O. Vengeyi, The Bible in the Service of Pan-AfricanismBible that skirted real issues that the African people struggled with, such
as land dispossessions, economic marginalisation, racism among others.
This missionary practice is not yet over in Africa. Although some
mainline churches have moved to briefly criticise the colonial structures,
most of them are still perpetuating colonial biblical interpretation that
seeks to enslave the Africans and reduce them to beggars who survive on
(alms) Western aid. They do not ask fundamental questions such as;
why are Africans poor? When was the beginning of their present state of
poverty? What do Africans need to escape the web of poverty? Instead,
the main interest of these churches, especially in Zimbabwe, is to source
food aid for the poor and criticise government strategies for addressing
colonial land and economic imbalances.
Mahoso understands fully well that these churches as well as those op-
posed to the pan-African agenda appeal to the Bible to justify their ar-
guments. It is historically well documented that the process of Bible
translation as well as biblical interpretation is not an innocent and objec-
tive undertaking;^7 they both have always been exposed to manipulation
by sectional interests, such as race, class, gender and ideological (politi-
cal and cultural). Thus through biblical translation and interpretation,
Western missionaries in Southern Africa entrenched Western–white
cultural values while denouncing, suppressing and eliminating African
traditional values especially the spiritual worldviews.8 Mahoso under-
stands this history quite well. He knows that the Bible has been influen-
tial as a weapon to subjugate and to blind the African people so as to
accept ‘slave status’ in their own land through this two pronged ap-
proach of translation and interpretation.
It is well known, for example that, it was through missionary Bible
translation (and interpretation) upon colonisation that not only were the
people and the lands colonised but also the Shona Supreme Being
Mwari was conquered and gendered following the Western cultural
values. As Nisbert Taringa argues, the concept of God among the Shona
(before Bible translations) may be expressed as: ‘Thou art woman, Thou
(^7) Cf. Lovemore Togarasei, The Bible in Context: Essays Collection (BiAS 1), 2009, 19.
(^8) Cf. Dorah Mbuvayesango, ‘How local divine powers were suppressed: A Case of Mwari
of the Shona’, in Musa Dube (ed.), Other Ways of Reading the Bible: African Women and
the Bible. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2001, 63-77; Cf. Musa Dube,
‘Consuming a colonial Cultural Bomb: translating ‘badimo’ into demons in the
Setswana Bible (Matthew 8:28-34; 15:22; 10:8).’ Journal for the Study of the New
Testament, 73, 33-59.