Christ was African but asexual
Denis Hills
THE AFRICANS: A TRIPLE HERITAGE by All Mazrui
BBC, f14.95
As a youthful professor of political science at Makerere university, Kampala, in the Sixties, Ali Mazrui made his name as a controversial and attractive guru. Those were the years immediately after uhuru when the pent-up frustrations of African students, teachers and writers flared up in a literature of protest against the old colonial system. The white man, they said, had tried to destroy their native culture and had humiliated and exploited the black people. The snake still had poison left in its fangs. There was the new threat of neo- colonialism: of economic dependence. In his Reith lectures (1979) Mazrui gave his talks emotive titles: 'A Garden of Eden in Decay', 'The Cross of Humiliation'. His present book is a rehash of the old fare. Alas, he has not improved his literary style since his transfer from East Africa to the university of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The language is American academese, the writ- ing turgid, the book brims over with glib generalisations and contrived analogies. The weapon is paradox, the thinking courageous and challenging but strong in bias. The west is made to squirm with guilt.
Professor Mazrui's subtitle 'A Triple Heritage' refers to three forces — indige- nous, Islamic and western. The black ancestors are still angry and Africans must recover respect for their own cultural origins. He has interesting things to say about the rivalry between Islam and Christianity in Africa. As a Muslim, his own sympathies are with Islam. European cartographers, he points out, erred in claiming the continent of Africa and the Arabian peninsula as two separate geog- raphical entities. Arabia, the centre of Islam, is an integral part of Africa (`For the purposes of this book I accept the Red Sea as one of Africa's boundaries — but I do so decidedly under protest').
`If eastern Africa was the cradle of man, northern Africa was the cradle of civilisa- tion.' Mazrui refers here to the civilisations that emerged along the Nile valley in today's Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia. Emph- asising African origins he asserts, `If the Semites were orginally African, so surely was Christianity, which was born out of a Semitic womb'. This of course will offend many susceptibilities. For if Christianity is to admit its origins it must bow to Africa. Indeed, man's first conception of a Sup- reme Being (God) originated in Africa among the so-called 'heathen' tribes.
Another debt owed to Africa is that she helped substantially to build the west's industrial civilisation, by providing slave labour to the mining of minerals (cobalt and chrome). But what Europe has failed to do in return has been to teach Africans the technology of production and the skills of efficient organisation. Europe's super- iority, as he puts it, has been built on the `black technological untouchables of the 20th century'.
In his chapter 'In Search of Stability' Mazrui admits the fragility of the state and democracy in modern Africa. The post- colonial state is 'overtly mighty but in- herently vulnerable — sometimes exces- sively authoritarian but in order to disguise the fact that it is inadequately authorita- tive.' In simple language there is little future for a multi-party democratic system in Africa or for long-term political stabil- ity. A leader's life may be glamorous and lucrative Call those new wives, the kilted bands, the dollars and Congo gold' as Idi Amin might have said) but (there have been exceptions) it is likely to be short.
Turning to the 'cultural and civilisational process of the tribal heritage' Mazrui asks if bribery, corruption and nepotism in an African context are true moral failings or simply time-honoured aspects of a diffe- rent culture — exemplary traditions, in fact, gestures of good will, rather than immoral. If black government is the suc- cessor of hated colonial administration, is it wrong to steal from it?
Mazrui has some remarks on sex. 'If Mary was a virgin, Jesus asexual, the priesthood celibate, what about the rest of humanity? Christianity manifested its dis- trust of sexuality by a rigorous code of morality.' African men, however, are naturally polygamous, 'less because they love women than because they love child- ren' — an assertion that begs many questions. Discussing (in his own quaint jargon) 'the sports-gender in relation to the work ethic' and to sexuality itself Mazrui says that though fitness implies being slim, sexual attractiveness in Africa is measured by fatness. African men prefer a fat wife. Her buttocks, enlarged by diet and cere- mony, bring honour to her husband. The warrior tradition — hunting and raiding that underlines sport in Africa has until recently kept women from the stadium.
Mazrui argues that the second world war in which the European nations slaughtered each other in vast numbers may be seen as a divine punishment for Europe's partition of Africa at the Berlin Congress of 1885. A grim historical debt has been paid with Europe's own partition into rival blocs: the Berlin Wall is its symbol. The war brought not only loss of prestige to the white gods from across the sea — in Burmese jungle fighting 'the European became just another frightened man' — but led to the liberation of Africa from colonialism. Yet Europe still has a potential for mischief in Africa. The struggle continues. Mazrui believes that the liberation of South Africa will not be won through the intervention of outside countries but by the black people itself through its own armed freedom fighters. By the beginning of the next century, he forecasts, 'the most humiliated blacks of them all are likely to become the most privileged and powerful blacks of the world.'
Mazrui's final remarks, on nuclear pow- er for Africa, are sketchy. He believes there should be some nuclear capability, e.g. in Nigeria and Zaire and in a black- ruled South Africa later. But only enough to force the west and the Soviet bloc to reconsider the whole nuclear dream and to give up their weapons.
Mazrui's technique of paradox and anal- ogy provides truths and half-truths and much nonsense. A phrase like 'the night- mare of colonisation' means nothing. His life as an academic, latterly as an exile in America, has distanced him from the common African in his rough setting — the peasant and the shanty-town dweller, the village askari, the beggar and petty thief. The noble Masai warrior pictured on the cover of his book with his wrist watch and red shorts and immaculate white shuka is the tourist's Masai. He may be physically flawed, with damaged eyes and worms. The polygamous wives, clean and smiling in their brilliant, matching dresses are likely to quarrel together and be jealous. The Acholi woman bending for hours over the baked earth with her hoe won't be lusciously fat. Cultural patterns and morals are fascinating but in the long run it is power and possessions, not scruples, that count.
One can discuss the printed word. But a television series with cunningly selected shots is another matter and will always distort the truth. 'Poor England' says the professor at one point during his conducted tour of Africa with camera crew in tow. `Gold, God, Glory! What obscenities have been committed in your name.' The bile seems to have got into the soul of this once charming Makerere lecturer since he has joined the international publicity machine.
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