Transcription
The problem we face initially as um academic students is to use um our understanding of religion and education to interpret African spirituality, if there is anything called African spirituality. Let's just call it spirituality because you go to the Mongolians, you go to the Red Indians, you go into the depths of the Karu, you go into Australia, the Aboriginal regions, and even the secret, you know, people in the islands. They all have their own way, indigenous ways of speaking to their environment, harvesting their foods, treating each other, conducting their marriages, secret ceremonies around animals, sacredness of plants, the rivers, which might have got sacred spaces.
So spirituality for me is not an institutionalized form of belief system where there is one man sitting in the front, particularly this male chauvinistic patriarchal Christianity, which is all a male-dominated environment, basically. That's where they write the theology and using the Bible, women have found themselves on the periphery of the whole conversation because of the male-dominated patriarchal sort. But when it comes to African spirituality, it's a lifestyle. When we eat, it's a spiritual event. When we marry, it's a spiritual event. When we bury, it's a spiritual event. When rights of passage, basically, it is human humanity living in awareness, consciousness, constantly being aware that they are not alone as human beings.
To be going to the forest with chainsaws, cutting trees, you know, digging gold, pouring cyanide into the into the rivers, and you don't even know what you have done, what is the impact of your actions as they are impacting the ants, the worms, the fish, ultimately even the human beings themselves. So for me, spirituality, it could be a highest form of consciousness where a person is aware of themselves from inside. Who am I? How am I related to those on my left and those on my right? How do I respond to the air that I breathe? Do I pollute it? Do I cleanse it? How do I live with the water that I drink? Do I pollute it? Do I cleanse it? How do I walk up to the soil that gives me food? Do I pollute it or do I cleanse it?
Therefore, the human being, being aware that these three elements, which is the real trinity of African spirituality, which is our air, our water, and our land, which is the substance of which, which the African is aware is made out of these three elements, are revealed when you access them. When you're approaching waters, you're not just approaching a a river or a lake or a dam or a fountain or a falls. You literally have to submit yourself to the space and be aware that you are with the mother, the water through which you become. So you don't just jump in a pool and do whatever you want to do there. But some spaces are quite secret and the energy levels are higher. You may not come back. So there's a way of approaching these places.
When our fathers used to go hunting, you don't just get there with your guns and dogs and start chasing animals in the bush. You have to seek for permission to ask for even those animals. By the time you are supposed to be eating them, you have to talk to them. And the way it's for food and etcetera, and similarly so with their hair. So the African spirituality is is is quite simple but complex because it will only not combine awareness in terms of your food consumption, your relationships, and dealing with your environment, but it's actually this unity of the human life with all other lives that are around it.
Hence, when colonialism came and they found an African putting his hands on a cow, they said they were worshipping a cow. They found us kneeling in front of a tree, saying, no, they're worshipping trees. No, you don't know. We're not worshipping trees. We are talking to the trees. We are aware that we are connected to them. We are connected to them as such. We constantly are seeking for this connectivity. Hence, it is humanity living in harmony with nature. That is the best definition I can give you for particularly when I speak about African spirituality. It is constant awareness of environment, space, and the intricate interconnected relationship between my life and the environment that is around me.
Christianity is an adulterated form of uh religion which has multiplied itself into 37,000 churches, one Bible, one devil, one Jesus, and 37,000 divided perspectives of how to interpret that. Uh, Christianity needs spirituality. Spirituality does not need Christianity. Simply put, you can be a Christian, but in your Christian experience, you have going to eat, you're going to drink, you're going to need the soil. The question is, what is your relationship as a Christian with these elements? And if you think that African spirituality is demonic, then even the food you're eating is demonic, the air you're breathing is demonic, the water you're drinking is demonic.
Because intrinsically, for life to happen, we understand cause logically as Africans that you are not an island. You are part of the nature which is around you. Therefore, you nurture nature. So for Christianity to come around and say, we don't believe in all this, we believe in God, then okay, let's go to God. Then what did God do? God created. What did he create? He created elements. He created a homestead which we may call a sanctuary, which you may call an altar, which you may call a temple, in which the human being must survive in. And for Christianity to undermine the environment in which she finds herself and train her children that these things are not important, then you end up actually becoming a parasite to your own environment. You end up becoming a nuisance and actually you end up becoming a polluter of your own environment.
Therefore, being Christian does not mean that you are a spiritual being. Being Christian simply means that you're institutionalized to be living the colonial form of religion, which has to do with church leadership and your allegiance to a system gives you access to God. Whereas in spirituality, you don't need anything between you and the soil. You don't need anything between you and the water. You don't need anything between you and the air. You are as directly connected to your divine space, being, and expression as as an individual. You are a cosmos on your own. You you are.
