King Leopold’s letter to missionaries reveals Christian imperialism, highlighting the missionary agenda of colonial control in Africa.
[dropcap]K[/dropcap]ing Leopold II’s letter to Belgian missionaries in Congo reveals the true agenda of Christian imperialism in Africa. His instructions emphasised not evangelising for spiritual purposes but ensuring that colonial interests were prioritised.
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He directed the missionaries to teach submission and discourage African knowledge and cultural heritage. Africans, already aware of morality, were not the target.
Instead, the missionaries were urged to interpret the Bible in a way that would protect Belgium’s control over the rich African lands.
Leopold’s directive also focused on ensuring that Africans remained impoverished, dependent, and submissive to colonial rule.
While Africans succumbed to Christianisation and colonial control, Japan actively resisted such influences.
The Japanese Shoguns saw through the imperialist intentions and expelled missionaries, preserving their sovereignty by ensuring Christianity did not take root.
This contrast between Africa and Japan highlights the long-term impact of religious colonisation on African society.
Today, the legacy of this brainwashing lingers in Africa, leaving many Christians passive and disconnected from activism, unlike their more militant counterparts in the West.
Read the full letter and other comments below.
Letter from King Leopold II of Belgium to Colonial Missionaries, 1883
“Reverends, Fathers and Dear Compatriots: The task that is given to fulfill is very delicate and requires much tact. You will certainly go to evangelize, but your evangelization must inspire, above all, Belgian interests. Your principal objective in our mission in the Congo is never to teach the niggers to know God — this they know already. They speak and submit to a Mungu, one Nzambi, one Nzakomba, and what else I don’t know. They know that to kill, to sleep with someone else’s wife, to lie, and to insult is bad. Have courage to admit it; you are not going to teach them what they know already. Your essential role is to facilitate the task of administrators and industrialists, which means you will go to interpret the gospel in the way that will best protect your interests in that part of the world. For these things, you have to keep watch on disinteresting our savages from the richness that is plenty in their underground. To avoid that, they get interested in it, make murderous competition, and dream one day to overthrow you.
Your knowledge of the gospel will allow you to find texts ordering and encouraging your followers to love poverty, like “Happier are the poor because they will inherit the heaven” and “It’s very difficult for the rich to enter the kingdom of God.” You have to detach them and make them disrespect everything which gives courage to affront us. I make reference to their Mystic System and their war fetish — warfare protection — which they pretend not to want to abandon, and you must do everything in your power to make it disappear.
Your action will be directed essentially to the younger ones, for they won’t revolt when the recommendation of the priest is contradictory to their parents’ teachings. The children have to learn to obey what the missionary recommends, who is the father of their soul. You must singularly insist on their total submission and obedience, avoid developing the spirit in the schools, teach students to read and not to reason. There, dear patriots, are some of the principles that you must apply. You will find many other books, which will be given to you at the end of this conference. Evangelize the niggers so that they stay forever in submission to the white colonialists, so they never revolt against the restraints they are undergoing. Recite every day: “Happy are those who are weeping because the kingdom of God is for them.”
Convert the blacks always by using the whip. Keep their women in nine months of submission to work freely for us. Force them to pay you in a sign of recognition — goats, chicken, or eggs — every time you visit their villages. And make sure that niggers never become rich. Sing every day that it’s impossible for the rich to enter heaven. Make them pay tax each week at Sunday mass. Use the money supposed for the poor to build flourishing business centres. Institute a confessional system, which allows you to be good detectives, denouncing any black that has a different consciousness contrary to that of the decision-maker. Teach the niggers to forget their heroes and to adore only ours. Never present a chair to a black who comes to visit you. Don’t give him more than one cigarette. Never invite him for dinner, even if he gives you a chicken every time you arrive at his house.
