In Other News

Lest we allow things to remain too lighthearted, it is important to remember that beyond the amusements of international interspecies intercourse or the remarkably more absurd character of American politics, there is real news going on which ought to affect all of us. For my part, I was troubled by the attack yesterday in Beirut, with its religious undercurrent hovering just below the surface. More disturbing still, however, is the revelation out of Kenya that Muslim groups appear to be converting Christians for the purpose of bombing churches:

Al Shabab, a militant Islamist group with ties to Al Qaeda, is no longer relying on its traditional base of Somali or Swahili Muslims. Instead, the group is recruiting a new multi-ethnic band of recruits, many of whom are former Christians, making it more difficult to identify would be attackers.

“It is the recent coverts who [are] being used to bomb churches. It is not members of the Somali, Boran, or Swahili communities, which have many Muslims, but the other tribes which have been known to follow Christianity, like the Luo, Kikuyu, or Luhya,” says Rev. Wellington Mutiso, the head of Evangelical Alliance of Kenya.

...Analysts say the problem originates with the chronic poverty that faces many young, well-educated, and talented Kenyans. Emmanuel Kisiangani, a senior researcher with the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) in Nairobi, says that poor Kenyan youth are being lured into Al Shabab because of the promise of an income...

Enabling Kenyan youth to deal with poverty, “uprootedness,” and youth disfranchisement could help keep them from turning to extremism, says Nyabera. He says if Christian churches practiced what they preached a bit more, that would also help.

This final observation bears consideration.

In Other News

Death, as usual, abounds in the news, and, what's more, it never seems wanting for unusual ways to strike at us. Consider the unfortunate death of the one week old panda cub at the National Zoo today:

"Panda keepers and volunteers heard a distress vocalization from the mother, Mei Xiang, at 9:17 a.m. and notified the veterinarian staff immediately," the statement read, in part. "The panda cam was turned off and the staff were able to safely retrieve the cub for an evaluation at 10:22 a.m. Veterinarians immediately performed CPR and other life-saving measures but the cub did not respond."

Dennis Kelly [elaborated,] "[Mei Xiang] got up and moved from where she was holding the cub and made a honk. The keepers and scientists tell me that a honk was an unusual sign to make, and we surmised that it was a distress call."

"It was just beautiful," said the zoo's chief veterinarian, Suzan Murray. "Beautiful little body, beautiful little face, the markings were beginning to show around the eyes. [The cub] could not have been more beautiful."

The zoo believes that it may have a cause of death pinpointed by Monday. On Tuesday, Cleve Foster is scheduled to die. For the third time.

[T]wice over the past year and a half, Foster has come within moments of being [executed by the state of Texas], only to be told the U.S. Supreme Court had halted his scheduled punishment.

On Tuesday, Foster, 48, is scheduled for yet another trip to the death house...

Pal’s relatives haven’t spoken publicly about their experiences of going to the prison to watch Foster die, only to be told the punishment has been delayed. An uncle previously on the witness list didn’t return a phone call Friday from The Associated Press. Foster, however, shared his thoughts of going through the mechanics of facing execution in Texas — and living to talk about it.

The process shifts into high gear at noon on the scheduled execution day when a four-hour-long visit with friends or relatives ends at the Polunsky Unit outside Livingston.

“That last visit, that’s the only thing that bothers me,” he said.

Giving death row inmates four hours in which to say goodbye to their loved ones face to face is an inadequate but humane gesture in an otherwise inhumane process. Making them relive that trauma for the third times very nearly approaches what should be universally recognized as torture. Cruel and unusual though it is to be brought repeatedly to the brink and then snatched back, all totally against one's will, it is hardly the only form of cruelty humanity has devised and mastered.

Poachers are escalating their assault on Africa’s elephants and rhinos, and conservationists warn that the animals cannot survive Asia’s high-dollar demand for ivory tusks and rhino horn powder. Some wildlife agents, customs officials and government leaders are being paid off by what is viewed as a well-organized mafia moving animal parts from Africa to Asia, charge the conservationists.

Seeing a dire situation grow worse, the animal conservation group WWF is enlisting religious leaders to take up the cause in the hopes that religion can help save some of the world’s most majestic animals.

...The poaching numbers are grim. The number of rhinos killed by poachers in South Africa has risen from 13 in 2007 to 448 last year, WWF says. Last year saw more large-scale ivory seizures than any year in the last two decades, it said. Tens of thousands of elephants are being killed by poachers each year.

There is nothing quite like slaughter for profit to get humanity back in touch with its roots. Thankfully, conservationists are trying "new strategies." Long recognizing that poaching is a moral problem, apparently the WWF is only just realizing that religious leaders should be part of the solution. "Faith leaders are the heart and backbone of local communities. They guide and direct the way we think, behave and live our lives," Dekila Chungyalpa, the director of WWF’s Sacred Earth program, said, adding later: "I think this is the missing piece in conservation strategies. ... WWF can yell us much as we want and no one will listen to us, but a religious leader can say 'This is not a part of our values. This is immoral.'"

