To Buttress My Earlier Point (Post 15)

'The fool who has said in his heart there is no God above.'

To buttress the points made in the last article, below is an excerpt from an issue of Amnesty magazine on the much maligned rights of Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual people in Africa. There are a few myths surrounding our perception of GLB people that are quite like what my previous article referred to.

Myth 1: Same sex activity is alien to African culture
Africa, like the rest of the world has a long history of same-sex sexuality and transgender identities. A cave painting in modern day Zimbabwe depicting sex between men is over 2000 years old while marriages between women have been documented in over 40 ethnic groups in sub-Saharan Africa.

Myth 2: Homophobia is part of African tradition
Laws criminalising 'homosexuality' are largely a direct legacy of colonialism: they had no basis in local customary law. The colonising powers and imported religions encouraged Africans to view dislike and fear of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual people as a sign of progress and civilisation. Today, the religious right in the USA actively funds and promotes homophobia in Africa.

Myth 3: All African clergy are homophobic
Religious leaders have contributed to the oppression and persecution of Lesbian and Gay and Bisexual people in Africa. However, several religious leaders, mostly Christian and Muslim, have called for religious and social acceptance. Examples include Bishop Senyonjo in Uganda and Archbishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa who famously said he would not worship a homophobic god.

Amnesty (2013) Out in Africa. Making Love a Crime: homophobia in Africa, 2013, 178. p14-15

Tell Me More (Post 14)

'The fool who has said in his heart there is no God above.'

And so what else might we be hanging on to – as if for dear life – that we are reluctant to get rid of? Well, it is hard to know where to begin; however, we could start by looking at the explosive phenomenon of culture or as is commonly put ‘African Culture’. I won’t bore anyone about the silliness of that phrase when it refers to a continent so large, vast and riddled with a variety of peoples with a lot of differences. So, I will bring it closer to home. Whilst in Nigeria, I often heard it said how such and such is not ‘part of our culture’. Usually, what was referred to were human behaviours and choices frowned upon by our religions eg women baring the flesh, smoking, sex before marriage etc. You can fill in your own examples of what you may have heard to be not ‘our culture’.

I have often wondered just exactly what this phrase meant as culture is not a very solid and fixed thing; it is fluid, changing to suit the times and to provide answers to certain expressions of human society. It has struck me that a lot of human vices have earned this phrase ‘not our culture’, anything from prostitution to internet fraud.  However, I digress. At this point, I would like to relate the story my father told me of how in the 60’s he would always bring presents home to his family from Europe. What his grandmother always favoured and he always got her was tobacco because she was big on the stuff. She, like her daughter, my grandmother were greatly renowned traders who later went on to build houses and own property. These women grew up in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, at a time when the influence of the colonialists was not that widely felt.

My great grandmother was a woman who used tobacco and who took charge of her financial affairs, things that might be referred to by many in Nigeria today as ‘not our culture’. My grandmother followed in her mother’s footsteps and they must have been a snapshot of women of their time – powerful, independent and reckoned with. What about the cultural traditions of many African societies where women dressed, on occasions, exposing parts of their body wearing not more than a covering for the breasts and waist beads? And why wouldn’t they when, along with the men who went about with a bare torso, they lived in a very hot climate that would not make it comfortable for a lot of clothing? I realised that a lot of what we call ‘not our culture’ actually have no such basis in fact. If anything, what we refer to as ‘our culture’, is actually foreign and came with the colonialists who brought Christianity with them.

This was an imperial England that was a very unequal society with a strong class system and women had very few rights. This England was very influenced by Christianity and pushed for full covering for women (helped by the fact that it is a cold country), agreed with the biblical injunction for ‘wives to submit to their husbands’ and for ‘women not to dress in men’s clothing’ and generally ran a society where men were in charge. We see the same in very religious countries all over the world today. The British transported these values to their colonies whose original cultures and systems and religions they regarded as ‘barbaric’. This was an England whose religion would not allow for female priests but regarded our traditional religions as 'barbaric' when they were less discriminating and oppressive to women. (Recall the priestess Chielo of Agbala in 'Things Fall Apart) 

But my father’s generation who grew up in the 50’s and 60’s lapped all this up, embraced Christianity and these values and passed on to their children how ‘un-Christian’ values are ‘not our culture’. And now, this is the refrain of many Africans and Nigerians who have no clue what their culture really was and what culture it is they now call theirs. So what has it cost us to buy the religion of Europe and stake our destinies on a God we never had a history with, a God transported to us with the sword and with domination? Well, it has cost us a lot indeed – first the erosion of our real culture and second, as will be covered in the next article, it has cost us our language!

Evolution? What Evolution? (Post 13)

'The fool who has said in his heart there is no God above.'

