By DavidG Maillu
I talk about “African God” to make a distinction between the Christian and Islam God who is physical and given male gender and whose dwelling is in heaven. The African God shares accommodation with people and becomes one of the people.
While Christians and Islams think of God as HE, Africans think of God as IT because God has no physical features. God is a Spirit or Energy that expresses itself through all visible and invisible creations on earth and elsewhere in the universe. The Universe is the God, or the engine behind cosmic activities. The African thinks the Universe is alive. For, if it is not alive, it can’t produce living things. The human being is one of the uncountable THINGS that are extensions of the Universal Energy or Mother Energy that Africans call God.
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God, the Energy, is distributed among its creations in various ways. Human beings make use of that energy in doing whatever they want for life. That energy is neutral. You can use it rightly or wrongly. For example, you have the power (energy) to keep yourself alive or kill yourself. That energy can be used for good or for bad. That energy is used in walking, working, singing, dancing, creating new things, and so on. It is that energy we have used to invent boats, ships, motorcars, aircrafts, buildings, farming. However long man would have spent praying to the Mother God to make him create a car, that prayer would have ended up in fruitless.
Christianity preaches to us that whatever we pray to God with faith, God will give it to us. Just like that? Manna from heaven? Wealth from heaven? How realistic is that?
For example, to understand how that energy is distributes, think about medicine for curing a disease. Medicine is a healing energy. It is hidden somewhere and if you want it to must look for it. You get it from a plant, for example. If you are suffering from a stomach, for example, you have been taught you can treat that sickness through boiling guava tree leaves and drinking the water. Would you have healed it if you simply sat down and prayed to God to heal you?
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The answers to most your problems are hidden in other people’s minds. So, you exploit your energy companions to help you solve your problems. Just as some people maybe gifted in composing music, you may have the distribution of that energy through psychic powers expressed through prophetic dreams. You may have it through extra-sensory perception to find or reach things that an ordinary person cannot reach. That is why there are prophets, wise people, philosophers, artists, actors, runners and so on. One can say, God created you and hid most of what you want somewhere. It’s for you to look for them. Your desire to be loved or love someone is not withheld by God for you to pray for it. It is for you to look for the lover among people.
Is it the will of God for you to be poor or rich? Christian and Islam religions argue out that God can influence you to be rich. So, if you want to be rich you must pray to God to help you become rich. That is not what African Spirituality preaches. It is your fate to make yourself rich or poor. This how nature works for all living beings. Whether you are living or dead, rich or poor, the Energy behind your creations is not bothered. If you want high education, can can’t pray to God to give it to you. You study and get it. The many churches spreading everywhere in Africa are inspired by the belief that you need to please God in a certain way for God to give you material things. Worship for a material God. That has never been the case in traditional Africa.
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Traditional Africans pray but with different perception of praying. They perceive God the way they perceive the sun. The sun is a neutral power out there for anyone who wants to use it. You can use it in building solar energy or solar cooker.
You are a living power house – battery. When full energy of the battery is spent, what do you do? You connect it to the Mother Energy for charging. That is what all about praying is about.
Africa is full of the stories regarding traditional people reacting to rain failure by gathering at a shrine and praying God to bring them rain. Is it true that their prayer can produce positive effect or is it sheer belief? To answer that, you must dig deeper to know what actually happens when people pray.
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In one of the many documented reports, there is an interesting one about a Japanese scientist who took water from a container and divided it into two by putting it into different jars. He kept one jar aside and took the other one to a praying group and requested them to pray for the water to change. After they had prayed for it, the scientist took the water into the two jars to the laboratory and discovered the water that had been prayed for had changed its chemistry composition different from the other. What happened is scientifically easy. The prayers were individual energies gathered together. Engaging in a prayed is charging the body to produce energy waves responding to the demand. When they prayed for the water to change, their bodies produced active electromagnetic waves capable of tempering with the chemical setting of the water. Water is very sensitive to different waves. That may indirectly explain what effect the praying shrine group may cause to the rain atmosphere.
When you hear someone has a green hand, it means his bodily energy is capable of producing electromagnetic waves that energize the growing of a plant. When he touches the growing plant, the energy produced by his body sends positive waves to energize growth. Energy is divided into two forces. Positive and negative forces. If a person with a negative energy touches the sensitive plant, his negative waves make the plant sick. Your soul is an active sensory nerve and a tool capable of creating various effects responding to the order.
African Spirituality, unlike Christianity and Islam, is tuned to exploiting and adjusting to natural forces of Universal Energy distribution among not only human beings, but among all other creatures, vegetations and the earth itself. To the African, the vegetation, earth, air and the universe are talking and influencing us. To traditional African Nature is God and God is nature. That is why outsiders have accused Africans of being superstitious and animists.