As far as death goes, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Africa and Our Philosophy of Missions

Several weeks ago, I attended a Bible study, the speaker at which had just returned from a mission trip. The study took the form of a mission report, and the woman who led the study had a number of inspiring anecdotes to share as well as some gut-wrenching ones about the rural conditions there (which to my frustration, she seemed more curious about than moved by). Throughout the entire presentation, however, I couldn't help but wonder why she went at all. Her explanation, predictably, focused on issues like her calling and the personal faith journey it represented for her, as well as obligatory references to winning souls for the Lord.

Here's the problem. Zambia is a Christian nation. Not in the way America is a Christian nation but actually, constitutionally Christian. More than 85% of Zambians self-identify as Christians, a number significantly higher than the number of Americans who so self-identify. And while Zambia is notable, it is by no means exceptional among African nations. There are more Christians in Africa than there are Americans. Note, that was "Americans" not "American Christians." More critically, the African church is now being evangelized more successfully and more rapidly by Africans and increasingly Africans are being brought in under denominational headings that are non-existent and often unknown in the West.

In other words, the missionaries claim that while the people of Zambia had been "evangelized" they still hadn't been "discipled," came across more like American (or perhaps Baptist) chauvinism than evangelistic concern. African Christianity is thriving and growing in ways that Western Christianity have long sensed even dared to dream of. Long gone are the days of sixteenth century Ethiopian scholar Tasfa Seyvon, quoted by David Northrup as writing:

I am an Ethiopian pilgrim...from the land of the infidels to the land of the faithful, through sea and land. At Rome I found rest for my soul through the right faith.

I grew up, as so many of us did, with the missionary work to Africa taking center stage, and perhaps then there was a time for it. I don't know that I ever attended a church in my childhood that wasn't sponsoring a missionary to Africa. In truth, though, what the African church needs from Western Christianity is not another round of affluent white people to tell them the Gospel. They have the Gospel and they are taking the commission to preach it to all nations very seriously. Instead of evangelistic missions, they desperately need benevolence missions. Missions bringing doctors, food, the means to access clean water, plans for developing local infrastructure, and modern agricultural techniques.

In other words, don't tell me about going to a country where more than two thirds of the people live in poverty and expect me to be excited that you taught the local preachers to preach more mature sermons. Don't show me pictures of a village of people who lack the hygienic facilities and the understanding of disease to wash themselves regularly and expect me to be in awe that you saw a man healed miraculously of his sores. I don't want to hear the song that the children taught you in their native tongue, not those illiterate, naked children who were as hungry when you left as when you arrived. Callous as it may sound, and perhaps with a touch of exaggeration, the next missionary to Africa looking for support or accolade from me better have iodine tablets in one hand, Flintstones vitamins in the other, and these words on his lips: I am an American pilgrim from the land of the land of the faithful, through sea and land. At Africa, I found rest for my soul through the right faith.

A Change of Perspective

It has been a long time, a very long time, since I have been excited about reading a history text outside my field of academic specialty, but a brief description of David Northrup's Africa's Discovery of Europe (2nd ed) was more than enough to arouse my interest. In this concise but engaging study, Northrup attempts to dissect the Afro-European encounter of the pre-colonial era from the perspective of the Africans. The approach doesn't seem all that novel on its face, until you really begin to consider just how euro-centric our perceptions of the "discovery" of Africa are. It doesn't take long before Northrup begins to turn standard wisdom on its head, forcing the reader to reconsider what idiosyncratic ideologies, politics, and historiographies have motivated the retelling of this history up to this point. The final result is a more fully rounded, realistic picture of Afro-European relations, one that is not dominated by the historiography of racial guilt but which privileges the historical recordings of actual Africans to European assumptions about what Africans must have been doing, feeling, and thinking.

The only real drawback in his exciting new approach is that Northrup has a frustrating habit of hedging his bets, an unfortunate necessity in an academic climate where the fear of political intrusion with its standard accusation of racism has taken on far too much weight. It is so obvious that it ought not need restating that the experience of Africans in the Americas was dominated for centuries by overwhelming racial prejudices. This fact notwithstanding, we ought to have the intellectual fortitude to let the evidence decide what the experience of Africans in Europe was or, for that matter, that of Africans in Africa encountering Europeans. The regular reminders by Northrup that his facts may be tainted, biased, skewed, or corrupted eventually begin to come across as defensive and indecisive, even if he follows these caveats with assurances that he is confident in his rendering. It is not for the historian to remind us that historical records are not scientific data which can be analyzed like so many particles under a microscope.

