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It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism
in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was
secular, but surely affected by what they were.Christian Louboutin What
they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man's place in
the Universe that Christianity had taught.
There's
long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing
tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in
our own culture: “theirs” and therefore best for “them”; authentic and
of intrinsically equal worth to ours.
I don't follow this.fashion I
observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it
suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of
the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional
mindset feeds into the “big man” and gangster politics of the African
city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the
(literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.
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Anxiety
- fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a
tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the
whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and,
call it fear or respect,fendi black heels a great weight grinds down
the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the
initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own
shoulders.
How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain?
When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he
finds - at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the
language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an
example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why
climb the mountain? “Because it's there,” he said.
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To
the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not
climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere?
Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation
- that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for
passivity.
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 philosphicalspiritual framework
I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious
to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it
liberates.
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Those
who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must
not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the
knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change.
A whole belief system must first be supplanted.
And I'm afraid it
has to be supplanted by another. 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.
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