Dear God, Are You A Racist?

Dear God,

In 1973, William R. Jones, a prominent black American theologian, published a book in order to answer this unstated but dominant question that nagged black theologians. Given recent events in Kenya, I think that his question “Is God A White Racist?” remains pertinent, and so I have decided to ask you the question directly.

Last Sunday, our media organized prayers for peace in our country. The prayers were rather interesting. None of them were conducted in indigenous religions or in African ethnic languages other than Swahili. Instead,  Christianity, Islam and Hinduism were the only religions given a platform.

Is there a written rule that African indigenous religions, beliefs and prayers cannot be used for peace because they are reserved for young men swearing to kill people, rape women and loot property? Was the Kenyan media your divine ambassador sent to remind us that you only inhabit praises that come from religions whose origins are outside Africa? Were they transmitting a message from you that African religions kill, steal and destroy, but you, whom African Kenyans have known for only a little over a century, miraculously provide peace in abundance? I would like an explanation from you as to why we seem so afraid of hearing prayers in each others’ languages, yet we kill in the name of the same cultures from which those languages emerge.

If the media presented you accurately, you may also have a slight credibility problem on your hands. We were christianized through the same indigenous languages that we are now afraid to pray in on national television. When your soldiers – or rather, missionaries – came to Kenya from Britain, Italy and Scotland in the 19^th century, they said that Ngai, Nyasaye, En’kai, Mulungu and other deities were actually the God of Israel, only that we did not know it. They called upon us to replace Mount Elgon, Mount Kenya or Kilimanjaro with the Mount of Olives and Golgotha. Instead of Nam Lolwe, now dubiously called Lake Victoria, we were told to think of the Sea of Galilee. Why is it that you prefer to reveal yourself through places we have never been to, and probably have no hope of ever reaching?

You seem to have made a concerted effort to distance yourself geographically from us, yet you still demand so much in terms of our soul, our bodies, our history and even the environment which you apparently despise. Your soldiers took our land, gave our women inferiority complexes about their bodies and turned our men from protectors into predators of women and children. Now the religious soldiers/missionaries have been replaced by tourists who visit our sacred places such as the kayas that Mekatilili fought to protect and the snowy mountain tops where Mwene Nyaga resides and provides Kenya with some of its water. The tourists are no longer satisfied with invading the privacy of the animals that our folk tales and myths taught us to respect. These days they seek to fulfill their sexual fantasies with Kenyans and have an increasing appetite for children. After all this destruction and mutilation that were launched in your name, why are we still expected to pray to you for peace?

Or do you manifest your peace through the mayhem that we now witness? Maybe you have double standards that we have not yet understood, or that we refuse to accept. Maybe when you speak of peace for Africans, you mean the exploitation of our people and our misery in the name of philanthropy. And when you speak of peace for Europeans, hence the choice of the white flag as a symbol of peace, you mean that they can enslave us, colonize us and exploit us without worrying about protest from us. Maybe it is you who sends the World Bank, the British and American ambassadors to give us pep talks on peace and democracy despite their blood stained history. Or maybe the confidence with which they lecture us and interfere in our lives is proof that your all-powerful blood is capable of wiping all sin-stained slates squeaky clean.

And why is it, dear God, that you require us to follow a man who trod the soil of the Middle East two millennia ago, yet you do not allow us to have a historical memory of our own continent that is more than a mere five years old? Our children born after independence are too young to be suffering from amnesia that they display in the media. Our journalists seem to have learnt in school that they must run to the British and Americans for lessons on democracy. Watching any news bulletin in the evening, one would think that Europeans whose plans to bask naked on our beaches have been slightly altered are suffering as much, if not more than, the hundreds of thousands of farmers whose milk and other agricultural produce are going to waste, or the hundreds of thousands of Kenyans who have lost their family members, property and homes. The media laments about the poor, but they ironically also sympathize with rich hoteliers who are a small minority in Kenya and who do not earn the country as much income as the ordinary Kenyan farmers and businessmen.

