Pope Francis talks for Africa

In November 2015, Pope Francis will visit Africa with American footprints marked by enthusiastic crowds desperate for talk that nourishes their communal humanity. His huge audiences, however, had few African-American clergy and worshipers. In Philadelphia delegates from African countries for a conference on the value of the family added some colour. The absence of black […]

In November 2015, Pope Francis will visit Africa with American footprints marked by enthusiastic crowds desperate for talk that nourishes their communal humanity. His huge audiences, however, had few African-American clergy and worshipers. In Philadelphia delegates from African countries for a conference on the value of the family added some colour. The absence of black Americans had roots in the Catholic Church being complicit in the slave trade and slave plantations. The struggle for civil rights was led by African-American churches. In the 21st Century, the Catholic Church has done little to combat the rot in schools for African Americans living in poverty and crime-infested ‘’inner cities’’.
The Catholic Church also carries a dismal record in Africa. It was silent on official ‘’crime against humanity’’ in South Africa from 1948 to 1994. In Rwanda and Burundi, its clergy engineered the visible and sporadic genocide between 1959 and 1994. Professor Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja blames her silence when King Leopold (from 1885-1908) slaughtered and decimated populations across the current Democratic Republic of Congo. France, as a Catholic country, had un-rebuked neo-genocidal violence in Central Africa, Algeria and Madagascar.  The African Union has a strong case for joining the Jewish community worldwide in condemning the Papacy for colluding with perpetrator’s deaths of peoples in millions.
The Pope gave injunctions for immigrants in the United States not to abandon cultures they came from. This was obviously a shot at Republican Party presidential candidates and their supporters animated by  diets of fears and hatred of ‘’Mexican immigrants’’. With President Obama once joking that both her and Donald Trump grew up together in their Kenyan homeland, he too is a target.
A chapel for students of Nairobi University conducts its worship in a mixture of Swahili, English and droplets of Latin. When President Mobutu Sese Seko led the campaign of telling his people that God knew their ‘’authentic’’ names before Catholic missionaries imposes alien ones on them, it aroused a brilliant rendering of a Catholic worship in local music. ‘’MISA LUBA’’, Fela’s ‘’SHAKARA’’ and Manu Dibango’s ‘’MAKOSA’’ were hot buys in elite music shops in New York City in the early 1970s. These Afro-classics were matched by Leopold Senghor’s Senegal using drums arranged in different sizes to render pieces created in a four-part European classical music form. Pope John 23rd seized this momentum and dragged a Euro-centric Catholic Church out of a legacy of inflicting severe brain damage on Africans through worship conducted with incomprehensible Latin chants.
Kenya’s distinguished writer, Ngugi wa Thiongo, has lucidly condemned systematic humiliation of African peoples by banning uses of their mother-tongues from boarding schools; text books and teaching.  Accordingly, Pope Francis must address this historic brain and soul violence. It ignores scientific evidence that creativity in Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology – and other hard sciences – is enhanced in those who learn them in their mother-tongues.  Between 1956 and 1958, for example, Japan translated over one thousand top quality books on ‘’AUTOMATION’’ into Japanese language. Japan soon became a leader in automation. The Chinese, Dutch, Danes, Swedes, Finns teach their children in their mother tongues. Pope Francis must bring ‘’LIBERATION EDUCATION’’ into Catholic schools all across Africa.
The pandemic of intellectual laziness and parasitism which this language alienation has perpetrated in personalities of Catholic elites is evidence by poverty in high quality intellectual productivity. Leopold Sedar Senghor celebrated ‘’socialism’’ in traditional African social technology but failed to integrate it into imagining novel post-colonial institutions. The Japanese, for example, translated ‘’collectivism’’ into directing all Japanese to hold savings accounts in Post Offices at a minimal interest rate. The money pooled was loaned to companies on whose management boards officials from the Central Bank, the Ministry of Trade and Ministry of Industry sat in their daily decision-making activities. This ensured accountability. Capitalism was, thereby, given a Japanese fuel of ‘’collectivism/groupism’’.
Mwalimu Nyerere, a devout Catholic, struggled to build ‘’familyhood’’/Ujamaa’’ into governance. The Catholic Church held on to robes imported from Rome; denying funds to a‘’familyhood’’ of Tanzanian converts employed in weaving and creatively embroidering them. Poverty and worship had a Catholic stamp.
With a total of 22 saints, Uganda leads in numbers of saints-per-capita. Winston Churchill feared that it was a curse. The Pope owes the Great Lakes Region 22 universities to keep saints busy planting flowers not petals of blood. The largest pool of Catholics are among Nigeria’s Ndigbo; driven by ‘’CHI’’(internal fuel for success).  Unlike the Japanese who used ‘’WORK AS ACTS OF WORSHIP’’ to manufacture high quality cars, the Catholic clergy have failed to seize ‘’CHI’’ to drive industrial innovation; while Korean, Japanese, Chinese imports block local manufacturing. Perhaps Pope Francis will burn CHI herbs at an Open Mass in Abba.