Abstract
On 12 March 2000, Pope John Paul II issued a historic statement in which the Catholic Church publicly acknowledged for the first time some of the gross human rights violations that it has committed, perpetrated, condoned, or tolerated over its two-thousand-year history. Using the euphemism “sins” to describe such atrocities, Pope John Paul II blundy stated that the church had violated the rights of ethnic groups and peoples, and in particular, shown contempt for their cultures and religions. He asked for forgiveness and called for the authentic purification of memory. While a step in the right direction, the confession and plea for forgiveness failed to address the basic contradictions between proselytizing, universalist faiths and indigenous religions and cultures, and the underlying arrogant and inflexible assumption of the moral, ethical, and racial superiority of the former over the latter. It is this vexed relationship between imperial faiths and the indigenous beliefs and moral universes of non-white, non-European, and non-Arabic peoples of Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas that is the subject of this inquiry.
Yet Christians have often denied the Gospel; yielding to a mentality of power, they have violated the rights of ethnic groups and peoples, and shown contempt for their cultures and religious traditions: be patient and merciful towards us, and grant us your forgiveness! We ask this through Christ our Lord.1
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References
Alessandra Stanley, “Pope Asks for Forgiveness for Errors of the Church Over 2, 000 Years,” New York Times, 13 March 2000.
For the Akamba of Kenya, for instance, formal European education was inextricably linked to conversion to Christianity (J. Forbes Munro, Colonial Rule Among the Kamba: Social Change in the Kenya Highlands 1889–1939 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1975 ], 147–48 ).
The designation of nonbelievers—individuals who do not profess Judaism, Islam, or Christianity—by both Muslims and Christians as either pagans or infidels is one manifestation of belief in their own superiorityover other religions. Christian missionaries and Muslim clerics evidence this zeal and drive to universalize through the conversion or salvation of unbelievers from what they regard as eternal damnation. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, “Human Rights in the Muslim World: Socio-Political Conditions and Scriptural Imperatives,” Harvard Human Rights Journal 3 (1990): 13.
The wars between the Christian Portuguese and Muslim North Africans are well documented. In the fifteenth century the Portuguese, under the command of Prince Henry, carried the crusades to Africa as part of the campaign to win back the continent from Muslims. An admiring portrait of Prince Henry said that the “flame that lit the Soldier of the Cross was kindled in his heart in early youth, and to win back Morocco from the Moors was the ambition of his life. He never drew his sword in any other cause” (Hans Debrunner, A History of Christianity in Ghana [Accra: Waterville, 1967], 15). Elsewhere he is called the “commander of the Portuguese Crusaders’ Order of the Knight of Christ” (ibid.). Even among different Christian denominations, competition for souls often turned violent, as evidenced by the conflict in 1637 between the Dutch and the Catholic Portuguese at historic Elmina, part of what is today Ghana. A Catholic account of the conflict said that the “new conquerors, the Dutch, were then bitter enemies of Catholicism. Wherever they came, they burnt and destroyed the churches and would not allow a Catholic priest to preach to the people” (H. Pfann, A Short History of the Catholic Church in Ghana [Cape Coast, 1965]).
Denys W. T. Shropshire, The Church and Primitive Peoples (London: SPCK, 1938), xix. The author goes on to write: Though he [the Native] relies a good deal on what he has observed, he will always seek the true cause in the world of unseen powers above and beyond what we call “Nature”—in the metaphysical realm in the literal sense, and his peculiar mental activity is largely due to his lack of distinction between what is actually present to sense and what is beyond (ibid.).
Alfred Henry Barrow, Fifty Tears in West Africa (London, 1900), 29.
Matthew Fox, A Spirituality Named Compassion (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990), 112: Crusades, inquisitions, witch burnings—which invariably meant the burnings of heretics and gay people, of fellow Christians and of infidels—all in the name of the cross. It is almost as if Constantine, and his empire’s conversion to Christianity in the fourth century, uttered a wellfulfilled prophecy when he declared: ‘in the name of this cross we shall conquer.’ The cross has played the role of weapon time and time again in Christian history and empire building.
