If you see public and private scandals perpetrated by a seemingly very devout , very religious and very educated clique of leaders who lack decorum and civility is because they were assimilated by their oppressors .
turned to laughter but the mass celebrant wasn ’ t at all amused as he asked another student to step in as a substitute altar boy , promising to deal with Ochieng as soon as the mass was over .
Ochieng was ushered into the deputy headmaster ’ s office by a still livid chaplain and began to explain how the insolent Ochieng had not only disrupted his mass but was openly defiant or incapable of following simple instructions in godly ways .
When the deputy headmaster asked Ochieng why he had responded in his vernacular , Ochieng responded that the chaplain had previously explained that God was omniscient so it follows that he obviously must understand the Luo language .
If God only understood Latin , then it would be impossible for the students to pray for themselves or was the priest the only one allowed to pray . Ochieng also wondered why God only spoke Latin , a dead language .
The deputy headmaster sent Ochieng out of the office while he and the chaplain conferred for the next half hour as Ochieng waited anxiously for the punishment that would be meted for the current infraction .
Amazingly there was none , after the half hour wait the chaplain walked out and Ochieng was asked to go in and the deputy headmaster read Ochieng the riot act reminding him that it was sacrilegious to interfere with mass but Ochieng was never again given alter duty .
Ochieng was reminiscing on his school days and wondered why he was never punished although in truth he may have been cheeky but he actually had not done anything wrong while both the chaplain and the deputy headmaster never addressed his dilemma .
Ochieng has come to believe that the genesis of all the problems that Kenya and indeed Africa faces today , emanate from the advent of Christianity and the disruption it caused to the African social and cultural fabric .
The Europeans had for centuries been in contact with Africa as equal trading partners and allies in their extensive internal wars which required the regular recruitment of warriors and generals to dominate the many principalities in fractious Europe .
That relationship took an unexpected turn
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If you see public and private scandals perpetrated by a seemingly very devout , very religious and very educated clique of leaders who lack decorum and civility is because they were assimilated by their oppressors .
when the new world plantations needed able bodied laborers to do the arduous work there . The African was the only person who had the physical strength and stamina to do the work .
It soon became apparent that to import labor from Africa was going to be a very expensive undertaking and the only way it was going to be viable is if the plantation owners somehow acquired cheap labor from Africa .
They approached the African Kings and requested to purchase prisoners of war and since they offered a good price the African rulers readily agreed little knowing that they had opened the slavery Pandora box .
Soon the African rulers were raiding their neighbors not only for the expansion of their empires but to also capture men of rival tribes and sell them to the European at a handsome profit . The floodgates of the horrors of slavery had been opened .
Since the plantations needed a steady stream of workers and there weren ’ t enough inter-Africans wars to create prisoners of war , the European started to organize raiding parties to African tribes to keep the supply going .
The slavery institution has existed among all communities for as long as life has existed but the sheer volume of Africans that were shipped to the new world soon made slavery a unique African reality .
We would like to believe that the African rulers that precipitated this inhuman trade had no idea that the trade they set in motion was going to come back and haunt them and they ignorantly did not care about the treatment of their prisoners of war .
What they did not realize was that the African had been reduced in the eye of the European to a commodity and not a human being . It was necessary to reduce the Africans , in totality , to a sub-human level to justify the savagery that was meted to the slaves .
During the expansion of the European city states in the Middle Ages the nobility and the church went hand in glove culminating in the Holy Roman Empire which was answerable to the Pope . Church became an arm of state just like the military .
It was during the period of the militarized church that the expansion to the new worlds took place but in the beginning this expansion skirted around Africa as there existed in Africa well established nation states and religions .
The European , covetous of the abundant land and resources available in Africa , set up an ingenious stratagem to dispossess the African of his land and resources using a two-pronged approach of using the church and the military .
Since Europeans did not have enough manpower to subjugate the huge continent by force , they devised a clever propaganda approach of divide and rule which essentially undermined the Africans and escalated inter-tribal rivalry .
The European missionary came to Africa on a premise that the African had no god . Since the African did not have a written history , they assumed that deity was a concept that the so-called savages of Africa could not understand .
So , they declared that they would educate the savage in their language to explain their god and began to sabotage existing African cultural practices as the work of the devil . Salvation was only possible if he renounced his culture and heritage .
The first indication of being educated and a Christian was by assuming European names and discarding the languages of darkness and evil and promoting a world view that eventually led to self-hate on the part of the Africans .
The individualistic European missionary came holding the bible and meekly asked to be accommodated amongst the Africans , who lived communally and hence did not