Excerpts only, July 1, 2019

CAESAR & GOD

Bishop KukaH

PROPHETIC ENGAGEMENT OF THE STATE IN AFRICA

State, Religion, Politics and Power in Africa

From the Conference flier, it would seem obvious that my work has been made quite easy by the caliber of speakers assembled here. My job is merely to provide some broad strokes around the multilayered themes of your Conference, namely, State and Religion in Africa. However, to give myself enough elbowroom for manoeuvre, I have slightly adjusted my Keynote address to read, Caesar and God: Prophetic Engagement of the State in Africa. I have added politics so as to enable us navigate the nuances around the themes.

It is almost impossible to name one area of human existence that has not been traversed and marked by the intellectual footprints of prodigious African scholars in thinking through the post-colonial state in Africa. Here, we must acknowledge a myriad of scholars who have written extensively on the themes of Anthropology, Literature, History, Economy, Politics, etc. By deploying such tools as epigrams, novellas, dance, culture, poetry, etc., they have presented a picture of pre and post colonial Africa.

Most of these narratives employed these tools to expose the underbelly of colonialism. In the process, a substantial part of this scholarship, inspired by Marxism, employed materialistic tools of analysis that focused so much on the impervious dimensions of slavery and colonialism. It may have been plausible to argue that colonialism and slavery were dehumanizing and to also focus on the superficial views that somehow, religion was conscripted to serve the interests of the colonial state. The problem here is that colonialism was not all negative nor was Religion necessarily part of the baggage of the colonial state.

Ignorance of the real history of missionary activities in Nigeria led to a prejudicial view that fed into an assumption that somehow, missionaries came merely to soften the ground for the colonial state and that there was a convergence of interests in their missions. Thus, whereas the spread of Islam was often accompanied by violence as with the Sokoto caliphate for example, missionary activities were totally free of violence and an impulse for power. Missionary activities focused on conversions, provision of education, health, social services as the gateway to freedom and liberation for the people.

I know that I am stirring a hornet's nest which is actually a good thing and should be the main focus and purpose of a gathering of this nature. Indeed, it would be a shame if a gathering of this caliber of scholars were not to leave behind a trail of academic and ideological fireworks. If we succeed in doing this, the next conference and the one after would create greater excitement as academic gladiators enrich the frontiers of knowledge through their debates, disagreements and generation of new ideas. These debates should expand the frontiers of our knowledge and help us contribute the proper interpretation of the histories of our nations.

My interest in this short intervention is not to review the literature but to examine the human angles of Religion in the Politics of the State in Africa. I am therefore not interested here in the exegetical forms of theology, but interested only in the extent that theology seeks to proffer solutions to the human condition, in other words, its liberatory dimensions. To explore this, I will be draw attention to how in particular epochs, religious leaders helped to shape the social, political and economic direction of their countries by deployment of the moral authority of religion to effect changes in their societies. This is what is known as the prophetic message of Religion.

To do this, I will divide this Keynote into three sections. Section one will briefly review the role of Religion, Politics and the State in pre and post independent Africa. In doing this, our intention is to look at what role religion may have played in particular periods of national trauma or moral stagnation. The second part of this Keynote will fast forward to the late 80s to see how religion shaped the subsequent development of politics and the state in Africa. The third party will, by way of summary, look at examples from elsewhere to illustrate the power of Religion to alter the course of the history of nations.

1: Religion and State in Africa: Pre and Post Colonial Phase:

A casual reference to the magnus opus of the late Professor Ali Mazrui, Africa: The Triple Heritage,[1] is enough to draw attention the nature of the experiences of African peoples with the colonialism, the foreign religions or Christianity and Islam. This research, which was the subject of a television documentary series aired by the BBC in 1986, opened up a new phase in the debate of the historical and cultural predicaments of African identity after colonialism. Indeed, the medium of articulation itself spoke volumes about the nature of the subject. Whatever grudges one may have about Professor Ali Mazrui's conclusions and biases, it is difficult not to give him the deserved honour for taking on this very difficult subject head on.