Ibid. Christian armies, much in the same way that Muslim crusaders saw themselves, considered it an honor to die for Christianity. According to many:
The supreme sacrifice was to die fighting under the Christian emperor. The supreme self immolation was to fall in battle under the standard of the cross.... But by the time Christianity was ready to meet Asia and the New World, the Cross and the sword were so identified with one another that the sword itself was a cross. It was the only kind of cross some conquistadors understood (ibid.).
Shari’a, the legal and ethical code of Islam, is derived from both the Qur’an and the Sunna, the Prophet’s elaboration of the Qur’an through his statements and actions.
An-Na’im, “Human Rights in the Muslim World,” 22; emphasis added.
Not surprisingly, the revealed scriptures are only the Bible, the Qu’ran, and the Torah or Old Testament, the holy books of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism respectively. It is inexplicable that Shari’a would disregard all other religious persuasions, such as Hinduism and indigenous African or native American religions, among others, as illegitimate.
An-Na’im, “Human Rights in the Muslim World,” 22–23.
Ibid., 24. An-Na’im adds: Non-Muslim subjects of an Islamic state can aspire only to the status of dhimma under which they would suffer serious violations of their human rights. Dhimmiszrc not entitled to equality with Muslims. Their lives are evaluated as inferior in monetary terms as well: they are not entided to the same amount of diya or financial compensation for homicide or bodily harm as Muslims (ibid.).
Many African communities did not see any functional distinctions between the colonial administrators and the missionaries: The political factor [colonialism] worked to the disadvantage of the missionaries in that the Kamba [an ethnic community in Kenya] like all other Africans, viewed the newcomers in terms of their local political situation. They identified the missionaries, arriving with the colonial power which gave them its support and approval, as part of the colonial authority system, barely distinguishable from administrative officers. In 1913, for example, elders in Mwala [area of Kenya inhabited by the Akamba] went to the mission at Kabaa to obtain licenses for sugar mills ( Munro, Colonial Rule Among the Kamba, 104 ).
Quoted in Kamuti Kiteme, We, The Pan-Africans: Essays on the Global Black Experience (New York, 1992), 94.
Shropshire, The Church and the Primitive Peoples, xiii.
Ibid. The author develops a methodology for evangelization in “primitive” cultures and pleads for the “careful discrimination, preservation, transmutation and transformation of the religious and cultural institutions and beliefs of the Southern Bantu [the African peoples of southern Africa], by and within a fullorbed presentation of the Christian religion” (ibid., xix).
Ibid. Eric O. Ayisi, An Introduction to the Study of African Culture (London: Heinemann, 1972), 57: It has been said that they [African religions] lack any theological ideas and all the elements which make Judaism, Islam or Christianity sublime are lacking in African religion. People who should have known better, especially missionaries, were completely misguided about African religion, and by their muddled thinking propagated erroneous ideas about African religious beliefs.
Shropshire, The Church and Primitive Peoples, 425.
A more forceful method was favored by others, as this description of Henry the Navigator reveals: The heathen lands were kingdoms to be won for Christ, and the guidance of their backward races was a duty that must not be shirked. Henry shouldered this responsibility. If he had the spirit of a crusader, he had that of a missionary as well. Wherever he explored, his aim was to evangelise, to civilise, and to educate the simple natives.... He sent out teachers and preachers to the black men on the Senegal river (Debrunner, A History of Christianity in Ghana, 15).
According to a leading African scholar, religion is an essential element of African culture. “Africans are notoriously religious, and each people has its own religious system with a set of beliefs and practices. Religion permeates into all the departments of life so fully that it is not easy to isolate it” (John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970 ], 1 ).
Basil Davidson, African Civilization Revisited (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1991), emphasis added.
