WHY CHURCH IS MORE FUN THAN THE PUB
Your feet can feel the rattle of the speakers. You can hear the speakers being rent in two in the crackle emanating along with the trashy pop music. Two friends and I are in a village pub in Malawi with empty plastic bottles of the local maize beer Chibuku strewn on the floor, casually dropped and with no one of a mind or deputed to clean them up. The occupants of the pub are exclusively men, sitting with their backs to the wall, staring straight ahead and entirely ignoring their fellow drinkers with the music so loud to make conversation a laughable proposition. The one exception is an extremely drunk patron in a santa hat who does a sporadic jig and refuses to leave us alone as he slurs and snarls incomprehensible nonsense.
Sadly this depressing scene repeated itself across multiple pubs in small African villages. Men's eyes glazed over as they drink themselves to an oblivion where the oft grinding poverty and boredom of village life disappear temporarily.
This scene was in marked contrast to a trip to church a few days later. Shahar, my Israeli friend, and I were invited to a Sunday church service in the Presbyterian church in the village of Ruarwe. Christianity in Africa has always inspired deeply ambivalent feelings in me. Missionaries may have been at the forefront of the movement to abolish the slave trade in East Africa, but they were and continue to be the foot soldiers of cultural imperialism. Traditional African religions are in sharp retreat, pushed to the margins of the deep bush or surviving as superstitions hidden in people’s official adherence to Christianity or Islam. Alongside this you have an onslaught of commercialism whereby shops sell nothing but soft drinks, villagers gaze with painful longing at my smartphone and women strive for an impossible standard of white beauty with skin-whitening creams and unflattering straight-haired wigs favoured over their own beautiful but difficult and unruly curly hair.
Combine these factors and you have a depressing picture of encroaching cultural monotony and loss of African identity. Yet for me to hector Africans on favouring second hand Calvin Klein shirts over traditional dress after the destruction of their garment industry by the flood of second hand clothes donated by the West is painfully patronising and condescending. They have had centuries of economic and cultural domination, they don't need me to add to the chorus of otherwise well-meaning white people telling them what to do. A Spanish friend who worked in El Salvador had the contradictions between missionaries and liberal atheist NGOs spelled out to him:
“I don't understand you Spanish” a local friend told him. “First you came with the cross and now you want to take it away”.
With this in mind we entered the church to a warm and reverent welcome. We were offered seats along with the elders of the village which we declined protesting that we were too young and unimportant to warrant such an exalted position. The hymns, prayers, and readings were almost exclusively in Chitumbuka, but no common language was needed to gauge the atmosphere in the church. Young and old, male and female in their Sunday finest shone with smiles as the choir sang and danced with gusto through the service. Obviously for some as per religion everywhere this was merely a social performance for public consumption but there was no faking the feeling of devotion and communal spirit in the room.
The church is the fulcrum of the community. It fosters a sense of belonging and is a source of spiritual succour in a remote and infertile village in one of the poorest nations on earth. Sunday is a ray of light in people's harsh lives, as we joined the choir and the whole church to practice our steps the church radiated a joy that was an eternity away from the apathy and frustration and the pub. Who are we to lecture people on the disappearance of traditional cultures and the banalities of western society to deny them such joy? The church was where the party was at. Now if they could just do something about those wigs…
Marcus Macdonald is currently riding a push bike across Africa and is sending dispatches from the field.
