The end of human imagination is the beginning of the belief systems and sometimes religion, writes one anthropologist. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of being able to receive knowledge and wisdom from God, states the Bible.
Develop me: Tapiwa Gomo
The debate on the hiatus between knowledge and religion has always been an arena of contestations as the former is based on proven science, while the latter is based on just belief or knowledge that is accepted at face value. One can be proven by scientific evidence, while the other depends on just belief.
Recent utterances in Marondera demonstrated that dogmatism can cause religious illusions, which blur the mind from what is supposed to be the obvious. Politics, like religion, can brainwash and intoxicate the mind. The nation listened in shock as one of the Zanu PF senior youth members equated President Robert Mugabe to an angel.
“Truly speaking, in heaven there is God and here on earth there is an angel called Robert Gabriel Mugabe. You are representing God here on earth,” announced the Zanu PF youth leader, Kudzai Chipanga.
While these words may have sounded like ordinary propaganda or just words, they actually smell of and exudes autocratic power — a power that should not be challenged by human beings.
From a religious perspective, challenging God or anything that represents, Him is both taboo and heretical and, therefore, attracts condemnation. This condemnation tends to manifest variously in different contexts.
Those words nullify and trash the relevance of democratic processes of electing a leader, by making it sinful to oppose the status quo. In a religious country like Zimbabwe, where people fear religion and respect spirituality, this can be the first stage of intimidation.
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It will not surprise, if leaders of those religious groups aligned to the status quo start preaching that anyone, who campaigns or votes against the status quo is committing a sin. Don’t we all fear sin and hell? And that is not the only concern here — people can be attacked for challenging the earthly “angel”.
We see this in other countries, where human beings take their lives to defend their God and religion. It is surprising that none of our religious leaders has dared to challenge that. Fear is the air.
I am not concerned about the use of the narrative in general, as people of this age are much more civilised and literate enough to draw the line between reality and illusion. I am also not concerned that the youth leader said it or that it borders on blasphemy. I am concerned that his thinking actually represents a constituency of youth that swims within the status quo’s arteries of power.
I am concerned because they hold power and yet their level of imagination of reality is shortsightedly limited and indoctrinated. That combination is a danger to the future of this country. I am referring to the future of Zimbabwe beyond the current establishment. Most rebels in most African countries are products of such kind of indoctrination. They hold beliefs of one system being the only one acceptable and one individual — as a god.
I am reminded of events of 1986 in a village called Mutsvaire in Rushinga district, Mashonaland Central. The majority of the inhabitants of this village were members of the Emmanuel Mudyiwa Dzangare apostolic church based in Mazowe farming area. It is a religious group that thrived on indoctrination of its members. Its members submitted to everything their leader said. Mudyiwa was seen as a god and was not to be challenged.
One day, we woke up to find out that three quarters of our class mates had been taken to Mazowe at Mudyiwa’s farms. We were told several lorries carried them from our village and surrounding areas and were sent to Mudyiwa — the god’s farms — to help with the planting of potatoes.
Even as young as we were, we questioned the logic of disrupting children’s education just to appease a church leader. The answer was simple — Mudyiwa was a god and there was no point in depriving a god free labour in pursuit of earthly education.
For most of my friends and classmates, that marked the end of their education and their dreams, as the majority of them were later forced into early marriages by the same god.
Such is the power of indoctrination. It blurs the mind from seeing what stands in our glare and is staring in our eyes. The danger with indoctrination is that it teaches a person or a group to accept a set of beliefs uncritically. It inculcates in the human mind — in an authoritative way — ideas, attitudes and cognitive strategies, that enables one to see and believe in nothing but one worldview.
In most cases, because it weakens the mind, most indoctrinated people assume that everything must be comparable to or in line with their own belief system and their god.
They rely on the imagination, which is really only capable of visualising that which they have been told represents the truth. This is why their imagination of the reality is incapable of grappling with other concepts of life.
Tapiwa Gomo is a development consultant based in Pretoria, South Africa
