Independent consultant and blogger in Dar es Salaam
What you need to know:
When, of all people, Catholic bishops try to lay the Gospel of Behave Yourself on a congregant, you know that person has definitely asked for an intervention
A few years ago, a Zambian friend told me over drinks that “Zambia is a Christian Nation!” I laughed straight into his face because I thought he was trying to make a very bad joke. Like, who even does that?
Forgive.
I didn’t realise at that time that taking the effective and continuously guarded separation of church/mosque/temple and state for granted was just part of my Tanzanian birthright. It seemed natural that pluralism is the default setting for any African country, a fortunate consequence of living in a metropolis like Dar es Salaam.
Because of this, one of the unspoken rules of political commentary is “leave religion out of it.”
Spirituality, ethics, whatever you want to call them, deeper matters are fine. One may even quote from a holy book or three — erudition in matters of theology is appreciated in our oral culture. But we’re tacitly not allowed to be total jerks about it, and as a consequence we rarely privilege the role of religion in politics.
Confronting the state is one thing, bringing the gods into the fray is a whole other issue.
So imagine my surprise when just before the Christian month of Lent, a handful of bishops put out a statement that was decidedly political.
Let me give some context: Part of the socio-political contract as hammered out between Tanzania’s ruling party CCM, the organs of state and civil society is that we flip between religions in our Head of State. Christian, Muslim, Christian, Muslim, Christian is the score so far and maybe one day we’ll even experiment with another form of faith, or even non-faith.
What the bishops had to say could be boiled down to one theme: The current administration (you know who you are) needs to stop being mean. Meanness is messing with the economy, it’s messing with our stability, and it’s making people’s lives unnecessarily harder. Oh, and it is also unconstitutional and there is literally no good reason for it. Meanness might even be antithetical to the precepts of your professed faith.
That last one... can you imagine what its like to have your spiritual workers look at you and shake their head in sorrowful disappointment? Harsh.
Beneath this veneer of pretending that we don’t “do religion” we have been less than honest to each other as Tanzanians about how much weight we give our spiritual leaders in matters political.
They know what they do in times of strife. In times of plenty. In times of election. Most importantly, in times of what is going on?
When, of all people, Catholic bishops try to lay the Gospel of Behave Yourself on a congregant, you know that person has definitely asked for an intervention.
Personally, I want us to continue to keep religious interferers thoroughly suppressed, forbidden from formally endorsing candidates, subject to Tanzania Revenue Authority raids on a monthly basis if not more frequently. And because contradiction is the sauce of life: We should listen when clerics actually make sense, because nobody knows evil quite like organised religion.
