By Charles T.M.J. Dube

IN the last article, I indicated that African Traditional Religion (ATR) inculcated a culture of love and team spirit.
It was also a vehicle of peace and reconciliation at family and community levels.
However, it is important that we not be too sentimental about it and paint the picture that all is well with our religion.
Like any other religion, ATR has its flaws, which we can only give a blind eye to at our own peril.
After all, our objective is to reconstruct who we are or want to be, beginning from who we have been.
We believe that you would be nothing, but fake, if you couldn’t accept who you are or have been.
Who you eventually become should by all means reflect who you have been.
In an earlier article, in areas of spirituality, we quoted Moses in the book of Deuteronomy indicating that God had assigned heavenly beings to all nations.
He is an acceptable authority for a country largely Christian, which not only recognises the supremacy of God in the preamble to its Constitution, but also recognises the vibrancy of its traditions and culture in the same.
In an earlier article, we talked about the Parallel Agenda, of which we drew analogies from natural science, where in the Law of motion, Newton tells us ‘for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction’.
From religion we learnt of the existence of God and Satan, while from psychology we picked up the concepts of auto and hetero-suggestion.
In politics, we had those working for or against the national interest.
Likewise, ATR has its own contradictions.
It is in the light of these contradictions that we must understand how and why our parents adopted the Christian religion during the colonial period as a better form of handling our spirituality.
The biggest weakness in our ATR is its susceptibility to corruption or misuse by evil or sly family members, even against those it is expected to protect.
Midzimu inotengwa (ancestral spirits are on record as being corrupted or manipulated) by cunning self-centred family members and at times used as vehicles for witchcraft and spiritual warfare against unsuspecting well-meaning and loving family members.
In the article on the Judas among us, we indicated that for forces of evil to succeed in destroying an individual, there is usual need for collusion with one of the close family members of the targeted victim.
These will help the enemy in removing the family spiritual cover.
Any religious arrangement which provides no guarantees for spiritual cover as it becomes open to manipulation by forces of negation cannot be trusted and provide sufficient confidence in the day-to-day nuisances of life.
While every family member can pray directly through the departed ancestral spirits, this is in times of unforeseen crisis only, otherwise the prayer lines require family indabas to agree on purpose, timing, costs and all.
Such spirituality, which is closely linked on that of another, emasculates individual spirituality in these times of cosmopolitan dispersion and interfaces.
Besides, even where there is consensus on such family biras or thanksgiving ceremonies, one or two family members pull the strings as there is some special modus operandi to accomplish such fellowship with the ancestral spirits and the Almighty.
Thus, the system tends to block the direct communication line between a believer and his God.
While the peace and reconciliation facet of the communal worship system is greatly appreciated, successful family members can easily be subject to being held to ransom by the less successful, but more spiritually knowledgeable kinsmen, or even the other way round where the more successful members use corrupting influence and bribery to keep other family members underdogs.
The lack of transparency in the communication channels with God and existence of individuals privy to these, including knowing the right side to massage the family spirits to do their job, does not sound very favourable, especially if it remains in the hands of a callous few.
It is important to note, however, that even in the more personal relationship Christian faith, this centralisation of the communication channels with God is fast dispersing the direct contact variety through the substitution of ‘man of God’, spiritual fathers and all, who will be expected to (intercede) hold the keys to the creator, controlling both blessings and protection.
In any event, the worship structure is cumbersome, especially in terms of the preparatory stages, let alone the strict dos and don’ts particularly those which have nothing to do with evil intents.
These do not take account of the disturbances and knowledge gaps that have been brought about by social dissonances due to colonialism, urbanisation and all.
At times, in following the expected family rituals, you actually end up inviting malevolent spirits into the home.
Evil ancestors do not all of a sudden become angelic after their deaths and at times it is only after having followed the cultural dictates to the end that family members discover that the specific family member should not have been given the requisite family rituals because he was intrinsically evil while alive and as such his spirit would tend to stand with enemy spirits instead of playing the benevolent role as expected in ATR.
In any event, the fact that even the good benevolent spirit can be bribed, manipulated or corrupted to act against family interests renders such a worship system impotent and unreliable.
The ancestral spirit is projected as some kind of robot, which only acts in accordance to instructions from those who appease it best.
This article cannot obviously go unchallenged and it is our hope that custodians of our religions and culture will respond and provide an appropriate rejoinder.
It is important, however, to point out the co-existence of good and evil, the same way we contended in the parallel agenda article.
Even in Christianity, which I happen to subscribe to, infiltration has been quite apparent and the preponderance of the forces of evil and negation is very clear.
It too has had its own periods of regression which led to the reformation.
As I write, there are even more regressions to the extent of challenging the natural order of things as evil practices such as same sex marriages get tolerated and even institutionalised in some of the churches.
I must admit though, that this contribution has been deliberately provocative to awaken us from our slumber as it were.
When all is said and done, it is the concept of love and care for the interests of others other than self that becomes vivid in the unadulterated purpose of religion.
It is also about protecting the common interests, which become the national interests, and those of the human race.
It is healthy for us to interrogate the past and present as we aim to move forward, and in this, there should be no sacred cows.
From the above, it is clear that while our own ATR is noble, the corrupt and evil make it impotent.
Likewise, while our nation’s present and future potential remains high, it is only the greedy and villainous among us who can drive it into comatose.
It makes it imperative that we become our brother’s keeper, for in the final analysis it is the future of us all that gets affected.