On the Trail of one Pastor Paul Mackenzie …

Prologue

Being a researcher of engineering background who has written on diverse events of human history, I was not surprised when a Kenyan cult preacher lured more than one hundred of his followers into dying in Jesus’ name. The Pastor Paul Mackenzie saga is beyond spiritual fanaticism. While it is a direct reflection of the state of the social order on the ground in Kenya today, it also depicts an African story that goes way deeper. It intersperses the core of our African cultural identity, and actually typifies consequential hallucinations that relate to delayed awakenings from colonisation!

In a past writing on the history of the African peoples that covered four continents, I set aside a whole chapter totalling twenty-two pages to discuss the African consumerism of a corrupted Christianity. When Pope Francis was inaugurated in 2013, I also wrote an article analysing how this consumerism from the African population, has been tailored over the years by the powers that be, for the sole purpose of denying the modern-day African direct leadership of the roots of Christianity!

Background Information

The last time I checked, a global survey revealed that 78% of sub-Saharan Africans attend church service at least once a week. Now, that’s a truly flabbergasting confounding figure as it is the highest in the world. The figure is miles ahead of the second placed Brazilian population which scored at 48%. It’s worthy to note here that Brazil has the second largest population of African descendants away from the mother continent. Simply put, if the Roman Catholic truly wished to allow the leadership of the church to its large following in South America, it should have logically landed in Brazil where its followers largely outstrip those in Argentina. I have written exhaustively elsewhere on the impacts of racism on the African population in Brazil, and how the African population have over the years been literally phased out of the socio-cultural system in Argentina!

As a frequent traveller around Kenya, I often find myself in hotel rooms with a limited choice of local TV channels on Sundays. From those available channels, I’m usually treated to endless worship activities from the many non-denominational, truly commercialised and often cultish religious gatherings. This story does not end there. I have also been a frequent witness to the many worshippers who are either clad in full white, blue or yellow cassocks jogging by the various highways to the beats of a drum, all in some prayer chorus that rhymes with their dance. Most of these joggers are always an attentive audience to a very agile conductor who from time to time sprints from one end of the joggers’ queue to the other!

As I have quipped on many occasions to a few of my Kenyan acquaintances, if our frantic worshipers could only put in the same energy, intensity, time and dedication that they do every Sunday towards fighting corruption, our country would certainly be rid of the scourge in under three years flat! Point to note here, corruption and desperation is the root cause of all this social malaise, and, religious fanaticism is simply a symptom!

Background Analysis

Of the four intelligences that belong to a human being, spiritual intelligence is the least understood at the individual level. It is thereby being the most confusing. When realistic attachment to the other three areas of intelligence including physical intelligence is dimmed by whatever causes, one tends to cling to spiritual intelligence in some sense of false hope! It is in this arena of false hope where religious fantasies reside, fostered by the many false prophets of our day.

Despite the many scrolls that have so far been unearthed to reveal what are perceived as the original recordings in the Bible, much of the teachings and traditions therein cannot be verified. In these spaces of the unverifiable sections, man has repackaged the Christian religion as a crutch for dominating fellow man. During the research on my book, I made an attempt to attune the often-evoked (historical) connection between Jews and African Americans as descendants of slavery by visiting a Jewish cultural centre. I came out utterly disappointed! In short, the lady at the centre informed me that whereas the story of African Americans in enslavement can easily be verified as a very recent passage from very popular history books, that of the Jews as recorded in the Old Testament cannot! What this meant is that historical entries, or for that matter biblical narrations, are all open for every individual’s interpretation as long it fits the desired objective!

It is true that many Kenyans, especially the youth are at crossroads when it comes to any sense of hope for their economic future. Still, it is worth noting that of the global societies that either deflected or lived under European imperialism and are currently proving to be economic heavyweights in the names of China, Japan and India more or less, held onto their religious identities. The big question here is what has Africa done to reignite her religious identity if there ever was one before European imperialism? And in actual fact, there were many! Well, I for one offered my professional services after co-opting an idea that was fostered by David Maillu in 2001 to write an African version of the holy book! After all, if there exists the King James version of the Bible, the Latter Day Saints’ version, the Jehovah Witness’ version, and even the Freemasons’ version, which I chanced on in the used Jaguar I bought some time back, I don’t see why we can’t come up with an African version!

Lingerings from the Slave Trade, and Colonisation!

Whereas there exist those many African adults who find it easy, in fact even comforting, to hang on their walls, some photo of a Jesus who is in a European image, none of the European adults I know (and I know many) would do so of some African prophet! Even the image of the Black Madonna, who has been very much discussed with a European perspective in many historical books, has been deliberately side-lined so as to fit a more beguiled European narrative (ever read Hitler’s view on this?). At least for the Jesus photo cause, one Legio Maria sect leader who listened to my view way back in 2020, went out of his way to remove the so-termed Jesus photos off his walls!

As for the Christian religion though, and, for all its promises of faith and spiritualism, it has mostly served the average African with more of a promise for the afterlife than the profits of enlightenment as played on the issues of our present-day life. Of course, this is exactly how it was introduced to Africans in the days leading to the slave trade whereby in example cases, “the Portuguese took priests and friars with them on every vessel . . . and . . . those men of God legitimized and sanctified greed!” What this kind of religion has often promised its followers again is the consolation against their own impotency while promising retributions. In cases as that of the Kenyan church followers who prayed for three days in 2010 for the resurrection of their already-embalmed leaders (I shared a house with one of them as a secondary school teacher in 1985), religion has conformed to an antidote for despair comparable only with alcohol, drugs, and possibly sex!

