Bantu Messiah and White Christ

“There is one thing, we sometimes wonder about,” he said, and hurriedly pulled his brown knitted hat down over his wrinkled forehead. The speaker was Theophilus M., a Zulu journalist and editor of an African newspaper, an intensive thirty year-old African intellectual, intelligent, quick-witted and with wide contacts among present-day Africans. “We wonder sometimes,” he repeated thoughtfully, whether we might not have got the wrong God. It might have been better if we had had our own God.” I thought for a moment about the Christian name which he had been given in Holy Baptism — for he was a Christian and, in common with the entire modem generation of African intellectuals the continent over, had been to the mission school. It was not a Bantu name, but a foreign name, a Greek name, Theophilus — ‘Loved by God.’ Yes, but loved by which god? Could it be the white man's God, when the chasm between white and black was yawning wider and wider with every passing day, in an apartheid-ruled South Africa? He took me with him to the Africans' own church, a cold and draughty little shack — this was in June, winter in Johannesburg. A layman was preaching and quoted Matt. 25: 1–3: “So shall it be with the Kingdom of Heaven, as when ten virgins took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. Five were white and five were black. The whites took their lamps with them, but forgot to take any oil. But the blacks took oil with them in their vessels…. At last they came and shouted, ‘Lord, open the door for us!’ But he answered and said, “Verily, I say unto you, I know you not!’”