With a trifling exception, I dont fancy African authors and speakers on this wise: they are not spiritually deep enough to inspire awe nor intellectually sophisticated enough to challenge thought. If they are a river, you cant dive in without breaking your neck: shallow waters. If they are a mountain, you can climb with your hands in your pockets. And if they are a bone, a toothless infant can crack it. They know too little of too much. There is a shattered focus...not the lack of it - just a focus that is blurred, with a blunt edge, unfit to fell huge trees of reality that would bring to the intellectually hungry masses fruits of sense. Even our political leaders are not wise and courageous enough to be to us an Abraham Lincoln or a Winston Churchill. Other than their pockets and pot-bellies, their heads seem to be quite empty. Thats why, if the world still be around, a century from now, their names would become a byword, or entirely forgotten. They are not quotable, as had said Chief Okadigbo. In those days, practiced by the Greeks especially, if a man was not a philosopher, he was deemed unfit to be a politician. If he did not have sense enough to keep the greater number of the governed hopeful, and if he could not, by sheer force of his intellect and compassion of heart, fashion out laws that could curb evil and promote order, he was, too, deemed unfit to rule, and was, with the loftiest of arguments, routed out of the seat of rulership. But today, what we have coming out from most quarters of leadership, religious and political, are, in the words of Shakespeare, words without thought. No inspiration. No one to believe in. No one wise enough to make us believe in the goodness of man. Even the God that inspires have been obscured by those in front...in front to lead. While the calm voice within bids us to deeper and eternal waters, the loud voices in front call us away from it to something shallow and transient. And this shallowness, only that it is more pronounced here, goes beyond the African continent. So, while the outside world offers me men of heart and men of sense to learn from, it is not everything I read and listen to simply for being of foreign origin. But the archives of sense and heart from which I choose for my intellectual and spiritual nourishment often come from abroad, and most times, from above. And very little from selected men of home habitat. This might sound unpatriotic to some with a misguided sense of loyalty. How anyone would throw matters of the heart and head under the train of patriotism is indeed baffling. It was just the other day, in the home of the humble Pastor AB Ayuba, that a matter of similar dimension chanced itself upon our discussion. It was the question of whether it is right for a Christian to vote into presidential leadership a man of an opposing Faith. He asked a question that brought the walls of religious prejudice crumbling down to rubbles. His question: If I want to travel and there are two people, a Muslim and a Christian, and out of the two, only the Muslim can drive, would I let myself be driven by the Christian on the mere account that he can say Hallelujah when I say Praise the Lord? The obvious response was in the non-affirmative; the car is to be given to the Muslim to drive, if one does not want an accidental demise. So, if going for foreign authors and speakers makes me unpatriotic, then patriotism is too heavy a load for me to carry. So, until we learn to cook good meals at home, Ill keep eating outside, as should you And, I assure you, I eat a lot, as should you. I have a lot of friends who are eating only from outside. Do you blame us? The home-food is badly cooked. When do we have a Lewis, a Boreham, a Spurgeon, or a Shakespeare? Lets really cook, Africa. And this will happen when we stop being satisfied with meals meant for pigs. When shallow authors and speakers are refused to be bought and listened to, they will get up from their bed of mental mediocrity and go back into their intellectual kitchen to prepare meals of sense delicious enough to satisfy our curiosity and challenge us to a higher level of reasoning. And until we leave pulpits of shallowness, worldly preachers will never go into their closet to contact fire that will set us ablaze for God. And until we stop celebrating thugs who impose themselves on us to lead, we will always have the wrong person in political leadership. As long as we show that we want bad men, even good men may become bad. Until we rebel against the tyranny of shallowness by desiring something deeper, we will always be tied down by the shackles of nonsense. -Aondozungwe KK, the one whom Christ loves.
Posted on: Mon, 08 Dec 2014 08:30:33 +0000
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