The Sunday Mail
Rangu Nyamurundira
King Leopold II of Belgium’s letter of 1883 to colonial missionaries is a must read for Zimbabwe’s indigenous Christian majority. After all, King Leopold II is the “founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State and all its people”, a claim approved by the Berlin Conference that partitioned Africa. King Leopold II is remembered as the “Builder King” who commissioned a great number of buildings, urban projects and public works that transformed Belgium, with the profits generated from grossly violent exploitation of natural resources from the Congo.
The extent of his violence, including the recorded genocide of children, is the precedent to what DRC Congo suffers today. What is the pulpit’s narrative on the matter of atonement by those that have coveted and blasphemously usurped God’s blessing upon indigenous economic souls? What do they speak upon our journey from economic subjugation to the Promised Land of a prosperous indigenous economy?
King Leopold II wrote to colonial missionaries, directing them to impose fraudulent and blasphemous biblical narratives that would economically pacify and enslave “natives” or “niggers”.
Such narratives would be instilled into our souls by a missionary church brandishing the awe and fear God.
King Leopold wrote, “Reverends, Fathers and Dear Compatriots: The task that is given to fulfil is very delicate and requires much tact. You will go certainly to evangelize, but your evangelisation must inspire above all Belgian interests. Your principal objective in our mission in the Congo is never to teach the niggers to know God, this they know already.
“Your essential role is to facilitate the task of administrators and industrials, which means you will go to interpret the gospel in the way it will be the best to protect your interest in that part of the world. For these things, you have to keep watch on disinteresting our savages from the richness that is plenty in their underground.
“To void that they get interested in it, and make you murderous competition and dream one day to overthrow you. Evangelize the niggers so that they stay forever in submission to the white colonialists, so they never revolt against the restraints they are undergoing.”
Shamefully, it is the church that the “niggers” have founded today that now evangelises our economic souls into submission and is applauded as “forthright” by the Daily News because it calls upon President R.G. Mugabe to repent before the legacy of King Leopold II.
And one human rights activist, Dewa Mavhinga, is quoted in the same Daily News of 21 September 2016, calling upon the church to raise the stakes by taking a more active role in national politics and build alliances with regional and international church groups to call for justice in Zimbabwe.
What “justice” nhai saMavhinga, by what church, whose church and for whose souls?
Is it not justice when our wretched socio-economic condition historically imposed under royal seal is sought to be remedied by President R.G Mugabe and his Zanu PF Government?
Is the injustice not that our church, more than a century later, echoes King Leopold II’s instruction to missionaries that “Your knowledge of the gospel will allow you to find texts ordering, and encouraging your followers to love poverty like – Happier are the poor because they will inherit the heaven.”
It is the youth whom the church curses most to perpetual slavery as commanded by King Leopold that, “Your action will be directed essentially to the younger ones, for they won’t revolt when the recommendation of the priest is contradictory to their parent’s teachings. Recite every day — Happy are those who are weeping because the kingdom of God is for them.”
And pastor Evan Mawarire, our burden of a weeping modern day missionary, wept on Sky News.
He represents a church that weeps in the embrace of the western economic interests, that weeps not for our economic souls it has abandoned but for the British legacy advocated by colonial missionaries.
Our devout souls are Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, taken to the Apostolic faith, Pentecostal or Charismatic church.
Who intercedes for our deprived wretched souls yearning reparation of the plenty in our underground which King Leopold II coveted and has missionaries tax each week at Sunday mass to “use the money supposed for the poor, to build flourishing business centres.”
Must our wretched poor souls find sanctuary in tithing to the church or ‘spiritual fathers’?
Shall we rather turn to the path of ‘political fathers’ who seek economic salvation from historically manipulated and enslaving biblical narratives?
Already,our youth look far north, in Nigeria, where Pastor Chris of the Christ Embassy pastoral fame founded the Future Africa Leaders Award.
There, far from their own home church, four young Zimbabweans were awarded $10 000 each in 2014 and 2015 for innovation and youth empowerment initiatives that would rebuke the deluded biblical interpretations of Leopold’s missionaries.
Last year’s winner, Kudakwashe Chiutsi, has just hosted a Future Africa Leaders Summit under the theme “Inspiring Future African Leaders for Sustainable Development”.
She brought a new doctrine from a distant church which will have our souls redeem God seeded economic aspirations.
May God save our wretched economic souls that find no economic redemption within the Zimbabwean church entranced by narratives from King Leopold II’s colonial missionaries?
Our lost in the wilderness church rather grandstands, chiding President Mugabe for refusing to be pacified and submit to ungodly and dehumanising economic narratives by colonial era type clergy.
Let their pulpits have it clear, that it is not President Robert Mugabe that ruins our God sent indigenous economy towards which our President, also called Gabriel, is but God’s messenger.
It is so called men and women of God, economic wolves in sheep skin, in our midst who trade our economic souls for 30 pieces of silver, or rather the Green Card and franchising deal equivalent.
Rangu Nyamurundira is a lawyer and advocate for Zimbabwe’s indigenisation and economic empowerment program.
