Islamic-Christian antagonism

The North-South religious divide in Africa is the offshoot of the Islamic-Christian antagonism that dates back to the Crusades. Africa was the staging ground for Arab-European rivalry for centuries. The religious map of Africa today is testimony to this fact, with northern Africa being largely “the spoils” of Arab conquest and Africa south of the Sahara populated largely by Christian “converts.” The introduction of Islam and Christianity into Africa has been described as the beginning of the “cultural genocide” of Africa: the best way to conquer a people is to control their “cultural mind.” Thus Africa’s colonization, partition and neo-colonization were accomplished first through religious and cultural enslavement.

Religion has always represented the essence of a people. In Africa, religion is synonymous with tradition and is inextricably linked with culture. Even in the so-called advanced Western industrialized countries that claim to have separated the state from religion, religious beliefs are, in fact, the central fulcrum around which moral and legal laws revolve.

Thus when a people’s religion is destroyed, their traditions die and culture atrophies. In his book, Africa and the World, Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois described the destruction of African culture in graphic terms: “…The old religion was held up for ridicule, the old culture and ethical standards degraded or disappeared, and gradually all over Africa spread the inferiority complex, the fear of colour, the worship of white skin, the imitation of white ways of doing and thinking, whether good, bad, or indifferent.”

“By the end of the nineteenth century,” Du Bois continues, “the degradation of Africa was as complete as organized human means could make it. Chieftains, representing a thousand years of thriving human culture, were decked out in second-hand London top-hats, while Europe snickered.” African American historian, Dr. John Henrik Clarke was equally incisive in his analysis of the cultural warfare on African culture by the European colonizers. He noted that in the 15th and 16th centuries, Europeans not only colonized most of the world, they also colonized most of the information regarding the world. Part of the war on the cultures of non-European people was the colonization of imagery, especially the image of God. Most of the people in Asia and in Africa under European domination dared not address God in a language of their own creation or look at God in the image created by their own imagination.

Dr. Clarke therefore called on African scholars to pay proper academic attention to the impact of the rise of Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries on the mind of the non-European world. Europe’s greatest achievement during this period, Dr. Clarke acknowledged, was not the enslavement and the military conquest of most of the world, but the conquest of the minds of most of the people of the world.

European conquest of the non-European world was achieved not by mere brute force or “brawn power” but largely by “brain power,” he observed. He wrote: “By the end of the 19th century, Europe effectively controlled or influenced most of the geography and people of the earth. In spite of the military advantage, the Europeans mainly having guns and their victims mainly without guns, there still were not enough Europeans in the world to have effectively taken over most of the world. What they did not achieve militarily, they achieved through propaganda. He called this achievement the manifestation of the ‘evil genius’ of Europe.”

Dr. Clarke continued: “When Europe found itself and shook off the lethargy of the Middle Age, after the disaster of the Crusades, they began to propagate false concepts that reverberate to this day.” The most damaging of these concepts are:

• That the world was waiting in darkness for the Europeans to bring the light of culture and civilization. As a matter of fact, in most cases, the truth was the contrary. The Europeans put out more light and destroyed more civilizations and cultures than they built. • Another European concept that is still with us, doing its maximum damage, is that the European concept of god is the only concept worthy of serous religious attention. In most of the world where the Europeans expanded, especially in Africa, they deprived the people of the right to call on God in a language of their creation and to look at God through their own imagination. They inferred or said outright that no figure that did not resemble a European could be god or the representative of god.

• The European concept that the invader and conqueror is a civilizer. Conquerors are never benevolent. In nearly all cases they spread their way of life at the expense of the conquered people.