TIMBUKTU
A story of Africa today

The film called Timbuktu takes its name from a province in Mali a country on the edge of the Sahara desert. It tells the story of a family who live in this semi desert area and how they are affected by a gradual take over of their country by the Boko Haram who are intent on wiping out the influence of western ways. The family consists of a young husband and wife and their daughter who is about 12 years old. They have adopted a young boy who is a little younger than their daughter but we do not see much of him as he spends his time herding the family’s cattle.

The human dream
They are portrayed as a very loving family who are well adjusted and live in a spirit of joy and harmony. They are idyllic in the way they live together for though the father idolises his daughter his wife lives contentedly with this. When their adopted son periodically returns from his work he too receives the father’s lavish affection. This is a beautiful portrait of the way we long for things to be. It a portrait of the splendour of the human dream of love, harmony and joy we get our first taste of from our parents.

This dream is the central theme of all our stories according to Joseph Campbell who spent his life studying the stories people tell. He believes that all our stories are about a journey which we go on to realize our dream. But we are also reminded in the film that ours is not a perfect world and that the beast of hatred and violence seeks to devour us. Our dream is easily consumed by this and is pushed underground, though it never dies. I thought of God’s words to Cain when he noticed the seeds of destructiveness taking root in him.

Is it not true that if you do what is right, you will be fine? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at the door. It desires to dominate you, but you must subdue it.” Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out to the field.” While they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him. Gen 4:7-8

A humbling experience
It was during my twenty years writing a number of books that I came to realise how much african society is based on the dream of love, relationships and the joy we can find there. This is a humbling realisation for me for I did not appreciate when I was in Africa for 12 years the highly developed capacity for love and relationship and for happiness that africans have. This was brought home to me when, a number of years after I left Zambia, I read The Lost World of the Kalahari by Laurens van der Post. We may tend to think of Africa as backward and primitive by modern standards but what emerges from his book is a portrait of a people who have a very well developed relationship with God, with each other and with their environment. This makes them admirable human beings and when we compare their culture with the one to which I belong to with its disregard for God, our fellow human beings and for mother Earth the comparison does not show mine in a favourable light.

Two cultures viewing for our allegiance

The Great Divorce between two ways we see our world
A book that helped me understand what has happened to us is Fritjof Capra’s The Turning Point. In it he describes the emergence, especially in the countries bordering the north Atlantic, of two cultures or of two ways of seeing reality and of valuing it. The first of these he calls the Systems vision and value system that prevailed in Europe until the beginning of the 17th century. It saw the world as a network of relationships between God, a world of good and bad spirits, between ourselves and between everything in the environment in which we live. I think this systems view of reality was the one out of which the Africans I knew in the 1970s lived.

The other vision and value system is one Capra calls the Mechanistic world view and and value system. According to Kenneth Clark in the series he did for television called Civilisation, this culture no longer asks, ‘Is it the will of God? or part of God’s plan to realise our dream. Instead it asks the question, ‘Does it work’? and “Does it pay’? In other words this second view of reality sees all in the material and monetary terms that Science and Economics defines as real. As a result, the spirit side of us that makes a priority of love and relationships is seen as unreal or as a private matter that should not be allowed to interfere with public life or that of our “getting and spending”.

The two ways

Where Jesus says we will find life in the fulfilment of our dream
The careers and prosperity we rightly wanted for our pupils in the school in Zambia I taught in came with their own built-in vision and value system. I remember coming out of a teachers’ staff meeting in the school I worked in while in Zambia. At the meeting I had spoken about the importance of Religious Education and English in the curriculum only to be reminded by a fellow teacher that we were educating our pupils so that they would find good careers. This attitude underrated, to say the least, the importance of Religious Education as well as English language and Literature that made a priority of human and Christian values. This is the vision and the values that Jesus advocates in the Great Commandment in that it invites us to get our whole person involved in the world of the love and relationships. This for Jesus is central to the realisation of our human dream and of the divine one he wants to build on this.

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” Lk 10:25-28

But now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves… The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Jn 17:13, 22-23

The two cultures in Chinua Achebe’s novels
How the conflict between these two cultures influence Africa today is wonderfully portrayed in Chinua Achebe’s novels, Things Fall Apart and No Longer At Ease. The first of these titles is taken from W B Yeats’ poem in which he speaks about what was happening in the Ireland of his time, when he witnessed how things fall apart when what is central to human life no longer retains its hold on us.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

The title of Achebe’s second novel is taken from T S Elliot’s poem, The Journey of the Magi. This is a reflection on what was on the minds of the three kings from the East as they return home after meeting Jesus. They are no longer at ease in the culture they are going back to after being exposed to the vision they had of the Saviour and the new value system and style of relating he exposed them to.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.

