Christain Fundamental Groups Spreading Over Africa

This is most disturbing information... The parallels between this situation and what missionaries did to Native American are quite sobbering.

--ryan


May 29, 2004 taz Magazine Dossier, Dominic JOHNSON S.

I-II Africa's Seductors

TRANSLATED BY FPCN GERMANY

Christian fundamentalist groups and Pentecostal churches are spreading over Africa. They promise salvation by submission. They are the most grotesque side phenomenon of Africa´s social crises.

(By Dominic Johnson)

The RCCG is one of the oldest and biggest of the countless Pentecostal churches and protestant sects in Nigeria- one of the centers of the confusing, multicoloured landscape of speedily growing Christian fundamentalist communities set out to offer security in Africa´s shattering societies. They have long since achieved to become a stable part of African life: the prayer services lasting all day that draw the faithful from the slums in their best apparel, with beaming faces, gathering in parks, sports stadiums and certain big event areas. Those charismatic preachers with their rock star sound systems and their sermons going on for hours. The miracle healings on TV.

The Pentecostalists, also called charismatic churches or Erweckungskirchen, are the fastest growing religious current in the world, with a count of approximately 680 million followers today, 30 percent of those in the US, aiming at growing to 920 millions over the next 20 years, according to the German sect expert Katharina Hofer. Their fundament: absolute faith in the biblical word. Their basic belief: individual salvation. Their method: total control. The overall number of different religious communities of this kind in Africa is an estimated 10.000.

They are offering countless stories of how entering one of them will change life. One may have found constant work, another gained a visa for the States, one was able to solve his monetary problems, still another may have quit drinking. Their recipe is the age old core of protestant faith: that everybody is responsible for his own faith. It is laid out in the Bible how to do rightly. Whoever sticks to that, will be saved, while hell is waiting for the rest. The church is leading the way: do what the preacher says, don´t smoke, don´t drink, don´t commit any sins, abstain from temptations. Work for the church and ye will be rewarded, either in this life or afterwards.

One has to experience by oneself the preachers spending hours in some shack filled with hot tropical air interpreting any biblical quote until the complete worldwide political situation as well as all principles of righteous living are drawn out of it in order to grasp how hard these preachers work to keep the faithful under their spell. One cannot but note that if politicians put as much effort in explaining the UN Human Rights charter or the principles of a democratic constitution to the citizens, Africa´s democracies would be stable. Here though the only thing stable lies in the certainty that God rules, and every human accepting this and opening up to the Holy Spirit will be saved. “Born again” is the word. The demons of old sins are driven out, the soul is turned to God.

Thus those sects appear as a phenomenon accompagnying the modernization of Africa that goes along with multiple ways of social disintegration and the fading of ancient traditions, where many lose their hold and feel themselves in desperate need for new certainties. They are, above all, a part of the expanding metropolis. In countries such as Congo and Nigeria, where social decline and misery are omnipresent, the promises of those churches may seem like oracles: You can make it. Just do as we say, and you will be prospering. For the people listening, there is no other way towards happiness. As it turns out, joining rates are extremely high amongst the groups of people suffering the most, like the survivors of the ethnocide in Ruanda oder the orphans of war in Liberia.

21th century christianity will be “bigger, younger, louder, softer, more shining- and more black”, as US-scientist Danny McCain, a minister himself, sees it. In his view, the triumphant procession of the charismatic churches is fueled by their tactics of fitting Christian beliefs into African traditions, and vice versa; they offer a “biblical version of the supernatural”, taking belief in spirits and ghosts as well as miracle healings serious.

In fact, many of the Pentecostalist churches are on similarly tense terms with the established churches as the democratic movements are to the established states. While the old churches offer stately buildings and imported rituals, the new churches eagerly include traditional popular beliefs - if only to force it into even stricter moral boundaries which challenge the individual in every aspect of his daily life. According to Congolese scientist Sedecias Kakule Kahotole, most of the Pentecostal churches were originally founded by lay priests that did not find a place in regular theological education. Quite often an unsuccessful minister would reinvent himself as head of a new church by God´s revelation. “due to their simple structure and their grounding in the masses with no diocese control they collect and include those outcast of the established churches.”, he points out.

Results are obvious. The biggest Catholic church in Africa´s largest city is located only a couple of houses away from the inconspicuous RCCG prayer center. St. Dominics Church in Yaba, Lagos, is a stately building erected in the 90s displaying beautiful windows - “made by a Muslim” as a priest tells with pride. But there are only few that wander the bright and airy rooms. No born-again-Christian would ever pass its treshold.

Priest Paul Oye considers his uncherished neighbours, the RCCG, a threat not only to his church, but to the people as well. “The Pentecostalists are preaching the gospel, but their real interest is money. They are using fear. They tell the people to live by their dreams, as to them, dreams are true. So, if somebody dreams his friend wants to poison him oder his father wants to kill him, it is considered a fact, and one has to abandon his friend or his father. People are taught to be afraid of their own dreams. It´s always evil, the devil, doing his work in them. That makes the people crazy, slowly but surely. And then they say: if you have bad dreams, come to us, we will heal you.”

In the meantime, many churches have their own TV channels, airing films of miracle healings, in which born-again-Christians confess their sins and bear witness to their salvation by the Holy Spirit. Films of this kind coming from Nigeria have grown to be notorious around half of the continent. Educated observers may well see through them: a street child is dragged in front of the camera and made to tell how priest x freed him from witchcraft and saved his soul. Due to these films, in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo and stronghold of the sects, the shégués, marauding street kids, are persecuted as “incarnation of
evil”, and sometimes lynched. The congolese newspaper Le Potentiel reported that nightmares, fear of the deep dark night during electricity breakdowns or of certain animals like lizards and cats are spreading among children exposed to those films.

