WHAT AFRICANS NEVER KNEW ABOUT THE COLONIAL MISSIONARIES

By Oduwaiye Fela

Letter from King Leopold II of Belgium to Colonial Missionaries in 1883:

Dear Rev. Fathers and Compatriots,
The task that is given to you to fulfil is very delicate and requires much tact. You will go certainly to evangelize, but your evangelization must inspire above all Belgium interests. Your principal objective in our mission in the Congo and all over Africa is never to teach the niggers to know God, this they know already. They speak and submit to us, and what else I don't know. They know that to kill, to sleep with someone
else's wife, to lie and to insult is bad. Have courage to admit it; you are not going to teach them what they know already. Your essential role is to facilitate the task of administrators and industrials, which means you will go to interpret the gospel in the way it will be the best to protect your interests in that part of the world.

    For these things, you have to keep watch on disinteresting our savages from the richness that is plenty [in their underground. To avoid that, they get interested in it, and make you murderous] competition and dream one day to overthrow you.

    Your knowledge of the gospel will allow you to find texts ordering, and encouraging your followers to love poverty, like “Happier are the poor because they will inherit the heaven” and “It's very difficult for the rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

You have to detach from them and make them disrespect everything which gives courage to affront us...

I make reference to their Mystic System and their war fetish – warfare protection – which they pretend not to want to abandon, and you must do everything in your power to make it disappear. Your action will be directed essentially to the younger ones, for they won't revolt when the recommendation of the priest is contradictory to their parent's teachings.

The children have to learn to obey what the missionary recommends, who is the father of their soul. You must singularly insist on their total submission and obedience, avoid developing the spirit in the schools, teach students to read and not to reason.

Dear patriots, these are some of the principles that you must apply. You will find many other books, which will be given to you at the end of this conference. Evangelize the niggers [slaves] so that they stay forever in submission to the white colonialists, so they never revolt against the restraints they are undergoing. Recite every day – “Happy are those who are weeping because the kingdom of God is for them.”

- King Leopold II of Belgium to Colonial Missionaries in 1883

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