I was having a conversation with my oldest son the other day
about my earliest experiences in the village and it occurred to me that for the
first and second generation of Nigerian Christians, there is an underlying
conflict in their lives. They grew up hearing about how witches control
people’s lives. But they also went to Church-sponsored schools where they were
told not to believe in witches. God, the “Supreme Being” is the only one to be
believed in. The conflict arises when you ask yourself “What should I believe
in? What I learned as a child or what I
learned later in life?”
I have noticed that most “young people” in my part of
Nigeria do not die of natural causes. People often ascribe their deaths to such
causes as “bad relationships” with envious coworkers or someone in the family
does not like them to make progress.
When a man is promoted at his job the first thing on his
mind is to find how he can do all those things he thinks that “rich men” do.
Therefore, he spends time and money on more beer and more eggs. This life style
makes him fat and/or obese. Being this way is wrongly perceived as the one way
to show others that “I have arrived”. The effects of such habits on the heart
are hardly thought of. However, when the man suddenly collapses in his office,
no one says that he died from bad habits. No! He died because someone in the
office was jealous of his success or some witch in the village was envious of
his apparent success and thus angry at him.
I have also noted that my relatives who proclaim themselves
Christians are often reluctant to practice Christianity in its pure form. Faced
with trials and tribulations, they fall back on what they learned when they
were young and innocent. Someone else
must be responsible for the trials and tribulations they face. They apparently
never review their own lifestyles to see if they might be contributing to their
current predicament.
Separating our original beliefs from those taught by the
missionaries is a difficult task. The missionaries came with the soldiers who
had been sent to bring our people under colonial rule. This colonial rule has some
glaring weaknesses that we have not been able to erase from our minds. There is
also the fact that the missionaries and their gun-toting countrymen might have
had different goals. Thus there are
lingering doubts about the authenticity of the missionaries and their message
of “Glory to God in the highest and peace on earth to people of good will”.
The doubt is re-enforced when we realize that these
missionaries come from countries whose practices and relationships to all
people are still questioned by all well-meaning folks. The recent happenings in
the United States reminds us all about the relationships between the white
population and the Americans of African origin. I still remember my experiences
when I first traveled around the US. In 1966, some of us from Nigeria had gone
to the Catholic Church in Champaign, Illinois. When we arrived at the church we
noticed that people were standing on the isles while there were still seats
available. Alas, these seats were next to the few Nigerians who had arrived
earlier. I left Nigeria when it was forbidden by the church for both sexes to
sit together. I arrived in the US to find that this “forbidden” rule did not
exist. Such “traditions” caused confusion in the minds of Nigerian Catholics.
It thus is difficult to determine what the right belief is and whether it is
right or wrong to toss out our initial or original belief.
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