent
eleven years fighting the ikko-ikki,
a type of militant Buddhist group. In January 1597, Toyotomi
Hideyoshi, a Japanese Daimyō and Japan's second great unifier, had
26 Christians arrested, tortured, mutilated, paraded and executed in
Nagasaki by public crucifixion.
In 1614, Tokugawa Ieyasu
commanded the missionaries to leave the country at once. Japanese
converts were ordered to renounce their faith. Anti-Christian
measures became harsher under the third Tokugawa shogun, Iemitsu, who
took power in 1623. The last straw was the Shimabara Rebellion of
1638, a Kyushu peasants protest marching under the Christian banner.
It brought a blood-soaked end to the 'Christian century'.
The main driving force
behind Christian proselytization in 16th-century Japan was the Jesuit
trade. Economic activities brought huge profits to Daimyō (feudal
lords) but also involved the missionaries in the supply of weapons.
The missionaries were political figures with important economic and
military influence. They rapidly developed a powerful faction that
was impossible to ignore and grew extremely intolerant of Japan’s
existing religions.
The unyielding Jesuits even
tried adopting local customs. They limited their meat consumption but
they couldn’t be persuaded to bathe daily as the Japanese did.
There were generally hostile relationships between them and the
Buddhist clergy. They often accused Buddhist monks of being lazy and
sodomites. The Buddhists thought the Europeans were spreading lies.
The Meiji reformation in
1868 bred a new Japan. Its forward march into Westernization,
modernization and “civilization” could hardly exclude
Christianity, though it could not put many dents. Japanese chose to
stay true to their roots out of respect for ancestors. This was a
result of the loyalty which was weaved in Japanese society. They do
not care whether God exists or not. No wonder Xavier and his Japanese
hosts misunderstood each other.
No comments:
Post a Comment