Church, traditional beliefs can co-exist

Editor, Allow me to react to the article, “Priest who saw no conflict between Christianity and African tradition” (The New Times, January 18). The danger that Bishop Bigirumwami, and people like him, noticed in pursuing western education at the expense of their own culture, has multiplied today. The majority of people, not only in Rwanda but across Africa, see their culture and local languages as worthless—and this is an incommodious occurrence for African society. Because people mirror themselves through the lens of western culture, yet Africans are continually seen as inferior to westerners. Concerning foreign religions and Rwandan traditional ones, there is no difference. Our ancestors believed in good and bad spirits, they believed in Almighty, The Excellent, the Creator, the One that is beyond human cognisance. Kalisimbi was believed to be a home for the good spirits and Sabyinyo for the bad ones. Indeed, David Attenborough, a British documentary maker for 60 years, has seen overlapping stories about God across the world. He equally argues that the intellectuals in the Middle East wrote the Bible referring to their own cultural framework. I am not convincing people to reject the gospel, but we have also much to learn from our culture and to keep up our coexistence. And there is no problem to parallel it with “modern” religions as Bigirumwami argued. Butare ******************* I wonder how Bigirumwami would be perceived nowadays by his fellow Rwandans if he came back. Unfortunately, the mushrooming and proliferation of “churches” made a new kind of believers whose bigotry is overwhelming. Believing in God is just about the Bible...and the faithful have apparently no clues as to how this book about the Jewish people was put together. Anyone who has some strength to convince a few weak fellows proclaims himself or herself as a pastor, an apostle or a prophet and has the right to racket the naive and the weak in the name of Jehovah, Jesus or the Bible! And people like Bigirumwami are at the opposite end of that kind of thinking. So I wouldn’t be surprised if Bigirumwami would be perceived as working under the influence of the “devil” because he valued our traditional beliefs that the new wave of self-proclaimed Christians (Muslims as well) know about nothing! Ritchie

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Church, traditional beliefs can co-exist