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10. The Tree of Life: Regenerating and Gendering the Garden after the Fall, 1975–2000
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10 The Tree of Life: Regenerating and Gendering the Garden after the Fall, 1975–2000 The gospel is a very potent change agent, but we must remember that we do not use the gospel to accomplish a “greater purpose,” i.e. development, but rather we realize that the process of transformation brought about by conversion is development in the ultimate sense. —J. Matthews, “Annual Project Progress Report, April 1998–March 1999” Iwas invited to visit some of the villages in which SIM has worked in the areas of agro-forestry and rural development by an impressive Maradi celebrity named Ibrahim Yahaya, popularly known as Jaho. Jaho hosts SIM’s weekly development radio show on Radio Anfani. The show airs live at noon when people are at home preparing the midday meal and is rebroadcast in the late afternoon when people are listening to the radio in the cool of the day. Jaho tells jokes, interviews local farmers, visits a broad array of development projects, and generally acts to encourage deeply discouraged farmers in an engaging and jovial manner. The show is much appreciated by the government, by Peace Corps volunteers, and by ordinary farmers. Nothing in the program has specific religious content but it does create a great deal of goodwill for the SIM mission. Jaho’s voice and impressive person (he is tall and when he is at public events he dresses with great flair in traditional Hausa garb) 330 / Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel are readily recognized by people throughout the region; he is associated not with Christianity but with modernity and development. Having worked for many years for SIM in the realms of reforestation, development , and relief, he is well known and has received awards from the government of Niger in recognition of his contributions to development (Rinaudo 1994b). Because of his Fulani family background and his long familiarity with Hausa-speaking farmers, he has proven an indispensable intermediary in mediating the sometimes-violent conflicts between pastoralists and farmers in the region (Rinaudo 1995). This is a man who loves his job, loves trees, and feels passionately about the importance of SIM’s work in development. On the way to the project villages, we passed by his house near the Danja leprosarium to pay a visit to his wife. Painted on the outside wall of his home is a charming life-size mural of a tree, above which are the words L’arbre, c’est la vie (“Trees are life”). Trees, with their biblical resonances of the garden before the fall and their long association with Paradise, bear a symbolic weight that resonates among both Muslims and Christians. The mural reflects the sentiment that motivated SIM’s rural development work for many years and one that was very much in sympathy with the national government’s environmental policies, which are captured performatively in annual tree-planting events. He commented with some acerbity that recently a SIM missionary visiting his home remarked, upon seeing the mural, that it should have read, Dieu, c’est la vie (“God is life”). SIM’s ambivalence about development is nicely captured in this interchange . Development work has often been driven by something akin to evangelical fervor—the commitment of those who feel they have the answer that will save the ignorant African farmer. The adoption of development initiatives (such as planting trees) is treated as a mark of a kind of civic virtue. But that secular fervor and the inevitable emphasis in development on relatively long-term physical goals are in tension with SIM’s historical commitment to the immediacy of spiritual transformation —it is rebirth in Jesus Christ that will save the people of Niger, with or without trees. Indeed, SIM believes that without spiritual change there can be no real improvement in physical conditions: “Development ministries are incomplete if they do not address both the spiritual and physical needs of man” (Rinaudo 1988b, 6). Trees, stoves, and woodlots are outward markers of Christian love to Muslims, but in themselves they are not (eternal) Life (Lovering 1985, 2). Only when farmers are transformed spiritually will their gardens begin to thrive. [34.203.221.104] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:44 GMT) The Tree of Life / 331 This same tension between physical and spiritual goals informed SIM’s medical work in the 1950s and 1960s, and it is perhaps surprising to find it reappearing, apparently unresolved, later and in another domain . A few questions come to mind...