Missionaries from India Karibuni Africa!
The other day I met Neema. She is a Tanzanian, and a candidate for a congregation of sisters who hail from South India and who have now some convents in Tanzania. She wears the churidar, speaks English with a strong Indian accent and shakes her head like a doll as she gives her assent. Whose fault is it? Is it the 18 year old Neema’s, who agreed to be Indianized, or is it that of those holy nuns who refused to be indigenized?
I heard from a fellow Indian missionary that in a convent in Tanzania, the local cook speaks very well one of the languages of South India. In fact I was told that on the one hand, the sisters are proud of their feat, on the other hand they regret that they are not able to speak any secret among themselves at table anymore. I didn’t know if the intelligent cook has to be praised for learning the language so well, or the sisters have to be blamed for not learning Swahili even after two decades of being here.
Some of the religious communities are little Indias on the African soil. Their delicious dishes tasting of pilipili (chilli) and their chapels filled with the aroma of the agarpathis! Some congregations even pride themselves seeing their African sisters beautifully wrapped in long saris.
From the 1980’s religious from India have been flooding the countries of the African continent. (This is only parallel to the phenomenon of the big chairs in several congregations’ generalates being filled by Indians.) It is a good sign for India. The Indian church has come up age. It is becoming missionary. However, my own observations as one of the Indian missionaries working in Eastern Africa in 1992 is that we bring a very rich spiritual and religious heritage to Africa, but camouflaged within it is a very parochial outlook. Let me reflect on the issues related to this great missionary expedition in this brief article.
Indian Religious show several positive aspects which challenge the status quo in Africa:
- They have a strong ascetic tradition coupled with a deep spirituality. These are part of the Indian traditions, which, no doubt, have boosted up the growth of religious communities in India.
- Indians have a strong economic sense. They save a lot of money through their prudent administration and efficient improvisations.
- Coming from a colonial past and a developing world situation they stand in a better position to understand the Africans.
- The Catholic Church in India has a very effective history in social welfare activities, like offering education and health services to the poorest. These are meaningful avenues for ministry even in Africa today.
- The Indian traditional rural cultures are very similar to that of Africa. Professor Aravaanan of Pondicherry University, for instance, has published several works on comparative studies between the Dravidian culture and the Bantu culture. (Bantu people are one of the major races in Africa.) He rightly sees several streams of similarity.
Obviously there are many favourable reasons for Indian missionaries to be loved by the Africans. Yet often there is little love lost between the Africans and the Indian missionaries. Why do Africans prefer European missionaries to the Indians. May be we need to understand some historical factors:
- Arab slave trade was more cruel than the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade. (In terms of numbers alone, approximately 18 million Africans were delivered into the Islamic trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades between AD 650 and 1905. Whereas the slaves brought to the New World from Africa would number less than 10 million. The other cruelties in the Arab slave trade include high rate of deaths, inhuman transportation, and castration of male slaves.) To the Africans the difference between Indians and Arabs does not exist, in the physical features nor in the attitude towards them. So the African antagonism towards Asians has an unconscious background.
- Secondly, during the colonial times Indians were brought to Africa especially in the English colonies as railway workers, secretaries and house boys! Those days there was a well-established hierarchy of people: Whites, Asians, Africans – in that order. This is reflected in the residential areas of Nairobi, and the housing and property laws, traces of which exist up to this day: Karen and Langata for the whites, Parklands and SouthLands for Asians, and Eastlands for the Africans. The British, perhaps, found this very convenient to preserve their own position in the hierarchy.
- Today most of these ethnic Indians callously control the businesses in most of the African countries, often encouraging corruption in the civil service and cruelly treating the local labourers. Though in many African countries the ethnic Indians played a very crucial role in struggle for independence, the “Asian community” in most African cities and towns is an isolated ghetto, with very little social interaction with the locals otherwise. Apparently the Indian missionaries just seem to perpetrate this pitiless attitude towards the Africans.
These historical reasons are only aggravated by the narrow minded attitude among many of our missionaries towards the Africans. Our strengths when exaggerated become our weaknesses:
- Our strong sense of economy makes us economical at best, and stingy at worse.
- Our effectivity in social welfare activities of education and health services, makes us too much centred around institutions. Perhaps Africa does not really need an institutional approach to welfare activities at the moment.
- The similarities of Indian culture to the African cultures makes us too complacent to believe that there is a lot that we can learn from the Africans! We fail to pay attention and be sensitive to the subtleties of the African culture.
- Our strong sense of discipline (which may some times be very hypocritical) could make us very severe towards the Africans. We are termed “wakali” (too strict) unable to understand the African attitude towards life and social etiquette. In Africa, human relationships are rightly of higher value than efficiency in work.
- We tend to be too moralistic in our judgement about people. We want everyone to be like the spotless heroes in our myths. In the Greek myths, for instance, the heroes often had a weakness (hamartia), but in the Indian myths this is not often obvious. So the Indian heroes (even those of today) tend to be hypocritical; and hypocrisy may well be the Indian collective shadow. Perhaps the Africans are too quick to notice this shadow. We are apparently very “spiritual”, yet at times inhuman in our approach to common people.
- Together with these we bring in our own divisions – language groups, castes – into the already divided African society only to surprise the local clergy and religious.
These problems jeopardise our missionary will in building the kingdom of God. So what can be done. Let me dare to make some simple recommendations:
- Indian missionaries coming to Africa should have a good introduction to the African culture, its history, and be well versed in at least one of the largely spoken languages. It is erroneous to think that since most of them are commonwealth countries we should be able to manage in English. So any new comer should spend at least one year doing some studies here in Africa before s/he begins to work.
- Indian congregations should not come to Africa relying on the psychological or administrative support of another Indian congregation. This may only facilitate the building Indian colonies here and delay the insertion of missionaries into the African culture. It may be better to take the risk of staying with the local congregations and dioceses.
- Congregations that do not have the experience of working in multi-cultural situations in India itself would naturally find it difficult to insert themselves in Africa.
So, missionaries from India, karibuni (welcome to) Africa. But let us come to feel at home in Africa. Come with the best practices of the missionaries we have had in India like Francis Xavier, De Nobili, Beschi, Bede Griffiths and others.