Dr. Ian Clarke
29 November 2008
column
Kampala — LAST week I was invited to attend a conference on private healthcare in Washington. I also had the opportunity to visit an African American church.
It was an experience which I greatly enjoyed, but got me thinking about the difference between Africans and their African American cousins.
One of the first things which struck me was that African Americans are, to a large extent, defined by their history of slavery and the struggle for equality in America, while most Africans, outside of South Africa do not wrestle with the same issues.
This is not to say that Africans do not have a problem with their colonial past, but simply that they are secure in their own identity.
African Americans were plucked from their ancestral homelands several hundred years ago and are only now beginning to find their identity as Americans. They stand between two continents, no longer belonging to Africa their motherland, but too often feeling that they are second class citizens in their own land of America.
The slaves transported all those years ago took refuge in the Negro songs and spirituals which spoke of resistance, solidarity and unquenchable hope and perhaps this was why Barack Obama's message of change and hope resonates so strongly with this section of American society today.
A hundred years ago, the slaves identified with the message of hope in the Christian gospel, making it their own and adopting what is now recognised as a particular brand of Christianity - black liberation theology. Sitting in the oldest Catholic African American church in Washington, I felt the solidarity and hope which that the Gospel brings.
The priest preached a message of 'paying if forward" - based on the biblical message that we are either pardoned or condemned depending on our actions towards the less privileged.
While African Americans have adopted this Christian theology and morality into their traditions and culture, I found some very different cultural values being practiced when I returned to Uganda - I read of how a child became a human sacrifice in Kampala.
Black Americans regard African as their motherland, but I wonder how they would react to the information that such practices are still alive and well in Uganda.
It appears that Africa has still not freed herself from the darker elements of its past, particularly the commitment to superstitious cultural practices, with the resulting cruelty and human sacrifice which such belief systems inculcate. On the other hand African Americans left such practices behind a long time ago.
I have read Barack Obama's writings on his struggles for identity in the book Dreams of my Father. He was a black man with a white mother who only met his natural father once in his lifetime.
He was a Kenyan American, who was free to adopt either cultural norms, but found his purpose in life based on values of serving the community and making life better for others, rather than adopting traits from either culture - the materialism of America, or the superstitions of Africa.
Ugandans have confidence and security in their identity and cultural roots, but does that cultural identity also mean adopting superstition, animism and child sacrifice? Africa has so much more to offer, that the sooner the darker side of our history is abandoned, the better. Such practices are a blot on the face of Africa.
Ugandans who are loud in their condemnation of western practices, such as homosexuality, should be equally vigorous in condemning African cultural practices which destroy the good name of Africans.
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