HLI Mission To Tanzania . . . “We Are A Life-Loving People”

By BRIAN CLOWES

“We are a life-loving people. We love children. We love life. We are all out to protect life and our families. . . . Africans need assistance with infrastructure. We need to have good roads. We need to have good hospitals and medicines. We need to have good schools. We don’t need condoms. We don’t need contraception. We don’t need abortion” — Emil Hagamu.

+ + +

Fr. Shenan Boquet, president of Human Life International, and I traveled to Dar es Salaam in mid-July to meet our regional director for English-speaking Africa, Emil Hagamu.
The mission had four purposes: 1) to meet with the Anglophone Africa country directors to discuss current challenges and successes as well as goals and strategies; 2) to educate and equip priests, seminarians, and lay leaders currently engaged in life and family apostolates from a dozen African nations; 3) to meet with the archbishop of Dar es Salaam, Polycarp Cardinal Pengo; and 4) to conduct the first Dar es Salaam March for Life.
We traveled to the Camaldoles Benedictine Monastery, about 15 miles South of Dar es Salaam. This beautiful complex is located in a quiet neighborhood, and Fr. Boquet and several other priests prayed Mass every day in the chapel. The sisters made us feel very welcome and took good very care of us during our nine days there.
Our primary focus was four days of intense training on the fundamental principles of activism and theology. Seven speakers covered The Theology of the Body, the encyclicals Humanae Vitae and Evangelium Vitae, and the concepts of conscience and freedom. We also spoke on the specifics of the Culture of Death movements that are oppressing Africa today, including gender ideology, population control, abortion, and homosexuality.
The common theme that wound its way through all of these presentations was the grave threat posed by “neocolonialism,” or contraceptive imperialism, which is motivated by Western interests eager to pillage the resources of the continent.
We asked the conference participants to rank the five worst threats to their communities and to their nations. They replied: 1) Western interference in their nation’s affairs; 2) political crises and corruption; 3) poverty; 4) disease; and 5) forced marriages.
Fully 80 percent ranked Western interference as the worst threat to their nations and communities. It is fascinating that corruption, which is crippling African development and modernization, was ranked a very distant second. It is very heartening to know that these priests, seminarians, and community leaders are aware of the true nature of the threat, which is not always the case in Africa.

How An African Views Life

In his book African Religions and Philosophy, Kenyan philosopher John Mbiti writes that Africans are “notoriously religious,” and that they “see the sacred in everything that touches life.” An African is constantly aware that life exists all around him in nature in all of its forms. In fact, he is always conscious of being literally immersed in life.
Unfortunately, the African connection between nature and belief in God has been misrepresented and mythologized in the West for so long that it has led to a deep-seated prejudice in the minds of many, a kind of stereotype of Africans being almost like the mythical Navi in the movie Avatar.
One of the speakers at our conference was Fr. Josephat Muhoza, SDS, who spoke on “The Value of Human Life From the Mouth of a True African.” He described why Western sexual “ethics” are repugnant to Africans.
For example, not one of the many African languages has a word for “abortion” because such abominable acts are considered taboo to even mention — while we Americans have a proliferation of words for it, most designed to cover up its bloody evil and violence (“freedom of choice,” “reproductive freedom,” etc.).
Instead, Africans use a descriptive phrase. A woman who has had an abortion is referred to as a “walking graveyard.” By contrast, in Kiswahili, a pregnant woman possesses ana mwili mbarikiwa, or a “blessed body.” So Africans see abortion as a gross attack on a pregnant women’s body, an authentic act of sacrilege, which the Catechism of the Catholic Church describes as the grave sin of abusing sacred persons, places, or things (n. 2120).
In his book African Religion: The Traditions of Abundant Life, Laurenti Magesa writes that the foundation of African ethics is life in its fullness, which is why the message of Christianity strongly appeals to Africans (John 10:10). If an event promotes life, it is good, ethical, and even divine. But if it diminishes life in any way, it is considered unethical and detestable.
Thus, Africans see abortion, sterilization and contraception as intrinsic evils precisely because they attack life at its very beginning, and those who engage in these practices are seen as enemies of society. Many times, such people are actually exiled from the community.
It is no coincidence that our mission was to teach the people to embrace the overall mission of all pro-lifers: To respect life, to protect life, to love life, and to serve life.
It is impossible to understand why Africans value human life so much without being aware of their deep-seated love and respect for God, who provides literally everything to them. Africans instinctively avoid unnatural acts like contraception, abortion, and homosexuality, because they have been taught — and have personally witnessed — that such activities always lead to bad health in soul, in mind, and in body, and that they always result in disruptive effects on human relationships.
Africans strongly believe in the dictum that “God always forgives, man sometimes forgives, but nature never forgives.” In the West, we have lavish social “safety nets” that insulate people from the unhealthy effects of their activities, but there are no such backups in Africa. So those who engage in unhealthy and unnatural sexual practices in Africa must shoulder the consequences of their actions themselves.

