Crazy Conversion Stories (cont'd)

A few posts ago, I wrote about my grandmother converting to Christianity. I said that once I found out how and why she transitioned from her initial impression of Europeans to converting to Christianity, I would let you all know. So I’m about to let you in on the additional nuggets of information she bestowed on me.

This time I skipped the small talk. I grabbed my cousin and said, “This is what you are going to ask her for me.” A minute later, we sat down across my grandmother and my cousin laid out the question. I had no idea how she was going to react.

It turns out that my grandmother did not decide to convert to Christianity. It was a decree issued to all the people in the area. She said, “We did not have a choice.” Additionally, not only was everyone to convert to Christianity, but everyone was also supposed to start wearing Western clothing. What was the local attire before? Great question. Women were topless, and the rest of the clothing was generally made of goat skins.

I think that it is necessary to frame this transformation in another way so that the craziness of the situation can be properly digested. Most of you reading this have worn some combination of shoes, pants, dresses, t-shirts, etc. for as long as you can remember. Now imagine that someone walked into your neighborhood and said that the following executive decree has been issued: From now on, everyone must go shirtless and wear goat skin for added coverage.

Most likely, you would think that the person issuing the decree was out of his or her mind. But this is what happened to my grandmother’s generation. Someone tried to mandate the wearing of crazy-looking foreign clothes. And the locals did it. Not even a generation later, people walking around wearing traditional attire were the weird ones.

Today, this sort of drastic transformation would be considered highly irrational and may even warrant someone getting checked into a psychiatric ward. Imagine if you went home for the holidays and your mother had just decided to start going topless and wearing goat skin bottoms. And then she explains that the catalyst for her change was these very interesting purple people who moved in down the street who wear goat skins. At minimum, you would probably have a very serious family discussion -- also known as an intervention. But for some reason, when religion was involved, this sort of behavior was seemingly rational. Go figure.

And that was just the beginning. When my parents were growing up, they would not be allowed to attend school unless they also attended Sunday School every week. Locals knew prayers in English before they could even speak English. Effectively, within one generation, the Europeans who came to the area succeeded in many ways at making the locals into replicas of what they considered “civilized” people. This is not necessarily an indictment of religion. However, it does raise serious questions about how the psyche of a people are affected by virtually adopting another culture wholesale. Rarely does this formula -- one culture trying to mimic another -- result in successful, independent societies. Rather, dependence seems to be the lasting legacy. If you think about it, locals were not dependent on foreign aid and sources until foreigners started trying to shape African societies in the mold of their societies. Of course you would need endless assistance if your goal was to become something that was once completely alien to you. Africans have never been, and will never be, as good at being European as Europeans. Along the same lines, perhaps one of the inherent flaws with African development is that Africa continues trying to replicate something that it is not. Or maybe a better question is: What is Africa now?

Certainly there is some good that comes out of interaction with other cultures. But when one culture so disproportionately adopts the way of life of another culture, surely confusion will follow. And let me be frank, confusion has followed and it remains.

This model of copying all things foreign can be seen throughout post-colonial Africa, from the organization of public institutions to simple things that were non-existent in communities a century ago that are now the norm -- like hair-straightening.

Don’t be too surprised if the next time you see me I’m wearing goat skins. I’ll just be getting back in touch with my roots. Or maybe I'll be wearing this ...