Psalm
37:12-13
King
James Version (KJV)
12 The wicked plotteth against the just, and gnasheth upon him with
his teeth. 13 The Lord shall laugh at him: for he
seeth that his day is coming.
It was in the midst of the Cold War in the late 1960’s that
we spent five years as missionaries in Tanzania. The country had been
independent from England for a mere 5 years when we arrived. The rural economies
were socialistic by nature, so the communist ideology was proving very
attractive to the average citizen. On a monthly basis our students would
receive beautifully illustrated glossy propaganda magazines from Red China.
These urged an atheistic dependence on the state as a final solution for all of
life’s problems.
Books were hard to come by in upcountry Tanzania in the late
1960s. Once in a long while I would get to go into Nairobi in Kenya. There was
a Christian bookstore that I would visit with every such opportunity. On one of
these visits I bought Tortured for Christ
by Richard Wurmbrand. His experience had a huge impact on my life and Christian
experience.
Wurmbrand was a Christian minister in communist Romania. He
had fearlessly preached salvation by Christ and the futility of communism. He
was arrested on several occasions and thrown into the most terrible of prisons.
He spent three years in absolutely total solitary confinement. He maintained
his sanity by daily creating a new sermon and then preaching it to the four
walls of his cell every night. Later he was able to recall over 350 of these,
and he published them in a book titled With
God in Solitary Confinement.
He was tortured repeatedly in ways that only people under
Satan’s control could devise. For fourteen long years he endured physical and
psychological torture. Finally he was ransomed by Norwegian Christians and
eventually immigrated into the United States. Then he was able to found the
organization The Voice of Martyrs to help Christians who were still being
tortured for their faith.
Living as I was in a country on the verge of choosing to
join the communist world, this book had a huge effect on my life. I took every
chance to warn my students about the dangers of communism should Tanzania
choose to go that direction. Fortunately enough similar voices prevailed in the
country.
Lord, grant us the
patience and fortitude to resist evil even under torture and persecution.
I am one of those blogs who believe in teachers without suspicion. Some characters do.
ReplyDeleteRecently, I read your blog in which you said 'we should never remember events of the past'. I doubted that one because most of the interesting blogging that you do are those based on what you saw or did in the past.
It is interesting to read the way you saw us, wrongfully, excited with socialism. Strange, isn't it ? Socialism in Tanzania was authoured by Nyerere the founding father of the Nation. It was called 'UJAMAA'.If you like 'brotherhood' especially in the way National resources are appropriated.It wasn't communism. Surely it was the opposite of capitalism, if you like racism or apartheid.It was a good and still a relevant policy for a young coming up nation.
To prove the goodness/acceptability of the aforesaid, Tanzanians voted no by 76% to multipartism when it was introduced in 1992. Even as I write, it has proven impossible to defeat the formidable and all time ruling socialist party in all the inherent and democratic elections, notwithstanding privatization of public corporations. Surely, Barack Obama and his democratic party or the Labour Party of England are very much brotherly in the way they treat their fellow citizens with regard to National Resources. They are neither communists nor capitalists.
Thank you Matiko for taking issue with what I wrote. I tended to equate ujamaa with socialism (not communism). Thanks for setting things straight. I should have stuck with Wurmbrand more closely in writing.
ReplyDeleteThe two decades of Africa nations of independence (1960/70s) were also years of intense missionary activities. The same is no more. I fail to understand why missionaries aren't coming from overseas as pastors or teachers? Missionaries at Ikizu were good people. They never allowed us to set eyes on any books except those of their choice. So whenever we found reading materials which we new were not allowed the circulation was quick and the reading was swift. In those years the understanding was that South Africa was an enemy of Tanzania and that you were a South African. Actually your nick name was KABURU a swahili word for 'the Boer'. I never believed it until recently when you showed that you were an American who grew up in South Africa.
ReplyDeleteColonialism was bad. It was synonymous with human oppression if not racism or apartheid as it was called in South Africa. So it was nice to read of some other rulership styles especially Chinese thoughts of Mao tse tung.
After Ikizu I joinned Songea Boys High school in southern Tanzania. FRELIMO an African patriotic movement was waging war against portuguese colonisers in Mozambique with the support of the OAU formed by independent African nations. China gave arms. The headquarter of the OAU liberation committee, was based in Dar es salaam. Songea town was frequently bombed by Portuguese war planes in pursuit of the Freedom fighters. The same organisation later spear headed the same wars into Angola, Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde Islands, Namibia, Rhodesia and finally South Africa itself.
At Ikizu I was a Pastor Dunder's top student of English Language. But for all the four years I never head of a subject called LITERATURE. Songea a large school compared to Ikizu. I gathered there were many teachers but no missionaries. One of the subjects to be studied was called English Literature. The teacher heading literature department was SIPO MABALA a south african refugee who wouldn't finish a class without mentioning white/black social relationships in South Africa. He hated the white people whom I loved. Using the book, 'The river between' of James Ngugi of Kenya he advanced the suspeting roles of missionaries as cohorts of colonialism.On my part it became conflicting.
To me and the many Tanzanians of the day these were 'formative years'. Now that colonialism is no more, it is better we rejoice as we look at things retrospectively, and forge new workable ways for a better World.
Somehow I missed seeing this posting. I just came upon it this evening. I'm surprised they didn't teach literature at Ikizu. I never had anything to do with English teaching. It may be that Literature was not require at the 'O' level.
ReplyDeleteMabala was right that in many cases the missionary organizations worked too closely with the colonial regimes. This was a big issue that were raised time and again when we had those politicians visit Ikizu during the year 1971. I don't remember whether you were there or not that year. However not all mission groups worked closely with these regimes. Both you as a student and I as a teacher were at Ikizu 5 to 10 years after Tanzania gained its independence, so certainly I had no first hand experience working with a colonial power.
Adventist education was very concerned about what the students read at that time, for better or worse. Their policy was to discourage the reading of literature, although I had had to read literature in my Adventist high school because we couldn't pass the external exams if we didn't know it.
Although I grew up as a kid in apartheid South Africa I did not subscribe to their doctrines. When it would appear that I did my mother would remind me: "Always remember that you did NOT make yourself white!"