Dominance Did Not Begin With Politics

Everyone who speaks of Western dominance, imperialism and white supremacy speaks of them as political things. Empires, borders, conquests, parliaments, the Berlin conference of 1885 where Africa was divided on a table. The assumption underneath is that dominance began with the political system and that religion was its servant, brought along to soften the conquered. I am going to show the nation that this is backwards, and the cost of getting it backwards is that Africa has spent seventy years fighting the servant and leaving the master in its house.

Begin where the political system cannot begin, with God. Human beings have always been God-conscious. From the beginning, when people looked at the sky they were not looking for weather; they were looking for the spiritual dimension and the gods. When they went into the water they knew there was something beneath it. This is in a person from birth, and no nation has ever formed without it. The record agrees: the oldest building human beings ever raised was a temple, eleven thousand years ago, before any city or state; the oldest kingship on record came down from heaven; and every people ever studied has its gods. Nations are God-centred before they are anything else. That is the ground on which everything stands, and it is the ground that dominance needed.

Now put on that ground a god who favours one nation. The Bible says so in its own words. “For the LORD’s portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance.” “Ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people.” “The LORD thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth.” A god who chooses one people above all the others is not a god for the others. He is a god against them, and the story of Moses before Pharaoh is the first demonstration of what that means in practice. When a religion built on that god is carried to a God-conscious people, it does something no army can do. It does not take their land first. It takes their consciousness. The African did not stop being God-conscious when the missionary came; he could not, it is his nature. What happened is that his God-consciousness was pointed at another nation’s god, a god who, by his own book, favours that nation above the African. From that moment the African is a subject in his own spirit, and everything else follows.

This is what I mean when I say that Western dominance did not begin through the political system. Look at the dates. Rome made the religion the law of all nations in 380, when there was no Europe, no nation-state, no parliament and no Berlin. In 1452 and 1455 a Pope authorised the king of Portugal to invade, conquer and subdue the non-Christian peoples of Africa and to reduce them to perpetual slavery, and in 1493 another Pope drew a line down the map of the world and gave everything on one side to Spain and on the other to Portugal. Those are the charters of conquest, and they are religious documents, issued from the Vatican, a century before any European state was strong enough to act on them. The slave ship carried a chaplain. The missionary came before the magistrate; in most of Africa he came a full generation before. The Bible arrived in our languages before the law did. And when the political system finally came, in the uniforms of the nineteenth century, it did not have to invent supremacy. It inherited it. Its own scholars say so: the jurist Carl Schmitt wrote that all the significant concepts of the modern state are secularised theological concepts, and the historian Charles Tilly wrote that war made the state. The political system took its supremacy from the religious system and its force from war, and it took nothing from God, because by then it had none.

So the order is this. The religious system, built on a god who favours one nation, came first and took the African’s consciousness. The political system came second and took his land, using the supremacy the religious system had already established in his own mind. And then independence came, and it took back the land and the flag and left the consciousness exactly where the missionary had put it. That is why I say Africa has been fighting the servant. We removed the governor and kept the god. We lowered one flag and raised another and went back on Sunday to a house that reports to Rome, to pray to a god whose book says he prefers another people, through a founder who struck down the gods of Egypt. A nation whose God belongs to another nation is a subject nation, whatever flag it flies, and no political independence can lift it, because the political system does not reach the place where the subjection lives.

I have said it in one sentence and I will end on it. As long as Africans are the subjects of other nations’ religions, Africa will never rise. Not because Africans are weak, and not because the other nations are strong, but because a people cannot build on a foundation that belongs to someone else, and a people’s God is its foundation. The Jews understood this; that is why they kept their god for themselves and wrote it into their book. Rome understood it; that is why it took the god, the book and the founder and made them Roman by law. The political system understood it well enough to leave the god in place when it left. Only the African has been taught not to understand it, and he was taught by a word, Judeo-Christian, that tells him his faith is ancient and Hebrew when it is a Roman institution with a Jewish story at its head.

What is the alternative? Not a new religion, and not a black copy of the old one. The alternative is the thing that was here before any of this came: the spiritual system, with uMdali the Creator at its head, our own deities beneath Him, our own mountain where the laws are received, our own spirit king who holds both crowns, and our own temple from which every other institution is born. That system never died; it was only unhoused. Restoration is not the building of something new. It is the return of a God-conscious people to its own Creator, in its own house, under its own law, so that when the African stands before the world he stands as the subject of no one’s story but his own. That is the only independence that has not yet been won, and it is the only one that counts.