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East London, SOUTH AFRICA - Africa is one continent that has acquired the image of a conflict zone because of numerous colonial and post-colonial wars, political instability, oppression, economic stagnation, droughts that result in crop failures, and other natural disasters. Africa is also known for pandemics like malaria, ebola, and -- more than any -- HIV/AIDS.
Mputhumi Ntabeni One may almost be pardoned for doubting Africa's potential for addressing the spread of disease when considering all of this.
Few things are as depressing as looking at AIDS statistics in Africa. I understand the unreliable and dubious nature of these statitistics, which -- even when remotely accurate -- tend to be used by people with various vested interests to serve their own bias. But they do give us an estimate of what really goes on.
Christianity is the avowed predominant religion of Africa, followed by Islam. I shall then limit my comments on AIDS and religion to these two religions.
Taking numbers supplied by Operation World Christian Handbook (2002), and comparing them with the United Nations' Barcelona Report one arrives at the 40 Christian countries in Africa and their adult HIV/AIDS infection rate:
Christians (%)
Congo (Dem. Rep.)
Equatorial Guinea
Angola
Congo
Burundi
Uganda
Zambia
Swaziland
Rwanda
Swaziland
South Africa
Ethiopia
Namibia
Botswana
Zimbabwe
Malawi
Kenya
Ghana
Central Af. Rep.
Eritrea
Cameroon
Congo
Nigeria
Mozambique
Lesotho
Then the numbers for the 10 countries that are predominantly Moslem in Africa and their HIV/AIDS adult infection stands like this:
Somalia
Morocco
Algeria
Libya
Senegal
Gambia
MaliEgypt
Sierra Leone
Sudan
These statistics present grave testimony to how AIDS is ripping at the heart of the continent -- devastating families, gutting townships and villages, wrecking national economies, creating millions of orphans. It looks as though only the Islamic countries have some sort of a solution against the AIDS pandemic. This might explain the growing popularity of Islamic faith in the continent.
Islam
Islam was brought to Sub-Saharan Africa in the first place via the trade routes from the Arab countries and North Africa. Since then African Muslims have always maintained close links with the Arab world, from which a number of their reformers came. African Moslems like to sh are the Arabic culture of their brethren, speak the language, which has Islamised their African culture.Although Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa has known a thousand years of cohabitation with traditional African religion, adapting to it even to the extent of intermixture, the mass adoption of Islam by a significant number of Africans is a relatively recent fact. It was preceded in most cases by a long period of co-existence during which Islam remained a minority religion. It is the sociological factors that have tipped the scales in Islam's favour in our era. These, as in the case of colonialism and the arrival of modern technology, are external to the spiritual universe.
The traditional socio-religious universe Islam offers has a similar framework to that of most African cultures: all-embracing, secure and reassuring. The solidarity within the Muslim community, for an African convert to Islam, replaces the village/township, or tribal, solidarities without changing the laws and habits of life for the African much.
The prescriptions and prohibitions are similar; moral and emotional, rather than intellectual. Both revere traditional authority above all else (I'm here taking the view that the Koran is part of the Islamic traditional authority)
There is no doubt, for most African Muslims, that Africanicity and Islam are in no way opposed. For them Islam is not an imported religion. Hence abandoning Islamic religion, for instance, becomes equivalent to rejecting your family and tribal traditions. That's how intermingled the two socio-religious universes have become.
It might then be safe to argue that Islam, in its traditional African form, is entirely part of African cultural heritage. And statistics are telling us that a growing number of Africans see Islamic culture as a better life solution, to the extent that some people have flirted with the idea that Islam will be the predominant religion in Africa by the end of this century. Nicholas Kristof wrote in New York Times :
Islam already has 1.3 billion adherents and is spreading rapidly, particularly in Africa, partly because it also has admirable qualities that anyone who has lived in the Muslim world observes: a profound egalitarianism and a lack of hierarchy that confer dignity and self-respect among believers; greater hospitality than in other societies; an institutionalized system of charity, zakat, to provide for the poor. Many West Africans, for example, see Christianity as corrupt and hierarchical and flock to Islam, which they view as democratic and inclusive.Christianity
African traditional ways are hard -- barbaric according to colonialists -- but never hypocritical. Africans, who are not touched by Western culture/religion, live by their own human capacities, knowing and reconciled to the fact that they're not gods. They're prepared to accept what they find in life, including their natures, with a cheerful disposition that irked Christian missionaries as naive child-like ignorance.But the African mode of belief offers no revelation in the light of which one might see oneself as either miserable sinner or fallen from grace. Hence most Africans became either fascinated or irked by Christian revelation.