And even the Bible, I wish I could start theology from scratch with the same Bible, who then go on to say, your bodies are the temple of the of of the Holy Spirit, the temples of God. And if your body is the temple, then why are you going to church? Because you're already in church. Is it where the very thing you're going to be looking for in a building? The Bible then says, it is in you. The Kingdom of Heaven is in you. And then it says, seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you. What does that mean? The first definition, the kingdom is in you. The second one, seek ye first the kingdom of heaven. Where is the kingdom? If the kingdom is in me and I am the kingdom, then I must seek first the kingdom of heaven within me and its righteousness, rightful living, living in harmony with everything else. And then everything else that you're seeking for will be added unto you.
So this whole external view of divinity being in the skies and being in the heavens is totally a confused concept of Christianity trying to interpret spirituality. Because then spirituality says everything is internal. It's within. And when you go from inside yourself, you will find everything that is inside is also outside. So it's the everything will be added unto you. You will finally be in harmony with everything else that you're looking for. So therefore, for me, the highest form of spirituality are the Bushmen and the Aboriginals who own nothing, but have everything. The bush is their pharmaceutical, the trees are their friends, the animals are their relatives, and they just walk and live in the abundance of everything. And no one can claim that I own this land, this this whole selfish thing, this this is mine. Then you must put a boundary there. You can't cross here. You can't cross there. And and then you end up with all these borders which become the politics of spirituality where we now begin to restrict natural living.
So Christianity has a short leg which does not touch the ground as it is actually planning to run to heaven instead of living on Earth. It's barbaric because the windows and the lenses through which they are looking at us from through the window, I mean, you you need to understand also the people who are defining this. They are the colonial missionaries and mercenaries who come to a space where one, the culture is different, the language is different, the expressions are different. You totally, you don't, you simply don't know these people. You don't understand them. And whatever you are saying, it is through the way in which you interpret what is happening from where you are coming from. So it's almost like a third window. You're not from inside, you're coming from outside.
So you would walk up to people doing their circumcisions, for example, if you don't know what they're doing, why they are doing it. You find people bearing each other, wrapping each other in skins and what, and you don't know why and how they are doing that. You find a woman putting her hands on top of a pregnant woman and the child is dancing and it's a bridge and then the child must start facing the right direction and don't understand exactly the science of what is happening. I mean, look at Africans conducting brain surgeries way before Cambridge and Oxford and Massachusetts even knew where the brain was. The Africans were already conducting brain surgeries, teeth extractions, cesarean sections, and stuff like that, using indigenous stuff and medicines.
And so when you, when you look at that, because it does not put on the white gloves and put on a mask and a swab and some clean things, we don't worry. Just take a knife, put it into the fire, and from the fire it is sanitized. Start doing the cutting. Only military people would understand that. Boom, boom, boom. People are shooting each other at war, and you have a gunshot. What do you do? Take your knife, put it into the fire, sanitize it, burn up the wound. All of a sudden, what is barbaric has become a science. So barbaric, barbaric language is not part of our dictionary. Let's use more gentle words such as organic, such as indigenous, such as, you know, culturally is done within the space of our own understanding.
So you cannot find me putting on cow dung on the floor and say that is barbaric. Only now do you understand that this is a thermostat. When it's hot, it is cool. When it is cool, it is warm. This is actually our sanitization center. This is our immunization center. The cow is eating all the herbs in the bush. And when you put this thing on the floor and I sleep on the floor, I'm smelling everything that is in the bush. And all the bacteria that are good for the body are already part of me. By the time I eat this cow meat, will not get me sick because me and this cow have been living together from cow dung to cattle to milk to what, so to meat is the unification and the purest of understanding of being adaptable to the environment. And and this cannot be barbaric. This is actually the highest form of science which has not been studied and had people taken enough time to study the science of how ants make their anthills. And when a storm comes, an anthill still stands, but a building built by human beings is falling apart. Then the question is, who is more intelligent? Who is more intelligent than the other?
And the African science, as it were, which you might call barbaric and primitive, has already started these small elements. So when they build their houses, these round huts, aerodynamics, when the wind blows, it's made out of mud and clay and etcetera, and it's it cannot be barbaric. It is the weakest link is actually our academic institutions because they've not been able to walk to these indigenous knowledge systems and then translate them into technology so that we could begin building cities that look like villages, using materials that look like villages, and in that we have been able to translate the knowledge of our ancestors into modernity and create a more sustainable environment.
