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Commentary

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Missionaries & Christianity

m’zungu missionaries created many distortions. Sometimes wittingly. Sometimes
unwittingly.

Missionaries had a deliberate policy of providing healthcare and other welfare

services as a way to enable their acceptance by and influence over local Africans. But
these missionaries reflected their own values and religion. The roots of some of the

problems in modern-day Africa have their roots in the actions and beliefs of those
missionaries.

In much of sub-Saharan Africa, 90 percent or more of the population are committed

Christians. As a result, they are easily jerked by zealous m’zungu Christians to act in a way
that undermines governance.

Catholic missionaries did not focus on teaching Africans to read and write. Protestant

missionaries did. This difference in focus has helped to create geographical areas where
the literacy rates were much higher and this in turn meant that political elites were likely to

come from specific localities.

The pattern of the incidence in Africa of the modern day HIV-Aids disease is also
thought to follow the differences between the teachings of Catholic and Protestant

missionaries.

Divide & Rule
All empires make use of a Divide and Rule policy. Britain is noted for making use of such an

approach. This policy created long-lasting divisions which plagued newly created African
nations in the decades of chaos that followed independence.

The 1994 Rwandan genocide has its roots in the exaggeration by a colonial power of
perceived differences between Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups. But in reality, you can find this

in many of the armed conflicts that took place in the decades of post-independence chaos.

Just one example of that is the bloody massacre by Idi Amin in Uganda of various ethnic
groups, such as Acholi and Lango.

Divide and Rule policies do not help to build the cohesion needed for an independent
self-governing nation state.