Science and Religion III: The Colonial Wound

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Our ancestors created socioeconomic systems where they formed iron, cultivated rice, and raised the stone walls of Great Zimbabwe. They understand the stars, the seasons, how the body works, the creator and the relationship between the visible and invisible world. Eventually, we ceased construction, development, progress and turned to praying. We stopped planning, visualizing, analyzing and started waiting, waiting on the higher power to come change our story. We began to distrust that which we did know and began to believe the reports that we were given. Could this be a coincidence or the fate that await us?

The History We Were Never Taught

The history we know about ourselves is not just our own but that which we have been taught in school, heard in debate, heard from our fore-fathers, and seen through foreign eyes. Little reference was made to pre-colonial history but colonialism was advanced as a civilizing enterprise ideology. Not even the name of our continent (Africa) is our own but a bestowed one upon us by strangers, who seems to be discovering everything, everywhere they go.

Our great ancestors did have sciences, they knew some mathematics, some of the oldest known mathematics art objects are the Lebombo bone (c. 42,000 years ago) and the Ishango bone (c. 20,000 years ago). They knew about astronomy the Nubian Desert’s Nabta stone circle, for instance, is one of the world’s oldest known astronomical devices, from around 4800 BCE, constructed the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, and the coral stone buildings of the Swahili coast, Great Zimbabwe. They smelted iron, invented African rice, controlled empires, and knew how to sailor. But none of it was taught to us because our system was disrupted at a point, attacked by malice, and overridden by the new host. We learned more about Shakespeare than we did empires of our own land, learn more about Newton than about the mathematicians of Timbuktu.

The Systems We Had

African societies were organized prior to colonialism for mutual support, economic exchange, which involves all individual to be able to get help from extended family, including the uncles and aunts, grandparents, and cousins. This practice arose because of the realization that the wealth of the family was dependent on the land and labor that were entitled from common ancestors. Mutual help and interdependence were the philosophy that prevailed, emotional support and material security were provided by social networks of gift-giving, mutual help and exchange, rather than money. Everybody was expected to be generous and support family and friends in need and those in the community so that no one would go hungry, everyone having in abundance and each individual belonging to a community not just a standalone figure.

However, let’s be honest, not everything we have done is off good report in our precolonial history. In many African communities, FGM was in use resulting in life-long physical and psychological harm, some societies kills because they believe it was evil, and reports of human sacrifice was known in the Asante Kingdom, amongst others. I can’t say for a fact that slavery, already had a long history in Africa prior to the transatlantic slave trade but for a fact I can say that, the transatlantic trade made slave trade worsen in the continent.

The Complexity of Colonial Intervention

This is where the story is hard to tell, the colonizer came not to save us, but to rule over us, to steal our resources, our labor, they loot, destroy violate and left a mark on the borders of each country. They also carried some things that were needed, although imperfect, but campaigns against FGM helped to its abolition, human sacrifice were outlawed, and lives were saved.

However, the colonizer did not only aim at eradication of harmful practices, but set boundaries between whats good and bad and us vs them. They brought the division that erected the walls around the borders of each country on the continent and condemned most of the things on our side. They studied our healers and classified them as witch doctors, considered our knowledge of oneness to nature as superstition, examined our views of the world, and branded them juju, black magic, paganism, devil worship and deliberately used derogatory terms to describe ATRs negatively, including “primitive,” “superstition,” or “barbaric. This made African spirituality inedible to many Africans, and led to a public separation from it, giving rise to the Testimony Economy.

The link is now apparent.

This is not a random collection of testimony economies but their hallmark is to celebrate survival as a miracle, to exchange testimonies instead of building systems, and to rely on God for provision rather than budgeting, planning, savings, investing, and development.

It came from a people to whom it was declared that their own knowledge was of no value. It was born of an education that had taught the people that what they could see was the white man’s world, the world of science, the world of reason, the world of real cause and effect. So we went into other worlds, spiritual worlds, the world which was invisible to them, the world of the spirit.

We clung to prayer as if that was all we had, clung on to faith as evidence of things not seen but is to come, replaced God with the systems we were never meant to create, the knowledge we were never meant to remember, and confidence we were never meant to feel.

The Deeper Wound: Epistemicide

The worst of all losses was not material; it was epistemological which is term the killing of knowledge by scholars (epistemicide). During colonialisms, African spirituality was criminalised through instrument of colonial dominance such as ethnicide, linguicide, and epistemicide.

We were told we did not know a thing, had nothing that is ours unless we have written document to prove our possessions that have always been pass down to us by our forefathers and that we were none until they have come. I do not believe this to be a coincidence but a deliberate action to destabilize an economy of an entire group of people. This was understood by Kwame Nkrumah, who knew that the process of erasing the identity of Africans was not a by-product of history but an agenda. If you cut off a people’s tongue and their identity, then they won’t build the house. They will find answers out there in the world all their lives, but the answers lie within.

The Identity That Was Imprinted on Us

We live with the repercussions today as we are educated in English, or French, rather than our native languages, wrappers and agbadas were replaced with suits and jeans, taught to look at ourselves through their eyes our spirituality as superstition, our knowledge as ignorance, and our identity as something we were ashamed of. Today the imprinted identity we carry is not of our own, neither is it of our own choosing, but years of overlap indoctrinated mindset have overridden our core nervous system which made us to perceive and interpret information and the world from a needy mentality, greedy mentality, receiving mentality, praying mentality, begging mentality and an in-furious good for nothing generation of people mentality.

This article does not urge anyone to give up on all of the good things that the colonizer introduced to us: education, medicine, technology, and some of the moral frameworks that enabled us to put aside harmful practices. It’s not calling anyone to go back to a “golden age” of the past that we may never have actually lived in. However, it’s a call to acknowledge that the narrative we’ve been fed is incomplete and the actuality of the wound cannot be healed by ignoring it, complaining, or talking about it or playing the blame game. But how we all can renew our minds and come together as a continent to change the narrative and the systems that seems to only work outside the continent when you travel to the European or American countries

Peace and Redemption

But we must not pick between the gifts and our inheritance, neither choose between prayer and planning, nor opposition between spiritual and practical. Yet we have to regain our faith in ourselves that we do know that there are answers already within us which must be found. We do need to be rebuilt, not by the west but by our own hands, own wisdom, own inheritance. And it isn’t about returning, but moving forward to be awaken, aware, and full of confidence that we were something before they were. In doing so we will find that prayer and planning never clash, neither is faith and works in conflict or dead, because science and spirituality are partners not competitors.