Colonial Christianity in Beti’s The Poor Christ of Bomba

‘Absolutely! You will protect them spiritually. You will tell them: “my dear children, you must accept the sufferings of this vale of tears. In death, you will find your reward.”’ p35

‘The Poor Christ of Bomba’ is a novel by Mongo Beti. It’s sourced on the dais of colonialism which pillaged through the mind of the colonized. Beti reveals the true intention of the African colonial masters, using Bomba, a town in Cameroon, as a microscopic example. In ‘The Poor Christ of Bomba,’ the western ‘masters of the soul’ came for their own interest and the text discusses themes such as deceit, hypocrisy, dehumanization, conscience etc. The last having to do with the young Denis who, after his sexual encounter with a lady, carries around the conscience of a sinner and views himself as unworthy of salvation.

                This article, however, will be focused on the paradigm of colonial Christianity by the Catholic missionaries in Africa. It will not be inappropriate to argue that, speaking from the text, Christianity was used to plunge into the conscience of the colonized. The Western colonial masters, first, viewed Africa as a place filled with monsters that needed salvaging. Secondly, Africans were viewed as sinners who were doomed to perish. This is seen in the event where a character angrily refuses to listen to the Father when the latter tries to tell him about Jesus Christ: he retorts, ‘Jesus Christ, another damned white! Another that I’d like to crush with my left foot. Do I come and tell you about my ancestors, huh?’

                The implication of this shows that the natives are already aware of the existence of divinity and do not need to be reminded of it by people who have come only to subdue them. They know that to kill, to steal, and to sleep with another man’s wife is bad, and they already submit to the god of their ancestors.

 Another old man reacts to Father Drumont’s action:

I’m not a Christian, Father. I’ve never been baptized and… suppose the whites were dancing here tonight instead of us and you were passing by, would you rush in and break their trumpets and their guitars? Answer me sincerely, Father.’ P55

Again, one would ask, what kind of man walks into the house of an elder and orders him to stop his music? Even Jesus Christ, as a character in the scripture from which they give sermons, did not convert his followers by subjecting them to his rules.

                Another evil of Christianity as introduced by the colonial missionaries is revealed in the act of keeping women at the parish to work for some months in a bid to readying them for marriage. Many of whom in this process sleep with the catechist and eventually become more corrupt than they were. Zacharia becomes the demon with which the missionaries’ Satan uses to corrupt the young women under the parish’s care. In this case, we learn that the introduction of this Christianity is the birth of a certain kind of evil – the mind evil. The natives become free to act outside the guard of tradition and to do evil right there in church.

                In the text, we also find deceit in the form of Christianity. While Father drumont discusses with the administrator, a fellow white, on how the latter treats the natives badly and forces them to labour to their death, we learn this: the administrator says to the Father, ‘You say to them: “Go and work at the mission, or you’ll all go to hell.” Is that not a worse constraint than any earthly one? They laugh.’ Following the mood of this discussion, one would conclude that the act of Christianity has been a charade of which both men are aware of. It explains that even Father Drumont is aware of the fact that there is no truth and sincerity in the sermons the missionaries give to the natives. The idea of it all is to make them their subjects; to strip them of any awareness they have and enslave their minds with a strange doctrine. 

Once, an old woman meets the Father to confess her supposedly sin, but he dismisses and asks her to go and pay her parish dues before she will be confessed and forgiven. We also learn that while the natives work and die, the Father goes many times a day to confess the dying.

 What we come to notice in this instance of colonial Christianity as revealed in ‘The Poor Christ of Bomba’ is that the adventure of the colonial missionaries in African nations is advanced only to capture the soul and mind of the African peoples. As noted by Walter Rodney, colonial Christianity denied Africa the right to cultural development and self expression. It took away from Africa its historical identity and we became drifters in the modern world, living in a world we did not create and do not understand. Let us end with this: Gicaamba in Ngugi  Wa Thiong’o’s I’ll Marry When I Want notes that:

Religion is not the same thing as God. When the British imperialists came here in 1895, all the missionaries of the churches held the Bible in the left hand, and the gun in the right hand. The white man wanted us to be drunk with religion while he, in the meantime, was mapping and grapping our land and starting factories and businesses on our sweat. (Ngugi: 1982: 56-7)