In summary, Professor Mazrui reminds the world that Africa was the cradle of civilisation, but since Africans had no real global ambitions of exploration or domination, they would later become victims of invaders who brought both Arab civilisation with Islam and trade, while Western civilisation entered Africa through both western missionaries and colonialism. What Professor Mazrui eloquently described as the Triple heritage is today the fate of most African intellectuals and believers. The impact of the triangle of western imperialism, Christian missionaries and Islamic clerics/traders taken together with what the great British historian, Basil Davidson would refer to as, the curse of the nation state, would become the furnace into which the fate of Africa and Africans will finally be formed.

Today, various African countries are only trying to cope with these challenges differently. It is safe to say that countries with substantial Muslim and Christian populations have not known peace since the end of colonialism because of the open wounds left by their colonial legacies. Competing historical narratives of injustices continue to provide frames and platforms for stocking vicious fires of violence based on perceptions of religious intolerance between Muslims and Christians.

After the experience of India and the events leading up to the creation of Pakistan, strong feelings began to emerge among non-Muslims especially in northern Nigeria that a similar situation might need to be considered, namely, the creation of a separate state for Islam. However, prominent Christian politicians were bitterly opposed to the idea of a divided Nigeria and thus, there was the cry of, No, to the Pakistanisation of Nigeria[2]. Within the north which sought to present itself as a united whole under the banner of Islam, statesmen like Aminu Kano insisted on rolling back the frontiers of Fulani hegemony with its feudal crust, arguing that feudalism was a threat to the emergence of an egalitarian society. He sought the liberation of ordinary Nigerians whom he called the talakawa from the clutches of feudal overlords, the Emirs whom he accused of a parasitism and referred to them as, Yan Tande[3].

The Non Muslims of the Middle Belt however continued their resistance of northern Muslim domination, arguing that the domination by the predominantly Muslim elites denied them their cultural and religious identity. They named their first political platform, The Non Muslim League.[4] When the colonial government set up what would later be more popularly called, the Minorities Commission in 1957, the people of the Middle Belt made a strong case against their incorporation into the North. A combination of subterfuge, intrigues and manouvre would later sabotage their dream and consign them to a so-called, united and indivisible North.[5]

Muslims in northern Nigeria have been exposed to a coercive form of Islam which traces its history to the bloody conquests of the nineteenth century Fulani jihad that laid the foundation for the emergence of the Sokoto caliphate and institutionalised the dominance of Islam. Since independence, northern Muslims have continued to agitate for the application of Islamic law and despite its suspension in Constitutional debates, the problem has not gone away[6]. The northern Muslim elite had come to terms with the fact that Islam was for them the most viable tool for mobilising their people and clinging on to power.

All of this came to a climax in 1999 when the country returned to civilian rule. In 1999, Nigerians had barely settled down to the joy of the return of Democracy and were savouring the prospects of gaining their freedoms when the then Governor of Zamfara declared that his state had decided to adopt Sharia Law as a means of administering justice and the state[7].

This is not the place to discuss the wider implications of all this development. Except for the Governor of Kaduna State, Alhaji Muhammad Makarfi who had the courage to stand his ground and opt for something more reasonable, all the Governors in the core Northern States, lacking the courage of their convictions, all declared that they had adopted Sharia law. However, with hindsight, the herd mentality of the Northern Muslim political elite (Governors) showed very clearly amount of fear that a coercive form of religious life had imposed on the people. It was a shame that leading northern Muslim politicians could not appreciate the complexity of these problems but rather hypocritically cast their lot with their followers even when they knew that they were heading for a cul de sac.

Today, what was declared in 1999 has borne fruits and the fruits are to be clearly seen in the rich harvest of atrocities that have turned Zamfara into the epicentre of violence and death in Nigeria. Indeed, to push this logic to its conclusion, by way of metaphor, we can argue that what Zamfara should be seen as what life under Sharia law should look like in a plural society such as ours. Beyond the banditry that has come to replace governance, the Supreme Court ruling which overturned the victory of the All Progressive Congress, APC, and handed power over to the Peoples' Democratic Party, PDP, in Zamfara state was the final nailing of the coffin of hypocrisy of the manipulation of religion.

Elsewhere in Africa, we have seen manifestations of Islamic resistance to the fine principles of Democracy and the tendency of Muslims to use Democracy merely as a footstep to deepening the hold of Islam in the state. In predominantly Muslim states of northern Africa such as Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Mali, Niger and so on, the stamp of Islamic dominance has left very little windows for other non- Muslim minority populations in these states to function. Thus, it remains a real challenge to ask whether Democracy in Muslim dominated states can thrive by effective management of pluralism and common citizenship. The emergence of the state of South Sudan is the highest expression of the failure of politics of managing diversity and common citizenship in a dominant Islamic state. The current situation in both Algeria and Egypt, the Shi'ite dilemma in Kaduna state, all suggest very clearly that even in predominantly Muslim environment are not safe from these internal tensions and intolerance within Islam.

