By Samuel Adjei Sarfo
When I was in Form Two in Koforidua Sectech, our Chrife seniors gathered us on the school field one day and proceeded to initiate us into tongue speaking. We were instructed to say “Thank you Jesus. Thank you Jesus. Thank you Jesus.” Soon, many people were indeed speaking in tongues as they slurred the words into an incomprehensible whole like drunken idiots. I was impressed and disenchanted. Many years later, I had an opportunity to work in a psychiatric hospital here in the US. One of the patients, who had forgotten all about how to speak his own language due to alzheimer’s disease, spoke some gibberish which was akin to the sound byte we emitted in Koforidua Sectech while being coached to speak in tongues. Recently, when Dr. Tony Aidoo declared that tongue speaking was a symptom of madness, I recalled my experience in Sectech and at the psychiatric Hospital. I have always dismissed Dr. Tony Aidoo as one of those intellectual goons who were transported into the limelight by the failed Rawlings interregnum of yesteryears. But on the day he uttered those words of truth, he became my hero……
Christian fraud is indeed legion in Ghana, and its exploitative grip on the minds of the poor masses would remain forever mysterious. Despite this, the notion of tongue speaking rises above the pervasive fraud to become simply an act of sheer dumbness. In short, some people are saying that we will become possessed by some alien spirit which will then transport us into the unknown, making us utter some non-language noises? Indeed, the fruits do not fall far from the tree……In the ancient past, the witchdoctors of the villages used to do the same. In their case, they would get possessed by the drumbeat, and at the height of that possession they would wax eloquent in unknown tongues which only their assistants were able to interpret. No doubt, any thoughtful person could see clearly that the drama was all fraud. However, even if we construe the Christian tongues by those lowest standards of the ignorant past, they will fall far short of commonsense. At least with those witchdoctors, there was someone pretending to interpret albeit falsely. With the Christians, they themselves cannot tell us what they say, let alone someone else. Think of this as the nadir of all folly. I can agree that those class of witchdoctors that bound our leaders and people in superstition and ignorance are the very same people who have metamorphosed into modern pastors and priests. Just like their predecessors, these pastors and priests overpower the minds of people through fear and tricks and lead them on to give up their money and wealth. But at least, no matter how repugnant, there is some sense and pattern to the witchdoctor’s fraud because it has a definitive purpose of exploiting his followers. But what is the purpose of gibberish? Does it give those leaders purveying the fraud a kick? Or does it give them some bizarre satisfaction as to how far they can go to screw up their members? What is the purpose of tongue-speaking if not to display how effective religious leaders can drive their members crazy?
I do not see any sense in using scripture to back up any of my points here, although I am no neophyte in the knowledge of holy writ. After all those books were simply the figment of nomadic imagination at a time when fantastic dreams and optical illusions held sway over science and rationality. It should suffice here to conceive of god as lord of order, not of cacophony and gibberish. It should be sufficient for us to display the fruits of our religion in terms of love, kindness, honesty……..After all, those were the things Jesus himself spoke about. He did not conceive of a time when his name was going to be associated with mass madness. He did not contemplate a time when his followers would conjure hell upon the head of an individual who spoke the truth to the temple of fraud. The Christian Jihadists who are calling for the head of Dr. Tony Aidoo are not taking their cue from those followers of Christ who prayed for their enemies and displayed love towards them. If anything at all, theses Christian Jihadists are displaying the spirit of the daughter of Nero’s wife, who demanded the head of John the Baptist when he confronted her with the truth. There is also some similarity to be drawn from Nero, who simply leveled false charges against Christians and killed them off en masse, only that the tables are inverted.. Ironically, Christians are now those who are shouting “crucify Tony Aidoo”. Left to many Christians, Tony Aidoo should die of some ignoble disease to vindicate their shrill prophesies against him.
What is a Christian doing with tongue-speaking? Isn’t the Christian’s duty to love his neighbor as himself, to supply the needs of the needy, to clothe the naked, to set a good example of righteous living in order to meet the requirements of the fruits of the spirit as enumerated in Paul’s book to the Galatians? What happened to the ideal goals of Christ’s advent? Who is talking about those perennial virtues about which the Christ spoke? How were these virtues reduced in the Christian context into acts linguistic fraudulence? How did the Christian responsibility end up from virtue to vice, and finally to mass madness? And while at it, how do we explain the transmogrification of the Christian’s mandate from God to Mammon, or to self aggrandizement characterized by verbal fakery? And when did it become a sin that those who subvert the norms and mores within the religion must never be criticized?
Whoever established modern religious delusion did a great job to enslave the minds of the masses. Beginning from the time when war-mongers and cold-blooded politicians conspired to give the gift of religion to bind the minds of the masses, there has always been the abridgement of individual’s freedom to debunk religious myth. The Christian’s mind is held perpetually captive by myth and folly. Not only that. His wages are also garnished by ridiculous demands. Today, the responsibility of the Christian toward his own family and the needy in society has been compromised by the Church’s heavy demand upon his purse. Christians have to pay tithe to corrupt pastors, and then give offering, and then yearly dues and harvest contributions….. These demands are made a priority to the detriment and neglect of a worshipper’s family and the needy in society. And as if this is not enough, , the Christian debate today is never about how to eschew corruption, how to fix the ailments within the society, or how to restore honesty within the body politic…… how to live the righteous life……It is now about defending the speaking of gibberish and raining curses on those who want to expose this fraud. Dr. Tony Aidoo has risen from the ashes and become an icon for the truth. In the end he may not survive the Christian onslaught; he may even disavow his own truth, having been so badgered by those Christians that now see him as enemy number one. By going against the establishment, he has dared to emulate the example of Christ. He has debunked the hypocrisy of the modern Pharisees. He would go down in history as one that has spoken a piece of truth to the hypocrites. If we are made the braver and better for it…if we are also encouraged to speak truth to religious power, the world would be the better for it, and we would no longer be held hostage by those who take us for idiots, and who daily show us by their evil examples that religion is just about hating or killing your enemies.
Samuel Adjei Sarfo. Houston, Texas.