Being the main character in this article and with the last name of Nthenge but opting to go around with only the European names of Paul Mackenzie, the fellow somewhat reignited the religious-sanctioned racism of the middle ages in Europe (from where the slave trade emerged)! Other than some very humane but very few men of God then, Christianity per se never cared for the African (just as it never really cared for the serfs in Europe). All this was subsequent to the Christendom age in feudal Europe during the Dark Ages, from where there followed the East-West Schism, persecutions,

counter persecutions, inquisitions, torture, confessions, excommunications, reformations and most significantly, the Crusades against (the infidels)! This era of raucous when Christianity was in turmoil in Europe, led to the formation of the Orthodox Church, the Protestant Churches, the Lutherans and the many others, all from Catholicism.

Between the years 1378 and 1417 during when the Papal Schism occurred, the turmoil around Christianity actually led to the election of two rival popes by the same College of Cardinals (before a third was added, thus bringing the office of the Pontiff into disrepute). One of the two popes, Urban VI, was a deranged sadist who read his breviary in the Vatican garden while supervising the torture of his cardinals! Certainly adopted lately by the likes of Pastor Paul Mackenzie as doctrines, these crude interpretations of Christianity from middle-age Europe were exhibited by some slave masters in new America. Borrowing from the many writings of one Frederick Douglass who was born into religion-sanctioned slavery in 1818 in the United States, many a slave master hid behind religious convictions of serfdom and enslavement! One exact quote from his noteworthy recollections simply read thus: “Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are worst.”

Much closer home is one satirical episode which fits this very depiction of false prophets on the rampage. My good friend Felix Okatch who is the author of Luo Clans and Legends has been publishing a paper reporting on local events supported by caricatures in Dholuo. Fittingly named Mano Doko Tim (What a Bizzare Phenomenon), the latest version has a story on a pastor from Nyakach location who stormed out of a burial ceremony he was to lead upon discovering that the hosts were actually poor. The disagreement came over the kind of meal he was served, nyoyo gi strungi (concoction of maize and beans served with strong tea). In his reported words when he stormed out of the ceremony, he went on to lament that “Yesu ne owuotho e puoth Ngano ok Bando. Omiyo Jadolo nyaka mi makate, chapat, kata mandas! Jadolo ok mi Nyoyo nikech onge kama ondiki ni Yesu ne owuotho e puoth Oduma! (Jesus travelled along wheat plantations and not maize. A pastor ought to be served bread, chapati or mandazi! A pastor cannot be served a concoction of maize and beans because the Bible has no entry of Jesus walking alongside maize plantations!”)

Religious Fanaticism Meets Political Sycophancy!

Just like there was the intense interplay between politics and religion during the formation of nations in Europe, similar scenarios are still very much in play in most societies today. Kenya is no exception to this phenomenon, just like the United States of America is with the evangelicals. In short, politics feeds off a compromised religion and vice versa! And since politics has proven to be the surest way to amassing wealth in Kenya, it’s not a wonder that with political escapades becoming more and more prevalent, so are the proliferation of religious movements some of which are bending towards cultism.

Ever wondered why Kenyan politicians have found it fashionable to exploit crowd opportunities at funeral gatherings as events of political rhetoric? Go figure! Attack and win them over when they are at their most susceptible moments (forlorn, low in spirits and busy questioning the real meaning of life)! It’s probably safe to conclude here that the average Kenyan politician has adopted the yesteryear European philosophy of world conquest which rhymed around “it’s safer to be heartless than mindless” just because “the history of the world is the triumph of the heartless over the mindless!”

Pathway Forward

With the recent submission from the now departed Pope Benedict XVI that Christianity had its imperfections in the manner that its teachings were relayed to Africans, it’s surely an opportune moment for us to refine our relationship with Christianity. Pope Benedict XVI wrote how the African has been wounded spiritually. He went on to add that instead of Africans being introduced to a God defined around Christ, who would feel welcome from our own traditions of all that is precious and grand, and bringing it all to fulfilment, the Europeans brought Africans the cynicism of a world without God in which only power and profit matter!

Now, even though we now have credible evidences of African civilizations that predated and actually fed into what became European civilizations, the onslaught of Europeans onto what was to be the literary reporting of African culture and history rendered those stories and events lost for some good five or so centuries. Whereas stories of the Renaissance period of the 12th century in Europe talks of the significant contributions from the Islamic scholars, the Greek philosophers, and Roman traditions, very little, if there exists, brings to the fore any mention of Egyptian civilizations (and other African civilisations) influencing ancient philosophers as Aristotle and Plato!

Following on the foregoing which is adapted from my 2012 book, I particularly disagreed with a view from one European writer who wrote that “whereas both Christianity and African religion were constructed in the same way through the philosophical interpretation of revelations, Africans, unlike Christian Europe, did not construct these religious interpretations in such a way as to create an orthodoxy”.

Conclusively serving as some worthy tribute to the discordant relationship with God that is exhibited in most modern day African societies, I personally came to adopt a poem written by the American-born Amiri Baraka which is appropriately entitled “When We’ll Worship Jesus”!