I
was born a Catholic in a village full of gods. I inherited Catholicism
from my older siblings as a way of life. If you weren’t a Catholic in
my village as a young boy, you were destined to doom, so we were made
to believe. I was more attuned to the festivals defined by Catholicism
than those defined by the ancestral traditions of my grandfather. Life
as a believer was bittersweet, for it was not easy for a young boy to
resist the scent of stewed chicken on the grounds that it was prepared
in the name of grandpa’s gods.
Before I entered
secondary school, I could no longer stand my baptised playmates who
were receiving communion while I sat in the audience mournfully. Though
I didn’t know the full meaning of communion, I yearned for the raised
round white wafer to touch my young tongue, while the priest mumbled
“Body of Christ”. So I took the crash course in catechism both in
English and Esan and got baptised and I started “receiving” too.
Most of my early
teachers, headmasters and principals were all Catholics, so were most
schools in Esanland, named after every saint imaginable.
We trusted every
catechist’s teachings, worshiped the ground that white reverend fathers
walked on and prayed for the Pope endlessly.
We never had a
resident priest. I actually thought the oyinbos that came to say the
masss every now and then lived in heaven. A well-grounded senior member
of church or a catechist named Michael Oboh conducted our regular
Sunday services. . It was the family tradition of the Obohs to be
catechists; his father was my senior brother’s catechist. And Mr.
Michael was a mean Son of God, one of the strictest disciplinarians
that ever liveth. One snicker from you and you will never forget Mr.
Michael’s knuckles that reminded you of your heathenish behaviour.
This never
discouraged us. We bought into everything Catholic and bought
everything Catholic, from rosaries that glowed in the dark to Sunday
Missals.
About three times
or so a year, a white priest (usually Irish) would come to my village.
His visit would be announced weeks ahead, so farmers could prepare
their best yams, plantains, and goats, and women keep crates of scarce
eggs as love offerings for the priest. And the buzz in the village
about the visiting priest surpassed that of Obama’s visit to Ghana.
Come the Sunday of Ifada’s (Ifada is Esan name for white reverend
fathers) visit, Mr. Michael would be tripping over himself a hundred
times, making sure everything was alright for the white priest. We the
children would be elated and wear pure white khaki shorts and shirts, a
sign of purity.
Upon seeing or
hearing the sound of a Volkswagen Beetle, the atmosphere in the church
would change. Mr. Michael would hurry out to help usher in the visiting
priest and his young Mass Servers. There is no way you can measure the
envy I had for those black boys in their long white togas topped with
red capes. They rode with the priest and carried the priest’s
portmanteau that was filled with mystery. They would hand the priest
bits and pieces of his priestly regalia, clean his golden chalice, wipe
his crystal goblets and smoothen the surplice before he put it on. I
would watch with open-mouthed awe at the efficiency of these young boys
who weren’t older than me.
How privileged, I
would say to myself. They were so blessed to get so close to a white
man, who said mass in Latin to villagers who barely spoke a world of
the coloniser’s English. The only chance I had of getting close to the
white priest was during “confession”. Even at that I could never stare
at the priest while saying, “Bless me father for I have sinned” and go
on to tell him how I had looked at Josephine sinfully during Physical
Education.
More than any
other dream as a kid, I wanted to be a Mass server. I wanted to stand
close to Ifada, carry his portmanteau and learn all the secrets of
assisting him in every way, possibly even sleep in the same mission
house as the Mass servers. Such was the innocence of my childhood. We
focused on the white priests and paid little attention to the God that
sent them.
Did they also forget the God that sent them sometimes, we couldn’t tell then.
Recently, CNN has
been going gaga about pedophilic priests and the young boys they abused
in the West. The Vatican has paid millions to many of these confessors
and even more to bury some cases. The high and mighty Pope has been
forced to apologise on behalf of the badly behaved priests in America
and Europe. Yet I can’t stop wondering- was Africa so lucky that there
were no pedophiles among the thousands of white priests that came with
the colonisers and remained after independence? Or is it a case of
Africans don’t talk about “such things”? Would the Pope apologise to
Africans if “such things” were to surface tomorrow, or will it be given
the slavery treatment of “we owe you no apologies”?
If thinking that there might have been pedophilic priests in Africa is a sin, well, forgive me father for I have sinned.
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