Abraham Our Father: Paul and the Ancestors in Postcolonial Africa

2. Zimbabwe’s Religious Cultural Configurations

2 Zimbabwe’s Religious Cultural Configurations Father Abraham had many sons Many sons had Father Abraham I am one of them and so are you So let’s all praise the Lord! The period of colonial expansion and missionary education saw the transformation of Shona religion, culture, identity, and social structures. From the beginning, the educational process of both Africans and whites was the responsibility of colonial administrators and missionaries. When Western Christian missionaries came to Zimbabwe, their two main objectives were to supplant African traditional religion with Christianity and to civilize the socalled pagan natives of the Dark Continent.1 They sought to do this through moral and religious education, which in the Christian sense included all efforts and processes that help to bring children and adults into a vital and saving experience of God revealed in Jesus Christ. Religious education, whether in government or mission schools, was also meant to quicken the sense of God as a living reality so that communion with God became a natural practice and principle of life. The avenue to achieve all this was through Bible recitation, music, catechism, drama, and memorized Bible passages. This perception of and approach to Christianity by missionaries shaped and formed Shona Christianity in both colonial and postcolonial times. Caught in this empirical scenario, Shona religion was confronted with an either-or situation. Notwithstanding the force of the European empire, Shona people were drawn to elements of what the missionaries had to offer. A major factor that forged links between the Shona people and missionaries was the establishment of strategic centers around Zimbabwe. These mission centers 23 were composed of elementary and high school education, hospitals, farms, and theological education,2 which attracted Shona religious leaders, including chiefs and tribal leaders—an attraction they valued, appropriated, and, eventually, Africanized. However, colonial masters took over ownership of land and natural resources and stripped chiefs of their power. The question at the center of this confrontation was: How is African traditional religion to be preserved? The answer determined the ways through which the Shona people would navigate both the missionary and colonial worldviews. On the one hand, the Shona people held to a desire to preserve their African traditional religion. On the other hand, missionary education presented the Shona with an opportunity to transmute and transform their religious experience, along with other opportunities for personal, social, and community development. How then would the Shona people respond to missionary Christianity without despising their own traditional religion? How would Shona people use missionary education as a resource for dealing with colonialism? Keeping this dichotomy in perspective, this chapter will examine the impact of missionary education during and after colonization. While this chapter offers an original and provocative interpretation of the changes brought about by colonial and missionary education, it also documents a well-planned effort by missionaries to place mission centers in vital areas of Zimbabwe. The aim of these mission centers was to target and reclaim the total worldview of the Africans. On arrival in Zimbabwe, missionaries planted mission stations that served two major purposes. First, mission centers were religious sanctuaries designed to protect the missionaries from local people. More importantly, these centers later developed into institutions for education, health care, farming, and evangelism.3 Indigenous people—especially women, who were persecuted within the culture—found mission centers to be places of refuge where they found sympathy and protection from harsh traditional customs.4 Whether mission centers fulfilled their intended purposes is an issue to keep in mind as this book unfolds. My thesis is that mission centers were incubators of cultural and religious change, change that would later transform Shona social structures and ways of religious practice. At the center of this change was the Bible, a book whose reading and interpretation was presented by two groups of “missionaries”: Victorian colonizers, on the one hand, figures such as Cecil John Rhodes and David Livingstone, who sought to carry out a “civilizing” cultural mission and thus promoted colonial policies of subjugating the Africans;5 and Christian 24 | Abraham Our Father missionaries, on the other hand, who had as their primary objective converting Africans to Christianity. Philosophically, both groups based their education on the same principle: the only form of education from which Africans could benefit was manual labor and practical training. The underlying rationale for this belief was that Africans could more readily acquire basic elements of Western civilization...