Our journalists seem not to recall the significance of 40 years of independence, and yet they would probably recite your path to Golgotha faster than a European graduate. And we hesitate to point out the errors of these young people, because they may accuse us of violating their freedom of speech, which was defended centuries by Galileo when he invoked the wrath of the Catholic Church by declaring that the earth is round. Never mind that our young people may have gotten their historical facts mixed up – they know their rights which are enshrined in American and French constitutions, and that’s all that counts.

Our lawyers issue public statements on the failure of our institutions to meet the standards set by the American constitution, apparently unaware that the constitution they venerate was drafted by, among others, holders of African slaves. In fact, if you listened to them, you wouldn’t know that America is founded on the dispossession of indigenous peoples and the savage exploitation of Africans.

The dismissal of the blood and sweat of black Americans in order to adapt principles from these Western countries raises once again the question that W.E.B Dubois asked and that inspired William R. Jones: “what meaneth black suffering?” If our Western-degreed citizens are your representatives, it would appear that black suffering means nothing to you. It has no political or moral significance, and so four centuries down the road, our younger citizens can close their ears to the moans and groans of their ancestors and embrace ideas that are never intended to include us, or worse still, that enslaved us.

Or maybe these young people understand you better than I do. They genuinely believe that your blood is so strong as to wipe away the past.  Maybe they have a child-like faith in your ability to wash us as white as snow. But unlike the older generations which have patiently worked at bleaching our history and conscience over the years, the young are not willing to go through the entire process. They have found a shortcut by seeking direction from Euro-America. Maybe they reason that Europeans do not need your salvation since their skin already bears the required holy color.

When we asked ourselves “what meaneth African suffering?” we instinctively thought that the suffering of Africans in other countries was evidence that most countries in Africa were “fledging democracies,” unlike Kenya whose elites are doing a rather impressive job at imitating Britain and the United States. We never thought that the loss of life in other countries in Africa should be morally or politically significant enough to make us mourn for our brothers and sisters, rather than pat ourselves on the back for being “unlike other African countries.” We refused to humble ourselves enough to realize that none of the other countries deserved their tragedies, and that the political leaders who sent countries into the abyss of genocide and gruesome wars did little different from what Kenyan politicians were doing. We did not want to believe that we are like other Africans whose souls had been injured and distorted by colonialism, neither did we question if our former colonizers had any business teaching us how to be human, as if we have not always been human.

Instead, we arrogantly consoled ourselves that we were an island of peace in a sea of turmoil. We forgot the thousands who died in Wagalla or in the Rift Valley. We forgot the women raped by British soldiers in our independent nation. We forgot to honor those who had lost their lives because they believed that our freedom was worth fighting for. In our arrogance and contempt, we were ashamed to be an African country. We forgot how to be human; how to mourn or to beseech the ancestors to wipe away the sacrilege that has visited different countries of our beautiful continent. 

Today, as we look in despair at injured and traumatized Kenyans, we do not know what to say. Politicians try to use the loss of life to make political capital, and lawyers have nothing else to do than call for resignations and withdraw honors. How callous and empty have we become, dear God, so that we cannot repent or mourn? On the other hand, if repentance and mourning come from the guts or the depths of our soul, how well can we perform these rituals in languages or religions that are not ours? And without an outlet for our pain, our sorrow is quickly fermenting into bitterness and despair.

You owe an explanation to a country that calls upon you in the first stanza of their national anthem. You at least need to tell us whether Mungu, whom we call upon, is the one in the Bible or the one we used to know before your religious soldiers came and made savages of us by treating us like savages and convincing us that we were. We need to know why you despise our cultures so much while claiming to love us infinitely. We need to know why our young men are destroying property, devouring women and children, while Euro-American ambassadors and journalists hover around us like vultures, hoping to feast on a carcass of Kenya that is still warm, but claiming to be interested in our peace and security.

If you are the all-powerful God that your adherents say you are, a few taunts from some woman in Kenya will not dent your ego. I therefore eagerly wait your response. You may send it by SMS, by email, or by an encouraging word from the church minister when I attend Sunday service tomorrow.

Yours faithlessly,

A Kenyan Doubting Thomas