For two reasons or three, if not more. Initially, the dominant culture always undermines the culture that it overcomes. And uh, you want your God, your way of doing things to become the way the people are doing things because otherwise I'm going to end up with tension. For example, must go to church on Sunday. So if we must go to church, everybody must go there. What if I must be going to my shrine? And you are a church and etcetera, then it creates all that. Number one is for control, basically, to create the community control that you need. Number two, the the African spirituality gave the colonial system a headache because it connected the African to other forms of power and functions that were outside of their common psyche. That men could chant in the night and what they were doing, they don't know. But when they come out of that chant, they are animals and they'll take pangas and face a gun and will not what happened last night. Is because they did some incantations, they did some psyching, they did some heat baths and etcetera, they literally super-boded themselves into other forms of humanity. And as such, even when they come back to war again, they wash it off. So they normalize.
We had all these sciences that are lying around. The way people take their oaths, you know, the oath of the white man, put your hand on the Bible or put it on the Quran, and after that, start lying. But if you should take the traditional oath where you're holding that rhino horn and you swear on your mother's grave, you swear on your sister, you you what, you would not find it easy even to open up your mouth and say something. And you you would then begin to understand that the environment and the background in which the colonial system is approaching the African is a complex species. He's quite deep in his own ways and it seems like he he will snap off and you don't know what exactly he is thinking.
So religion becomes a very interesting academic institution that turns down their anger. If a man clips you on one cheek, you know, give him the other cheek. If a man takes your jacket, give him the waistcoat also. Don't worry about what they're doing to you. God will deal with them. We're going to go to heaven one day. They're going to live together happily ever after. The angels will be singing for us. So don't worry about these earthly things. There is another home somewhere in heaven. And while we are looking forward to be going to heaven, we are satisfied with a cottage below, a little silver and a little gold. Don't worry about poverty. When Jesus comes again, you equalize things. And the theology then begins to do the brainwashing of the mind, removes the African from his land, removes him from the sources of power, makes him a servant and a slave instead of a master and an owner.
So Christianity actually is a is a brainwashing institution, religion rather, it's a brainwashing institution that unplugs the African away from his sources and centers of power and then plugs them in into the colonial God. And the colonial God allows the African to become a slave of the one who has colonized him. And the god of the master becomes the god of the servant. But you look at it carefully, the god of the master and the god of the slave are never the same for what their concept of God is and what our concept as African of God is. It cannot be that your God comes to my house and tells you to kill me, rape my wife and children, and take my land, and I must be looking over to God and say, please God, can you help me do this?
The whole Bible is full of war, fighting over land, from Genesis to Revelation, gardens, wars. So if the Israelites are allowed to fight for their land, quote unquote, that is if they really Israelites, conversation for another day. But if they are allowed to fight for their land, what makes you think that the Messi, the Shaa, the Kanga, the Venda, the Russians, they cannot fight for their land also? No, it's only the British that must expand their kingdom. It's only the French that must expand their kingdom. And all of you, you don't have a kingdom, you must report to us. And this this is a kind of colonialism we're talking about.
But from a spiritual perspective, that once you remove the religious uh blanket on our faces and we face the spirituality in its truest sense, to practice it, you need land to practice it. You need waters to practice it. You need mountains. And when you remove these things away from the African, the question is, where does he go to practice the very essence of his own spirituality? And it was convenient to move the mind of the African away from centers of power to a church. And when they get to church, they find a bishop or pastor, a priest will be feeding them some stuff. Open your mouth and put some things and give them some wine there. And then people can walk around. And this is the representative of God on Earth. And it's, um, it's, it's rather sad that for 500 years we've had to eat this garbage and rubbish to to this extent that we end up worshipping two bags of cement and a bucket of paint. This is Mary, the mother of Jesus, must come there and kneel down and worship an idol. You were saying it's barbaric. Now let's talk. What is barbaric? You are kneeling in front of a a bag of cement and kissing it. And the African is kneeling in front of a tree and kissing it. What is the difference? You are eating the blood of Jesus and eating his flesh and drinking his blood. Is barbaric? I'm eating my chicken. It is barbaric. What, what am I missing here? What, what which part of this is confusing to anybody here? You are with your rosary, counting your Hail Mary, the Mother of God. You know, here's a woman with her beads on her waist, counting her monthly cycles and periods. What is the difference?