It is obvious that the new churches are less liberation movements than instruments of power. Those endless sermons do not serve education, theyare scare tactics; exhausted by standing still for hours and praying all night long, the disciples will do anything they are told. Furthermore, money plays a huge role in the services; it´s a question of honour to donate hundred-dollar-bills. Church activists are expected to give part
of their income to the church. In return, by some sort of snowball-system, they themselves profit from drafting new disciples. “They say: God is rich, so when you´re rich, you´re close to God”, as Catholic bishop Pius Ncube, helplessly watching the corrupt elite of his land sharing business with the charismatic priests, puts it.

Basically, the system is just the logical processing of Protestantism: Success is the measurable result of righteousness; the miserable have failed before God, they are bad and have to take the blame themselves.
This basic rule is the key to the success of the new churches. They are climber churches. And everybody wants to climb the social and financial ladder. When in 2001 the RCCG in Nigeria proclaimed that God decided He wanted to have ten thousand millionaires in the church, this was both an incentive for the followers and an invitation to the rich to enlist. The RCCG, founded in 1952, proclaims the “twelve keys to prosperity”:
accept the yovereignty of God; be willing to get rich; follow God´s will, give, sow, donate the first part of any new income; work hard; increase your capacities for blessings, pray, get ready for the battle; praise the
Lord, and unite with the owner of the keys, Christ, through his church. Thus, personal enrichment and alimentation of the church are closely linked and offered in the language of business.

In Kenia, the charismatic churches are holding private universities and business schools, in Nigeria they are at the forefront of internet expansion and the use of modern technologies altogether. “Many churches started out as real estate transactions” , Nigerian journalist Jahman Anikulapo explains.” During the economic crisis in the 80s, speculators were buying abandoned factories and got their money back by holding prayer services there. In fact, they got very rich by that.” In Nigeria, many kings of the underground economy discovered religion, together with internet fraud, to be very profitable. In some cases, the heads of both branches are said to be even identical.

As sect specialist Asonzeh Ukah from Ghana, author of a thesis about the RCCG, expresses in an analysis of sermons by RCCG minister Adeboye, the “prosperity gospel” of this church consists of a perverted form of the principle of corruption: “you can´t make something out of nothing”, as in: one has to pay to get, and in order to get some blessing out of the Lord, one has to pay him as well. “This idea is simple and attractive”, Ukah explains, “Jesus has already done everything that´s needed to get the good things in life. By his poverty and passion, he has opened a credit for uns we´re free to draw from, since he sacrificed himself for us. So, when you´re poor, it´s because you don´t believe.”

Like many of their competitors, the RCCG has become an economic empire, with subsidiaries in other countries like Great Britain. Meanwhile, the church owns a “redemption camp” of ten square kilometers close to the highway from Lagos to Ibadan, where big events are held frequently, and a gigantic service with millions of participants and a duration of several weeks is taking place. An event that also gets economic sponsors to cue up in line. Their leaders are allowed to hold services in Nigeria´s presidential palace - President Olusegun Obasanjo, who in his coming into office by democratic election 1999 ended sixteen years of military dictatorship in Nigeria, calls himself a born again Christian, and his takeover was celebrated as an evidence for the power of God himself by the Pentecostalists.

It seems no miracle that these days the bloodiest of religious wars are fought in Nigeria. The rebellious forces of the revival churches prove to be politically relevant. Metaphors of “revival” are used by almost all of the African presidents that by their seizing of power seemed to end the previous state of misery and dictatorship, and not few of them are registered members of these churches. Francois Bozizé, president of the Republic of Central Africa, who reached power by a takeover coup in 2003, is leader of the local branch of the “Eglise Christianisme Céleste”, founded in Benin. Laurent Gbagbo, President of the Ivory Coast and warlord in his own country, is depending on radical Christian sect leaders in Abidjan to win the unemployed youth and recruit them for militia.

When in Zaire in 1996-1997 Laurent Kabila´s rebels took on the fight against the corrupt Mobutu dictatorship, their leaders linked protestant asceticism with millenary expectation of salvation. “We have driven out the devil” the kid soldiers bragged amongst the debris of the wrecked barroom in the devastated city hotel of Bunia in spring of 1997 when their movement was just about to march towards Kinshasa from their location in the east of the country. There was talk of “new moral”, “battle against decadence” and “spiritual recovery”; whether that was Christian or Maoist was not quite clear. Later, in power, they succumbed to the lure of the flesh and of corruption just as their motubistic predecessors, and in the great war in the Congo 1998-2003 sects were influential on all sides.

Today in Kinshasa, poorest of the African metropoles, priests and pop stars are the idols of the youth. It´s only logical that Congo´s biggest singing star, Papa Wemba, joined forces with the biggest female church leader, Maman Elisabeth Olangi, whose gigantic mass events are frequently visited by the higher ranks of politicians. When “archbishop” Fernando Kutino of the Congolese “victory church” took a stand opposing president Joseph Kabila, recruiting followers for a “let´s save the Congo”-project, the regime was alarmed, the church was prohibited, opposition leaders demonstrated in favor of the “archbishop” while he himself moved to Paris. Congo´s wrecked capital is overcrowded with sects preaching the healing of the soul, the most successful of their leaders eben expanding their realm into the US.

Being asked by a congolese interviewer why there´s more and more churches and priests in Kinshasa, Freddy Shembo, who had moved his “Mount Carmel Church of God” from the city to North Carolina, answered: “Why? People are hungry for God. If there´s more and more hospitals and doctors, it´s a sign for development, too.”