THE COLONIZATION OF THE DIVINE AS ONE OF THE SOURCES OF INTERCOMMUNAL VIOLENCE IN OUR LAND.- By Cpt. Mabior Garang de Mabior

Fellow Junubeen,

The issue of hating our brothers and sisters is ultimately an issue of Black self hate. The very image of Divinity was colonized during the days of colonialism and slavery. If we are created in the image of God, then in our imagination, God is supposed to look like us - as Professor Clarke put it. To the Caucasian, God should look Caucasian, to the Indian God should look like an Indian, to the Chinese, God should look Chinese. Similarly to the African, God should look like an African.

In the human family, it is only the African who seems to have a problem with imagining the Divine in his/her image. We are afraid to see God in our own image. To many of us, it is even demonic to do so. Those of us who imagine God in our own image, as African, are vilified and ostracized by our brothers and sisters. As if we are possessed by evil. To many Africans, God is unapologetically white. As if this was not tragic enough, the image of evil is black. So when we imagine the personification of evil, it looks like us. This presents numerous problems.

This can be counted as one of the major causes of intercommunal violence in our land. The failure to see Divinity in our image makes it easier for us to kill someone who looks like us. It is easy to kill our brothers and sisters because in our psyche, we look like evil anthropomorphized. When we kill our brothers and sisters in ethnic violence, this is what is going on in our minds. It is an act of self hate. Whole communities are vilified and labeled ungodly if they do not believe in a "White God."

Compatriots,

True self-love is not loving the ego-self. It is loving the higher self. It is recognizing Divinity in you and loving it. It is loving he/she that is in you, not he/she who is in the world - as it were. When we are able to see God in our own image, we will then be able to see Divinity in our brothers and sisters - Umoja as it were! In the fight for our liberation, our forefathers and foremothers waged a struggle to bring us the right to self-determination. This has given us our country and has broken the chains from our hands and feet. However, our minds are still shackled.

Compatriots,

The second liberation will not be fought through the barrel of the gun. It will be a war of ideas. If we do not emancipate our minds from mental slavery, as Bob Marley sang, we shall not achieve total liberation. The liberation movements in Africa, which pandered to the Eastern bloc during the Cold War, lost sight of this when they were exposed to communist ideology, which believes "religion is the opium of the people." From Marxist Leninist philosophy. Those who pandered to Western Liberal Democracy were forced to accept a foreign conception of Divinity that did not look like them. In the end, it is our civil population who suffered the consequences of the destructive civil wars that haunt us to this day.

This is the crux of the matter, mental enslavement. We may be proud of our participation in the liberation struggle, the battles we fought, and the country we liberated. We may be proud of our education and the PhDs we have attained. We may be proud of our great success in business. However, it is meaningless if our minds are not free. The self-determination that gave African countries our independent nation states will be meaningless if our respective civil populations are divided. If we are unable to liberate the very image of the Divine, we will never be united and achieve total liberation.

Compatriots,

"We must be united!"