The State and Liberation: Appeal to Religion:

Across Africa, it is plausible to argue that flag independence has not delivered the good life to our people as it was predicted. Tones of literature exist to explain the abysmal failure of the postcolonial political elite. Most African countries (barring for example, for example, Angola, Namibia, South Africa) got flag independence as the saying goes, on a platter of gold. To be sure, there were struggles of resistance here and there. In most cases, the colonial state did everything possible to align with the conservative structures of the societies they had colonised either by transferring power to these conservative groups based on ethnicity or religion (e.g., Kikuyus in Kenya, Hutus in Rwanda or Muslims in Nigeria and Sudan). The result is that years and years after flag independence, the issues of minority rights, adequate power sharing mechanisms have eluded most African nations. The result has been the long, drawn out war of attrition has consumed the continent as all kinds of wars continue unabated.

The unresolved issues of adequate power sharing mechanisms, managing diversity, running inclusive governments have become almost impossible dreams to achieve. The result has been the inevitability of instability with societies convulsing into wide scale violence at the slightest provocation. It is difficult to name one African country that has gone unscathed from internal violence since independence.

It is often in the midst of these crises that we can locate the conflict and crises between Caesar and God. In other words, central to the issues is the role of religion in nation building. Here, almost every African country has a different story to tell. For the Muslim dominated countries, the context was often different with invocation of the themes of Islamic Jihadism and martyrdom as metaphors as distinct from the secular voices of aluta continua. I will briefly illustrate a few examples to make this point.

In most African countries without significant Islamic presence, often, the struggle for independence was cast in western liberal modes of independence as freedom from domination and the urgent need for Africans to take over their resources and the running of their affairs. Coming in the wake of the emergence of a bipolar world of Communism and Western Liberal Democracy, African independence struggle was heavily influenced by the Soviet Union with its Socialist message of Communism as the Saviour. For the better part of fifty years, African politics and development would continue to swing between these two poles.

The seismic impact of the collapsed of the Berlin Wall in 1979 came as a defining moment in the quest for global power and domination. The event threw up nomenclatural definitions or interpretations depending on the ideological side of the wall that one stood. The west responded in a tone of triumphalism, announcing that what had happened was the death, defeat, collapse and end of Communism. In a more nuanced manner, Professor Francis Fukuyama attracted a flurry of intellectual debates when he proclaimed that indeed, what had happened was the manifestation of the Hegelian notion of the end of history. Liberal Democracy in his view had won the war, thus setting the stage for the emergence of a new world order!

The battles for the supremacy of western liberal Democracy and Communism drew inspiration from secular values? With prosperity, an increasingly secular Europe had begun to treat religion with some kind of disdain drawing inspiration from the French revolution. Communism on the other hand had founded its philosophy on a materialistic view of the world believing that somehow; the human person had the capacity to suspend God and create a heaven on earth. The Soviet Union raised its Communist ideology into an imaginary god and went on to pursue an illusive el dorado whose last gasp was marked by the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. However, unknown to secularists who believed that they had displaced the supernatural, Religion, which had been lurking around laid the foundation for the collapse of secular ideology. As with the collapse of the walls of Jericho, modern day Jericho would collapse not by the triumph of war but by the sound of the feet of the prophets.

At the height of his revolutionary arrogance, Joseph Stalin had famously quipped; How many divisions has the Pope? Of course, the Pope's divisions were of another kind and sadly, Stalin did not live long enough to see his army, empire and ideology lie prostrate before the Pope's divisions when the bells of war tolled. The details of this debate are not of immediate concern to me now. I wish to now end by looking briefly at the role of Religion in the liberation of Africans themselves from the clutches of the curse of their own new states.

Here, by way of conclusion, we now try to find the nexus between Caesar and God and the extent to which prophets over time have employed the Gospel as a viable tool for summoning the state to account to its citizens.

