I read in the
papers that one of the four persons who, apparently, bombed the London underground is a black man from Jamaica, a Mr. Lindsey. I asked myself: what in the world has a black
man got to do with the war between Christians and Muslims?
Why is this Jamaican fellow injecting himself into the clash of civilizations,
a war that is not his?
Clearly, the Christian and the Muslim worlds, two different civilizations,
are at war, a war that began in the seventh century when Mohammedans took over the Christian Holy City of Jerusalem,
and swept into Spain and other parts of Europe. So what has an African, at home and in the Diaspora, got to do with this war between Europeans and
Arabs?
There are Africans who call themselves Christians or Muslims, and they
feel compelled to join the battle
between Christian Westerners and Muslim Easterners?
Are there African Christians and Muslims? Let us see. Europeans came to my Alaigbo
world and imposed their Christian religion on me. I was socialized into the ideology of Christianity. Being the
philosophical type, I have probably read as many books on Christian theology as any theologian, from Tatulian to Origin, St Augustine,
Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart,
Erasmus, Anselem, Calvin, and
others. I must have read the Bible one million times.
This would seem to make me a Christian, right?
One supposes that there are Africans who were socialized into internalizing
the norms of the religious ideology called Islam and, therefore, are Muslims?
Christianity, as is currently practiced, is a European phenomenon. Christianity
has nothing to do with the simple gospel of love and forgiveness taught by a radical Jewish rabbi. When so-called
Christianity finally was accepted by Europeans, via Emperor Constantine embracing that hitherto Jewish sect in
315 AD, they proceeded to color it with their world view. They gave a Semitic religion their European interpretation.
Christianity, a teaching of love and forgiveness, in the hands of Europeans, became an instrument for conquering
the world and imposing European worldview on it.
For an African to be a Christian, in Christianity’s present form, is
for him to become culturally colonized. Cultural imperialism means imposing one group’s socially constructed reality,
not reality itself, weltanschauung, on others.
As an African, I cannot permit my thinking, my mind, to be colonized by Europeans
and their bastardized Christianity.
Of course, I believe in God. I believe in the Igbo God that my ancestors,
the Osuji-Njokus, were the
high priests of. I believe in African religions.
However, our African cultures have diffused with European cultures; all
things being constant, African religions and European Christianity will converge into a new religion, one suited
for Africans. The process of syncretism is already taking place in Africa. The so-called Pentecostal religions of Africa, Aladura,
Cherubim and Seraphim, are really attempts by religiously creative Africans to synthesize African and imported
European Christianity. In a few hundred years, African Christianity would not be any thing like what we currently
call European Christianity, the later, itself very unlike first century Paulian Christianity.
Islam was formed by Mohammed (570-632 AD) in Arabia. Islam was a means with which Mohammed unified his then
disparate people and subsequently embarked on a war of conquest, imposing Arabian worldview on other people. Shortly
after the “Seal of the prophets” death, Muslims took over Palestine, and swept into North Africa and took Egypt,
Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Northern Sudan, and Mauritania. They then swept into Spain and took it over, and ruled it for seven hundred years. They swept
into Southern France and would have
marched all the way to then primitive Britain before the Germans, Franks, under Charlemagne the great, stopped them at the
famous battle of Poitiers. But for that defeat of the “Moors”, Europe, today, would be
a Muslim country. Later,
when the Turks embraced Islam, they, too, attacked Europe, this time from the East, and reached the gates of Vienna, Austria, before they were beaten back. If Islamic Turkmen had not been defeated, Central Europe, today, would have become Islamic, as Southern Europe (Bosnia,
Albania, Bulgaria, etc) became.
Beginning in the tenth century, Europeans, now calling themselves Christians,
organized crusades and went to the Middle East
with the purpose of retaking the “Holy land” from the Mohammedans.
Several crusades were fought.
Sometimes, the Crusaders succeeded in taking Palestine,
and at other times, they were driven off. Saladin, the one time head of the Arab Muslim army, proved as able as King Richard the lion hearted.
In the 19th century, Europe finally defeated the Ottoman
Empire and triumphed in Muslin lands.
Christian Europeans took ever the Middle
East and ruled it until the middle of the 20th century when they gave independence to those Arab lands.
During the post Second World War era, Europe was divided by two competing ideological camps: Capitalism and Socialism. These two
engaged in a cold war, a war they fought primarily through third world proxies. In 1990, the hapless Soviet Union Collapsed and America became the sole superpower in the world, the world’s Hegemon.
America
is the leader of the Christian West. As it were, Christians are now the dominant power in the world.
Arab Muslims,
apparently, do not like being dominated by the Christian West. They call the Westerners infidels.
Arabs were at
one time at the apogee of human civilization.
All things being equal, Arabs resent being second fiddle to Westerners, those
they believe that they, Arabs, civilized. It was Arabs who took the forgotten Greek Classical culture back to Europe and stimulated
the Italian renaissance.
Arab Muslims, apparently, have renewed their somnolent fourteen hundred
years war with
the Christian West. That
war is for the control of the world. Either party considers itself entitled to rule the world.