What is barbaric and what is so ultimately, we want to measure barbaric attitudes in terms of what do people do? I think those that are barbaric are those that disrespect other people. They find them in their own cultures and you bring your guns and shoot them. That's being barbaric. You shoot animals in the bush, 10, 15, 20,000 animals. What for? I want the horns. She goes, then you cut the horn and leave the animals. You're not even eating them now. Not that's barbaric. You take cyanide and put it into the rivers and then says three bars of gold. Now the British government gets so much gold in their warehouse. Gold that economy is strong now. That's barbaric because where this gold is coming from. And you sit around putting decks of gold and diamonds etcetera, and you go back to the places where these diamonds have been dug and the whole forest have been destroyed just to pick up a piece of stone. Now that's barbaric. To wake up in the morning and create atomic bombs, nuclear bombs, and drop them on each other, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and etcetera. Now that's barbaric.
And when you look at a nation that does not understand the environment, when you look at a people that don't understand nature, when you look at academic institutions that produce destroyers of environment, now those people that are doing those things, I think they deserve that title of being called barbaric. But the African cannot be barbaric. You can take a coin, coin, and drop it into the toilet. You can take a coin and drop it into the bush or put it in the dustbin or put it in the mud. But when you pick it up and you clean it up, its value has not changed because of where you placed it. The African, in our bloodlines, in our systems, does not matter where you have placed us. The melanin within us remains pure and good.
All it takes for the young people is to know first of all, identity. Who are you? And after knowing yourself, we need to do what we call walking the ancestral spaces. Like just take the people to the Mau battles, let them walk around those spaces. Take them back to the forests, let them land, sit in front of the elders, have those downloads. Something mysterious happens when you get to a place where you've never been, but your forefathers were. Everything that they saw is in you. And when you see it, you will re- and the remembering is not as of memory. You re- you rejoin, you reconnect.
So the issue of eating indigenous foods, it's not just for eating indigenous foods. It is to make sure that our taste buds become motherboards of collecting information that again resurrect our mindsets. Going places and dressing in this way, singing in this way, chants and drums and all these things are not just for entertainment. They are actually intended to be the connecting cables so that the African mindset can begin to get the signal which it used to get again. And it's a beautiful, beautiful space. The young people of our generation find themselves in. Lucky, if I should say that. The old people like ourselves have come out from the pulpits where we've been hiding for all these years. And for the first time, we have begun to rally a campaign toward self-actualization, indigenization, and self-determination.
Whereas Africans were saying, you don't need to go there to Mecca to find God. He doesn't need to go to Jerusalem to find the grave where Jesus was buried. Maybe this thing is not there or over there. This thing is right over here. And how do they help themselves to find their truth? They need to find themselves. It starts off right here in their hands. Who are the two grandmothers? Who are the two grandfathers who gave birth to your mother? Who are the two grandmothers or the two grandfathers that gave birth to your father? So there is your mother, there is your father. When these two families come together, there you have your ancestral lines. And there is the first diamond you find, the birth canal through which all of us have come into existence. Putting your hands together becomes the first form of understanding literally, who am I and where I'm coming from? This becomes my identity, both maternal and paternal.
Look at genetics. You're already teaching science of how families are formed and how children are born and etcetera. It's all right here within our hands. And by the time we are telling people now, you're going to get married also. You want to go through there as a young man, but are you aware of what is hiding behind this person, this individual? We begin to teach this knowledge system, the simple, simple forms, which is the natural form. And this whole thing of going to school and you're teaching children in departments, you're going for English. No, English is finished. Go to history. History is finished. Got this this compartment kind of education is not is not real. It is fake. You end up being called a professor or a doctor because you have stayed too long in one class.
But look at this. This mathematics, and inside mathematics, this is this is biology, this is sociology, this is cosmology, and all of it in one sentence that you would actually allow your mind to run between here and there. And this, this, this, this for me is chemistry in in the highest form. How do you combine? And what chemicals am I made out of? I'm made out of these ones. I'm made out of this one. So when I talk the way I talk, the question is, amongst these that make this, who amongst these had these qualities and how are they manifesting themselves? And if you go behind these four here, you find a whole bunch of 16 that is behind, and you expand it. So for you to understand the funnel of information and data that has been funneled through ceaseless ages of time to me who is sitting in front of you today, you're not looking at me in the present, but you're looking at me in the past. For everything that I am was before.