4: Summary and Conclusion: Caesar and God in Africa

To be sure, most ill informed commentators have often taken the text about rendering to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's to mean that Jesus was drawing a line of separation in the path of politics and faith[8]. In reality, what Jesus did was to call attention to the need for Christians in politics to see politics as a service to God, be guided by divine injunctions. For, in the mind of Jesus, the logic was that if the coin belonged to Caesar, then of course, it was a sign of submission to Caesar. However, since both the coin and Caesar are creations of God, they must both be submitted to divine authority.

Those who have used the text to tell the religious leaders to keep away from politics must see the text actually as a call for religious leaders to point and encourage Caesar to ensure that he uses his coin for the good of the people since both he and the coin are subordinate to God! This is therefore precisely the reason why over time, leading Churchmen have had to raise their voices to call the state to its duty to its citizen. This task if often referred to as the exercise of a prophetic voice. Like the prophets of old, religious leaders have to remain vigilant despite often being accused of being agitators and rabble-rousers[9]

By the 80s, the underbelly of Communism had begun to unravel. Developing countries had secured their political freedoms, Communist countries were, to use their own expression, riddled with internal contradictions, its propaganda machinery had been struck down by superior western propaganda, its citizens began to desire the good life of the west as the promised el dorado had proved to be an illusion. Increasingly, citizens living with Communism began a search for meaning in their personal and communal lives. Citizens began to feel diminished by denial of rights of movement, religion, free speech and expression, personal and private property etc.

It is significant to note that in the end, it was the Pope's divisions that laid the foundation for the end of Stalin's empire. The revolution had consumed its children and rendered their states illegitimate. The stirrings of Religion as a force for liberation had begun in Latin America with the birth of Liberation Theology in the late 70s and then the 80s. The liberating message of Christianity would later spread to Asia and Africa before birthing much later in Europe itself. Religion, derided by Marx as the opium of the people now became the powerful testosterone for revolt. The Pope's division had been roused and Stalin's army routed.

In Latin America, Nicaragua stood out as the first sign of victory for the principles of Liberation theology. Sadly, its politicisation and the incorporation of the clergy into the power structured diminished its intrinsic value and appeal within the Catholic Church. In the Philippines, its force would manifest in the routing of the famous dictator, Ferdinand Marcos and usher in a new dawn. The Philippines was 98% Catholic, Marcos the dictator was Catholic and it was significant that it was the same Catholic Church that routed him from power. He fell to the winds of what then came to be known as People Power. The same force of liberation rallied an Ecumenical coalition led by Christian leaders like the late Catholic Archbishop of Cape Town, Dennis Hurley, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and a range of others that would sweep South Africa and force an end to apartheid. In Europe, beginning from Poland, the Catholic Church lit a light and handed over to a Political Movement, Solidarity. It set the pace for the gradual dismantling and banishment the darkness of Communism and opened a new dawn for human freedom.

Perhaps the critics will be quick to argue that Communism is not dead and that, yes, liberal Democracy has neither responded to its lofty claims of ending poverty and banishing hunger. However, it is my view that what the world desperately needs, at any point in human history is a moral balance to hold whatever systems the world throws up and by whatever names. Over time, the world has known that revolutions by whatever name whether based on ideology or religion will sooner than later be stuck in their own distorted dreams which tend to end up as nightmares. Thus, whether it is the revolutions inspired by Lenin or Max, Pope John Paul 11 or an Ayatollah Khomeini, Castro, or a Mandela, sooner than later, renewal has to start all over again. This is the nature of the human person.

Neither Capitalism nor any other ideology can entirely by itself solve the world's problems no matter how laudable their prophet's claims might sound. However, the real challenge is a system, by whatever name, which offers citizens an opportunity to legitimately engage in the pursuit of happiness, a society committed to the proposition that we are all created equal in the image and likeness of one God. It is the duty of prophet to hold the moral mantle that enables a co-operation between Caesar and God for the betterment of society.

[1] Ali Mazrui: Africa: The Triple Heritage

[2]

[3] John Paden: Ahmadu Bello: Sardauna of Sokoto

[4]

[5] Midwest paper

[6]

[7]

[8] Matthew 22:21 but for an extensive review of this theme

Matthew Kukah: Religion and the Politics of Social Responsibility in Nigeria

(Spectrum Books. 2007)

[9] John Allen: Rabble Rouser for Peace: The Authourised Biography of Desmond Tutu

(Free Press. Cape Town. 2006)