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Fifth Estate

Africans! You are Poor Because You Pray to The Wrong God and Defecate in Bushes

If a pauper and a prince pray to the same god, but the prince stays a prince and the pauper stays a pauper. The pauper should seek a new god! To understand this let’s go back a little bit.

It’s 1895 Arthur Henry Hardinge, head of colony at the Imperial British East Africa Company stands atop Fort Jesus leaning on a bastion looking out at the Indian Ocean. He has just ordered that the fort be converted to a prison. He has to quash an Arab uprising in the neighborhood and needs somewhere to hold the dissidents.

If he knew better, he would have named the dissidents insurgents and have them shot in the streets, no need for a prison.  But he didn’t know better. So, he lights his pipe, looks out across the Indian Ocean, towards India and Australia, where the British empire extends to. His heart filled with pride and patriotic fervor, he seeks to achieve the mandates of the Imperial British East Africa Company, what we shall henceforth call IBEACO.

Seven years earlier, on the 18th of April, 1888, Victoria Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of India granted a royal charter to William Mackinnon for the IBEACO.

The company’s mandate was to set up business interests in East Africa. In other words; to subjugate your otherwise peaceful grandparents and convert that subjugation to economic gain for the crown and people of the British Isles.

Thanks to men like Arthur Hardinge and Mackinnon, the British people in the industrial revolution experienced a boom like never before. Common folk were even allowed to eat meat more than once daily, an act that was previously punishable by law.

More than a hundred years after Hardinge built a railway, a road and a port; showed us how to make a country wealthy, our relatives are still dying of famine and water borne disease.

Don’t raise your nose at the thought, as a middle-class Kenyan, you are a kidney transplant away from living in Korogocho or moving to your rural home to die undisturbed; a small economic crisis and you suddenly have to learn how to use a pit toilet again.

You poor Africans, who has bewitched you?

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Ten years after Hardinge smoked his pipe atop fort Jesus, in 1905, sociologist Max Weber explained to us why the industrial revolution created such an even wealth.

Before the industrial revolution, most of the European powers were by and large the same. Portugal built for Jesus (that Hardinge now stands on) and ruled the Indian ocean trade. Italy exercised considerable influence in main land Europe. Spain had more colonies in America than the British or French and poor Germany was twiddling her thumbs missing out.

But then came the Industrial revolution and suddenly, the sun doesn’t set on the British Empire, Hardinge smokes his pipe atop Fort Jesus defecating (figuratively) on the Portuguese, Francophone Africa emerges, the Germans cause two world wars and we give Kilimanjaro to appease the Germans. This whole time, Italy, Spain, Portugal fade to the status of minor players.

Marx Weber, tells us, you can predict with a fair degree of certainty, the wealth of European community by the version of Christianity they practice. The protestants are wealthier than the Catholics, all factors held constant.

Weber attributes this to the Protestant work ethic, more so, Calvinist protestants. So, the Baptists will be wealthier than the Presbyterians who’ll in turn be wealthier than the Anglicans.

Move this thinking across the Atlantic and see the comparison, protestant US and Canada, with less in the way of natural resources than their Catholic Southern neighbors are wealthier by leaps and bounds. The theory seems to hold!

Marx Weber therefore posits that wealth is cultural, it is at the core of the way a people think. Which will also be apparent in the type of god they pray to. In Catholicism, God is benevolent and sovereign and so doles out good fortune, wealth and mercy to those he pleases, he owes nobody an explanation. All we can do is humbly request that he shows us favor and keeps ill away from us. To quote the Lord’s prayer “Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses”.

Conversely, the protestants cling onto a different way of looking at God’s benevolence and sovereignty. To borrow and illustration from the Biblical book of Deuteronomy, “The LORD will open the heavens, the storehouse of his bounty, to send rain on your land in season and to bless all the work of your hands” Therefore, for the Protestant, poverty is not pious, it is a sign of the Lord not blessing your work. You must therefore be: not working hard enough, are wasteful, lazy or indulging in too much pleasure.

Observe the following cherry-picked scenario, to see this point. The beautiful island of Puerto Rico, (A territory of the USA) is smack in the way of hurricanes, year after year. A subservient Puerto Rican population will pray for God to spare them from the ravages of hurricanes and submit themselves to God’s will. All while being a territory of the wealthiest most powerful nation on earth.

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The Dutch, with their low-lying country prone to incessant flooding in the meantime, built dykes and dams to reclaim land from the sea. All this beginning before the first world war! Very few Dutch today have witnessed catastrophic flooding of years past.

A people’s culture speaks deeply into the way they view wealth, their self-belief and ability to bend circumstances to their will. Africans are stuck with a Messiah notion; they are waiting to be saved. Waiting for a particular leader to come into office to save them, waiting for their relatives to pull strings to get them a job, waiting for rains to plan their crop and the government to build dykes at its own volution to stop rampant flooding. Waiting for foreign aid to send them food in a famine, waiting to be saved!

The African praises a god who gives a nod to corruption if they are the beneficiaries of the corruption, a god who accepts tithes from stolen public funds, a god who allows for public squalor and private opulence. Our god allows us to throw trash out of our vehicles because our private space must be comfortable even at the expense of others.

The African god gives wealth mysteriously, the African does not question or get angry at his brother who gets rich by ‘unknown ways’. No, The African quickly allies himself with the owner of the mysterious wealth, so he can at least pick up crumbs.

The African has never taken on a development project longer than a generation because the African god will take care of tomorrow. The African will be poor until the African god ruptures us all to heaven and finally rewards the poor with mansions and streets of gold.

The African will ignore this blog, because it was written by a fellow African. The African will stay poor because he fails to cultivate integrity in his household, in his life and in his peers. He is still waiting for his messiah in the form of good leaders.

My fellow African, these good leaders will have to be birthed by us and come from us. The next election, just like the last one, will not help you, you will stay poor, the one after will still not help if you do not change what you believe.

Ama mnangoja Mzugnu awaambie?

On the next blog we shall discuss how open defecation has caused your poverty. Just like Weber wrote at the time of an industrial revolution, we are in the midst of another revolution, but this blog has become a bit too long for the African to read.

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Ama mnangoja Mzungu awaambie?

 

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