Audit of African spiritual portfolio

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8 min

John Kuria Kariuki describes himself as a seasoned entrepreneur, corporate executive and business strategist. He is certainly all those. And now he has used a company executive’s approach and language to follow a meticulous paper trail in assessing the origins of some basic Christian texts and dogmas – particularly as they have been exported to Africa.

His key premise is that from Monday to Saturday, African professionals, when assessing proposals or reviewing reports, demand facts, evidence and transparency, yet on a Sunday they jettison those demands.

As Kariuki points out: “In the boardroom, they demand empirical data before authorising a merger. In the courtroom, they dismantle flawed arguments with surgical precision, refusing to accept hearsay as evidence. In the hospital ward, they rely on peer-reviewed science and exhaustive diagnostics before presenting a cure.”

He goes on to say that when the same professionals step through the doors of a local parish church, a mega-church or a cathedral, they enact what is the title of his book – Sunday Suspension. It is a clever book; it is a challenging book. I think it will delight some of its readers; it will disturb many of them.

Before Kariuki analyses the Christian theology that was brought to Africa, he describes what he calls the ‘indigenous operating system’ that was challenged and destroyed. Particularly, he focuses on the pre-colonial moral code of Ubuntu that was spread across the Bantu peoples of Africa. Its central idea is that a person becomes a person through other people — as the saying goes, ‘I am because we are’. Through this connectedness, the emphasis is on human dignity and communal responsibility.

Two years ago, I was conducting a consultancy for the Queen of the Baganda, who was setting up a development programme for women. The value system and description of objectives were based on traditional Ubuntu principles: compassion, respect and mutual responsibility. Africa was not the ‘dark continent’ as described by the colonialists and the Christian missionaries. As Kariuki says: “For centuries, the African professional has been handed a fraudulent prospectus regarding their own history. The colonial missionary enterprise justified its aggressive theological takeover by claiming the target company – the African continent – was entirely bankrupt.”

Theological brand

This enabled them to claim that their own theological brand was, as Kariuki says “the only viable software upgrade”. He suggests that the upgrade the modern professional should do is to salvage something of the traditional operating system that involved horizontal and not vertical responsibility, community-driven rather than priestly-imposed ethics, and earthly rather than spiritual restitution. And Kariuki insists that this does not mean an uncritical regression to an 18th century agrarian lifestyle.

As for the Christian religion that was exported, Kariuki’s textual audit has a number of, at least for me, surprising and thought-provoking findings. In no way did the Bible drop from the sky. Kariuki has forensically traced the origin of key documents, primarily focusing on the four gospels that have determined some of the most significant Christian tenets and dogmas. And the many footnotes allow any reader to follow the same paper trail. But there was no paper at the beginning of the trail.

Kariuki reminds us that the historical Jesus and his immediate followers were illiterate Aramaic-speaking Jewish people. They didn’t write the gospels. What there was after the execution of Jesus was what Kariuki calls an ‘oral ledger’ that was adapted and embellished as the words spread across different regions and communities. The gospels were actually written many decades later by anonymous, educated Greek-speaking authors.

Kariuki’s verdict is that we should stop reading the Bible as an infallible text but as ‘a complex curated library of ancient texts, deeply influenced by the political realities of the men who compiled it’.

Rather than writing a precis of the whole book – which would involve summarising the justification Kariuki gives for regarding the export of Christianity to Africa as a ‘hostile takeover’ – l will now concentrate on how he deals with two basic beliefs, wherever Christians are: the doctrine of Original Sin and the belief in Hell.

Original Sin means that we all are born somehow depraved – we have inherited a sinfulness as a result of the Fall of Adam and Eve as described in the Book of Genesis, and it is Jesus’s life, death and resurrection that gives us the chance of salvation. It is something that the illiterate Jewish followers of Jesus didn’t talk about; it is something that the Greek-speaking authors of the Gospels didn’t write about. It was something thought about in the late 4th and early 5th century by a North-African bishop called Augustine of Hippo.

Jerusalem 

As for the belief in Hell, Kariuki notes that Jesus would have referred to Gehenna – a specific location outside Jerusalem that was a smouldering landfill where the city refuse was burnt- like Nairobi’s Dandora dump. It was a symbol of wastefulness and ruin. Kariuki claims that it was a “socio-political warning about earthly consequences, completely devoid of any reference to post-mortem, eternal conscious torment”.

However, as Christianity spread out of Judea and became a movement within the Greco-Roman empire, it was strongly influenced by mythologies such as the Greek concept of Hades – the dark underworld of the dead. And so it became helpful for emperors and colonialists in subjugating their peoples by supporting a religion that had a notion of eternal punishment for those who wandered at all out of line.

In the final chapters, Kariuki reflects on the present situation, having completed his study of how some core Christian beliefs have evolved, not as dictates of the Divine but as conclusions of those, sometimes self-serving, custodians of the Christian rulebook. He particularly focuses on the operating system of the current Mega Churches in Kenya and the rest of sub-Sahara Africa.

Kariuki reminds us that CEOs of companies are accountable to their Boards of Directors, while the ecclesiastical leadership is bound by no such regulatory framework: ‘The Church demands the continuous financial commitment of a corporate shareholder…. but in exchange it offers zero equity, zero voting rights, and absolutely zero financial transparency’. Kariuki then makes a contrast with the operating system of the Chama (a micro-financing or rotating investment group) that he describes as ‘a master-class in decentralised finance, horizontal accountability and rigorous ethical governance’.

Kariuki concludes by saying that we should operate with a humanist mental approach, liquidating fear and inherited depravity: “It is time for us to sign our own names to our moral framework, end the Sunday Suspension, and reclaim the sovereign equity of our own minds”.

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