Sunday, March 10, 2013
New
Gods for old
Further conversation with a young Ghanaian
male about his unshakeable belief in Christianity provides insights into
cultural dissonance. That is, between him and me and between him and his
traditions. There is little doubt in my mind that one of the reasons why
Africans take to Christianity with a fundamentalist zeal is that its rituals
are sacrificial and mysterious. His blood. His flesh. There is also the Old
Testament with its patriarchal, forbidding and vengeful God. Since the white
man brought ‘the book’, the new religion had the effect of breaking down social
infrastructures within tribes. Where once women ran commerce and saw to the
delicate business of maintaining the balance between labour and survival, the
imperialist empire builders, brandishing their words from God, would only deal
with males. Rupture followed. We see the consequences today, everywhere. And
now the men have guns and women and children become ever more vulnerable.
Fortunately, for the time being, Ghana is
peaceful and there are strong remnants of the old world co-existing with the
new. Women choose tribal chiefs. Land is still passed down the female line. But
the traditions are being eroded by land registry and other western business
practices which tend to discriminate against women.
Back to my young Ghanaian friend, the one
who laughs hysterically at the notion that I might not believe in ANY god! In
northern Ghana, he tells me, The crocodile Chief in the river has a ‘red cap’.
He will not kill humans. You can sit on him. He is a kind of godly
manifestation in the water. But kill any of his tribe and humans will die as a
consequence. He tells me another story. The tribal custom is to bury the umbilical
cord of every human birth in a particular spot. The Chief travelled to the US
and married a white woman whom he brought back. She set about, in a western
health and safety kind of way, clearing up this site of decomposition. Once
cleared the Chief’s body underwent encroaching paralysis; hands, arms, legs…. A
further myth or traditional reality is that before you die you must be
‘instructed’. If this happens then you can communicate with the living and vice
versa.
He tells me these stories with a curious
reticence which gives way to enthusiasm as I don’t deride them like the
Christian priests do. Pagan black magic. It reminds me of the extraordinary
nature of churches all over the UK. The believers stand, sit, kneel and pay
their respects to the One God and all around them are symbols of
pre-Christianity. The Green Man. Fornication. Images of Lilith who preceded
Eve. Bestiality. Christianity was the progenitor of imperialist (and
capitalist) subjugation of the old traditions. And it is still doing it
consummately well, here in Ghana.
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Labels: The repression of tradition and the imperialism of religion.
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