It helped also that the African outlook on life is religious. The emotion with which Africans contemplate the world is religious even if not defined in theological creeds. Religion is a vital part of African life. It encompasses ones entire existence, substantiates and explains a person's role in the community. Christianity extended the community to include the universe, which Africans had no theory about. African culture relates to nature at large but not in particular.
Religion among African people is not simply a faith, or worship system but rather a way of life, a system of social control, a provider of medicine, and an organizing mechanism. Many African societies have religious rituals for each phase of life, from the womb, through birth, infancy, puberty, initiation, marriage, and funeral.
Major steps in the life of the African mentality are given to consultation of fortune-tellers and diviners to ascertain the will of God and the spirits. It is rare to find any act in Africa, human or otherwise, without a religious explanation. All this made for the African fascination with Christian religion when the missionaries came. But the fascination didn't last.
Perhaps if Christianity had come directly from the Middle East to Africa, it would have been more easily understood and appreciated by pre-Christian African followers. But, having filtered through European culture, it acquired many abstract terms and values that do not always touch the spiritual depth of the religious African person. This has created a lot of problems with converting Africans to Christianity. Christianity's former popularity in Africa was it's association with education and Western civilisation.
When Christianity, through mostly the evangelical wing of charismatic churches, re-evangelised -- first in Methodism, and then the 'happy-clappy' kind of born-again charisma -- it appealed more to the African soul. This kind of Christianity demonstrated signs of having learnt the trick of appealing to the heart, the emotions, rather than to the head.
Most African people don't care much about the nuts and bolts of religion. They want religion to comfort, sanctify, and direct. This -- well and the fact that people are always likely to think of God when they are having a hard time -- is the reason why today Africa is the only continent in the world where traditional religion is still growing.
Catholicism is growing for another added reason. Since the Second Vatican Council, Roman Catholicism has had to look closer on ATR (African Traditional Religion). The Council discovered similarities of love of ritual, belief in the communion of saints -- Africans call them ancestors. Roman Catholicism then learnt the art of incaulturisation. Now it no longer dismisses adherents of ATR as pagans, animists, pantheists, superstitious people, and magicians, or even devil worshippers.
The fundamentals of Christianity have never really managed to completely replace traditional religions anywhere in the world. It's function, and appeal, was in purifying them. That is why it is so easy for it to be burdened by culture at the hands of uninformed and misguided missionaries.
Now that Christianity has learned to respect African traditional ways also, it is starting to gain the respect it deserves.
Islam learned that trick long ago. In fact, Islam is that trick. Islam is more than a religious belief, it is a way of life.
Conclusions On Religion & AIDS in Africa
What most people tend to forget when they criticize religious sectors, especially concerning the scourge of AIDS in Africa, is that religion is a structural representation of personal faith. The aspect of personal faith is often neglected in debates about religious organizations and their dubious leadership.The Islamic and Catholic religious sectors have been largely criticized for their unwillingness to engage the HIV/AIDS debate. Their leaders meantime argue they've no problem with engaging the HIV/AIDS debate so long as the applied solutions do not imply dilution of the moral standards of their faiths.
Both the Islamic and Christian faiths, especially the Roman Catholic Church, have taken some harsh criticism in the way they discriminate against gay people, for instance. Discrimination, without prejudice, is a sign of a mind that has made a choice.
A liberal discriminates against conservative values, which is fine -- so long as there's no prejudice involved.
Likewise, it is alright for the faithful to discriminate against values that are contrary to their own, so long as there's no prejudice involved.
Prejudice a sign of a sick mind.
There's an undeniable interconnection between religion and the expression of human sexuality, which highlights the extent to which religion influences beliefs and shapes human sexual behaviour.
Homosexuality, for instance, in the majority of African communities, is seen as perversion. The reasons for this are traditional and largely sociological rather than religious.
It stands to reason then that a religion that takes a stand against homosexuality would be popular in African societies. It's a personal, or communal, sentiment concomitant with religious creed. Islamic communities are perhaps the best demonstration of that.
