Can intellectuals be men and women of God?

University students during a lecture. [PHOTO: FILE/ STANDARD]

I wish to propose that the teaching of religion be made compulsory at the university level and that the role of the intellectual in the Kenyan revolution be redefined.

We should not only discuss the indigenous education as it is enshrined in our traditional cultures and religions, but also in the way it is influenced by Christianity and the concomitant Western civilisation on the one hand, and the Islamic and Arab civilisation on the other.

Mourning about being “entrapped and enmeshed” in the colonial web will not help us.

We must be clear about the brazen pornography and shameless sex in some of the works by East African writers despite the fact that most of our readers seem to enjoy them.

Let us disaggregate the obvious differences between the traditional African aesthetics and the Western and Christian values in literature and work out a compromise.

Writers who discuss the human body and its natural functions without “blushing” should be examined against the restrained Platonic, Hellenic, and even Christian values in Western values. If they are found wanting, let their works be excluded from the curriculum.

What passes as modern and even secular in Kenya today is actually Western and Christian at the same time. Western civilisation and Christianity are two faces of the same coin. Conversely, indigenous education and traditional African religion are also two faces of the same coin, and this must not be forgotten.

Whereas Western education and Christianity leave the questions of choice to the individual, traditional African education and religion demand that the individual must conform to the ethical stance and the morality of the community.

Christianity says we are free to enjoy our vices and break all the bones while we still have all the teeth in the mouth, but the time of atonement will come. Let the people choose. Education is a process of instilling knowledge, skills, values and attitudes in learners. In our age and time, it takes place at school, college or university. It is a process by which people are prepared to live effectively and efficiently in the social and physical environment.

Notoriously religious

An intellectual should not only be seen as an acrobat -- “a person who has the capacity to be fascinated by ideas, and has acqiuired the skill to handle some of those ideas effectively”-- as Ali Mazrui once claimed, but he must represent values which go beyond the orthodoxy of his or society and relate them to the holy Scripture.

That Africans are notoriously religious and that there are no aspects of African life that are not touched by spirituality and religion is a laughable notion today. In traditional Africa, teaching of the youth was fulfilled with religious zeal.

Education was imparted by the communities of different ethnic groups through rituals and adherence to taboos and regulations governing life in those communities. What people call culture today was, as a matter of fact, religion in the yester years. Luckily for us, Christianity came to Kenya in the 19^th Century. Islam came earlier.

Today, traditional African religion and Christianity live together as our “triple heritage”. Why are we not treating them as integral parts of our culture and our learning of every discipline in the university?

God is a recognised source of all knowledge in all societies. And yet, one can spend two weeks, a month, or even a year at a Kenyan university and not hear a professor invoking God’s name in his discussion on burning issues. From our perspective in the 21st Century, are African traditional societies not largely pagan and superstitious? The rituals we went through at our birth, naming, initiation, courtship, marriage, death and burial rites, are they not backward and primitive?

I have attended many discussions on bride wealth in the different ethnic communities in which my sons and daughters are married. I am at pains to explain to my prospective daughters-in-law that it is taboo among the Bukusu, from whom I come, to shake hands with them. On the reflection of this, I have learned that customs, taboos, and traditional observances are also religious, and that they belong to the past. Scholars say, “Through taboos, religion is portrayed as a very necessary social intervention. It is a powerful religious substitute which helps in the maintenance of social order.”

The exclusion of God from our academic discourses is responsible for the moral laxity and the run-away corruption ravaging the Kenyan soul. Many Kenyans claim that ours is a Christian country, but the professors who have read books about the European renaissance and picked examples of Western intellectuals who studied and taught the Bible, seem to have thrown their knowledge through the window.

Some Western scholars excelled in textual scholarship, edited the Greek versions of the New Testament. These people worked with chosen languages. We have similar men and women of erudition in East Africa: Christians like John Samuel Mbiti and Jesse Mugambi; Muslims like Mohamed Hassan Abdulaziz.

We seem to be either stuck in the darkness and superstition of traditional religion or lost in the permissive present which, like Dodge Kiunyu, a character in Charles Mangua’s Son of Woman, says,”Do your own thing, just don’t hurt nobody. Don’t get involved ‘cause you can’t change how the world spins.” How will we learn about African and Christian thought without studying comparative religion? Mbiti has tried to discuss the African concept of time as opposed to the Western where time travels in a straight line.

In our colonial high school days, teachers and heads of schools set the moral tone of their schools by invoking the word of God. From the word of God, it was easier for us to study biology as change is studied in the theory of evolution.

Christian ethos

At the university, we met sociologists who helped us chart the progress of society as others worried about the end of the human race. We realised that the linear concept of time was Biblical and it talked about the beginning and the end, the last judgment as described in the Book of Revelation (and/or the apocalypse which the Marxists also embraced).

Modern education must promote its Christian ethos. It has to continue evangelising the learner. Its method of teaching must draw from scripture and the spread of the amalgam of African and Western civilisation.

Scholars must work together and say of African and Western civilisation. Scholars must work together and say “No” to what they do not eat as exemplified by Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego who were college students at the University of Babylon.

When faced with cultures that challenge intellectual situations, we should thwart them. We may argue that we are being initiated into the sophisticated intellectual climate of the permissive world.

We are exiles in a strange and hostile land. We should have a perspective of how an intellectual can handle an oppressive, ruthless and oppressive ruler.

When we, as learners, are saturated with the truth of God’s word, then we shall not blink before the current immorality and corruption. The elders of our traditional African societies were brilliant, yet limited.

They worked to change their physical environment and knew how to count. They read the sky and the stars, made great discoveries in astronomy and the other sciences. They created great art and had a rich literature.

But their erroneous worldviews and their pagan superstitions, however, were a real obstacle in their pursuit of truth.

Intellectual academics in East Africa ought to join religious leaders and talk boldly about God and His wrath at the way “things have fallen apart” in our midst. Muslim scholars are at it. They address issues from a religious perspective.

Their fiction and drama are based on the after world. Dead human beings are being tried in their afterlife. They are highly conscious about the centrality of God in their discussions of burning issues of our time.

Mbiti’s poetry tries to do the same, but it is not enough. In the West, writers like Shakespeare, TS Elio, George Herbert, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Graham Greene’s and Flannery deliberately addressed issues through Christian lenses.

Their works addressed religious themes like healing the sick, feeding the hungry, repairing families, rebuilding morality, reforming society and generally lives of the poor recur in their books.

Their books are about following God in a hostile and indifferent environment. The characters of their books include preachers, kings, and common people and show the intelligentsia stands by the disadvantaged.

Chris Lukorito Wanjala is Professor of Literature at the University of Nairobi. He holds a PhD in Literature and is the author of ‘The Season of Harvest’ and ‘For Home and Freedom’. His autobiography, ‘Beyond Mount Elgon’, will be published soon.