(New Zealand Tablet, about 1978)
Where does the Church fit into the life of Zambia today? This is an extremely difficult question to answer because Zambia, like every other country in Africa, is going through a period of rapid change with many different transitions interlocking and overlapping one another. What we are witnessing is a change of culture, expressed partly in a change of institutions, as, for example, the fact of political independence and economic dependence, urbanization, industrialization, improved standards of health care, the Westernization of education, the weakening of the tribal system, new strains on family life, the emergence of the individual from the tribe, and many others that are difficult to define. Everything that one attempts to say about any part of Africa can immediately be challenged on many grounds. Fools rush in…
One thing seems clear. It was providential for the Church in Africa that Vatican II came at the time of independence for many African countries. It would not be possible to have a pre-Vatican II Church in a post-independence Africa. Europeans may reject Vatican II with all its works and pomps, they may have endured rather than enjoyed its fruits, but, for the Church in Africa, it was a life-saver. An authoritarian, clerical, European Church could scarcely have survived in an independent Africa.
Perhaps I can begin to answer the question I posed at the beginning by looking at some of the features of religious life in this part of Zambia when the Church began work here in 1931. Many of these features still exist today although in changed form. First and foremost, the presence of God permeates African life. Atheism and agnosticism are virtually unknown. There is a sense of wholeness and unity in life. Divisions between the natural and the supernatural, the material and the spiritual, family and community, work and leisure are not as defined as in European countries. A sense of community is strong: tradition, respect for parents and elders, a sense of kinship, the authority of the father in the family – all have combined to make for a cohesive society.
However, there is another side to all these features. God is spoken of quite freely, but he seems like the Mikado – honoured with all honours and troubled with no decisions. You might call him a God made in the image and likeness of man, a tame, domesticated, pocket-sized deity, who is not so much the light of the world as like an electric light that you can turn on and off as you feel like it. It reminds me of the New Zealand lady who said to me, ‘I give the Lord his place’. God is so close to ordinary life that he is bound by its limitations. What seems to be missing is a vibrant sense of the mystery and the majesty of the Almighty God.
The lack of clear distinction between the material and the spiritual means that the people expect the priest to be not only a minister of the word and sacraments but a supplier of petrol, postage stamps, medicine for chickens, pencils, barbed wire and cooking oil plus the many other goods in short supply. ‘Father, you have come here to help us. This is what we need….’ That’s a real quagmire for anyone who falls into it.
The extended family shows its strength in a time of family sorrow, as when children are orphaned, but it has its other side when a man who gets a job finds that squads of relatives descend on him and live at his expense for months at a time.
Work and leisure seem to overlap, as when a team of eighteen men, paddling a heavy barge upstream against the Zambezi in full flood for two hours, laugh, talk, whistle and sing while the sweat pours off them. The other side of the same coin is when someone you’ve employed to do a job takes it as a paid holiday. The saying, ‘There’s a time and a place for everything’ implies a different outlook from what holds good here.
The tribal community can give a person a strong sense of security, of knowing where he fits into the scheme of things, but it often does so as the price of conformity, so that the person has little room to express his individuality, and personal initiative is not something to be welcomed.
The change from the old Africa to the new is only superficially a change from white rule to black rule. Political change is perhaps the most superficial of all. The real change is from the traditional culture to a new one, only gradually emerging, but which is beginning to look like imitation Europe, with the primary emphasis squarely on individual money, status and pleasure. The process of Westernization has accelerated rather than diminished since independence. The slave, having broken his chains, kisses them reverently and puts them back on, calling them bracelets.
How does the scene stand today? Family life is unstable. Polygamy and divorce are the norm. It is not uncommon to meet children who do not know who their father or even their mother is because there is so much swapping around. Out of 10,000 people on the parish register there are perhaps 30 couples whose marriage is right in the eyes of the Church. There have been only two marriages in the church in the last six years. I recently discovered that one member of the church council, (now a former member!), had eleven wives! It’s a problem which has increased rapidly in recent years, and the cost in human suffering is high.
The education system is less a vehicle for the transmission of a culture than for its destruction. It effectively separates the child, especially at secondary level, from home, community, tribe, language and culture. In many cases it produces children who are not only ignorant of their own tradition but despise it as well. In the name of political unity much that is good in tribal life has been destroyed since independence, and a cultureless, rootless, materialistic child has emerged as the citizen of a new society. A colonial administrator, aiming at the destruction of African society, could not have done better.
When the first Catholic missionaries came to the Western Province of Zambia they found that a lot of the groundwork had already been laid. The Protestant Paris Evangelical Missionary Society, which came in 1880, had already translated the Bible into Lozi and produced a Lozi grammar and dictionary, the first written works in the language. The Catholic missionaries, coming from Europe, naturally took from Europe their ideas of what the Church should be. They set up what might be called a Catholic alternative society, a kind of mini-Christendom. They built schools and hospitals, home-craft centres and technical institutes in the central missions, and then extended outwards into rural areas. The schools were seen as the primary means of spreading the faith. The idea was that if you could convert a generation of children they would be the Catholic parents of the next generation. The missionaries in Africa avoided the mistake of the Church in Latin America, of having millions of baptisms and a handful of conversions, and the European mistake of allowing the cult and the culture to separate.