The above speech, which shows the real intention of the Christian missionary journey in Africa, was exposed to the world by Mr. Moukouani Muikwani Bukoko, born in the Congo in 1915, and who in 1935, while working in the Congo, bought a second-hand Bible from a Belgian priest who forgot the speech in the Bible. — Dr. Chiedozie Okoro
We should note:
1] That all missionaries carried out, and still carry out, that mandate. We are only lucky to have found King Leopold’s articulation of the aim of all Christian imperialist missionaries to Africa.
2] Even the African converts who today manage the older churches in Africa (the priests, bishops, archbishops, cardinals, etc., of the Roman and Protestant sects), and especially those who evangelize Born-Again Christianity, still serve the same mandate. This is why they demonize African gods, Anglicize African names, drop the names of African deities that form part of African names, and still attack and demolish the African shrines that have managed to survive, e.g., Okija.
3] Those Africans who voluntarily converted to Christianity before the colonial conquest, such as Affonso I of the BaKongo in the 15th century, probably did not discern the purpose of the brand of Christianity supplied to them. This was likely why they fell prey to the missionaries and the white traders and pirates who followed them.
However, their Japanese counterparts probably did discern the game, even without access to some version of Leopold’s letter. Even if the Japanese Shoguns did not intuit what Leopold makes explicit, they clearly realised the danger of Japanese converts to Christianity forming a fifth column within Japanese society and state — a fifth column loyal to their co-religionists in Europe. To rid Japan of that danger, in the late 16th century, the Shoguns began expelling Portuguese and Spanish missionaries on the grounds that they were forcing Japanese to become Christian, teaching their disciples to wreck temples, taking and trading slaves, etc. Then, in 1596, it became clear to the Japanese authorities that Christianization had been a prelude to Spanish conquest of other lands. It quickly dawned on them that a fifth column loyal to Rome and controlled by the priests of a foreign religion was a clear and present danger to the sovereignty of a newly unified Japan. Soon after, the persecution and suppression of Japanese Christians began. Early in the 17th century, sensing the danger from a creed that taught obedience to foreign priests rather than the Japanese authorities, all missionaries were ordered to leave, and all Japanese were ordered to register at Buddhist temples. When Japanese Christians took part in a rebellion, foreign priests were executed, the Spanish were expelled, and Japanese Christians were forbidden to travel abroad. After another rebellion, largely by Christians, was put down, Japanese Christians were suppressed, and their descendants were put under close state surveillance for centuries thereafter. In the 1640s, all Japanese suspected of being Christians were ruthlessly exterminated. Thus did Japan, by 1650, save itself from the first European attempt to mentally subvert, conquer, and colonise it.
4] The African captives who were taken abroad and enslaved, and the Africans at home after the European conquest, having already been forcibly deprived of their autonomy, were in no political position to resist Christianisation. Thus, the Christianity still practised in all of the African-American diaspora, just as that in the African homeland since the start of the 20th century, continues to carry out the Leopoldian mandate.
Hence, for example, whereas the White Born-Agains of the USA, when in the US Navy ships in WWII, sang: “Praise the Lord,
And pass the ammunition,”
the attitude of African Born-Again converts today is best summed up as:
“Praise the Lord,
And lie down for the manna.”Thanks to a century or more of this Leopold-mandated missionary mind control, African Christians are not an activist, self-helping, economically engaged, politically resolute, let alone militant bunch. Hence, they put up with all manner of mistreatment and exploitation by their misrulers, white and black. The most they are disposed to do to their misrulers is to admonish them to “Fear God!” — as one protester’s miserable placard read in last week’s Lagos demonstration against the latest of the murderous fuel price hikes by the OBJ Misgovernment. The idea of an uprising to tame their misrulers is alien to the religiously opiated frame of mind of the Nigerians.
5] The lesson in the contrast between an Africa that the Christian missionaries brainwashed and subverted, and a Japan where this brainwashing and subversion was forcibly prevented, is stark and clear. What then must Africans of today begin to do to save themselves from brainwashing by their White World enemies here on earth? That is the question.
Ojelabi, the publisher of Freelanews, is an award winning and professionally trained mass communicator, who writes ruthlessly about pop culture, religion, politics and entertainment.
