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The Commentary

Back to Bongo Bongo land?

At the end of December, the noted gay journalist Matthew Parris published an article in The Times, which encouraged many Christians but simultaneously left us sad for him.

It was titled ‘As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God’. Parris was brought up in what today is Malawi and he returned there recently in connection with the charity Pump Aid. It caused him to reflect on the impact of Christianity. Here is some of what he wrote: ‘In Africa Christianity changes people’s hearts… We had friends who were missionaries and as a child I often stayed with them… In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them… They stood tall.

‘At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced the impression… We slept under the stars, so it was important… that every day we find somewhere safe for nightfall. Often near a mission. Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people… something in their eye, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man… more open.’

All this is a lovely testimony to the transformation the gospel brings. It is this change in people that Parris believes is still essential for Africa today. He does not believe, with Western political correctness, that African tribalism should be left un-critiqued. ‘I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours, and that it suppresses individuality… People think collectively… This rural traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader and his (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of a loyal opposition… People won’t take initiative.’

Parris explains how Christianity releases Africans from this mindset. ‘Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosophical/spiritual framework I’ve just described... Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.’

Lesser beings?

While supporting Parris’s general thesis, there are far more things to say by way of response than there is space for here. But, first, it makes us wonder about Mr. Parris. It is good that he is prepared to address the way Christianity changes people lives. However, one senses an unconscious patronisation of African people as if he still views them as a lesser kind of humanity from ‘Bongo Bongo land’ whose experiences could not possibly be meaningful for sophisticated Westerners like him. His atheism is sacrosanct. Could it not possibly be, Mr. Parris, that these changed lives have come about because what they have come to believe is actually true? Also can he not see that the Western mindset is just as much enslaved as that of African tribalism? The evil spirits of self-centred self-fulfilment and the ‘swaggering leaders’ of celebrity culture imprison people just as much.

But Mr. Parris’s article needs also to be turned to criticise ourselves. Why is it that he can see the transformation that Christ brings to people in Africa but does not seem to detect the same miracle here? It may be that he does not come into contact with real Christians here. It may be that our spiritual lives have been stunted by worldliness.

John Benton