I have only just returned from Nigeria; while I was there, I became acquainted with some of the issues that are being debated at the heights of government. One of these issues was the push by Cameron and the US for Nigeria to legalise or support Gay unions. Anyway, this has not been received well by many, if not a majority of the Nigerian people and I had a quite interesting discussion about this with my brother in law. Somewhere in our conversation, he veered into the God/Bible issue which is quite difficult to argue against without bringing in Evolution, so I did. The interesting thing is that - and I have mentioned this in a previous article - evolution is still not properly taught in our schools, if at all. It is quite like there is a concerted and collective effort to keep the nation ignorant of what is a demonstrated scientific fact - like gravity. I should know because I studied Biology in Nigeria and evolution was glossed over almost like a third hand account of what some people said. It wasn't focused on and taught like I learned of gravity and the laws of motion, like the causes of disease and the circulatory system. But maybe, this isn't for all schools; maybe, there are some schools where people are taught properly.
There can only be one reason for this; the Federal Republic of Nigerian believers have not and are reluctant to accept evolution as truth because it inherently challenges their comfortable religious beliefs. We all reinforce these beliefs by banding with people of similar opinions, especially as these people are all around us - yes, everyone else.  How do I spell this out? Evolution is a fact, one that has been painstakingly desmonstrated and proved by science over and over again. The only aspects of evolution that science is still working on are the nitty-gritty, the why's and when's; the event itself has been robustly proved. Oh, there are arguments against evolution, mainly by creationists who sometimes field 'scientists'. Even the Bible alludes to evolution as things are created at different times, with humans coming last, although, why a Creator wouldn't simply create everything at once, beats me. No real scientist can deny evolution as all they would have to do to disprove evolution is show fossils in the wrong developmental era; as some scientist pointed out: "Show me rabbit fossils in the Cambrian and I will abandon the theory of Evolution". For Evolution is about a sequence in the appearance of living things from minor to greater complexity, with links and relational structure.
I am appalled to think that we are living about four centuries behind the educational knowledge of many countries in the world; we are in denial, quite like Christian Europe was when Copernicus and Galileo demonstrated that the Earth moved round the Sun and not the other way round. The similarities are so clear; history repeats itself once again. Those two scientists were persecuted by Christianity and silenced just as Evolution is being silenced today by a very religious Nigeria.
We refuse to accept demonstrated facts and instead choose to believe in religious theories that have no way of being proved right or wrong. We feed thieving and exploitative religious leaders who are rising up in vast numbers every minute and polluting the average Nigerian mind with superstitions and panicky messages of Hell, the Devil, Witchcraft, evil powers, the Enemy etc. These leaders understand that as long as people are running scared - and what better way to drive people to God than through fear - they will stay loyal to the church and will pay their dues. And my people keep getting destroyed for lack of knowledge. (Reference by a Christian please)
So dear reader, if you want a little light on your understanding of Nature, God and the origin of life on Earth, then you want to read up on Evolution. There is plenty of literature out there, sadly, not many might be readily accessible in Nigeria - but maybe I am wrong. Read up on Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins but most importantly, question your own beliefs in every way possible, beginning with the most basic question of all - why you hold those beliefs. If a belief doesn't make sense or serve a concrete purpose - is there a chance it is simply bullshit? And if you hold this belief simply because it makes you feel good and you are willing to admit that to yourself, then you must be ready to keep telling yourself you really do believe because you may really not. 

Evolution (Post 12)

'The fool who has said in his heart there is no God above.'

Now we have thrashed out the issue of the beginning of the universe, let us move to the creation of all life on Earth. What is the alternative if not God? Could it be chance?  Well, like I said in earlier articles, this is a most often quoted misunderstanding; the fact that evolution doesn’t need and cannot have a designer does not mean that it is the action of pure blind chance. The thing is evolution is in itself an absurdity, the oxymoron of nature itself, for while it is indeed filled with random and unpredictable creative events, it is geared by its very nature towards well built and efficient mechanisms so that it looks like these mechanisms were ‘designed’ with a purpose in mind.

Evolution is succinctly defined in the sentence “What works, stays.” What we need to understand is that for every species of living organisms alive today, thousands have gone extinct. Evolution is not magical, it is simply a natural process of refinement, adaptation an d extinction. It is quite like the course of any life, we are born weak and ignorant, we grow, learn, adapt to our environment. Some of us adapt better either by luck or by talent and bloom; others don’t adapt as well and fade either into poverty or ill health or early death. But in the end, we all die. This is evolution; at some stage every species will become extinct just as they were born; it is series of life cycles encompassing species of different life forms.

What Darwin observed when he first began thinking about Evolution was that in the Galapagos Islands was a proliferation of different types of one animal spread across a not too huge area. He wondered why God would go to the trouble of making so many different types of the same animal with different qualities. Over time and with experiments, he realised that it was the difference in their environments that had made that animal evolve into different forms. Living things are quite capable of changing over time and what animals are found in a place or situation is determined by what qualities help them survive in that place or situation – ‘Survival of the Fittest’.

So from the earliest days when life first appeared, it has and still is a random combination of cells in genes that make individual life forms. But what this means is that there is a diversity in make-up of life that there is sometimes one or a few with qualities that others lack. Added to this is the fact that random genetic mutations can occur that give organisms a quality or (handicap) that others don’t have. In the right situation, usually one of stress, the organisms with the right quality survive and pass their genes on to their offspring. Given enough time, they and their offspring become predominant in that area. So evolution which is a blown up picture of the cycle of birth, growth and death is not blind chance even if made up of chance events. It is a trial and error process that picks out every success in hundreds of errors and improves on that success while replicating it. It repeats this process over and over again over millions of years that its achievements though painstakingly slow seem like the work of a Supreme Designer. What is more, evolution has been proved without doubt to be a scientific fact, one that every educated person in today’s world should be quite familiar with.