Simply put, I define as indigenous all African religions that predated Islamization and Christianization. Similarly, the term could also be used to denote the religious beliefs of native, nonsettler peoples in the
Americas and parts of Asia.
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), 16 December 1966, GARes. 2200 (XXI), UN GAOR, 21st Sess., Supp. No. 16, at 52, UN Doc. A/6 3 1 6 (1966), 999 UNTS 171, art. 18 (entered into force 23 March 1976 ).
The ICCPR, the principal civil and political human rights treaty, establishes the Human Rights Committee, the body responsible for the elaboration, interpretation, and encouragement of the implementation of the treaty (ICCPR, art. 28).
Article 40(4) of the ICCPR directs the Human Rights Committee to “study” state reports and to “transmit its reports, and such general comments as it may consider appropriate.” The general comments are meant to be authoritative interpretations of the ICCPR’s provisions.
Article 27 of the ICCPR provides that “in those States in which ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities exist, persons belonging to such minorities shall not be denied the right, in community with others members of the group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, or to use their language.”
General Comment No. 23, UN Doc. ICCPR/C/21/Rev.I/Add.5 (1994), para. 6. 2.
Proclaimed by General Assembly Resolution 3 6/5 5, 2 5 November 1981. United Nations, Human Rights: A Compilation of International Instruments (New York, 1993 ), 122–25.
The Working Group on Indigenous Populations was established in 1982 by the United Nations as a subsidiary body of the UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (now the UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights).
UN Commission on Human Rights, Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 46th Sess., Agenda Item 15, UN Doc. E/CN.4/Sub.2/1994/Add. 1 (1994) (hereafter “Draft Declaration”).
African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, 26 June 1981, OAU Doc. A/C A B/L E G/6 7/3, Rev. 5 (entered into force 12 October 1986), reprinted in 21 ILM 58 (1982) (hereafter “African Charter”). The charter establishes a continental human rights system by creating the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, its implementing body. Although widely criticized as lacking in effectiveness, the commission remains the only continent-wide human rights body.
Makau Mutua, “Returning to My Roots: African Religions and the State,” in Proselytization and Communal Self-Determination in Africa, ed. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im ( New York: Orbis Books, 1999 ), 169–90.
Republic of Benin Const, 1990, art. 10, Law No. 90–32.
Republic of Ghana Const, 1979, sec. 27(1); Mozambique Const, 1975, art. 33; Mali Const, 1977, sec. 11.
Mauritius Const, 1971, sec. 11 5(b); Zimbabwe Const, 1980, sec. 19 5(b).
Mauritius Const, 1971, sec. 11(b). The Constitution of Zimbabwe, 1980, section 195(b), repeats almost verbatim the corresponding section of the Constitution of Mauritius.
Article 19 of the UDHR provides that “everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes the freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” Article 19 of the ICCPR is the equivalent provision, although it warns that these rights carry “special duties and responsibilities” and are therefore subject to “certain restrictions” for the “respect of the rights... of others and for the protection of national security or of public order (ordre public), or public health and morals.”
Henry J. Steiner, “Ideals and Counter-Ideals in the Struggle for Autonomy Regimes for Minorities,” Notre Dame Law Review 66 (1991): 1548.
ICCPR, art. 1: “All peoples have the right of self determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.” Article 1 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the other treaty that together with the ICCPR and the UDHR makes the so-called International Bill of Human Rights, is identically worded.
Steiner, “Ideals and Counter-Ideals,” 1545. 7.
Christians and Muslims came to Africa to wage holy war, as it were, and to subjugate and eradicate indigenous religions and cultures. They did not come to persuade; they came to conquer and did indeed conquer. This is a contradiction of the right to self-determination.
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Mutua, M. (2004). Proselytism and Cultural Integrity. In: Lindholm, T., Durham, W.C., Tahzib-Lie, B.G., Sewell, E.A., Larsen, L. (eds) Facilitating Freedom of Religion or Belief: A Deskbook. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-5616-7_28
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