Their policy had its weaknesses. It was centred on the child rather than the adult, on the central mission rather than the outstations, on the priest rather than the people. It may also have created an artificial security in which the individual was never really asked to commit himself clearly to a life under God, because he was supported and carried along by the strength of a group which made the decisions for him. Putting it crudely, you could say he joined the club in baptism and shared the benefits without having to give very much of himself or his life to its purpose. Despite the weaknesses there is no doubt that the first missionaries have to their credit the achievement of having broken the ground and sown the seed. They laid a foundation that could later be built on. Whatever criticisms may be made, it is at least possible that their policies were the right ones, and perhaps the only ones, for their time.
But it is clear that these policies cannot work today. There are many reasons for this. The possibility of maintaining a distinct Catholic alternative society in an increasingly pluralistic world is questionable at least; its desirability is also questionable since the Church is called to be a sign of unity for mankind. On a more mundane level, we have not got the personnel to maintain it, and a single priest cannot possibly fulfil all functions. The pastoral one-man band cannot cope.
So where do we go today? Well, in 1973, the bishops of five East African countries, including Zambia, got together and hammered out a policy. That in itself is a great blessing as it means that instead of drifting to nowhere in particular we have a policy and a direction.
This policy recognizes that the parish is not the basic unit of the Church. For example, here in Sichili, in a parish 120 miles by 150, there cannot be a sense of parish unity. The basic unit of the Church has got to be the basic unit of the people in their own society; it must have a natural base. For us, that unit is the village, and the next unit above that is where you have a group of villages linked together, for example, by being situated along the banks of a river. Usually the people who live closely in this way have a common language as well as many activities shared in common. What we’re aiming at is to establish on these units Christian communities that minister to themselves as far as possible, that are self-supporting, and that undertake the work of spreading the faith. We’re encouraging the people to pray and read the Bible in their own villages, and then come together to a central place in their area on Sundays to conduct their own prayer services, consisting of prayers, hymns, Bible readings and a sermon. For this, it’s necessary to have trained local leaders, so a prime focus of the priest’s activity is the preparation of suitable materials, and the running of training courses for the leaders. In almost all centres, some leaders can be found, although those in a Christian marriage are few and far between.
All the above is a lot easier to state on paper than it is to put into effect. For all concerned it’s a big change. It involves a change from the school to the village, from the child to the adult, from the central mission to the outstation, and from the individual to the group. It is not simply a different organizational method of doing the same thing as before. It means that laypeople have to move from the passive role of “pray, pay, and obey” to the active one of being responsible for the Church in their area, of realizing that they are the Church, that it is not an organization run for them by priests and religious. This means a conversion from a childish to an adult Christianity. Many of today’s Catholics (and not only in Zambia, I think) are still children in their faith. They have received it passively but have never thought their way through it or committed themselves to it at any depth. This change means that people have to move from an attitude of dependence to one of self-reliance.
There’s a big change involved for priests and religious also. We have to move from paternalism to participation, from talking to listening, from administering to animating, from controlling to serving, from being functionaries to learning about relationships, from measuring progress in bricks and mortar to learning to value conversation, friendship and hospitality for their own sake, from rushing around trying to do everything to learning to sit for a while and listen, even though this may involve the frustration of seeing a job we regard as important go undone. It means that the clerical caste system has to go, that the priest is no longer Pope and Emperor rolled into one, that Christian ministry is not that of priest to people but of the Church to the Church. That means, for instance, that local leaders are not the delegates of the priest but what their name implies, that is, leaders in their own right.
Does all this have any chance of working? It’s too early to say, because the policy has been in existence for only a few years, and a big change like this comes only slowly. But preliminary indications give grounds for hope. In three centres in this parish the people have built churches by their own efforts, and four more are under way this year. That fact is both a sign and a source of strength in the Christian community in those areas. A sign that this policy is not opening the way to separatism but is leading to unity among the centres is the fact that people from other centres helped those who were building.
In the past the mission would have built the churches for the people where they showed an interest. Now the message is: do it yourselves. And they do it. They build churches in the style of their houses. These houses are round huts, about nine feet in diameter, made of poles and reeds with a grass roof. The churches are built in the same way with six or seven of these huts forming a circle with an opening in the middle. The altar is in one of them and the people sit in the others. A church built in this way seats about seventy adults in comfort. There are practical problems about these churches. They are not permanent buildings, though they can be easily repaired and replaced. An advantage is that they are built of local materials, use local skills, and cost virtually nothing as all labour is voluntary. The biggest advantage is that they are the people’s churches, built by themselves. Their appearance is virtually the same as that of the villagers’ own houses, so that they fit into village surroundings better than a block building with a zinc roof. These factors help the people to see the Church as theirs rather than a European import.
Building up the Church involves a great deal more than building churches. There is not the slightest doubt that we still have a long way to go, that only the first few steps have been taken, but what matters is that we know where we’re going, and why, and – provisionally at least – how also.
Mission is a receiving as well as a giving. Is there anything here that the older Churches, so long accustomed to thinking of giving to Africa, can now begin to receive from Africa?