As an African, I was born to believe that the worship of ancestry is the origins of my Africanism. I believed that “Sangomas and iziNyanya” can solve all the spiritual problems we may face. I, like any other Christian in Africa came to know about Jesus Christ because of the missionaries back in the day. They portrayed Christ to us as “White” and thus made it hard for Africa to receive Him. This was because the same missionaries that preached the good gospel of Christ were turning an Africa into a slave and had colonised her into thinking that her own culture was demonic. In essence, this caused the African child to move further away from God and to forget her actual origin in Christ Jesus. Africa has suffered greatly spiritually during the period of slave trades and needed something different from the people that were colonising it.
I have come to know Africa as the only continent that sings and dance when facing trials and tribulations. And this is because of the spirit in its heart; the spirit of worship. Africa has now drifted away from its origins, its first belief and its mortality. And this has happened because God has been presented to Africans as a God of the “White” man and everything African has been deemed evil. Africa then began to seek origins it can call its own. This is when ancestry began to take shape in the continent. But what does God say about all this? I want to take you through the journey of the first book of the bible; Genesis.
Often when we read the bible we tend to concentrate on what God will do for us. You can bear witness with me if I can say; it’s unlikely that we will even check on the geographical area of the occurrences of the stories in the bible. I mean, you can read the bible from Genesis 1 straight up to Revelations 22, you will find that nowhere will it mention countries like America or even England. Now, straight from its take off in Genesis 1, the bible teaches us of the creation of the world. Genesis 1:2 says “the earth was without form, void and darkness was upon the face of the deep and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Verse 26 of the book says; “And God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the fowl of the air and over cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
I now want you to notice where Genesis 1 took place as we scrutinise Chapter 2 of the book. After God had created men in His image, He gave them dominion/rulership, He told them to multiply and replenish the earth. Genesis 2:4; “these are the generations of the Heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the Heavens.” Verse 8, 10, 11, 13, 14 and 15 of Chapter 2 now dwells on the geographical area of the occurrences which then proves the Origins of our Spirituality as Africans. From verse 8 it says; “And the Lord God planted a garden EASTWARD in Eden; and there He put the man whom He had formed. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.
In geographical terms, we may call these four heads tributary rivers. The name of the first river is PISON: that is it which compasses the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. And the name of the second river is GIHON: the same is it which compasses the whole land of ETHIOPIA; the name of the third river is HIDDEKEL: that is it which GOES toward the EAST of ASSYRIA. And the fourth river is EUPHRATES. And the Lord God took the man and put him into the Garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.
Now, the main matter here is the origins and the realities of our origins as Africans. We now know that the missionaries came to preach the good gospel and twisted the truth so they would appear to be superior and the chosen people of God. But now we know that it all began in Ethiopia which is right in the continent of Africa. After Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit we lost our being as the chosen people of God and when Jesus was crucified we became as in the beginning. We are now, no longer gentiles but sons and daughters, even better; we are heirs to the Kingdom together with Christ Jesus.
As an African Christian, I have learned that there is no relationship between the living and the dead. They cannot do for me what God can do for me. God is a jealous God and when we go back to the graves and talk to our great grannies who were created like unto us by the same God, I fail to believe in their power but to trust that God supersedes all that we may call gods or iziNyanya. So maAfrica, come back to your first love, come back to your creator. As African Christians we know that procreation is the key to our immortality, our birth is the face of our mortality; our religion is the voice of our morality, dying from birth in the form of baptism is the truth of our reality. Let us not mix God with ancestry because He is the Alpha and the Omega, meaning the author and finisher of our faith. Be blessed