That war is currently going on in the form of Arab terrorism and Western
counter measures. The Muslim Arabs seem too weak to take on the Christian West in a frontal warfare, so they resort
to terrorism and other forms of guerrilla warfare. Terrorism is the weak man’s war. Here, a combatant randomly
kills his enemy’s people, hoping to generate fear of harm and death in them, and in the process intimidate them
into changing their policies and becoming amenable to the terrorists control. Of course, the enemy, aware of what
the terrorist is trying to do, refuses to be intimidated; hence both of them are locked in a prolonged war of attrition.
Let us get one thing straight, right now. There is a power struggle going on between the West and
the Middle East,
Christians and Muslims. I am a political realist and accept that human beings, as ethologists tell us, are territorial animals and will always fight for control over human territory. I have no problem understanding
the war between Westerners and Middle Easterners. What I do not understand is why an African should inject himself
into a war that he has nothing to gain from.
In the 9th
century of our common era, Muslims swept into black African lands. They came as far south as parts of North Western African
countries and parts of East Africa. What did they do in Africa? They kidnapped Africans and sold them as slaves to the Middle
East. Between 9-19th AD, Arabs were involved in selling African slaves. (If you are in doubt as to whether Arabs bought
African slaves, just look at today’s Arabs; they are mostly a mixture of Semites and Africans.)
In the late 1400s, Europeans, lead by the then sea Powers of Portugal
and Spain, buoyed by their conquest of the Muslims and the retaking of Spain in 1453, came to West Africa. By the 1500s, Europeans
were buying African slaves. From 1500-1900 Europeans bought African slaves and brought them to the Americas and used their labor for free to develop the land that they had
stolen from Indians.
What is the point, you ask? The point is that both Arab Muslims and Christian Europeans
enslaved Africans. Both used their religions as instruments for abusing and oppressing Africans.
It used to be the case that in Arabia and Europe, 18 year old men were conscripted into the military. They were trained and let loose
on the world. Arabs
and Europeans used their youths to kill other people and to take over other people’s lands. North Africa, a black
man’s land, was taken over by Arabs. America, an Indian man’s land, was taken over by Europeans.
There are no other lands left for these marauders to expropriate from
their native owners. These sociopathic
people have nothing more left for their youth to do. Thus, their youth, having nothing relevant to do with their
lives, are increasing becoming degenerated.
They are abusing drugs at an alarming rate and becoming homosexuals. We are
probably witnessing the death of moribund civilizations.
It seems that for these two anachronistic civilizations to revive themselves,
they must find purposeful and meaningful work for their youth, such as get them to serve mankind, rather than destroy
them in senseless wars.
My question is this: Why are black persons participating in a war by
their oppressors? The rational approach to that war would be to encourage the two supermen with feet of clay to
go for it, to duke it out.
I am not a pacifist, in fact, I love war. Mankind makes its greatest leap forwards during wars.
However, I must only fight a war that serves my people’s self interest. The war between Europeans and Arabs does not serve Africans’
interest. The clash between the people who enslaved Africans is not in Africans’ interests, except in so far that
when they self-destroy, Africans stand to benefit.
In case an African deludes himself into thinking that he is a Christian,
let him remember that Christian Europeans enslaved him; and if he has the delusion that he is a Muslim, let him
remember that Arab Muslims enslaved him (and are still doing so in Sudan
and Mauritania).
The war between Muslims and the crusaders seem a necessary war between
two aggressive races, each bent on enslaving the rest of us.
We ought to encourage these war dogs to go at each other until they self destroy. When they have weakened
each other, guess who would pick up their pieces?
The spill over effect of wars between great powers is their mutual destructive
and the emergence of other powers in the international world. The old must die for the new to be birthed and we
do not need to be sentimental about the destruction of Europe and Arabia.
I believe that Europeans and Arabs will be at war during the rest of
this century. And I
like it. God, how, I love it when those who enslaved my people destroy themselves. I bear grievances against those
who enslaved Africans; I desire vengeance and do not forgive any one who has abused Africans. I demand punishment
for oppressors. I
want these two slavers to destroy themselves. It is only upon their graves that Africa will emerge from their shadow. (Please do not be deceived by Christianity’s insistence
that you forgive your enemies. That is a ploy employed by the powerful to disarm the weak and control them. As
Nietzsche pointed out, anger is probably the best agent for keeping people alive. If you feel unjustly treated,
as I feel that Arabs and Europeans unjustly treated Africans, feel angry at those who maltreated you, and desire
vengeance, not forgiveness, you give yourself reason to live and something to work for. I exist to work for the
development of Africa,
so that those who humiliated us pay a heavy price for their crimes. Forgive and die, as Jesus did, but be angry
and live on planet earth.)
I believe that in a hundred years time, Africa will take over human civilization. Mankind was born in Africa. Then civilization seemed to have left Africa and went elsewhere.
The savages of Europe and Arabia ruled the world and made a mess of it. But civilization is coming back to where it
began: the birth place of all mankind. The death of the two Caucasian barbarians is a precondition for the emergence
of an Afro-centric civilization.
I, therefore, urge my fellow Africans, be they in Africa itself, or in the
Diaspora, to diplomatically remove themselves from the present East-West war.
No black man should ever inject himself into a war between those who enslaved
his people, unless, of course, he is a confused African, like the brother from Jamaica who, apparently, mistook himself for an Arab or a European.
Africans goal should be to work like hell to modernize and develop Africa, so that Africans’
can walk with their heads held high and not be seen as backward. It is not for Africans to get themselves foolishly
involved in other people’s war.