~ Does the spread of Christianity also spread the western way? and should it?~

In my first week on my own I was driving with my host supervisor Dean Myaka to a service in the rural areas, he and another pastor that was with us were talking about the Zulu tradition of the Reed Dance where girls dress in traditional clothing and march in front of the Zulu king with a reed in their hands. The discussion led to the mixture of traditional African ceremonies and the Christian religion. There are many, it seems that say you can’t have one without the other, and many that say you can. This led us to a discussion about early missionaries and the idea that when you convert someone to Christianity you must also convert them to a western way of thinking and living. It is an idea and stigma about missionaries that has followed missionaries even into today’s minds. I guess in my own mind I had never thought of westernization and Christianization as two different things, they always went hand in hand for me as one entity. I now realize that this is not true, they are in fact two very different things that have been molded together and mixed up through the course of history. If you think about it say missionaries that reached Africa were actually from the Middle East where Christianity originated then we’d be living in a very different Africa, one influenced by a Middle Eastern way of life, not a western/ European one. But the reality remains that a western and European way of life was forced on people and it rode the coat-tails of the idea of spreading Christianity.   

I felt almost embarrassed that I had never thought of spreading Christianity and the western idea as two different concepts. But I was also really glad to have this topic opened up in my mind and to discuss it with two people that had a view of life completely different from mine. Myself coming from a culture of the missionary having this conversation with people coming from a culture of those who were affected by missionaries offered some amazing insight and views.

I read a quote in a book that said “as a continent Africa has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill”. I feel like it couldn’t be a truer statement and the mixture of those feelings come out in conversations like the one I had about westernization and trying to embrace the original African cultures and the new Christian ideals which sometimes come attached with western ideals.

All and all it was a great conversation that opened up a lot of topics that I hadn’t thought about and finally got the chance to simmer over. Just the first of many new trains of thought brought to me in the last seven weeks. I hope that maybe this idea is also new to some of you and opens up some conversations as well.