Sometimes religious leaders obstruct a proper response by their faithful in the context of passionate defence of moral principle that is consistent with what they see as a Christian morality and vision of service to God and the people.
People on the ground tend to follow popular cultural choices, despite the moral teachings of faith institutions, especially when they feel these make wrong choices for being too distant from the ground (locality). This is largely the case with Catholic communities concerning the gay issue.
Having said all that, anyone who has ever worked with the people on the ground will tell you that faith-based motivation is an undeniably powerful internal response to the AIDS pandemic.
Politics, environment, poverty, gender insensitivity, and power inequity motivations do not touch the soul of a community in the same way as relationships based on respect for spiritual capacity.
Facilitation of local family and neighbourhood spiritual connectedness is a key foundation for effective response to AIDS. Religious communities are interwoven into the wider community. That's their major asset and strength for scaling up a sustenance response, and for promoting mutual, healthy accountability for care, support and change of attitude.
Hence, I say, the acknowledgement of the capacity for personal faith is critical to effective community response. What is crucial is to teach the faithful that 'morality' can be received as an affirmation of mutual good without assumptions, judgements, or exclusions. That it can be an expression of solidarity, containing beliefs that are offered and often owned by the wider community. The faithful must be taught that articulation of religious values and norms is alright as part of community identity but these must never be imposed on others who don't share the same values.
Uganda is reported to be the first country in the world with a massive AIDS problem that has reduced the numbers of the afflicted, from possibly 25% in 1992 to about 6% in 2004 -- though there are fears the tide is turning the other way again, due to complicity.
The Ugandan government claims it could not have achieved its success against the HIV/AIDS pandemic without the churches that had to face up to the terrible calamity and work to achieve this reduction.
One welcomes the return of Africa to God, especially as it is obvious that this has social spin offs like the reduction of HIV.
But there are disturbing signs that 'The Age of Reason' is being replaced by an Age of "Faith" -- rigid, uncompromising, intolerant faith that leaves no room for debate or discussion. Sadly these signs show that most Africans are attracted to that sort of fundamentalist faith, which is mostly evangelised by American pastors.
Fundamentalist belief systems are inherently damaging to the individual and to society. When one adheres to a rigid set of beliefs that allows for no questioning or individual thought, things tend to be "clear" in dangerous ways. This is one of the reasons Islamic fundamentalists have been able to recruit terrorists to do horrible things. Fundamentalism in Christianity is showing signs of joining the fray, with America fundamentalists enacting their own form of legalised terrorism around the globe.
Fundamentalism, whether Christian, Jewish or Muslim, is dangerous and wrongheaded. It prevents people from doing what we are all here to do: to learn, to grow, and become more enlightened. It blocks the flow of information to people who need it in the name of God. AIDS activists know that the main weapon in our battle has always been education and self-empowerment.
I must emphasize that my objection is not against organized religion or spiritual belief, but fundamentalism that reduces people to sins rather than seeing them as human beings. I'm against any 'moralism' that uses the Bible or Koran to support slavery, sexism, mutilation, oppression, discrimination and prejudice.
The role of religion in combating HIV/AIDS in Africa is crucial. There was a time when religious leaders of most major faiths denounced those who fell ill with the virus that causes AIDS, even suggesting that their fate was divine punishment for immoral behaviour.
Luckily this is no longer the case. At HIV/AIDS conferences now, many religious faiths and HIV/AIDS activists sit together with speaker after speaker calling for compassion and tolerance for victims.
These are signs that religious leaders, too, are assuming their role of praying for the sick, comforting the afflicted and helping to spread awareness and prevention strategies.
There are, of course, still conservative religious attitudes, especially in the Catholic Church and Islamic faith institutions, who're opposed to measures like condom distribution to stop the spread of the disease. But it has become clear to everyone that the majority of the faithful, even from these sectors, are not opposed to these measures. Perhaps we can learn to live with each other's attitudes and priorities so long as we agree that the job at hand is fighting the AIDS pandemic.
HIV/AIDS is Africa's biggest challenge ever. It is well and good that men and women who serve God have decided they have a role to play in helping the present and future victims of this dreaded epidemic. With churches working with committed governments, Africa can beat this scourge. Uganda has led the way.
© 2005, GENERATOR 21.
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