Reflection: Secularism Results in Subservience in Africa
Jim Harries (PhD, theology, University of Birmingham, UK), has been researching aspects of African culture and lifestyle while engaging in mission work, since 1988. He has authored 10 books and numerous articles. His primary ministry engagement in non-COVID-times, is with indigenous churches. Jim is single, while keeping 12 African orphan children in his Kenyan village home.
WCIU Journal: Community and Societal Development Topic
March 4, 2021
by Jim Harries
Western communities are battling to bring their visions of the egalitarian global secular nature of people to fulfillment. Drawing on biblical notions of universal human equality,[1] their refusing to allow any conclusions that might suggest “racism” or the “inferiority” of non-Western people (according to their secular evaluations of “competence” [Harries 2020, 9]) has given them a self-imposed blindness to what is going on around them.
Western people, whose ancestors came up with today’s secular modernity, implicitly act as if people from other parts of the world can very quickly become as competent in running and functioning in modern institutions as are their own populations. They seem to live with two implicitly contradictory presupposed truths:
1. That today’s Western people’s peculiar history has enabled them to be global trendsetters especially in economics and technology, and
2. That people with different histories are no less capable of doing the same.
Any implication that people from certain parts of the world are less capable, they assume, must not be based on truth, but on partiality (or “racism”).[2]
Western secularists ignore the implicit contradiction between numbers 1 and 2 above. A people’s historical and cultural background and upbringing can have a significant influence on their understanding and ability to perform in another society, including a secular modern one. Not taking this into account will prove unsustainable and be deleterious in many of its consequences. Around the world, Africa certainly a case in point, equations of economic benefit are massively tilted in favor of expressing agreement with the Western-originated hegemonic system. People who disagree, people, that is, who prefer to do things on the basis of their own understanding rather than foreign rationality, are quickly marginalized and silenced in formal contexts.
Secularism is resulting in non-Western people being brought into a subservience to things that they do not understand.[3] A satisfactory future is entirely dependent, it seems to me, on the paradigm that is being drawn on being correct. In short, today’s formal Western secular view of the future is dependent on all non-Western people being able to put aside an irrational “religion” that they have been hanging on to, and as a result to be appropriators of Western secularism. Unless or until they achieve this they must be, as far as the West is concerned, “on hold.”
This causes great frustration in education in today’s Africa. It means that the African is always “wrong.” This is why in most of Africa, what is considered the highest quality and most desired education is always that arising from white people in Western countries. When African people innovate, i.e., begin to adjust education to their own understanding and context, the standard falls, the pristine original is corrupted. This means in effect that African people are required to as far as possible “shut up and listen” until the day on which they finally achieve Western gold standard.
In parts of Africa known to me, the failure to realize the above is an enormous intentional blind spot on the part of the West that is perpetuating corruption (amongst other things) by not permitting people to think for themselves. The expectation that non-Western people will simply adopt Western ways is preventing those non-Westerners from, in formal circles, following their own thinking. (In formal circles, to follow your own thinking in preference to pleasing the West, once one is discovered, is easily to invite economic disaster. While certain people can benefit from corruption, when it is discovered, economic cooperation from the outside that is not “aid” can go into steep decline.)
Lip-service given by African people to the principles of secularism rarely arises from their actually wanting to appropriate secular values. It is much more likely to be motivated by desire for money, power, prestige, and so on. In other words, the success of the Western capitalist economic machine results in it swallowing the thinking of peoples around the world into the toxic enzyme soup of its digestive belly. Non-westerners such as Africans are left pleading for the West to maintain its concern for victims, as their only hope for thriving.[4]
While the primary aim of this short piece is to point to a problem, I will briefly articulate what to me is an avenue towards a solution. The above-described hegemonic system is far too radically stuck for any individual to easily make a serious dent in it. Instead, at least in this stage of the game, I suggest sidestepping rather than confronting the juggernaut. Should sidesteppers reach a critical mass, then their critique of the reigning paradigm may be heard. In terms of Westerners’ relationship to “others,” the means of sidestepping I propose is vulnerable mission. That is, for some Westerners to seek opportunities to relate to non-Western people using the languages of the latter, and without bringing their “superior” economic/resource advantage into play. That can begin to give a Westerner a view of the “other” from the inside. That view could then enable them to articulate the ills of today’s hegemonic system of secular domination. Those people being listened to and taken seriously could, as a result, glean insights that would throw light into dark areas of today’s world.
References
Girard, René. 2001. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Trans. James G. Williams. Maryknoll: Orbis, 177),
Harries, Jim. 2020. “COVID-19: The West as ‘Laughing Stock’ in Africa.” Alliance for Vulnerable Mission Bulletin 12, no.8: 5-19.
Sowell, Thomas. 2019. Discrimination and Disparities. Revised and Enlarged. New York: Basic Books.
End Notes
[1] Being secular, today’s Westerners are no longer ready to re-examine the theological roots to many of their convictions, thus leaving them set in stone. Their assumption of universal human equality is an example of this.
[2] These days differences in outcomes are assumed to be due to “either biased treatment … or genetic deficiencies” (Sowell 2019, vii).
[3] The recent corona pandemic is a good example of this. Much of the advice offered to African countries on how to evade corona were derived from a logic that made little sense to indigenous people (Harries 2020).
[4] Because concern for victims is the modern absolute: (Girard, 2001, 177), such claim to victim-status is taken very seriously. Taking it seriously, for example by providing aid, conceals the reasons why it is needed on today’s massive scale in the first place.