The quiet revolution the Saviour invites
I have thought a lot about this quiet revolution or change of mind and heart the Saviour invites. It is called for if we are to adopt the vision and values he calls ‘the Good News’. This is encapsulated by Jesus in his commandment that we love others as he has loved us. Very important to this way of loving and relating is that we learn to notice, respect and defer to where people are and what they want. The following advice a bishop gave to his newly arrived missionaries is a wonderful expression of this sensitivity, respect and deference

Our first task on approaching another people, another culture, another religion, IS TO TAKE OFF OUR SHOES, for the place we are approaching is holy; else we may find ourselves treading on people’s dreams. More serious still, we may forget that God was there before our arrival.

This is a piece of wisdom I realised the truth of only in hindsight. I still find myself challenged by this call to take off my shoes when approaching another person, especially if that person comes from another culture with his or her distinctive style of loving and relating.

“You know book but we know life”
When I first went to Africa I, like so many others at that time, had little idea or feeling for the cultural values of the people I was sent to help. I had the idea that I was there to clear the bush of all plants and trees before building what I considered would provide people with a better way of life. This lack of appreciation of the richness of what was already there and of how people wanted our help to improve this was not on my agenda. The result was that because they had a different idea from ours of the value of work as a way to improve I tended to see the way they lived in a negative way. This lack of understanding and feeling for how africans saw life and what was important in it was epitomised in a joke that was doing the rounds at that time. It imaged the real expert on Africa as someone who writes a book about it while flying over the continent in a high speed jet and preferably at night.

There is a wonderful scene in one of Achebe’s books which highlights this clash of cultures. It takes place when a young man returns from abroad very proud of his academic degree. When he is invited to address a gathering of the Umoufia Progressive Union he outlines how he thinks his people might improve themselves. After the talk one of the village elders says to him “You know book but we know life”. It is only in hindsight that I appreciate the wisdom of this remark even though the longer I was in Africa the more I realised how little I understood about the culture in which I lived.

“The beast is at the door seeking to devour you but you must master him”

Yahweh asked Cain, ‘Why are you angry and downcast? If you are well disposed, ought you not to lift up your head? But if you are ill-disposed, is not sin at the door like a crouching beast hungering for you, which you must master’. Gn 4:7-8

What we do with our anger
Years of colonialism and misunderstanding have left a residue of anger in Africa so it is surprising and a great tribute to Africans that the Peace and Justice Commission in South Africa worked so well. It is also easy to understand but difficult to countenance the level of hatred and violence expressed by Boko Haram in the film, Timbuktu as they gradually take over the life of the people. They repress many of the ways we ‘work out our soul’s queer miracle” or the ways our spirit finds bodily expression in music, football, beer drinking and smoking. There is an anger in Africa that is healthy in that a great injustice has been done to people there. However, when this anger finds expression in the hatred and violence of the Boko Haram in this film it becomes destructive.

Indiscriminate hatred is the worst thing there is. It is a sickness of the soul…. We must not fan the hatred within us, because if we do, the world will not be able to pull itself one inch further out of the mire.
Etty Hillesum

Jesus spoke a lot about this destructiveness of hatred and violence because it so disruptive of the dream he has for us. This dream is of the joy we find in being loved and loving in all our relationships, even those with our enemies. This is what remained with me from the film and not the way that this dream was soon shattered by anger, hatred and violence.

Where the human dream of love, warm relationships and contentment is initiated

The idyllic life we experience at the beginning of the film in which people are sensitive to, respect and care for each other is powerfully portrayed for us in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus knows that this dream he so wants us to realise in life will have to contend with the resentment, hatred and violence that so easily takes hold of us and dominates our relationships. It is interesting that the good Samaritan comes to the aid of a jew even though their peoples would have been enemies for generations.

Now an expert in religious law stood up to test Jesus, saying, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you understand it?” The expert answered, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and love your neighbour as yourself.” Jesus said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”

But the expert, wanting to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him up, and went off, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road, but when he saw the injured man he passed by on the other side. So too a Levite, when he came up to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan who was traveling came to where the injured man was, and when he saw him, he felt compassion for him. He went up to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him, and whatever else you spend, I will repay you when I come back this way.’ Which of these three do you think became a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” The expert in religious law said, “The one who showed mercy to him.” So Jesus said to him, “Go and do the same.” Lk 10:25-37

Jesus and the ‘beloved disciple’
Where the dream is ultimately fulfilled