Swedenborg And The Future of Africa

A few weeks after I wrote an article entitled God is an African in the Gambian Observer twelve years ago, I was frankly not surprised that around the time I was writing the piece, a picture had just been released back home in Lagos, Nigeria, and was named God is African. Even before I left home the Lagos film mill had begun to trot out dozens of ‘home videos’ a month - now it’s dozens a day - and I was not surprised that someone had also come up with anthropomorphic ‘God is African.’

Like films, evangelical churches had been growing exponentially before I left home more than a decade ago. Next door to the house I lived in Lagos there was a jerry-built Pentecostal church whose megaphonic service I willy-nilly followed for the better part of four hours every Sunday morning and on most weeknights. It was always as if the whole thing was taking place in my room, and of course there was nothing I could do to stem the outflow of the church’s thunderous nervy liturgy. And since I could not baffle this with any sort of noise or busyness, I had to eavesdrop on sermons, preaching, and prayers, even at the cost of being diverted from more earthly, and invariably worthwhile, things like reading a novel. A particular sermon was often repeated - the fact that Nigeria, even Africa as a whole, was now where the heart and soul of religion (particularly the Christian religion) was, where all must be joyous for the great number of people turning to God.

Even if the seed of secular humanism had not been planted in me since teenage years, if I had remained a Protestant, I would still have chewed over the relevance of celebrating the number of churches and ‘born-again’ Christians in my country. I didn’t really do much questioning until I wrote the article in the Gambia a couple of years later. At the time the immediate spur for writing the piece was a fellow Nigerian who came to my office and had made a great effort at persuading me to become born-again, he admonished me to join the bandwagon of rapturous Christianity as it arrived in Africa. He told me that a new age had dawned on the continent, the age of true Christianity, a fulfilment of a prophecy somewhere in the book of Isaiah. But I made him understand that some people had brought the Christian religion to us barely 150 years ago, after bearing its chequered weight for almost 2,000 years, and now that a good few of those people had turned away from it, what was the point of celebrating a boost in church-going in Africa now? With this the young man smiled - smirked, in fact - and clinched his point: The West’s loss of Christianity is our gain in Africa. The West has lost its way and we Africans have just found the straight and narrow.

While my own God is an African may just as well have been published in Ecumenical Lampoon, (if any such magazine does exist), the film that came out back in Nigeria had taken a more po-faced approach to God being African, it is considered a fact that everyone should take seriously. Just as in the film I had neglected to include the fact that Africa would come to marinate its chaste pristine soul in religion had been predicted many centuries before.

I came in contact with Emanuel Swedenborg early in life. The last of the trinity of primary schools I attended as I followed my headmaster father - like the boy in the earlier part of Seamus Heaney’s poem, Follower - from one workplace to another was New Church. The first was St Andrew’s Anglican; the second St Michael’s Catholic. If I had started school two years earlier I would also have attended African Church Primary. The African Church was an Episcopalian breakaway from Anglican, a church that sought to allow for such ‘Africanness’ as polygamy.

Even as a little boy the New Church had fascinated me. The church building was built on the brow of a hill beside the school. I was enthralled by the cathedral architecture of the building, especially the wooden portals which were busy with the bas-reliefs of heaven, paradise, angels, nameless patriarchs and a sprinkling of Swedenborg’s name.

Later as an undergraduate I chose an elective in theology because I saw the name Swedenborg in the course. My elemental interest in the man had decided this for me. This gave me the opportunity to read about the man and the New Church. It will be difficult even for the most detached atheist to tsk-tsk over Swedenborg’s transformation (not a Kierkegaardian leap) from scientist to Christian mystic, spiritualist and a visionary. Or maybe not. I think the ecclesiology of New Church wooden door that I knew had made a lasting impression. Even then, over the centuries, Swedenborg has influenced great thinkers and writers as varied as Balzac, Kant, Borges, and C. Jung. The latter had deployed one of the defining visions of Swedenborg to elaborate on his theory of synchronicity, a theory that may be illustrated, lightly, by the coincidence of me using the phrase God is an African at the same as certain filmmakers a couple of thousand miles away.

