AFRICANS, YOUR TRADITIONAL GOD AND RELIGION DID NOT SAVE YOU, WHY DO YOU THINK THAT FOREIGN GODS AND RELIGION WILL SAVE YOU?

I was recently speaking with my Nigerian friend, Mr Madu, whom I last saw 20 years ago and he was very upset with the African preoccupation with foreign religions. He wanted to dissuade Africans from extreme Western and Eastern Religiosity. Thus came the idea to write this piece. The concept of God and Religion is culturally dependent. Before the advent of Western Religion, the Igbos had personal gods called Chi who looked after you, guided your thoughts and actions and punished you if you transgressed. The big God in the sky supervised all the other gods. Let us assume that the Africans were wrong in their choice of God and that the Western and Eastern Gods or God is the real God. If life began in Africa as every sober scientist agrees, why would God appear somewhere else and not in Africa first?

When a farmer plants crops, the farmer starts weeding from the first plantings and not the later plantings. So the idea that God appeared elsewhere after creating Africans first is difficult to fathom. Again, let us assume that Africans are terribly bad children and God wanted to visit his favorite children initially. You would expect God to visit his African children before departing for God’s home? That never happened. Instead, Africans had to wait several hundred years for the news of God’s coming to filter into Africa through marauding Moslems and later Christians.

These adventurers subjugated, dehumanized, raped, and enslaved Africans with the help of their God. Is it possible that this happened because Africans abandoned their God for a foreign God that had other peoples’ interest? Or is it that Africans did not give their God a chance to help them? If the African God did not help Africans from foreign domination, the foreign God will not help Africans escape foreign domination.