The Spreading
Anti-Life Cancer

We must ask: If African culture is so life-loving, why are contraception, sterilization, and abortion spreading so quickly?
Therein lies the true tragedy. These evil practices would not be increasing without the baleful and powerful influence of the Western “developed” nations. Africans from each nation are being paid huge salaries to deceive their own people. Hundreds of Western-funded non-governmental organizations with an African veneer have been established all over sub-Saharan Africa for the purpose of pushing population control programs.
Tanzania, which ranks 19th in the world in fertility with an average of 4.95 children per woman, and which has a median age of only 17, is a favorite target of these groups, which are supported by about 50 foreign population NGOs ranging from ADVANCE Family Planning to the Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights.
All of these groups are given an “African face” by hiring local people to staff them. These people are paid lavishly compared to the average African, and they are formally trained to use deception and subterfuge. One primary example is their passing long-acting reversible “contraceptives” (LARCs) off as harmless, not informing women of their severe side effects, not telling them that they act for months or years, and not informing them that they sometimes work as abortifacients.
Informal village education is also being overwhelmed by the systematic dismissal and denigration of African values in formal higher education. People and organizations from the West are seen as trustworthy.
When youth from the smaller towns travel to larger cities for education or for jobs, they become submerged in Western values and lose sight of the traditional virtues they were taught at home. Many younger people see Westerners as experts simply because we live a lifestyle they envy, a lifestyle that is constantly on parade on television.
Then there is direct and visible corruption, such as when Kenya legalized abortion in its constitution in 2010 after being promised by Vice President Biden that “the money will flow” if they did so. There is no doubt that a significant portion of the $65 billion that has been poured into Africa by the “developed” nations since 1996 specifically for population control and related programs has been used to corrupt and bribe many governments to repudiate their pro-life laws.
It is heartbreaking to consider how much good that $65 billion could have done if it instead had been spent on authentic economic development. It could have provided health care, schooling, clean water, good housing and roads, electrification and modern farming equipment for 25 million people.
Instead, it has not improved living conditions at all — it has simply made millions of large poor families into small poor families.

The March For Life

The highlight for the conference attendees was the colorful March for Life, which was the first ever conducted in the city of Dar es Salaam. Led by the 40-piece City Police brass band, we walked down Sokoine Drive, one of the main waterfront streets of the city, which runs into (sigh) Barack Obama Drive.
People had obviously never seen anything like the March for Life before, because almost all rallies and parades are banned in Tanzania. We had the express permission of John Magufuli, the president of the United Republic of Tanzania, to do this March. Many people ran up side streets to see what was going on, most taking photos with their phones.
Many of our marchers carried photos of aborted preborn babies, and some of the onlookers could be heard saying that it was certainly sinful to kill unborn children. We found out later that three television and seven radio stations covered the event that evening.
The March, and our mission trip, concluded with an absolutely beautiful Mass in St. Joseph’s Cathedral, celebrated by a dozen priests, most of whom had participated in the conference.
The following day, as Fr. Boquet and I began our 30-hour trek home, we were encouraged by the strength of the love for God and family that Tanzanians still possess. And we vow to fight to the last of our strength to help Africa resist the West’s Culture of Death.