And I think only doctors have come to understand that when you go to them and they ask you, do you have a history of diabetes in your family? Do you have a history of cancer in your family? Or did your mother also have fibroids? You know why are they asking that? Because they know that the diseases of your parents can be, will be, transmitted from one generation to another generation. So is biology only good for diseases? So only thing that can be transmitted are diseases? What about brains? What about intelligence? What about spirituality? What about skills? And so biology has taught us only a tip of an iceberg. But the creation of the human being, the birth of a child, has much more in it than what meets the eye. Literally, the DNA is the biggest microchip that the world has ever seen. Gazillions and trillions of data from shapes of teeth to color of beard to body marks, symmetry on the head, shape of the nose, how big must his cheeks go, and the body structure, how must it look, how will the brains function, what kind of memories are we sending forth?
Ever wondered as a mother, you have a child hardly two, three years old, and they're scared of snakes, and yet they've never seen a snake? And others are not scared of snakes, they will actually go and hold it. Why? Because in their ancestral memory, they could be carried trauma from one generation to another generation. This is why we are scared. Politically speaking, when we talk to the Western world, particularly the colonizers, you abuse one generation, you kill them, you slaughter them, you butcher them, you indoctrinate a few of them to to follow your ways, and they follow. But the trauma that you have already sent into the bloodstream of this generation, it will come out another year, another place, another space. And what will happen then becomes disaster.
We need to live in harmony with each other and not cause trauma to each other. Because trauma, even also, has a way of being transmitted from one generation to another. How did the youth work with this? Work with your trauma issues. Work with your environment. Understand where you're coming from. Study yourself. Know yourself. It is the highest form of spirituality. The path of growth happens at various levels. It, um, it's a spiritual encounter. Where I worked in the religious space for almost 33 years plus, there's a bishop there. I climbed the ladder of religious hierarchy very swiftly and fast. And you get to the top. And my mind never stopped searching. In as much as my career was doing fine, my salary was fine, but these men, they had told me about this Jesus. I was still looking for him and I could not find him.
So when I was young, I was told that he loves me and he cares for me. And many times I was looking for him underneath the church pulpits to find out. They say, come to Jesus, come to Jesus. People go to Jesus and go. They want to find out after church, where is he hiding? Behind the pit here? And I never found him. You grow up and then you are taught to read. No, he's in the Bible. He's in the Bible. So this God is actually hiding in a book. So I went on. I read that book more than 18 times from this to that side, and even the other day I read it from the back to the front, a bit of Hebrew there, a bit of Greek there. Still could not find this fellow. And then you start, you being told, no, when you are in theology school, now you need faith to believe. You need faith. Then you start trying to find out how do you believe in what you have not seen? And you look for that. And by the time I graduated and I started working, I was still asking, where is he?
And then I was told, no, you can't ask us where is he. You must not be telling us where is he because you you have been to school to study this thing. So I just, I finally, you know, to stop a little bit and, um, go back into myself. I had my own visions. I had my own dreams. I had my own encounters in various spaces with, uh, things of, uh, supernatural order that then moved my mindset from the common things that I thought never existed. And now to come face to face with them, it changed everything. The the whole file of, uh, religion went into the dustbin. And all of a sudden, I decided I need to start looking after myself. I need to start learning afresh. I need to start questioning things. And those of you have been following on my Facebook page are 2011, 2012, then I started asking these complicated questions. And and people saying, no, he's backsliding now, he's becoming a heathen, he's becoming Antichrist. But for me, it was my journey.
So it is both for me being an academic journey, but most especially also it has been a spiritual awakening of, uh, learning and knowing who I am, where I'm coming from, and where I am going. And above all, the satisfaction of of of life, the reduction of anxiety, and beginning to have a purpose and the reason for being. Uh, it changed, it changed quite a lot in my own spirit. And I should say, I don't know everything. I'm just a student of life. But it's a journey that I'm prepared that we walk with other young people and be an example because each journey is different. So I don't want to become prescriptive, say, do this like they do in in church, no, believe in Jesus, no, get baptized, then you're a Christian. I can't say that. All I can say is that find your truth, walk your path. Some will end up in engineering, some will end up in midwifery, some will end up in cosmology, some will end up in indigenous healings, some will end up as teachers, some will end up as president. But when you find the reason for being and you connect with the purpose to which you've come into existence, who is, who is channeling what energies are you channeling? What are you bringing to the table? When it arrives at the table, you the happiest person in life. For for me, that is the real purpose of life.
So how did I get to where I am? When I started looking for the reason why am I alive after baptizing all these thousands and opening all these churches? So what is this all? No, they're going to go to heaven and then they're going to come back again. Then if God wants us in heaven, then why did he put us on Earth? Now it's a big logistical nightmare to kill us, move us to heaven, and bring us back here again. Some of these things stopped making sense altogether. And as I am right now, I should say I don't even know how my life will end, but I will not stop learning.