Saturday, June 14, 2014

"Simon, (whom he also named Peter,)" - Christianity and Colonization Complex Influences




Mt. Fuji and Sunset around Tokyo in the Rainy Season


Christianity and Colonization Complex Influences


In Japan African authors are not popular.

For example, it seems that only one novel among some works of Chinua Achebe (1930 – 2013), a Nigerian novelist, was translated into Japanese: Things Fall Apart (1958).

In 1948, in preparation for independence, Nigeria's first university opened.[24] Known as University College (now the University of Ibadan), it was an associate college of the University of London. Achebe obtained such high marks in the entrance examination that he was admitted as a Major Scholar in the university's first intake and given a bursary to study medicine.[24] After a year, he changed to English, history, and theology.[
...

While he meditated on his possible career paths, Achebe was visited by a friend from the university, who convinced him to apply for an English teaching position at the Merchants of Light school at Oba. It was a ramshackle institution with a crumbling infrastructure and a meagre library; the school was built on what the residents called "bad bush" – a section of land thought to be tainted by unfriendly spirits.[36] Later, in Things Fall Apart, Achebe describes a similar area called the "evil forest", where the Christian missionaries are given a place to build their church.
...

 He taught in Oba for four months, but when an opportunity arose in 1954 to work for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS), he left the school and moved to Lagos.
...

Also in 1956 he was selected at the Staff School run by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). His first trip outside Nigeria was an opportunity to advance his technical production skills, and to solicit feedback on his novel (which was later split into two books). In London, he met a novelist named Gilbert Phelps, to whom he offered the manuscript. Phelps responded with great enthusiasm, asking Achebe if he could show it to his editor and publishers. Achebe declined, insisting that it needed more work.

Back in Nigeria, Achebe set to work revising and editing his novel (now titled Things Fall Apart, after a line in the poem "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats). He cut away the second and third sections of the book, leaving only the story of a yam farmer named Okonkwo who lives during the colonization of Nigeria.
...
In the book Okonkwo struggles with the legacy of his father – a shiftless debtor fond of playing the flute – as well as the complications and contradictions that arise when white missionaries arrive in his village of Umuofia.[52] Exploring the terrain of cultural conflict, particularly the encounter between Igbo tradition and Christian doctrine, Achebe returns to the themes of his earlier stories, which grew from his own background. 
Things Fall Apart went on to become one of the most important books in African literature.[53] Selling over 8 million copies around the world, it was translated into 50 languages, making Achebe the most translated African writer of all time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinua_Achebe#Things_Fall_Apart
The most impressive part of Things Fall Apart is that there were a kind of segregated people in a community of the leading character Okonkwo.  They were discriminated from other residents for the reason that they were unclean spiritually in light of their religious traditions.

But when a European missionary came to the community in Nigeria, those people being looked down by mainstream residents first accepted the teaching of Christianity.  Then young men, including a son of Okonkwo, who had troubles with their parents, especially fathers, concerning life philosophy, left their homes and joined a newly built church and Christian community led by a European mission.

Indeed unhappy people in a local community of Africa were saved by European missions.  But there were always colonial rule behind such missionaries.  And this colonial rule penetrated deep into African local communities even leveraging diffusion of Christianity among minorities and the handicapped in those communities.  Consequently, African local communities lost a potential to solve their internal problems and correct social biases and evils that had produced those segregated or neglected members among them.

In other word, Christianity that was introduced into Africa through European missionaries helped some victims in African communities, but as a whole European missions deprived local communities of their chances to grow and establish their own social frameworks for modern justice and democracy.

Africa did not have strong and deep traditions of civilization.  They could not resists evils being introduced into Africa by Europeans, including European missionaries, merchants, colonial masters, and military.

Without Islam, Arabs and some Asians must have been also subject to spiritual colonization by European churches.    

In this context, India, China, and Japan have not been easy targets for the Christian Church and European Colonialists Complex.

Nonetheless, more tragic were indigenous people of America after the era of Columbus.  Their unique civilizations were almost nothing before invasion by Spaniards, Portuguese, and other European nations.

So, the World Cup Soccer Games are now going in Brazil, a country showing one example of this historical movement of global expansion of European/American material and religious influences.  Indeed we cannot almost see or discern any indigenous Brazilians even in stadiums, good or bad.  


http://catbird2.wordpress.com/2011/01/02/books-continue-each-other-part-2/




*** *** *** ***



Luk 6:13 And when it was day, he called unto him his disciples: and of them he chose twelve, whom also he named apostles;
Luk 6:14 Simon, (whom he also named Peter,) and Andrew his brother, James and John, Philip and Bartholomew,
Luk 6:15 Matthew and Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus, and Simon called Zelotes,
Luk 6:16 And Judas the brother of James, and Judas Iscariot, which also was the traitor.