My dilemma this coming week is not choosing between poverty and wealth.
No, the real intellectual yoga begins when you look at what we choose to call “faith” versus what we dismiss as “madness”.
It is the exhausting task of deciding which ancestor to believe in and which one gets you labelled a patient.
Look at you judging me already for daring to even think this. Ai! Let’s be honest. If a man walks up to a woman from the bekeer choir and tells her, “Sister, the Lord showed me your face in a vision, and we must marry next week”, she will blush, call it a prophecy, and start looking at wedding venues.
On the other hand, try walking up to that same woman and saying: “My ancestors appeared to me in a dream last night and told me you are the one.”
She will spit in your face, call an usher, and bind you in the name of Jesus. Why the hostility? Are they not all ancestors? One just has a longer paper trail.
You see, I spent my last Thursday morning watching a man on television explain with absolute, sweat-soaked certainty that a first-century carpenter died, went into a coma-like state for precisely 72 hours, and then simply walked out of a stone tomb like he’d just finished a heavy weekend shift. The congregation was weeping. People were throwing N$200 notes at the altar. It was a beautiful, legally protected, tax-exempt Thursday.
Later that evening, I was at the village sitting with an elder. The old man took a slow sip of his tea, looked into the middle distance, and casually mentioned that my great-grandfather, who departed this realm during the height of apartheid, was highly annoyed that the children don’t come home any more.
He explained that the old man’s spirit had a direct line to the Almighty and had explicitly requested we visit the homestead at least twice a year to keep the fire burning.
And that is where my brain’s gearbox started skipping gears. Who is actually suffering from a mental deficit here? Me, who believes in a 72-hour resurrection, or me, who believes my great-grandfather is alive in another realm and affects my daily life?
Why does geographical distance make supernatural events so much more palatable? For some reason, if a miracle happened five thousand kilometres away, it is divine truth. But if it happened at Omahenene, narrated by an aunt who actually remembers the man’s face, it is treated as a severe case of untreated heatstroke.
Let’s look at the efficiency of the Divine Complaint Department (I made that up): On one hand, you send your prayers up into a massive cloud of celestial bureaucracy. The guy at Epukiro practises something similar by calling 17 names of long-dead ancestors to speak to Ndjambi.
We’ve built a society where we allow people to be beautifully insane, provided they use the approved, European-stamped textbook.
You are legally required to believe a wooden staff turned into a real snake, but don’t you dare believe a tree fell and stood right back up somewhere in the Kavango. That is considered backward witchcraft.
It’s a magnificent piece of mental gymnastics. We look down on the village elder who pours a little omagongo brew onto the earth to honour the ancestors who cleared it before him, calling it pagan superstition. Then we immediately drive to a church where we consume a tiny wafer and a sip of sweet wine nectar, and we are kamma digesting the literal flesh and blood of a deity.
I’m not trying to fix the system, because it is far too entertaining to watch. I’m simply trying to navigate the weekly schedule of allowed delusions.
I just want to know the exact threshold. How many years must pass before a hallucination becomes a cultural heritage? How far away does a ghost have to live before he stops being a family nuisance and becomes a saint?
Until someone gives me a clear answer, do not come for me when you find me at an altar worshipping a well-fed chameleon.
At least it changes colours.