Nevertheless, Northrup's text is deeply challenging and, because of this, immensely satisfying. He takes direct aim at the popular notion of the African encounter as one between the exploitative light-skinned pillagers and the poor, dark, benighted villagers. He points out that war, plundering, and the slave trade all antedated the Africans first encounters with the European. Taking specific aim at the politicized notion of a European-induced cycle of selling slaves to get guns to capture more slaves, Northrup even cites explicit statements from African rulers that capturing slaves is a centuries old part of African culture (as it was in European culture) and that he never goes to war simply to take slaves. The guns, Northrup points out, that so fascinated the Africans, actually did very little to give any one combatant a decisive advantage in war, making such a cycle unlikely if not impossible. Northrup also debunks the notion that European trade somehow destroyed native craftsmanship. He combats blanket assumptions of racism, showing cases where Africans were encouraged to marry white Christian woman rather than black pagan ones and numerous cases in which Africans in Europe translated a lionizing of their skin color into educational, political, and social opportunities.

What remains then is a less stylized and more human picture of the Afro-European encounter. Contrary to prevailing notions, Africans and Europeans entered into mutually beneficial economic, social, and political relationships which made many on both sides extremely wealthy at the expense of the lower classes (an economic circumstance which has always dominated history). Africans and Europeans mingled and even intermarried at almost every level of society with restrictions of class and religion being infinitely more important than those of race. Of the many successful and long-lasting conversions to Christianity, those which were in any sense forced were the exception rather than the rule, and most accounts by actual Africans represent the choice of Christianity as a conviction of faith that they embraced rather than a decision of expediency. (Interestingly, Northrup points out as a historian what many theologians and ministers have been realizing for some time now, that the metaphysical world of tribal Africa is on many of its most important levels, compatible with Christianity.) Local artisans continued to create local crafts, local peoples continued to embrace local customs, and even "westernized" Africans remained acutely aware of their cultural heritage and those features of it which were non-negotiable just to suit their fascination with the technological and cultural advances of the West.

This is, of course, not to say that everything was rainbows and roses. Africans made war on Africans; Africans made war on Europeans; Europeans made war on Africans. Slaves were taken by Africans to be kept, to be sold to other Africans, or to be sold to Europeans (who would in turn typically resell them). Slaves ships, while probably not most accurately represented in the polemical accounts of the abolitionists, did have a one in eight mortality rate, with the cause of death ranging from disease, dehydration, capital punishment, and, all too often, suicide. However muted the inter-cultural animosity among Europeans and Africans was, it is an inescapable fact that many Africans ended up in the Americas where conditions were brutal and racism rampant, and, before long, European colonialism would irrevocably change the dynamic between the cultures.

Nevertheless, what Northrup offers is an account that steps away from using history in the ongoing blame-game and instead engages the accounts on their own terms. He admits that his credulity in reading some of the accounts will strike some historians as naive, but--and I cannot stress my agreement with him here too strongly--the alternative method of assuming a certain narrative and then discounting accounts which deviate from it is infinitely more suspect. What Northrup does instead is challenge the reader to take Africans at their word rather than assuming to speak for them, which seems to me to be a more pernicious form of racism anyway. The final product then is not only a great work of history covering a specific subject in a specific time period but also a convicting challenge to be wary of our inevitable and natural inclination to assume that history exists only in our default perspective of it.

Christ's Church in Nigeria

In case you have not already heard, while most of the world was celebrating Christ's birth (or Santa's materialistic bacchanalia), Christians in Nigeria were being slaughtered by an Islamic organization attempting to establish an Islamic theocracy. Some three dozen were killed and many more injured in coordinated attacks. This is the second time in as many years when Christians have been targeted while celebrating the Nativity. While Muslims worldwide have condemned the attacks and insisted the attackers are not "true Muslims," Boko Haram, the responsible group, has proudly taken credit for the murders:

After the bombings, a Boko Haram spokesman using the nom de guerre Abul-Qaqa claimed responsibility for the attacks in an interview with The Daily Trust, the newspaper of record across Nigeria's Muslim north. The sect has used the newspaper in the past to communicate with public.

"There will never be peace until our demands are met," the newspaper quoted the spokesman as saying. "We want all our brothers who have been incarcerated to be released; we want full implementation of the Sharia system and we want democracy and the constitution to be suspended."

Boko Haram has carried out increasingly sophisticated and bloody attacks in its campaign to implement strict Shariah law across Nigeria. The group, whose name means "Western education is sacrilege" in the local Hausa language, is responsible for at least 504 killings this year alone, according to an Associated Press count.

Last year, a series of Christmas Eve bombings in Jos claimed by the militants left at least 32 dead and 74 wounded. The group also claimed responsibility for the Aug. 26 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Nigeria's capital Abuja that killed 24 people and wounded 116 others.

In other news, analogous incidents of coordinated Christian bombings of mosques appear to be non-existent.