Missionary Colonialism

“War brings about a lot of things: you know, children on the street, HIV AIDS, rape; and you had widows who did not have any land, who did not have anything left; and the whole country was down; and this was our inheritance: we inherited a run-down, trodden over, dead, rotting country – literally rotting, because there were dead bodies rotting on the streets everywhere. And that was our possession.”

I almost fell out of my chair when I heard this. When someone starts talking about genocide as a personal experience, it doesn’t really matter how disengaged you may be, you stop what you are doing, and you listen. Me, I was sitting at my desk, doing some homework, while simultaneously “listening” to my missed missions conference sessions, when this cut through the static. This always happens to me: I’ll be at the missionary conference, seething in my objection to this mandatory proseletization by these alphabet soup organizations, when the word of God will all of a sudden cut through my defenses. This year I had thought I could get out of it by going to visit schools (hi Davids!), but no, there is no escape for Jonah, and I was made to listen to twelve hours worth at my own leisure. It was in the middle of the eighth plenary session, entitled “testimonies,” them time when four different people got up to tell their stories. The guy introducing the people wasn’t even sure about this person’s name, and called him the missionary formerly known as Aman. Apparently he goes to Multnomah’s seminary. I’m still unsure, but at any rate, his testimony was pretty outrageous, wherein he shares a pretty heart-wrenching story about being kicked out of Rwanda, eventually rejected again in Uganda, and ultimately finds himself between the two, in literal “no-man’s land.” While there he heard mother pray, “Lord, these nations will not claim us, so now, we belong to you.” That’s the most biblical thing I’ve heard in a long time.

Aman relays a quick history of Christianity in Africa, specifically of how it came part and parcel with colonialism, with much confusion, and without separation. With Colonialism came a conception of leadership as lordship. And so when Africans finally came into power, they instilled the only model of leadership they had: ruling from on high, being served. But slowly they came to realize that in Europe itself, leadership was much more democratic than colonialism. “But,” he says,

It’s too late, because we have killed each other, we have tried to be the boss, we have tried to be dictators. Why? Because we knew – we thought that leadership was about being served. But the same thing happened in the church. When the missionaries came to Africa, they set up houses on the hill.”

The “house on the hill” image (Ronald Reagan anyone?) soon came to represent a general idea of western superiority.

Aman then traces a panoramic view of the brutal war and bloodshed that is plaguing Africa – Sudan, Somalia, Congo, Uganda, Sierra Leon, South Africa – and asks, “why is Africa still the way it is after 300 years of Christianity? Something must have gone wrong.” Something indeed has gone wrong, but Aman is responding with an outrageous sort of hope. Not optimism in human process. No, that is forever out of the question in light of what he has seen. But the hope he has is the sort that rises out of the horrors of Holy Saturday, with knowledge that God is working in the midst of the most brutal events. That kind of hope is not something I’m used to witnessing, and the perspective it gives rise to is one that desperately needs to be reclaimed in the western church. He concluded with a question and a charge, asking,

“What in the world is God doing in Africa?” “What God is doing in Africa today” he answers with an audacity akin to Paulo Friere, “is liberating them from misconceptions, from confusing the gift of the gospel with the wrapping of colonialism…what here in America you need to do is revisit your conception of what Africa is.”