CONVICTIONS THAT COST

Change gets impacted better when anticipated. Dreams get realized fruitfully when well-thought. And actions have the potential of sowing seeds – be they good or otherwise.

Since the dawn of the year 2000, stories of ‘night schools’, where kids got enrolled without their consent and that of their parents, have remained prevalent in the country. Records can reveal of cases where kids from different homes have been testifying against cruelties and oddities from some identified persons who they (kids) called their ‘teachers’ at night.

Complaints from grievously concerned parents about their children being taught witchcraft would also in no way go unvoiced on June 16, 2010, the Day of African Child. They whined about the future of children of Malawi, in Africa, the beloved country in the words of Alan Paton, which is steadily being splotched by such publicity-shy voluntary night ‘teachers’.

But all this is, in the thinking of secular humanists like one George Thindwa, nothing but illusions, baseless illusions. And his tongue, a viewer would bet, wasn’t in cheek. “I challenge everyone that there’s nothing like witchcraft. Such issues are spread by those who have grudges with some members of the society, just to tarnish their image”, he said with poise on Television Malawi (now Malawi Broadcasting Corporation), in a phone-in program presented by Mgeme Kalilani.

One lady upon hearing Thindwa’s remarks was made to chip in, and angrily, so: “My child has been doing so many strange things at night and it has always been waking up very late in the morning and tired.

“When asked it revealed a certain woman who has been coming to take it every night together with some other kids for witchcraft lessons. That man who’s saying there’s no witchcraft must be a wizard himself”.

Thindwa then, in such typical vibes of secular humanists, reached an extent of promising to cough a sizeable sum, K25, 000, to anyone ready to prove in the open the practicality of witchcraft. But telling a story, the wise know, requires knowing how and where to tell it. Some knowledge on witchcraft responds well to such thinking.

The inscrutable nature of the practice makes its partakers – both young and old – not to like even being associated with any aspect of it. How, then, can one dare to prove it to the public just for the love of money which can be consumed by one today and be forgotten tomorrow while knowing that his reputation is likely to be unsafely shared day in and out with a higher possibility of going into the annals of history after being recorded for posterity’s sake? Interesting.

When secular humanist movements started in Europe in the early twentieth century, all countries there and elsewhere had already in their vocabulary terms meaning witchcraft, wizard, witch, supernatural, deity, God – we can reserve the list, at least for now. This was the period, they say, that strove for excellence and perfection, for absolutes of knowledge, and for the development of human potential through education.

This non-religious world view in question, to which Thindwa’s conviction belongs, is known to be a secular approach to life that accepts that human beings, like all living things, exist and operate in a purely natural world, and denies the existence of supernatural forces such as deities. It is this approach that has, for months now, been knocking on the doors of some Malawians’ beliefs for an adorable place to live and space to occupy.

But Malawi, which registers at least 75 percent of its citizens as Christians, 20 percent Muslims, and 5 percent African Tradition Religionists, promises to have a setup with too little space for atheists, nay, secular humanists. Since time immemorial, all these three have been holding a shared belief in the existence of some supernatural being as well as acknowledging the practice of witchcraft.

They are such hard surfaces into which waters of secular humanism, if the approach is to survive, are to permeate.

Interestingly, besides the power to reason, convictions – deep convictions – separate human beings from other creatures. They influence one’s thoughts and actions a lot.

Among other disciplines from which branches of secular humanism stem, is philosophy, the love of wisdom. But even among sundry lovers of wisdom, this secular approach to life has never been, and is not, popular. One of them is Emmanuel Levinas, Lithuanian-born French philosopher.

A line from his book, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, suffices it all: “Humanism must be denounced because it is not sufficiently human”. But this must, perhaps, in the thinking of present secular humanists, be another representation of illusions, baseless illusions.