Another Muslim public holiday has come and gone. Called the
‘Feast of the Sacrifice’, it celebrates the compliance of Ibrahim to readily forgo
his son Ishmael as sacrifice at the command of Allah. For Islam, the later –
their ancestor – was the son in question as opposed to Isaac – ancestor to the
Jews – as recorded in the Hebrew Bible. It is on this count that the holiday –
apart from the respite from the biting times it afforded – also served to awaken
erstwhile sleeping thoughts.
Floating atop the eddying melange was why the patriarch in
question did not have a third son to whom Africa could have clung to retain its
ancestors forever lost – save something is done – to the two ‘world’ religions
spawned in their commemoration. Or, taken from another angle, why in the world
did we not end up like peoples like the Japanese or Chinese who were spared
from this debacle by history.
Indeed, when the story of how Africa lost her religions to
outright invaders will be told, it will make more compelling tale than that of
how the leopard lost its spots. O yes, because though sundry revisionists are
quick to reposition the continent as only the birthplace of mankind, it is also
well and truly the cradle of its civilization. Indubitably, ever before the
fountains in Mesopotamia n Asia – to whom the honour is being surreptitiously
transferred to – so long before Greece on account of its Classical Age, black
Egypt had risen, waxed, waned and subsisted. They only trouble was that those
she treated as equals while it reigned supreme treated her vice versa at the
turn of the civilization tide. Thus with help from a superior firepower they
were to overrun it, usurping and supplanting her lands and ways.
Nowhere else was this more so than in the subject of her
religions. When the early Christians were driven out of Jerusalem, those that
made it elsewhere took along with them their local belief as Jews. This to the
new proselytes meant accepting the two together and adding local belief systems
to the mix was termed syncretism. In Egypt particularly the religion from which
coincidentally the burgeoning religion had borrowed many aspects of its
mythology, was set aside for the new. This was the main or part of the reasons
why from the Arab invasion Egyptian Christianity could not cope with mass
conversions to Islam – this after four solid centuries of achievement.
It is most heartrending that while spreading these
newfangled faiths to Africa, none of either of them gave the old ways of people
a doubter’s benefit. All our forebears had taken centuries to build were wholly
and entirely swept under the carpet as primitive. Even concepts that would have
served to endear the new faiths to the converted were labelled as belonging of
the devil, worthy of nothing but the desuetude of oblivion. The proselytized in
the same vein never questioned what they were taught. With the zeal of new
converts, they even disowned their families and abandoned their homesteads for
less than morsels of porridge served up as assurances to salvation after they
must have died.
Opposed to their preachments of an omnipotent and
omnipresent Supreme Being, they in no way try to explain why perhaps due to
their untoward intrusion newer evils hitherto assuaged by local mores now
plague the land on end. They even end up locating Him – o yes – to specific
spots to which their adherents from all over the world paid regular visits that
apart from offering abundant grace also enrich the respective home countries in
recompense. These are fanned on by local clergy who end up inventing all kind
of new fables to keep the people in line. Offensive old prayers are replaced
with more compliant ones just to maintain the status quo.
Alien customs are not only introduced to supplant
homemade ones but even dressing codes are altered to favour that of outright
visitors who did not get a hang of what they had met on arrival in the
continent. Practical modes of existence are condemned and passed off as of the
devil whose colour is attributed to ours. In the urge to have our souls as
white as snow as we are admonished, everything foreign is now way to go. Even
houses are built as though we have cold seasons all through and not our
God-given all-year summer. And the beat goes on – and on.
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