But for me, as an African, it was Swedenborg’s prophetic interest in the continent that concentrated my mind. At a time when even liberal thinkers like Diderot and Voltaire were not unreservedly charitable about Africans, Swedenborg was in a class of his own. He made certain constructive comments about Africans which at the time were considered too fey and fanciful, and even now they may be dismissed as a particularistic excess of a protoliberal. He wrote about Africans possessing the ‘light of illustration,’ the ability to ‘think interiorly,’ to receive truth. This would have been rich soul food for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s, but somehow Swedenborg seemed to have escaped them. Or perhaps not. Someone like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jnr would have recognised Swedenborg’s good intentions, but taking this as part of the term of reference of his racially equalitarian struggle would have been problematic. It is the sort of thing that demagogues could twist out of context.

More significant for me was Swedenborg’s pronouncement that the European church was in decline and the God had shown him that it was in Africa that he would establish the next true church. In the late 18^th century followers of Swedenborg went to West Africa to establish the New Church. While the New Church movement did not take deep root in Nigeria, thanks to the synergy of Catholic and Anglican churches and a subaltern simmering of minor Protestantisms, evangelicals and spiritual churches began to appear in modest numbers in the early 1960s. The church building that adjoined the New Church primary school I attended some thirty-odd years ago was the first and last one I would see in the part of the country I lived.

But then even if the New Church did not grow, Swedenborg’s prophecy of Africa being the future nucleus of Christianity has been eminently fulfilled. Now there are millions of churches across the continent. Recently I watched a Nigerian stand-up act repeating a routine of how the alphabets had been exhausted many times over by those searching for names for their newly found churches. The thesaurus has also been ransacked in search of words like tabernacle, chapel, ark, minster, fount, haven, temple, the Judaist synagogue has long been appropriated, and words as quotidian as hall, house, and as tangential as mountain, Beulah. And founders have rejoiced under epithets like bishops, archbishops, primates, prophets, overseers, prelates, papas, mamas – everything has been exhausted.

It’s easy to segue into cynicism and even humour when writing this kind of thing - and of course there is nothing wrong with that. Even the theological thinker Soren Kierkegaard - one of the philosophers I often return to - would joke about this. But the speed with which churches and prayer-and-worship shacks are being established can only be beaten by the speed with which pastor-ridden ‘home videos’ are released everyday, numerous John Churchseeds ceaselessly plant houses of God on every kind of soil: rocky, humous, grainy, boggy and so on. You often hear people unwittingly echoing Swedenborg about how the West has thrown Christianity away and Africans have seized it. And no one seems to bother to ask: To what end?

Swaths of the continent have become veritable bible belts, really a country like Nigeria now wears flowing vestments of religiosity. As a humanist, I have always argued that I do not mind people following whatever religion they wish, so long as it is for their - and possibly, for the greater - good and well-being. But religion disserves its better ends when it becomes a fad, a mercenary activity, main chance, which is now the basis of most of new spawn of churches in Nigeria. The church that neighboured my house in Lagos used to be the only one in the street before I left the country, but now four plank-built lean-tos compete with each other with loudspeakers pouring out vociferous prayers and songs, pentecostal-speak and a number of other activities which are no more than parodies of inwardness. In Lagos there is only one bereft public library to about three million people, a city of about 12 million souls. And the number of churches? Well there is no knowing that. A million? More than a million? Less?

Whatever the number might be, certainly Immanuel Swedenborg’s prophecy is being lived out in Nigeria, houses of worship have become so many as to be invasive and socially constipatory. But was this sort of new church the man had seen in Africa’s future? Is the African continent truly the New Jerusalem? Now I would not let this posers go unanswered, they are not meant to be rhetorical. Truly, a lot Africans - whether conversant with Swedenborg’s prediction or not - seem to be revelling in this unfortunate presbyopia of seeing their continent as the jumping ground of spirituality in all its incarnations, and in spite of the palpable and overwhelming counterintuitive rewards of the whole religious project, the song and dance remain unabated.

I would not dwell on how dreadful or false Africa as New Jerusalem is turning out to be, how closer it is to some of the more accursed of Old Testament city-states ruled by a God-cursed principality, it would again turn out as no more than a rehearsal of the litanies of religious hypocrisy and imposture that a lot of people have griped about. Second-sighted Swedenborg might have good intentions seeing Africa as a future Christian arcadia, but I wonder whether he was able to foresee these pestilential hordes of happy-clappers, tongues-speakers, Bibleheads, hyperbolic Jesus-Freaks, counterknowledgeable hot-gospellers, all of whom have brought chronic benightedness to Africa - at least to Nigeria. With the way we are carrying on with mindless celebration of religion, at the expense of such staples of development like science and technology, our future will be far darker than pre-Swedenborg’s early Middle Ages in Europe when religion was placed on a pedestal even less unquestioning than that on which we have now placed it.