Mimicry killing our nation

By AUSTIN KALUBA
THE real tragedy of most African states is the culture of mimicry that has created mimic societies that refuse to develop home-grown ideas in preference to alien values.
Looking at the directionless of our society, I even feel maybe we need to revive the Ministry of National Guidance of the UNIP days just to guide us, especially our culturally lost youthful generation on what direction to take.
From promotion of rights of the ‘minority’ (a veiled reference to unsavoury groupings like gays and prostitutes) to circumcision, one can see the fingerprints of the west remote-controlling us on how to effect these changes.
Even in religious circles, our clergy men and women are being dictated to from the Vatican or America on how to save our poor souls from the wrath of God.
Why have we become a mimic-people? The new Church of dollars and pounds is bowing before Mormon and making the congregants tithe themselves blind.
The offering and tithe they give to thieving clergymen who audaciously announce themselves as ‘men of God’ is only enriching these suited men who put the money in their already overflowing coffers.
Must we live like this? It comes down again to a rank failure of direction. As adults, we have lamentably failed to manage the change that is necessary to move our nation forward.
The new Christianity has flourished like a plague under “democracy”.  What Christianity has done to Zambia makes me agree with American televangelist Billy Graham, who said he believed in Christ and not in Christianity.
Our Pentecostal pastors are introducing un-biblical American ways of worshipping, peddling them as biblical to their congregants. Mimicry is killing our race.
In the same way our colonial masters twisted Christianity citing the name of their God while holding a Bible in one hand, they bound our ancestors with chains and threw them in the holds of massive ships to be slaves.
The expansion of western civilisation through imperialism has created mimic-fiefdoms which have been built on the backs of the conquered who cannot culturally wean themselves from their colonial masters, their former oppressors.
We should face the cruel truth that the measurement of social advancement for our society is Eurocentric and we are the other.
The white man’s books and values despise everything we stood for, entrenching in us self-hatred that make us ape everything western without scrutiny.
While I agree with pro-colonialism scholars like Dinesh D’Souza and others who argue that Christianity brought Africa the great benefits of civilisation, I also acknowledge the damage the faith has done to us.
We have almost lost everything indigenous and all we do is mimic the conqueror.
By merely passing through school that promotes western values using foreign languages, we have lost our identity since to adopt an alien tongue is the loss of self.
The media that lauds everything western as being the epitome of civilisation for people globally has also played a part in brainwashing us further.
The media tells what is the standard dress code, the standard religion, the standard values and beliefs all based on the Eurocentric yardstick.
The movement of civilisation has been at the expense of conquered people like us.
We have been hunted and haunted by the demons that inhabit their narcissistic gods.
It is time we broke away from these invisible paralysing force that like arsenic is odourless and colourless but has the power to destroy us.
The author is a Lusaka-based freelance journalist.